Posts by Cassius

Episode 174 of the podcast is now available!

Quote from Don

Νο. No, no, no.

Once again as I see it we have a perspective issue, in which I placed "greatest good" in scare quotes in extension of the way that Godrey and I are discussing it as an ideal form, while you also rightfully bring back the point that there is another perspective in human feeling where it is essential and vital that we do consider it to be real.

My view is that *both* observations have to be made (the "greatest good" does not exist as an ideal form but does exist as a feeling which is our guide), and we have to be flexible enough to keep both in mind at the same time. Only then can we both understand where Plato and friends go wrong, while at the same time understand where Epicurus gets it right.

If we don't understand that *both* perspectives are important for us to understand then I don't think we ever get on top of these issues with enough confidence to deal with the Platonic arguments that undercut Philebus and the whole attack against "pleasure" as the greatest good. From the ideal perspective we have to see that Platonically the "greatest good" doesn't exist any more than does a line with no width, but from the real world perspective it does exist in our focusing of our mind on an intelligible guide.

I would like to think that we could dispense with this argument and simply talk about pleasure in "realistic" terms, but we don't live in such a world and given the way it has developed for 2000 years we - at least we in our lifetimes - in all likelihood never will.

Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life by Emily A. Austin - The Objective Standard

Living for Pleasure offers a thorough presentation of Epicurean morality in a readable, entertaining style.

theobjectivestandard.com

I think most of us here will find this largely positive review to be something we can mostly agree with, while at the same time it will help us to dive further into the differences between Rand and Aristotle and Epicurus.

The reviewer wishes that LFP had gone further into these differences, which is a perspective I can share without calling it a criticism. The thing I like about LFP is that it goes as far as it does in presenting a positive view of Epicurus that active and healthy people can embrace. When the reviewer talks about JFK's speech on the reasons for going to the moon, he doesn't so much point out a flaw in the book or in Epicurus but in the current orthodox understanding that Epicurus would hesitate to go himself if he had the chance.

The main failure I would point out in turn as to the review is that the writer does not acknowledge that Rand placed "selfishness" and "reason" at the heart of her philosophy, rather than the feeling of pleasure and the rejection of logical rationalism. But to explore that would open too many wounds for most Objectivists, who have a long way to go before they begin to realize that their own sin of rationalism - which many of them admit - is built in to Rand's' neo-Stoic and neo-Platonic worship of "reason" rather than the feeling of pleasure as the ultimate standard of a proper way to live.

Rather than continue my own comments I'll just post the link and we can discuss further to the extent people are interested.

Godfrey this excerpt from DeWitt is not exactly the same point, but I think closely related:

Note: This kind of reference to Italians and Ionians always confuses me. I am not sure whether I am misreading DeWitt's labels here or he is talking colloquially, or what, because according to Laertius Epicurus is listed with the Italians and Plato with the Ionians. Then again Aristotle is an Ionian and he disagreed a lot with Plato. But those labels aren't really relevant to the current discussion.

Yes I think that's the point.

And it may also be exactly the same point as with the "greatest good" which exists only in Platonic ideal status.

Many of our conversations may boil down to exactly that point, and maybe that's exactly why Epicurus recommended against walking around obsessing over the meaning of "good."

It is pretty mind-boggling to think that so much controversy might in reality be so simple to unravel.

Looks to me too like this section of the following article is interesting, however I am not comfortable with the "better" part in the title or the "modest satisfaction." near the end.

Sounds to me this is parallel to where Diogenes Laertius says Epicurus valued *both* pleasures of rest and of action, and I would think the better approach is just to be aware of the differences and how the choice between one vs the other is contextual and requires prudence. Slow mental pleasures might not be what you want when you're resting on a railroad track and a train is approaching, while at other times the roller coaster ride really isn't a good idea when the ride isn't being well maintained and the chance of accident is high. And as to the "modest satisfaction' it's better just to realize that pleasure comes in many packages both mental and physical.

But thinking about these three bullet points makes sense.

Satisfaction is better than exhilaration.

We've been conditioned to think that the right combination of actions will achieve a flash of exhilaration. When we happen upon the perfect marketing strategy, we expect a rush of joy. When we discover the best business for us to start, we're flooded with an electric sensation of excitement.

This thrill-seeking mentality is yet another symptom of the good killing the perfect. It's important to understand that the perfect-being-the-enemy-of-the-good can skew aspects of our daily lives, like those listed above. But the concept can impose even more damage, skewing our expectations even as it cripples our actions. So, try the following moves:

• Rather than expecting aha moments, prepare yourself for gradual improvement.
• Rather than risking sudden leaps in ability, skill, or progress, expect marginal improvement over periods of time.
• Rather than waiting for a rush of exhilaration, expect modest satisfaction over time.

It's good to condition ourselves for success. We can do this by preparing for it, visioning it, pursuing it, seeking it and wanting it. But we can't expect our success to explode like the finale in a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Instead, success is more likely to be gradual. It may feel good, but it won't necessarily feel perfect. Success arrives as a sense of satisfaction, not a sudden thrill.

Your Secret Mental Weapon: 'Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good' | Entrepreneur

Now, get busy accepting good enough as a great place to start.

www.entrepreneur.com

Supportive of the main point:

Why Perfect Is The Enemy Of Good

Why obsession with perfection can paralyze.

www.psychologytoday.com

Quote from Little Rocker

chief among them is the view that there is no meaning or purpose behind suffering

Great point

Even from the Nietzschean "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" perspective, there darn well better be a goal of "making us stronger" for engaging in any suffering or else I want no part of it!

Certainly standing alone the idea of fixating on suffering is awful. I haven't really absorbed or am ready to endorse N's view of "pity" as being such a bad thing, but I think he has a point there too which could eventually be made more clear. In my case I concretize the issue by thinking about how easy it would be for me to sit around thinking constantly about people in nursing homes or animals in animal shelters or in factory farms. But I can usually catch myself by realizing that if I did nothing but continue to think about those issues there would be no time for anything else in life, much less the possibility of finding time to help at least a few of them where possible.

I guess we need a specific thread on "perfect as the enemy of the good" so here it is, starting with Wikipedia citing Voltaire:

"Perfect As the Enemy of the Good"

This is a thread specifically devoted to "perfect as the enemy of the good." Seems to me this has a lot of application in Epicurean decisionmaking, although this thread stems from the discussion of Hegesias the Death Persuader. Some apparently assert that the perfect "is" the enemy of the good, but others react that we cannot allow this to be accepted. While the two things may not be the same, having the imperfect is superior to taking positions or actions that never allow us to obtain the perfect. Absence of pain may be desirable in the abstract, but for humans the only way to achieve total freedom from pain is death, and the dead can experience neither pleasure nor pain, so obsessing on total absence of pain is self-defeating for humans. That's why I think it is unfair to Epicurus to interpret him as doing so, and that when he "seems" to do so he is engaged in philosophical debate about competing philosophic definitions, not stating that we should forgo the pleasures of life in order to make sure we never experience pain.

This is the current 5/18/23 content of the Wikipedia page:

Perfect is the enemy of good is an aphorism which means insistence on perfection often prevents implementation of good improvements. The Pareto principle or 80–20 rule explains this numerically. For example, it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort.^[1] Achieving absolute perfection may be impossible and so, as increasing effort results in diminishing returns, further activity becomes increasingly inefficient.

Origin[edit]

In the English-speaking world the aphorism is commonly attributed to Voltaire, who quoted an Italian proverb in his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie [fr] in 1770: "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene".^[2] It subsequently appeared in his moral poem, La Bégueule, which starts^[3]

Quote

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the best is the enemy of the good)

Previously, around 1726, in his Pensées, Montesquieu wrote "Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien" (The best is the mortal enemy of the good).^[4]

Antecedents[edit]

Aristotle and other classical philosophers propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general.^[5]

Its sense in English literature can be traced back to Shakespeare,^[6] In his tragedy, King Lear (1606), the Duke of Albany warns of "striving to better, oft we mar what's well" and in Sonnet 103:

Quote

Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?

Variations[edit]

The 1893 Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources lists a similar proverb, which it claims is of Chinese provenance: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."

More recent applications include Robert Watson-Watt propounding a "cult of the imperfect", which he stated as "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes";^[7] economist George Stigler's assertion that "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport";^[8][9] and, in

Seems to me too that at a very basic level we can pin a lot of the problem of Buddhism and Stoicism to their "physics" views that there is essentially a soul that survives death to experience new things in some type of future existence. That's at bottom of what they use to justify renouncing pleasure while it is available in this life, and even to consider that it might have been better not to have been born. In the absence of some reward for ascetic behavior somewhere down the road, why would any sane person ever choose it? (And for the present conversation we can just refer to the "sane" rather than worrying about the insane.)

With Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics you can't even entertain such a suggestion as reasonable to consider, so you steer clear of ideas that what will happen after death justifies counter-intuitive decisions in this life.

At the same time, Epicurus does recognize that for at least most of us today is not the last day of life, so we do in fact make short-term decisions to choose pain for the sake of pleasure that comes afterwards.

But when you know that the playing field is exclusively *this* life, you keep that calculation in check, and come to reasonable conclusions in balancing the present and the future.

Just as an aside, in flipping over to the Latin Library, I see that google is now more ready than in the past to translate to Latin.

But it's really NOT ready - here's the google translate of the section on Epicurus at the start of Book 1:

Human eyes were filthy with life 62
In countries under severe religion ,
the head of the air, countries showed
dreadful upon the appearance of mortals , 65
Gray was the first person to take the mortal
The eyes dared to oppose ;
the fame of the gods, neither the thunderbolts, nor threatening them with whom they have neither
murmurs sky, but the more severe
provokes the power to break tight 70
nature of the first gates barriers desire.
Therefore, the force of the lively and out
Then there came out the walls of the world by far the flame-like
and every soul of the mind and soul ,
What matters to us is the winner can rise , 75
what can not be, the power of the finite, in short, to each one
for it is the reason and the high-term clinging to the.
Why is religion in the feet, subject to the other hand
it is necessary that we match the victory of the sky.

Although Hieronymous of Rhodes was not a Cyreniac, it's useful to contrast HIS views too in this conversation. Hieronymous held that not pleasure, but absence of pain, was the goal of life:

These seem to me to be the kinds of errors that people run into when they fail to appreciate how Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics steers you to a reasonable conclusion about how to deal with guides and goals of life. Cicero is doing us a favor by showing us how contrasting these different views helps to sort them out.

Post

RE: Are You Epicurean Or Hieronymian?

Thanks for the detailed post Titus. Here are my thoughts:

[…]

I very much agree with that. It seems to me that most of the people whose interpretations I find reason to criticize focus almost exclusively on one aspect (most frequently, the letter to Meoneceus) and act as if the epistemology and physics are irrelevant. In a nearby (in time) thread I think we see an example of that in an American philosopher (Pierce) who embraces one aspect of Epicurus to support his own views, but rejects the…

Cassius

February 28, 2021 at 6:58 AM

This deserves a post of its own, and ought to be in full caps:

It has been thought by some that Hegesias was influenced by Buddhist teachings.[2]

That such a statement is even reasonable to entertain is an indictment of Buddhism.

I don't have time for a full post but I want to get this out there before I forget about it. Credit to Emily Austin for bring this to our attention, which we touched on briefly in a short zoom discussion on 5/17/23.:

"Some contemporaries and predecessors of Epicurus did run around telling people that life is bleak, and that death is a welcome reprieve from human suffering, but Epicurus thinks that’s nonsense. The Cyrenaics were a competing hedonistic philosophical school and numbered among them was a man dubbed “Hegesias the Death Persuader” for the power of his argument that life is more painful than pleasant. Hegesias was reportedly run out of town for his effects on the young. That life is unpleasant is an odd view for a hedonist, and Epicurus felt at pains to deny it."

Seems to me that there is a lot to be learned from looking into this to see if we can figure out what weaknesses in Cyreniac philosophy held the door open for this kind of craziness and how Epicurean philosophy deals with it and prevents it. It's not clear to me how the dates relate and whether Epicurus was aware of Hegesias, and whether the reference in the letter to Menoeceus about those who wish never to have been born applies to him, but I think we could gain some good points of comparison by following the trail. -- especially as to the danger of inarticulately holding "freedom from pain" to be the goal of life without a lot of background explanation of how that perspective can make sense if you understand that freedom from pain is just a measurement of living completely engaged in pleasures without any component of pain of body or mind.

Seems to me also that there is a discussion here about the danger of letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good" if these clips are correct. What kind of logic is it that would say that because "perfect" happiness cannot be achieved we should consider the pleasure we can experience in life to be of indifference to us?

I wonder also if the title of this thread might better be: "Hedonism Gone Wrong....." which gets me back to why I personally do not in general conversation describe Epicureanism as "hedonism" or "pleasurism" (which would be the English term for hedonism if we were willing to be straightforward in English). Warning against the disasters that come from pursuing a feeling - even pleasure - without prudence is maybe the main subject of Epicurean ethics.

Here are references:

Hegesias of Cyrene - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Hegesias followed Aristippus in considering pleasure as the goal of life; but, the view which he took of human life was more pessimistic. Because eudaimonia was unattainable, the sage's goal should be to become free from pain and sorrow. Since, too, every person is self-sufficient, all external goods were rejected as not being true sources of pleasure:

Quote

Complete happiness cannot possibly exist; for that the body is full of many sensations, and that the mind sympathizes with the body, and is troubled when that is troubled, and also that fortune prevents many things which we cherished in anticipation; so that for all these reasons, perfect happiness eludes our grasp. Moreover, that both life and death are desirable. They also say that there is nothing naturally pleasant or unpleasant, but that owing to want, or rarity, or satiety, some people are pleased and some vexed; and that wealth and poverty have no influence at all on pleasure, for that rich people are not affected by pleasure in a different manner from poor people. In the same way they say that slavery and freedom are things indifferent, if measured by the standard of pleasure, and nobility and baseness of birth, and glory and infamy. They add that, for the foolish person it is expedient to live, but to the wise person it is a matter of indifference; and that the wise person will do everything for his own sake; for that he will not consider any one else of equal importance with himself; and he will see that if he were to obtain ever such great advantages from any one else, they would not be equal to what he could himself bestow.^[3]

Hence the sage ought to regard nothing but himself; action is quite indifferent; and if action, so also is life, which, therefore, is in no way more desirable than death:

Quote

The wise person would not be so much absorbed in the pursuit of what is good, as in the attempt to avoid what is bad, considering the chief good to be living free from all trouble and pain: and that this end was attained best by those who looked upon the efficient causes of pleasure as indifferent.^[3]

None of this, however, is as strong as the testimony of Cicero,^[4] who claims that Hegesias wrote a book called Death by Starvation (Greek: ἀποκαρτερῶν), in which a man who has resolved to starve himself is introduced as representing to his friends that death is actually more to be desired than life, and that the gloomy descriptions of human misery which this work contained were so overpowering that they inspired many people to kill themselves, in consequence of which the author received the surname of Death-persuader (Peisithanatos). The book was said to have been published at Alexandria, where he was, in consequence, forbidden to teach by king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3751954

But if you're going to take the time to OCR it, and that gives us a fully digital version without formatting issues, then that too would be worthwhile. For lots of reasons reduction to basic text and/or markdown format is very desirable for use in many ways

But don't let these others stop you from digitizing this is you can! It would be great to have one that we know is reviewed by Bailey, possibly with his comments as to issues in the text and selecting from various versions.

Just read it. Your criticism is spot on. Deliberate and stubborn refusal to identify "meaning" as "pleasurable" for reasons that probably need a psychologist to drill down to find.

Very similar to the refusal to accept Epicurus' position that healthy functioning life in its normal state - without pain - is itself pleasurable.

This isn't just a dispute over dictionary definitions, there is an agenda behind it to fight against pleasure itself as being given by Nature as the guide of life.

And I would bet that same agenda is behind Buddhism and Stoicism too.

That would be great to have. There is a version of the Latin on the internet from that site that contains many Latin texts - the Latin Library - but I have never been sure how high quality it is.

Lucretius

Thanks for posting this separately Don as I agree it deserves a thread of its own. Going to probably be until the weekend before I can listen but I am really looking forward to this one.