Gassendi On Happiness

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    Cassius, thank you for starting this thread, and glad folks are finding the essay of interest! I became intrigued by Gassendi for reasons that have been touched on in the thread--i.e., he's a crucial link to the modern era. I was specifically interested in his take on "liberty" and how this links up with the modern understanding of the term. And then I noticed that "Happiness" had relevance to some of the things we have been discussing in the forum and our Sunday sessions.

    Certainly some problem areas, as both you and Patrikios (and Karl Marx) have pointed out. So I'm also quite interested in the divergences, some of which you have identified already. Regarding Gassendi's dismissal of active pleasures, I see that he is going to great lengths to distinguish Epicurus from Aristippus, and maybe this leads him to overcompensate by implying that Epicureans were sort of proto-monastics.

    I've only started exploring his work and don't have a good read yet on the availability of translation. I started with the 1699 text, then had a look at the PDF I shared and decided that it was reliable. It's certainly easier to read! But I'll continue poking around.

    Patrikios, you've really got me interested now in Marx's take on Epicurus. The fact that Epicurus influenced thinkers as divergent as Jefferson and Marx blows my mind.

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    Quote from Robert

    The fact that Epicurus influenced thinkers as divergent as Jefferson and Marx blows my mind.

    No doubt! Once I saw a few Lucretian callbacks in Shakespeare, I began compiling a list of other writers who make explicit or indirect mention of either Epicurean Philosophy or De Rerum Natura (usually the latter, having been received from Latin): Bacon, Bergson, Byron, Chaucer, de Bergerac, Darwin, Deleuze, Descartes, Diderot, d’Holbach, Dryden, Einstein, Erasmus, Frederick II, Freud, Gassendi, Goethe, Halley, Hitchens, Hobbes, Horace, Hume, Kant, La Mettrie, Leo X, Locke, Lovecraft, Machiavelli, Milton, Montaigne, Newton, Nietzsche, Pope, Rousseau, Sagan, Santayana, Shakespeare, Spenser, Spinoza, Stevenson, Tennyson, Thomsen, Virgil, Voltaire, Whitman, and Wordsworth.

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    Here's the detail on what was mentioned in post 7 above. On page 56 Bernier/Gassendi is alleging (incorrectly in my view) that Epicurus did not make the statement that he would not know what good is but for the pleasures of sensation. Rather, he's alleging that this is a fraudulent statement inserted by Stoics. I'd say this is a gross error, and comes from failing to address Epicurean Canonics/Physics (probably due to the blinders of religion). Having not paid attention to that, Bernier/Gassendi fail to see that this statement is focused on the feelings/anticipations/senses as the Canonical test of knowledge, rather than a statement on practical ethics. He goes on at some length about this and it's a major problem - I'm just marking it here so we know where to find it starting on pdf page 56.

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    Cassius I can't help but be amused by Gassendi's tactic for defusing this problematic (from his point of view) Epicurean statement--blame it on the slanderous Stoics! But I notice that in "On the Nature of the Gods," it's Cotta the Academic Skeptic who references the controversial statement, not Balbus the Stoic. And Cotta gives the impression that the Epicurean saying was well-known, originated from Epicurus himself, and was often repeated by Epicureans.

    He also makes the connection to Epicurean physics that you allude to above--no good can be experienced apart from sensation. Conversely, Gassendi's objection to the statement would reflect his objection to materialism. As you suggest, his religious biases come into play.

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    Yes, that fragment is remarkably well-attested:

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    [06] They say that he wrote to many other women of pleasure and particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also in love; and that in the treatise On the End of Life he wrote, ‘I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight.’

    -Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers Bailey Translation

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    Thus you speak: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain.” And these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted.

    -Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Yonge Translation

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    I do not suppose, Velleius, that you are like some of the Epicureans, who are ashamed of those expressions of Epicurus, in which he openly avows that he has no idea of any good separate from wanton and obscene pleasures, which, without a blush, he names distinctly.

    -Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Yonge Translation

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    For Epicurus says, without any concealment, but speaking with a loud voice, as it were, "For I am not able to distinguish what is good if you once take away the pleasure arising from sweet flavours, and if you also take away amatory pleasures." For this wise man thinks that even the life of the intemperate man is an unimpeachable one, if he enjoys an immunity from fear, and also mirth. On which account also the comic poets, running down the Epicureans, attack them as mere servants and ministers of pleasure and intemperance.

    -Athenaeus, The Banquet of the Learned, Yonge Translation

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