Episode 318 - In The End It Is Pleasure - Not Virtue - That Gives Meaning To The Happy Life
Welcome to Episode 318 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 with Section 34 of Part 5.
Cicero spends the final sections trying to chip away at pleasure being the goal of life by discussing how luxury, honor, and riches are not required for happiness. He does so generically without direct mention of Epicurus, but we’ll discuss his examples and how his argument actually proves Epicurus’ point that pleasure is the goal: those who overindulge obtain do not in sum obtain pleasure, but in fact more pain than pleasure.
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 318 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. We’re still in part five of Tusculan Disputations. Closing in on the end. Last week we dealt extensively with section 33 in which Cicero went into Epicurus division of the natural and necessary desires. Cicero had close 33 by saying that Epicurus had held that a wise man enjoys continual pleasures by uniting the expectation of future pleasure to the recollection of what he has already tasted.
And similar notions are applied by them to high living, and the magnificence and expensiveness of entertainments are deprecated because nature is satisfied at a small expense. As Cicero proceeds into 34 and 35, he gives additional anecdotes from other people without going into anything that Epicurus himself said. And I think the thrust of the anecdotes that Cicero gives is basically to pile on additional instances of people who understood that great pleasure can indeed come from very simple food and drink and other experiences when you are not acclimated to requiring the luxuries that can lead you into trouble because you expect them over and over. Bread and water give great pleasure when you’re hungry and appetite is the best sauce. Those are fairly non-controversial, and Cicero is able to basically glide into them without missing a beat. He continues in the same vein in section 35 doing exactly the same thing, talking about how the life of happiness does not require luxury in eating and drinking and other accommodations like that. He cites Aristotle for basically endorsing the same position. So again, C at this point is into his name dropping phase. He’s got his position staked out. You don’t have to have luxury in order to have a happy life, and he’s going to add every citation he can come up with.
And of course, these citations standing alone are consistent with what Epic’s position would be. I do think there’s a danger here though, in that Cicero is implying not only that luxury is not necessary for happiness, but since Cicero equates pleasure with bodily stimulation and luxury Cicero, I think here is implying that his argument should also be interpreted to mean that pleasure is not necessary for the happy life. But at the moment he’s focusing on these luxury items as opposed to pleasure. And he continues on into section 36 where he changes the focus from the luxury of food and drink and accommodations to issues of power and fame. And he says that lack of power, lack of fame, do not prevent the wise man from being happy again, a position that is largely in accord with Epicurus conclusions, but very little mention of Epicurus in this section because he’s going to other examples from Greek and Roman history to support the argument towards the end of 36.
The example that Cicero turns to is someone who is banished from his country as also something that should not prevent the wise man from being happy, even though it is an example of something terrible that can happen to you, especially from the point of view of a Greco-Roman such as Cicero. He returns to Epicurus by first mentioning the position taken by someone that wherever I am happy is my country. And then he cites Socrates specifically for saying that when he was asked where he belonged to Socrates replied the world for, he looked upon himself as a citizen and inhabitant of the whole world. And it’s in that context that he comes back to Epicurus mentioning someone named Altius asking did he not follow his philosophical studies with the greatest satisfaction at Athens, although he was banished, which however would not have happened to him if he had obeyed the laws of Epicurus and lived peaceably in the Republic. Was Epicurus happier living in his own country than Metro Doris who lived at Athens or did Plato’s happiness succeed that of Achates or promo or slus? There are several things going on here. One being Epicurus, advice to live peaceably within the republic, and then a reference to Epicurus life in Athens as opposed to metro. Doris who was not originally from Athens but was from another location. Joshua, can you help us with that?
Joshua:
Exactly, Cassius. So he quotes this classic view, which is I’m not only a citizen of Greece but a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan and cites that as being the view of Socrates. And then he goes down this list of people who were banished or moved themselves somewhere else, and he asks the question, were they any happier in their new position than they were in their old, their old position than they were in their new? And the point that Cicero is trying to reach here is that the location of your body, on the surface of the earth is not going to make or break your happiness. You can be happy without being where you want to be. And so he makes this reference to Epicurus. He says that Alta BEUs was banished and would not have been if he had followed the laws of Epicurus, presumably about political engagement and lived peaceably in the republic.
And then Ciro goes on to say in what was Epicurus happier living in his own country than metro? Doris who lived at Athens, Epicurus was born on the island of Samos. Samos was a colony of the city, state of Athens, and he was an Athenian citizen enrolled in the Deme ghettos and with all of the citizenship rights that pertain to that. So when he moved himself back to Athens when he was perhaps 30, you could say that he was moving back to his homeland in a way, although he had only seen the place once before for two years. Metro Doris meanwhile was from Laki on the coast of Asia miner at the Bosporus. And the point that CR is making here is do we have any reason to suppose that Epicurus was any happier than metro Doris for being in his home city? In other words, did metro Doris have any reason to be upset or unhappy because he was not in his home city?
And for Cicero, whose whole point to this fifth book of Tus and Disputations is that virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life. It doesn’t matter where you are, it doesn’t matter how famous you are, it doesn’t matter what kind of table you keep. None of these things are going to determine your happiness for someone like Cicero. And so all of these anecdotes that he’s giving here are in service of that point of view. We’ve skipped a lot of anecdotes here. This row tends to dwell on a theme and just pile on as many citations to history as he can.
Cassius:
We are going to be moving in now to section 38 and we are in fact closing in on the end of Tuscan Disputations. There are only a couple of sections left and we will be through with the book before we go into 38. Let me repeat the point I made at the beginning. What Cicero is doing here in wrapping up Tus and Disputations is dealing in what we’ve discussed many times here about this SOR paradox. Cicero is going through a list of the things that people normally hold in life to be pleasurable, such as food, drink, luxury, living in your own country, having power, reputation. He’s going through all of these things and he is saying you don’t need each one, one after another. You can subtract and still be happy and we’re going to want to keep that in mind. I think as we get to the end here, because the premise that Cicero is following here is one that I do not think Epicurus would agree with.
You can take these individual pleasures and do without them absolutely and still be happy. But from the epicurean perspective, it is these pleasures not in luxurious or overindulgent amounts, but as in Cicero’s anecdotes, even if you’re just recognized by a woman carrying water in the street, that is a form of pleasurable reputation. The different things that can happen to you are still valuable, not because you’ve given up all these other things in life that cause you more trouble, but because the different things that can happen to you are pleasurable. It’s not asceticism for the sake of asceticism that’s important. It is in fact pleasure that gives value to life. So we’re going to go next in 38 and I’m going to ask you to read section 38, Joshua because there’s a good bit of discussion of Epicurus in the beginning of it, and that’s going to be the context in which we’re now moving to discuss other things that we can be deprived of such as blindness and still be happy. It’s still sort of in the line of arguing that nature does not require an awful lot in order to be happy. But when Cicero says nature doesn’t require much, the implicit direction Cicero is going in is all you need is virtue. When Epicurus says nature doesn’t require much, Epicurus is still focused on pleasure in order to find a happy life
Joshua:
Besides the emotions of the mind, all griefs and anxieties are assuaged by forgetting them and turning our thoughts to pleasure. Therefore, it was not without reason that Epicurus presumed to say that it wise men abounds with good things because he may always have his pleasures from once it follows as he thinks that that point is gained, which is the subject of our present inquiry, that a wise man is always happy. What even though he should be deprived of the senses of seeing ad hearing yes for he holds those things very cheap for in the first place. What are the pleasures of which we are deprived by that dreadful thing blindness for though they allow other pleasures to be confined to the senses, yet the things which are perceived by the sight do not depend wholly on the pleasures the eyes receive as is the case.
When we taste, smell, touch or hear four in respect of all these senses, the organs themselves are the seat of pleasure, but it is not so with the eyes. For it is the mind which is entertained by what we see. But the mind may be entertained in many ways even though we could not see at all. I’m speaking of a learned and wise man with whom to think is to live. But thinking in the case of a wise man does not altogether require the use of his eyes in his investigations. For if knight does not strip him of his happiness, why should blindness which resembles knight have that effect for the reply of anti potter, the sic to some women who bewailed his being blind, though it is a little too obscene, it’s not without its significance. What do you mean sayeth he? Do you think the knight can furnish no pleasure and we find by his magistrates and his actions that old Abbey is too who was blind for many years was not prevented from doing whatever was required of him with respect either to the republic or his own affairs. It is said that Chias Jus’ house was crowded with clients when whose business it was could not see how to conduct themselves. They applied to a blind guide.
Cassius:
Joshua, as you read this section, it reminds me of some comments made by Dewitt that it seems like some of the ancients actually like to indulge almost as a game to start talking about how many of your limbs, how many of your parts of your body could you slice off and still be happy If you lose a foot or a leg or two feet or two legs or a hand or both hands or you’re blind or you’re deaf or you can’t smell how many of your senses, how many of your aspects of your body can you lose and still have life be worth living? And this of course echoes what I was saying before you read that last paragraph about the sororities aspect of this. When Cicero talks about the man for whom to think is to live, yes, Geus can agree with many aspects of how life can be worthwhile even in significant disadvantages.
But Cicero is driving this argument in a direction that Epicurus would not have approved of because just as you never get an answer to the question of which grain of sand can you remove from a heap and still have a heap, all of the aspects of life that we find desirable are desirable. And while it definitely can be helpful to think about what it is you really need, it’s not the point of life to live in the most minimal way you possibly can. If there’s a problem that causes more pain than pleasure, then absolutely there’s all sorts of things that you can do without but to drive over and over and over. The idea that, well, I can be happy even if I’m just a brain and a vat because for me to think is to live that may appeal to some people, but that’s not a productive way of looking at human life.
So again, I don’t mean to be too critical of this line of thought from Cicero here because in each step along the line you can get something valuable out of it. But as Cicero continues on here, when he says he’s speaking of a learned and wise man with whom to think is to live, while we can agree that thinking is pleasurable, thinking is not the fullness of life, humans are both minds and bodies, and the best life is going to involve the happiest use of both aspects of life. And to carry on with the point I just made, 39 is basically all devoted to blindness and anecdotes involving issues that confront those who are blind, referencing Homer of course, who very famously was blind, and then of course from blindness, what do we do? But proceed into section 40 to address deafness. But there is a mention of Epicurus at the beginning of 40. So Joshua towards the end of 40, there’s another mention of pleasure in a way that then evokes Epicurus in the beginning of 41. So Joshua, why don’t you read for us the part that begins to apply to Epicurus again towards the middle and then read us out through the end of heart five
Joshua:
In the middle of section 40 here, Cicero has just come off his discussion of blindness and deafness and he kind of summarizes it this way. He says, but suppose all these misfortunes were to meet in one person, suppose him blind and deaf, let him be afflicted with the sharpest pains of body, which in the first place generally of themselves make an end of him still should they continue so long and the pain be so exquisite that we should be unable to assign any reason for our being so afflicted still, why good gods Should we be under any difficulty for there is a retreat at hand and death is that retreat, a shelter where we shall forever be Insensible Theodorus said to Li, who threatened him with death. It is a great matter indeed for you to have acquired the power of a Spanish fly when Percys and treated powerless not to lead him in triumph.
That is a matter which you have in your own power. Said powerless. I said many things about death in our first day’s, disputation when death was the subject and not a little the next day when I treated the pain, which things if you recollect, there can be no danger of your looking upon death as undesirable or at least it will not be dreadful. That custom which is common among the grecians that their banquets should, in my opinion, be observed in life drinks, say they or leave the company. And rightly enough for a guest should either enjoy the pleasure of drinking with others or else not stay till he meets with affronts from those that are in liquor. Thus, those injuries of fortune, which you cannot bear, you should flee from. And in section 41 and continues, this is the very same which is said by epicurus and by MOUs.
Now if those philosophers whose opinion it is that virtue has no power of itself and who say that the conduct which we on our side denominate, honorable and laudable is really nothing and is only an empty circumstance set off with an unan sound can nevertheless maintain that a wise man is always happy. What think you may be done by the Socratic and platonic philosophers. Some of these allow such superiority to the goods of the mind as quite to eclipse what concerns the body and all external circumstances. But others do not admit these to be goods. They make everything depend on the mind. Whose disputes car ease used to determine as the sort of honorary arbitrator for is what seemed goods to the peripatetics were allowed to be advantages by the stoics. And as the peripatetics allowed no more than the stoics to riches, good health and other things of that sort, when these things were considered according to their reality and not by mere names, his opinion car DE’s opinion was that there was no ground for disagreeing.
Therefore, let the philosophers of other schools see how they can establish this point. Also, it is very agreeable to me that they make some professions worthy of being uttered by the mouth of a philosopher with regard to a wise man always having the means of living happily. And then we come to section 42, which is the final paragraph of tus and disputations. We’ve come to the end of the book and Cicero says, but as we are to depart in the morning, let us remember these five days discussions. Though indeed I think I shall commit them to writing for how can I better employ the leisure which I have of whatever kind it is and whatever it be owing to. And I will send these five books also to my friend Brutus, by whom I was not only incited to write on philosophy, but I may say provoked. And by doing so it is not easy to say what service I may be of to others at all events in my own various and acute afflictions which surround me on all sides. I cannot find any better comfort for myself.
Cassius:
All right, Joshua, thank you for reading to the end of the chapter and to the end of the book. And it is probably worth celebration that we have come to the conclusion of a very long series of episodes, approximately a year we’ve spent going through it. And I do think it’s been time well spent because we have gotten a lot of detail out of discussing what Cicero had to say about Epicurus and about the arguments that a peus was addressing that we would not have gotten otherwise. And the same is true I’d say here in the final paragraphs that you’ve just read for us because interestingly enough seems like Cicero comes back more to his skeptical position here and while he’s bounced around about his assessment of whether the stoics really disagreed with the aristotelians or not. In the end here in this final paragraph, he cites caries who is more of a skeptic like Cicero himself is as taking the position that in the end they’re basically saying the same things between those two schools.
And Cicero says he’s happy with any philosopher who is able to say things that are worthy of coming from a wise man’s mouth about living happily, Cicero’s closing on much the same argument that he’s used throughout Tuscan Disputations, that he doesn’t agree with Epicurus about pleasure. He thinks that Epicurus says things that aren’t worthy of a philosopher, but Epicurus seems to Cicero to come to some of the same conclusions that he himself does. And if even Epicurus, even someone whose opinion it is that virtue has no power of itself, even someone who says that the conduct which we hold to be honorable and praiseworthy is really nothing except empty circumstance set off with an unknowing sound. If even somebody as depraved as Epicurus can come to a similar conclusion, then how much more can the Socratic and platonic philosophers do in explaining the desirability of pursuing virtue as the basis of happiness?
In saying that the stoics and the aristotelians arrive at the same point. He reminds us of what their dispute was about, which is that some say that the goods of the mind are so much more important that they transcend the goods of the body. The stoics on the other hand say that the things of the body and external circumstances are not even good at all. And that’s where Carnegie and the skeptics will come in and say, it doesn’t matter, both of you are arriving at the same place, which is that the goods of the mind and virtue are those that are really important. And in that thought, Cicero brings us back at the end to his conclusion that the philosophers of the schools can debate these points among themselves if they’re like just so long as they say things that are worthy of being uttered by the mouth of a philosopher. So Joshua, we’ve reached the end of the book and so we probably should devote the remainder of the episode to summarizing the lessons we get from these final chapters and from the book as a whole.
Joshua:
That’s right. We have spent a long time on Cicero in various works. It’s always rewarding. It’s not always easy to do because he does raise real challenges, challenges which might not occur to someone who is approaching Epicurus with a friendly eye toward his philosophy, right? You need a critic, you need someone to ask the hard questions, and Cicero has been very good about that for us to help us think through some of the potential problems and pitfalls and to think through what were the objections that were made by the other schools in classical antiquity and how did the epicureans of the ancient world respond to them and how should we respond to them today?
Cassius:
Joshua, lemme jump in just a moment before you continue. What you’ve just said is exactly an argument that has attracted my attention. In a new article I’ve been reading over the last several days, Dr. David Sudley wrote an article some 25 years ago entitled The Inferential Basis of Epicurean Ethics, and one of the points he raises there is exactly what you just brought out, which is that we find in Cicero, in many cases, the proofs and the logical arguments of Epicurus in support of his position that we don’t really find in the letters of Epicurus himself so much. For example, as Dr. Sedley says, the principle doctrines and especially the letter to Menoras, they are lists of conclusions, especially the principle doctrines, the Vatican sayings, and then the things that are included within the letter to Menoras. They are excellent summaries of the conclusions that Epicurus reaches and the advice that he gives about how best to live a happy life, but they’re not necessarily the logical argument that he followed step by step along the way to reach those conclusions.
And that’s a point Dr. Sudley brings out that we have in Quata in book one of own ends, the section that we talk about all the time where Atu lays out from the beginning how Epicurus held pleasure to be the good. Dr. Sudley points out that presentation by Cicero is actually much more helpful in understanding Epicurus thought process at arriving at his conclusions than is the letter to Menoras itself. So what you’ve just said I think is a really important reason why the study of Cicero, especially onions followed by Tuscan disputations and also on the nature of the gods, because that gives us the argument on divinity that Cicero, as irritating as he can be, has preserved for us vital information about how to interpret and procure us.
Joshua:
That’s exactly right. And as we’ve gone through these texts, I see echoes in the plays of William Shakespeare of things that I’m reading for the first time in the works of CO, which I’ve never studied in any serious level before this podcast. So it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, particularly Dave Finns, that first text that we went through on ends, tus Disputations is probably one of his weakest dialogues because the interlocutor, the person we’ve been referring to as the student doesn’t really have much to say and except in one or two places doesn’t really argue back. You’ve already given us the example within the last five minutes or so about the student pointing out the contradictions between this book and on ends, the contradiction between what Cicero says about the relationship between the stoics and peripatetics here versus what he says over there. And there are many more instances that are like that we could point out, and we’ve tried to do that to the extent that we could, but it is a huge, massive material and it’s great to have this source, this great big lump of classical antiquity of Greek and Roman philosophy, something we can really sink our teeth into.
And I will second the point that you’ve made and that you’ve attributed to David Sedley there, which is we would be in a very different place when it comes to the understanding of Epicurean philosophy without these works of Cicero. Cicero. In his conclusion in section 42, he says, how can I better employ the leisure which I have of whatever kind it is and whatever it is owing to then to write these texts, then to study philosophy, to write dialogues, to write books about it, to write summaries and outlines of what different philosophers thought and to really do the hard thinking on some of these questions. And we are the beneficiaries of his labor. I’ve mentioned this many times before, but the Romans had a word OTM to refer to a kind of healthful and productive leisure. It finds its negation in the word nego, which is the root of English words like negotiation and so on.
So it’s in the question of a business or pleasure. We’re very much on the pleasure side here, speaking of OTM, but it’s not mere idleness and it’s not nce. And those are things that Cicero is the most frequent and most harsh critic of. He is spending his leisure time in the company of friends, and they are in the waning days of the Roman Republic in the shadow of the looming rise of the prescriptions of Mark Anthony and Augustus, Octavian and Lapidus that would ultimately lead to his death. He is taking this time away from the troubles and the wars and the political intrigues and scandals of the end of the Roman Republic to study philosophy, to study how to live and why we live the way we live and the benefit to us. As I said, we are the beneficiaries of his labor in his free time here at the end of his life, and our knowledge and our experience of Epicureanism is greatly enriched by it.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, I completely agree with your assessment of the significance of Cicero and the material that we’ve been able to gather from Tuscan Disputations and from own ends. Now, don’t hold me to what I’m about to say because we may have a mid-course correction as to where we go next, but one of the things we’ve been discussing for a while is that we have not really brought a lot of attention to some of the foundational works of Phil Edemas. And the one that has been circling around us forever is Phil Edemas own signs or own methods of Inference. And we have a very good article by Dr. Sudley that we can bring to use in devoting some attention to that as well as a lot of explanatory material that’s in the appendix to the translation by Delacey. But before I commit us even to doing that, we’ll have some discussions this coming week because I have a feeling that we may not be quite finished with Cicero because in order to understand Phil Edemas, we need some background about the arguments about skepticism that were tearing apart the other schools, and we’ve made reference to that before existing in Cicero’s academic questions.
I’m going to take a look at that and see if it would make sense for us to devote any more time to Cicero and that work as a prelude to getting into Phil Edemas because like I say, this issue of the canon of truth, what truth means, what reality means, what epic’s unique perspective on those questions really was, is something that surrounds much of what we talk about. And I don’t know that there’s any better source for that than edemas own methods of inference, but unfortunately, that work is not complete. We don’t have the beginning of it, we don’t have the background at which point Phil Edemas gives us epicure and perspective on it. And I think we can set the stage if we spend at least a little time with how Cicero introduces that to us in academic questions. There’s not as much discussion of Epicurus and academic questions as there has been and Tuscan disputations, but I think that if I recall correctly, it’s not a very long work and it sets up the arguments that Epicurus had to deal with in coming up with this canon of truth. So we’ll see where we go from here. But for today, let’s bring the episode to a conclusion. Thanks again to you, Joshua and Callini for all of your work in helping us produce this. We’ll come back soon as we continue to discuss Epicurean philosophy. In the meantime, please feel free to drop by the Epicurean friends form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We will be back again soon. See you then. Bye.