Just for clarity the correct link to post number 36 is: RE: Episode One Hundred Thirty Eight - Letter to Menoeceus 5 - Pleasure Part One
It's not obvious how to do that.... to get the direct link click on the post number at the top right, and you get a popup box. One of the entries is "permalink" and you can click on the "copy" icon to copy the link directly into your clipboard, where it is then easy to paste.
We don't necessarily choose which desires arise within us. Many - most? - of our desires arise from things outside of ourselves.
As to the arising of desires (thoughts?) there is of course also the Epicurean theory of images:
[15.16] Cicero to Cassius
[Rome, January, 45 B.C.]
I expect you must be just a little ashamed of yourself now that this is the third letter that has caught you before you have sent me a single leaf or even a line. But I am not pressing you, for I shall look forward to, or rather insist upon, a longer letter. As for myself, if I always had somebody to trust with them, I should send you as many as three an hour. For it somehow happens, that whenever I write anything to you, you seem to be at my very elbow; and that, not by way of visions of images, as your new friends term them, who believe that even mental visions are conjured up by what Catius calls spectres (for let me remind you that Catius the Insubrian, an Epicurean, who died lately, gives the name of spectres to what the famous Gargettian [Epicurus], and long before that Democritus, called images).
2 But, even supposing that the eye can be struck by these spectres because they run up against it quite of their own accord, how the mind can be so struck is more than I can see. It will be your duty to explain to me, when you arrive here safe and sound, whether the spectre of you is at my command to come up as soon as the whim has taken me to think about you - and not only about you, who always occupy my inmost heart, but suppose I begin thinking about the Isle of Britain, will the image of that wing its way to my consciousness?
3 But of this later on. I am only sounding you now to see in what spirit you take it. For if you are angry and annoyed, I shall have more to say, and shall insist upon your being reinstated in that school of philosophy, out of which you have been ousted "by violence and an armed force." In this formula the words "within this year" are not usually added; so even if it is now two or three years since, bewitched by the blandishments of Pleasure, you sent a notice of divorce to Virtue, I am free to act as I like. And yet to whom am I talking? To you, the most gallant gentleman in the world, who, ever since you set foot in the forum, have done nothing but what bears every mark of the most impressive distinction. Why, in that very school you have selected I apprehend there is more vitality than I should have supposed, if only because it has your approval. "How did the whole subject occur to you ?" you will say. Because I had nothing else to write. About politics I can write nothing, for I do not care to write what I feel.
I agree with most everything in that last post. I would want to clarify this part however:
Oh, I agree! My only intent was to get away from moral judgements. Desires arise naturally from our physical needs and from just living our life but they also arise from things we've been inculcated to desire by society and culture. They're not *morally* good or bad but they can be useful to our life and existence or detrimental to our well-being if we choose to follow them. If we choose NOT to follow those that are useful for our life, that's not going to go well for us. Likewise, if we choose TO follow unhealthy or harmful desires, that's not going to go well for us either. But we should leave the morality out of it. "Oh, you did THAT! You're a BAD person!"
You are listing there numbers of ways that desires arise (naturally from physical needs, living our life, things we are inculcated to desire by society and culture. Agreed. But per the letter to Menoeceus do we not also to some degree choose our own desires, consistent with our free will, and indeed to the events arising from those choices praise and blame do attach?
[133] For indeed who, think you, is a better man than he who holds reverent opinions concerning the gods, and is at all times free from fear of death, and has reasoned out the end ordained by nature? He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain; he laughs at (destiny), whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things. (He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity) and some by chance, and some are within our control; for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame
"They're not *morally* good or bad " I think I would agree with that statement, since we are basically jettisoning absolute standards of morality, with the result that we are pretty much talking about "What we find to be desirable" and "What we find to be distasteful." But within the paradigm that there is no absolute morality, there is still sort of a factual or consensus "agreement" (possibly related to the justice discussion) that it is valid for us to consider some actions to be praiseworthy and others to be blameworthy.
I am thinking that is a very important part of this discussion. We're all in agreement I think in Epicurean terms that there is no "absolute" morality in the sense established by supernatural gods or ideal forms. But on the other hand there always remains pleasure and pain, and among our friends at least we presumably share certain views on what makes us happy and what makes us sad, and through that perspective there does in fact remain an important concept of "praiseworhiness" and "blameworthiness."
So - "Oh, you did THAT! You're a BAD person!" cannot refer to an absolute morality, but to the extent we want to define "bad" we can still talk about our norms of agreement on working together for our mutual benefit and not harming each other.
Correct or no?
Welcome to Episode One Hundred Thirty-Nine 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.
I am your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we'll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts, and we'll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt.
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.
Today we continue our discussion of Pleasure in Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus. Now let's join Joshua reading today's text:
BAILEY:
And again independence of desire we think a great good — not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things, but that, if we do not possess many, we may enjoy the few in the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it, and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard. And so plain savours bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet, when all the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water produce the highest pleasure, when one who needs them puts them to his lips.
[131] To grow accustomed therefore to simple and not luxurious diet gives us health to the full, and makes a man alert for the needful employments of life, and when after long intervals we approach luxuries disposes us better towards them, and fits us to be fearless of fortune.
When, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.
[132] For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit.
Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy: for from prudence are sprung all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, (nor, again, to live a life of prudence, honor, and justice) without living pleasantly. For the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life, and the pleasant life is inseparable from them.
HICKS:
Again, we regard independence of outward things as a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much, being honestly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it, and that whatever is natural is easily procured and only the vain and worthless hard to win. Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, when once the pain of want has been removed, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.
[131] To habituate one's self, therefore, to simple and inexpensive diet supplies all that is needful for health, and enables a man to meet the necessary requirements of life without shrinking, and it places us in a better condition when we approach at intervals a costly fare and renders us fearless of fortune.
When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.
[132] It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy; from it spring all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice, which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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?
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."
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.
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!
