Posts by Godfrey

This paper by Emily Austin has an interesting take on death which might be pertinent.

(Can't remember where I got this; I'm not sure if I'm re-posting what somebody else posted or not...)

One way to process the death of a child is to understand that, just as my being dead is nothing to me, being dead is nothing to the child. They no longer exist and so aren't missing out on any hypothetical pleasures. The pains that they may suffer before dying are a different discussion, and those pains may be heartbreaking.

If it was our child, after the initial grief has mellowed, we will probably often feel sadness when we think of what the child would be doing if they had lived. We see somebody else their age and maybe feel sadness or envy that our child isn't alive, experiencing various joys, and thereby bringing us various joys. We will always have emotions regarding the child, but these have nothing to do with any actual future the child might have had: we have no way of knowing what that might have been. The only sense in which the child being dead is bad is in the pain it brings to those still living.

To my mind, both we and the child can only experience physical reality (which is both bodily and mental, since the mind is physical). So there is no point in wracking one's brain as to whether there is a loss of potential for something which will never occur and, at best, is only an abstract projection of something that might have occurred.

Quote from Don

I also enjoyed hearing Kalosyni say, "I'm beginning to dislike Cicero more and more." I couldn't agree more!

Quote from Titus

Can you specify what you mean with Aristotelian?

I used that term to associate with duty ethics and virtue ethics, which to my extremely limited understanding are grounded to some extent in Aristotle's ethics. Probably Plato's as well. My exposure to Aristotle is limited, so I may have used that term rather loosely. I think it's fairly accurate, but my main point was to contrast duty and virtue ethics with pleasure ethics. My take is that the former are grounded in ideas that tend toward abstractions whereas the latter is grounded in physical reality and therefore provides a more effective guide to a pleasant life.

Interesting discussion!

Quote from Cassius

I keep putting "temporarily" in brackets only because we all know that we'll get hungry and thirsty and want more pleasures every couple of hours so long as we continue to live. That observation doesn't matter to Epicurus, because he identifies *both* the state of acting to fulfill those desires, and the state of fulfillment, as pleasure, so the general condition of life is pleasure.

Using this example it seems to me that you could consider kinetic pleasure to be eating as well as relieving hunger and the temporary state of not being hungry. Katastematic pleasure would be the secure knowledge that you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

Referring to a prior point by burninglights , with this reading of k/k, katastematic pleasure doesn't necessarily arise from kinetic pleasures, particularly those of eating. It may involve pain and struggle to arrive at a point where you have the confidence that you don't have to worry about going hungry: activities such as planting crops, harvesting &c.

The actions that you might take to reduce this pain and struggle might include such things as cultivating a social order to provide a division of labor and a state of security. These two things would potentially provide additional pleasures such as friendship.

Quote from the article

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth.

Quote from the article

While certain factors might make some individuals more resilient than others, resilience isn’t necessarily a personality trait that only some people possess. On the contrary, resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop.

To my understanding, ataraxia enhances resilience. It isn't the same thing as resilience, and resilience doesn't necessarily promote ataraxia. Ataraxia reduces the background noise which causes undue stress, anxiety and panic, so when a challenging event occurs you're more able to assess the situation and respond effectively.

The list in the article of how to build resilience strikes me as more Aristotelian than Epicurean. Some of the items overlap, such as friendship, self-care, seeking help, and healthy thoughts. What healthy thoughts are, of course, depends on your overarching philosophy. Purpose and meaning, at least for me, can be a gateway to virtue ethics or duty ethics. From my experience these add to the background noise, largely because duty and virtue are nebulous mental constructs. Living with pleasure ethics, on the other hand, you become sensitive to how your feelings are guiding you in a particular situation and, from there, can apply reasoning as to how best to deal with the situation given the pleasure or pain that it brings.

I like where I think burninglights is going with this.

One question to add into the mix of classifying pleasures into two types: how would a pleasure that doesn't fulfill a desire be classified? If active/passive, moving/still, fulfilling/fulfilled desires relate to k/k, where do pleasures like happening across a pleasant smelling flower, or feeling warm sunshine on a cool day fall in terms of k/k? I think of these as passive, moving (in that they're fleeting), and unrelated to desire. To me, these are kinetic, but I'm not sure how they relate to Cassius ' question 2:

Quote from Cassius

2 - Are (1) and (2) the the *only* type of pleasures, or are there (3) other activities / actions / conditions that also fall within pleasure which are not related to desires being acted toward or being fulfilled?

Another extremely relaxing activity is watching Bob Ross painting videos on YouTube.

Bingo!

Well said Don .

One of the values of thinking of katastematic pleasure as "a permanent condition produced by practice" is thinking of practice as an action or actions that we can and must take to benefit our well-being. I like that, at least for me, this seems more active than passive. I'm on the fence as to whether to think of KP as a permanent state, however. Stable, yes. But stability doesn't necessarily imply permanence. A volcano can be stable for ages, and then erupt. An illness can be stable until it gets better or worse.

TauPhi has referred to KP as the will to life, which is a permanent thing. I'm not denying that there is a will to life, in fact I agree that there is. But I question whether that is what KP is referring to. I'm thinking that life presents each of us with long term challenges (financial stability, stable good health, stable food and shelter, aging, caring for loved ones, and other things that come up). Doing prudent work of planning and preparation to address these challenges, and others, results in a stable freedom from fear and worry (i.e. pleasure) with respect to each individual challenge. This type of pleasure is quite different from the Cyrenaic type of pleasure which needs to be constantly replenished.

(Cross-posted... this post is in reponse to Don 's post #37.)

Is there a neutral state allowed in this poll?

I personally don't use much social media, so it's not much of a factor. A little annoying sometimes, sometimes pleasing.

Quote from Don

You just to put the work in on A to live the calm life of B.

TauPhi , I think that burninglights ' post #32 above does a good job of clarifying what I was trying to describe as to how my understanding of katastematic pleasure differs from what you are describing. And I find this understanding of it useful in using our reasoning and agency to craft our most pleasant life.

Quote from TauPhi

I am strongly opposed to the idea of a "neutral state".

We're definitely in agreement there.

Quote from TauPhi

it's felt constantly throughout one's life and is sometimes disturbed by pain caused mainly (but not only) by fear which distorts our perception of life's experiences.

My main question is whether or not this is correct. Whether there is actually a background state, or a constant fluctuation between pain and pleasure in all parts of the body and mind. I'm beginning to see it as the latter.

Quote from TauPhi

If katastematic pleasure would be fleeting and unstable and lasted only for some time, k/k division would make no sense and would be reduced to an absurd. I mean, how much time do we need to declare a pleasure long-lasting so it's katastematic and no longer kinetic? 15 minutes? Two days? 5 years? At this point we might as well start discussing which superhero is better, Superman or Spiderman?

Ataraxia and aponia have no inherent time component as far as I can determine as a non-Greek speaker. If they define katastematic pleasure, there is no reason why katastematic pleasure would have to have a particular time component, let alone last a lifetime. The only reference to time is the secure knowledge of their continuance, which depends on prudent choices and avoidances. In this case, they're "stable" because you've done the work necessary and can tap into the particular feeling of pleasure at any time, even though you don't feel it all of the time.

It does seem to me that kinetic pleasures, in general, have less breadth of location than have ataraxia and aponia. But that depends on the exact definitions of ataraxia and aponia.

I hope I'm making sense and not driving people crazy with this line of thought! My own thinking is evolving, and we have so few sources to go on that it seems necessary to do the digging to really try to get a handle on the deeper ideas. And as always I welcome frank speech!

As for Superman and Spidey, I have my opinions. But those belong in another corner of the internet (a corner to which I never go )

Quote from TauPhi

everything that is alive, has senses and a brain (or the corresponding organ) capable of translating sensory inputs into experiences, is equipped with katastematic pleasure at birth. This pleasure is, simply put, background noise to life.

As such, katastematic pleasure has nothing to do with intensity, location and duration. These can be descriptors of kinetic pleasures. If one really wants to apply these descriptors to human katastematic pleasure, they would look something like this:

intensity: subjective and unquantifiable

location: somewhere between one's ears

duration: lifespan

This is interesting, but in pondering it, I keep coming back to Epicurus' wording. To paraphrase: the healthy functioning of the body and lack of disturbance in the mind. But, to me, this mustn't be considered simply background noise, and it still consists of intensity, location and duration.

For something to be a pleasure, by definition it must be felt. With this in mind, a "background state" could easily be misconstrued (and typically is, outside of this forum) as a "neutral state", even though I don't think that's what you're saying TauPhi .

By being in either the body or the mind, these felt pleasures have a location. They have duration, which can be anything from fleeting to long lasting. (Think of times when your body feels really great or your mind is really clear. For me, these times are fleeting. If they're long lasting for you, tell me how you do it!) And they have varying intensities, depending on the particular situation.

So apparently where this is leading me is to the conclusion that ataraxia and aponia are most likely the katastematic pleasures. But they are like all other pleasures in that they vary in intensity, location and duration. If there is anything that categorizes them as separate from other pleasures (notice that I studiously didn't say "makes them special") it's the breadth of their locations: aponia being throughout the body at a given moment and ataraxia being throughout the mind at a given moment. Unless, of course, you're a god. (Which kind of sounds similar to a Stoic sage as I write this... but I digress.)

We have two methods of working toward a pleasant life which can be found in the extant texts of Epicurus: 1) working with the categories of desires and 2) working with intensity, location and duration of individual pleasures. Considering the lack of clarity of k/k pleasures, both of these methods seem, to me, to be more directly useful than trying to sort out the k/k debate (although Don may not agree with that, and I respect his thinking on the matter!).

Each of these two methods is geared toward helping us feel the most pleasure with the least effort.

When using intensity, location and duration to consider individual pleasures there is no hierarchy among these three that I'm aware of. We use our own evaluations, for our own particular situation.

A day full of delight to both of you, Joshua and Kalosyni !

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I would guess then that "contingent," in this case, means something like political/social activity for aims that are not pragmatic (say, to sustain beneficially secure social contracts, laws and norms), but based on some other "contingent" considerations: such as personal power or enforcement of some ideology.

That was my impression: contingent as opposed to realpolitik. But I was confused, and haven't gone back and listened to that part again.

Not sure I buy into "unique and sacred nature that is fundamentally different from the nature of all other beings and phenomena". That seems to me to be in conflict with evolution. Also, separating ourselves out as unique, sacred and fundamentally different sounds like one of the evils of idealism and religion which leads to all sorts of misinterpretation and ensuing conflict.

But I appreciate the chart Pacatus ! Quite interesting.

From the circumplex, I interpret what Eoghan Gardiner is describing to be near the bottom of the "Deactivation" axis. With such a low amount of "excitement", it would be very difficult to distinguish pleasure or pain even though the feeling is still there. Additionally from the circumplex, the feeling would not be very strong. But it would still be there as either a pleasure or a pain.

This aligns with my intuition. But it's difficult to intuit the idea that the absence of pain is the greatest pleasure. It’s logically correct, but when I really dig into it, it's hard to wrap my head around. At first it makes sense at the macro level, but Eoghan Gardiner 's anecdote is at the macro level. After a while it makes my head spin!

Of course, what Cicero loved to do was to find rabbit holes and dig away....

This article that Kalosyni posted is a good read and has some pertinence to the discussion:

Post

Article: "Lucretian Pleasures" by Sedley

This article may be of benefit in understanding the nature of pleasure within Epicurean philosophy, and here is the abstract:

[…]

https://www.academia.edu/43841652/Lucretian_Pleasures

Kalosyni

October 11, 2023 at 11:07 AM

Could VS11 possibly have any relevance in this discussion? If it does, it's certainly not explicit. It's set up as contrasting to something, but the question is what it's contrasting to. I've typically thought of it in terms of discussing people's actions, but what if it's about k/k pleasures. Admittedly, I'm probably reaching pretty far....

VS11: For most people, to be quiet is to be numb and to be active is to be frenzied.