Welcome Max Duboff

Ohhhh, yes, I wasn't denying that the absence of pain (i.e., tranquility and the asence of bodily pain) is pleasure. The question is, in large part, what "pleasure" means. What it doesn't mean (in my view) is that tranquility feels great in the way that caviar or a beautiful view does. Epicurus doesn't have a preset idea of pleasure, shared with everyone else, that he then asserts ataraxia is an example of. Rather, he thinks pleasure is the good, but he has a distinctive idea of what pleasure means. It is very clear that the good is pleasure and vice versa, but it is not at all clear waht pleasure(s) actually determine a blessed life. Only the absence of pain does that; but he expects that lots of other pleasures will be present in a blessed life.

Two of my more complicated views (can say more later):

1) in Epicurus's epistemology, a pleasure is whatever plays the functional role of appearing good to us and motivating us to pursue it (DL 10.33, pathos is one of the criteria)

2) Epicurus is a hedonist because he thinks only pleasures appear good to us evidently [i.e., with enargeia]

Quote from wbernys

Do you know (or are allowed to share) if Emily Austin has any new works on Epicurus coming out? I really enjoyed her book and hoped she would do more!

She's writing a book on Epicurus for the Routledge Philosophers series.

Quote from Max DuBoff

What it doesn't mean (in my view) is that tranquility feels great in the way that caviar or a beautiful view does.

I would slightly disagree, caviar and a beautiful view do feel great in the same way as tranquility, afterall pleasure reach it's limit in removing pain, it's just that tranquility (like all mental feelings) last a lot longer and are more intense because of it being affected by past, present, and future, and thus more important.

Good to hear Austin is working on something!

Quote from Cassius

I would be alert to the direction that some writers seem to take that tranquility does not only not "feel great" -- but that tranquility is not a "feeling" at all. That's how "they" (not referring here to Max) argue that tranquility is not a feeling at all.

Maybe “tranquillity” (which seems to be the dominant translation of ἀταραξία) is a translation subject to too much distortion, often taken as an unfeeling state. I think that Don and I have both used “equanimity” – but that seems to come up against your point here as well.

Since ταραχή is (an unpleasant) disturbance or unease in the mind (such as anxiety), it seems to clearly fall within Epicurus’ understanding of pain – in this case, mental as opposed to physical. Though it certainly can – and perhaps most often does – present somatically as well; in fact, I would suggest that the psyche/soma connection works both ways, and that physical pain can also cause ταραχή – which is why that is something that Epicurus deals with (contra, at least in terms of emphasis, the Cyrenaics).

For me, “serenity” seems more of a feeling state – of which, among its synonyms, Wordhippo includes “a mildly euphoric feeling” (albeit only after a pleasurable experience, which seems to me an unnecessary limitation). Or, perhaps, just “pleasant mind” – or even “enjoyable mind.” [Though ἀταραξία is rendered in the negative – so maybe just “untroubled.”]

I’m sure somebody here can come up with a better solution, so I’ll end this meandering with ??? ….

Quote from Cassius

Epicurus considered himself to be happy even during his last days of extreme physical pain. ..., as Epicurus tells us that his mental pleasures from friends and philosophy outweighed the physical pains.

Slight quibble: he didn't write that his mental pleasures outweighed the physical pains, but he did write that he could contend with his pains with the mental pleasure of his memories: ἀντιπαρετάττετο "metaphorical, hold one's ground against, Epicur.Fr.138: abs., stand in hostile array" (LSJ) I like the image of drawing up battle lines against your pain.

I feel the need at this point to add in my reading of some of the PDs, which when carefully considered (at least to me), delve into further parsing pleasure as intensity, duration and location. All pleasure is pleasure, full stop. The way to differentiate between various pleasures is not by attempting to rank the pleasures but by looking closely at their intensity, location and duration. For example:

PD09. If every pleasure were condensed and were present at the same time and in the whole of one's nature or its primary parts, then the pleasures would never differ from one another.

Quote from Don

Quote from Cassius

Epicurus considered himself to be happy even during his last days of extreme physical pain. ..., as Epicurus tells us that his mental pleasures from friends and philosophy outweighed the physical pains.

Slight quibble: he didn't write that his mental pleasures outweighed the physical pains, but he did write that he could contend with his pains with the mental pleasure of his memories: ἀντιπαρετάττετο "metaphorical, hold one's ground against, Epicur.Fr.138: abs., stand in hostile array" (LSJ) I like the image of drawing up battle lines against your pain.

Thanks for this point, Don. Antiparatattesthai is markedly military language, evoking a battle line and the presence of an enemy. It derives from paratattein, which refers to arranging battle lines. Antiparatattesthai is perhaps best translated as “to be drawn up in battle array against.” It's rare outside of a military context is rare (to my knowledge, the only parallel roughly contemporary to Epicurus is Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 257), and the military connotation remains very strong.

Warren, following Long and Sedley and influenced by Cicero’s term compensabatur in Fin. 2.96, translate antiparatattesthai in DL 10.22 as “counterbalance.” I have two objections to a translation of DL 10.22 based on compensabatur. The first is that it doesn't do justice to the military connotation at all. The second is that compensabatur appears in Fin. 2, which is obviously polemical and does not clearly reflect Epicurean views, unlike Fin. 1, which does appear to try to represent Epicurean views accurately.

Quote from Godfrey

I feel the need at this point to add in my reading of some of the PDs, which when carefully considered (at least to me), delve into further parsing pleasure as intensity, duration and location. All pleasure is pleasure, full stop. The way to differentiate between various pleasures is not by attempting to rank the pleasures but by looking closely at their intensity, location and duration. For example:

PD09. If every pleasure were condensed and were present at the same time and in the whole of one's nature or its primary parts, then the pleasures would never differ from one another.

Thanks for this idea. Although I largely agree with Cassius just below, it's good that you raised this, because one of the biggest developments in 20th-century scholarship on Epicurus was less attention paid to PD 9. I don't mean to necessarily say that's a good or bad thing; but Rist and Diano, for example, placed a lot of weight on it, and scholars rarely do now. I'm with Cassius, though: saying that all pleasure would be indistinguishable if (somehow) combined doesn't mean all pleasure is indistinguishable now.

Side note: anyone who can read Italian should check out Carlo Diano. He's super interesting but not widely remembered outside of Italy (except for his influence on Rist, but his interpretations are often more interesting than Rist's imo). His papers on Epicureanism were collected in the 1974 volume Scritti Epicurei--though I admit it might be a bit tough to find without a university library (and I haven't been able to find a digital copy).

Quote from wbernys

So pleasure is clearly the absolute goal, but mostly defined the absence of distrubance, which is itself a pleasure. I don't think ultimate pleasure, but certainly a pleasure worth pursuing, like all others if not outweighted by pain.

I've now reread the thread, and I'm going to respond to a number of posts, but I think it'd be more helpful to write a few paragraphs than respond to individual points. If there's an individual point from upthread which you think is important for the conversation but which I don't address here, please do feel free to reraise it.

I think wbernys's point quoted above (first sentence) is closest to my own view. Let me lay out some of my interpretation of Epicurus.

It's clear from the Letter to Menoeceus that pleasure is the good. Anything good is such that we should pursue it (DL 10.33; Men. 128-130). But there are lots of pleasures. So how do we know which to pursue? This is where blessedness comes in. All pleasures are choiceworthy (by which I just mean to-be-chosen, or, there's sufficient justification to pursue them), but only some pleasures lead to blessedness. This is Cicero's crucial mistake. In On Moral Ends he assumes that the good simply is the summum bonum, i.e., what leads to blessedness. But Epicurus has an entirely different assumption: there are goods that don't contribute to blessedness, and some goods that actively impede blessedness. So it's important to ask, on top of what is good (i.e., pleasure), what we should actually pursue, because we can't pursue all the goods (not just because we don't have time/space, but because some goods preclude other goods).

When I emphasize tranquility, it's in this context. PD 25 is the lode star of my interpretation: "If you do not, on every occasion, refer each of your actions to the goal of nature, but instead stop short at something else when making either avoidance or pursuit, your actions will not follow arguments" (trans. Inwood and Gerson, with my modifications). I understand "the goal of nature" as particularly connoting katastematic pleasure (following the use of this term in Men. 133 and VS 25, where it most naturally refers to katastematic pleasure).

So, all pleasure is good and is worthy of pursuit. When figuring out what to do, figure out first and foremost what will lead to blessedness, which Epicurus identifies as tranquility. One should only pursue other pleasures when they do not interfere with blessedness.

But why is tranquility the pleasure that confers a blessed life? Epicurus, like many Greek philosophers, thinks that a good life is a perfect life (pantelēs; PD 20, 21; Pyth. 116). It's not clear to me exactly why he holds this assumption (very curious for your thoughts; I think this is one of the big puzzles of his ethics, for which we don't have extant sources). "Perfect" in this sense means "not able to be made better, in the respect in which it's good." But pleasure fits a bit awkwardly with this assumption. Lots of pleasures are good additively: when I eat ice cream, it's always better if I eat more ice cream (other things being equal, which, to be fair, they're not). Or it's always better if I'm looking at a beautiful view for longer, and looking at more beautiful views. So these kinds of pleasures can never support a perfect life.

Tranquility is blessedness because it's the only pleasure that can be perfect in this sense. That's why PD 3 speaks of the "limit of the magnitude of pleasures"; once pain is absent, pleasure cannot be made better in the respect in which it's good. If blessedness were based at all on goods like ice cream or beautiful views, it'd never be able to be made perfect, because we could always have more ice cream or beautiful views. Blessedness/tranquility isn't best because it allows for ice cream or beautiful views to be enjoyed painlessly (in my view); it's best because it's the only pleasure that allows for a perfect life, and a good life must be a perfect life. Nonetheless, tranquility as a matter of fact allows us to enjoy many other pleasures painlessly, and that's great. We very much welcome those pleasures, even though they don't have a role in making our lives blessed.

This all leaves open what the relationship is between kinetic and katastematic pleasure. I should note that there are substantively different views of the relationship between kinetic and katastematic pleasure, and of what pleasure is. Cassius was raising Gosling and Taylor, who argue that kinetic and katastematic pleasure are two ways of describing the same thing. This is controversial (and not my view), but it's certainly a view with plenty of interesting arguments in its favor. I'm going to crib a footnote from one of my drafts to show how I classify the different views of katastematic pleasure:

The most influential view is that katastematic pleasure is the unimpeded atomic condition of the mind or body, and pain is a disturbance to this condition (Diano 1974a: 45-47; 1974b: 82-90; 1974c: 168-170; Rist 1972: 102-114, 170-172; Purinton 1993: 306-307; Wolfsdorf 2013: 162; Arenson 2019: 85-108). Others consider kinetic and katastematic pleasure to be different ways of describing the same phenomenon (Gosling and Taylor 1982: 365-396; Hossenfelder 1986: 255-258; Striker 1993: 17; Nikolsky 2001). Others consider katastematic pleasure to be the intentional object of a mental state (Tsouna 1985: 151-155; Purinton 1993: 283-291, 300-302; Erler and Schofield 1999: 655-657; Splawn 2002: 476-481). Mitsis (1988) considers katastematic pleasure to be the fulfillment of needs.

Quote from Max DuBoff

Quote from Don

Quote from Cassius

Epicurus considered himself to be happy even during his last days of extreme physical pain. ..., as Epicurus tells us that his mental pleasures from friends and philosophy outweighed the physical pains.

Slight quibble: he didn't write that his mental pleasures outweighed the physical pains, but he did write that he could contend with his pains with the mental pleasure of his memories: ἀντιπαρετάττετο "metaphorical, hold one's ground against, Epicur.Fr.138: abs., stand in hostile array" (LSJ) I like the image of drawing up battle lines against your pain.

Thanks for this point, Don. Antiparatattesthai is markedly military language, evoking a battle line and the presence of an enemy. It derives from paratattein, which refers to arranging battle lines. Antiparatattesthai is perhaps best translated as “to be drawn up in battle array against.” It's rare outside of a military context is rare (to my knowledge, the only parallel roughly contemporary to Epicurus is Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 257), and the military connotation remains very strong.

Warren, following Long and Sedley and influenced by Cicero’s term compensabatur in Fin. 2.96, translate antiparatattesthai in DL 10.22 as “counterbalance.” I have two objections to a translation of DL 10.22 based on compensabatur. The first is that it doesn't do justice to the military connotation at all. The second is that compensabatur appears in Fin. 2, which is obviously polemical and does not clearly reflect Epicurean views, unlike Fin. 1, which does appear to try to represent Epicurean views accurately.

Oops, I forgot to mention: I designate "resistance"/"resist" to translate antiparatattesthai. It's not a literal translation (it's impossible to capture the full context in one word), but it does preserve the military context. (I owe this suggestion to Inwood.)