Episode 295 - TD25 - Plutarch's Absurd Interpretation of Epicurean Absence of Pain

Quote from Rolf

hanks for your reply Cassius! Would it be accurate to say then that once our basic (natural necessary) desires are satisfied, it is no longer pain or lack that drives us to pleasure but pleasure itself?

I feel this sort of relates to the question I posed a little while ago about why we should pursue unnecessary desires if necessary desires are enough. Epicurus was, among other things, a researcher of human behaviour. Why is it that we still pursue superfluous pleasurable sensations once we have reached the limit of pleasure (absence of pain)?

To be very clear, I don’t disagree with the conclusions here. But the fact that the clock displays the correct time is not enough for me - I must know how it ticks!

That's the best possible attitude Rolf. I've seen so many people start and then drop the study of Epicurus, and I am convinced this is the main problem. Most people don't seem willing to question the authorities on how the "authorities" say Epicurus' view of happiness works, so they only hear an upside down version and give up trying to make sense of it to find out how it really ticks. They get tired of anesthesia, which is all that is offered in the word "tranquility," and they eventually walk way.

And as I have said before, if I thought what your question suggests about "absence of pain" was the correct interpretation of Epicurus, I would shut down this forum in an instant.

Would it be accurate to say then that once our basic (natural necessary) desires are satisfied, it is no longer pain or lack that drives us to pleasure but pleasure itself?

To this I would say that it is ALWAYS pleasure that drives us to pursue pleasure. Pain can be viewed as the absence of pleasure just like pleasure is the absence of pain.

Your question displays exactly why there is so much fixation on the "natural and necessary" categorization. People act as if Epicurus said that all you need is a little air and bread and water and you ARE living like a god. What he said was that HE was able to compete with the gods even if that was all HE had, but what HE was suggesting HE could do does not mean that any particular Tom, Dick, Benjamin, or Mohammed on the street would see the same result with only bread and water and air.

In the case of Epicurus, HE was able to say that it as a greatly happy day for HIM even when he was dying a very painful death because HE could stack against that pain the memory and thoughts of what HE had accomplished and experienced in HIS life to that point. Would you compare the happiness that you have experienced from philosophy to date (including your period of anti-natalism) as such an ecstatic experience that you would whoop and holler and exclaim that this memory mad it worth staying alive even as your kidneys were exploding? Would a child in war zone reasonably be able to say that with only bread and water and air he was living a life worthy of the gods?

I don't think so, and I don't think Epicurus would say so.

Why is it that we still pursue superfluous pleasurable sensations once we have reached the limit of pleasure (absence of pain)?

Because all pleasure is desirable, and none of it is superfluous as long as we are able to experience it.  As we have been discussing recently the way Metrodorus stated it is that the reason we need no more pleasure after we reach "absence of pain" is that there is no more room for those pleasures in our lives, because our experience is already full of pleasures! It's not that additional pleasure is not desirable, but that under the hypothetical we do not have the capacity to experience any additional pleasure. And that's because our experience is already full of pleasures of every kind, mental and bodily, and there is no "empty spot" - no extra time or attention - into which to inject new pleasurable experiences.

Is your experience full to the brim when you have a little water and air and water? Mine is not, and I hope to live a significant number of additional time and experience more pleasures that I can reasonably hope to experience.

In the case of Epicurus on his last day, given his circumstances and what he had accomplished, calling yourself happy is very reasonable, because Epicurus understood what he had accomplished and how his time wsa coming to an end because his body was wearing out. But are you in your 20's satisfied that all you need for the rest of your life is bread, water, air, sleep ---- and rinse and repeat that cycle and nothing else for the next 80 years?

Of course not! You want to experience all the mental and bodily pleasures that your particular situation (health, abilities, etc.) allows you to experience! Why would any reasonable person choose to look at everything above a subsistence level of existence as "superfluous"!?!?

But that's exactly what the "frenemies" of Epicurus have succeeded in making you think is Epicurean philosophy. It's detestable that this has become an accepted manner of thinking.

This now commonly accepted view of Epicurus (that he deprives us of singing and dancing and having fun) is an ATTACK on Epicurus. Yet many defenders of Epicurus have ACCEPTED this sarcastic argument of Plutarch and tried to turn it into a strength!

What dolts they are -- Plutarch and Cicero both gave them enough credit to think that any person of normal common sense hearing their argument would run like the wind from a philosophy that drains all joy and delight out of life. But what happened? Plutarch's and Cicero's sarcasm was over the years EMBRACED (after the true Epicureans had been suppressed) to the point where it has now become the majority modern accepted interpretation of Epicurus!!!

To me the antidote starts back with tracing back where these arguments came from in the first place, and why they proved effective.

Epicurus was always focused on PLEASURE, and he made very clear that his definition of pleasure includes all common pleasures. Full stop - no ranking of pleasures on an absolute scale as some "always" better than others.

The major innovation that Epicurus added to the view of pleasure was to expand it to include all mental and bodily experiences that are not painful. And he did so for a reason that is the very opposite of those who despair about life and about children and who chose to focus on suffering.

Epicurus said that life itself is desirable and pleasurable, given how short it is, and that we should view it as our most valuable possession and make the most out of it that we can.

But does that mean that all any random mystical anti-natalist has to do is drug himself into a stupor to the point he doesn't feel anything mental or bodily, and by that action he becomes as happy as a god?

Heck no - such a person remains the same miserable creature he was before he drugged himself out of existence.

It is possible for someone (like Epicurus) to compete with a god, even in austere conditions, because as Epicurus said he found his joy in the study of nature, and in Epicurus' case he knew what he had accomplished. His friends were numbered in whole cities and as a result of his work he had come to be living in what has to be interpreted as relatively wealthy circumstances. People who are destitute don't own multiple properties and multiple slaves and have admiring women and students and friends surrounding and supporting them up to their last breath.

So the ultimate proof of the error of the view Plutarch has promoted is that EPICURUS HIMSELF DID NOT LIVE LIKE THAT! Epicurus was as capable as any philosopher of embracing hypothetical examples, and using hyperbole such as living on bread and water, to dramatize and illustrate philsophical points.

But how did Epicurus actually live? All you have to do is read his will to realize that Epicurus did NOT live a life from which singing and dancing and joy and delight had been banished.

But that interpretation of "abence of pain" is an argument Plutarch thinks some people are stupid enough to fall for. And the bitter truth is that people have proved that they are far more stupid that Plutarch gave them credit for being! Plutarch much be laughing in his grave to realize that he's helped destroy Epicurean philosophy - not by convincing people that it deprives them of pleasure they could otherwise have, but by convincing them that Epicurean philosophy isn't about pleasure at all!

Quote from Rolf

Why do we seek variation of pleasure? Why should we seek variation of pleasure?

Because nature tells us that all pleasure is pleasing and that is why it is called pleasure.

Quote from Rolf

How would you respond to confusion about absence of pain in a single clear and concise paragraph?

Epicurus considered "absence of pain" to be a philosophical term which describes the condition of any part of the body or mind, or of one's life as a whole, from which pain is absent. We need this general term because everyone's circumstances are different, but we still need a logical and understandable objective. Once you identify that all of life resolves into two feelings (pleasure and pain), and you choose to view your experience as a whole as a jar to be filled, it becomes logically obvious that the most desirable life possible is that in which the jar is filled with pleasures. Stating that your goal is "absence of pain" is the same as stating that your goal is "pleasure." Neither term implies that you are limiting your choice of pleasures to a particular physical or mental activity, and you are certainly not going to limit it to a subsistence minimum when more desirable pleasures are available. All pleasures are desirable, but some pleasures are more desirable than others. The proper goal is to set out to fill your experience (your jar of life) with the most pleasant combination of pleasures possible for you. Consideration of "natural and necessary" desires does not undermine this viewpoint, but supports it. Every step along the way of pursuing a jar full of pleasures, this consideration provides a rule of thumb that is not absolute but provides guidance as to which choices are most likely to lead to more pain than pleasure.

Quote from Rolf

2) I had absolutely zero knowledge of Epicureanism before coming here. My confusion here does not stem from the mainstream false interpretations of Epicurus. I hadn’t read Cicero or Plutarch, nor had I read any inaccurate books on Epicurean philosophy. While people like Cicero and Plutarch seemed to have wilfully distort Epicurus’ words, my questions about the philosophy come from a place of organic confusion. This matters because it means that I’m not struggling to break away from some prior false interpretation of the texts, but instead I’m trying to understand things from a fairly neutral standpoint. Your argument seems to focus a lot on disproving Cicero and Plutarch’s falsehoods, which I already disagree with, rather than independently clarifying the Epicurean view.

Yes I follow you and I think that's important. It's a remark that is kind of like Dave's perfectly correct comment to the effect that every quantum scientist is not a mystic in disguise.

All it takes is reading the letter to Menoeceus without any prior or other reading whatsoever and you're thrown headlong into this confusion.

That's because if we start and stop with that letter we are taking Epicurus' words out of context, and not accounting for the circumstance that Epicurus was writing for students who wanted summaries to make things easier to remember, but who were otherwise very familiar and had intimate access to his full views. For example, PD03 about the limit of the quantity of pleasure, and their inability to co-exist (and therefore there are only two options) is not spelled out in the letter to Menoeceus, but is essential background to avoid this confusion about "absence of pain."

You're not more confused than most other new readers. You're doing what most new readers fail to do -- rather than walk away from the obvious omissions from the letter and accepting apparent contradictions or even mysticism, you're seeing how that interpretation makes no sense and that it's essential to bring the full picture into focus so that this part can be understood.

It's definitely easy to see why Cicero and Plutarch would come up with this argument, because it can be made to look ridiculous due to lack of context. More troubling for me than that they chose the argument is that they got so far with it. No doubt these are the kinds of questions that the book(s) on the "goal" from which Cicero was quoting would have cleared up these issues, so their loss is particularly damaging.

I think there's a problem related to what Rolf is asking about that needs our best response. Here's an effort to describe that problem and give a provisional answer:

"If it's so easy, Epicurus, to caricature your philosophy to make it seem like the opposite of pleasure, don't you think you have a problem with the way you're saying it?"

There's a section of Frances Wright's chapter ten, especially the part I underlined below, that makes a similar point, where she has Epicurus say:

“Zeno, in his present speech, has rested much of the truth of his system on its expediency; I, therefore, shall do the same by mine. The door to my gardens is ever open, and my books are in the hands of the public; to enter, therefore, here, into the detail or the expounding of the principles of my philosophy, were equally out of place and out of season. ‘Tell us not that that is right which admits of evil construction; that that is virtue which leaves an open gate to vice.’ This is the thrust which Zeno now makes at Epicurus; and did it hit, I grant it were a mortal one. From the flavour, we pronounce of the fruit; from the beauty and the fragrance, of the flower; and in a system of morals, or of philosophy, or of whatever else, what tends to produce good we pronounce to be good, what to produce evil, we pronounce to be evil."

I think part of the answer to this question would include referring to VS29. (Bailey) “In investigating nature I would prefer to speak openly and like an oracle to give answers serviceable to all mankind, even though no one should understand me, rather than to conform to popular opinions and so win the praise freely scattered by the mob.”

I don't think Epicurus expected that his letter to Menoeceus would survive isolated from his other ethical works on the End, and his works on the Canon and On Nature and so forth. When he wanted to distill his ethical philosophy down to its core essence, he chose to include in PD03 the key fundamental point which is not stated so bluntly in the Letter to Menoecus: PD03. The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body, nor of mind, nor of both at once.

If the Principal Doctrines had survived and the Letter to Menoeceus had not, I don't think we'd be in nearly the same situation we are now. We'd still have knowledge that absence of pain is a crucial concept, but we wouldn't be dealing with the confusion caused by saying in isolation that when all pain is gone we have no need for pleasure. That statement makes sense only when you realize that it means that we have no further need for more pleasure because our experience is already full of pleasures. We haven't gotten rid of pleasure along with pain, we'll filled our experience with all our own personal combination of those mental and physical experiences that everyone recognizes as pleasure, along with those other experiences of health and stability that everyone doesn't but should also recognize as pleasure.

If you keep PD03 firmly in mind as the starting point, and you realize that it's being stated as the third most important thing to know in the whole philosophy, more important even than a statement that Pleasure is the goal of life, it's easier to see that there's something special about this formulation which has to be treated like an axiom never to be contradicted. With PD03 in mind you know that pleasure and pain cannot coexist in the same space, and that no more pleasure can be added when all pain has been removed.

And if you know anything about the major philosophical debates of the age, you know that this addresses the major objection to holding Pleasure to be the greatest good that had been stated by the opposing philosophers: that pleasure can always be made better by adding more, and that therefore pleasure can never be properly viewed as full or complete. You don't need to be told that Pleasure is desirable, because no one in their right mind would assert that (even though the Stoics and others moved in that direction). What you needed most of all to be told is that there is an answer to the anti-Pleasure logic problem, and that the answer to the logic problem is that Pleasure when viewed as "Absence of Pain" cannot be improved - there is no "better" than can be reached by adding more pleasure when your experience is already completely full of pleasure because you have removed all non-pleasurable experiences.

This is the key philosophical answer which Epicurus' formulations was targeted at explaining. Epicurus was aware that he could and would be misconstrued and misrepresented, but he also knew that nothing will satisfy that type of person. The most important thing was to provide the key for those who are capable of figuring the problem out. No doubt in other places he did explain the issues in more plain and simple terms, but it appears confusing to us because from Epicurus' own hands only one letter on ethics and a list of key doctrines survives.

That's one way I would begin to answer someone who legitimately asks Why didn't he state this more clearly and why does this have to be so confusing?

Quote from Rolf

Regardless of all the abstract reasoning I’m engaging in while trying to understand this point,

Well you may have found something to say that I disagree with! I don't think your comments constitute abstract reasoning (with the implication that there's something improper about them). I think the questions you are asking are the most practical possible. If good answers do not exist to them, then Epicurean philosophy is worse than worthless.

I can't imagine much that would be worse than a philosophy that would appear to argue that the goal of life is to obsess over being anesthetized from all pain, and living with the minimum pleasure possible to sustain you. In fact, that's exactly what I strongly criticize the Stoics, Buddhists, and others for in essence advocating.

I've not yet made up my mind to do this, but it appears that neither Joshua nor Don are available for this weekend's podcast. While we wait on Joshua's return before going further in Tusculan Disputations, I am thinking of using this thread of comments on Episode 295 and just recording a commentary as I pick out some to talk about on the general topic of Plutarch's criticisms, especially on "absence of pain" (I will omit the names of the post writers).

So if you're considering adding a comment to this thread, please do, as that will give us more material with which to work. And to repeat, if I do this at all I'll pull out only the thrust of the comments and I won't be associating them with names of posters (other than probably Don as he made his points on the first episode).

This thread is going to become a primary resource for arguments about absence of pain, so I want to include here one of the major sections by DeWitt bearing on this, from Chapter 12 of his book under the subheading "The Unity of Pleasure":

Quote

Though we certainly fall short of possessing the whole argument of Epicurus, there is ample evidence upon which to construct the skeleton of a case. The Feelings, as usual, are the criterion. It may be recalled how he proved life itself to be the greatest good by pointing out that the greatest joy is associated with the escape from some dreadful destruction. By a similar argument, even if not extant, it could be shown that the recovery of health is a positive pleasure when the individual has recently survived a perilous illness. It would be a positive pleasure also to be freshly relieved from the fear of death and the gods through the discovery of the true philosophy.

To substantiate this drift of reasoning it is not impossible to quote a text: "The stable condition of well-being in the flesh and the confident hope of its continuance means the most exquisite and infallible of joys for those who are capable of figuring the problem out." [Usener 68]

This passage marks a distinct increase of precision in the analysis of pleasure. Its import will become clear if the line of reasoning already adumbrated be properly extended: let it be granted that the escape from a violent death is the greatest of joys and the inference must follow that the possession of life at other times cannot rank greatly lower. Similarly, if the recovery from a dangerous illness be a cause for joy, manifestly the possession of health ought to be a joy at other times. Nevertheless the two pleasures differ from one another and it was in recognition of the difference that Epicurus instituted the distinction between kinetic and static pleasures. The difference is one of intensity or, as Epicurus would have said, of condensation. At one time the pleasure is condensed, at another, extended. In other words the same pleasure may be either kinetic or static. If condensed, it is kinetic; if extended, it is static.

There is a catch to this reasoning, however; it holds good only "for those who are capable of figuring the problem out." This marks Epicurus as a pragmatist, insisting upon the control of experience, including thought. His reasoning about kinetic and static pleasures is sound, but human beings do not automatically reason after this fashion; they fail to reason about the matter at all. Although they would spontaneously admit the keenest joy at recovery from wounds or disease, they forget about the blessing of health at other times. Hence it is that Epicurus insists upon the necessity of being able to reason in this way. Moreover, this reasoning must be confirmed by habituation. The same rule applies here as in the case of "Death is nothing to us." It is not enough to master the reasons for so believing; it is also necessary to habituate one's self to so believe. [Diogenes Laertius, 10.124] This is pragmatism.

There is also another catch to this line of reasoning. The conclusion clashes with the teaching of Aristippus and Plato and it also violates the accepted usage of language. It was not usual to call the possession of health a pleasure and still less usual to call freedom from pain a pleasure. It was this objection that Cicero had in mind when he wrote: "You Epicureans round up people from all the crossroads, decent men, I allow, but certainly of no great education. Do such as they, then, comprehend what Epicurus means, while I, Cicero, do not?" [Cicero, De Finibus, 2.4.12-13] The common people of the ancient world, however, for whom Platonism had nothing attractive, seem to have accepted Epicurean pragmatism with gladness. Cicero, being partial to the aristocratic philosophy and having no zeal to promote the happiness of the multitude, chose to sneer.

The irritation which Cicero simulates in the above passage was beyond doubt genuine with those from whom the argument was inherited. They had been nettled by the phraseology of Epicurus, who was mocking Plato. The words "those who are capable of figuring the problem out" are a parody of Plato's Timaeus 40d, where the text reads "those who are incapable of making the calculations" and the reference is to mathematical calculations of the movements of the celestial bodies, which "bring fears and portents of future events" to the ignorant. Baiting the adversary was a favorite sport of Epicurus.

Epicureans at a later time were in their turn subjected to incessant baiting by Stoic opponents, and it may have been these who tried the reduction to the absurd by means of a ridiculous example. If those who are not in a state of pain are in a state of pleasure, "then the host who, though not being thirsty himself, mixes a cocktail for a guest is in the same state of pleasure as the guest who is thirsty and drinks the said cocktail." [Cicero, De Finibus, 2.5.17]

Cicero, however, had his tongue in his cheek and knew that this was mere dialectical sparring, intended rather to disconcert the opponent than to refute him. He was partial to the New Academy and to Stoicism, both of which tended to turn argumentation into a game and thus make it an end in itself. They could not fail to be intolerant of the procedures of pragmatism, of which action is the primary object and not logomachy.

This extension of the name of pleasure to freedom from fear and pain was not the sole achievement of the new analysis. In popular thought, the correctness of which Plato assumed, pleasures were classified according to the parts of the body affected, eating, drinking, sexual indulgence, philosophical thinking. In respect also of this conventional classification Epicurus exhibited finer discrimination. He not only discerned that the pleasure associated with one organ is brief and intense while that associated with other parts is moderate and extended but also observed that certain pleasures, like that of escaping a violent death, affect the whole organism.

The next step in this new analysis was to declare that this fact of extension or intension was of no fundamental importance. The high value assigned to this principle is indicated by its promulgation as Authorized Doctrine 9: "If every pleasure were alike condensed in duration and associated with the whole organism or the dominant parts of it, pleasures would never differ from one another." Positively stated, the meaning would be that pleasure is always pleasure; it is of no consequence that some pleasures are associated with the mind, others with the stomach, and others with other parts, or that some affect the whole organism and others only a part, or that some are brief and intense, others moderate and extended. In other words, it makes no difference that some pleasures are static and others kinetic. Pleasure is a unit. This unity could be expressed in ancient terminology by saying that all pleasure was a kind of motion, kinesis or motio, the ancient equivalent of reaction.

To put the colophon upon this topic it should be added that three Authorized Doctrines, Nos. 8, 9, and 10, deal with pleasure and all three imply the quality of unity. The eighth stresses the fact that the evil attaches solely to the consequences; all pleasures are alike in being good: "No pleasure is evil in itself but the practices productive of certain pleasures bring troubles in their train that by many times outweigh the pleasures themselves."

The ninth Doctrine has been quoted above. In it the item about "condensed pleasure" was pounced upon by Damoxenus of the New Comedy as a good cue for merrymaking; quite aptly he allowed a cook to dilate upon it.[Fragment 2, pages 349-350 (Kock)] Some five centuries afterward the frivolous Alciphron testified to the longevity of the theme by assuming it to be still good for a laugh.[Usener, 432]

The tenth Doctrine, last of the three, serves to shift all ethical condemnation from pleasures themselves to the consequences: "If the practices productive of the pleasures of profligates dispelled the fears of the mind about celestial things and death and pains and also taught the limit of the desires, we should never have fault to find with profligates, enjoying pleasures to the full from all quarters, and suffering neither pain nor distress from any quarter, wherein the evil lies." Such declarations afforded to enemies of Epicurus a means of besmirching his name, but he was absolutely honest; he did not evade the logical implications of his principles; he flaunted them. By disposition he was a teaser; he drew enjoyment from the squirming of the piously orthodox.

A variation of the same teaching appears in an isolated saying. "I enjoy the fullness of pleasure living on bread and water and I spit upon the pleasures of a luxurious diet, not on account of any evil in these pleasures themselves but because of the discomforts that follow upon them." [Usener, 181] The net effect of these pronouncements is to put all pleasures in a single class, all being good, irrespective of extension or condensation or of the organ affected or of approval or disapproval, which attach only to consequences. This is an instance where Epicurus exhibited deeper insight than Plato in the latter's own field, discerning the one in the many.

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And even more directly DeWitt concludes his section "Pleasure Can Be Continuous" of Chapter 12 this way:

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Even at the present day the same objection is raised. For instance, a modern Platonist, ill informed on the true intent of Epicurus, has this to say: "What, in a word, is to be said of a philosophy that begins by regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content?" [P. E. More, Hellenistic Philosophies (Princeton University Press, 1923), page 20.] This ignores the fact that this was but one of the definitions of pleasure offered by Epicurus, that he recognized kinetic as well as static pleasures. It ignores also the fact that Epicurus took personal pleasure in public festivals and encouraged his disciples to attend them and that regular banquets were a part of the ritual of the sect. Neither does it take account of the fact that in the judgment of Epicurus those who feel the least need of luxury enjoy it most and that intervals of abstinence enhance the enjoyment of luxury.[Diogenes Laertius, 10.131] Thus the Platonic objector puts upon himself the necessity of denying that the moderation of the rest of the year furnishes additional zest to the enjoyment of the Christmas dinner; he has failed to become aware of the Epicurean zeal for "condensing pleasure."

I have never previously tracked down DeWitt's reference to the P.E. More criticism, but More's book is on Archive.org and here is the relevant section in greater detail. It is very interesting and I think very helpful to read through this kind of strong denunciation of Epicurus. I am going through the full section and will post it here because it amplifies the reasoning that Don and I discussed in the podcast and which Rolf is asking about.

This is a long quote but think the forum software will provide a collapsible box so it doesn't break the flow of the thread. The analysis is perverse just as DeWitt describes it, but it's well worth reading in full as an expansive interpretation in modern language of Plutarch's criticism. This is a position that is widespread and if you're a fan of Epicurus you need to understand the argument and have a position on why it is wrong. Rolfe who is asking the question and Don who read Plutarch recently for the podcast will definitely see how it tracks.

Quote from P.E. More - "Hellenistic Philosophies"

The difficulty that confronts us when we try to understand Epicurus is the extraordinary paradox of his logic. What, in a word, is to be said of a philosophy that begins with regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content? There is no possibility, I think, of really reconciling this blunt contradiction, which was sufficiently obvious to the enemies of Epicurus in antiquity, but it is possible, with the aid of Plutarch’s shrewd analysis, to follow him step by step from his premises to his conclusions, and so to discover the source of his entanglement. [Note 1]

Epicurus began with the materialistic and monistic theses which had allured Aristippus, and which, mingled in varying proportions from the teaching of Heraclitus and Protagoras and Democritus, had come to be the prevailing belief of the Greek people; they were, indeed, no more than the essence refined out of the voluble lecturing and debating of the so-called sophists against whom Socrates and Plato had waged a relentless but unsuccessful warfare. This visible palpable world of bodies is the only reality, and the only thing which to man, in such a world, has any certain value is his own immediate physical sensations. Pleasure we feel and pain we feel, in their various degrees and complications; and we know that all men welcome pleasure and shrink from pain by a necessity of nature. Pleasure, in fact, is simply a name for the sensation which we do welcome, and pain for the sensation from which we do shrink. The example of infants and animals is before us to nullify any attempt to argue away this primary distinction.

These are the premises of Epicurus, as they had been of Aristippus, and to these he will cling through thick and thin, whatever their consequences may be and however they may entangle him in self-contradictions.He seems even to have gone out of his way at times to find the grossest terms to express the doctrine, whether his motive was to shock the Philistines of morality or to fortify himself and his friends in their positive belief. The avowed programme of the school was “not to save the Greeks, but to indulge the belly to the limit of safety with meat and drink”; and in a letter to a friend Epicurus says: “I invite you to continuous pleasures, not to virtues that unsettle the mind with vain and empty hopes of fruition.”

The programme is simple enough in all conscience, and might satisfy the most cynical votary of the flesh, but, desiring like his predecessor to be a voluptuary, Epicurus was driven despite himself to be a philosopher, even more a philosopher than the Cyrenaic, whether his wisdom came from deeper reflection or greater timidity. His experience might be described as the opposite of that of Johnson’s humble acquaintance who had been trying all his life to attain philosophy but failed because cheerfulness would break in. Aristippus could make a boast of his Habeo, non habeor, but, however he might twist about, his dependence on the fleeting sensation of the moment left him at last a prey to the hazards of circumstance.

Clearly the hedonist who was enough of a philosopher to aim at liberty and security must embrace a wider view of life than the Cyrenaic; and so the first step of Epicurus was to take happiness, conceived as a continuous state of pleasure, rather than particular pleasures, for the goal. This is the initial, and perhaps the most fundamental, difference between the strictly Epicurean and the Cyrenaic brand of hedonism.

But how, taking individual pleasures still in the grossly physical sense, was a man to assure himself of their consummation in happiness? It was well to make a god of the belly and, in the Epicurean language, of any other passage of the body that admitted pleasure and not pain, but, as soon as he began to reflect, the philosopher was confronted by the ugly fact that the entrances of pain are more numerous than those of pleasure, and that the paroxysms of pain may surpass in intensity any conceivable pleasure. He saw that there was something ephemeral and insecure in the very nature of pleasure, whereas pain had terrible rights over the flesh, and could dispute her domain with a vigour far beyond the power of her antagonist. Evidently, in a world so constituted, the aim of the philosopher will be lowered from a bold search for sensations to the humbler task of attaining some measure of security against forces he cannot control; and so, I think, we shall interpret the curious phenomenon that the greatest of all hedonists was driven to a purely defensive attitude towards life.

On the one hand he knew, as Plato had shown, that the recovery from disease and the relief from anguish do bring a sense of active well-being, and hence it was possible for him to define pleasure in negative terms without seeming to contradict flagrantly his grosser views about the belly and other bodily organs. Again, since positive pleasure and pain by some law of nature are so intimately bound together that the cessation of one is associated with access of the other,[2] then, clearly, the only pleasure free of this unpleasant termination is that which is itself not positively induced but comes as the result of receding pain. For the content of happiness, therefore, the Epicurean will look to sensation of a negative sort : “The limit of pleasure is reached by the removal of all that gives pain,” and “Pleasure in the flesh admits no increase, when once the pain of want is removed; it can only be variegated.”[3] But the philosopher cannot stop here, Such a state of release, though in itself it may not be subject to the laws of alternative pleasure and pain, is yet open to interruption from the hazards of life. And so Epicurus, in his pursuit of happiness, is carried a step further.

Not on the present possession of pleasure, whether positive or negative, will he depend for security of happiness, but on the power of memory. Here, at least, we appear to be free and safe, for memory is our own. Nothing can deprive us of that recollected joy, “which is the bliss of solitude” ; even what was distressful at the time may often, by some alchemy of the mind, be transmuted into a happy reminiscence:

‘Things which offend when present, and affright, In memory, well painted, move delight." [Note 4]

The true hedonism, then, will be a creation in the mind from material furnished it by the body. Plutarch describes the procedure of Epicurus thus, and exposes also its inadequacy: Seeing that the field of joy in our poor bodies cannot be smooth and equal, but harsh and broken and mingled with much that is contrary, he transfers the exercise of philosophy from the flesh, as from a lean and barren soil, to the mind, in the hopes of enjoying there, as it were, large pastures and fair meadows of delight. Not in the body but in the soul is the true garden of the Epicurean to be cultivated. It might seem as if by the waving of a magic wand we had been translated from a materialistic hedonism to a region like that in which Socrates and Plato looked for unearthly happiness.

But in fact there is no such magic for the Epicurean. The source of the pleasures which compose our happiness is still physical, and only physical; the office of the soul, so-called, is merely to retain by an act of selective memory the scattered impressions of sensuous pleasure and to forestall these by an act of selective expectation. If you hear the Epicurean crying out and testifying that the soul has no power of joy and tranquility save in what it draws from the flesh, and that this is its only good, what can you say but that he uses the soul as a kind of vessel to receive the strainings from the body, as men rack wine from an old and leaky jar into a new one to take age, and so think they have done some wonderful thing.

And no doubt wine may be kept and mellowed with time, but the soul preserves no more than a feeble scent of what it takes into memory; for pleasure, as soon as it has given out one hiss in the body, forthwith expires, and that little of it which lags behind in memory is but flat and like a queasy fume, as if a man should undertake to feed himself today on the stale recollection of what he ate and drank yesterday. What the Epicureans have is but the empty shadow and dream of a pleasure that has taken wing and fled away, and that serves but for fuel to foment their untamed desires, as in sleep the unreal satisfaction of thirst and love only stings to a sharper lust of waking intemperance.

Memory, though it promise a release from the vicissitudes of fortune, is still too dependent on the facts of life, too deeply implicated in the recurrence of passionate desires. There is no finality of happiness here, and so the Epicurean is driven on to further refinement. If pushed hard, he will take refuge in imagining a possible painlessness of the body and a possible stability of untroubled ease. Life itself, in some rare instances, may afford the substance of this comfort, and memory then will be sufficient; but if the substance eludes us, we have still that within us which by the exercise of free will can lull the mind into fancying it remembers what it never possessed. Step by step the reflective hedonist has been driven by the lessons of experience from the pursuit of positive pleasure to acquiescence in pleasure conceived as the removal of pain; from present ease in the flesh to the subtilizing power of memory in the mind, and, when memory is starved, to the voluntary imagination that life has gone well with him. The fabled ataraxy, or imperturbable calm, of the Epicurean turns out to be something very like a pale beatitude of illusory abstraction from the tyranny of facts, the wilful mirage of a soul which imagines itself, but is not really, set apart from the material universe of chance and change.

Habeo non habeor, was the challenge of Aristippus to the world; the master of the Garden will be content with the more modest half : Non Habeor. There is something to startle the mind in this defensive conclusion of a philosophy which opened its attack on life under such brave and flaunting coIours. There is much to cause reflection when one considers how in the end hedonism is forced into an unnatural conjunction with the other monistic philosophy with which its principles are in such violent conflict. For this ataraxy of the avowed lover of ease and pleasure can scarcely be distinguished from the apathy which the Stoic devotees of pain and labour glorified as the goal of life. This is strange. It is stranger still, remembering this negative conclusion of Epicurean and Stoic, by which good becomes a mere deprivation of evil, to cast the mind forward to the metaphysics of another and later school of monism which led the Neoplatonist to reckon evil as a mere deprivation of good. Into such paradoxical combinations and antagonisms we are driven as soon as we try to shun the simple truth that good is good and evil is evil, each in its own right and judged by its immediate effect in the soul. It may appear from the foregoing that the hedonist, in his pursuit of the summum bonum, argues from point to point in a straight line; in practice he seems rather to follow no single guide, but to fluctuate between two disparate yet inseparable motives.

At one time, in a world where physical sensation is the only criterion of truth, the basis of all reality, the liberty of enjoyment is the lure that draws him on; at another time, in a world of chance and change or of mechanical law which takes no great heed of our wants, it seems as if security from misadventure must be the limit of man’s desire. Other philosophers, the Platonist in his vision of the world of Ideas, the Christian in his submission to the will of God, may see their way running straight before them to the one sure goal of spiritual happiness, in which liberty and security join hands. The path of the hedonist wavers from side to side, aiming now at positive pleasure and now at mere escape from pain; and this, I take it, is one of the curious reprisals of truth, that the dualist should have in view a single end, whereas the monist should be distracted by a double purpose. Whether one or the other of the revolving objects shall stand out clearer before the hedonist’s gaze, will depend perhaps chiefly upon his temperament. With an Aristippus the pleasure of the moment is supreme, though he too will have his eye open for the need of safety; with an Epicurus, more timid by nature and more reflective, the thought of security at the last will almost, if never quite, obliterate the enticement of pleasure. It was still as a good Epicurean that Horace could write:

Speme voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas.

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[Note 1: Non Posse Suaviter Vivi Secundum Epicurum, I draw freely on the racy language of the old English translation.]

[Note 2: This association of pleasure and pain was familiar to Plato, He refers to it in Phaedo 60b, and deals with it at greater length in the Philebus.]

[Note 3: Sayings 3 and 18. In my quotations I sometimes adopt the language of the excellent versions in R. D. Hicks’s Stoic and Epicurean.]

[Note 4: Cowley, Upon His Majesty's Bestoration.]

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