Competing Greek Words for Pleasure in the Epicurean Corpus?

Epicurus' common greeting in his letters uses the the phrase Ἐπίκουρος Μενοικεῖ χαίρειν--"Epicurus to Menoikeus, joyful greetings".

χαίρειν is closely related to χᾰρᾱ́ mentioned above.

Quote from Pacatus

Are there sources in the Greek, among the Epicurean corpus, for τέρψις and/or χᾰρᾱ́? And a distinction from Ἡδονή?

Quick response: χαρά is specifically one of the "kinetic" pleasures. I'll have to dig around about τέρψεις. That's a new one to me.

Cicero is just willfully obtuse on this point, as we've been discovering. Pleasure refers to a wider range of feelings than he is willing to acknowledge. Even Socrates in Philebus is prepared to recognize that Aphrodite, though having one name, signifies a number different varieties of pleasure.

There's no use of τερψις in Diogenes Laertius book 10.

Maybe in Philodemus? But he's not readily searchable.

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, τέρψις

No Epicurean citations there.

Here's from that Stanford / Konstan article. Possibly all or possibly only part of it is accurate, and no doubt digging in to the details will be helpul, especially if we could prepare a "concordance" of every time one of these words appears.

But one thing I can say for sure - a strictly academic approach can easily make a normal person's eyes glaze over and lead too all sorts of doubt and uncertainty if not handled carefully. Almost like the letter to Menoeceus as to religion being preferable to hard determinism, I could see some people saying "save me God from these incessant vocabulary drills!"

Quote

The ability to reason or calculate (logismos) cannot be a function of images. It is the faculty that lets us infer by analogy from the visible world to the invisible, and also that with which we may recognize that not all pleasures are to be chosen at all times, since some immediate pleasures may lead to long-term pain or harm (Letter to Menoeceus = LM 129). What is more, one must know something about the nature of pleasure in order to pursue it rationally, and likewise for pain. Epicurus, it appears, uses the terms pleasure and pain (hêdonê, algêdôn) strictly in reference to physical pathê or sensations, that is, those that are experienced via the non-rational soul that is distributed throughout the body. As for the rational part or mind, we have positive and negative experiences through it too. Most prominent among the negative mental states is fear, above all the fear of unreal dangers, such as death. Death, Epicurus insists, is nothing to us, since while we exist, our death is not, and when our death occurs, we do not exist (LM 124–25); but if one is frightened by the empty name of death, the fear will persist since we must all eventually die. This fear is one source of perturbation (tarakhê), and is a worse curse than physical pain itself; the absence of such fear is ataraxy, lack of perturbation, and ataraxy, together with freedom from physical pain, is one way of specifying the goal of life, for Epicurus.

There are also positive states of mind, which Epicurus identifies by the special term khara (joy), as opposed to hêdonê (pleasure, i.e., physical pleasure). These states too depend on belief, whether true or false. But Epicurus does not treat khara as an end, or part of the end for living: rather, he tends to describe the goal by negation, as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance (LM 128). However, happiness (eudaimonia), according to Epicurus, is not simply a neutral or privative condition but rather a form of pleasure in its own right — what Epicurus called catastematic or (following Cicero’s Latin translation) “static” as opposed to “kinetic” pleasure. Although the precise nature of this distinction is debated, kinetic pleasures seem to be of the non-necessary kind (see below), such as those resulting from agreeable odors or sounds, rather than deriving from replenishment, as in the case of hunger or thirst. The philosophical school known as the Cyrenaics advocated increasing desires and seeking ever new ways of gratifying them.

Epicurus objected that such pleasures are necessarily accompanied by distress, for they depend upon a lack that is painful (Plato had demonstrated the problematic nature of this kind of pleasure; see Gorgias 496C–497A, Philebus 31E–32D, 46A–50C). In addition, augmenting desires tends to intensify rather than reduce the mental agitation (a distressful state of mind) that Epicurean philosophy sought to eliminate. Catastematic pleasure, on the contrary, is (or is taken in) a state rather than a process: it is the pleasure that accompanies well-being as such. The Cyrenaics and others, such as Cicero, maintained, in turn, that this condition is not pleasurable but rather neutral — neither pleasurable nor painful.

I don't think we've previously done this (I know I haven't myself) but some of Don's posts have come very close to being a "concordance" of where words denoting pleasure are found.

If we can pull that together somewhere that would be well worth the effort. At the very least we ought to find out where this has been posted before and post the links here, and then we can turn that into a reference page as we have time.

Right now we have most of our "special resources" stored under this link:

- Epicureanfriends.com

www.epicureanfriends.com

If we end up creating a "concordance" of uses of words that are a variation of "pleasure," we definitely need to add it there.

I would differ with the title of this thread: "Competing Greek Words for Pleasure in the Epicurean Corpus?"

I would suggest any terms are more like "Complementary Greek Words" or even "Supplementary" or maybe even "Greek Words for Varieties of Pleasure".. in the Epicurean Corpus.

Quote from Pacatus

the source for terpsis: Warren, James (2002). Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University.

This review may be of help to is:

Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia – Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Quote

The rest of chapter 2 is an analysis of the longest surviving fragment of Democritus, B191. It begins, ” Euthymia arises in men through a moderation of joy and a good balance of life.” This confirms, says Warren, “that Democritus is no full-blooded hedonist,” since it advises that we pursue, not “the maximum amount of pleasure,” but only “a moderate amount of terpsis” And what is terpsis ? Warren translates it “joy,” and distinguishes it from “pleasure” ( hêdonê) as follows: whereas a feeling of pleasure “might or might not be beneficial,” terpsis“is a feeling we can accept as objectively good.” I find this implausible and would urge instead that Democritus’ distinction between terpsis and hêdonê anticipates Epicurus’ distinction between “joy” ( chara) and “pleasure”: joy is the mental state that has pleasure as its intentional object. (On this, see my article “Epicurus on the telos“, Phronesis 38 [1993] 281-321.)Warren cites B4: “Joy ( terpsis) and lack of joy are boundary-markers of what is and is not beneficial.” But Democritus is not saying here that joy is the feeling of pleasure that we get from what, being truly beneficial, is objectively good. He is saying that what is good (i.e., beneficial) must be measured in terms of what causes joy. And that sounds to me a lot like the moderate hedonism of Epicurus.

So, it appears Democritus uses terpsis, not Epicurus.