Ongoing Discussion of Jack Gedney's "Untroubled" Substack Blog

This is not meant to be nearly as negative as it is going to sound. Be sure to read to the last line of my post.

But - here's a quote from the article:

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O’Keefe’s latest piece on Epicurean ethics is another work of helpful synthesis. While many correctly note that Epicurean “hedonism” is primarily about the reduction of pain, that bald summary can overlook the next layer of analysis: Epicurus believes that avoiding bodily pain is pretty simple, and that therefore most of our therapeutic attention should go to avoiding mental pain. The largest component of mental pain is fear. (Epicurus does also discuss other disturbing emotions such as regret and envy.)

"Correctly note that Epicurean "hedonism" is primarily about the reduction of pain!" ????

As a technical statement this means nothing different from saying "primarily about pleasure" because absence of pain and pleasure are the same thing.

As a choice of wording in presenting the philosophy it is disastrous. And the elaboration that follows it just digs the hole deeper. The whole line of thinking is not only inaccurate, but It encourages the worst tendencies of seeing the world as mostly suffering, as if through a Buddhist or Stoic prism.

I've read enough of OKeefe over the years to think that this problem isn't attributable to Jack Gedney, but rather it's the sense I've gotten from reading O'Keefe directly. This is exactly why I take O'Keefe very cautiously and do not prefer to cite his articles, even though they often contain very good research and information.

I don't think this is the way Emily Austin conveys Epicurus ("Living for Pleasure") and I would consider her work head and shoulders better than OKeefe's.

Other than that I applaud Jack Gedney (I don't know who he is either) for his activity!

I am really glad Don posted that article because otherwise I might not have seen it.

It very much helps crystallize my thinking about one of the most important moderating decisions I have to make in administering this forum.

If someone comes here thinking that "Epicurean 'hedonism' is primarily about the reduction of pain," then I would welcome them and welcome the opportunity to explain how that is an inversion of the truth and of the meaning of the reliable ancient texts.

However if someone comes here dedicated to and advocating the idea that "many correctly note that Epicurean 'hedonism' is primarily about the reduction of pain" then that is beyond the terms of our "Community Standards" and "Terms of Use" and our "Not Neo-Epicurean" statement, and their membership will be rescinded.

There are plenty of places on the internet where people can focus on suffering and devote their time to studying Buddhism and Stoicism to the exclusion of and with indifference to joy, delight, pleasure, and happiness as those terms are ordinarily understood by ordinary people.

The purpose of this forum is to study and promote Classical Epicurean Philosophy as Epicurus taught it. It is extremely important for us to grapple with Epicurus' framing of the term "absence of pain" and explain how Epicurus is about PLEASURE - which can indeed be defined for certain important uses as "absence of pain" or "reduction of pain." But to place PAIN in the center of the philosophy rather than PLEASURE is not what the ancient Epicureans did, and it's not consistent with the mission of this forum to allow for the regular advocacy of that position here.

Again, we'll talk about pleasure and absence of pain as often and as intensely as necessary, but if in the future some new person wishes to join and use their membership to cross over into advocacy for Epicurean philosophy is primarily about alleviation of suffering on a regular basis that's something that will not be allowed to continue.

Just to be clear - neither Don nor anyone else here has done that, nor are they anywhere close to doing so. I think it's likely that our "Community Standards" and "Terms of Service" and "Not Neo-Epicurean" statements that are stressed in our registration process have done their intended work, and we don't have dedicated advocates for that position here.

But new people come on the scene all the time, and this is a good opportunity to write something up to address this.

As administrator I have no right or ability to state flatly that "this is" or "this is not" true Epicurean philosophy for the general world and for all time. Everyone has to decide that for themselves. But I do have the right and ability to help steer this forum into the direction set for it when it was launched, and as long as I am here to administrate I will continue to do that.

Peace and love to all!

Quote from Cassius

Peace and love to all!

Backatcha!

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For instance, “natural” desires for food or sex are biologically determined and probably can’t be eliminated. To argue for their elimination would be foolish, so instead we should try to manage those desires prudently. In contrast, unnatural desires (which are culturally learned, rather than innate) are more likely candidates for elimination: the desires to be portrayed in public statues or to have a billion dollars, for instance, are clearly not innate, and so it seems plausible to remove those desires through the cognitive training of philosophy.

Here's something i really disagree with on with the TIm O'Keef, and i've been curious about other's opinion on this for a long time.

Does Epicurus mean natural as innate or natural as in nature approves of it? I think Tim O'Keefe misreads natural desires as meaning innate, whereas it actually means "actually helps with pleasure", this is why natural desires can turn into vain or unnatural desires if they become sources of stress or likely to cause harm. It's natural and should be pursued when brining more pleasure than pain but unnatural when not and should be shunned. There is also the fact that i think Epicurus just outright disagrees that sex or lavish food is necessary for happiness and can't be eliminated and he seems to say the opposite below.

PD30: Those natural desires which create no pain when unfulfilled, though pursued with an intense effort, are also due to baseless opinion; and if they are not dispelled, it is not because of their own nature, but because of human vanity.

Emily A. Austin seems to agree with me on this btw.

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While both necessary and extravagant desires earn Epicurus' endorsement as "natural," corrosives desires are both unnatural and unnecessary. Recall that when Epicurus says "unnatural" here, he doesn't mean "artificial". Instead he means contrary to our nature, or not conductive to human well-being. (Pg.50)

I quite like DeWitt on this point;

That's from pages 66-67 of Epicurus and his Philosophy. Lucretius had indeed written (Book IV, line 823) that sight did not exist before the eyes, or language before the tongue; these organs were not created to fulfill a purpose. Rather, their existence afforded the opportunity to be adapted by the organism for the uses with which we now associate them.

In this way the early Epicureans prefigured Charles Darwin, who also wrote about the eye in a well-remembered passage that is often abused by creationists:

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To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

But if Epicurus rejected the Platonic and Aristotelian view of teleology, what justification can we make for his continued use of the word telos (τέλος)? DeWitt resolves the problem by suggesting that, while Epicurus did throw out creationism and intelligent design, he did not wholly reject teleology.

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"This amounts to saying that a nonpurposive Nature had produced a purposive creature, for whom alone an end or goal of living could have a meaning. This is teleology at a minimum."

He enlarges on this theme with a discussion of the word nature as opposed to reason on pages 127-132, and here is a relevant excerpt:

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The priority of Nature was also insisted upon in establishing the identity of the end or telos. Aristotle had furnished a precious hint in this connection; he wrote "that perhaps even in the case of the lower animals there is some natural good superior to their scale of intelligence which aims at the corresponding good." To this principle Epicurus adapted his procedure. By the promptings of Nature alone, apart from reason, every animate thing, the moment it is born, reaches out for pleasure and shrinks from pain. Consistent with this reasoning is the steady practice of referring to pleasure as "the end of Nature," which occurs five times in our scant remains. As analogous phrases may be cited "the good of Nature" and "the pleasure of Nature," all of them implying that reason played no necessary role in establishing the truth. Similar is the implication of parallel phrases such as "the wealth of Nature," signifying that Nature and not reason reveals the true meaning of wealth; and also "the limits of Nature," implying that Nature and not reason teaches the true limits of the desires.

Quote from wbernys

Does Epicurus mean natural as innate or natural as in nature approves of it? I think Tim O'Keefe misreads natural desires as meaning innate, whereas it actually means "actually helps with pleasure", this is why natural desires can turn into vain or unnatural desires if they become sources of stress or likely to cause harm. It's natural and should be pursued when brining more pleasure than pain but unnatural when not and should be shunned. There is also the fact that i think Epicurus just outright disagrees that sex or lavish food is necessary for happiness and can't be eliminated and he seems to say the opposite below.

Depending on how many further responses we get on this I may move Wbernys' comments and responses on this topic to a separate thread given that it seems to regularly be of interest.

Especially the second sentence I underlined:

Can a natural desire turn into an unnatural desire? If so, what does that mean?

Does that mean that the true defining criteria of what should be classified as natural or unnatural is not whether the desire in question is with us at birth, but something about the way we pursue it?

Ok there Don you're addressing the full categorization scheme by referencing necessary/unnecessary.

What if we focus precisely on one of the aspects of what wbernys said:

Can something that is a "natural desire" turn into an unnatural desire?

I think a lot of the confusion comes from the appropriate thought that we ought to be able to construct a table with "natural desires" in one column and "unnatural desires" on the other so that we can see clearly what distinguishes the two categories.

If "desire for food" is natural but "desire for caviar" is not, then should we not be able to consider them as forever separate so that we can see what element or aspect must be "added to" the desire for food in order to identify something that is unnatural?

And we ought to be able to do that separate from considering the "necessary" part.

Separate and apart from any other topic, what makes something "natural" and something else "unnatural"? It's NOT simply a question of "is it present at birth?" Or is it?

I presume your "Yes" means you think that you don't think it is sufficient to say "the desire was present at birth."

Separate and apart from the necessary criteria, what does "natural" mean? Because I can see someone arguing that if it's natural, it's natural from the start and forever, just like atoms have shape, size, and weight.

Quote from Don

Yes, I'm picking nits but they're nits that deserve picking.

Yes I very much agree that this needs deep analysis.

I think there is a simple answer to the meaning of natural/unnatural. It refers to the criterion provided by nature: the feelings.

A natural desire is one that is likely to result in net pleasure if fulfilled.

An unnatural desire is one that we only imagine as likely to produce pleasure, but in fact is likely result in net pain. Also referred to as "vain and empty". The first definition that comes up when I search "vain" is "not yielding the desired outcome; fruitless" - the desired outcome being pleasure. Empty means empty of pleasure.

Quote from Don

As is my wont, let's consult LSJ: The word Epicurus uses is φυσικός (physikos) "natural, produced or caused by nature, inborn, native; of or concerning the order of external nature, natural, physical." So, I take that to mean a desire which is aligned with the natural order of things, in other words, a desire which aligns with the natural order of seeking pleasure. If a desire leads to pain with no accompanying pleasure (I'm thinking the desire for the pleasure of a healthy body via the pain of exercise is natural) that's an "empty/vain/corrosive" desire.

Ok well now if I understand you that, that would be to consider nature as "aligned with the goal of nature" and NOT "inborn with us at birth." Presumably there could be something destructive inborn in us at birth that is NOT aligned with the goal of nature, thus those are two different things.

So you are in the "alignment with nature's goal" camp rather than "inborn at birth" camp?

I just realized that I forgot to include something that I always try to mention when the subject of Tim O'Keefe or any other professor comes up.

I try not to judge Tim O'Keefe or really even Emily Austin as primarily advocates for Epicurean philosophy. As far as I know they are professional educators and they aren't hired or for all I know allowed to be the kind of advocates for the philosophy that I attribute to the members of the school such as Lucretius or Diogenes of Oinoanda in the ancient world.

I've never read anything from Tim O'Keefe or most of these other academics either stating that they are personally endorsing what they write about. To some extent some sympathy with their subject is implicit, but they are not obligated to put the most sympathetic face on the Epicurean viewpoint. Certainly Cyril Bailey did not do that, and he is one of the authorities we rely on most for his translations. But I do keep in mind that Bailey very clearly stated that he did not agree with many of Epicurus' ethical positions.

So I just want to be sure to say that I've found a lot of valuable information whenever I've read Tim O'Keefe material. I just wouldn't look to him for an explanation of the Epicurean viewpoint from a position of advocating the most persuasive form of it that is possible.

Quote from Cassius

I try not to judge Tim O'Keefe or really even Emily Austin as primarily advocates for Epicurean philosophy. As far as I know they are professional educators and they aren't hired or for all I know allowed to be the kind of advocates for the philosophy that I attribute to the members of the school such as Lucretius or Diogenes of Oinoanda in the ancient world.

Cassius

There is a Comment to Geddy’s posting about O’Keefe, by D.S. Griffin, which follows much of the statements by you and Don .

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O'Keefe's work is detailed and documented and he is a serious scholar. His papers on friendship, natural desires, and wealth are all worth the time to read. But the framing in his paper on Achieving Tranquility is problematic.

O'Keefe writes that Epicurean hedonism is primarily about the reduction of pain.

That single sentence does real damage. Epicurus was explicit. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life. Not pain management. Not suffering reduction. Pleasure. Putting pain at the center rather than pleasure doesn't just shift the emphasis - it quietly imports a Buddhist or Stoic prism onto a philosophy that was built in direct opposition to both.

This isn't a minor semantic quibble. A reader who absorbs that Epicureanism is primarily about reducing pain walks away with a completely different philosophy than the one Epicurus actually taught. That framing makes Epicureanism sound like damage control for a life that is fundamentally difficult. The actual philosophy is a full throated argument that pleasure is the natural guide of every living thing from birth and that a life organized around that fact is genuinely available to anyone willing to think clearly about what they actually need.

Epicureanism keeps getting filtered through frameworks that dilute it. Buddhist suffering. Stoic virtue in disguise. Humanist civic obligation. Academic hedging that sands down the sharpest edges. O'Keefe's framing here is a milder version of the same problem. Epicurean philosophy doesn't need rehabilitation or translation into more respectable terms. It needs to be stated as Epicurus stated it.

Pleasure is the guide of life.

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Here is the response from the author of the post, Jack Gedney:, which provides the direct quotes from Epicurus, supporting O’Keefe’s premise.

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I think O'Keefe is being entirely true to Epicurus here. The redefinition of pleasure (compared to the popular conception) as the absence of pain is front and center in the core ethical texts.

Principal Doctrine 3 states that "The greatest magnitude of pleasure possible is the removal of all suffering." The Letter to Menoeceus 128 says "Everything we do is for this purpose: the avoidance of pain in our body and fear in our mind." A few lines later comes the sentence you quote, but the full version says this: "For it is when we feel pain from the absence of pleasure that we require pleasure; when all our pain has been relieved, we need no further pleasure. This is why we say that pleasure is the beginning and end of a blessed life."

As you note, O'Keefe is a serious scholar who makes sure to document his claims well, and there is plenty of evidence for this emphasis in the original texts. The ancient Epicureans clearly talked extensively about pain management, increasing security, and reducing painful emotions, while relegating positive pleasures to minor "variation" rather than actual amplification of happiness.

How is the response from Geddy supporting O’Keefe not a valid viewpoint on Epicurus’ writings?

Because he is ignoring the well documented point, stressed by Torquayus as well, that there are only two feelings, pleasure and pain, and that the absence of one is the presence of the other.

He is talking as if less pain is something different and better than more pleasure when in fact they are exactly the same thing.