Posts by Cassius

So what about the word translated as "blessed?". Does it have connotations so strong that it cannot be applied to humans? If "immortal" can be applied to human activities, then can "blessed" be less flexible?

Quote from Don

121] Two sorts of happiness (eudaimonia) can be conceived, the one the highest possible, such as the gods enjoy, which cannot be augmented, the other admitting addition and subtraction of pleasures.

I wonder if that means that the happiness that the gods enjoy is necessarily greater that the top level that can be enjoyed by non-gods. Meaning, just because the happiness of the gods never increases or decreases, does that mean that the top level enjoyable by non gods is less than that when it is at its top level?

Further and rephrased: I wonder if that passage about competing with the gods for happiness indicates that the changing level available to non-gods, when it is at its highest level, can be equal the unchanging level of the gods, with the only difference being the limitation in time available to the non-gods?

Don, as our resident Greek expert, what is your assessment of the possibility that PD01 is not a reference to the gods alone, but is intended to be a reference to the best life for humans as well as gods, and thus serves as a reference to pleasure (the opposite of pain as stated in PDO3) being the goal?

Also as to the possibility that PDO1 is intended to refer to more than just the Epicurean gods even though the term "immortal" is used, there is this:

VS78. The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship; of these, the one is a mortal good, the other immortal.

Quote from Kalosyni

It is observed too that in his treatise On the Ethical End he writes in these

terms11 : "I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form."

Very good observation!

I don't know that we have discussed this before, but I think the long title of the thread states an interesting question worthy of exploration:

"What Are The Possible Reasons (And Of These, The Most Likely) Why The List of 40 Principal Doctrines Does Not Feature A Statement Explicitly Stating Pleasure To Be The Goal of Life?"

Before we settle on one or more as the most likely, it would be very helpful to see if we can come up with a list of reasonable possibilities. I doubt it makes sense to try to separate "goal" from "greatest good" in this discussion, in part because it's also interesting to note that neither "ataraxia" or "katastematic pleasure" or any other term which some might promote are explicitly stated to be the goal or greatest good either.

1. Was the list not prepared by Epicurus himself? (Was it prepared by later followers as a compilation, much as we think is the origin of the Vatican Sayings?)
2. Was it originally in the form of a letter to which we no longer have the introduction?
3. Was Epicurus opposed to identifying a "greatest good"?
4. Was Epicurus opposed to defining "good" in terms that would imply that the number of goods are limited?
5. Was the view that pleasure is the good so clearly a part of every Epicurean discussion that it became a habit to omit the statement as repetitive and taken for granted?
6. Is PD01 not supposed to refer only to "gods," but to the conception of the goal / greatest good for humans or any other form of life? In other words, was "immortal" not meant to apply only to the gods but to the best life to which we should all aspire, and the "knows no trouble" meant to be a synonym for experiencing nothing but pleasure (since there are only two feelings and the absence of one is the presence of the others, as stated in the second sentence of PD03)? One reason that might support the backhanded way of emphasizing pleasure in this way might be the desire not to identify any single type of pleasure as the most important type. I think this occurs to me because I woke up from sleep thinking about this, and it now strikes me for the first time as a possibility due to comments DeWitt makes about "immortal" sometimes being a term of high praise rather than just a reference to deathlessness - similar to "gods among men" and such.
7. Is PD08 (no pleasure is a bad thing in itself) supposed to be read as an explicit statement that pleasure is the good?

Of these, I have traditionally considered (5) to be among the most likely, but I am not at all sure that I don't favor many of the others in this preliminary list as equally or more possible, and I am sure I have not exhausted the good possibilities.

This is only a very preliminary list intended to spur discussion. We may not have talked about this all that much, but it is certainly a question that a newcomer to Epicurus would ask, and it deserves the best answer we can give to it.

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Two more notes on this;

1 - From the same Wikipedia article, we see that empiricism is closely related to Pyrhhonic skepticism, which was something Epicurus was firmly against (or at least modified considerably):

The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 330 BCE.^[15] Its members rejected the doctrines of the dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of phantasiai (i.e., phenomena, the appearances).^[16] The Empiric school was closely allied with the Pyrrhonist school of philosophy, which made the philosophical case for their proto-empiricism.

2 - It is interesting to note that the Wikipedia article discusses Aristotle at length, as well as the Stoics, but makes no mention of Epicurus.

It will be a couple of days before this is ready for release, but one point worth noting on what is discussed in our look at Sensations and "Epicurus not an Empiricist" comes from the Wikipedia entry on Empiricism:

Empiricism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That page features discussion of Bacon, Locke, and Hume.....

Quote

Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.

Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, says that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification".^[5] Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method.

Etymology[edit]

The English term empirical derives from the Ancient Greek word ἐμπειρία, empeiria, which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which the words experience and experiment are derived.^[6]

But this sentence especially catches my eye:

Quote

Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience.^[7] This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which states that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses. For example, John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly Robert Boyle, a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we have innate ideas.^[8][9] The main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method".^[10][11]

A large part of the importance of the issue we are discussing this week is that Epicurus is definitely willing to use deductive reasoning to make conclusions about issues that he has not experienced directly - notable examples being the condition of life after death, or the age of the universe, or the size of the universe --- none of which Epicurus himself personally was able to test through his own sensory experience.

I wonder if the development of this school through Lock and others did not find its way through Bentham and his friends to France Wright, which would explain what I think are her deviations from Epicurus in "A Few Days In Athens" to stress that "observation is everything" and theories are often damaging. I recall in reading her work outside of "A Few Days In Athens" that this position seems to have been especially important to her, and at least in part explains her lack of interest in many of the "physics" issues which interested the ancient Epicureans.

I would tentatively have to say than an "excess of empiricism" was damaging to Frances Wright's confidence in Epicurean philosophy, that in turn probably illustrates why this seemingly boring issue many important ramifications that justify our taking the time to slog through it.

The recent rash of shooting at "UFO"s makes this article bubble to the top of the heap again:

Vatican Considers Possibility of Aliens

Pope Orders Astronomers to Look into Life on Other Planets; Wants to Bridge Gap Between Religion and Science

www.cbsnews.com

I don't know what they eventually decided; maybe time for them to convene a new meeting!

This is where I wish we had more detailed info on the Vatican sayings:

VS08. The wealth required by Nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity

"Required?"

Is this one of the sayings that comes from Epicurus himself or one that certainly does not?

Questions questions questions.....

Being an advocate for Epicurus in the modern world, like in his time, is not for the faint of heart or for those who can't stand controversy.

Quote from Don

Easy is due to the eu- prefix on the verbs in lines 3 & 4 of the Tetrapharmakos

Don are you aware of any other reference stating "easy" other than the tetrapharmokos ?

The external analysis seems reasonable to me, and the "'zenia" might indeed be relevant if less attractive to us today, but - as to:

[4] [Epicurus teaches us that good is easy for us to procure] and that evil is [not] only limited precisely because it is useless to have defined the good (τἀγαθόν), if it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to attain,

Do those brackets mean that this is partly or totally reconstructed? If so by how much? Is this bootstrapped off the later "Tetrapharmakon"?

Also is this Voula Tsouna? Do you have the more specific cite?

As you know I would myself never read "EASY" unless the text demands it. (Which reminds me to follow up at some point and determine if in fact a particular text does demand the "EASY" as if so I am not aware of it outside apparently the T)

thanks!

Now I am unfortunately inserting something random but I will be short: Here I feel in sympathy with Cicero. English, like Latin, is a rich language. There is something fundamentally wrong going on when we have a supposedly critical concept for which people insist on using an untranslated foreign word, as if English were insufficient to explain the concept. Like Lucretius, we should use our own language to explain what we mean by "katastematic pleasure," and if we can't or don't then that in itself indicates a major issue. And that's exactly what the great majority of commentators are doing in perpetuating the kinetic / katastematic discussion rather than engaging with people who come to Epicurean Philosophy for real answers.

Ok so yes there is a list of Metrodorus' works in DL and that's not in it, right? Is It clear that Clement is talking about the same Metrodorus?

I don't really doubt the sentiment, given the statement in Torquatus that mental feelings can be stronger than bodily ones, but I don't know that we have more to work with than that, and I would expect the emphasis to be on "can" rather than "are always."

Being burned in phalaris' bull might not be able to extinguish every scintilla of pleasurable memory until the person is dead, but for much of the time I would think the pain of the experience would be much stronger than those good memories. And during that time calling the victim "happy" would be more of a very broad abstraction rather than a common sense summary of total feelings (or even a specific feeling of wellbeing) as we normally attach to the word.

It's good to go number by number. When I reread the list I found I had completely slipped over the ox analogy item.

And for example the reference to the book by Metrodorus being cited by Clement of Alexandria... Is that title also cited by Diogenes Laertius? I thought DL cites the titles of Metrodorus" book too?

Lots of good things to talk about in this thread.

I thought of another perspective:

What about the pleasure of remembering past pleasures?

Is that not always available to us too?

That is something that we all I think acknowledge to be a great pleasure, and always available, just like confidence or whatever we are designating as "katastematic."

But none of us would suggest that " remembering past pleasures" is somehow the highest pleasure or the goal of all other pleasures, would we?

Thinking about why "katastematic pleasure" is an obsession of some people and why "remembering past pleasures" is not such an obsession is something to consider. The answer, I think, is that a word like "katastematic" is so obscure that it is easy to bend to one's own prior Stoic or Buddhist or Christian or Platonic disposition, while other and more clear words describing specific pleasures are not.

Again, not talking about Don, but about a cultural force that catapulted "Katastematic Pleasure" into what is alleged to be the full meaning of the philosophy.

Over and over I repeat that my words are not meant to be disagreeable to Don. Were he not exploring these issues we would not have such a good opportunity to examine it.

On looking up examples of damage that comes from loose construction, (which Don is surely avoiding, I know) I happened to look again at this from Wikipedia on the T. Take a look at the last sentence in this paragraph:

What is terrible is easy to endure

The Epicureans understood that, in nature, illness and pain is not suffered for very long, for pain and suffering is either "brief or chronic ... either mild or intense, but discomfort that is both chronic and intense is very unusual; so there is no need to be concerned about the prospect of suffering." Like "What is good is easy to get," recognizing one's physical and mental limit and one's threshold of pain — understanding how much pain the body or mind can endure — and maintaining confidence that pleasure only follows pain (and the avoidance of anxiety about the length of pain), is the remedy against prolonged suffering.^[13

The "REMEDY"? Or as people are fond of saying "the CURE"? I think Epicurus would say "No"! The remedy or the cure of a disease is to root it out and destroy it. What is being described here in 3 and 4 are "coping mechanisms" which are certainly desirable but in no way a "cure." I am surely in favor of aspirin, but aspirin does not really cure the source of the pain at least in most cases. The "cure" of these pains is not in thinking about them as short or mild, the cure comes in "curing" them, and to the extent that the phrasing of 3 and 4 suggests that Epicurus would suggest "coping" rather than "curing" this is extremely damaging to Epicurean theory.

I am not so down on 1 and 2 as I am on 3 and 4, but in sum the total effect of these is to more aptly deserve the name the "Four-Part Coping Mechanism" than the Four-Part "cure."

This is just the kind of diversion from proper focus that undue emphasis on the word "katastematic" creates in the minds of those who do not understand that "katastematic" (to the extent it has a clear definition stated by Epicurus at all) is simply one among many pleasures - and one that does not rate even the clear emphasis Epicurus gave to friendship and prudence as of special importance.

I am together with all of this with the probable exception of post 3. That is not what Diogenes Laertius says about the two categories, is it?

And of course I also want the record to reflect that I agree with Boris Nikolsky that the whole "katastematic" question is an overlay of non-Epicurean analysis adopted from other schools, well apart from Epicurus, which is an artifact of Diogenes Laertius' well meaning but imprecise attempt to categorize Epicurus according to theories well known at DL's time.

As for mental pleasures being more significant than bodily ones at times I agree that makes sense as stated by Torquatus in his discussion with Cicero, so Metrodorus' book title would fit that well.

I also think it is useful to highlight the confidence of maintaining ones pleasures and the ability to experience pleasures mentally (including the memory of pleasures of the past) which is also well documented.

The only real problem that I have is that framing all this in terms of "katastematic pleasure" seems to me to be bound to be interpreted by those who are not so subtle as Don to be justification for their continuing focus on this term for their implication that katastematic pleasure is something higher than any other kind of pleasure, which I believe is not justified and is very harmful.

Of the points raised by Don, points 4 and 5 are lost on the "katastematic pleasure above all" crowd, and the difficulty is that the view of "Confidence in Katastematic Pleasure" will continue to crowd out and undermine the proper focus, which was as summarized by Torquatus more accurately as

"pleasures great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them" (Reid)

Nothing there about "katastematic pleasure" being the primary goal," and to elevate it loosely as many do is to implicitly derogate all the rest.

So to me the task is to flesh out the benefits of the subject without confounding errors (which are in many cases intentional under the influence of Buddhism and Stoicism) even worse than before.

I have no doubt Don can do that here, but in general conversation about Epicurus elsewhere using this terminology is like hobbling oneself at the beginning by explaining "what's good is easy to get" and "what's terrible is easy to endure" to starving children. That's not a challenge that any Epicurean has any need to undertake voluntarily, because those contentions phrased that way are not well founded in the core texts of Epicurus himself. To me, those phrasings are best considered to be innocent but harmful diversions from the main core and stream of Epicurean thought. "Easy" and "katastematic" are similarly troublesome, and I don't advise people to look for unnecessary trouble!

Welcome to Episode 161 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.

We're now in the process of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book "Epicurus and His Philosophy."

Sensations

Epicurus Not An Empiricist

Anticipations

The Account of Laertius

The Element of Anticipation

Evidences From Specific Context

Later Evidences

Feelings

This week we continue in Chapter 8 and move to the subsections "Sensations" and "Epicurus Not An Empiricist"