Episode 308 - TD36 - Tracing Epicurus' Key Ideas From the Principal Doctrines To The Tetrapharmakon To Cicero's Epicurean Speakers
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Welcome to Episode 308 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 the second half of section 10 of Part 5 where Cicero criticizes Metrodorus and Epicurus for allegedly making high-sounding statements by being inconsistent for involving pleasure and pain in them.As we discussed last week, Cicero identifies this question of whether and how the wise man can always be happy as one of the most important - perhaps the most important - in philosophy.
Today we will look at the four points that are summarized all-too-briefly in the “Tetrapharmakon,” and we will expand on the meaning of each branch by referring to the full text of the first four Principal Doctrines, supporting statements in the letters and fragments of Epicurus, and to where Cicero has Torquatus reference them in Book One of On Ends, including:
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XIX. At the same time this Stoic doctrine can be stated in a form which we do not object to, and indeed ourselves endorse. For Epicurus thus presents his Wise Man who is always happy: (3) his desires are kept within bounds; (2) death he disregards; (1) he has a true conception, untainted by fear, of the Divine nature; (4) he does not hesitate to depart from life, if that would better his condition. Thus equipped he enjoys perpetual pleasure, for there is no moment when the pleasures he experiences do not outbalance the pains; since he remembers the past with gratitude, grasps the present with a full realization of its pleasantness, and does not rely upon the future; he looks forward to it, but finds his true enjoyment in the present.
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XII. Again, the truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. (3) Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them; I ask what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable? A man whose circumstances are such must needs possess, as well as other things, a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain, because (2) death is apart from sensation, and (4) pain when lasting is usually slight, when oppressive is of short duration, so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity, and its slightness to its continuance. When in addition we suppose that such a man is (1) in no awe of the influence of the gods, and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them, what circumstance is it possible to add to these, to make his condition better?
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius (00:10):
Welcome to episode 308 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 Cicero’s Tuscan Disputations. We’re in part five where the question under debate is whether virtue is sufficient for happiness. This is a question that Cicero says is one of the most important in all of philosophy, and he spends a lot of time here in part five dissecting the various opinions about whether the wise man can be happy all the time or not, and that’s where we left off last week in reading Section 10.
Cassius (01:19):
Cicero was remarking at the end of section 10 that Epicurus two says The wise man is always happy. Of course, Cicero completely disagrees with Epicurus analysis of how that can be the case and says at the very end that philosophers should be judged not by their isolated utterances, but by their uninterrupted consistency. A Cicero says that Epicurus is being totally inconsistent in his position because Epicurus hold that pain is evil, and if pain is evil and because nobody, even the wisest person is totally able to prevent pain from coming into his life, Cicero says Epicurus is ridiculous because if you are surrounded by pain and you say that pain is evil, then you are admitting that no matter how wise you are, you are surrounded by evils that you can do nothing about and that makes no sense whatsoever from the point of view of philosophy, which promises us that there’s a way to totally avoid the evils in life and to live a happy life defined as a life which is all good and no bad, all virtue and no evil.
Cassius (02:37):
And so before we go further into section 11, it would be good for us to use this opportunity to pick up the thread of what Cicero started and did not finish, which is where Cicero says that Epicurus does himself say that the wise man is always happy. It’s a very practical question. Not only is it important philosophically as Cicero is stressing, but it’s really one of the questions that virtually everybody who starts reading about Epicurus is most interested in. We generally talk in terms of pleasure because that is the word that is associated with Epicurean philosophy, but of course, pleasure has a context and pleasure is ultimately what the happy life is made of. According to Epicurus, it’s our goal to fill as much of our life with pleasure as possible and reduce the amount of pain in life as much as possible. But the big picture of what we’re doing while we engage in that process is attempting to live a happy life.
Cassius (03:38):
Cicero is focused here on this question about whether pain is evil or not and whether that prevents the wise man from being happy, but that is not the only question that’s involved in this issue, and today we’re going to take the opportunity to go back into other parts of the ancient record and reconstruct what Epicurus is really saying in the context of this question. In any discussion of Epicurus that anyone today is likely to hear about, they’re going to hear it said that Epicurus focused on a certain small number of key doctrines as especially important in his recommendations in life. Many times the core of Epicurean doctrine is described as being contained in a fragment that survives from the Herculaneum papyri, the tetra pharmaco. The Wikipedia page on the Tetra Pharmac says The Tetra Pharmac four part remedy is a summary of the first four doctrines of Epicurus.
Cassius (04:39):
These are short recommendations to avoid anxiety or existential dread. It’s usually at this point in the discussion that I personally state my objection to this kind of framing of the question because it seems to be the modern approach to look at this as a remedy as if for a mental disease, which ends up sounding like it’s an equivalent of an attempt to deal with depression by moderating serotonin or some other pharmaceutical approach in the same way that you can look at a glass as either half full or half empty, it seems to me a much better approach to look at the core recommendations of Epicurus as Cicero is doing in these pages of and Disputations and seeing these key recommendations not as a medicine for the diseased, but as sound advice for the healthy as to how to live the happiest life possible. That appears to be the context in which all of this was being debated in the ancient world as Cicero has been explaining at length, whether you start with Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, go on down the line through Aristotle or many of the others, they were all focused on this question of whether the wise man can always be happy or not.
Cassius (06:04):
What is the best life, how to approach living the best way you possibly can, but in the end, it’s this question of whether virtue is sufficient to live a happy life or whether you need something else. With the core always being we want to live a happy life, this is how to go about doing it. The discovery of the tetra pharmaco in the hercule and papyrus 1005 has become the dominant way. These issues are discussed as presented in the Wikipedia page as of today, November the 16th, 2025. The Tetra Pharmacon is translated as Don’t fear God, don’t worry about death. What is good is easy to get and what is terrible is easy to endure. That list is a very good short summary of the topics that it’s clear Epicurus stressed. As the Wikipedia page says, though, this is a summary of the first four doctrines.
Cassius (07:05):
It’s extremely abbreviated, and in order to understand the full picture of where each one of these is coming from, it’s necessary to consult other sources of information. Certainly one of the first to consult would be the first four principal doctrines themselves, but beyond the principal doctrines, we can see these issues elaborated on in the material that Cicero has been talking about both here in Tuscan Disputations and in own ends, which we’ve previously discussed. And so today as we go through this material, we’ll talk about each of these four points and fit them in the bigger picture to bring out the depth of each one.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
So as far as we can tell Cassius, this particular condensation of the first four principal doctrines was a later development within the school. This happened in antiquity. We have this from Phil Edemas and we have it called the Tetra Pharmacos in his writings, but we don’t have it from Epicurus himself except to say that he wrote the letter to manias and assembled the principal doctrines, and that’s where this stuff is being pulled from and assembled in this way possibly by Phil Edemas, possibly it was already in circulation before his own time, but it does not come from Epicurus himself. As we go into it, I am going to recommend that we have in front of us while we do. So Emily Austin’s book, living for Pleasure and Epicurean Guide to Life. This is important because she has a chapter in her book. Chapter 23 is called The Fourfold Remedy, and she is going to do in this book what we’re going to try to do today, which is go into some deeper and finer detail on each of the four points under question and give them a much more complete description and representation of epicurean thought, something that is not amenable necessarily to the soundbite of the tetra pharmaco, but something that is much more true to Epicurus his own thought.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And in our interview with Emily Austin on this podcast, which was episodes 1 56 and 1 57, she also gave an excellent summary of the tetra pharmaco while we were talking to her in that interview. So I also recommend the people go and listen to that, which I’m sure I need to do again myself. Beyond that, we have a whole bunch of information from a lot of different sources to get through. So I guess the question, Cassius, is where do you want to start first? We’re kind of going right back into Cicero.
Cassius (09:31):
Yeah, Josh. Well, let’s go back and cite Section 19 from book one of own ends because this is where Cicero lays out the very same thing he’s been talking about the stoics saying that virtue is the key to happiness, and he says this in 19. At the same time, this stoic doctrine can be stated in a form which we do not object to, and indeed ourselves endorse for Epicurus. Thus presents his wise man who is always happy. His desires are kept within bounds death. He disregards, he has a true conception untainted by fear of the divine nature. He does not hesitate to depart from life if that would better his condition. Thus equipped, he enjoys perpetual pleasure for there is no moment when the pleasures he experiences do not outbalance the pains since he remembers the past with gratitude grasps the present with a full realization of its pleasantness and does not rely upon the future.
Cassius (10:35):
He looks forward to it, but he finds his true enjoyment in the present. Now that 19 is a mirror of what Atu has previously said in section 12. Lemme read that as well and then we’ll pick out these points and line them up against the tetra pharmaco and against the principal doctrines in 12 torta had said again, the truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures. Great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily with no pain to thwart or threaten them. I ask what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable a man whose circumstances are such must needs possess as well as other things, a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain. Because death is apart from sensation and pain when lasting is usually slight when oppressive is of short duration so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity and its slightness to its continuance when in addition we suppose that such a man is in no awe of the influence of the gods and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them.
Cassius (12:01):
What circumstance is it possible to add to these to make his condition better? Okay, so the first of the tetra pharmacon is condensed down to don’t fear God. Well, Cicero is giving us a lot more detail about what that means because he’s saying that it means he has a true conception untainted by fear of the divine nature. That’s what he said in 19 and in 12 he had said that the happiest condition is when a man has no awe of the influence of the gods. That already is an elaboration on this point before we even proceed to principle doctrine one itself. So we have to ask the question, how is it that we have no awe of the influence of the gods and how do we have a true conception untainted by fear of the divine nature?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
So our text again for the tetra pharmaco is P Herc 1005. This is a papyrus fragment that survives from antiquity. It was in the villa of the Papyri Herculaneum. It was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It was recovered in the Renaissance and it’s amazing they’ve survived it all. We’re lucky to have them. The first thing I want to address before we go over to the principle doctrines is in the tetra pharmaco, this singular for God God is no cause for fear and why is he using the singular here when we know that for Epicurus and for the ancient epicureans who crafted this little summary of the first four principle doctrines, there were innumerable gods. There wasn’t one God, there wasn’t one God that was higher or better than the other gods. There were many, many, many gods in nature and I think Lucious says actually that nature never throws up only one thing of a kind.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
If you have one, there’s another one out there somewhere. You just haven’t looked hard enough, right? And so the idea of a unitary God is actually incompatible with what lucious certainly thought was true about nature, but this use of the singular for God as opposed to the plural for Gods is something that we are going to see as we move into the letter to Menno Equus, that the same phenomena is observed there, that Epicurus uses both the singular and the plural depending on the context in which he is describing them. I point that out here because as we move into the principle doctrines themselves, the first thing we’re going to notice is that there’s no mention of God or Gods. The text of principle doctrine one, this is the Bailey translation, the blessed and immortal or incorruptible nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other so that it is never constrained by anger or favor for all.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Such things exist only in the weak. We know that we’re talking about the gods with this principle doctrine because he’s used those words blessed and incorruptible. But it is interesting that here in the first principle doctrine, the word God does not appear as it does in the tetra pharmacos. So that’s one of our first important differences. It may be a distinction without a difference, but it is interesting and it’s worth talking about. I think in the Bailey translation of the letter to Manus Epicurus writes this, he says, first of all believe that God is a being immortal and blessed even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men’s minds and do not assign to him anything to his immortality or ill suited to his blessedness, but believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness or incorruptibility. Those two words in particular when you see them side by side, we’re always talking about the gods and he goes on to say For Gods there are since the knowledge of them is by clear vision, but they’re not such as the many believe them to be.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
For indeed they do not consistently they being the many represent them as they believe them to be. And the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many. And from there he goes into a discussion of prolapses and sensation, which is probably outside the scope of what we’re talking about today, but we do see here a transfer in language from the singular to the plural. We have the common idea of a God that is engraved on men’s minds. This is the image of what a God is like that we have in our minds and it’s that that we’re referring to with the singular. And then epicure says For Gods there are and now he’s talking about the gods that exist in nature and they are plural. This is one of the things we have to be careful of when you condense things down too far is that you’re sacrificing completeness for brevity. You’re sacrificing a full understanding, an explication of what Epicurus has said for something that is a bit snappier and easier to remember certainly, but it invites misreading and that’s why I think this kind of thing can be dangerous and why it’s important to go back to the books themselves and see what is the foundation for something like the tetra pharmaco and how do we justify each point under consideration and part of that is being able to explain the language being used.
Cassius (17:15):
Yeah, Joshua, what you’ve already gone over so far is a good explanation of the complexities of this subject and we’re only going to have time to hit some of the high points, probably some of the first things that occur to people when they hear don’t fear God. Many people are familiar with the idea in religion that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom or from another point of view you’ll hear people say that God is love and of course, if God is love, why would you fear love the common viewpoint about this topic from whatever position you’re coming from in a religious point of view, that common viewpoint Epicurus is rejecting when he talks about having a holy and correct opinion about the divine nature. The key to it seems to be that from whatever epicurean text you want to go to any gods that do exist are not supernatural and they are not involved in either creating or managing or determining what’s going to happen in human affairs or even in the rest of the universe.
Cassius (18:19):
It is certainly not the case that Epicurus is saying Don’t fear God because God is love or God’s your friend or God’s going to keep you safe. It’s in fact much the opposite. The reason you don’t fear God and the way you have a correct understanding of the divine nature is to understand that that’s not the way Gods are. Gods are not managing the world for our benefit to the extent they exist. Gods are simply not involved in human affairs. So that would be the first point of the way the wise man is always happy from the epicurean perspective, the wise man is not living in fear or concern that some supernatural influence is going to determine his fate, punish him for doing wrong or reward him for doing good. A correct understanding of divine nature eliminates all of that from your thought processes and sets the stage in one of the most important aspects of life about how you can always be happy because you don’t have to be concerned about that problem. Okay,
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So continuing in the tetra pharmaco we have the next element of it which is death is free from risk or death is not something that we need to fear and the corresponding view in the principle doctrines is this death is nothing to us for that which is dissolved is without sensation and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us. In the letter to EU in section 1 24 and 1 25 of that letter, Epicurus says, become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us for all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation and therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who is truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living so that the man speaks but idly who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when it comes, but because it is painful in anticipation for that which gives no trouble when it comes is but an empty pain in anticipation.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So death, the most terrifying of ills is nothing to us since so long as we exist, death is not with us, but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead since for the former it is not and the latter are no more. And we can add to this also Lucious who says that we should consider the symmetry that exists between the infinity before we were born and the infinity after we die and just as we had no trouble from the infinity before we were born, we can expect no trouble from the infinity of non-existence after we die.
Cassius (21:18):
So again, Joshua, let’s summarize the highlights there. Just as don’t fear God doesn’t mean that God is our friend. Don’t worry about death doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t worry about it because we’re going to heaven when we die. Just as it’s important to understand the nature of the gods, it’s important to understand the nature of death. Death means the end of our existence That is not a sad and depressing thought. That is a thought that liberates us and motivates us to use the time that we have most pleasantly, as Epicurus points out, there are actually positive aspects about death being the way that it is because indeed we are concerned about the role of pain in life and as Epicurus says, there’s nothing terrible in life for those who know there’s nothing terrible in not living. As we move in just a moment into a discussion of pain, that’s going to be become important because Cicero has been hitting epicurus hard with the idea that pain is in fact not avoidable in life and we’ve got to find a way to deal with pain and ultimately the issue of how you can always be happy is going to involve how you can be confident that you are not going to be held in the grip of unendurable pain forever.
Cassius (22:41):
So very dramatically differently than simply thinking that when we die we go to heaven and that’s why we don’t have to worry about it. Understanding the nature of death gives us strength to know that there is nothing that is truly able to imprison us and torture us forever,
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Which for the early Greeks might’ve meant meta psychosis, which was a kind of reincarnation where the soul after death goes into a new body in this world and it’s this sort of continuous cycle of transmigration of the soul. Epicurus rules that out and he also rules out the mythological idea in ancient Greece that there is a place for the dead souls to go after death to the realm of Hades where a few select people will be punished harshly. People like CLIs and Sisyphus and axion where most people are going to be shuffling around in a sort of listless, forgetful torper and where the select blessed few are going to be on the aisle of the lithium enjoying happiness for the rest of their days. He’s ruling out basically all of these views and the views that will come in the future with Christianity and all the rest. So as you’ve been saying it, Cassius, I think is a good way to phrase it. A correct understanding of these issues enables us to see that death holds no terror
Cassius (24:04):
Right Now, before we move on to the third of these key doctrines, let’s of course relate this to what Quata has said in book one of own ends because in section 19, Quata had said that the wise man who is always happy disregard death. Then in section 12 he had added that the best life involves having a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain because death is apart from sensation. Now of course that harks back to what Epicurus has said and the principle doctrines and in the letter to Menorca, that sensation is where good and evil comes to us in life without sensation we have no pain or pleasure, we have no good or evil, we are essentially dead, and that is the nature of death that our awareness of anything comes to an end. So that knowledge there as we’ve been talking about is the key to what it means to not be concerned about death, have a correct understanding of it, realize that it has positive aspects and don’t be concerned that it brings it into your life because as Epicurus also says, no matter how long you live, the fullness of pleasure never gets any more full.
Cassius (25:22):
It would take us on too long of a tangent to go into that, but there are many, many reasons not to be concerned about the fact that you are going to die. So this would be the second of the ways in which the wise epicurean is always going to be happy. He has a correct understanding not only about the gods but about death. Now let’s move to the third of the key issues. What’s good is easy to get.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, that’s right. And there’s another interesting language question with this one because the word in Greek is hon and agathon is good, hon is the good. So we are dealing with not just anything good, but we’re dealing with the good.
Cassius (26:05):
Joshua, before you go too much further, let me jump in there and say as to both the third and fourth of these doctrines, one of the real sticking points that people including me will have with some of this wording is the idea that these things are easy. That when you think about all the frustrations people have in life to say that what is good is easy to get or what is terrible is easy to endure, can seem to be pretty darn unrealistic if not actually offensive even depending on how you say it and how it comes across.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, because people are in such different positions in their life with health issues and the resources available to them that for some people buttoning up a shirt isn’t even easy. So to talk about attaining the good is something easy. I could definitely see why this kind of thing really rubs people the wrong way. In the principle doctrines, Epicurus writes this, the limit of quantity in pleasure is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind, nor of both at once and in the letter to eu, Epicurus goes on for quite some length about pleasure and I won’t read it all. What he does say though is that the right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choice and avoidance to the health of the body and the soul’s freedom from disturbance.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Since this is the aim of the life of blessedness for it is to obtain this end that we always act namely to avoid pain and fear. And when this is once secured for us, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed since the living creature has not to wander as though in search for something that is missing and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body for it is then that we have need of pleasure when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure, but when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and the end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure is the first good innate in us and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance and to pleasure, we return again using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.
Cassius (28:16):
Yeah, Joshua, there’s a tremendous amount of detail there in the letter to Menoras that we’re not going to be covering today, but in our current context, it’s very interesting to look at the way Cicero has touched on this issue in on ends because if we consider that what is good is easy to get is a summary of principle doctrine number three and principle doctrine number three is focused on the limit of quantity of pleasure. It’s interesting to look back at section 19 and see that when Quata says how Epicurus says the wise man is always happy, the first thing he says, and this would be I think the equivalent of principle doctrine three, is his desires are kept within bounds. He doesn’t say anything else at that point about what’s good is easy to get. He’s focused on the boundary of his desires, which of course is a major theme that one thing you want to avoid in pursuing desires is going for those things that are neither natural nor necessary and which have no limit to them. The nature of the problem being that if you go after a desire that by nature cannot be satisfied, then you set yourself up for perpetual frustration and failure so you focus on desires in life that can actually be achieved in section 12, the equivalent of principle doctrine. Number three is the statement. Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures, great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily with no pain to thwart or threaten them.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
For this principle doctrine, the episode that I always think of as Alexander the Great who possibly when encountering for the first time the idea that there might be innumerable other worlds like our own, which is certainly an idea that Epicurus held, Alexander was said to have wept, to think that there were so many worlds that he would never even have the opportunity to conquer. And that to me is setting your desire at a scale that is so far outside of the realm of what is open and available and possible for you to achieve that you’re just setting yourself up to be miserable.
Cassius (30:28):
Yeah, Joshua, the Alexander illustration is a good one. Principle doctrine number three certainly does not focus on pleasure being easy. Principle doctrine three focuses on there being a limit to pleasure, meaning that it is attainable to find pleasure in life and not be constantly frustrated. As Toez says, it is possible when you keep your desires within bounds to actually attain the pleasures that you set out to seek in life. In that sense, bottom line is what’s good is getable. It is not something that you are doomed to fail in attempting to get, and as Tarus said in section 12, the wise man is not going to allow his past pleasures to slip away but take to light in constantly recalling them. As deputy cures said at the end of his life when he was in pain from kidney disease, he was able to offset against that pain the pleasure of his friendships and his accomplishments and philosophy.
Cassius (31:28):
So pleasure in life is attainable despite the many obstacles that can sometimes get in our way and place us under tremendous pain. The good is attainable. It is possible to live happily. That’s the point that Cicero is examining. Is virtue sufficient for happiness? Well, according to Epicurus, that’s the wrong way to look at it. Virtue is going to bring you happiness, but the key is that happiness is a matter of pleasure and virtue brings pleasure and pleasure means a happy life even when you sometimes suffer pain. So I think that really is the thrust of the third of these key doctrines of epicurus. Not necessarily that it’s easy, but it is definitely attainable to live a happy life. Of course, related to that is going to be the fourth of the issues that is in the tetra pharmacon. What is terrible is easy to endure the one of these four that is the most criticized out there in the world. Again, not stated in this way, in the principle doctrines or in the letters of epicurus, what is stated in the principle doctrines is principle doctrine number four.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, principle doctrine four says this pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once, but chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh and it’s very easy for the modern reader to just breeze past that word continuously. This is a word that has heavy significance because there was an argument in the ancient world as to whether pleasure could be continuous or was it merely momentary episodic that it comes and goes and that when pleasure is gone you have either pain or perhaps a middle state. Epicurus falls down on the side. The pleasure can be continuous and that’s kind of the goal. The goal is for pleasure that is enduring and long lasting and on the other side of the equation you have someone like aip, the crna, who thinks that continuous pleasure is not attainable and that what we’re dealing with are momentary pleasures and that perhaps as a pleasure begins to fade.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
You might have to replace it with another one or something. So a close examination of the language here is important because that argument was long lasting in the ancient world. But it’s interesting. Epicurus says, pleasure can last continuously. However, what he says here in principle doctrine four is pain does not last continuously. This is the distinction. This is part of what allows us to always have a predominance of pleasure over pain. Epicure says elsewhere that the wise man always has more reason for joy than for vation. This is wrapped up in this idea that the wise man is always happy even if the wise man is in immense pain. There are several strategies that you can use to set the pleasure that you have in your life over and against the pain that you’re experiencing and the pleasure because of attributes like this. One, pleasure is continuous and pain is not because of attributes like this. One pleasure will predominate if you allow it to predominate over the pain in your life.
Cassius (34:48):
Yeah, Jo, where I think that is exactly the point, the criticism of this phrasing comes from stripping it out of its context. It sounds very clinical when you start talking about continuous versus interrupted pleasure and when you read the details of principle doctrine number four about whether intense pains last a long time or not, whether longer term pains are manageable or not, that all sounds very clinical and very easy to dispute because everybody can say, well, I know intense pain that seemed to last a long time to me and I know even lesser pains are not easy for me to manage. You get into this, he said, she said back and forth about clinical facts, but that’s not the thrust of why this is being said. The context in which this whole issue has come up is again this question of how the wise man can consider himself to be happy no matter what his circumstances.
Cassius (35:40):
The way you do that is to have a correct understanding of what happiness is in the first place, and happiness does not mean that you are totally in the condition of a God and have zero pain in your life. Happiness means that pleasures predominate over pains. It doesn’t require you to eliminate every moment of pain from your life in order to consider yourself happy. What you do have to have though is confidence that you are in enough control of your situation to be confident that pain is not going to prevent you from being happy. That pain does not have the power to keep you in its grip without any relief. There is often nothing easy about what is terrible in life. There is nothing easy about the pain of life, but just as the good is attainable being the point of principle doctrine. Number three, the point of principle doctrine number four and this fourth leg of the tetra pharmacon is that pain cannot prevail over us unless we let it.
Cassius (36:45):
There’s nothing terrible in life for the person who knows that there’s nothing terrible in death. We are always in ultimate control of our lives because we have the power to end our lives. If things get bad enough, what’s good is possible burning in hell forever. Always being in pain is not something we are required to endure. Bringing it all home again to the original point, this is the way Epicurus presents the wise man always to be happy. Though Cicero may wish to ridicule it, Epicurus himself did say that the wise man is always happy. Epicurus is not simply caught by the grandeur of the thought. According to Cicero, Epicurus has definitely thought through the meaning of his own words, and Epicurus is presenting a consistent and reasonable approach to how the wise man is always happy. Epicurus is not saying with Jackie Gleason how sweet it is when he’s under torture. Epicurus is saying that happiness can be truly and correctly understood as something that is attainable to us in life and that not even the executioner or the torture chamber can hold us in its grip and force us to continue forever in pain as the poets threatened for those who disobeyed the gods.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
So isn’t part of it that pain has a limit.
Cassius (38:18):
Callini, you’ve said it much better than I did. I don’t think the point is that what is terrible is easy to endure. The point is is that what is terrible pain has a limit. Just like pleasure has a limit. There is a limit to pain, and knowing that there is a limit to pain gives us confidence to face adversity and all sorts of problems in life knowing that pain does have a limit.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Paulina, I think that’s a good point. I’m going to end this by reading from Emily Austin’s book on page 2 48 because as you’ve already said, Cassius, this is the prong of the tetra pharmacist that creates the most division or conflict and she’s going to reinforce some points that you’ve already made and makes some more of her own. So she says on page 2 48, we tend to measure the merits of a philosophy of living in part by how it advises us to manage the misfortunes of life. How does it help us navigate life’s difficulties? People who do more than dip their toe in the water of a philosophy discovered that each tradition addresses suffering within their larger system, not as a few tidy and easily implemented pieces of advice. Buddhism, for example, requires adopting a new perspective on personal identity, one that expands or even erases the self stoicism, at least.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Traditional stoicism likewise requires seeing oneself as situated within a cosmos of meaning organized by a divine hand. The doctrines of time-tested philosophical schools hang together as a whole, so we cannot cherry pick advice. I think that is good philosophical advice for any system, but it’s especially important with Epicureanism because there’s been so much hostile commentary and misinformation over the years and understanding how everything fits together. You don’t really understand even just the first principle doctrine until you understand all the principle doctrines and how they connect to each other and how they relate to the broader system. But she does go on. She says, for example, the stoic rejection of negative emotions requires adopting their view that virtue is the only benefit and vice is the only harm as such a child’s existence or death does not benefit or harm a parent because a child is neither virtue nor vice.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
The only genuine harm stoic can suffer is the loss of virtue. So the loss of anything else, person or object does not count as a harm. It is irrational for stoic to grieve the death of a child because grieving what does not harm us is irrational. That is why stoics reject grief as irrational, and you’ll remember we did an entire section on grief in Tesco and Disputations, and that is exactly Cicero’s point of view, that nothing would be worse than the loss of your virtue and that most of the things that people think of as being terrible are actually not terrible at all. They are indifferent. She continues a subscriber to stoicism needs to grapple with the stoic system of value which holds that only virtue is good to reach the stoic conclusion about indifference or misfortune. For all my reservations about Stoicisms theory of value, I respect their admirable systematicity and do not like to see it chopped up for parts.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
In other words, that stoicism, just like every other philosophical system, is a consistent and coherent whole and that if you want to understand part of it, you have to have an understanding of the broader picture, and that is certainly no less true for Epicurus. She goes on to say, Epicureans, unlike the stoics, cannot redescribe physical pain or significant misfortunes as harmless primarily because they are hedonists. The very definition of hedonism contains the view that pain is genuinely bad just as pleasure is genuinely good. Epicureans then must give their advocates advice for managing misfortune rather than denying its existence for counterbalancing physical and psychological pain. As we saw in the chapter on misfortune, Epicurus considers grief a natural outgrowth of attachment to the people with whom we share pleasures and form bonds of trust. While we are rarely injured beyond possible repair, Epicurus does not deny that that can happen.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Nevertheless, Epicurus remains optimistic that cultivating certain habits of living provides resources for managing the inevitable misfortunes of life. Then she says Epicureans instead, prepare for misfortune by living pleasantly with friends and by cultivating gratitude for the daily pleasures that living pleasantly affords. When we fall on hard times, whether through physical incapacity or the loss of those we love, we draw on gratitudes resources largely in the form of pleasant memories and the support of the friends we are grateful to have in our lives. And there has long been discussion about the ending of Lucius’s poem. Why does he end his poem on Epicurean philosophy with a horrible account of the plague in Athens, people whose bodies are rotting in the streets and there’s no one left to bury them, or people who are fighting with each other in a very unseemly way over who gets to put their friend’s body on the pire to give them the proper burial while the other body that is associated with the person they’re arguing with is going to be left out to Rod.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
I mean, it’s really horrifying stuff and I recall Stephen Greenblatt making the very same point that Emily Austin makes here, which is if Epicurean philosophy works, it can’t just work when things are going well for you. If it works, it has to also help you get through the bad times. It has to also help you get through the pain and the grief and the misfortune, and we cannot, like the stoics, rely on sheltering ourselves within the armor of virtue and everything outside of that is merely external to us so that it holds no power over us. This is the view that Cicero has been trying to sell all throughout tus skill and Disputations, but it’s a system we cannot avail ourselves of and remain epicurean. If it’s really the case that pain is an evil, we’re going to have to find healthy ways to deal with that in our own lives because we can’t fully eliminate pain and be sure that we have eliminated it for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
For as long as you are alive, there is the potential that you’re going to experience it. And for Cicero, this is why he thinks that epicurean philosophy does not lead to happiness, because even if you’re not in pain at this moment, you have to live in fear that you might be in pain one day and that fear is with you now, and that fear will ruin your life before the pain even gets to you. So these are all very difficult questions and I hope we’ve managed to bring a little bit of clarity to this very condensed form of part of Epicurus ethics because the things we’ve been talking about today are things that we’ve been discussing in many forms for many, many years now, and it takes a lot of work to establish and understand a framework within which to fit all of these different elements in a way that makes sense and in a way that also works and is true to life.
Cassius (45:34):
Very true. Joshua, that brings us back to where we started the episode and where we’ll conclude it for today. Happiness is something that we can realistically expect to attain. Happiness does not require that we eliminate every moment of pain from our lives. Happiness is something that we can be confident through. Epicurean philosophy is achievable. Next week we’ll come back and continue into Section 11 of Tus Coon Disputations. As always, we invite you to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.