Eat Drink and be Merry!

One quick thought regarding the location of a pleasure.... Once it has been established that pleasure is a feeling, location gives it a degree of specificity that is useful in debating the subject. For any pleasure to be real and, further, to be evaluated, it needs to be felt. In order for me to evaluate pleasures, they need to be (or have been) located in my body and/or mind. Furthermore, ranking "universal pleasures" is meaningless, as these are nothing but concepts which aren't actually felt by anyone. And the feelings that these concepts refer to can be experienced differently by everyone.

This brings to mind duration, which can also be expressed as "time". If I've never experienced a particular pleasure, then I can't accurately compare it to another pleasure through some abstract ranking.

All this is not to say that I can't plan ahead by imagining how a particular pleasure will feel to me if and when I were to experience it, and compare that to how another imagined pleasure will feel to me. This is pretty much a necessary exercise in all sorts of situations. But the appropriateness of my comparison can only be accurately assessed during and after actually experiencing the pleasure. There needs to be a feeling, which occurs with a particular intensity, at and for a particular time, and at a particular location in my body and/or mind.

Quote from Godfrey

For any pleasure to be real and, further, to be evaluated, it needs to be felt. In order for me to evaluate pleasures, they need to be (or have been) located in my body and/or mind. Furthermore, ranking "universal pleasures" is meaningless, as these are nothing but concepts which aren't actually felt by anyone. And the feelings that these concepts refer to can be experienced differently by everyone.

Quote from Godfrey

There needs to be a feeling, which occurs with a particular intensity, at and for a particular time, and at a particular location in my body and/or mind.

I think both of those positions make a lot of sense. We can make generalized statements about how most people experience feelings but in the end if you don't experience them yourself you can't understand them.

I would bolster that by one of my favorite quotes:

Quote from Jackson Barwis, Dialogue on Innate Principles

When we are told that benevolence is pleasing; that malevolence is painful; we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning, nor by forming them into propositions: but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls: and if on such an appeal, we could not feel within the sentiment of benevolence, and the peculiar pleasure attending it; and that of malevolence and its concomitant pain, not all the reasoning in the world could ever make us sensible of them, or enable us to understand their nature.

Okay, so here is my revised nautical analogy for pleasure of the katastematic and kinetic varieties. Since I am still of the opinion that katastematic pleasures (especially ataraxia) are necessary *but not sufficient* for the pleasant life.

I'll use the sea as a metaphor for the mind which, in the end, senses all pleasurable sensations.. in fact, all sensations.

Imagine a sea that is polluted, churned up with mud, silt, and waste, with a surface whipped into whitecaps by winds and rains and storms.

The muddy, polluted, windswept, inhospitable waters are a metaphor for a mind under the influence of fears and anxieties of death, divine retribution, fear of one's neighbors, and all manner of ill-considered and false beliefs.

Cleaning the water and calming the storms brings calm, clear waters readily sailed in safety.

Only then does the clear calm water allows one to see with pleasure the bountiful life, colorful fish and other animals, the underwater corals, and the amazing sights under the water as well as to view, on the horizon, other shores that hold pleasurable experiences for one to sail to.

However, one must first achieve the calming of the storms and having clean water (katastematic pleasures) before all those other pleasures (kinetic pleasures) can be fully experienced.

I'm not saying you can't have some pleasure while rocking on a filthy, stormy sea if you batten down your hatches and sit in your cabin on your boat. But there is so much more available if you sail out of the storm and find clear waters.

Some of those storms - once you know the winds and can read the charts - can be avoided entirely. The Winds of the Fear of Death can be avoided. The Winds of the Fear of the Gods can be sailed around with assurance.

Some pain - winds, waves, etc. - is unavoidable living a human life, but one will also know the sea will calm and the waters will clear eventually.

This isn't a perfect analogy by any measure, but I think this might convey what's in my mind slightly better than the ocean and waves metaphor I've been sharing recently.

PS. I'm also going to refer back to the discussion from Summer 2022 on katastematic and kinetic (specifically my posts no. 149 and 150 at this link:

Post

RE: Do Pigs Value Katastematic Pleasure? ( Summer 2022 K / K Discussion)

@Cassius asked me:

"what would you say are the implications of your position"

Well, I was going to read all the papers, synthesize all the points, convey my agreements and objections, pull in modern and ancient citations and quotes, and...

But that seemed like way too much work and pain!!

So, what I'll do is try to summarize my thinking into some bullet points and see how far we get.

From what I read in the classical and modern sources:

- The katastematic and kinetic pleasure distinction was…

Don

July 17, 2022 at 6:51 PM

One thing that strikes me about this picture, Don , is that it seems very similar to descriptions of the effects of meditation that I've read. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems to me to be somewhat limiting when it comes to pursuing pleasure.

I've been attempting to complement this picture of katastematic pleasure by looking at the components of pleasures/pains as I've described in my above posts. Also, katastematic pleasuinvolves both a durable presence of pleasure and a durable absence of pain. On the one hand these are by definition the same thing. On the other hand, they provide two different viewpoints for maximizing pleasure.

Katastematic and kinetic seem to me to be relative concepts for describing the duration (durability?) of a pleasure or pain, and perhaps to describe the extent of location (breadth?) of a pleasure or pain.

I'm leaning toward the idea that katastematic/kinetic is really just a description of durability. Breadth is important, but not katastematic or kinetic. Breadth would be something like "does this thing bring me both physical and mental pleasure? Does it affect one part of my body, or is it a more widely distributed feeling? Does it give me mental satisfaction in one way or in a variety of ways?"

What I'm thinking is that looking at feelings in terms of the particular components of intensity, duration and location gives us a practical set of tools. Katastematic/kinetic is just a way of talking about the tool of duration. This line of reasoning was prompted by the texts, but I haven't yet gone back through the existing texts (studiously excluding Cicero) to see how fully it's supported.

Quote from Godfrey

What I'm thinking is that looking at feelings in terms of the particular components of intensity, duration and location gives us a practical set of tools. Katastematic/kinetic is just a way of talking about the tool of duration. This line of reasoning was prompted by the texts, but I haven't yet gone back through the existing texts (studiously excluding Cicero) to see how fully it's supported.

I generally agree with this perspective. Specific pleasures obviously differ from one another in their unique qualities, and intensity, duration, and location are practical ways of distinguishing them for purposes of discussion.

It makes sense also to focus on what Epicurus and Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius and any other self-proclaimed advocates wrote. However I would not exclude Cicero for too long, because when he records an advocate of Epicurus (Torquatus or Velleius, I am not sure if there are any others) speaking, I think a lot of stock can be put in those words. I can't cite an example at the moment but it seems I have read that commentators think that Cicero had before him texts from the various schools when he was writing, and it seems to me that the extended presentations by Torquatus and Velleius deserve a lot of consideration.

Quote from Godfrey

I'm leaning toward the idea that katastematic/kinetic is really just a description of durability. Breadth is important, but not katastematic or kinetic. Breadth would be something like "does this thing bring me both physical and mental pleasure? Does it affect one part of my body, or is it a more widely distributed feeling? Does it give me mental satisfaction in one way or in a variety of ways?"

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. I see why you are saying that breadth is important but why is "duration" not important?

Quote from Godfrey

One thing that strikes me about this picture, Don , is that it seems very similar to descriptions of the effects of meditation that I've read. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems to me to be somewhat limiting when it comes to pursuing pleasure.

I could see that similarity, but it seems to me that meditation (especially mindfulness meditation) is sometimes seen as an end in itself instead of a tool in a toolbox. However, whereas I see meditation as a tool to quiet one's busy mind (which is not a bad thing in itself), the Epicurean context is the necessary elimination of false and damaging beliefs and mental habits and similar impediments to well-being. Studying, meditating on the teachings "by yourself and with similar people," is a necessary step in freeing one's mind from unnecessary fears, anxieties, and negative mental habits, ripping these "empty" beliefs and habits out by the roots so they don't come back. If one wants to engage in meditation as a tool to help with day to day overthinking or being anxious, I think that has value. But the big storms and pollution that need to be eradicated in my (admittedly off the cuff) analogy are the existential fears of death, divine retribution, feelings of "I am a worm in the eyes of God," etc.

Without eliminating those, we might experience pleasures but there's going to always be a sea serpent ready to rear its ugly head out of the water and capsize our boat.

Quote from Godfrey

All this is not to say that I can't plan ahead by imagining how a particular pleasure will feel to me if and when I were to experience it, and compare that to how another imagined pleasure will feel to me. This is pretty much a necessary exercise in all sorts of situations. But the appropriateness of my comparison can only be accurately assessed during and after actually experiencing the pleasure.

Hmmm...I may be misinterpreting what you're saying. Your saying that you "can't plan ahead by imagining how a particular pleasure will feel" seems to negate the idea of choosing and rejecting which pleasure to follow and which pains to reject. Can you expand on what you're saying there?

Re post 27, I'm saying that we plan ahead by imagining how a particular pleasure will feel, but that we can only confirm our "hypothesis" by actually experiencing the pleasure. Basically just a common sense statement, but poorly worded. I began the statement with a double negative: "All this is not to say that I can't plan ahead..." meaning "this is how I plan ahead". Kind of like some of Epicurus' wording

Quote from Cassius

Quote

Quote from Godfrey I'm leaning toward the idea that katastematic/kinetic is really just a description of durability. Breadth is important, but not katastematic or kinetic. Breadth would be something like "does this thing bring me both physical and mental pleasure? Does it affect one part of my body, or is it a more widely distributed feeling? Does it give me mental satisfaction in one way or in a variety of ways?"

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. I see why you are saying that breadth is important but why is "duration" not important

What I'm saying is that katastematic/kinetic (k/k) involves duration but that I don't think that k/k involves breadth. Both duration and breadth are important in order to maximize one's pleasure. The combination of the two, to my current way of thinking, is more important, both practically and theoretically, than the concept of k/k pleasures.

Basically I'm toying with the idea that k/k may not deserve the amount of attention that it gets. My thinking is that k/k is really just a way of describing duration, and we don't have any existing texts from Epicurus to which would give it any more importance.

An existing text that we do have is PD09. I'm currently interpreting it as defining the three components of pleasure as intensity, duration and location. The more I think on it, the more useful these seem to be for working with maximizing one’s pleasure. And if I'm interpreting PD09 correctly, which is open to debate, then to my mind it has more relevance than the texts dealing with k/k, as it is directly attributed to Epicurus.

So I'm suggesting that the three components of pleasure as described in PD09 are a more valuable topic of study than katastematic and kinetic pleasure. As far as I can tell, PD09 has been pretty much ignored, possibly due to its confusing wording, while k/k is the subject of endless, and endlessly open-ended, discussion. And I'm wondering if the focus on k/k is more useful to opponents of Epicurus than to practicing Epicureans.

(Note that I'm not in any way disparaging Epicurean discussion of k/k! I'm just thinking that, once again, opponents such as Cicero and his ilk have cynically sent us off on a wild goose chase!)

Quote from Godfrey

An existing text that we do have is PD09. I'm currently interpreting it as defining the three components of pleasure as intensity, duration and location. The more I think on it, the more useful these seem to be for working with maximizing one’s pleasure. And if I'm interpreting PD09 correctly, which is open to debate, then to my mind it has more relevance than the texts dealing with k/k, as it is directly attributed to Epicurus.

Your analysis of PD09 seems on target to me. I think most of the time that people pick up this subject the first places they intuitively go are (1) time /duration, (2) intensity, and (3) part of the body or mind being affected (location). It's hard for me to think of what additional classifications would deserve the same level in the hierarchy as those three. They apply to every kind of experience I can imagine, and all the other ways you can categorize pleasure seem to fit within those.

Quote from Godfrey

opponents such as Cicero and his ilk have cynically sent us off on a wild goose chase!)

And my current favorite explanation for that is that everyone in a competition knows the strategy of "divide and conquer." Suggesting that some "pleasures" are abstractly better than others creates a competition between the advocates of pleasure. Maybe someone needs to play the game against the other side and suggest that the virtue of courage is MUCH better than the virtue of wisdom, or piety to the gods is MUCH better than virtue. But then again those games have always been played too, and most everyone is as confused as ever even though 2000 years have gone by.