Episode 299 - TD27 - Was Epicurus Right That There Are Only Two Feelings - Pleasure And Pain?
Date: 09/13/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4727-episode-299-td27-was-epicurus-right-that-there-are-only-two-feelings-pleasure-an/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius Amicus:
Welcome to episode two hundred and ninety-nine 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.
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This week, we’re returning in our series covering Cicero’s Tusculan disputations from an Epicurean Viewpoint to section twenty of part three of this book, which contains some tremendously interesting information and commentary and debate about the specifics of the Epicurean view of pleasure.
In this section, Cicero divides his attack against Epicurus into three specific complaints. The first complaint is that Epicurus has said that he cannot imagine anything to be good unless the senses are tickled with some type of pleasure, but that Epicurus also says that to be free from pain is the highest pleasure.
That’s where Cicero says that “Can anyone contradict himself more?” - because Cicero’s position is that being free from pain has absolutely nothing to do with being tickled with pleasure, and Cicero thinks that this is a dramatic failure of logic on Epicurus’s point to take these two seemingly inconsistent positions.
The second of the complaints, which is where we’ll pick up today, is related to the first and related to absence of pain, but is slightly different because the second of the complaints is that there is in Nature a threefold division of conditions. The first is to be experiencing pleasure, the second is to be experiencing pain, and then the last is to be affected neither by pleasure nor by pain. Cicero criticizes Epicurus for not recognizing that there is an intermediate or neutral state between pleasure and pain.
Joshua:
Yes, Cassius, in Cicero’s On Ends, which we went through on the podcast previously, he gives a very good quote which describes his own view of this, and let me read that. Cicero says this, “It is as good as doing violence to the senses, Torquatus, to uproot from our minds those notions of words which are ingrained in us. Why who can fail to see that there are, in the nature of things these three states, one when we are in pleasure, another when we are in pain, the third the state in which I am now, and I suppose you too, when we are neither in pain nor in pleasure. Thus, he who is feasting is in pleasure, while he who is on the rack is in pain. But do you not see that between these extremes lies a great crowd of men who feel neither delight nor sorrow.
And then we get the reply from the Epicurean interlocutor Torquatus, who says: “Not at all, and I affirm that all who are without pain are in pleasure, and that the fullest possible. And Cicero replies to Torquatus: “Therefore, he who not thirsty himself mixes mead for another, and he who, being thirsty, drinks the mead are in just the same state of pleasure. That’s the question that Cicero asks at the end of that paragraph.
Cassius:
Yes, this is definitely a thread of thought through much of Cicero’s attacks that Epicurean philosophy makes no sense, just in case someone’s expected me to get to the third before we dive into the depths, the third is also related to dividing things in that Cicero says that Epicurus is making a great mistake in dividing virtue from the good. So the issue of dividing things up is continuing through all of this, and it really is essential for us to get to the bottom of Epicurus’s justification for this, because the division between pleasure and pain - and only pleasure and pain - is of huge logical significance to Epicurus’s conclusions about pleasure being the good.
Cicero, on the other hand, is taking the position that it’s obvious, and everybody acknowledges, that there are times when we are neither suffering pain nor experiencing pleasure, and it’s logical for us to ask, what is Epicurus’s justification, what is Epicurus’s authority, what is Epicurus’s reasoning for concluding that there are only two states pleasure and pain and that there is no middle ground.
We know that this is Epicurus’s position based on Diogenes Laertius, based on what Torquatus is plainly stating to us here. We don’t know exactly what the source was that Cicero was getting this from, but clearly Torquatus is speaking confidently and firmly that this is the Epicurean position. So clearly the Epicurean position is that there’s only pleasure and pain and nothing in between. Anybody who’s going to attack Epicurean philosophy, like Cicero, like Plutarch, is going to say, “Epicurus,you are simply wrong. There are more than two states. There is pleasure, yes, I grant you. There is pain, yes, I grant you. We all experience those things. But we all experience other times in our lives when we are neither experiencing pleasure nor pain. Why don’t you see this, Epicurus. You criticize us for using words that have incorrect meanings; what gives you the authority or the right or the justification to divide every experience in the world of a living person between pleasure and pain only? Are you different than we are, Epicurus? Aren’t there times when you’re feeling neither pleasure nor pain? What is going on with your reasoning to take the kind of position that you’re taking, because it conflicts with what everybody else in the world seems to understand? Why is it that you don’t see things the same way?”
It’s particularly important for us to explain this issue because Cicero does not explain it. Cicero does not let Torquatus explain it. Cicero does not explain it here. He simply asserts that it’s obvious that Epicurus is wrong because he’s ignoring this neutral state. And it’s the failure to explain why Epicurus thinks that there is no neutral state, that there are only two, that is really a big missing piece here. And by leaving out Epicurus’s position, Cicero and Plutarch both are able to present Epicurus as being basically nonsensical. If we think Epicurus was a smart person, he had to have had an explanation for why there are only two and why there is not a third - a neutral condition - as well.
We’ve quoted many times from Norman DeWitt that it was the major innovation of Epicurean philosophy to extend the definition of pleasure not only from active stimulation to also the normal, healthy operation of the body and the mind. And that, as DeWitt says, that humans would be better off if they believed that this was the case and acted accordingly. But to say that we would be better off thinking that there are only pleasure and pain does not really get to the heart of the question of what foundation are you standing on to assert this. What is the reality that you’re pointing to or the authority or the evidence that there are only these two positions? Is there something in reality itself that tells us this, or is this the philosophy? Is this an attitude that we have to adopt in order to come to the conclusion that there are only two?
And in that context, there are many people, obviously Cicero and Plutarch among them, who take the position that there are neutral states, that there are situations in which they are experiencing neither pleasure nor pain. And for those people who think that this neutral state exists, for them it is ridiculous to consider this neutral state to be the highest pleasure, because in their condition, they are not subjectively experiencing pleasure.
When they are coasting in their minds. They are presumably simply turning over their existing reflections about what’s going to happen to them after they die, or what the gods think of what they’re doing with their time. So that for such a person as that clearing your mind, so that you’re separated from any pains of the moment, either mental or bodily, what’s left for them is not a particularly enjoyable experience to them. How do we sort this out?
Joshua:
It’s a very interesting question, Cassius, just because as I said last week on the question of what is the foundation of our knowledge of pleasure and pain? I said last week that pain and pleasure are feelings, and as feelings, they are felt by the individual, they’re experienced by the individual. And it is not at all appropriate for one individual to say to another that eating olives is a pleasure for everyone because I like it personally. The person they’re talking to might well not enjoy eating olives. And so if you do enjoy eating olives, that’s fine, but you need to understand that that is a personal experience, that is a personal response to the stimulus of the taste of the olives, and that is a subjective experience of life and nature.
And so if all of our experience of pleasure and pain as feelings is so wrapped up with the tastes and experience of the individual, how can Epicurus make broad, sweeping claims about the lack of any neutral state for any person at any time, in any place, between what Cicero refers to is these two extremes, these two feelings of pleasure and pain?
And let me quote first from Lucretius in book four of his poem, because he does cement further something we touched on, as I’ve already mentioned last week, which is this idea that the experience of pleasure and pain, and any judgment that we make about individual causes of pleasure and pain, that these things have to be considered on an individual level.
Lucretius makes our point for us because he is credited with coining several phrases. But if you’ve ever heard the phrase one man’s meat is another man’s poison, that also derives from Lucretius. That is a reference to book four of Lucretius, and this is what he says, this is the Bailey translation, around line six thirty three, he says:
Now, how for different creatures there is different food and poison? I will unfold or for what cause? What to some is noisome and bitter can yet seem to others most sweet to eat. And there is here in a difference and disagreement so great that what is food to one is to others biting poison. Even as there is a certain serpent, which, when touched by a man’s spittle, dies and puts an end to itself by gnawing its own body. Moreover, to us, hellebore is a biting poison. But it makes goats and quails grow fat.
And so this is me talking now, if eating hellebore, or if eating some of these other foods that we’re talking about - he makes a reference to pigs and marjoram elsewhere in this text - if the feeling responds to the stimulus that comes from eating the food varies from person to person, how can we generalize, when we’re talking about pleasure and pain to the whole human race? How can we generalize to all living things? Because that’s kind of what you have to do in order to say that there is no neutral state, or it seems like that would be what you would have to do in order to say that there is no neutral state.
Cassius:
And there, you’re taking us back to the question of how do we ever generalize? Every cat, every dog is different from every other cat, and every other dog. Every horse, every snowflake is supposedly different from each other. Does that mean that because every snowflake is not identical that there is no usefulness in the term snowflake or cat or dog? That goes right down the line of where Cicero and the Academic Skeptics would argue - that everybody’s got a different experience, nothing’s ever the same. Heraclitus: you can never step into the same river twice. You can’t even stay in the same river for very long because it’s constantly changing.
Well, the Epicurean response to that is, as we know from Diogenes of Oenoanda, that yes there is change, yes there is a flux, but it is not so fast that our senses are not able to allow us to experience a reality in our own level of being. That it’s something we can rely on and develop observations about that we can turn into a productive means of living.
Joshua:
Yeah, exactly. And the question is so important because it touches on every aspect of Epicurean ethics. For example, Epicurus says that if we want to understand the good as furnished for us by nature. We should look to young animals as soon as they are born, and what we observe them to do, and what we interpret their behavior to signify, is that all animals reach for pleasure and recoil from pain as their most natural instinct.
But if Epicurus is wrong and there are as Cicero wants us to think, there are three states, one when you were in pleasure, one when you were in pain, and one when you are neither in pleasure nor in pain. Suddenly we have to look at these animals that we’re using as a guide to understanding ethics and how we should live, and we have to say that we can’t make a judgment about what the animal is experiencing, because even though we can look at it and say that its behavior is not consistent with an experience of pain, that nevertheless it might still not be feeling pleasure. And so when we look to the animals, when we look to the young of all species and say the most native instinct in these creatures is to reach out and to approach that which is pleasurable and to recoil from pain, that becomes a great problem if Epicurus is wrong, if there are three states, if there are three different conditions you can be in at different times. The one when you’re in pleasure, the other when you’re in pain, and one when you are feeling nothing at all.
And it crops up also in interesting places, like in the question of death. This is like a thought experiment here, but death is really the only time when you are neither in pleasure nor in pain - is when you don’t exist.
Now, the problem with that sentence is the words “you are.” “You are” neither in pleasure nor in pain. Well, you are not when you’re dead. So any further consideration about experience and so on is not relevant to the person who’s dead, and they don’t experience anything. There’s no subject. The subject has been annihilated, and so there’s no experience of any object, is one way to use grammar to describe what I’m trying to say.
But the question of how we can determine that there are only two feelings, that this is true for every living thing that exists, and how we bridge that gap from the subjective experience of an individual to sort of an ethical rule that is true under all conditions of life is a very interesting question. A nd I’ve been talking for some time now but I’ve come no nearer to answering it. So that’s what we need to drill down here and find is how does Epicurus justify doing this?
And what I’m going to recommend. We don’t have time, of course, to go through the whole chapter, but Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus, in his Philosophy, has a chapter called the New Hedonism. You’ve already referenced it, Cassius, on the question of Cicero in his threefold division, and I can read that quickly here as well. DeWitt says this:
The extension of the name of pleasure to this normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form freedom from pain in body and distress of mind that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it is really superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state, did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and so believing.
This is from his chapter “The New Hedonism,” and this is where we’re going to get the fullest modern explication of Epicurus and how he reaches this conclusion. But we can’t go through this whole thing during this episode. We’re going to have to find a way to explain Epicurus’s position as we can in light of everything that we’ve mentioned, in light of the fact that this question touches on all aspects of Epicurean ethics, it presents an interesting challenge.
Cassius:
Which is one reason presumably why Epicurus, in the letter to Herodotus, recommended that we form our philosophy into outlines, because we don’t always need the details, but we need to be able to move back and forth between the big picture and the details and understand how everything relates together.
We start off today thinking we’re going to talk mostly about pleasure, but we’re now going to have to go on an excursion back into canonics - epistemology - and by the time it’s over we’re probably talking some physics again as well. But before we begin to move towards an answer, here’s another way of looking at the problem: Cicero is alleging that there are three divisions of experience into pain, pleasure, and neutral. But why three, Cicero? Why not thirty? Why not three hundred? Why not look at every activity of life and look at the younger animals, if you like, consider them drinking or eating, or resting, or flying or swimming. Does each one of those activities have to have its own name as a type of pleasure?
And must we always keep every aspect of those activities separate and not look for the one thing among the many activities that is common to them. This idea of coming up with pleasure as a concept is a philosophical mental activity that we engage in that reminds us of what we’ve talked about in recent weeks in terms of the sorites problem or the heap problem, in that heaps of sand do exist in our experience, but no matter how we add or subtract grains of sand from that heap, there’s no magical moment at which the heap becomes a heap or ceases to be a heap. There’s no single grain of sand that constitutes heapness, or there is no heapness within a single grain of sand, just as there is no pleasure as a concept within a particular activity all the time, always present within it. The same activity can be painful or pleasurable, depending on context.
So the first step in looking at what Epicurus has done is to acknowledge that nature gives us feelings. Nature gives us experiences in our lives that we then turn and take and discuss in terms of concepts. We take related activities and group them together in our minds. But I think we have to acknowledge that Epicurus does not ever say specifically that nature has set us down as in a classroom and written on a blackboard the word pleasure and the word pain and listed under each category a certain set of activities. That’s not the way nature works.
Feelings are something that we experience, just as we experience touch and taste and sight and hearing. There are things we become immediately aware of through the operation of our bodies, as nature has given to us and our minds, which we then interpret as we think about them and form opinions about. When we talk about pleasure and pain as concepts, we’re giving our opinion about these concepts. Just as Cicero is giving his opinion that there’s three, Epicurus is telling us that we should look at all experiences of life as either pleasurable or painful, as within only two categories, as opposed to three.
And I think that this is where we have to acknowledge that a philosophy is not magic. We’re not interpreting divine emanations from a god. We’re doing our dead level best as human beings to use our minds to organize our thoughts. But our justification for our categories has to come through observation. The content of our minds and the opinions that we generate are not given to us directly by nature. As Torquatus explained, the young of all species pursue pleasure and avoid pain before they are corrupted, before they are perverted by incorrect ideas, by incorrect opinions that are generated as they grow older. I want to again point to Lucretius. I think we did this last week as well. That the opening of book one points us to how nature, through pleasure and through pain, motivates all living things to do all of the things that they do to pursue life and to pursue the continuation of their species. Pleasure and pain affecting every living thing directly, instinctively, without need for a reflection or evaluation or logical explanation.
But Book two supplements that at the opening by pointing out to us that it is a great pleasure — just as it is a great fear for those who don’t understand the truth of the world — it is a great pleasure for us to understand that there are alleged dangers and hazards that we are in fact free from because we have the understanding that there is no eternal punishment in hell, that there are no supernatural gods directing us what to do, and that that knowledge is itself a great pleasure. Well, that knowledge does not come from simply clearing your mind or taking a drug that drains your thought processes down to nothing.
That pleasure that Lucretius is talking about beginning of Book Two comes only to those people who do understand the way things are. As Lucretius says, it is not the rays of the sun alone that educate us to the proper attitude towards life, but a scheme of systematic understanding, as Munro translates it, the pursuit of an understanding that things are a certain way, and that in this understanding we can live happily.
I would say that Epicurus is doing something very similar to what Lucretius is referring to in terms of thinking about those hazards that we are free from. Epicurus is suggesting that pleasure and pain are the correct division, because, as we’ve discussed many times before, this allows us to see that pleasure has a limit, that pleasure is not logically incapable of being a goal, because it can always be made better when you have only pleasure and pain. When you have eliminated pain, you have reached full pleasure.
Epicurus does not say that all pleasures are the same. In fact, in Principal Doctrine number nine, he points out that pleasure would be the same if every pleasure that we’re talking about particularly could be expanded over the whole body and over the whole experience and lasted the same length of time. But pleasure is not that way.
Pleasure differs by duration, intensity, and parts of the body that are affected. Epicurus knows that, and so pleasures and pains are different from each other. There’s an infinite number of pleasures and an infinite number of pains, but it is still justifiable and logical to take all of them, no matter what parts of the body, duration, or intensity are involved, and say that some of these experiences are desirable - we experience them as desirable - and some of these experiences we experience as undesirable, and these are pains. That’s a logical way of making an infinite number of experiences and coming to terms with how they measure up in human experience.
So I would say in defending Epicurus here that Cicero’s argument displays its own weakness when he says that you’re wrong, Epicurus, there’s not two, there’s three. Well, from Cicero’s point of view, there could be three thousand.
The division into three or two is a philosophical choice that a skeptic like Cicero may not be willing to make, but that a philosopher like Epicurus, who is looking for a rational method of living happily, is more than capable of making.
Joshua:
It’s very much a struggle in going through this, because the best I can do to justify this view of things is that we’re alive, and we are material creatures, material beings in a material cosmos, and so there is no possible way for us to shelter ourselves fully from external stimuli. And so as long as we’re being stimulated, and that stimulation can come from the outside, from external to ourselves, or it can come from within our own minds, the operation of our own minds, there’s always a stimulus if you’re alive. Even when you’re unconscious, people dream, you still have emotional feeling responses to this. And if it can be understood that every stimulus produces a response, no matter how reduced, no matter how remote, no matter how small, and that the experience of all of this stimulation is continuous, then the response what you feel in response to the stimulus must also be continuous.
And so from that we could say, well, you’re always feeling something because you’re always being stimulated while you’re alive. I made the point earlier that the only time when there’s a middle point between pleasure and pain is when you’re dead, because you’re not in pleasure and you’re not in pain, but you don’t exist anymore. It would not even be appropriate to call that a middle point. But while you’re alive, while you are responsive to stimulus, whether external or internal, and while there is a physical psychological response to the stimulus, you are feeling something.That would be my approach to responding to Cicero in this idea that there is a middle state when you’re not feeling pleasure or pain.
Cicero could very well respond to me by saying, well, it might be true that you’re not feeling nothing, but just because you’re feeling something does not mean that what you are feeling must be categorized either as pleasure or pain. So again, it’s very difficult as we go through this.
Let me read Torquatus’s explanation of this, and this is going to lead, Cassius, into something that I don’t know if it’s going to make it easier, it’s probably going to make it harder. Chrysippus’s hand, I think, is where we have to go next, and Torquatus will lead us there on this very question. So let me read that passage.
This is from Book One of On Ends, and this is of course Cicero again giving the Epicurean view of things. In this case, this is what Torquatus has to say:
But let what has been said on this occasion suffice. Concerning the brilliant and famous actions of illustrious men. We shall indeed find a fitting opportunity by and by for discoursing about the tendency of all the virtues towards pleasure. At present, however, I shall show what is the essence and what are the characteristics of pleasure, so as to remove all confusion caused by ignorant people, and to make it clear, how serious, how sober, how austere is that school which is esteemed to be pleasure seeking, luxurious and effeminate. For the pleasure which we pursue is not that alone which excites the natural constitution itself by a kind of sweetness, and of which the sensual enjoyment is attended by a kind of agreeableness. But we look upon the greatest pleasure as that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed. Now, inasmuch as whenever we are released from pain, we rejoice in the mere emancipation and freedom from all annoyance, and everything whereat we rejoice is equivalent to pleasure. Just as everything whereat we are troubled is equivalent to pain. Therefore the complete release from pain is rightly termed pleasure.
For just as the mere removal of annoyance brings with it the realization of pleasure whenever hunger and thirst have been banished by food and drink, so in every case the banishment of pain ensures its replacement by pleasure. Therefore, Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure. What was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of all pain, was not only in itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. Surely, anyone who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain.
And then we go into the next paragraph, and this is where he sets up Chrysippus’s hand, the statue and what it signifies:
Epicurus, he goes on, thinks that the highest degree of pleasure is defined by the removal of all pain. So the pleasure may afterwards exhibit diversities and differences, but is incapable of increase or extension. But actually at Athens, as my father used to tell me, when he wittily and humorously ridiculed the Stoics. There is in the Ceramicus a statue of Chrysippus, the Stoic, sitting with his hand extended, which hand indicates that he was fond of the following little argument. Does your hand, being in its present condition, feel the lack of anything at all? Certainly of nothing? But if pleasure were the supreme good, it would feel a lack of pleasure. Then is not the supreme good.
And Torquatus says my father used to say that even a statue would not talk in that way if it had power of speech. The inference is shrewd enough as against the Cyrenaics, but it does not touch Epicurus. For if the only pleasure were that which, as it were, tickles the senses, if I may say so, and attended by sweetness, overflows them and insinuates itself into them, neither the hand nor any other member would be able to rest satisfied with the absence of pain, apart from a joyous activity of pleasure. But if it is the highest pleasure, as Epicurus believes to be, in no pain, then the first admission that the hand, in its then existing condition felt no lack was properly made to you, Chrysippus. But the second improperly I mean that it would have felt a lack had pleasure been the supreme good. But it would certainly feel no lack. And on this ground - that anything which is cut off from the state of pain is in the state of pleasure.
So we have got our work cut out for us. It is my conclusion at the moment as I’m reading through this. Let’s deal first with this claim, Cassius: Torquatus says surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain. That’s exactly the question we’ve been trying to answer today: if someone who is conscious of their own condition tells you that they’re neither feeling pleasure nor pain, and if the feeling of pleasure, if how we judge pleasure is subjective, why do we not trust that person’s judgment of their own experience? And I’m putting you on the spot there to answer that. But this is genuinely challenging stuff.
Cassius Amicus:
Well, like you say, that’s exactly the way that Cicero would frame the question, and the twist on it this morning that I’m wanting us to focus on is in giving the answer, which is that a hand or any other part of the body or the whole body that is not in pain is in pleasure, the specific point is that describing your feelings is a subjective activity. And if Cicero wants to describe the periods of time in which he is not in the sauna getting a massage as neutral, then there’s no god or absolute form that says that Cicero is wrong in taking that position.
If we’re going to take the position that a hand in its normal condition is experiencing pleasure, it is us who are extending the definition of pleasure to cover normal, healthy activity - normal healthy states of being - in which sometimes we’re being stimulated from the outside, but at other times we’re just living healthily and not feeling any pain. That is not the way the word pleasure is normally used by the Ciceros or the Plutarchs, or frankly most people of the world.
But Epicurean philosophy is teaching us that we should consider that condition to be pleasure. And when we say that, it teaches us that we should consider it to be pleasure, it’s got to provide an explanation and reasoning to support that conclusion.
The puppy, the kitten, the baby are not able to intellectualize that at the moments that they’re not hungry or thirsty, they are experiencing some kind of supreme pleasurable experience. All they know is that they’re not hungry, not thirsty, not cold, and at those times, their attention, if they’re awake, is going to be directed towards activities that it finds to be desirable to pursue. Just because it finds those activities desirable to pursue does not mean that it’s going to necessarily label those activities as pleasure. In an intellectual sense, it’s entirely discretionary what activities we include within the category of pleasure and pain. It’s not discretionary at all at the feeling level, however, because we are going to feel some things to be desirable and some things to be undesirable. But to label them as pleasure and pain, and to say that every experience must be listed under one of those two categories seems to me is clearly an intellectual choice that is consistent with a philosophy of life that has to be chosen and understood.
As I understand it, Cicero refers to Epicurus’s book on canonics as being described as handed down from heaven in a way that might be joking or might be just pointing to the analogy that it is the philosophy that gives us this result, and this philosophy has to be pursued and understood. That if we don’t act to pursue this understanding, then we are going to be left in a haze or a maze of uncertainty and confusion, which we’re going to find to be painful.
Again, it’s not the rays of light themselves and seeing them that tells us anything about the way the world works. Our minds have to engage and study the evidence and assemble it into a philosophy of living that is going to result in a successful outcome.
So it’s very frustrating here how Cicero and Plutarch are both doing this. They are repeating words that no doubt were stated by Epicureans. Cicero is allowing Torquatus to speak at length in On Ends to present what you’ve just read, Joshua. And yet what is not included in this presentation is the explanation we’re talking about now about how do you reach this conclusion. They are leaving out the back and forth recognition through the outline the Epicurus is talking about in Herodotus that these individual, discrete experiences have to be understood in a context to make sense of them. And the context is what is provided by Epicurean philosophy, by the understanding through the physics that there are no supernatural gods, that the only thing that’s eternal are the atoms moving through the void, and the canonics, which says that pleasure and pain are feelings on the same level as things that we see or touch or smell or taste that have to be accepted as facts of our experience and then processed accordingly.
Diogenes Laertius reports that Epicurus said that seeing and hearing are just as real as pain, which means that pleasure and pain are on this same level of when we experience it, these are the facts that nature has given us to work with, and it’s up to us to put them in a context and make sense of them so that we can live happily. We have the choice of ignoring philosophy and listening to the priests who threaten eternal damnation and supernatural punishment, and if we put things in that context, we’re going to live a certain way. But we also have a choice of saying that that’s not true. That nature provides us a context of its own, which we can determine by observing nature and rationally assembling what we observe into logical deductions, just like we deduce that the atoms exist even though we’ve never seen an atom before.
This gets back to the skepticism issue as well. Cicero is going to say that because everybody experiences everything differently, no conclusions can be reached. All we know is that there is no single truth! We can say that somebody is consistent or inconsistent, but we can’t say what’s right and wrong, according to Cicero and Pyrrho and the radical skeptics who take that approach.
Epicurus is saying that in lieu of abandoning hope and abandoning reality to the Heraclitus of the world and saying that the flux is so strong that no sense can be made of it, we can, through a philosophical approach, understand that there’s desirable experiences in life, and there’s undesirable experiences in life, and that that is a sufficient basis for us to understand and put together a way of life. The desirable we’re going to call pleasure, the undesirable we’re going to call pain, and as long as we exist, we’re going to be moving back and forth between these two categories.
And when you organize things that way, you realize that the best experience of life is when all of your experience is in the pleasure category. And when Plato or Seneca or somebody else says that pleasure is not your goal because pleasure can always be made better, and therefore pleasure is never the best because it’s always in the process of being made better, you can say that’s ridiculous, because pleasure that is one hundred percent pleasure can never be made better than one hundred percent.
And at that high level of analysis, you then turn your attention back to looking at the trees instead of the forest, and you say that in my particular life and my particular experience, these activities, these thoughts are pleasurable, and these are painful, and I am going to choose to spend as much time as possible - and organize my life to spend as much time as possible - in those pleasurable experiences and as little time as possible with these negative, painful experiences.
Even if I’m Epicurus, I’m going to face kidney disease, I’m going to face age-related pain, and I’m not going to be able to make those things go away by thinking about them. But I can live with them as long as possible by realizing how much pleasure there is in life, how much pleasure I’ve experienced in the past, by remembering those things, and I’m going to continue to live as long as I possibly can find a positive balance of pleasure over pain. When the day comes when I can no longer expect that the pain is going to be outweighed by the pleasure, I can exit the stage when the play ceases to please me. I can drink some wine and settle in and surround myself with my friends for a final few moments of pleasure, and then recognize that I am leaving life, having successfully experienced the best life that was possible to me.
Epicurus having packaged all of this into an understandable whole that is violently opposite of the way that the other philosophers were looking at it is what justified in the minds of those ancient Epicureans who followed after Epicurus the idea of calling him basically a savior, of delivering them from all this unnecessary confusion and pain by presenting an understandable approach that makes sense.
But I don’t think it’s possible to say that nature herself inscribed categories of pleasure and pain on any particular activity, and therefore when Epicurus divides it into two as opposed to three, this is something that is a part of Epicurean philosophy that has to be understood before you can make sense of any of it.
Joshua:
I think where you’re going there is where DeWitt himself ends up when he says, as I quoted before, the fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, or that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and so believing. Because what you’re saying is it’s discretionary how you categorize pleasure and pain. There is no absolute standard we can have recourse to to permanently settle and clarify this issue.
Cassius:
Joshua, let me jump back here for just a second, because I know the reaction that some will have to framing it this way - they will focus on the feeling of pleasure and pain, which is not discretionary in any way. Nature gives us that as a mechanical, automatic faculty, and that part, that feeling, the individual feelings, are not discretionary, are not subject to our categorization.
Epicurus could not look at the pain of his kidney disease and just move it over into the other category of pleasure by mental exertion and thereby overcome it. It’s like your squares and your rectangles. We’re talking at this moment in terms of the concepts of pleasure and pain, and the fact that those words not only are feelings, but are also labels that we can communicate about in terms of limits and in terms of whether they’re the goals or not. There are these two different levels that we’re moving back and forth between the conceptual level of pleasure and pain and then the experience of pleasure and pain. The conceptual level is certainly subject to our philosophy and our thought, but the physical immediate feeling level is not, so that distinction has to always be kept in mind. And I apologize for interrupting you there, but I know that’s a significant issue. Go ahead, I’m sorry.
Joshua:
No, I think that’s a very good point, because thought, reason, logic are actually downstream from feeling. As a canonical faculty. You mentioned a book by Epicurus which is lost to us, unfortunately, but which Cicero mentions again in Book One of On Ends. I cite this text often. Let me read that passage, because this, I think is going to reinforce the point that you’re making there. This is Torquatus speaking, he says:
Epicurus, judge that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate. He laid the greatest stress on natural science. That branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words and the natural conditions of speech, and the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions. And when we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition, are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena, from which ignorance, more than anything else, terrible panics often arise. Finally, our characters will also be improved when we have learned what it is that nature craves. Then again, if we grasp a firm knowledge of phenomena and uphold that canon which almost fell from heaven into human can that test to which we are to bring all our judgments concerning things? We shall never succumb to any man’s eloquence and abandon our opinions.
The point I want to make about this lost work the fact that Torquatus refers to it here as the book that fell from heaven. The Canon of Epicurus is the book that fell from heaven. How in a philosophy where there is no divine revelation, where there is nothing outside of nature, can you talk about something falling from heaven with any kind of meaning?
And I think the answer lies in Greek culture, because there were several objects in Greek history culture mythology that were thought to have fallen from heaven. One of them was the Palladium at Troy, which was this religious icon. It was sort of the center of Trojan religious life and the other one I’m thinking of was the Omphalos, the navel stone, which there’s different myths for how this came to be. You’ve probably heard the idea of two birds flying, one from the north, one from the south, and wherever they meet, they drop the stone. Another idea is that the Omphalos stone was the stone that Chronos, the father of Zeus, ate instead of his living son, and he thought he was eating his son, but he ate this stone, and when he hurled it up, it was thrown, and where it landed was the center of the Greek world.
I keep using the word center, and that’s important here because that is what Torquatus is trying to signify when he talks about the Canon which almost fell from heaven into human ken. He is talking about this method, this epistemological method, being at the center of Epicurean inquiry, and it has to be because we continually resort back to it to calibrate ourselves and to get our bearings on what we can know is true. Because it’s only the canon - it’s only those three aspects of canonic epistemology, the sensations, the anticipations, and the feelings - which can actually furnish us information about nature and about ourselves.
And so the idea that this is something that fell from heaven and it occupies a central position within the philosophy is so important, and it’s got nothing to do with divine revelation. That’s not the insinuation that’s being made here. The insinuation is this is the center point, and everything else is tethered to this, and everything else moves around it. But this doesn’t change. And so when you’re talking about pleasure and the experience of pleasure, and you say, well, when the individual experience is pleasure, we can’t say that that’s discretionary, because it’s a fact in nature. It is a fact in nature, and as such it is more important, more central, more formative for our understanding of nature and human life than reason and logic and geometry and mathematics and so on, because that feeling is epistemological. That feeling is a part of the canon.
And so you interrupted me, which of course is fine, and I want to say that you were right to do so, because this helps us to frame the question that we’ve been asking all morning, and it helps us to reply to it as well, by saying that just as one sense cannot override another sense, but both must be taken together and fed into the reasoning process. And that’s where the error, if there is one, is made. The error is not made in the direct sensation. The error is made in the reasoning process that is downstream from sensation. And just as one sense cannot overrule another, sensations cannot overrule the feeling. The direct feeling of pleasure and pain as sources of information.
Cassius Amicus:
Right, Joshua, and I do think it’s particularly appropriate that you quoted that last section from what Torquatus had to say in On Ends. I tend to overlook that and think of it as basically just some kind of a rhetorical flourish where Torquatus is ending his speech about Epicurus, and he’s just laying it on thick in terms of praising Epicurus.
But when you quote it in the context we’re discussing right now, it really serves a very important purpose of focusing our attention. At the end there, he’s not just singing a song to pleasure. He’s singing a song to the philosophy that Epicurus taught. Because this is the point that I’m constantly hitting on: I just don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest that all anyone has to do is sit on the floor and clear their mind and maybe smell a little incense, and all of a sudden, this eternal wisdom and feeling of pleasure is going to flood over your mind. That’s not the way it is for most people, especially today, especially somebody who’s educated, intelligent, who knows all the troubles and tribulations and conflicts and philosophical oppression and mistakes that people make and worries that they have.
If they just clear their minds and do nothing, they’re probably in a worse state than when they started, because they have some coping mechanisms when they’re actually thinking about things. I think what Torquatus is focusing on there is that you’re not emptying your mind as a way of achieving the highest pleasure. You are filling your mind with this understanding that comes through what he’s praising there in that section about Epicurus and the insight that you get from this approach to life.
It’s not like Epicurus was magic. If Epicurus had never lived, other people would have eventually assembled a similar approach at similar times. But Epicurus is the one who did it first and is most well known for it, and has done it apparently better than anybody else in Western civilization has ever done. And that’s the reason he was held with such high esteem by his followers who understood that it’s this approach that brings about happy living. It’s not just simply getting out of the way of nature and then all of a sudden you automatically become some wise man sitting on a mountaintop. You have to go through this process of thinking about the way things are before you can understand that the world is not some kind of a malevolent monster that’s set its goal of making your life miserable.
It totally reorients your approach when you understand where Epicurus is coming from, and that reorientation is what’s necessary, not just simply getting out of the way, not just simply emptying your mind, but filling it with the right approach.
Okay, we’re going to be running long here today. I’m afraid let’s think about closing thoughts and then we’ll come back next week. It looks like we’ve achieved maybe getting through point two of Cicero’s criticisms of Epicurus and will reserve the third for next week. But any final thoughts today?
Joshua:
Today, well, it’s been challenging going, and I think it’ll continue to be somewhat difficult. We’re dealing with very challenging questions that crop up when we talk about this stuff. And Chrysippus’s hand is something we didn’t spend much time on today, but that’s an example of something I find very difficult. And I get to end the episode today the same way I did last week. All we can do is the best we can do as we go through this in trying to articulate and clarify a response to Cicero and a defense of Epicurus that makes sense in light of the material that survives.
Cassius Amicus: Absolutely, and I know this is extremely helpful to me. I hope it’s helpful to other people as well. My mind goes back to the comment from Emily Austin in her interview with us that there’s no better way to understand something than to teach it. And I hope that people, as we go through these issues will think about how they too can express them better, and in so doing, I think everybody will profit from this exercise.
As always, we invite you to drop by the Epicurean Friends forum, and let us know if you have any comments or questions about any of our discussions on Epicurus. Thanks for your time today, we’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.
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