Discussion of the thread - Against Katastematic Supremacy - Pleasure Is A Unified Whole And Not A House Divided - Forum Editorial Policy

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Blog Article

Against Katastematic Supremacy - Pleasure Is A Unified Good, Not A House Divided Against Itself - INCLUDES FORUM EDITORIAL POLICY

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This entry has been superseded. Please read the current version here.

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The Current Establishment View - Which It Is the Editorial Policy Of EpicureanFriends.com to Reject

With only a few notable exceptions, practically every modern account of Epicurean ethics repeats the same claim: Epicurus divided pleasure into two distinct kinds, ranked one above the other. Pleasure, like a house, cannot stand if it is divided against itself — and that is exactly the…

Cassius

July 16, 2026 at 2:06 PM

There are all sorts of things that are reasonable Dave, but prolonged advocacy that Epicurus held that anything other than the word Pleasure is the supreme good is the target of this policy for the reasons stated in the article.

If the policy is unclear in some way please let me know. The goal is to reinforce the ultimate conclusion that appears at the head of this forum (If then even the glory of the Virtues, on which all the other philosophers love to expatiate so eloquently, has in the last resort no meaning unless it be based on Pleasure, whereas Pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically attractive and alluring, it cannot be doubted that Pleasure is the one supreme and final Good and that a life of happiness is nothing else than a life of Pleasure.")

which is the same as stated by Seneca to be posted outside the forum. Here our highest good is PLEASURE.

I think that those outside the forum who advance the argument which is the target of this policy probably understand very well the rhetorical question that is involved. The issue is not fine-tuning types of pleasure so as to reach the best result - that is a primary subject for us all to address. The question is what IS the best result, and as Diogenes of Oinoanda finally had to shout - a life of happiness is a life of pleasure. He did not shout katastematic pleasure, he shouted pleasure.

What is not acceptable here is to adopt the rhetoric of people who want to substitute some other term for pleasure as the description of he supreme good, and who run from use of the term pleasure as if it is embarrassing.

There are many places that people who believe that approach is best can advocate for it - outside this forum.

No doubt this policy will reduce the actual or potential number of participants here. We could become immensely more popular by adopting the rhetoric displayed in my collection of "World's Worst Epicurus Videos." But that's not an acceptble goal for this forum.

Quote from DaveT

Certainly a person can feel katastematic pleasure over longer periods of time than physical pleasure. Can we agree to that?

And interestingly, no - we can't even agree to that.. The "experts" themselves are all over the board as to what pleasures really fall within katastematic and kinetic in the first place. I have been going through the Kelly Arenson book today and she - who like Emily Austin largely if not fully agrees with the fundamentals of the Gosling & Taylor and Nikolsky position cited in my article - has a very different interpretation than I have seen before.

So no - other than the flat statement that Diogenes Laertius records Epicurus himself having said, there is very little if anything we can agree on with certainty as to anything about the meaning of "katastematic" or "kinetic" or the implications of those terms.

On the other hand, there is much we can agree on about pleasure. And while the katastematic-kinetic debate occupies some for another 2000 years, normal people need a fundamental understanding of Epicurus that focuses on pleasure as the category that defines the goal.

Quote from DaveT

After all, physical pain and discomfort are crucial bodily mechanisms to maintaining good health. So why is it unreasonable to distinguish the two forms of pleasure just within those distinctions?

It is not unreasonable at all to distinguish pleasures in terms of how long they last, what parts of the body they effect, and how intense they are? What is necessary about adding on words like "kinetic" and "katastematic" on top of that which Epicurus himself did not include in PD09?

Dave - You wrote:

Quote from DaveT

.Certainly a person can feel katastematic pleasure over longer periods of time than physical pleasure. Can we agree to that?

it appears to me that we can include among those who would not agree with that Professor Kelly Aronsen in her 2019 Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus. There, Aronsen parses kinetic vs. katastematic entirely differently from the mental vs physical your question implies:

Quote from Kelly Aronsen

Contrary to the dominant scholarly view, I argue that there is good reason to avoid classifying non-restorative pleasures as kinetic since they are not derived from movements toward painless, healthy functioning. In this chapter I contend that pleasures from taste, sex, sound, etc., are painless in themselves and are therefore katastematic; no matter whether they occur in the midst of pain (such as when we enjoy tasty food when hungry) or are isolated from pain (when we enjoy dessert after filling up on dinner), they are perceptions of the painless workings of the organism.

I don't write this to encourage us to spend more time looking for classical scholars to take sides with on the meaning of kinetic and katastametic. Nor should we throw up our hands and conclude that Epicurean philosophy is hopeless because we've lost so many texts. The right way forward for virtually everyone is to focus on the basics as it is clear that Lucretius, Diogenes of Oinoanda, Diogenes Laertius, and the general ancient world understood him. And it seems clear that they saw Epicurus as embracing pleasures of both types - pleasures of action or pleasures of state or whatever those words mean - and choosing among those pleasures by applying a a common sense analysis of whether they will bring us more pleasure or more pain.

Pacatus i think your post does a good job of summarizing where we need to be.

Quote from Pacatus

I didn’t read the policy thread as forbidding any and all discussion of kinetic/katastematic pleasure (or aponia/ataraxia). They’ve been batted around on here since I’ve been here – often helpfully.

Correct. These terms and questions can be discussed without advocacy of the opposing position, and the very existence of the controversy is an "elephant in the room" that cannot be made to go away by ignoring it. I expect to write many additional posts and articles that address the issue from the "pleasure is the supreme good / pleasure is a very wide concept perspective, and I hope others will too. We can also have "private" discussions that do not affect the publicly-viewable flow of the site and distract from its central message.

Quote from Pacatus

But it seems as if the various arguments (using that word in a technical, not a pejorative sense) about trying to parse strict distinctions are unlikely to ever be settled to any general satisfaction.

And that is probably the most important point. There will never be universal agreement on these points, even among those of us who devote extensive time to reading about Epicurus. In my own mind I come back over and over to the scenes in the "Agora" movie about Hypatia, where the Platonic-like philosophers were consumed in their disputes about astronomy and geometry while their world was collapsing around them outside their doors. There's a time and a place for everything, but these are not the times nor is this the place to allow the focus of the site to be distracted away from central issues.

I don't think anyone on this website is an ascetic or even a minimalist at heart or views "pleasure" or even "desire" with suspicion. And yet those attitudes and perspectives have embedded themselves into Epicurean discourse, largely through this dispute that somehow "katastematic" pleasure is superior and different to pleasure itself.

I haven't recently referenced Elayne's article from 2019 but it continues to be a good non-technical discussion of the issues:

Blog Article

On Pain, Pleasure, and Happiness

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Not "absence of pain" as a full statement of the goal of life, but “the Feelings are two, pleasure and pain” and “Pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life.”

Brief: The feelings are only two, pleasure and pain—there is no third state such as neutral, and there are no “fancy pleasures” which are different from regular pleasures. Because there is no neutral, reducing pain…

Elayne

July 15, 2019 at 7:31 PM

Quote from DaveT

Respecting the man, and Epicurus' mind, is what the Forum is dedicated to, right

That's one way of looking at it, maybe like there is more than one way to view pleasure.

Yes if we respect Epicurus' mind and person, as Lucretius did for example, that's a good guardrail. But just like Epicurus himself as a real person, we all have to live day to day and focus on the most important issues, just as he wrote in the letter to Herodotus about not always needing to know the details but always returning to the headings.

So I would say the real idea is to focus more on the importance of the core ideas which are needed all the time (true views of gods, death, pleasure as the goal, pain as manageable) and only after those are firmly established as the organizational principles would we be prudent to be spending much time on secondary issues.

Of course its tricky - advocacy that Epicurus had a goal other than pleasure is not a secondary issue at all. That takes us back to Pacatus' observation that we will never have consensus on some things. If we are going to buiod content and community on the view that pleasure is the goal, there has to be a limit on advocacy that undercuts that.

Dave's questions and this thread have me constructively focusing on the issue of what IS really important to focus on. I'm working on some new thoughts for articles about the general issue of the public perception of what "hedonism" means and how much of a problem that word can be.

I was watching a short clip this morning of someone who was mad about an issue and he concluded by accusing his opponents of being "greedy" and essentially focusing on their own pleasures of the moment to the exclusion of concern about future generations. Whether he was right or wrong on the particular issue isn't nearly as important as the fact that he specifically called his opponents "hedonists" as if there is no other possible meaning of the word beyond a narrow focus on the immediate bodily-pleasures-of-the-moment.

1. Is it worth anyone's time to write material trying to rehabilitate the word hedonism?
2. Does it make more sense just to explain that that's not what Epicurus was about?
3. Why is it in fact so hard for people to weigh the pleasures of the moment against the pains that are sure to follow? Aren't there ways to work on improving that situation without talking as if pleasure and desire should be entirely abandoned?

I tend to think that one of the most effective lines of argument is to look to the actual lives of the ancient Epicureans to see how they implemented the philosophy. The contents of Epicurus' will and his last letter are extremely helpful in putting to rest any ambiguities because we can see how Epicurus himself lived his philosophy.

Many of us here and I am one of them love to spend time digging into the details of the surviving fragments to glean more out of them, but can I say that I really have time to do that given that I can't seem to eat right and exercise enough and already have a clear focus on the balance of short and long term and greater and lesser pleasures and pains? No, I can't say that I've come nearly far enough on the basics, and spending too much time on nonessential details may in my case at least be a way of procrastination from what really needs to be done.

So there's all sorts of things that need to be addressed, not only in others but in ourselves. And a time and a proper way to say everything - even denouncing with righteous indignation those who are so blinded by desire that they choose a lesser but immediate pleasure that will cost them a future but much greater pain.

Quote from Torquatus On Ends 1:33

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of the pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

Quote from Pacatus

don’t know if that word pleasure (and pain as well) scares people.

There's absolutely no doubt --most people are scared to death of the term, and they would never want to be associated with a philosophy of pleasure - especially in Academia.

Since there's a lot of criticism of negativity embedded in this discussion I thought I better draft something as an example of what I personally think is a more positive approach to Epicurus. Nothing that people here haven't seen a hundred times before, but again that's the point - we are the tiny minority, and I don't think we should sit back and make no effort to change that by talking about the core issues - WITHOUT lathering it with apologies for pleasure, with appeals to asceticism, minimalism, resignation, withdrawal, or the like. Posting this mainly for X, Facebook, Substack, etc.

Blog Article

Living For The Pleasures Of The Moment Isn't Epicurean — It's Lunacy: Why the World's Most Famous "Hedonist" Would Have Despised What We Call Hedonism

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The Passage You've Seen a Thousand Times, and What It Actually Says

You have almost certainly seen this sentence before, even if you've never read a word of it: "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." It's the source of "Lorem Ipsum" -- the scrambled placeholder text that has filled empty design mockups and dummy web pages for…

Cassius

July 17, 2026 at 3:05 PM

Let me expand further on what I have said in some of these recent comments.

When Epicurus says that he is not able to conceive the good without the pleasures that he mentions, all of those pleasures he mentions are "active" - not "katastematic" under the normal definition that people seem to be presuming. While pleasure is the supreme good, it is not the pleasures of the moment, but the life of pleasure, which is foreseen to be the final result, and that means at time choosing pains.

In other words, there are many perspectives on pleasure and the life of pleasure, and more than one can be true at the same time, and they are not in conflict.

What most of us seem to accept here is that the word katastematic refers to something that is stable or established. Is there something there which is not a subset of DURATION, which is referenced in PD09? Of course we want our pleasures to have the longest duration possible!

Is anyone here thinking I am advocating against pleasures being stable and established? OF COURSE NOT. What I am saying is that 'stability' and 'being established' are attributes of something else, not of themselves, and that something else is PLEASURE.

Rather than taking the passage "Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures, but Joy and exultation are considered as active pleasures involving motion" in isolation, we should consider it with all the rest we know. We know that Epicurus held that because there are only two experiences, for the living human whenever pain is not present what is present is pleasure. This quoted passage need be saying nothing more than that mental or bodily well-being (meaning when pain is absent) constitutes a "stable" perspective on the goal of life. This is a perspective that does not change and does not vary from person to person. This is because we all want 100% pleasure and 0% pain in mind and body. At individual times and places, however, some people are going to engage in food, some in sex, some in zip-lining, and some in studying ancient Greek literature. Those activities and the pleasures that come from them are as stated in PD09 - they vary in intensity and duration and parts of the body that are effected -- they CHANGE with the circumstance.

But those changing circumstances are exactly what human life is made of. At the same time, we maintain a stable attitude that our goal - to the extent we can attain it - is 100% pleasure and 0% pain. This is a goal that is stable and which never varies, and if we keep it mind mind with the reasons for it, then we can have confidence and not be deterred by obstacles.

Is this interpretation spelled out by Diogenes Laertius? Is exactly the same description given by Gosling and Taylor or Boris Nikolsky or Emily Austin or Kelly Aronsen? No, but the writers u have listed are making an effort to present a theory in understandable terms without just chanting Greek words as if they were stating something impossible for the American mind of 2026 to understand in English.

And whichever interpretation you end up taking for yourself, you end up focusing on pleasure in understandable terms that does not incline you toward thinking that being "untroubled" is the best you can do with your life. There are all sorts of ways to be "untroubled" in life and you damn well better specify what you mean rather than leave it to the imagination that blowing your mind out with drugs, or worse, is an equally acceptable way to become "untroubled."

There is absolutely no reason that the factors listed by Epicurus in regard to pleasure - intensity, duration, and parts of the body effected - are not all that anyone needs to make rational decisions about what activities to pursue and what results should be considered the target. And to repeat - injecting untranslated Greek terms into the ultimate description causes much more harm than good.

So I certainly am not arguing against the value of attitudes, or the value of locking up in your mind certain knowledge about import topics, or anything of the sort connected with stability and being established. But the reason this dispute arises is because that's not the interpretation that normal people are going to give to attempts to hold up "Tranquility" or "Calm" or the like as Epicurus' true goal of life. If someone is in this group it is because they are legitimately trying to make use of Epicurean philosophy not only for themselves - but in the great Epicurean tradition, for others as well. And that means being able to explain it in understandable terms.

If katastematic means simply stable and established then say so, and talk in plain terms about how much we value and appreciate things that we have been able to make stable and established in our lives. If someone wants to argue that it means something else - that it is not in fact pleasure, that it means something higher and better than pleasure itself -- then they can take that argument outside this group, because that is the straight highway to asceticism, minimalism, and the total abandonment of the term "pleasure" as we see happening so often. it's not even a slippery slope - it's a Chinese bullet train to that same destination.

Stating things plainly in English will not tempt anyone to think that "tranquility" is an attribute of pleasure that can be detached from pleasure itself. Stating things plainly in English will not tempt people to think that being "tranquil" is the Epicurean supreme good. When virtually every expert has their own individual interpretation about what katastematic means and what activities fall within it, that's neither a stable nor established base on which to move forward. And to let this argument undermine the whole philosophy - as it is doing - is absolutely unacceptable.

it's the job of Academics to debate each other. It's our job to make Epicurean philosophy useful for ourselves and other regular people.

My posting of this earlier in this thread and Pacatus' reminder have in turn reminded me that this is where we were in 2019 - almost seven years ago to the day.

We've come a long way since then - in many ways forward - but we still don't have many articles / posts here that are as on target on this topic as this one. I have now added it to the front page as one of the featured blue buttons to call more attention to it.

Blog Article

On Pain, Pleasure, and Happiness

[legend='Superseded:','#b8860b']

This entry has been superseded. Please read the current version here.

[/legend]

Not "absence of pain" as a full statement of the goal of life, but “the Feelings are two, pleasure and pain” and “Pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life.”

Brief: The feelings are only two, pleasure and pain—there is no third state such as neutral, and there are no “fancy pleasures” which are different from regular pleasures. Because there is no neutral, reducing pain…

Elayne

July 15, 2019 at 7:31 PM

It would be interesting to discuss if anyone sees a conflict between the 2019 "On Pain Pleasure And Happiness" article and their current understanding of the katastematic / kinetic situation and the "Against Katastematic Supremacy" article which is the topic of this thread. If there is any such conflict then by all means it needs to be cleaned up as we go forward.

Quote from Bryan

However, it is also clearly true that a single brick -- or even a huge pile of bricks -- is not as good as a whole stable and established brick building.

That would be exactly the analogy I seek to use with the "full cup" of pleasure and what I take DeWitt's "fullness" argument to mean. Yes you want your life to be 100% pleasure and 0% pain, and you want it to stay that way, neither needlessly below the rim (due to the presence of pain) or sloshing over the rim (causing intrustio of pain due to the sloshing). But no matter what perspective you look at the vessel, what it is full of is real tangible experiential pleasure. Or using the other analogy, when you build a house of bricks you have something more desirable than a pile of bricks, but you would be a fool to then think that you have freed yourself from reliance on bricks. You don't need a greater quantity of bricks when you finish building a house in the same way that you don't need a greater quantity of pleasure when your life is 100% full of plesure.

But who would be such a pinhead or so stupid -- when you have a completed house or a full life of pleasure -- to go on a campaign apologizing for, or talking down, or even outright dismissing, the value of bricks or pleasure???