Are You Epicurean Or Hieronymian?

According to Doctrine 3, Epicurus held that the limit of quantity of pleasure is the absence of pain. This is a function of the truism / premise that there are only two feelings - pleasure and pain - which means that in quantity, the measurement that describes the "absence" of the one is the same measurement as the "presence" of the other. But this observation is limited to quantity - it has nothing to do with the quality or the detail of the type of pleasure (or pain) that is being experienced at a particular moment.

Nevertheless, there is at loose in philosophical communities today the idea that Epicurus taught that pleasure is exactly equal - is defined as - "absence of pain," and so many are motivated to try to reconcile the inconsistencies in the texts by holding that Epicurus meant "tranquility" and that "tranquility itself" is the goal of life. What they would really say, if they followed their conclusion to the end, is that "tranquility is the highest pleasure" -- but you rarely see that formulation, as it is so obviously and counter intuitively incorrect.

The record of how all this discussion got started is out there if people would look. Much of the story begins with Plato and Philebus, but Epicurus was not the only one to grapple with the issue. One philosopher -Heronymous of Rhodes - explicitly adopted the modern "absence of pain" position - and everyone at the time knew the difference. Heronymous of Rhodes is forgotten today, but Epicurus is tagged with his incorrect viewpoint. Beware!

Cicero - Academic Questions:

Cicero - On Ends:

I will give Hieronymous credit for one thing: he is consistent in seeing that holding up "absence of pain" as the goal means to depreciate "pleasure" as the goal of life. Whether they admit it or not, this is the natural road which proponents of "absence of pain" will follow - they end up being opponents of "pleasure" as ordinarily understood.

Next - again from Cicero, On Ends:

Cicero the lying litigator at work again! Cicero KNOWS that Epicurus did not make the mistake of calling "absence of pain" the goal of life, as Hieronymus did, but because some are so obtuse as to think "absence of pain" makes sense (Hieronymous was such a one!) Cicero is able to use the argument to great effect - or so he thinks! But once we see that the goal is PLEASURE, rather than absence of pain, Cicero's argument falls to the ground:

Exactly Charles. This information is out there, but I think very few people have taken the time to digest it and think about its implications. And the last couple of decades the problem is accelerating -- all people are reading nowadays is popular wikipedia-like summaries, and the most recent commentaries, and the misinformation is accelerating like a snowball on a hill.

Poster GW: "But is it not a Principal Doctrine that, "Pleasure reaches its maximum limit at the removal of all sources of pain. When such pleasure is present, for as long as it lasts, there is no cause of physical nor mental pain present – nor of both together."?

Poster A:

"...the complete removal of pain has correctly been termed a pleasure.

Even Cicero forwarded Torquatus' writing:

The happiness we pursue does not consist solely of the delightful feelings of physical pleasures.

On the contrary, according to Epicurus, the greatest pleasure is that which is experienced as a result of the complete removal of all pain.

When we are released from pain, the mere sensation of complete emancipation, and relief from distress, is itself a source of great gratification.

But everything that causes gratification is a pleasure, just as everything that causes distress is a pain.

Therefore, the complete removal of pain has correctly been termed a pleasure.

For example, when hunger and thirst are banished by food and drink, the mere fact of getting rid of those distresses brings pleasure as a result.

So as a rule, the removal of pain causes pleasure to take its place.

Poster GW:

Yes indeed that is a principal doctrine, and that has a meaning within the full context of Epicurean philosophy which does not contradict the bottom line that PLEASURE is the goal. That is what this thread is about, Garrett, that it is not possible to take things out of context and still understand the full picture.

And nothing that Poster A just wrote contradicts the point either, Poster G. As A writes, Epicurus endorsed both pleasures that some term as "at rest" and some term as "active" -- but both types are PLEASURE. the key observation is that there are only two feelings - pleasure and pain - and that therefore as a matter of quantity, the "absence of one" is the same as "the presence of the other." This has everything to do with quantity and nothing to do about what type of feeling is actually happening at the time.

Poster G, (and anyone else reading along) - just read Cicero's words closely and you'll see the issue. Cicero was a master of the details of all of these philosophers, and he knew very well that Epicurus' view of the goal of life was pleasure, and that Heironymous' view of the goal was "absence of pain" and that these are two totally different things and are not reconcilable. That means that PD3 does NOT mean that "absence of pain" is the ultimate goal, or even "the ultimate pleasure." The key words are "maximum limit" or as others translate "the limit of quantity." This is not a discussion of the goal of life explicitly, but a discussion of a specific objection to pleasure that had been raised previously by Plato / other philosophers. The objection was that "pleasure has no limit" (we always want more) and Plato thought that was an effective argument because the logicians had decided that nothing could be an ultimate goal if it can always be made better (meaning that it has no limit). This is set forth in Philebus and elsewhere.

Epicurus pointed out the error in this reasoning by showing that pleasure DOES have a limit - and that limit is reached when our total experience is filled with pleasures of any time such that there is no more room for the experience of any pain -- all pain has been "crowded out."

And thus in another context Cicero described the Epicureans as holding that "nothing was preferable to a life of tranquility crammed full of pleasures." In Defense of Publius Sestius 10.23

Poster A:

Even Cicero continues:

Fourth, we do not agree with those who allege that when pleasure is withdrawn, anxiety follows at once.

That result is true only in those situations where the pleasure happens to be replaced directly by a pain.

The truth is, in general, we are glad whenever we lose a pain, even though no active sensation of pleasure comes immediately in its place.

This fact serves to show us how life itself, WHEN LIVED IN THE ABSENCE OF PAIN, IS itself so GREAT a PLEASURE.

We will eventually straighten out the posting here, but in the meantime, here is the point: it is absolutely true that all these references to "absence of pain" do exist. The issue is "What do they mean?" and "What do they tell us about the goal of life?" For each reference to "absence of pain" we can find MORE references to "Pleasure," and so it is necessary to determine the relationship between the two. Cicero and Hieronymous and the Greeks knew that the two are absolutely not the same thing. Epicurus had a reason for saying what he said, and it is up to us to figure out what the Epicureans meant from the fragmentary texts that are still available.

Quoting over and over the same passages does nothing to explain to an honest inquirer how to reconcile these things, and the bitter truth for the Hiernonymous crowd is that "absence of anything" tells us NOTHING about "what is present" unless we define the terms of the discussion first. Epicurus had already done that - many times it appears - by making the point that there are only two feelings - pleasure and pain. When there are only two of anything, the "absence of one" means that the space formerly occupied (if any) by that thing is now occupied by its opposite.

If you re like Hieronymous and think that "absence of pain" tells you anything specific and practical about how to spend your life, then more power to you, but have the grace to identify yourself as Hieronymian, and allow the Epicureans to pursue the pleasure which Epicurus, and more importantly Nature, calls us to pursue.

Once we have that ground rules of the debate established, we can then discuss with intelligence what the "absence of pain" references do mean, by referring to Plato and the other anti-pleasure philosophers who suggested that "gods" or "virtue" or "ideal forms" give us the standard by which to live our lives.

According to Wikipedia, Hieronymous of Rhodes lived from c. 290 – c. 230 BC, while Epicurus lived from 341–270 BC. That means that Hieronymous lived after Epicurus, and had Epicurus' works to reference, but Epicurus was no longer around to respond to Hieronymous. If indeed Epicurus had taken the position that "absence of pain" is a correct and full statement of the goal of life, why would Hieronymous have had to deviate from Epicurus, and why would Cicero have had to set them up as opposites? the tragedy is that we don't have the works of contemporaneous Epicurus who would certainly have written to clear up this conflict. All we can go on now is that Cicero and those who knew at the time, knew that Hieronymous advocated "absence of pain" and deprecated pleasure, and that that was *not* what Epicurus had taught.

More of my ill will toward Cicero: Cicero was nothing if not intelligent, and he had the means at his disposal to get to the bottom of the issue, and, if necessary, consult the two opposing sides for their own explanation of the apparent conflict between Heironymous and Epicurus. Yet rather than present a sympathetic explanation from an Epicurean (or from a Heironymian) as to why their positions were in conflict, he simply stated the alleged inconsistency and left it unanswered, planting in the mind of his readers that Epicurus was a sloppy thinker and did not even know how to make a coherent argument about pleasure.

Once again the DeWitt statement about Cicero rings in my ears:

The bottom line is that Cicero took out of context the building-block discussion of "limit of pleasure" - which has a perfectly legitimate place in the *foundation* of the logical structure that Epicurus was erecting - and placed that building-block at the *apex* of the structure instead of in its proper place as a supporting explanation of why Pleasure is the ultimate goal. That's why it ("absence of pain") standing at the apex of the philosophy looks silly or ridiculous or even offensive to neutral normal people, but still is absolutely correct as written when viewed in its proper subordinate context.

Godfrey just FYI I split off your comments about Philebus into THIS new subforum / thread: Philebus - Plato's Arguments Against Pleasure and Epicurean Responses

Poster GFL: "If you maintain that there is pleasure beyond the absence of pain, then you are not an Epicurean, but a Cyrenaic."

Cassius:

In the Epicurean system where all feelings are either pleasure or pain, there would be no possibility of adding another type of feeling once pleasures expand to occupy all feeling. However I am not aware of a Cyreniac statement which would assert such a thing, are you? The word "beyond" in that statement would need explanation, because if we are talking quantity in the way Epicurus stated it, there is no quantity of pleasure other than "absence of pain." Unless we are more clear about what we are talking about the entire conversation becomes a word game --- which is exactly what it was in its original Platonic context.

What does "quantity of pleasure" mean anyway except in context as an answer to a logic puzzle? That is why it appears to me that this entire discussion must be kept in mind as linked to Plato / Philebus for us to even understand what we are talking about. The original issue, as queried by Plato in Philebus, started with the question "Does pleasure have a limit?" Are we measuring the pleasure from ice cream in inches or pounds? What is a "limit?"

Unless you in know the reasoning behind the question, the discussion is meaningless -- and worse: deceptive. Of course that is just how Plato intended it, as wordplay to deflate those who see pleasure as the goal of life.

I believe it is also useful to analogize this question to Epicurus' analysis of the boundlessness of space. We can throw the javelin endlessly and never hit the end of space, and yet the universe has a logical limit in being composed of only matter and void, outside of which nothing exists or can be conceived to exist as possibly entering the universe from outside to change it.

Pleasure and pain stand in the role of matter and void - it is useful to consider them from the perspective of quantity for some purposes, but no one should be so foolish as to forget that the matter and space composing my body and my mind are much different to me, and of much more concern, than the matter and space composing a rock on the far side of the moon.

The rock and my mind may be equivalent in quantity (weight) but they are dramatically different in most other,and most important respects, about which"quantity" tells us nothing.

Why are we talking about these absurdities? Only because Plato and the logicians seek to avert us from pleasure by arguing that the greatest good in life must have a "limit."

Jumping ahead when we peel this back far enough we are going to see that this all comes down to feeling vs logic. Life is about feeling / sensation and logic alone is worthless, but Plato through wordplay is attempting to reverse that natural priority and convince us that logic has primacy. This is why Epicurus' canonical analysis is so important.

But we have come so far down the wrong path for so long that today we have to walk back step by step through the argument in order to see how the Platonic / Stoic / Virtue / Dialectical Logic crowd led us astray.

Yes exactly Charles - great quote from Onfray. I think that hits the nail on the head to explain much of what we encounter.

As to Onfray generally, I have not read his material directly, but from what I've observed other people quote he's written a lot of good stuff. I gather that he also chose to differentiate himself from Epicurus and that he's not exactly an Epicurean in his philosophy, but that doesn't mean that a lot of what he said isn't exactly on point, like (for example) some of Nietzsche.

Thanks for the detailed post Titus. Here are my thoughts:

Quote from Titus

Many thinkers only refer to the ethics as presented in letter to Menoeceus (additionally Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings) but do not apply Canonics and Physics, which they consider as a different point of interest. For a person who studies all three main branches of Epicurean philosophy and even tries to combine and interconnect, it's something different.

I very much agree with that. It seems to me that most of the people whose interpretations I find reason to criticize focus almost exclusively on one aspect (most frequently, the letter to Meoneceus) and act as if the epistemology and physics are irrelevant. In a nearby (in time) thread I think we see an example of that in an American philosopher (Pierce) who embraces one aspect of Epicurus to support his own views, but rejects the rest of Epicurus. I think it's necessary to incorporate them all to get a balanced picture.

Quote from Titus

In my personal opinion, Epicurus is neither looking for painlessness nor for pleasure as pleasure on its own. He tries to find out what a human is in itself. This is why he focuses on senses, feelings and anticipations.

I agree that Epicurus is very concerned about looking to Nature to determine what a human is in itself, and that he does not just start with pleasure as the goal without any reason. But I would have to differ and say that the reliable texts when read as a whole (including the material cited in this thread) are clear that Epicurus held "pleasure" to be the goal and not painlessness. When you say he focuses on senses / feelings / anticipations I think that is where the answer is found, in that it seems to me that he is using "feelings" (or whatever word one prefers in translation) in general as the basis for choice, with pleasure being the positive thing to choose and pain being the negative to avoid, which is both a theoretical statement of the goal (pleasure) and a practical way of evaluating each decision (does it lead to greater pleasure or greater pain). I think the multiple perspective (incorporating both theory and practice) is how it is kept in mind that even when you are sometimes choosing pain in the short term, you are really always choosing pleasure (because you view the long term / total result),

Quote from Titus

Consequently, satisfying all natural and necessery desires is the highest level of being.

This is a phrasing that I find very troublesome whenever I run into it, but it is definitely a conclusion a lot of people reach. For me, there is no way to carry such a formulation to its logical conclusion without accepting that living in a cave on bread and water is the course most to be desired for everyone. Epicurus himself certainly did not do that, and that observation alone is sufficient (to me) to show that such an interpretation would not be valid. I am sure that an elaborate and detailed rendering of such a phrase, by going through each word and applying very specific definitions, could be employed to save the formula from that result, but I just don't think Epicurus intended for his students to take that path.

Quote from Titus

This is why Epicurus advices only to fullfill natural but not necessery desires if they do not harm.

I would repeat the same observation as I just made. There are literally (to my knowlege) zero exampled of actual Epicureans who pursued lives of asceticism and minimalism. Again, I realize that the formulation can probably be explained in a way that allowed the activism of a Cassius Longinus or the movement in the highest circles of Roman life of Atticus and other leading Romans who embraced Epicurus, but they had access to far more authoritative texts and teachers than we do, and they apparently found no contradiction in their lifestyles and fundamental Epicurean teaching. Maybe in fact there was a large body of ancient Epicureans who competed with the Stoics and the various ascetics in pursuing only that which was necessary to sustain their lives, but if there were such applications that seem to have escaped mention in the texts I have seen.

Much more likely to me is the deduction from such references as are made in the Ciceronian comments set out here that Epicurus would have been fully aware of the option of setting up painlessness as the real goal, as set forth by Hieronymous, and that Epicurus rejected that option in favor of identifying the goal as "pleasure" - which he then proceeded to broadly define as including all types of physical and mental pleasures.

As in the concluding sections of Diogenes of Laertius:

Quote

Epicurus differs from the Cyrenaics about pleasure. For they do not admit static pleasure, but only that which consists in motion. But Epicurus admits both kinds both in the soul and in the body, as he says in the work on Choice and Avoidance and in the book on The Ends of Life and in the first book On Lives and in the letter to his friends in Mytilene. Similarly, Diogenes in the 17th book of Miscellanies and Metrodorus in the Timocrates speak thus: ‘Pleasure can be thought of both as consisting in motion and as static.’ And Epicurus in the work on Choice speaks as follows: ‘Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures, but Joy and exultation are considered as active pleasures involving motion. '

A further difference from the Cyrenaics: they thought that bodily pains were worse than those of the soul, and pointed out that offenses are visited by bodily punishment. But Epicurus held that the pains of the soul are worse, for the flesh is only troubled for the moment, but the soul for past, present, and future. In the same way the pleasures of the soul are greater. As proof that pleasure is the end, he points out that all living creatures as soon as they are born take delight in pleasure, but resist pain by a natural impulse apart from reason. Therefore we avoid pain by instinct, just as Heracles, when he is being devoured by the shirt of Nessus, cries aloud,

Or maybe I could summarize my views on all of this subject as "Like Epicurus, I refuse to give up joy and exultation!"

What we're discussing is a very interesting and continuing issue of how to express things. It certainly is clear that the "natural / necessary" analysis is in the texts and must be important, yet no matter how much someone talks about it, I've never really met anyone who actually follows that path to its logical extreme if taken literally. So I agree that when we're talking among friends we're really talking about wording issues as much as anything else.