Episode 324 - Is Pleasure The Good Or The Enemy Of the Good?
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Welcome to Episode 324 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective. We are focusing first on what is referred to as Book One, which provides an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and gives us an overview of the philosophical issues being dealt with at the time of Epicurus. This week will will continue in Section 6
Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:
And these are those three kinds which most people believe the Peripatetics speak of: and so far they are not wrong; for this division is the work of that school. But they are mistaken if they think that the Academicians — those at least who bore this name at that time — are different from the Peripatetics. The principle, and the chief good asserted by both appeared to be the same — namely, to attain those things which were in the first class by nature, and which were intrinsically desirable; the whole of them, if possible, or, at all events, the most important of them. But those are the most important which exist in the mind itself, and are conversant about virtue itself. Therefore, all that ancient philosophy perceived that a happy life was placed in virtue alone; and yet that it was not the happiest life possible, unless the good qualities of the body were added to it, and all the other things which have been already mentioned, which are serviceable towards acquiring a habit of virtue. From this definition of theirs, a certain principle of action in life, and of duty itself, was discovered, which consisted in the preservation of those things which nature might prescribe. Hence arose the avoidance of sloth, and contempt of pleasures; from which proceeded the willingness to encounter many and great labours and pains, for the sake of what was right and honourable, and of those things which are conformable to the objects of nature. Hence was generated friendship, and justice, and equity; and these things were preferred to pleasure and to many of the advantages of life. This was the system of morals recommended in their school, and the method and design of that division which I have placed first.
But concerning nature (for that came next), they spoke in such a manner that they divided it into two parts,— making one efficient, and the other lending itself, as it were, to the first, as subject matter to be worked upon. For that part which was efficient they thought there was power; and in that which was made something by it they thought there was some matter; and something of both in each. For they considered that matter itself could have no cohesion, unless it were held together by some power; and that power could have none without some matter to work upon; for that is nothing which is not necessarily somewhere. But that which exists from a combination of the two they called at once body, and a sort of quality, as it were. For you will give me leave, in speaking of subjects which have not previously been in fashion, to use at times words which have never been heard of (which, indeed, is no more than the Greeks themselves do, who have been long in the habit of discussing these subjects).
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 324 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. We’re continuing in book one of Cicero’s academic questions. Last week we devoted most of our time to section five of book one in which we introduced the framework in which according to these pre epicurean philosophers, there were three divisions of philosophy, those three being ethics, physics, and what we sometimes today call epistemology. But as we see the way that Barrow is discussing it, these philosophers considered the issue of knowledge mainly in the context of dialectic and how to develop true through discussion, which was one of the major differences we were already seeing with Epicurus in that Epicurus view of knowledge and epistemology is not based on dialectic, but on the senses anticipations and the feelings of pleasure and pain the faculty is given to us by nature as opposed to dialectic.
After introducing those three divisions, we started with the division that is generally thought of as ethics, and Vero immediately turned our attention to this question of the nature of good and whether there is more than one type of good or whether good should be considered in a unitary form. That’s where we ended last week with the identification that these pre epicurean philosophers were looking at the goods of the mind, the goods of the body and goods that are external to the mind or body with all sorts of implications that are going to come from the way that division might be construed, the emphasis being placed at the end of section five on the goods of the mind, the intellect which were considered to be of greater importance than any other type, but nevertheless did not exclude the existence of other types of goods. Now that takes us to the beginning of section six, and Josh was going to read that for us and give us any introductory summary that he might want to add before he does so,
Joshua:
Yeah, that is a great introduction, Cassius, because it’s going to set up some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy and in life. When we were in cul disputations, we dealt with questions like, is death an evil? Is pain an evil? Are the other disturbances of the mind like grief evils? But we came at last to the question, which for Cicero is the all important one, and that is the question of whether virtual alone is sufficient for a happy life. Can you be happy without external goods? Can you be happy with just what you have inside yourself? Can you walk out of the city walls while the city burns behind you like a philosopher carrying nothing and have everything that you need or want with you? So in section six, we are continuing with the ethical discussion of these three divisions, the divisions of ethics, of nature, and of logic or epistemology or dialectic.
And so what we talked about last week, Cassius, as you said, is this sub-question of ethics, which is the three kinds of goods, and Vero presented us with a brief description of the goods of the mind, the goods of the body, and the goods of what you might call your situation in life, external goods, goods that don’t have their source inside the stable world of your mind and soul, where virtue reign, supreme. And from the point of view of some of these thinkers, you don’t want to be dependent on things that are external to you because you can’t control them. And if you can’t control them, you can’t guarantee happiness. You can’t guarantee the good of philosophy. The whole point of studying philosophy in the first place will be out of reach for you as a reasonable goal because you’re depending on things that are unreliable in your pursuit of that goal.
And in Tuscan and Disputation section 11, in the fifth division of that text, which is on the question of whether virtual alone is sufficient for a happy life, we’ve already dealt with one aspect of this problem, which is that there was division among these three schools, Platonism, Aristotelian, and stoicism, even on this central and most important question. And so Cicero’s got some very fine footwork he’s got to pull off in Tesco and Disputations if he wants to make it seem like Plato and Aristotle and Zeno are all more or less in the same camp. And the student calls him out on this in section 11 of the fifth division of Tus and Disputations, because Ro had said in section 10, it is the duty of one who would argue accurately to consider not what is said, but what is said consistently as in that very opinion which we’ve adopted in this discussion, namely that every good man is always happy.
It is clear what I mean by good men. I call those both wise and good who were provided and adorned with every virtue. Let us see then who are to be called happy. I imagine indeed that those men are to be called happy, who are possessed of good without any alloy of evil, nor is there any other notion connected with the word that expresses happiness, but an absolute enjoyment of good without any evil virtue cannot attain this if there is anything good besides itself, that’s the central problem for Cicero. He says, for a crowd of evils would present themselves if we were to allow poverty, obscurity, humility, solitude, the loss of friends, acute pains of the body, the loss of health, weakness, blindness, the ruin of one’s country, banishment, slavery, if we were to allow those things to be called evils and knowing that a wise man may at times be afflicted by all of these evils, numerous and important as they are, if we allow them to be called evils because we’ve already allowed that there is good external to the mind of virtue, then virtue would not be sufficient for a happy life.
And moreover, a happy life would not even be attainable because we’re talking about things that all humans experience. Not everybody experiences poverty perhaps, but we all experience pain and grief and loss of friends and family, and we all experience eventually death and we’ll experience the apprehension of death. And so if we hold that these things affect us in a way that can make us unhappy, then we can never be happy. So that is a huge, huge problem in these philosophies and it’s a sufficiently large problem that it’s going to recur in the text that we’re dealing with now in academic questions. It’s also a sufficiently large problem that Cicero covered the same ground in book four of on ends. And the interlocutor brings this up because Cicero had ended that section by saying, we are not therefore to form our judgment of philosophers from detached sentences, but from their consistency with themselves and their ordinary manner of talking.
And then the interlocutor steps in and says, you compel me to be of your opinion, but have a care that you were not inconsistent yourself. And Cicero says, in what respect? And the interlocutor replies, because I have lately read your fourth book on good and evil. And in that you appeared to me while disputing against Cato to be endeavoring to show, which in my opinion means to prove that Zeno and the peripatetics differ only about some new words. But if we allow that, what reason can there be if it follows from the arguments of Zeno that virtue contains all that is necessary to a happy life, while the peripatetic should not be at liberty to say the same, if you’re going to claim Cicero that the stoics and the aristotelians differ only in their use of words, but the stoics say that virtue alone is sufficient and the aristotelians say virtue alone is not sufficient, that is a glaring difference between these two schools and in on ends, you made that point.
You were quite willing to say that. And now here in Tuscan Disputation, Cicero is kind of papering over those differences in order to present more of a unified face because Cicero replies to that. He says, what you would convict me for my own words and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere, you may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth and say anything that strikes our mind with probability so that we are the only people who were really at liberty. But since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is if the opinion of Zeno and his pupil aristo be true, that nothing is good, but what is honorable, but admitting that then whether the whole of a happy life can be rested on virtual alone.
And he says, wherefore, if we certainly grant Brutus this, that a wise man is always happy, how consistent he is is his own business for who indeed is more worthy than himself of the glory of that opinion, still we may maintain that such a man is more happy than anyone else. So Cicero is even being inconsistent on the question of whether consistency is important there in Tuscan Disputations. Going back now to academic questions and our text for today, which is in section six of the first book of academic Questions, still under this broader heading of ethics within those three divisions at philosophy, and we’ve just dealt last week with the three kinds of goods. We are now continuing that discussion.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua, it’s really hard to overstate the importance of what we’re talking about now. And let me add this to what you’ve just said. We’re about to be talking about these three kinds of good. The overarching question still remains though that what we’re really talking about is the good in the sense of the chief, good in the sense that when Quata was talking about the question that confronts all philosophers, the issue is that we are looking for a way to express the ultimate goal that which we are going to do everything to achieve, but which is not itself a means of achieving anything else. Our discussion of whether there is one good or three goods or any number of goods is critical because we’re trying to identify what is our ultimate goal and therefore whether we can consider ourselves to be happy or not. The way this had been stated in section five was that the chief good to which everything was referred, was not to be sought in anything whatsoever except in nature.
And they laid it down that the crowning point of all desirable things and the chief good was to have received from nature everything which is requisite for the mind or the body or for life. Now, that’s the way Yang translates that. Let me give it to you in Rackham as well, because Rackham says they went for a starting point to nature and declared her orders must be followed and that the chief good, which is the ultimate aim of all things, is to be sought in nature and in nature only. And they laid it down that to have attained complete accordance with nature in mind, body and estate is the limit of things desirable and the end of goods. So the problem they’re setting up for themselves, and the problem that the stoics and Epicurus are about to address is that these older schools were saying that there were three aspects of the chief, good, mind, body, and estate, and we discussed last week that you start dividing things down into health and strength and beauty and so forth.
And by having this threefold division, you’re setting up categories of achievement which you’re going to have to meet if you’re going to consider yourself to have the best life. If there are three types of goods of the mind, of the body and of external goods, then you’re going to have to have all three of those. If you’re going to live the best life possible, that immediately is a problem because we don’t have total control over our health. We don’t have total control over our economic circumstances or our beauty or strength and many other things like that. And where does that leave us? If we don’t have control over those things and if we don’t always attain them, then a happy life, the best life is not possible for everyone who fails in achieving some part of that goal. You’ve set yourself up that it only if you are in fact a renaissance man, completely healthy, rich in money and fame and power and glory.
If you don’t have all of these goods, you’re not going to be able to consider yourself to be happy. And there’s various ways of attacking that question, which we’re going to be seeing as we go into section six, but I think we can already anticipate the outline that the stoics decided that the way to deal with that problem of having an attainable goal of the ultimate good was to distill everything down into virtue and say that virtue is the only thing that’s important, and if you have virtue, you’ve got everything. And the reason I set it up that way is I think that is why we have to understand epicurus in doing the same thing with pleasure. Pleasure is not a narrow stimulation of the body in terms of food or drink or sex or music or any set of stimulations. Pleasure is the term that Epicurus is going to use to solve this problem for what must I have in order to have a happy life.
And in answering that question, Epicurus tells us that pleasure is absence of pain. In other words, pleasure is everything in life that is not painful. So to the extent that we are able to make our lives predominantly full of pleasure, we’re able to say that we are happy even though we have pains at times, even though he had kidney disease at the end of his life. Even though we don’t have total control over how much money or health or strength or beauty that we have as long as pleasure predominates in our lives in some form or the other, we can consider ourselves to have a attainable goal of happiness in which pleasure is the term we look to as the ultimate good. The stoics try to do the same thing with virtue, but from the epicurean point of view, they fail because virtue itself is not intrinsically desirable.
Virtue is desirable only because it is a tool for the attainment of pleasure. Epicurus is the one who’s got the broadest, widest and deepest understanding of what nature is calling us to do, which is an aspect that all the philosophers had agreed on. Let’s look to nature. Well, what Epicurus is saying is yes, let’s look to nature and see that nature tells us through pleasure and pain, those things which constitute the good. So as we get into section six, we’re going to be talking further about whether there are three types of good or whether there’s only a single good, but in the end, the more divisions of good you come up with, the more difficulties you set up for yourself in being able to attain them and therefore attain a happy life. These old academics had all sorts of ideas about excellences in every aspect of life, but we all know that we cannot be perfect and we have to deal with this question of whether a life that is less than perfect can be considered to be happy or not.
So Joshua, as you’ve explained it, Cicero has been dancing around this question throughout all of his works, but it’s a legitimate question and it demands an answer, and to some extent, I think this is why you would see that the epicureans and the stoics became the predominant schools during this period of time because both of them were trying to answer this question, how can we consider the happy life to be the ultimate good? What is the happy life? The stoics coming down on the side of virtue, the epicureans coming down on the side of pleasure and the academics going off into a world of skepticism in which they say, well, nothing’s really certain. All we can do is yes, and so we’ll content ourselves with what is probable and never get too tied to any single answer. We will avoid taking positions that would lock us down, and as Cicero says, only by doing so can we really be free to pick and choose between whatever system strikes us as appropriate at the moment, at least in terms of identifying a clear goal of life, the stoics and the epicureans were attempting to be clear and systematize a goal, and that presents us today with the choice of which argument do we believe is the most persuasive?
Is it virtue according to the stoics or is it an expansive definition of pleasure as a sign by epicurus?
Joshua:
Okay, so the last sentence in five was, and thus a threefold division of goods is inferred by them, and in six he starts out this way, and these are those three kinds of goods which most people believe the paracetic speak of, and so far they are not wrong for this division is the work of that school, but they’re mistaken if they think that the academicians, those at least who bore this name at that time are different from the peripatetics. The principle and the chief good asserted by both appeared to be the same, namely to attain those things which were in the first class by nature and which were intrinsically desirable, the whole of them if possible or at all events, the most important of them, but those are the most important which exist in the mind itself and are conversant about virtue itself. Therefore, all of that ancient philosophy perceived that a happy life was placed in virtue alone, and yet that it was not the happiest life possible unless the good qualities of the body were added to it and all the other things which have been already mentioned, which are serviceable towards acquiring a habit of virtue from this definition of theirs, a certain principle of action in life and of duty itself was discovered, which consisted in the preservation of those things which nature might prescribe, hence arose the avoidance of sloth and the contempt of pleasures from which proceeded the willingness to encounter many and great labors and pains for the sake of what was right and honorable.
And of those things which are conformable to the objects of nature, hence was generated friendship and justice and equity and these things were preferred to pleasure and to many of the advantages of life. This was the system of morals recommended in their school and the method and design of that division which I have placed first, in other words, this division of philosophy which deals with ethics.
Cassius:
Joshua, thanks for reading the first part of section six. There are several things going on here. Varo is setting us up to accept his contention that the old schools of philosophy prior to the stoics had in fact placed virtue at the center of their analysis of ethics, and yet in his explanation of it, he’s making clear the divergence because where he says that ancient philosophy perceived that a happy life was placed in virtue alone, and yet it was not the happiest life possible unless the good qualities of the body were added to it and these other qualities that he’s already mentioned. So that’s the crux of this issue. Is virtue alone sufficient for the happy life or in order to obtain the happiest life possible, do you have to have other good qualities in addition to virtue you can easily anticipate That’s where the stoics are going to say no.
Happiness is not a comparative condition where you’re either more or less happy. If you’re happy, you are happy according to the logical insistence of the stoics. And so if you’re happy, then you’re the happiest life possible because if you’ve got virtue, you’ve got everything. Well, that’s where they want to go. But Varo is admitting here that these ancient schools, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, and the rest understood that you needed more than virtue in order to live the happiest life possible. That’s one aspect of this that’s really important to note. Another aspect that’s really important to note is that the way Varo justifies this is to point out that it’s in the mind that you look for all of these things. That’s where you find both the avoidance of sloth and the contempt of pleasure and that according tove is how you generate concepts of friendship and justice and equity and how you prefer those things over pleasure and other advantages in life.
It’s because the most important of the goods from this perspective are those are the most important, which exist in the mind itself and are conversant about virtue itself. That’s the heart of their analysis. Look to the mind, look to virtue the mind takes precedence over the body, and if you carry that to an extreme like the stoics did, you come up with all sorts of cute ways of analyzing things such as preferred indifference and aspects of apathy in which you decide that certain things might be nice to have, but really they aren’t important at all and you end up dismissing them and treating pleasure as something to hold in contempt as opposed to the guidance of nature about what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. There’s a lot of wordplay word game going on here in all of this, and people can accuse epicurus of doing the same thing by placing so much emphasis on the word pleasure, but the key defense there is that Epicurus is looking to the feelings of nature, mental and bodily as the guidance.
He’s not going to let the guidance of nature through the senses, anticipations and feelings be overrun and overwhelmed by a logical analysis which deprecates and which holds that guidance of nature in contempt, in favor of logic and wordplay. This is where in the heart of this analysis varo is telling us from this definition of theirs, a certain principle of action in life and of duty itself was discovered, which consisted and the preservation of those things which nature might prescribe. Well, nature doesn’t prescribe words to us and conclusions nature gives us faculties, and when we construct definitions and ideal forms instead of following the constant and continuous guidance of nature, you get into all sorts of trouble and we’ll have more to say as we go further in section six about the trouble you get into in improper analysis of nature. But I suspect Joshua has some further comments on this first part. Before we get to that,
Joshua:
I think Cassius, if I were to try to take myself out of this larger dispute among ancient thinkers about what the good was and approach this text is someone who had never studied the question before, I might find the place we come to here surprising. We’ve been talking about the three kinds of goods in ethics, then they say that all of those ancient thinkers platonists all the way back to the pythagoreans, they all perceive that a happy life was placed in virtue alone, and yet that it was not the happiest life possible unless the good qualities of the body were added to it and all the other things which have been already mentioned, which are serviceable towards acquiring a habit of virtue. And then we get down to hence arose the avoidance of sloth and that I probably would’ve understood from a Christian perspective of one of the seven deadly sins, right?
This is something that leads you to waste yourself away and makes it impossible for you to sustain the virtue that they’re striving for. But then he comes down to and contempt of pleasures, a contempt for pleasure arises out of this view that virtue is self-sufficient and it occurs to me to ask the question now, why do they think that you can’t seek both? If virtue which is a quality of the mind is sufficient for a happy life and yet it’s not the happiest life possible unless the good qualities of the body are added to it and all the other things which are serviceable towards acquiring a habit of virtue, why do you throw pleasure by the wayside? I know why someone like Vero or Cicero is not going to say that pleasure is the chief good for them, but why did they go to the extreme of saying that pleasure is something to be regarded with contempt and to be placed on a level with sloth?
And one of the reasons I keep returning again and again and again to Plato’s Republic and the allegory of the cave, and I know you’re tired, Cassius, of hearing so much about being and becoming all over again, but Socrates does deal with this question of why pleasure should be regarded with contempt. So the allegory of the cave appears in Book seven of Plato’s Republic in which Socrates is disputing with his interlocutor glaucon, and it’s in that book where they present this idea that the world of sensory experience is a prison house and that within this prison house we are even worse than groping around in the dark looking for the good. We are in fact being directly misled by our senses in pursuit of that good. And it’s in that context that Socrates says this. He says, anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderment of the eyes are of two kinds and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye quite as much as the bodily eye.
And he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak will not be too ready to laugh, he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light and he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being and he will pity the other. Or if you have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. And he connects this with this idea of learning, is it ever truly possible to learn something new? He says, but if I am right about this, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before like sight into blind eyes.
Our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being or in other words of the good. So just as if you want to turn your eye from darkness to light, you’ve got to turn your head. It’s the same with the soul. If you want to turn the instrument of knowledge from the world of becoming, which is the world of the prison house of the senses, if you want to turn it from the world of becoming over to the world of being, which is the world of the ideal forms and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being which is so bright and magnificent, the brightest and best of all things in the word the good, you can only do that by turning the movement of the whole soul.
You can’t just move the intelligence, you have to move the whole soul just like you can’t just move the eyes, you’ve got to move the whole head. I know this sounds completely unrelated to anything that’s important that we’re talking about, but this is the key point in Plato’s argument for why we have to discard pleasure, why pleasure should be regarded with contempt. Because pleasure is the thing that drags your soul back into the world of being pleasure is the thing that drags your soul like lead in weights back to the world of becoming back to the world of the lie and it makes it difficult or even impossible for you to turn your soul from becoming to being from the lie to the vision of the pure and perfect good if you devote yourself to pleasure. Socrates says there must be some art which will affect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner, not implanting the faculty of sight for that already exists but has been turned in the wrong direction and is looking away from the truth.
And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities for even when they are not originally innate, they can be implanted later by habit and exercise. We saw that bit about habit in what we’re reading in academic questions. It’s the same thing here for even when they’re not originally innate, they can be implanted later by habit and exercise. The habit of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which remains always the same and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable or on the other hand, hurtful and useless. And then he says to glaucon, did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue, how eager he is, how clearly his poultry soul sees the way to his end? He is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness and this is when he goes on to say the key point which relates to pleasure.
He said, but what if there had been a circumcision of such natures of these rogues in the days of their youth and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures such as eating and drinking, which lead in weights were attached to them at their birth and which dragged them down and turned the vision of their souls upon the things that are below. If I say they had been released from those impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would’ve seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to. Now, this is a complex argument that he’s developing here, that the eye can have three states essentially. I mean let’s say that for convenience sake because this is complicated. In one condition the eye could be blind and see neither the good nor the evil. But then you have people like the rogues who are keen eye just as keen eye as the wise.
Only their keen eyes are attuned not to the good, but to what is evil and it is pleasure. It is the devotion to sensual pleasure eating and drinking, which like lead and weights, drag them down, drag them down into this world and keep their eyes on that world when they should be looking at the world of pure being the world of the good. So with all of that in mind, we can come back now to academic questions and compare that with the wave. Barrow has put it, the principle he says, and the chief good asserted by both the peripatetics and the academics appeared to be the same, namely to attain those things which were in the first class by nature and which were intrinsically desirable and by first class we’re talking about the goods of the mind. Those are the most important which exist in the mind itself and are conversant about virtue itself.
Therefore, all that ancient philosophy from Pythagoras to Aristotle through Plato, through Socrates perceived that a happy life was placed in virtue alone and yet that it was not the happiest life possible unless the goods of the body were added to it. But this is where you have to be very careful. You have to be very careful about which goods you add to it because we’re only looking for the goods of the body which are serviceable towards acquiring a habit of virtue. What you don’t want according to these people, you don’t want to indulge in those contemptible pleasures that are going to act like lead in weights and drag you down like sloth, like prophecy. This is where in on ends, Cicero said, Epicurus wants to limit the passions. Can a passion be limited? It is rather a thing to abolish and cut out by the roots.
This is why Cicero wants to abolish pleasure and rip it out by the roots because it is a lead in way dragging down the adherent to philosophy in his quest for the good. And we see that in Plato in his republic. We see it in Cicero and on ends. We see it in Vero in his description of the contrast between these different schools, but they’re all unified. They’re all unified on this question that pleasure is to be regarded with contempt and that the idea that pleasure is the chief good is so abominable because it means indulging in what is evil. Have I explained that well, Cassius, or is there something that you would add to that or do you have any comment on where I’ve gone with all of that?
Cassius:
Joshua, you have explained material that is of such great importance and yet frustratingly for us is not often appreciated in the study of Epicurean philosophy. This is why Epicurus is talking about pleasure. This is what Epicurus would no doubt have claimed to have been the heart of his philosophy. Any five-year-old can understand the principle that if you eat too much ice cream, you’re going to get sick. That kind of wisdom is not unique to Epicurus. It’s something that any religion, any philosophy, whether it be Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, humanist, any type of person of minimal intelligence can understand what passes under the term of hedonic calculus. That is an important thing to understand. But what you’ve just been describing is what Epicurus spent his lifetime developing in response to the errors and the disaster in the making that was being promoted by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the stoics.
You cannot divorce the body from the mind and think that the mind is all that is important. You cannot take pleasure out of life and say that it is something to be held in contempt because virtue is all that is important. You started out the explanation by observing from a practical point of view why it is surprising to read this from Varo, starting out with something that makes some amount of common sense, but concluding that pleasure is to be held in contempt and your explanation is consistent with that given by tortas and on ends, that many people are beguiled by the glamor of the name of virtue and they think that by fixating on something that is a part of life, they can dazzle other people into accepting their leadership on things where they have no justification for trying to provide that leadership. The material that you’ve covered there in regard to Socrates jumps out at you when you realize that the cave analogy, the heart of this whole approach from the platonic school is to suggest that the senses are not to be trusted, that they can’t be trusted, that they’re deceptive, that they lie to us, that they lead us to disaster, and that instead of the guidance of nature through the census, we need to accept the idea, the form, the suggestion, the speculation that there is some kind of world outside of this world where true reality exists and that we should pity anyone who does not commune with that external reality and who doesn’t understand that life here on this earth is basically the veil of tears where you are constantly being held back by your body, your mind is enslaved to pleasure and that your true goal to be to divorce yourself from all of that.
As we’ve been discussing recently, that death is indeed not something to avoid, but it’s something to look forward to free you from this world in favor of a better world. When you read Lucretius and understand the intensity of emotion in which he’s talking about the hearts in darkness and people wandering lost because they don’t understand what’s really important and they don’t understand their place in the universe and that they are going to cease to exist forever and that this life is short, when you read the intensity of all of that, it’s because of these issues that you’ve been discussing. Joshua, it’s not because Lucius had a better way to eat cake. It’s not because he had particularly brilliant advice about romantic love. Yes, he had some good things to say about those issues, but it’s the limits and boundaries of the universe and of human life that are of ultimate concern that lead down the road to the practical application of how to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
You’ve first got to understand the overall framework and you have to reject the framework that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the stoics were suggesting, and that the religions that run the world today adopted as their own. There’s no other world besides this one. The guidance of nature through the senses, anticipations and feelings or the way to make your decisions in life, and those are things that are not so difficult to understand, but which are hidden in many cases by arguments such as being advanced by these other schools for purposes of confusing you, as Lucrecia said, for purposes of spinning tales, to confuse people into thinking that they better follow these rules of morality put forth by the religions or else they’re going to spend an eternity in hell or else they’re going to miss out on an eternity in heaven. Those are the ultimate questions that Epicurus is addressing, and he’s addressing them and giving you reasons to have confidence in his answers.
He’s not simply saying, well, it’s probable that you’re not going to burn in hell for an eternity. It’s probable that you’re not going to miss out on an eternity of bliss in heaven. He’s saying these aren’t issues of probability. Human intelligence is able to provide you with confidence that those things are simply not true, that this is the only world that you have to live in and the way to live in it is to follow the guidance of nature, not through logic and word games, but through the real guidance of pleasure, pain, the sensations, anticipations and feelings. In last week’s episode, we devoted most of our time to a sort of procedural analysis, and we didn’t take too many positions about the implications of the divisions that we’re talking about, but in this week’s episode, I think we’ve seen the implications of the kind of thing that Aristotle is so famous for.
Let’s divide things up into categories and let’s come up with words to describe these categories, and that very process of dialectic and putting things into words will by itself lead us in the right direction, and that’s where epicure and philosophy begs to differ and says that it’s not through definitions, it’s not through divisions and logical propositions that you come to what’s important in life, but through confidence in the sense and the willingness to let nature lead you through natural faculties and not substitute your own judgment in favor of that which is provided by nature. Not to speculate that there’s some better way of life beyond what nature itself provides, not to look for some other world, but to find a home in this world. When we come back next week, we’re going to get back into the issue of how the academy and Aristotle tried to divide the world up between an efficient force of power versus a matter on which everything is being acted upon by this power. Those issues go hand in glove with what we’ve been talking about today because they’re going to say that the world could not exist except for this external power outside the world, but we’ll come back to that next week. In the meantime, let’s see if we have any final thoughts today because we’re going to run out of time for this episode. So Joshua, anything further you’d like to add today before we quit?
Joshua:
Yeah, my final thought is this. It would be tempting to categorize Epicurus as presenting a direct point by point refutation of everything that’s being said here, but he doesn’t just reverse what he’s hearing. It’s not like Vero is saying Virtu is sufficient for a happy life and we should regard pleasure with contempt. It’s not that Epicurus just reverses the formula and says Pleasure is sufficient for a happy life. We should regard virtue with contempt. That would be a simplistic and foolish way to proceed about that. That’s not what he’s doing, and if he were doing that, I don’t think Cicero would find Epicurus nearly so irritating. The reason that Cicero finds Epicurus and Epicureanism to be such a constant irritation is because Epicurus puts pleasure in the place of the chief good, and yet still manages to not be a rogue, not come to a criminal view of human life.
He’s actually arriving at some of the same conclusions. He’s just getting there by a very different road, a road that doesn’t require him to do what Socrates is doing. In saying that the world of this sense is a prison house that we need to turn our attention to the world of pure ideal forms and so on. Epicurus is able to get to a valuation of justice, for example, without going through all of that other unnecessary stuff, and that’s part of what I think is so irritating to Cicero is that Epicurus is able to do a lot of the same things. He’s able to formulate a conception of justice. He’s able to formulate a conception of virtue, and he’s able to do all of that while putting pleasure in the spot of the chief. Good.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a really important point. Cicero sees the problem with Epicurus because Cicero sees that Epicurus strikes at the heart of the errors of this existing philosophy. If Epicurus were just some party animal, no one would’ve needed to take him seriously, but Cicero and these other schools knew how seriously they needed to take Epicurus, and that’s actually a lesson for us here today. We need to take Epicurus seriously on the full depth of his philosophy and not just on the superficial aspects of pleasure and pain that we often talk about and sort of deal with exclusively. There’s so much to Epicurus that deserves the emotional investment that we see in Lucretius and endogenous of Eno Ander and in those others who understood that Epicurus was essentially a savior like figure, not in a mystical sense, but someone who could unwind the depth of the stupidity of the platonic consensus that was leading the ancient world into disaster. So okay, let’s leave it at that point for this week. We’ll come back next week and discuss the rest of section six and move into section seven. As always, we invite you to drop by the epicure in French Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or our other discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.