Posts by Cassius

Please remember our Zoom meeting tonight and join us if you can. We have some really interesting discussions going on right now on the forum as to the relationship between desire and pleasure and if you have time to join us we will make time for that as well.

Quote from Joshua

I resist this formulation as well.

Most all of the comments in this thread I agree with and they are very productive to help us challenge ideas that we think are wrong.

I hope everyone will help us remember - however - that our goal should be to eventually emerge from these details with some high-level conclusions about what we think Epicurus was saying. We'll discuss as much of all this as we can on the podcast, but the goal eventually needs to be something in writing that summarizes the major distinctions between "desire" and "pleasure" in Epicurean philosophy.

Perhaps even a comparison chart with Desire and Pleasure as the column headings and as many lines as necessary for the major points about them and how they differ or are the same as to each point.

Quote from Don

So, I don't think it's helpful to think of desires as "good" or "bad". They just are.

I almost hate to comment on this because my thought is not major and I don't want to interrupt the stream of the posts from Don.

But this formulation prompts me to comment that while pleasure and pain are feelings that are presumably reported "involuntarily", I would think that many desires have a much larger component of voluntary choice in them. I realize the limits to this statement, but we can to some extent by willpower express or suppress our desires, while that is probably not as much true with pain and pleasure itself.

So the comment "they just are" may be true in that they are not inherently bad or good, but if there is a larger component of choice attached to desires then that would be a significant difference (which reminds me of the comment later in the letter about attaching praise or blame).

I remember and agree with what Joshua said in the episode about how often in the end it does not work to suppress desires. But nevertheless there probably is a distinction worth noting in how most feelings of pain and pleasure are much more immediate and automatic, while many types of desires involve complicated mental calculations that are chosen and far from automatic.

Sorry for the interruption - please carry on Don!

Quote from Godfrey

The only things which are intrinsically "good" or "bad" are pleasure (good) and pain (bad). Everything else, including desire, only lead to greater or lesser pleasure or pain

And Epicurus saying in the letter that sometimes we treat the good as bad and the bad as good is a very clear statement and stark reminder of how "relative" those terms (good and bad) really are.

Nevertheless the world throws around those terms (good and bad) as if they were handed down on tablets from Mt. Sinai!

Quote from Don

Epicurus explicitly describes some desires as groundless, empty, vain. That doesn't sound like a description of something "good." In fact, it sounds like something to be avoided.

Yes I think we've got an interplay of issues here mainly arising from the word desire and how specifically to define in.

Pleasure is the only word that Epicurus held to be always "good" -- Did he say that specifically, or is PD08 the closest to that? (PD08. No pleasure is a bad thing in itself; but the means which produce some pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures.)

So maybe the better question to ask in paraphrase would be - Would it be correct to say?

"No desire is a bad thing in itself, but some desires bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasure achievable from the pursuit of the desire."

Or was Epicurus saying that some desires (e.g., seeking to live forever) are intrinsically "bad"? Seeking to overcome death would jump out at me as an example of a desire that would in every case lead to frustration, but even that one might be viewed in a better light depending on how the desire was pursued. Would it not be ok for a medical researcher to spend their lives on life extension research, if that researcher didn't obsess over success?

Examples of desires we might generally agree would lead to bad results (seeking great political power, riches, etc) would likely still not be something that Epicurus would say would "always" lead to undesirable results. (And if the result doesn't "always" happen then the thing is not intrinsically bad, correct?)

So where I am going is that unless we can articulate a desire that is intrinsically "bad" then we've got to set up a definition of "Desire" that accounts for its essential role in life but also describes how it can be misused.

I think Martin's observations in the podcast were particularly helpful when he referred to pleasure as a "drive for action" or something like that. I remember analogizing that to Nietzsche's "will to power" phrase. I've never understood Nietzsche well enough to be sure what he was talking about, and I can't parse his original German phrase. But with the understanding that the "power" being referenced is not "power over other people" but "the power to obtain one's desires," I think the phrase fits what we are talking about. And I would think that given all the urgency that Epicurus and Lucretius display in pursuing pleasure without delay, and with knowledge that life is short, a good case can be made that "desire," in the very general sense of the will to pursue a pleasurable life, is something that Epicurus would urge to be maximized.

The issue seems to me to be that like "Pleasure," the word "desire" is a very high level abstraction and includes within in innumerable examples, some of which will lead to greater pleasure than pain if pursued, and some of which will lead to more pain than pleasure if pursued. And at that level it doesn't make sense to consider "desire in general" to be a negative thing, but rather a positive, and to ensure that it is a positive by categorizing the desires according to their expectancy of in fact leading to greater pleasure if pursued (which is in fact what the natural and necessary formula does).

So just like Pleasure, some Desires are to be pursued in certain circumstances, and some should not be pursued, but at no point do we consider either "Pleasure" or "Desire" to be tainted terminology. In fact I would come very close to applying the same phrasing as in the letter and paraphrase the result as: "All Desires are good, because they are desirable, but some desires may lead to more pain than pleasure and thus should not be chosen."

Of course that takes us down the road of parsing what "good" means, but that kind of parsing comes with the territory when there are no absolute standards, and only the feelings of pleasure and pain as ultimate guides.

Quote from Joshua

The very existence of desire indicates a lack of satisfaction.

Maybe that is a large part of the problem of terminology, and gets us into the "confident expectation" material.

If I am happy and healthy now, I still want to "desire" that to continue. I am never satisfied to think "Ah, I am happy now, I need nothing more, time to die." I always want ("desire")the continuation of pleasure, even though I know that in the end I will die and I will experience no more. Even when i am closed to my experience being full of pleasure and all pain being absent, I still want that experience to continue.

Possibly we need to go back to the physics for help here. It has seemed to me in the past that the key to proper interpretation of many aspects of the philosophy is that nothing is ever truly "at rest" -- our atoms are constantly moving, our bodies and minds are constantly functioning, and they never stop until we die. That observation is also helpful in seeing the limits of "tranquility" - we're never really at rest. We may wish our sailing to be smooth and undisturbed, but the analogy of sitting at anchor in a harbor in perpetuity "is not what ships are for."

We at the very least desire this motion to continue, and we cannot ever say "I have reached a state of motion that I find perfect and therefore I will freeze everything in place." That is not possible, nor a conceptually sound way to look at life, I would have to think.

So I don't know that the "very existence of desire" in the most general sense indicates a lack of satisfaction, unless you want to say that you should be satisfied where you are at a particular moment and then stop all the activities of life and die.

So maybe I would argue that the existence of desire indicates that you are alive - not that you are in a state of frustration.

I can certainly see that the desire to stay alive runs into the knowledge that we can't do that perpetually, but when you drill down that level I think you're at the point of the cliche of "making the perfect the enemy of the good."

Perfection (eternal life) is not possible to us, but that does not mean that we consider life, and the desire for its continuance through an natural lifespan, to itself be a frustration. Does it?

Quote from Godfrey

point to clarify, at least in my mind, is that rather than being bad or evil, pain is a guide pointing away from health.

If indeed desire is a guide, and it is part of the healthy functioning of the organism to experience it, would it not be equally or more proper to call it a pleasure?

I think an argument can readily be made that these feelings of desire are not problems, but the healthy functioning we should wish to occur, and that we find these spurs to action pleasurable rather than painful.

Wasting away from lack of food is certainly painful, but having an appetite for a good meal strikes me as readily something that can be considered pleasurable.

If ALL feeling must be categorized as pleasure or pain, then I could see desire being listed among the pleasures at least as readily as a month the pains.

When we lose all desire, we die. In a very real sense life IS at root the desire for pleasure. Robots and the dead cannot feel or desire. Is not in a very real sense life the ability to desire?

Would the Epicurean gods feel pleasure in their blessedness if they did not desire that pleasure?

Maybe the ultimate point is that the ability to feel, the ability to experience pathe, is "good" in the sense that it is life, and "desire" is just a subset of pathe as the motivation to continue to life on. We never "desire" pain but we use the faculty of feeling as the guide to maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

I think I can work up a good head of steam to argue that desire is at the root of what it means to be alive, which is why advocacy of suppression of all desire strikes me as so "evil."

Quote from Don

Discuss

And we probably don't want to forget "pathe" since that seems to be the blanket term for pleasure and pain.

Is desire a "pathe" or a subset of that term?

Lots of questions and few answers right now but this is how we eventually punch our way out of the paper bag of considering all desire to be actually or potentially "bad."

Don I think that's a very important direction to pursue. At various places I have read that the ancients did not seem to have an exact equivalent to what we talk about as "will" or "willpower" and I presume that what we are at least in part talking about is whatever it is that we consider our basic "motivational spark" to be. "Desire" seems closely related to "will/willpower" and we need to explore the differences.

I have not had time to explore your links but I presume we need to trace the Latin equivalents as well. It always seems logical to me to presume that the people who lived and interacted the closest with the Greeks and whose language we an also identify with (even better than the Greek) deserve great attention in the way they translated the Greek.

It is also probably relevant to this conversation to note the opening "hymn to Venus" in Lucretius. It is the desire / drive for Pleasure which motivates all living things in the pursuit and continuance of life. Maybe we experience this as a "spur" to move forward, and maybe spurs can be analogized to a discomfort with existing circumstances, but I cannot imagine anything more destructive to the human race - or to life itself - than the demonizing of this drive. This is what I would condemn in religions or other philosophies wherever they exist, and so I cannot imagine that a general condemnation of the desire for pleasure exists in Epicurus. Yes desires that are misguided which result in more pain than pleasure are certainly on any list to minimize, but the flip side must also be true: desires which in fact leads to more pleasure than pain deserve to be encouraged and magnified.

You only live once. The goal of life is not to become a corpse.

Quote from Godfrey

For now I'll push the idea that desire is not a pain but that it leads to pain

This is a good discussion. For the moment at least I am still more where Martin was in the podcast, that desires are not inherently good or bad, pleasurable or painful, as a whole, but that they are a kind of mechanism or will or drive that can be immediately or can lead to pleasure or pain.

One thing I am sure of is that the dead have no desires, and I cannot consider that to be a good thing, so that a general call to limit ALL desires cannot be correct. When Epicurus made the statement about if you want to make a certain person rich, limit his desire, I feel like that has to be related to some specific aspect of the person being discussed.

We desire enlightenment on these issues as a means of living happier lives. That desire can be met through knowledge, but the existence of the desire hardly seems something in general to be considered to be painful or a bad thing.

To hold generally that pleasure is "good" but the desire for pleasure is "bad" would hardly seem to be a workable or logical construction.

Don that reminds me of the formulation of pleasure as related to "smooth motion." I think the last time I looked that up I didn't track it to Epicurus but to someone earlier. I wonder if that last part of the passage is related to that issue of of " smooth motion"

(Crédit to Donald Robertson for tracing the smooth motion to the Cyreniacs here https://donaldrobertson.name/2016/05/21/epi…-the-cyrenaics/ )

That Robertson article raises a number of topics about the Cyreniacs/ Epicurean relationship that we ought to explore.

Yes indeed I agree that. In general it's a very positive presentation.

Britain has so much Stoicism in its blood that I suspect we will never see anything BUT that interpretation over there. It's an interesting issue.

Very lively presentation. Thank you! I especially liked the guest who stressed the Roman attitude that Epicureanism can be explained in simple words.

It's interesting what people choose to stress. I like her choice of topics - mostly physics - but I think I am now halfway through and I have not heard the word "pleasure." (Did hear one use of "happiness" in passing)

Good that she points out the difference with the Stoics on the Epicurean view of free will.

Well a major disappointment: at 23:58 she launches into ethics purely in terms of Ataraxia and Aponia without a single use of the word pleasure. So she doesn't have the excuse that she's only talking about physics

She does close the presentation by saying ...you should embrace Lucretius and be happy... but the elephant in the room is the amazing British tendency to elevate "tranquility" and demote the word "pleasure" as if they want to entirely strip "pleasure" from Epicurean Philosophy.

Episode 138 - The Letter to Menoeceus 05 - On Pleasure (Part One) - is now available!

Quote from Don

But is that it? That's what everybody pegs Epicurus's dislike and distrust of poetry to?

Joshua's supplemental cites are good to add to the pot.. I think the Diogenes Laertius statement is the main cite as to Epicurus, and yes that is probably the main basis for the allegation, but there's definitely supportive commentary in Lucretius (and maybe others, but I can't recall specific cites).

It's almost as if they are including the poets as purveyors of supernatural religion, but that doesn't seem to be the exclusive basis.

That would be Diogenes Laertius as below - not really a sweeping condemnation of poetry as such. The Greek should be viewable at the link below -

Epicurus The Extant Remains Bailey Oxford 1926 : Cyril Bailey : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Epicurus - The Extant Remains - Text, Translation & Notes - By Cyril Bailey - BEST COPY

archive.org

"Greek poetic pessimism" -- Maybe that was part of why Epicurus was hostile to at least some aspects of poetry?

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is twofold: it explores Giacomo Leopardi’s (1798-1837) interpretation of, and engagement with, Greek pessimistic thought and, through him, it investigates the complex and elusive phenomenon of Greek pessimistic thought itself. This thesis contends that Greek pessimistic thought – epitomised by but not limited to the famous wisdom of Silenus, the µὴ φῦναι topos – is an important element of Greek thought, a fundamental part of some of Greece’s greatest literary works, and a vital element in the understanding of Greek culture in general. Yet this aspect of ancient thought has not yet received the attention it deserves, and in the history of its interpretation it has often been forgotten, denied, or purposefully obliterated. Furthermore, the pessimistic side of Greek thought plays a crucial role in both the modern history of the interpretation of antiquity and the intellectual history of Europe; I argue that this history is fundamentally incomplete without the appreciation of Leopardi’s role in it. By his study of and engagement with ancient sources Leopardi contributed to the 19th century rediscovery of Greek pessimistic wisdom, alongside, though chronologically before, the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacob Burckhardt. Having outlined some fundamental steps in the history of the reception of Greek pessimism, this thesis examines the cardinal components of Leopardi’s reception of it: his use of Greek conceptions of humanity to undermine modernity’s anthropocentric fallacy, his reinterpretation of the Homeric simile of the leaves and its pessimistic undertones, and his views on the idea that it would be best for man not to be born.

Quote from Don

considered to be "the classic formulation of Greek pessimism":

That's an interesting topic in itself. To what extent were the Greeks "pessimists"? Was that an integral part of mainstream (Socrates / Plato / Aristotle) Greek philosophy, or was it a minority viewpoint, and if so held by who?

I don't consider the Romans to have been pessimists -- were the Greeks more so than the Romans? I gather the Romans didn't always have a high opinion about all aspects of Greek civilization and i wonder if this was part of it.