Episode 316 - Happiness Is The Goal Of Life - A Life of Happiness Is A Life Of Pleasure
Welcome to Episode 316 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 30 of Part 5.
Thanks to Joshua for reminding us that this episode will mark our sixth year anniversary of podcasting about Epicurus!
These then are the opinions, as I think, that are held and defended: the first four are simple ones; “that nothing is good but what is honest,” according to the Stoics: “nothing good but pleasure,” as Epicurus maintains: “nothing good but a freedom from pain,” as Hieronymus asserts: “nothing good but an enjoyment of the principal, or all, or 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 best 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 Callipho have coupled pleasure with honesty: but Diodorus, the Peripatetic, has joined indolence to honesty. These are the opinions that have some footing; for those of Aristo, Pyrrho, Herillus, and of some others, are quite out of date. Now let us see what weight these men have in them, excepting the Stoics, whose opinion I think I have sufficiently defended; and indeed I have explained what the Peripatetics have to say; excepting that Theophrastus, and those who followed him, 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.
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 316 (TD43) continues the Tusculan Disputations series, with Cassius and Joshua first establishing the core Epicurean equation of happiness with pleasure before working through TD Sections 30 and 31. Cassius opens by noting the podcast’s approximate sixth anniversary, then turns to the central theme: for Epicurus, “a life of happiness” means a life in which pleasures predominate over pains — not unbroken pleasure in every moment. He draws on the Letter to Menoeceus (“pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life”), the deathbed Letter to Idomeneus (“on this truly happy day”), the Principal Doctrines (equal pleasure in finite and infinite time), and Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Fragment 32 (pleasure is the end of the best mode of life). Torquatus in De Finibus Book 1 (lines 54 and 62) further confirms that a happy life is a life of pleasure and that the wise man experiences more pleasures than pains at every moment.
Joshua surveys the Greek and Latin vocabulary for happiness — eudaimonia, felicitas, beata, makarios, bonum/summum bonum, agathon/tagathon — noting that different schools deploy the same terms with opposite meanings. Cassius responds that Epicurus treats words like “happiness” and “blessed” not as Platonic forms but as conventional pointers, understandable through examples rather than definitions — just as “heap” is understood by accumulating grains of sand, not by logic.
Returning to TD Section 30, Cassius highlights the crucial Epicurean distinction: Hieronymus (freedom from pain as the good) and Epicurus (pleasure as the good) are fundamentally different positions, and Carneades’ view is circular while the Peripatetics’ three-type division is equally empty. Only Epicurus grounds the good in a natural feeling that requires no further definition. Joshua reads TD Section 31, in which Cicero — rather than attacking Epicurus — actually enlists him: life can be called happy not because every moment is good but because good things abound to a considerable degree; happiness may attend virtue even in Phalaris’s bull, according to Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemon. Epicurus, Metrodorus, and Carneades all agree the mind can distinguish real from apparent goods, and Epicurus handles death (dissolution ends sensation) and pain (great pain is short; long pain is endurable) as well as any philosopher. Joshua identifies this as Cicero’s recurring rhetorical pattern: marshal all ancient philosophers against the interlocutor’s opening claim.
The episode closes with Joshua reading from Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life on Lucretius Book 6: Epicurus arrived in Athens to find prosperous but anxiety-ridden citizens — the classic “leaky vessel” whose corrosive desires poisoned their pleasures. Austin connects this to Thucydides’ plague of Athens, where citizens facing death spontaneously abandoned false notions of honor and wealth in favor of present enjoyment — a vivid demonstration of what Epicurus had been trying to teach all along.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 316 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. As we begin today’s program, it’s worth noting that this is approximately our sixth anniversary of podcasting. We started around this time in January of 2020, and we’ve been going almost without break since that time. I want to especially state my appreciation to Joshua and Kalosyni, who are with us here today, as well as our other podcasters from the past — specifically including Don in that list, and Martin, who has contributed a lot over the years as well — and hopefully we’ll keep going for as long as we possibly can. Thanks to everyone who’s been a participant or a listener in the podcast over the years.
Today we’re continuing in Tusculan Disputations near the end of Book Five, and we’ll be focusing our attention on Section 30, where we introduced the topic last week — in which Cicero is going to talk about the different opinions about what is good among the different schools. In that context, I’d like to drop back even further, however, and remind everybody that what Cicero has done to organize this Book Five is focus on the question of whether virtue is sufficient for a happy life. That in fact is the way that the student posed the question here in Book Five. The King edition translates that question as: “It does not appear to me that virtue can be sufficient for leading a happy life.” The point I’d like to make at the beginning is in regard to this term “happiness” and how it relates to pleasure, which we’ve discussed many, many different times in the past, but at this point in our discussion it’s a good time to remember that it seems to be the consensus of these ancient Greek philosophers that there is a single word which we translate and generally use today as “happiness” — a single word that corresponds to what they are considering to be the best life, the blessed life, or the goal that should be our goal in life.
We frequently point out that Epicurus said that you are not always going to be pursuing pleasure in every moment of your life, that sometimes you will choose pain. In fact, when choosing pain leads to a greater pleasure or lesser pain, in the end it’s certainly permissible to look at that calculation as one in which you are maximizing pleasure. But it’s an important point that everything you’re experiencing at every moment in life is not necessarily pleasurable. We’ve been talking recently about Epicurus’s kidney disease during the last days of his life. We’ve been talking about the example of whether the happy man can enter a jail or mount the rack. When you are tortured, either literally or figuratively, you are certainly suffering some pain during those moments; but nevertheless, Epicurus is talking as well — just like these other philosophers are talking — that even when you are in pain, you can still consider yourself to be blessed or happy, or a number of other words that connote that what you’ve got is a balance of good things over bad things. You may be encumbered at the moment by something that’s painful or bad in your life, but that does not dominate you; and what does in fact predominate in your life are good things and pleasurable things.
Of course, that’s one of the questions here: when we use the word “good,” what does good mean? The Stoics will say nothing good but virtue. And last week we saw in Latin that Cicero says Epicurus held nothing good but pleasure. So all of these concepts come together and need to gel in our minds in a way that we can state with some degree of clarity — that we’re not insisting that every moment of our lives be pleasurable in every aspect of our experience. Sometimes we will, whether we want to or not, suffer pain. But this balance — this overall assessment — I think of an article that David Sedley wrote called “Cyrenaic versus Epicurean Happiness”: this overall assessment of whether we are living well, whether we have a good spirit, whether we are living a blessed life or a happy life — all sorts of different words can be used to describe it — but there’s this overall assessment that is a valid and important way of looking at your life, perhaps the most important way. Now, to nail down that Epicurus looks at these things in this way, we can go right back to the beginning of the Letter to Menoeceus, where Epicurus talks about the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by — he is like the man who says that the age for happiness is not yet come to him or has passed away. Skipping down further: “We must then meditate on the things that make our happiness, seeing that when that is with us, we have all; but when it is absent, we do all to win it.”
Epicurus says: “We must consider that of the desires, some are natural, others vain; and of the natural, some are necessary and others merely natural; and of the necessary, some are necessary for happiness, others for the repose of the body, and others for very life.” Epicurus regularly talks about blessedness in a very similar way, and a letter begins: “In your letter to me, of which Cleon was the bearer, you continue to show me affection, and you try, not without success, to recall the considerations which make for a happy life.” Of course, Laertius said that Epicurus held that even on the rack, the wise man is happy. In his Letter to Idomeneus at the end of his life, Epicurus started: “On this truly happy day of my life, I am at the point of death as I write this to you.” And then in his Principal Doctrines, he refers to how infinite and finite time both have equal pleasure if one measures its limits by reason, and Epicurus goes on to state that reason, enabling us to conceive the end and dissolution of the body and liberating us from fears relative to eternity, procures for us all the happiness of which life is capable — so completely that we have no further occasion to include eternity in our desires. In this disposition of mind, man is happy even when his troubles engage him to quit life, and to die thus is for him only to interrupt a life of happiness.
Now, hopefully that emphasizes the viewpoint that Epicurus had about happiness. But then the question becomes: what exactly does happiness mean? And we have some very good quotations that nail down that position as well, because for Epicurus, a life of happiness is one in which pleasures are predominating over pain. Of course, in the Letter to Menoeceus we have all the different references to pleasure as the beginning and the end of the blessed life — how pleasure is the standard by which we judge every good. And then in Diogenes of Oenoanda, we have in Fragment 32 an extremely clear statement of this relationship. Diogenes of Oenoanda said: “If, gentlemen, the pointed issue between these people and us involved inquiry into what is the means of happiness, and they wanted to say the virtues — which would actually be true — it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature, I say now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life. While the virtues, which are inopportunely mistaken about by these people, transferred from the place of the means to that of the end, are in no way an end but the means to the end.” Also, we have two very clear quotations from Cicero where Torquatus, who is explaining Epicurean ethics, says the same thing. Line 54 of Book One of On Ends: Torquatus says, “If even the glory of the virtues — referring to justice there — on which all the other philosophers love to expatiate so eloquently, has in the last resort no meaning unless it is based on pleasure, whereas pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically attractive and alluring, it cannot be doubted that pleasure is the one supreme and final good, and that a life of happiness is nothing else than a life of pleasure.” There are other references as well, especially around line 62, where Torquatus talks about how the wise man is continuously happy by keeping his passions within bounds and his attitude towards death and towards the gods, and that there is in truth, for that type of person, no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains. So we could go on and on further, but there’s a lot of evidence that Epicurus used the same terminology as the other Greek philosophers — describing the best life as one of happiness — but then tightly identifying a life of happiness as a life in which pleasures are predominating over pains. As we go forward in this discussion today and future discussions, it’s important to keep this relationship between happiness and pleasure in mind, not to find these words at odds with each other but to view them as complementary and explanatory: pleasure is given to us by nature as a feeling; we do not have to have pleasure explained to us in words or fancy logic. We can understand pleasure through the faculties of nature, and that understanding of pleasure is what informs our understanding of happiness.
Joshua:
Yes, Cassius. There is a lot to get a handle on here. It does seem that most of the philosophers in antiquity are interested in the good life, the happy life, or the blessed life, and the words that recur as we read these texts are — just to go over them briefly — eudaimonia, to mean something like happiness, but more literally, almost in English, it means “wellbeing” or “in good spirits.” One word in Latin that we continually see with reference to happiness is felicitas, which can mean happiness, but it’s also linked to good fortune — in this sense also to luck — in that sense of the word “fortune”: not just that you’ve done well or that you’re well off, but that you were lucky to have arrived in this position. The other word we’ve seen here in Cicero is beata — “blessed” — and this is a word that Epicurus uses in the Greek as makarios or makarion. He uses this all over the surviving texts: in Principal Doctrine One, “a blessed and incorruptible being has no trouble itself,” etc. — the word he’s using there for “blessed” is makarion. Then we have the word “good” in English, which is a pretty direct translation to the Latin bonum, or “highest good,” which is summum bonum. And in Greek we have agathon for “good,” or tagathon — “the good.” So there are all these words swirling around through the texts, and we’re dealing with them in three different languages, which makes it difficult sometimes to keep a handle on things.
Cassius:
Joshua, at that point in your thought there, you’re reminding me that the general attitude of Epicurus and Lucretius towards language in the first place is that there’s nothing magical or divine about particular words — that people by convention come to point in particular directions and make themselves understood by using examples of things that they’re talking about. So it seems to me important to note that I don’t think there is anything magic about the particular word we’re using here. Almost as in the sorites paradox we keep talking about — when you’ve got grains of sand that add up to a heap of sand, there’s nothing magical about the word “heap.” There’s no external ideal form of the word “heap,” and yet we can conceive in our minds of what a heap of sand is by referring to individual examples of grains of sand and accumulating them in our minds to come to an understanding of what we’re talking about.
It seems to me that we do the same thing with this idea, whether we call it blessed, happy, good, felicitous, or any other type of word. We can all come to an understanding that what we’re talking about is something very desirable, something that is perhaps the best possible, something that perhaps we link to divinity — in terms of blessedness especially. I tend to shy away from using words like beata because it reminds me too much of the Catholic Church and the beatitudes and things that are so tightly tied to religion. But the idea that the gods, whatever they might be, are the happiest type of life seems to me to be pretty much common sense, and it’s very understandable to say that — as Epicurus said in his Letter to Menoeceus — our goal might be thought of as being “a god among men,” living the happiest or best life possible to us as human beings. We’re not able to completely avoid pain; we’re not able to avoid death as a god might be able to do. But the simulation of that type of experience makes a lot of sense to me as the way to express your goal in life. To live as blessedly as possible doesn’t mean you’re going to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or anything like that. It just means you’re living as close to what we would envision a god might live as we possibly can.
Joshua:
And it’s important to note that while these philosophers are generally all using the same kinds of words, they mean different things by them, and the end result of what they envision to be the good life is quite different.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua. And before we move back to Section 30, what Epicurus is concerned about is — before Epicurus groups individuals and talks about how groupings might work — he is concerned about what is the good of the individual in the first place. What is the nature of the grain of sand that makes up the heap? What is the nature of the individual person who makes up the city? Cicero and these other philosophers launch off in designing their ideal cities based on presumptions that are simply not true from Epicurus’s point of view — in terms of society, the state, or the world being a divine being in itself, being intelligently designed, being something that has worth of its own. Epicurean individuals are created by nature to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and while they do come together into societies to ensure their happiness, the structure of society, the goals of society, everything about our joint experience is informed by our individual natures — and not by the design of a god, not by any ideal beautiful form to which society needs to conform, but purely constituting a response to nature’s guidance through pleasure and pain.
Joshua:
In 29, Cicero ended with this sentence. He says: “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.” And then we get to 30. “These then are the opinions, as I think, that are held and defended. The first four are simple ones: that nothing is good but what is honest, according to the Stoics; nothing good but pleasure, as Epicurus maintains; nothing good but a freedom from pain, as Hieronymus asserts; nothing good but an enjoyment of the principal, or all, or 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, and the next best 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 indolence to honesty. These are the opinions that have some footing; for those of Aristo, Pyrrho, Herillus, and of some others are quite out of date. Now let us see what weight these men have in them, excepting the Stoics, whose opinions I think I have sufficiently defended; and indeed I have explained what the Peripatetics have to say, excepting that Theophrastus and those who followed him 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.”
Cassius:
Okay, thanks Joshua. That last sentence is sort of our theme — that the word “happy” has a very wide application, and it’s the understanding of what “happy” means that we’re trying to drill down and gain from this paragraph. We’ve talked already at length about the distinction between Epicurus maintaining that there is nothing good but pleasure, and Hieronymus, who is saying that there is nothing good but freedom from pain. And I think that’s one of the takeaways of this paragraph — good reason to cite it in the future — because it shows that there is a major distinction between these two positions: that pursuing pleasure, or considering pleasure to be the good, is very different than considering freedom from pain to be the good. But there are other things in this paragraph as well, and one of them is where Cicero is referring to Carneades, who I think we’ve mentioned as being sort of an academic skeptic like himself, who held — in opposition to the Stoics — that there is nothing good but an enjoyment of the principal, or all of the greatest goods of nature.
What I wanted to point out about that is that this certainly seems to me to be circular reasoning at its best, because he’s saying there’s nothing good but the goods of nature, and he’s using “good” twice in the same sentence without explaining what the goods of nature are. That continues to be the ultimate question: what is the meaning of good? Is it in pleasure, as Epicurus maintains, or is it in virtue, as the Stoics maintain, or is it in something else? Now, when Cicero here cites the Peripatetics as dividing goods down into three types — the goods of the mind, the goods of the body, and external goods — to me that’s doing basically the same thing Carneades is doing. He’s simply using the word “good” in his explanation of what the word “good” means, and that doesn’t tell you anything about what is good in terms of the body or the mind or these external things they’re talking about.
The other examples that Cicero cites here are people who are combining different variations of the same type of wording to come to a definition of happiness. But what jumps out here is that you’ve got Epicurus grounding the good in pleasure, and you’ve got everybody else grounding the good in something else that really, in the end, has no meaning to it — whether that something else is virtue, which is impossible to really determine without looking at the outcome of the action you’re talking about, or whether you’re talking about goods of the mind, goods of the body, goods of the soul, or the goods of nature. You’re not answering the question unless you explain whether your meaning of good is grounded in pleasure or grounded in something else. And in general, the something else that these people are grounding their assertions on is ideal forms, or divine revelation, or some other worldly aspect that is dictating to us what good is.
It’s only Epicurus who is grounding the good in pleasure given to us through the feelings of nature. Epicurus’s explanation, I would say, is not subject to the same criticism of being circular that the others are. Pleasure is a feeling, like sight or sound — it’s something that we are given by nature directly. All sensations are true in that sense; we have to accept what nature gives us if we’re going to live consistent with nature as being final. What is virtuous? What is the meaning of good? Those are not final, because you’re left to an endless string of definitions and logical assertions. You never end up with anything solid to rest on if you do not wind up in nature with a feeling or a data point that nature itself provides.
Joshua:
I think we’re ready to jump into Section 31 — that’s where we really get Cicero dealing with each claim. And as usual, he starts with Epicurus in his criticism, just as he did in On Ends, when he says “to begin with, let the theory of Epicurus first enter the arena” — it is to most people thoroughly familiar, et cetera. He usually starts with Epicurus in his criticisms. So in 31 he says: “For even as trading is said to be lucrative and farming advantageous — not because the one never meets with any loss, nor the other with any damage from the chance of the weather, but because they succeed in general — so life may be properly called happy, not from its being entirely made up of good things, but because it abounds with these to a great and considerable degree. By this way of reasoning, then, a happy life may attend virtue even to the moment of execution, nay, may descend with her into Phalaris’s bull, according to Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemon, and will not be gained over by any allurements to forsake her. Of the same opinion will Calliphon and Diodorus be, for they are both of them such friends to virtue as to think that all things should be discarded and far removed that are incompatible with it. The rest seem to be more hampered with these doctrines, but yet they get clear of them — such as Epicurus, Metrodorus, and whoever else thinks it worthwhile to defend the deserted Carneades — for there is not one of them who does not think the mind to be judge of those goods and able sufficiently to instruct him how to despise what has the appearance only of good or evil. For what seems to you to be the case with Epicurus is the case also with Metrodorus and Carneades, and indeed with all the rest of them; for who is there who is not sufficiently prepared against death and pain? I will begin, with your leave, with him whom we call soft and voluptuous. What does he seem to you to be afraid of — pain or death? — when he calls the day of his death happy, and who, when he is afflicted by the greatest pains, silences them all by recollecting arguments of his own discovering. And this is not done in such a manner as to give room for imagining that he talks thus wildly from some sudden impulse, but his opinion of death is that on the dissolution of the animal all sense is lost, and what is deprived of sense is, as he thinks, what we have no concern at all with. And as to pain too, he has certain rules to follow: if it be great, the comfort is that it must be short; if it be of long continuance, then it must be supportable. So what do those grand, eloquent gentlemen state any better than Epicurus in opposition to these two things which distress us the most? And as to other things, do not Epicurus and the rest of the philosophers seem sufficiently prepared? Who is there who does not dread poverty? And yet no true philosopher ever can dread it.”
Cassius:
As I listen to you read this, Joshua, and look at what is said in Section 31, Cicero is not attacking Epicurus here. Cicero is saying that happiness does not require every moment to be happy, but that a life can be called happy — not because it’s entirely made up of good things, but because it abounds with these things to a great and considerable degree. Now, it seems to me this contradicts what Cicero has said several sections earlier, but I think in this part Cicero is correct — that the better view, the best view of happiness, is that you can be happy even when you are momentarily in pain, even when you might be facing the torture of Phalaris’s bull, or even when you might be facing execution. You can continue to be happy even in those circumstances. And he’s proceeding to use Epicurus here as an example of someone who he does not consider to have the best line of reasoning, but as someone whose line of reasoning allows them to reach this very same conclusion — that even when facing torture, even when facing disease, we can still be happy, even though those aspects of life are certainly not aspects we would prefer to experience.
So I think this is going to continue on past this Section 31, but what Cicero is saying about Epicurus here I think is useful for us and doesn’t constitute an attack so much as a recitation of how Epicurus tells us to deal with the difficulties of life. Cicero says that these are words that come from someone whom we consider to be “soft and voluptuous.” But even so, Epicurus himself holds the same position about happiness — that you can be happy even in the face of adversity. When Cicero says, “Do these grand, eloquent gentlemen state anything better than Epicurus in opposition to these things which distress us the most?” — I think he’s being largely serious there, because he’s admitting that Epicurus and the rest of the philosophers prepare themselves for things like poverty and other things that people don’t wish to encounter. So as is often the case with Cicero, sometimes he’s just out and out attacking Epicurus; but in this section I think he’s simply enlisting Epicurus on his side — that happiness is capacious and does not have to be perfect at every moment.
Joshua:
That’s right, and that’s because he’s arguing against his interlocutor, who is the one who posed the question at the beginning of this section. And this is a recurring pattern where Cicero will be responding to his interlocutor who says, for example, in Section Two of this text, “I look on pain to be the greatest of evils.” Cicero replies, “What? Even greater than infamy?” And then Cicero lays out his own position on this, and then he says, “You’re still not convinced? I can recruit every philosopher in the list to my side on this question specifically. We disagree about almost everything else, but on this question specifically I can summon forth legions of thinkers from the ancient and contemporary world to my view — that pain is not the greatest of all evils.” And so then he marshals his forces and leads them on, and by the end of it he convinces the student that their position was ridiculous the whole time.
And so we’ve been down this road now — this will be the fifth time we’ve done this. The first was on whether death was an evil; then it was Section Two on whether pain was the greatest of evils; then we had a section on mental pain; then a section on other disturbances of the mind. And now we come to the final question, which is: can virtue alone be sufficient for a happy life? And while Cicero would probably fail Epicurus on that question, he is prepared to enlist his help on this other question, which is: can you be happy even if you are experiencing pain? Cicero says: “The rest seem to be more hampered with these doctrines, but yet they do get clear of them — such as Epicurus, Metrodorus, and whoever thinks it worthwhile to defend the deserted Carneades — for there is not one of them who does not think the mind to be judge of those goods and able sufficiently to instruct him how to despise what has the appearance only of good or evil.”
So we have: the mind is the judge of what really is good. And then we have this other ability of the mind, which is to detect what only has the appearance of being good, or what only has the appearance of being evil, without actually bearing the characteristics of what is good or what is evil. I focus in on that in the text because it almost directly relates to Plato’s Republic — this tripartite division of the soul in which the mind, representing the patrician ruling class of the city, is the one making decisions. I say “mind,” but really we’re talking about the rational part of the soul, which is represented in that part of the city that is qualified to make decisions for the whole of the soul or the whole of the city. And it is that part of the soul which determines what is good and what is evil, and is able to determine what only appears to be good or what only appears to be evil.
Cassius:
And Joshua, just in case somebody might think that there is a tension here in Epicurean philosophy between Epicurus’s view of the mind and the other views of the mind that you’re talking about right now — I do think it’s clear that ultimately Epicurus takes the position that you have to have philosophy, you have to use your mind, in order to process the information that your senses give you. As Lucretius says, it’s not just the light of day that brings enlightenment and a happy life; it is a study of the laws of nature. The eyes don’t tell you what is going on — the eyes provide information that your mind then has to interpret. The eyes don’t tell you whether the tower is square or round; it is the mind that makes a judgment. And the proper use of the mind is not at all in conflict with Epicurean philosophy.
It’s just that the mind must take the information that nature gives us through the senses, through the feelings of pleasure and pain, and through the anticipations, and use those as the guides to proper reasoning and to proper conclusions. They work together; they don’t work against each other. It’s Plato, Socrates, and these other Greeks who imply a war between the mind and the body, who divide things up and say that one is holy versus unholy. Epicurus looks at the whole person — both mind and body — and brings them together into a proper operation that leads to a happy life. He doesn’t pit them against each other as these other philosophers are doing. So we won’t go further today; but before we do conclude on Section 31, this is again one of the times where Cicero provides for us a summary of important Epicurean doctrines. And I would suggest that what we can find in Section 31 here, in the discussion of Epicurus, is another restatement of the same principles we’ve seen over and over — both in Epicurus’s works, in Lucretius, and in other works by Cicero.
Because as Cicero repeats here, Epicurus overcomes the fear of death and the fear of pain. He calls the day of his death happy, even when he’s afflicted by the greatest pains, because he silences those pains by recollecting his philosophy. And he’s not doing this in a wild manner, but basing it on his conclusions that death is dissolution and the end of all sensation — and that if we have no sensation, we have no concerns. He has reassurance about pain: that great pain is short, and long pain is endurable. He’s thereby able to maintain his happiness even when afflicted by what people normally think of as the worst things in life — the different variations of pain. So we’ll continue next week going further into Section 32, where Cicero continues to talk about Epicurus’s views. But for today, let’s begin to bring our discussion to a conclusion. Any final thoughts today?
Joshua:
You know, Cassius, I do think there’s something interesting to be said about the sixth book of Lucretius and how it relates to this question. And I’m looking here again at what Emily Austin writes in her book Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. She writes: “Lucretius opens Book Six with the story of Epicurus’s arrival in Athens. Epicurus, as Lucretius tells it, looked about town and was impressed that everything that necessity demands for subsistence had been already provided and that life was, so far as possible, established in security. But while Epicurus found much to admire, Lucretius claims he also saw the unhappiness of the Athenians. They possessed power with wealth, honor and glory, and took pride in the good reputation of their children. They considered this wealth among the greatest benefits of living in a flourishing city. Epicurus, though, found that notwithstanding this prosperity, all of them privately had hearts racked with anxiety, which, contrary to their wish, tormented their lives without a pause, causing them to chafe and fret.” The problem, in Emily Austin’s words, was the vessel itself — which might represent the psychologies of individual Athenians or the hive mind of the city itself. Whatever the exact nature of the vessel, it was leaky because of insatiable desire. Pour as much pleasure into a leaky vessel as you want, it will never remain full. Worse, Lucretius writes that the leaky vessel somehow corrupted within it all things — even good things that entered it from without. Pleasures that someone with a sounder vessel might have fully enjoyed became instead contaminated with a foul flavor. In the terms of this book, corrosive desires broke holes in the vessel and poisoned otherwise harmless extravagances. Epicurus set about trying to help the Athenians shore up and detox the vessel. And then she says this: in the passage between the opening description of Athens and the plague that struck it, Lucretius discusses the physical causes of various meteorological and mineral phenomena. Meteors, thunder and lightning are physical events, not encoded messages from the divine. He explains the mysterious power of magnets; finally, Lucretius returns to the natural origins of diseases. His account is astute for its time, including that some diseases arise after excess rains and the rarefaction produced by the sun’s heat, while we catch other illnesses that hover in the atmosphere itself, so that when we inhale the infected air we inevitably absorb the germs in our body at the same time. Such was the plague of Athens. And then Emily Austin makes the connection between the plague in Athens in Lucretius and the same story in Thucydides, which is where Lucretius found the story. She says: “According to Thucydides, once the Athenians saw that they could die at any moment, they abandoned their desire for honor and great wealth, instead giving in to pleasure. They did just what they pleased. They resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, realizing that saving up for the future was ridiculous when the future was so uncertain. They abandoned grand ambitions and the desire for great honor for the same reason: why make such sacrifices to pursue something so volatile when death revealed their efforts as a waste of time? Thucydides claims that death hung ever over their heads, and they vowed that before this fell, it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little. They settled on the present enjoyment.” This is what it looks like when people set aside their false notions and their insatiable desires and when they confront death in the face.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua. That section of Lucretius is sort of an elaboration on the point that Cicero is raising here in this Section 31 — that Epicurus is emphasizing that when we die, we no longer exist; nothing good will happen to us after we die. And so that knowledge of the importance of pursuing happiness while we are alive is going to permeate our decisions on what type of activities to pursue. Are we going to try to build a glorious city for the glory of god, or for the glory of the city, or for some other ideal that is not directly related to our personal happiness? Or are we going to pursue those things in life that bring happiness to us while we are alive? And your framework of analysis for how the universe operates is going to make all the difference in the world between whether you choose some type of Stoic or Platonic ideal of glory as the purpose of your life, or whether you understand that nature has told us to pursue pleasure and avoid pain — and to apply those practical guidances in the way we live every moment of our lives.
We’re not going to succeed in every moment being sex, drugs, rock and roll. But happiness, seen as a predominance of pleasure over pain — in which most of your life, or the greatest part of your life, is something that you consider to be pleasurable, blessed, felicitous, good — that’s what makes sense according to nature as to how you spend your time, and that’s what Epicurus is telling us to pursue during the time that we have. Okay, that’s all the time we do have for today. We’ll pursue the conversation further next week. In the meantime, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.