Episode 315 - Preventing Pain From Destroying Happiness
Listen to “Episode 315 - Preventing Pain From Destroying Happiness” on Spreaker.
-
Welcome to Episode 315 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 are closing in on the end of those portions of Tusculan Disputations that are most relevant to Epicurean philosophy today, so we’ll pick up this week after Section 27 of Part 5.Quote
XXVII.
But to dismiss the subtleties of the Stoics, which I am sensible I have employed more than was necessary, let us admit of three kinds of goods: and let them really be kinds of goods, provided no regard is had to the body, and to external circumstances, as entitled to the appellation of good in any other sense than because we are obliged to use them: but let those other divine goods spread themselves far in every direction, and reach the very heavens. Why, then, may I not call him happy, nay, the happiest of men, who has attained them? Shall a wise man be afraid of pain? which is, indeed, the greatest enemy to our opinion. For I am persuaded that we are prepared and fortified sufficiently, by the disputations of the foregoing days, against our own death, or that of our friends, against grief and the other perturbations of the mind. But pain seems to be the sharpest adversary of virtue: that it is which menaces us with burning torches; that it is which threatens to crush our fortitude, and greatness of mind, and patience. Shall virtue then yield to this? Shall the happy life of a wise and consistent man succumb to this? Good Gods! how base would this be! Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedæmon, troops of young men, with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay even ready to expire, rather than own themselves conquered. Is any country of barbarians more uncivilized or desolate than India? Yet they have amongst them some that are held for wise men, who never wear any clothes all their life long, and who bear the snow of Caucasus, and the piercing cold of winter, without any pain: and who if they come in contact with fire endure being burned without a groan. The women too, in India, on the death of their husbands have a regular contest, and apply to the judge to have it determined which of them was best beloved by him; for it is customary there for one man to have many wives. She in whose favour it is determined exults greatly, and being attended by her relations is laid on the funeral pile with her husband: the others, who are postponed, walk away very much dejected. Custom can never be superior to nature: for nature is never to be got the better of. But our minds are infected by sloth and idleness, and luxury, and languor, and indolence: we have enervated them by opinions, and bad customs. Who is there who is unacquainted with the customs of the Egyptians? Their minds being tainted by pernicious opinions, they are ready to bear any torture, rather than hurt an ibis, a snake, a cat, a dog, or a crocodile: and should any one inadvertently have hurt any of these animals, he will submit to any punishment. I am speaking of men only. As to the beasts, do they not bear cold and hunger, running about in woods, and on mountains and deserts? will they not fight for their young ones till they are wounded? Are they afraid of any attacks or blows? I mention not what the ambitious will suffer for honour’s sake, or those who are desirous of praise on account of glory, or lovers to gratify their lust. Life is full of such instances.
In this week’s text Cicero is going to say “For I am persuaded that we are prepared and fortified sufficiently, by the disputations of the foregoing days, against our own death, or that of our friends, against grief and the other perturbations of the mind. But pain seems to be the sharpest adversary of virtue…”
In that regard I want us to return to Cicero’s statement in the preceding section “for I do not apprehend how past pleasures can allay present evils”
As I mentioned in the thread to last week’s episode, this is a direct challenge for us to give our best reasoning to support the use of pleasures (of the past, present, or future) to “offset” or “array against” current pains.
-
Quote
Nor did he take any trouble to provide himself with those remedies which might have enabled him to bear pain; such as firmness of mind, a shame of doing anything base, exercise, and the habit of patience, precepts of courage, and a manly hardiness: but he says that he supports himself on the single recollection of past pleasures, as if any one, when the weather was so hot as that he was scarcely able to bear it, should comfort himself by recollecting that he was once in my country Arpinum, where he was surrounded on every side by cooling streams: for I do not apprehend how past pleasures can allay present evils. But when he says that a wise man is always happy, who would have no right to say so if he were consistent with himself, what may they not do, who allow nothing to be desirable, nothing to be looked on as good but what is honourable? Let, then, the Peripatetics and old Academics follow my example, and at length leave off muttering to themselves; and openly and with a clear voice let them be bold to say, that a happy life may not be inconsistent with the agonies of Phalaris’s bull.
-
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 315 continues the Tusculan Disputations series with Sections 27-30, taking in Cicero’s summary of all ancient views on the chief good. The central thread is whether pleasure can “overcome” or “offset” pain — and what it even means to be happy when suffering.
Cassius opens by contextualizing the TD project: Cicero in circa 50 BC is distilling the sum of Greco-Roman philosophy in its last preeminent era, before the rise of Judeo-Christianity transformed Western thought. Cicero’s TD is not idiosyncratic — it represents the consensus view of non-Epicurean philosophy that has persisted for two thousand years.
Joshua reads TD Section 27: Cicero steps back from extreme Stoic language (“I have employed more of the Stoic subtleties than was necessary”) but still insists that the divine goods of the mind — unlike bodily and external goods, which “lie groveling on the ground” — extend to the heavens and are sufficient for happiness. He marshals examples: Spartan boys torn by rods, Indian ascetics bearing snow and fire, Indian women competing for the honor of dying with their husbands, animals fighting for their young. Cicero’s conclusion: custom and bad opinions enervate us against pain, but nature has given us what we need.
Joshua provides historical context: Pyrrho of Elis (the Skeptic philosopher) accompanied Anaxarchus on Alexander the Great’s campaigns and encountered the gymnosophists in India/Bactria. Diogenes Laertius records that Nausiphanes of Teos was charmed by Pyrrho — and Nausiphanes later taught Epicurus, who asked Nausiphanes about what he had seen in those exotic lands.
Cassius draws the Epicurean response: the nature/custom distinction Cicero uses is itself Epicurean — flee bad opinions, protect yourself from poisonous ideas — but the application differs. Cicero uses it to strengthen the mind’s control over the body; Epicurus uses it to restore contact with nature’s guidance through pleasure and pain. The key distinction: Cicero does not want you to be happy on the rack, he wants you to be virtuous on the rack — he has equated the two terms so completely that feeling is irrelevant.
Kalosyni asks whether Cicero’s point is that pleasure distracts from preparing for hardship. Joshua responds with the example from De Finibus: Cicero’s caricature of the Epicurean ideal man is Lucius Thorius Balbus dining sumptuously at a rich table on a bed of roses, while Cicero’s own ideal is Marcus Regulus willingly returning to Carthaginian torture because he gave his word — an exercise of virtue in the face of certain death.
Kalosyni reads TD Section 29 (student’s question) and Joshua reads Cicero’s response: Cicero invokes his Academic Skeptic freedom to draw from all schools and examine each philosopher’s view on whether the wise man is always happy. He notes that Carneades argued against the Stoics on this with great zeal and vehemence — but Cicero himself thinks the Stoic conclusion is right if their premises hold.
Joshua reads from the Wikipedia article on Carneades: Carneades held that neither reason (logos), conception (phantasia), nor sensation (aisthesis) can serve as a criterion of truth — each depends on the others, all are tainted by the unreliability of sensation, making certainty impossible. Cassius responds: this Academic Skepticism pervades all these arguments, which is why Epicurus placed such emphasis on the canonics — sensation, anticipation, and feeling — as the unavoidable and trustworthy guide that even the skeptics must rely on simply to stay alive.
Joshua reads TD Section 30: Cicero lists all major opinions about the chief good: four simple views (Stoics: only the honorable; Epicurus: pleasure; Hieronymus: freedom from pain; Carneades: enjoyment of the greatest natural goods) and several mixed views (Peripatetics: three kinds of goods; Dinomachus and Calliphon: pleasure plus virtue; Diodorus the Peripatetic: freedom from pain plus virtue). The views of Aristo, Pyrrho, and Herillus are dismissed as out of date.
Cassius and Joshua discuss the Latin in the Loeb edition: nihil bonum nisi voluptas (nothing good except pleasure, attributed to Epicurus) — as clear as Epicurean ethics can be stated. Joshua notes Cicero’s use of finis (limit/end, the Latin equivalent of telos) and summum bonum (highest good) — the same summum bonum that appears at the end of Lucretius’s poem.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 315 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’re continuing to close in on the conclusion of Tusculan Disputations, but we have a number of episodes left as we are still in Section Five, which is devoted to the question of whether virtue alone is sufficient to happiness. And as usual, at the beginning of these episodes, I try to put it in context — this question of virtue being sufficient can be a little on the dry side if you look at it as a sort of hypothetical.
But in the course of examining it, what we’re doing is talking about what happiness really is. And that’s a very practical issue of extreme importance to us in Epicurean philosophy — not just as a response or contrast to Stoicism or other philosophies, but just to understand what Epicurus had in mind when he was talking about happiness being so important as the goal of life and that happiness means a life of pleasure, as opposed to conformity with the gods or conformity with some kind of ideal abstractions. So as we go through these continuing sections at the end of Tusculan Disputations, Cicero is bringing all of his arguments about this topic together. And also Cicero has done us a great service by synthesizing the status of Greco-Roman philosophy around 50 BC — which was around the last period of time that it was really preeminent before the rise of Judeo-Christianity and the destruction of the ancient world and all the ancient attitudes that went with it.
So even though we’ve continuously talked about Cicero, I don’t think we should consider these positions he’s taking to be in any way unrepresentative or unique to Cicero. He is summarizing for us what the Stoics, what the Academics meaning Plato and Socrates and their crowd, what Aristotle through the Peripatetics and a number of other philosophers — he’s summarizing all that for us and giving his opinion about it. And of course, being as skeptical as Cicero was, he always hedges about what he himself believes and says, “I’m not going to tell you what’s right and wrong, I’m just going to tell you what’s probable.” But in the course of giving us all these alternatives, he’s telling us what Epicurus said, opposing what Epicurus said, but explaining it at the same time and giving us context and detail that we just don’t have in the original letters of Epicurus himself.
So again, we are in the middle of discussing this issue of virtue being sufficient to happiness. And in Section 26 where we ended last week, Cicero had given us a rousing Stoic call to action for everyone — including his friends in the old Academy and the Peripatetics following Aristotle — that everyone should follow his example and stop muttering to themselves and say with a clear voice, in the words of King in the Loeb edition, “a happy life will step down into the bull of Phalaris.” This is the illustration we’ve been talking about regularly: is the wise man still happy while on the rack? And he’s saying that the old Academy and the Aristotelians should not be hedging about it; they should say absolutely clearly: yes, even under torture, the wise man is still happy if he maintains his virtue. Now, the context for this part of the discussion had been the question of whether there is more than one kind of good thing.
In other words, whether there’s anything but virtue that is really good — because we have the ability to control whether we are virtuous or not, but we don’t have the ability to control whether we are healthy in body or whether we have external goods like luxurious living conditions and material goods which are not always within our control to keep. So in just a moment, Joshua is going to read for us Section 27, at which point Cicero is going to go back and talk about the three kinds of goods that Aristotle had suggested there were — goods of the body, goods of the mind, and external goods. And while stepping back from some of the rhetoric of Stoicism, he’s going to continue this campaign to focus on virtue as the center of happiness. So with that introduction, Joshua, if you could take us towards Section 27.
Joshua:
“But to dismiss the subtleties of the Stoics, which I am sensible I have employed more than was necessary, let us admit of three kinds of goods, and let them really be kinds of goods, provided no regard is had to the body and to external circumstances as entitled to the appellation of good in any other sense than because we are obliged to use them. But let those other divine goods spread themselves far in every direction and reach the very heavens. Why then may I not call him happy? Nay, the happiest of men, who has attained them. Shall a wise man be afraid of pain, which is indeed the greatest enemy to our opinion? For I am persuaded that we are prepared and fortified sufficiently by the disputations of the foregoing days against our own death or that of our friends, against grief and other perturbations of the mind.
“But pain seems to be the sharpest adversary of virtue — that it is which menaces us with burning torches, that it is which threatens to crush our fortitude and greatness of mind and patience. Shall virtue then yield to this? Shall the happy life of a wise and consistent man succumb to this? Good Gods! How base would this be! Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedaemon troops of young men with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay, even ready to expire rather than own themselves conquered. Is any country of barbarians more uncivilized or desolate than India? Yet they have amongst them some that are held for wise men who never wear any clothing all their lifelong and who bear the snow of the Caucasus and the piercing cold of winter without any pain.
“And who, if they come in contact with fire, endure being burned without a groan. The women too in India, on the death of their husbands, have a regular contest and apply to the judge to have it determined which of them was best beloved by him — for it is customary there for one man to have many wives. She in whose favor it is determined exults greatly and, being attended by her relations, is laid on the funeral pyre with her husband. The others who are postponed walk away very much dejected. Custom can never be superior to nature, for nature is never to be got the better of. But our minds are infected by sloth and idleness and luxury and languor and indolence. We have enervated them by opinions and bad customs. Who is there who is unacquainted with the customs of the Egyptians? Their minds being tainted by pernicious opinions, they are ready to bear any torture rather than hurt an ibis, a snake, a cat, a dog, or a crocodile. And should anyone inadvertently have hurt any of these animals, he will submit to any punishment. I am speaking of men only. As to the beasts, do they not bear cold and hunger running about in woods and on mountains and deserts? Will they not fight for their young ones till they are wounded? Are they afraid of any attacks or blows? I mention not what the ambitious will suffer for honor’s sake, or those who are desirous of praise on account of glory, or lovers to gratify their lust. Life is full of such instances.”
Cassius:
Okay, thanks for reading that, Joshua. The majority of that paragraph has been devoted to these examples that Cicero is bringing up to show that people across the world — and indeed animals — can stand up to pain and persevere through it when they have an objective ahead of them that makes it worthwhile to do so. Talking about the young men of Sparta, women in India, and on and on. In addition to those examples, Cicero goes at the beginning of the paragraph to say: grant that there are three kinds of good things — to make a final escape from the meshes of Stoic subtleties, of which I realize I have made more use than I generally do. Grant, if you will, the existence of these kinds of goods, meaning other than virtue, provided only that goods of the body and external goods lie groveling on the ground and are merely termed good because they are to be preferred, while those other divine goods extend their influence far and wide and reach to the heavens.
So that’s a little clearer, I think, than the Yonge translation — what he’s really doing in this paragraph is insisting that even if you want to be in a moderate position, even if you want to be a backsliding old Academic and say that there’s more good in life than virtue, he is labeling everything other than virtue — any good of the body or any external good — as something that lies groveling on the ground and is merely termed good because it’s to be preferred. And he’s contrasting that with the goods of the mind, which he’s calling divine goods that extend their influence far and wide and reach to the heavens. So again, Cicero is giving us interesting examples from other civilizations about how people are willing to overcome pain, but all of it is in service of this identification of the goods of the mind as being divine and any other goods — goods of the body or external goods — as being merely preferred, which is the Stoic terminology.
Joshua:
We get these moments in Cicero’s texts when he just gives us a string of examples in service of his point. But what we found out last week, and I see another example of it today, is that he’ll use an example in service of one point and then he’ll say the direct opposite thing in service of a different point. So we were talking about in a previous discussion in Tusculan Disputations on the subject of how different people respond either to war or to disease — I recall Cicero saying that the Gauls, for example, have an incredible ability to endure the pain of war, but disease or sickness lays them up very easily. And he said the Greeks are the opposite, that they have no stomach for the pain or distress or hardship of war, but illness they’re very good at enduring.
But then he’s always needing to use the Spartan boys to make a point about the limits of what humans are prepared to endure in terms of pain. And certainly historically they did undergo some truly horrifying things. He describes them here as on the wrestling ground being prepared to tear each other to pieces rather than admit that they lost the match. So I just make the point that when Cicero gets into his run-on of example after example, we should be somewhat cautious with the information we’re dealing with. Another point about the example he’s using: he talks about the situation in India. He says, “Is any country of barbarians more uncivilized or desolate than India? Yet they have amongst them some that are held for wise men” — and he goes on to describe how, wearing slight clothes or no clothes at all, they bear the snow of the Caucasus and the piercing cold of winter and if they come in contact with fire endure being burned without a groan.
So they have a high tolerance for enduring pain; and the women in this polygamous relationship dispute with one another to see who shall have the honor of being buried with the husband — in other words, being killed prematurely so that she could be buried with him. And we do know from Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Pyrrho the following. The first two sentences he says: “Pyrrho was the citizen of Elis and the son of Pleistarchus, as Diocles informs us. And as Apollodorus in his Chronicles asserts, he was originally a painter and was a pupil of Bryson, the son of Stilpo, as we are told by Alexander in his Chronicles. After that, he attached himself to Anaxarchus and attended him everywhere, so that he even went as far as the gymnosophists in India and the Magi.” So what this is describing here is: after the death of Philip II of Macedon, after the wild success of his son Alexander in conquering Greece, rolling up the Persian possessions along the eastern Mediterranean, liberating Egypt from Persian domination, he then went east as far as Bactria — perhaps as far as India. He was in the region of the Hindu Kush mountain range, eastern Afghanistan, that kind of area, and encountered a group of people that the Greeks called the gymnosophists — we could think of them as sort of yogis.
And I mention this because it’s obviously relevant for the text today, since Cicero is talking about what Pyrrho and Anaxarchus and the other attendants of Alexander the Great’s army saw when they were in India or in Bactria. But Diogenes Laertius also makes the following point: he says that “Nausiphanes was charmed by Pyrrho even when he was quite young and used to say that he should like to be endowed with his disposition without losing his own power of eloquence.” And he says too that “Epicurus, who admired the conversation and manners of Pyrrho, was frequently asking him about him.” So Epicurus had heard about Pyrrho and his travels and became curious and wanted to know more about what he saw there — what did you experience in all these exotic lands that you went to with Alexander the Great?
Okay, the other point I wanted to make is this: Cicero writes in the text here, after describing what these Indian women do with the funeral of their husbands: “Custom can never be superior to nature, for nature is never to be got the better of. But our minds are infected by sloth and idleness and luxury and languor and indolence. We have enervated them by opinions and bad customs.” So he has lifted up here the two competing guides of human behavior — you could say one of them is nature and one of them is custom. And he says that nature has equipped us to deal with all of the stuff he’s talking about, but that what ruins people, what makes us so poorly equipped to deal with pain and death, is custom — bad opinions, wrong opinions. And he makes a point about the customs of the Egyptians and how that causes problems for them. But I find that to be a very interesting way to break down the question, and it’s one that Epicurus himself seems to have used, right? Because for Epicurus, we have him on record saying flee from public education and so on, flee the gymnasium, don’t go near this stuff — protect yourself from the prison of politics and of these high-culture places, because of the ideas that circulate in these places. And if you want to follow the course of Epicurean philosophy, you have to protect yourself from these poisonous ideas and what they do to your ability to respond to pain and to pursue pleasure. So this distinction here between nature and custom is an interesting one. Cassius, do you have any thoughts on that?
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, examples that come to my mind immediately are the beginning of Lucretius’s Book Six, where he talks about the vessel being corrupted by forces — which I think are pretty clearly related to what you’re talking about, bad ideas. So I think you’re right that certainly Epicurus would endorse that. I’m sure there are some distinctions, however, and I guess the first thing that comes to my mind to be concerned about would be the emphasis that the Stoics, for example, place on the mind’s ability to control everything. And that’s what I think we’re seeing here in terms of Cicero emphasizing that virtue is sufficient for happiness — he is emphasizing the mind’s ability to basically disregard the goods of the body and external goods and say that they’re not important, and ultimately in this Stoic kind of way write them out of existence. And I think somewhere along there is where you’re going to find the distinction with Epicurus — that he’s not willing to write out of existence and say that they’re not significant, the pains and pleasures of life. In fact, very much not — he’s emphasizing that pleasure and pain and the realities of life are what’s important to us, and not pure mental abstractions as Cicero would imply in some of his reasoning. Again, the argument that has come up several times and is included by Cosimo Raimondi, that human beings are both a mind and a body and you don’t get to the right answer by only focusing on the mind. You have to give the body its due and realize that the body and the mind are connected and inseparable.
Joshua:
Yeah, just to reiterate the point you’re making there: while many of these philosophers use this basic model of nature versus custom — or as we might now say, nature versus nurture — certainly the application of this model in their work is going to be wildly different. Someone like Socrates, for example, is going to say that sensual pleasure is a corrosion of the soul — basically a weight that hangs on the soul as it’s trying to ascend from the cave up into the world of pure being, the world of the ideal forms. So pleasure is the obstacle, pleasure is the thing that gets in the way. Same model, but very different applications.
Cassius:
And also what comes to mind when you say that would be Aristotle or someone taking the position that the mind is an absolute blank slate at birth and that everything that comes into our minds comes in after birth and is a result of our interactions with the world and the way that we think. And Epicurus I don’t think took that position at all — as Lucretius would show, nature predisposes us in certain directions and gives us this feeling of pleasure and pain, which is not to be eliminated from life but which is to be learned from and followed.
Joshua:
So Cicero has talked about how people will respond — how the boys of Sparta, how the men and women of India, and how the people of Egypt will respond to these problems. And then he says: “I have not even begun to mention what the ambitious will suffer for honor’s sake, or those who are desirous of praise on account of glory, or what lovers are willing to do to gratify their lust.” That brings us to Section 28. “But let us not dwell too much on these questions, but rather let us return to our subject. I say and say again that happiness will submit even to be tormented, and that in pursuit of justice and temperance and still more especially in fortitude and greatness of soul and patience, it will not stop short at sight of the executioner. And when all other virtues proceed calmly to the torture, that one will never halt, as I said, on the outside and threshold of the prison. For what can be baser, what can carry a worse appearance, than to be left alone, separated from those beautiful attendants? Not however that this is by any means possible, for neither can the virtues hold together without happiness nor happiness without the virtues, so that they will not suffer her to desert them but will carry her along with them to whatever torments, to whatever pain they are led.
“It is the peculiar quality of a wise man to do nothing that he may repent of, nothing against his inclination, but always to act nobly with constancy, gravity, and honesty; to depend on nothing as certain; to wonder at nothing when it falls out as if it appeared strange and unexpected; to be independent of everyone and to abide by his own opinion. For my part, I cannot form an idea of anything happier than this. The conclusion of the Stoics is indeed easy, for they are persuaded that the end of good is to live agreeably to nature and to be consistent with that. As a wise man should do so not only because it is his duty but because it is in his power, it must of course follow that whoever has the chief good in his power has his happiness. So too and thus the life of a wise man is always happy. You have here what I think may be confidently said of a happy life, and as things now stand very truly also, unless you can advance something better.”
Cassius:
Okay, thank you Joshua. I really want us to hammer this point home because I think people today have a tendency to believe that there’s no way these ancient philosophers could have taken the position that virtue is its own reward, that virtue is all you need for happiness, that happiness is nothing but virtue. Most of us today are acclimated to understanding the pleasures of the body as being really important, and so we pursue them as second nature. But what we see even today is that the pleasures of the body and the external pleasures are looked down upon by the intellectual world. And even though today we don’t always talk in terms of Stoicism or Academic Skepticism or Aristotle, the same perspective exists today — that the mind, the intellect, virtue, being a good person — which depending on your definition of humanism is what much humanist philosophy is about — there is a good without God. They eject God from the equation, they look down upon traditional religion, but they embrace an idea that there is an abstract good which is the purpose of life. And that good, which is the purpose of life in 2025 or in 50 BC, is held by many of these philosophers to be the pursuit of wisdom and the intellect and this abstract idea of goodness.
So this is the argument that is advancing here, which also sounds very archaic to us. Can the happy man mount the rack? Can the happy man enter into the doorway of the prison? Can he stand up in the face of the executioner? These are all ways of dramatizing the question of whether you can remain happy under very difficult circumstances. It’s the same thing as Epicurus suffering from kidney disease at the end of his life.
You can pick the poison you wish to talk about — whether you want to talk about painful disease or being tortured on the rack or being burned at the stake or imprisoned in a jail. It’s all the same question. And the philosophical issue is: do you remain happy under those circumstances, and if so, how do you do it? And the answer being given by the Stoics and by the Greek philosophers in general other than Epicurus is that you focus your attention on virtue, which is within your control and within your mind. And as long as you hold fast to virtue in your mind, you are happy regardless of what the executioner does to you, regardless of what disease does to you, regardless of what war does to you — you remain happy because you have identified happiness with virtue. You can maintain that in your mind if you’re devoted enough to it, as Cicero is explaining here. And that’s the direction that non-Epicurean philosophy has taken for two thousand years.
That is an extremely incorrect position in the eyes of Epicurus because it makes no sense whatsoever unless you have a divinity guiding the universe. It makes no sense to do all these things for something that gives you no reward in the end, because in the Epicurean universe there is no afterlife, there is no divine reward — there is only pleasure and pain, and you calculate pleasure and pain while you are alive here in this life. So when Cicero reaches the end of this paragraph and says “thus the life of the wise man is always happy,” that’s the direction he’s coming from. And he’s wrapping in the subtle differences that exist between Plato, between Aristotle, between the Stoics, and I think he’s doing so properly because they are all going in that direction — and that’s the reason why they reject Epicurus and the Epicureans rejected them.
It is a stark difference of approach that again it’s difficult for some of us today to appreciate without going back to these texts and realizing what was being said. And this is not just some idiosyncratic Cicero with some weird opinion that nobody should care about in 2025. Cicero is distilling down in these paragraphs the sum of non-Epicurean philosophy as it existed prior to the rise of Judeo-Christianity, and after the rise of Judeo-Christianity to the extent that it was incorporated in this consensus view that has reigned for the last two thousand years.
Kalosyni:
Could it be that Cicero is saying that if you’re focusing on pleasure, then it’s going to get in the way of preparing for hardship, and then it would make it difficult for the person when they do encounter hardship, because they have been too focused on pleasure and they haven’t trained themselves — so then they will be very unhappy going through the hardship?
Joshua:
Yeah, I certainly think that’s right. I remember when we were going through On Ends, Cicero presented an alternative to Torquatus. He said: “Look, you may not want to admit this, but your ideal man is Lucius Thorius Balbus dining sumptuously at a rich table and then going to his repose on a bed of roses. You may not want to admit it, I know you’re going to try to weasel your way out of it, but this is your version of an ideal man.” And then Cicero says, “I don’t even need to say who I would prefer because virtue herself will speak for me.” Virtue holds that Marcus Regulus — who was willing to submit to the Carthaginians for capture and imprisonment and torture because he had made them that promise — his willingness to do that was an exercise of virtue in the face of pain and probably death.
And that doing that puts him at the top of Cicero’s own list. He says, “It’s not even me, it’s virtue herself making this decision.” So certainly I think Cicero sees pleasure — particularly what he’s always complaining about, which is the pleasures of the body — as a hindrance to the development of virtue. And that without virtue you lose the ability to withstand the pain and the heartache and the fear, and you end up giving yourself over to anything that will save you from these horrible experiences. Whereas Cicero says you have everything you need inside of you. You shouldn’t have to rely on things that are external to you to relieve your pain or your fear or your suffering. You have the fortitude, the virtue that you need — it’s in your mind, and that’s all that you require.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think the answer you’ve given so far there, Joshua, does correctly address the fact that there is a practical difference between devoting your life to pleasure and devoting your life to virtue. Cicero is saying that if you devote your life to pleasure, you will not be prepared for hardship; it will be a distraction and you will have difficulty when you do confront these problems. However, I would go further than that and say that you also have to closely examine what happiness is from Cicero’s point of view, because our tendency today is to think that happiness means “we feel good.” And by focusing on the torture and the rack and the sickness and the disease, it’s easy to think that what those mean is “feeling bad.” Well, that’s not the way Cicero is ultimately looking at these things, because he’s focusing on virtue as an end in itself.
He’s not saying “be virtuous and get ready for hardship so that then you will feel good.” He’s saying “be virtuous, because no matter what comes your way you will still be virtuous.” He doesn’t care if you feel bad. In fact, feeling bad is something that makes a glorious leader in military terms if you undergo physical hardships. I think it’s really critical to look carefully at what the goal is in these different perspectives, because Cicero is not saying that pleasure distracts you from preparing for hardship in order that you can continue to feel okay when you’re in hardship. He’s not interested in your feeling okay when you’re in hardship. He’s interested in your being virtuous when you are in hardship. It doesn’t matter to him how you feel. And I think that’s a distinction that has to be drawn as well — it’s very benevolent of us to look at Cicero and think that he sees happiness in a way similar to the way we do.
And I think Cicero admits that there’s a problem here. That’s why he keeps saying that the Stoic subtleties he’s going to retreat back from. In the end he’s not really saying what he thinks is true — he’s saying what he thinks is probable. He keeps hedging his statements after he gives us these sweeping exhortations to virtue. But the reason he hedges, the reason he backtracks, is he knows what he’s saying. And what he’s saying is that virtue is its own reward. You are not virtuous in order to be happy. You are happy only because you are virtuous. He’s equated the two terms — happiness and virtue — as being exactly the same thing. You cannot be happy without being virtuous. There is nothing to happiness other than virtue. That’s the purpose of this whole section. All you need is virtue to be happy. That’s why he’s going in this direction.
He’s excluding any kind of feeling of pleasure from his calculation, because it doesn’t matter to him how bad you feel and it doesn’t matter how good you feel. All he wants you to do is be virtuous. So that’s the way I would answer that question. And in pursuing that, as we go further into Section 29, we’re going to see that’s exactly the question he turns to next. So I think in further answer to what you’ve asked, Kalosyni, when we turn to Section 29, which you’re going to read for us next, I think we’ll see how this conversation develops in the same direction. Cicero has just said that “this is what I can confidently say of a happy life, unless you can advance something better” — so he’s invited the student to ask a question, and the student replies in Section 29.
Kalosyni:
“Indeed I cannot, but I should be glad to prevail on you — unless it is troublesome — as you are under no confinement from obligations to any particular sect, but gather from all of them whatever strikes you most as having the appearance of probability. As you just now seemed to advise the Peripatetics and the old Academy boldly to speak out without reserve that wise men are always the happiest, I should be glad to hear how you think it consistent for them to say so, when you have said so much against that opinion and the conclusions of the Stoics.”
Joshua:
“I will make use then of that liberty which no one has the privilege of using in philosophy but those of our school, whose discourses determine nothing but take in everything, leaving them unsupported by the authority of any particular person to be judged of by others according to their weight. And as you seem desirous of knowing how it is that, notwithstanding the different opinions of philosophers with regard to the ends of goods, virtue has still sufficient security for effecting a happy life — which security, as we are informed, Carneades indeed used to dispute against, but he disputed as against the Stoics whose opinions he combated with great zeal and vehemence — I however shall handle the question with more temper. For if the Stoics have rightly settled the ends of goods, the affair is at an end, for a wise man must necessarily be always happy. But let us examine, if we can, the particular opinions of the others, that so this excellent decision, if I may so call it, in favor of a happy life may be agreeable to the opinions and discipline of all.”
Cassius:
Okay, thank you Joshua and Kalosyni for reading Section 29 there — in which again Cicero always loves to emphasize that he is an Academic Skeptic and has the freedom to tell us exactly what he thinks because he’s not chained to the views of any one particular school. And in this case, he is not even going to follow the example of Carneades, who is a name that continues to come up as being an important figure in academic circles, pursuing a skeptical approach against the Stoics. We see reference after reference in Cicero that Carneades attacked the Stoics from a skeptical point of view, but still within the Academy. And Carneades was definitely not an Epicurean — he was not holding pleasure to be the end — but he seems to have had a strong inclination to attack certainty wherever he found it.
Not only in Epicurean positions in favor of pleasure, but also in the Stoic attitude of confidence that logic was going to get them where they wanted to be. Carneades, pursuing a skeptical argument against the Stoics, as Cicero says, with great zeal and vehemence. But as Cicero says here, despite Carneades being a skeptic like himself, Cicero is going to take the position that if the Stoics are right — which he thinks they are — then the affair is at an end, for the wise man must necessarily be always happy. And of course, again, that’s Stoic logic: wisdom is virtue; if you are a wise man, you are by definition happy. It doesn’t matter what happens to you from this point of view. And he says he’s going to then examine the opinions of the other schools, and he’s going to of course take us right back to Epicurus in Section 30.
Joshua:
Let me read this from the Wikipedia page for Carneades because it is interesting and it touches on what you were just talking about with logic. Wikipedia says: “All this however was nothing but the special application of his general theory that people did not possess and never could possess any criterion of truth. Carneades argued that if there were a criterion, it must exist either in reason (logos) or sensation (aisthesis) or conception (phantasia). But then reason itself depends on conception — logos depends on phantasia — and phantasia again depends on aisthesis or sensation. And we have no means of judging whether our sensations are true or false, whether they correspond to the objects that produce them or carry wrong impressions to the mind, producing false conceptions and ideas and leading reason into error. Therefore, sensation, conception, and reason are alike disqualified for being the criterion of truth.” So some of the schools of philosophy that are so well known for their use of logic and of dialectic end up rejecting even reason itself — even logos itself — as a criterion of truth, because reason and conception are tainted by the requirement of sensation, because they depend on sensation, and sensation is unreliable. So the unreliability of sensation in fact goes on to poison the whole enterprise of looking for truth or any method of acquiring truth.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think you’re making a very important point there, Joshua — that Carneades and this issue of skepticism that has invaded the Academy is one of the really important issues of philosophy that students of Epicurus need to understand, because it pervades all of these arguments back and forth. If you can’t be sure of anything, then you’re going to attack the Stoics, you’re going to attack the Epicureans, you’re going to attack anybody who says that they have any conception of truth whatsoever. Which is why Epicurus puts so much emphasis on his canonics and the role that the sensations, anticipations, and feelings play — and how that is the way that we make contact with reality, and that that contact is entitled to be considered reality. You can debate the fine points as Carneades and the skeptics do all day long until the cows come home. But you have to rely on the sensations, anticipations, and feelings to even stay alive.
And at that point, the practicality of staying alive — which all of us are trained by nature to want to do — becomes the ultimate judge of how to live day to day. You have to live day to day according to Epicurus. That’s the whole argument with the skeptics. It’s impossible to be happy — it’s impossible even to live — by the dictates of the other philosophers. You lose the confidence that you can even walk across the room or that you can walk into the same stream twice if you let your mind get carried away on these skeptical rabbit trails. Now we’re going to run out of time today to do justice to Section 30, but Joshua, I think that because Section 30 has an extremely important sentence or two at the very beginning, I think we can go ahead and read the full Section 30 and then we’ll come back and discuss it more at length next week.
This Section 30 is where Cicero is going to tell us what the major categories of opinions are about what good is, and it’s worth hitting it both this week and next week so that we can give it the focus that it deserves. So again, in Section 30 he’s going to list for us the major categories of opinions among the schools about what good really means, and he’s going to include Epicurus among those schools. And he’s going to say it in a way that has tremendous implications for the term “freedom from pain” and how it relates to pleasure — because we’re going to see those two categories attributed to different philosophers in this list as if they’re not the same position. So Joshua, if you could read Section 30.
Joshua:
That’s right. He ended Section 29 by saying, “Let us examine, if we can, the particular opinions of the others, that so this excellent decision in favor of a happy life may be agreeable to the opinions and discipline of all.” These then are the opinions that are held and defended. “The first four are simple ones: that nothing is good but what is honest, according to the Stoics; that nothing is good but pleasure, as Epicurus maintains; that nothing is good but freedom from pain, as Hieronymus asserts; that nothing is good but an enjoyment of the principal or all of the greatest goods of nature, as Carneades maintained against the Stoics. These are simple; the others are mixed propositions. Then there are three kinds of goods: the greatest being those of the mind, the next those of the body.
“The third are external goods, as the Peripatetics call them, and the old Academics differ very little from them. Dinomachus and Calliphon have coupled pleasure with honesty. But Diodorus the Peripatetic has joined freedom from pain to honesty. These are the opinions that have some footing. For those of Aristo, Pyrrho, and Herillus and some others are quite out of date. Now let us see what weight these men have in them — accepting the Stoics, whose opinion I think I have sufficiently defended, and indeed I have explained what the Peripatetics have to say. Accepting that certain others dread and abhor pain in too weak a manner, the others may go on to exaggerate the gravity and dignity of virtue as usual. And then after they have extolled it to the skies with the usual extravagance of good orators, it is easy to reduce the other topics to nothing by comparison and to hold them up to contempt. They who think that praise deserves to be sought after even at the expense of pain are not at liberty to deny those men to be happy who have obtained it. Though they may be under some evils, yet this name of happy has a very wide application.” And the word by the way that Cicero is translating to “happy” or “happy life” — that’s vita beata, as in the Beatitudes would be one example. So it’s sort of like “the blessed life.”
Cassius:
We debate regularly what’s the best way to translate the different words that are being used as the goal — whether eudaimonia or other words are the best. We were recently talking about “felicity” as another example, and so forth. But whatever the word you choose, it’s really evoking the sense of the best possible life. And we would presume today that includes feeling good. And that’s really the question we’re talking about: what does the best life really mean? And Cicero has done a very good service for us by listing out the different opinions. We’ll come back next week and go through these in more detail, but it is very interesting to see.
Joshua:
In the Latin word there is de finibus — which we see in the title of his other book, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” But you could just as easily translate that as “On the Limits of Good and Evil.” These are another way of translating the Greek word telos, which we’ve talked about many times — having a whole range of possible translations, everything from “the goal” to “the guide” to “the end or limit.” And finis, which is here being translated as “limits,” is the word that Cicero typically uses when he is trying to suggest the telos. We do see though in this text he also uses, in reference to the chief good — which we’ve talked about today in passing — he uses summum bonum, the highest good, which we see also in Lucretius in the last book of that poem.
Cassius:
The Loeb edition through King has “nothing is good unless it is morally right as the Stoics say.” And he contrasts that with Epicurus by saying “no good except pleasure as Epicurus.” And then “no good except absence of pain according to Hieronymus.” So he’s shifted the terminology from “happiness” here to focusing on the word “good” and saying that Epicurus held that there is no good except pleasure. And of course we’ve said that many times, but it’s always good to remember that from the Epicurean view, happiness is a life of pleasure, and those words are tightly intertwined. And from the Stoic view, that same equation resolves down not to pleasure but to what is morally right.
Joshua:
I quite like that little phrase in Latin there — nihil bonum nisi voluptas, “no good but pleasure” in the words of Epicurus. So anyway, we’re going to have a lot to talk about when we get into Section 30 properly next week, because he is giving us a survey of the whole field here.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s exactly right, and I very much agree with your singling out that Latin. I’m looking at the Loeb edition as well. It’s on page 510 under Section 30 — nihil bonum nisi voluptas. Those four words are about as clear as you can get: nothing good except pleasure. Alright, well with that, we’ll bring today’s episode to a close. Joshua, anything else?
Joshua:
I’m looking at the same PDF that you are, Cassius. I noticed that in one of the footnotes Cicero had written “for if the Stoics have rightly fixed the limits of the good, the question is settled,” and the footnote is on “fix the limits” — as in a boundary stone on which was inscribed, and it gives some Latin words, to mark the limits of a field. And the word there is finis — in other words related again to de finibus. But it’s this idea that you come to the end of something and now we’re marking the limit or boundary. And it’s interesting because Lucretius uses this image of the boundary stone repeatedly — several times in his own work. So I just point that out as another connection here worth considering and perhaps pursuing. I don’t really have much more to say today than that. We’ll have this whole section to talk about next week.
Cassius:
Yes, I’m glad we introduced it today, but we’ll come back next week and give it much more attention as it deserves. With that, we’ll bring today’s episode to a close. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.