Episode 312 - Word Games Are No Substitute For Reality

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Welcome to Episode 312 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.
   
We’ll pick up this week at Section 15 of Part 5 of Tusculan Disputations, continuing to look at how the Stoic/Platonic philosophers use logic to deduce that since only virtue is within our control, happiness comes from exclusively relying on virtue, excluding all else from being considered to be truly good.

Transcript (Unedited)

Cassius (00:10):

Welcome to episode 312 of Lucretius today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious who wrote on the nature of Things, the most complete presentation of epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean texts and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes we’re picking up this week in section 15 of part five of Tus and Disputations, where we are continuing to look at the division among those who argue that virtue is all that is necessary for a happy life versus those who take a different position, including Epicurus, who considers the happy life to be essentially tied to virtue, but that the goal of the happy life is not virtue itself, but the pleasure that is generated from living in such a way.

Joshua (01:15):

So two weeks ago, cash as we ended in the text on this question of virtue and particularly of courage and how that relates to happiness, Cicero says, for what else is courage but an affection of mind that is ready to undergo perils and patient in the endurance of pain and labor without any alloy of fear. Now, this certainly could not be the case if there were anything else good, but what depended on honesty alone and then he goes on to say, but how can anyone be in possession of that desirable and much coveted security for I now call a freedom from anxiety, a security on which freedom, a happy life depends who I say can be in possession of that security who has or may have a multitude of evils attending him. And he goes on to say, now if to this courage I am speaking of, we add, how can he be brave and undaunted and hold everything as trifles which can befall a man for so a wise man should do unless he be one who thinks that everything depends on himself.

(02:20):

So on the subject of security and particularly security from anxiety, he goes into a question of courage and then he says at the end of 14, now if to this courage I’m speaking of, we add temperance that it may govern all our feelings and agitations what can be wanting to complete his happiness, who is secured by his courage from uneasiness and fear and is prevented from immoderate desires and Im moderate insense of joy by temperance, I could easily show that virtue is able to produce these effects, but that I have explained on the foregoing days. Okay? He is however going to continue that discussion as we go into 15, which I will read now, but as the perturbations of the mind make life miserable and tranquility renders it happy, and as these perturbations are of two sorts, grief and fear proceeding from imagined evils and as in moderate joy and lust arise from a mistake about what is good and as all these feelings are in opposition to reason and counsel, when you see a man at ease quite free and disengaged from such troublesome commotions which are so much at variance with one another, can you hesitate to pronounce such a one, a happy man?

(03:38):

Now, the wise man is always in such a disposition. Therefore, the wise man is always happy. Besides every good is pleasant. Whatever is pleasant may be boasted and talked of. Whatever may be boasted of is glorious, but whatever is glorious is certainly laudable and whatever is laudable, doubtless also honorable. Whatever then is good, is honorable, but the things which they reckon is good, they themselves do not call honorable. Therefore, what is honorable alone is good, hence it follows that a happy life is comprised in honesty alone. Such things then are not to be called or considered goods when a man may enjoy an abundance of them and yet be most miserable. Is there any doubt but that a man who enjoys the best health and who has strength and beauty and his senses flourishing in their utmost quickness and perfection? Suppose him likewise, if you please nimble and active nay, give him riches, honors authority, power, glory.

(04:45):

Now I say, should this person who is in possession of all these be unjust in temperate, timid, stupid, or an idiot, could you hesitate to call such a one miserable? What then are those goods in the possession of which you may be very miserable? Let us see if a happy life is not made up of parts of the same nature as a heap implies a quantity of grain of the same kind, and if this be once admitted, happiness must be compounded of different good things, which alone are honorable. If there is any mixture of things of another sort with these nothing honorable can proceed from such a composition. Now take away honesty and how can you imagine anything happy for whatever is good is desirable on that account. Whatever is desirable must certainly be approved of whatever you approve of must be looked on as acceptable and welcome. You must consequently impute dignity to this, and if so, it must necessarily be laudable. Therefore, everything that is laudable is good. Hence it follows that what is honorable is the only good and should we not look upon it in this light, there will be a great many things which we must call. Good.

Cassius (06:02):

Okay, thank you for reading that Joshua. We need to talk about exactly where he’s going here, but my first thought in listening to you read that is that Cicero, again focusing on what we’ve discussed in the past in terms of this sor syllogism, he’s approaching the question of happiness by means of definitions and logic, and he’s from the very beginning of the paragraph, parsing out what he thinks happiness consists of by saying that perturbations make life miserable, tranquility renders it happy, and there’s two kinds of perturbations, grief and fear and also in moderate joy and lust which arise from a mistake about what is good. And if you take all of those flatly as givens, then anyone who is disengaged from all perturbations or commotions is Cicero’s definition of a happy man. And you can especially see the sistic logic of this kind of thing when he says that the wise man is always in such a disposition which is free from perturbation, and so therefore the wise man is always happy.

(07:12):

He ends up defining happiness in terms of being free from perturbations, and that’s very different from the way that Epicurus would approach things because Epicurus focuses on pleasure as the key component of a happy life. Cicero is considering pleasure in the epicurean sense to be a perturbation, and so there’s just no way to reconcile these respective positions. If you take the position that pleasure is the goal, then happiness is going to rest on pleasure. If you take the position that pleasure is a perturbation, then you can’t have any pleasure whatsoever of that type involved in a happy life as Cicero is describing it. So I think you’re seeing here an illustration of how different the approach is when you focus on pleasure versus absence of perturbation as Cicero and the stoics want to define it. And so from the cone perspective, you end up identifying the best life, the happy life almost in the same way that you would say that one plus one equals two in a very black and white way.

(08:19):

That leads you to the conclusion that you can set your goal in life and say that you’ve achieved it purely through the mental process of defining as desirable only those things that are within your control. In the same way that a modern Christian can say that my treasure is in heaven and therefore think that he’d need not have any concern whatsoever about his current circumstances here on this earth, you talk yourself into this mental state where you have decided that whatever it is that is within your control here is all that matters. And the necessary requirement to get to that conclusion of Cicero is to be able to say that there is nothing good that is not within your control. Everything else that some people say is desirable. We’ll come up with some other words to describe those things, but we won’t describe those as good.

(09:13):

We’ll just say that they’re preferable or excellent or there’s some other words to describe them, but we won’t consider them to be good and therefore necessary for a happy life. The example that Cicero gives here, is there any doubt that a man who enjoys the best health, who has strength and beauty and flourishing senses and nimble and active and has riches, honors authority, power, glory, is there any doubt that such a person who has all those things but still has any degree of timidity or stupidity or unjustness about him is still miserable even though he has all those other good things? And the conclusion you reach from Cicero’s point of view is that all these other good things in life, health, riches, authority, power, honor, glory, all those other things are just irrelevant to whether you are living a happy life or not because it all comes down to what’s going on inside your head.

Joshua (10:11):

Cassius, as I listened to you talking there, I realized we’re not even halfway through this section five in the text, and I don’t know at what level of detail we’re going to go through the rest of this, but you can already get a sense that Cicero is kind of building toward his end game here because just in this first few sentences of 15, we’ve already dealt with a kind of wide ranging summary of the content so far, which is in section one, and he hasn’t really talked about this yet, but in section one we talked about whether death is something to be feared. Section two is pain and evil. Section three dealt with the question of grief or mental pain, and section four dealt with other disturbances or perturbations of the mind. And now we’re into section five here and the seminal question in section five is this is virtue alone sufficient for a happy life, and we’re kind of getting a recap of everything in this one section because he starts out with this discussion of these perturbations of mind, which he says were of two sorts grief, which was section three in this text and fear, which I think basically covered sections one and two, and then he goes on to talk about in moderate joy and lust, which arises from a mistake about what is good, which are the other perturbations of the mind, and you may remember that when we were going through section four on the other perturbations of the mind, I quoted pretty extensively from this Wikipedia article called Stoic Passions, which has to do with the way in which the Greeks translated the word pathos.

(11:46):

Pathos is the word that epic himself uses for the feelings as a canon faculty and for pleasure and pain. As kind of the two chief examples of this or the broadest examples of pathos within Epicurean philosophy, we’re talking about pain, but we’re also talking about pleasure, but from the stoic point of view as we discussed, this use of the word is almost thoroughly negative in its connotations. And so Cicero, we’ve already discussed this, but he’s coming back to it here as part of his kind of mid section five wrap up, and I’m sure I haven’t read very far ahead in this text, but I’m sure there’s a lot more to come, but it does just seem to me that he’s kind of building toward his end game and connecting it with the rigidity and the absolutism that we’ve also seen from Cicero on all of the questions we discussed when he says now the wise man is always in such a disposition, the wise man is always happy.

Cassius (12:45):

Joshua, let’s drop back and talk about where is he going with this argument that only virtue is necessary for happiness. Is it all just a word game And Epicurus and Cicero and Plato and Aristotle all end up at the same place just using different words as Cicero himself said was the case between the stoics and Aristotle and on ends. What is the end game that is really at stake in this question of whether virtue is the only good or whether there are other good things besides virtue?

Joshua (13:20):

Well, it’s clear to me that as much as Cicero quotes from the other thinkers in the other schools of thought, even he doesn’t think that all of these philosophical schools follow maybe different paths to the same place, right? He thinks there are clear differences, clear and very important differences, and that if you want to be happy, it makes a difference of which particular philosophers and which particular school you associate yourself with and which ones you learn from. In fact, I’m looking ahead here at section 41 and Cicero says, thus, those injuries of fortune, which you cannot bear, you should flee from. And then he gives kind of a little summary of what the different schools and philosophers have to say about it, which I think partially answers your question. He says, this is the very same which is said by Epicurus and by MOUs. Now, if those philosophers whose opinion it is that virtue has no power of itself and who say that the conduct which we denominate, honorable and laudable those two words again, which he’s just defined here in section 15 as we’ve been reading those philosophers who say that the conduct which we denominate honorable and laudable is really nothing and is only an empty circumstance set off with an unknowing sound can nevertheless maintain that a wise man is always happy.

(14:38):

Now, if that’s the case, he says, what think you may be done by the socratics and the platonic philosophers? Some of these allow such superiority to the goods of the mind as quite to eclipse what concerns the body and all external circumstances, but others do not admit these to be goods. They make everything depend on the mind whose disputes caries used as a sort of honorary arbitrator to determine for as what seems good to the peripatetics were allowed to be advantages by the stoics. And as the paralytics allowed no more to riches good health and other things of that sort than the stoics, when these things were considered according to their reality and not by mere names, his opinion was that there was no ground for disagreeing. Therefore, he says, let the philosophers of other schools see how they can establish this point, always the point, presumably being that the wise man is always happy, and he says, it is very agreeable to me that they make some professions worthy of being uttered by the mouth of a philosopher with regard to a wise man’s having always the means of living happily.

(15:51):

So in answer to your question, Cicero himself ends this entire book by saying that no, the school is the philosophy, do not agree on what is the good. They do not agree on whether virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life. They do not agree even on the question of whether virtue is the only good, and yet part of the draw for Cicero of great philosophy is that all of these disparate schools of thought are willing to come together on the final question, which is the wise man is always happy from his point of view. He sees even the philosophers that he most disagrees with, he sees them coming down to that conclusion. Now, the question of whether we should reach the same conclusion is a different one, and maybe that’s a question that we can keep in mind as we continue through the text.

Cassius (16:35):

Yeah, Joshua, in what you’ve just read in bringing up caries, it’s probably worth pointing out that caries is one of these academic skeptics like Cicero himself. And so when caries decides that in his opinion there’s no true grounds for the disagreement between the peripatetics and the stoics, it’s not necessarily because caries himself is establishing a position that he thinks is true. He simply, as a skeptic always does pointing out the inadequacies of the other positions and saying that in the end they appear to him to come back to something that is very similar. And I think that’s why carni disease’s approach the idea that there’s really nothing at stake here that’s different between the schools. The reason Cicero doesn’t want to go with that here in Tuscan Disputations as he was willing to go to it in on ends is that Cicero is committed to the idea that philosophy should be used for the benefit of the state, for the benefit of the state religion to enforce in people’s minds that the ultimate guide and target and controlling rules of life are ultimately of a divine nature, which he considers virtue to be, and that it’s important to have people always focused on the mental aspects of virtue rather than having them go after other things in life besides something that he can enlist in the service of the state.

(18:16):

Religion virtue ultimately in Cicero’s point of view comes from divinity, comes from God. And of course, since God’s not around to tell us moment to moment what to do, it makes it awfully convenient for the state and for people who are actually priests of the state religion, that they are the interpreters of what is virtuous in any particular situation. Epicurus, on the other hand says that the interpreter of virtue, the guide of life is nature through pleasure and pain, and that’s something that each individual has a direct access to without the need for any intermediary priest or state guidance to enforce the same kind of law at all times in all places and on all people as Cicero likes to talk about. So the real practical thing that we end up coming back to is this question of ultimately what is the motivating force? Is it an other worldly divinity or ideal form or is it within us through nature and pleasure and pain?

(19:24):

And that takes me back to where we were in section 15 where Cicero is once again mentioning this so syllogism and saying, let us see if a happy life is not made up of parts of the same nature as a heap implies a quantity of grain of the same kind, and if we admit that the heap is composed only of grains of the same kind, then once we admit that, then happiness can only be composed of things that are happy. And that’s the slippery slope that you get into which Cicero finds to be advantageous, that if you find everything good to be in virtue, then you can eliminate from the life of a virtuous man, every target, every priority, every action, which does not conform with this divine sense of virtue. You have this rather than absol disposition, I might say even totalitarian viewpoint, that everything in life must conform to this central organizing principle which Cicero equates with the divine and that there’s no room within this best life for anything other than things which partake of the divine.

(20:43):

In the same way that a heap of sand must contain nothing but sand. Any heap that contains even a single grain of something other than sand from this point of view ceases to be a heap of sand. Again, I think the point here is not so much to play a word game, but to allow Cicero to justify this absolutist, totalitarian type of orientation towards life in which you submit every aspect of your life to the control of virtue rather than any other priority or target or desirable goal whatsoever. Certainly not individual pleasure. Now, in coming paragraphs, some of which we will cover, some of which we probably won’t, Cicero is going to give a lot of individual examples of people who he wants to praise as being virtuous and so forth. But again, in order to keep the end goal in mind, that’s one way of getting a grip on what Cicero’s end goal really is and why Cicero thinks it’s a good use of his time to write these lengthy philosophical books, essentially campaigning against anyone like Epicurus who would argue that there is a proper goal of life apart from this state run religious run, idealistic sense of virtue.

Joshua (22:08):

If you go to the Wikipedia page for the SOEs paradox, it has on the right side an image of a color gradient from green on the left to red on the right. And the point is that if you compare one narrow band of color to the adjacent one, the human eye can’t tell them apart. But if you take something from the far left where it’s very clearly green, and compare that with something in the middle where it’s kind of a reddish, greenish, brownish color, you can distinguish. It occurs to me that even earlier on in this section, before he even gets to his discussion of the so syllogism, he uses a kind of chain argument, which touches on I think some of the same questions, right? When he says Every good is pleasant, whatever is pleasant may be boasted and talked of, whatever may be boasted of is glorious, but whatever is glorious is certainly laudable and whatever is laudable, doubtless also honorable, whatever then is good, is honorable.

(23:05):

Now you see the jump he’s made there. He started with the word good and ended up with the word honorable, and he said, whatever is good is honorable. But what if you take the second stage of that where he says, besides every good is pleasant, whatever is pleasant may be boasted of. He could very well end this by saying whatever is pleasant is honorable. Presumably the way this works, you can pick any element in the chain as the starting point of the chain just by cutting off the bottom of it and start from there and build buildup. And I don’t know if I’m entirely comfortable with this kind of incrementalism, particularly when we’re talking about words. I mean, gosh, over the years we’ve had so many discussions about the word pleasure and all of its meanings and all of its different ways you can understand that word and everything that is included under the umbrella of that term.

(23:53):

And I have no doubt if we’d spent the same amount of time talking about words like glorious or laudable or honorable, if we would’ve a similar level of variation to discuss. Don is one of our great friends on the forum, and he’s always cautions in the translation of a text against using just one word in a target language to translate a word in the original language because even though there might be a connection between the two words in the different languages, each word also has distinct connotations that don’t translate effectively across languages. And that I think is kind of true even within a language. He says, every good is pleasant. Whatever is pleasant may be boasted of. I don’t think that Cicero even believes this himself, that whatever is pleasant may be boasted of. He’s using it as part of his chain argument to get to his conclusion, which is whatever is good is honorable.

(24:49):

And then he reverses that by saying that therefore what is honorable alone is good. Nothing is good that isn’t honorable. And again, I say by the same logic, you could say that nothing is good, that isn’t pleasant, nothing is good, that isn’t glorious, nothing is good that isn’t laudable. And when you’ve got these words that sit adjacent to each other and you go down the line one to the next, and then you get to the end and you compare it to the beginning or to the middle of the chain, just like this color gradient, you’re dealing with some pretty expansive differences. And is Cicero being careless in the way he’s using language and the way he’s using logic to do the things that he does? Even though I can sit here and turn it around on him by saying, well, you just said Cicero, that every good is pleasant and whatever is pleasant may be boasted of, and you concluded this chain by saying that such and such is honorable and that what is honorable alone is good.

(25:48):

And I can go back just like you’ve done and say whatever is pleasant is honorable. Just as Cicero has said, whatever is good is honorable because whatever is good is pleasant. So I dunno if I have a firm conclusion here, I’m just not happy with the way he’s using these words. It seems to me that he’s kind of pulling the wool over our eyes as he’s going through this list, and it’s very easy to just breeze through it. But when you really think about the claims that he’s making here, I feel like we could spend an entire podcast episode just on the question of he says, whatever may be boasted of is glorious, is everything that you can boast of glorious. I don’t know if I’m immediately and instantly convinced by that claim, but it’s sandwiched in here in a list of other claims just like it. Everything that’s good is pleasant. I don’t even know if I agree with that.

Cassius (26:38):

Absolutely, Joshua. We’ve talked about this in many different ways in the past, but it’s this attempt to turn reality into a mathematical equation or to a geometric form. It’s like breezing through if A equals B, and if B equals C, then A equals C. Well, yeah, if that’s the way you want to define it, but what is B is C in real life you can sound so smart and so confident by establishing in your mind a set of definitions and then playing with those definitions, but that’s not what the world is all about. That kind of thing can be a very valuable tool in working with reality. But if you allow someone to confuse you into thinking that an equation or a syllogism is reality, then you’ve just set yourself up for being totally manipulated and distorted and having the tight barred gates set between you and the nature of reality as Lucious refers to in terms of epicurus.

(27:47):

That’s a lot. It seems to me, of what’s going on with both religion and this type of sistic propositional logic that Epicurus is so against in terms of dialectic or however you want to define it. I think that’s where we end up in terms of where this is all going, is that it turns into a word game that substitutes for the reality that we learned through our senses. And Epicurus saw into this game that it was a game that it’s not the same thing as reality and decided that the most important thing to do was to attack this gamesmanship of words and see through virtue as just another word that has to be brought into contact with reality in order to mean anything. And reality for us is what we have contact with through the five senses, through the sense of pleasure and pain and through paralysis or anticipations.

(28:47):

If a thing is not tangible to us through those mechanisms, then we’re out of touch with reality and all the word play in the world, all the sistic equations and formulas in the world are essentially meaningless to us. But Cicero and the stoics, these people who are investing themselves in platonic forms and platonic ideals are going exactly in that direction. And it’s a very dangerous and destructive direction to take philosophy, to take human life, to take anything. Again, in terms of the Soror syllogism, whether a heap is composed of 100% grains of sand or whether it is composed of 99.9% grains of sand and one grain of rice is a word game, whatever it is that you’re looking at, if it is 99% sand, it is reasonable in human life to consider that to be for most purposes a heap of sand. Now, there are times when one grain of rice in the middle of a heap of sand, if you’re using it in some type of scientific or technical procedure, can throw a monkey wrench into the result and produce terribly unexpected and undesirable results.

(30:10):

But for most cases, 99.9% sand is good enough to constitute a heap of sand. And the good enough is the world that we live in. We do not live in a world of perfect forms where everything is in its ideal state and is completely pure. We live in a world just like Epicurus lived in where we have many, many good things to be happy about. And yet at the same time, we have kidney disease, we have pain in certain parts of our body. We’re constantly dealing with a mixture of good things and bad things, and we can decide that if I don’t have perfection, I don’t want anything, and we can be mad and go home and commit suicide even if we are convinced that perfection is required in life. But if we take a realistic approach that we can be happy and consider ourselves to be blessed even to have dominance of pleasure over pain, even though we do have certain things in life that irritate us, that’s the world that we live in, those of us who are committed to this world as opposed to some other world.

(31:21):

So I think a lot of these issues that we’re talking about today are extremely important in understanding where all this goes, and as we go forward through any other parts of Tuscan and Disputations that we look at before we move on to another topic, I think that we’re going to continue to come back to this kind of analysis that there’s a real world that Epicurus lives in, and there’s an ideal world that these other philosophers are chasing. And from the epicurean point of view, it is a whole lot more sound, more consistent with nature and produces a better result to stay with this world than this other world of idealism and abstractions that from the point of view of the senses just simply does not exist.

Joshua (32:06):

And all of this is in line with the discussion we’ve been having in an open thread on the forum, which is this comparison between reason and sensation as methods of inquiry or methods of gaining knowledge. And with Epicurean philosophy, you get more of the latter. You get claims of knowledge that are derived from experience that you yourself can go out and put to the test, I think is the issue. Whereas when it comes to Plato in its forms, he is making claims of knowledge that proceed any experience, and there’s no way to really test those claims. The claims about this realm of pure being unaffected by any change, which is the abode of these perfect forms that might as well be all a hallucination, right? That might as well be a fantasy story for all the relationship that it has with our lived experience of reality. We just don’t see this kind of thing in our lives, and it appears to have no connection with anything that we do see or do experience in our lives. So that’s another thing to be careful of, is claims that are made that go beyond what we contest with our senses, what we contest empirically and what we can experience for ourselves.

Cassius (33:23):

Very good points. Joshua, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion as we were discussing before the podcast started, I think of what we’re doing here at tus and Disputations right now in terms of making sure that in our work at Epicure and Friends, we keep some of the real big picture issues front and center. It’s very easy to get involved in many of the details of physics or canons or ethics, and we will continue to do that, and we want to pursue all of those details on the forum and as we have time to do so. But at the same time as well, I think what we’re talking about here that Cicero is concluding Tuscan Disputations about is taking us back in the direction and keeping us focused on the very biggest of pictures just as Cicero himself saw that he was doing. It’s just that we are taking from an epicurean position, an extremely different position on the issues that Cicero is addressing. Okay, with that, we’ll conclude for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean French form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any other of our discussions about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.