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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!
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 -
"Greek poetic pessimism" -- Maybe that was part of why Epicurus was hostile to at least some aspects of poetry?
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.
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.
I have already forgotten when we said in the podcast to some extent, but what I meant by respectable was that I got the impression what Joshua was saying was that the statement might have been put in the mouth of a character in a play, rather than made as a direct statement by the playwright.... With the implication that if so the statement might have been made by a character in a context which the playwright was clearly not advocating the comment himself.
So if Theogonis is the author (and we did not cite him) then we need to explicitly clean up what we said - maybe in this week's episode.
Welcome to Episode One Hundred Thirty-Eight 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 Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, and we discuss ___________ with ___________ reading today's text:
BAILEY:
We must consider that of desires some are natural, others vain, and of the natural some are necessary and others merely natural; and of the necessary some are necessary for happiness, others for the repose of the body, and others for very life.
[128] The right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choice and avoidance to the health of the body and (the soul’s) freedom from disturbance, since this is the aim of the life of blessedness. For it is to obtain this end that we always act, namely, to avoid pain and fear. And when this is once secured for us, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed, since the living creature has not to wander as though in search of something that is missing, and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body. For it is then that we have need of pleasure, when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure; (but when we do not feel pain), we no longer need pleasure.
[129] And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.
And since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them: and similarly we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time. Every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen: even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided.
[130] Yet by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters. For the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good.
HICKS:
We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only. And of the necessary desires some are necessary if we are to be happy, some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness, some if we are even to live.
[128] He who has a clear and certain understanding of these things will direct every preference and aversion toward securing health of body and tranquility of mind, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life. For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and, when once we have attained all this, the tempest of the soul is laid; seeing that the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking, nor to look for anything else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled. When we are pained because of the absence of pleasure, then, and then only, do we feel the need of pleasure.
[129] Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing. And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And ofttimes we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure. While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is choiceworthy, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned.
[130] It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good.
So Don on the point we were debating - is that position truly being advocated by a respectable character or writer?
