Posts by Cassius

In regard to "the same thing"....

When i was editing the podcast this afternoon I became pretty dissatisfied with some of my formulations on "the same thing." I know that we can talk in categories and hierarchies as well, and that pleasure could be in the category of good or virtue, or virtue in the category of pleasure or good, or whatever, so I don't mean to obsess over whether pleasure and virtue and good are entirely the same thing in every respect.

But if they are not the same thing in every respect, but they share something, then we need to be clear about what it is they share, and what that thing is, and describe that thing in a way that makes clear that it isn't either a "Platonic ideal" or an "essence" in Arisotelian terms.

So to get back to sex and filing fingernails, they certainly are not the same thing in every respect, and what they share in common is probably describable only as "a feeling of pleasure." However does that answer whether there are two pleasures, or is it more proper to say two activities that "bring a feeling of pleasure." Is the "feeling" part of those two things really exactly the same though? We might call both feelings pleasure, but I have a hard time believing that both things are identical in every respect. They seem to me to differ at least in intensity, and maybe even in time or other qualities.

This is that vexing "one and many" issue, or "universals" issue. I am not ever sure that we are clear on what Epicurus' position was on whether "universals" exist, or whether he held that there are only discrete experiences which we choose to call by the same names.

I tend to think that Epicurus did not believe in "universals" as having any kind of independent existence apart of the atoms and void involved, so when we start talking about something as High-level (or so it appears to me) as "good" then we really need to understand what it is that unifies "things that are good."

Plato and Aristotle clearly had views of what makes something "good" that differ dramatically from Epicurus, and on their framework it made perfect senses that there are ideals or essences that unify all "Goods" into the category of "good."

But does it make sense to say that Epicurus held anything to be good at all unless it is directly associated with bringing pleasure or avoiding pain? Is frances wright correct that we (speaking as Epicureans to Epicureans) can boil all this down to very simple statements that there is nothing good but pleasure, and nothing bad (or evil) except pain?

I'm probably not advancing the ball in this post but I wanted to note that I realize that there are different perspectives in looking at things, and just because two things like virtue and pleasure cannot be dissasociated from each other, which seems to be the point of PD5, does not mean that they are themselves identical. (Or at least I don't think at this moment that it does!)

That was in The Swerve? How in the world did I miss that.... Thank you!

Nate thanks for that info! If anyone has not read the article by Nikolsky on the kinetic katastematic distinction, this would be a good time.

The premise of that article, which I believe is persuasively argued, is that later writers were forcing Epicurus improperly into their own paradigms, and that seeing this error explains much confusion.

It is easy to argue that that is what is going on here - that Cicero and later writers through today are insisting on viewing Epicurus through the paradigms of hostile and incompatible philosophic frameworks, and that this leads to major errors.

Remember too that in addition to Nikolsky that probably the longest and most detailed work on the topic, The Greeks on Pleasure by Gosling and Taylor, reaches much the same conclusion and was the foundation for Nikoloskys conclusions.

Finally I have got the latest Lucretius Today posted and anyone who has braved the length of this thread so far will want to catch it at some point. It doesn't solve any of the issues raised here but might articulate them differently. I wonder how many ways I contradicted myself between there and here after questioning from Don! All he had to have done was appeared with us on the podcast and we'd have cleared all this up last weekend!

Post

RE: Episode One Hundred Nine - The Epicurean View of Friendship

Episode 109 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this week's episode we discuss the Epicurean View of Friendship:

spreaker.com/episode/48777070

Cassius

February 17, 2022 at 5:13 PM

Episode 109 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. In this week's episode we discuss the Epicurean View of Friendship:

Editing is finally coming along. One of the highlights of this episode is Martin taking Torquatus to task for his citation to Theseus and Orestes!

Quote from Don

Is there a goal other than pleasure that you would suggest?

Not ME! But there are a lots of other philosophers who would beg to differ, and they insist on arguing on "logic" grounds for other goals.

Quote from Don

That's Epicurus's answer, as I see it, to the question of "what is that to which everything else points?

My answer to that part Don would be that it is not clear to me AT ALL that in an atomistic universe as we understand it to be, that there IS or SHOULD be something "at which everything else points." We *don't* think that in regard to the movement of the atoms through the void, so why should at some other point there be a single goal?

That is a *huge* presumption for the Platonists et al to be making -- that there is a "single good" that makes sense to everyone.

What I am suggesting is that if you come at the world through religion, then you stipulate that "god" sets the terms. But religion isn't the only way, and from the Pythagoreans and their numerology on through to Plato and his world of ideal forms, there is a "logic-based" approach through which you can allegedly conclude that there is a single good.

I'm suggesting that Epicurus rejected *both* approaches.

In religion, it's pretty simple to say "You're wrong because there is no god."

But in "logic-based approaches" it's not so simple to understand what they even are saying, must lest decode and refute it.

They are postulating things in their formulas and their syllogisms that have to be questioned lest you be tricked. Is it really self-evident that it makes sense to talk of a single highest good? That's pretty much the question we're debating. If we're all in good faith about the basic fundamentals that there's no supernatural realm then we can presume that no one is trying to pull anything over on us, and we can talk about pleasure being "good." But while we agree on what pleasure is (a feeling) no one has ever defined explicitly what "good" is, and so you get packed into that word various presumptions which are at least potentially at odds with Epicurus. Among them are:

Can something be "good" without it being directly attached to pleasure and pain? The world seems to shout "yes" but I am not sure Epicurus would agree.

Are there in fact then many "goods"?

If so, what makes something good? We say pleasure, but the rest of the world shouts that it's more than that.

We pretty much agree I think that there are many pleasures, but they are unified to an extent because our feeling tells us they are pleasures. But all those many pleasures aren't identical to each other in every respect. Sex is not the same as filing your fingernails.

Are all pleasures equally pleasing? Are all goods equally good? If they are not equal and identical in every respect, can they be ranked?

Is there an absolute ranking to which all can refer, or is it purely personal how to rank them?

All these questions tend to get hidden if we jump to "pleasure is the greatest good" and think that ends the process.

Those are questions enough, but I seem to recall (and I bet someone can remind us) that Plato traps some of his interlocutors in his dialogues by talking about "cookery."

As I understand it (and I may be grossly wrong) he asks questions like we are discussing now, and he asks "How do you know which pleasure (or good) is the greatest?

And he ends up suggesting that the only way we can know which good is the greatest is through WISDOM.

As a result, you end up concluding that if you have to have wisdom in order to know what is the greatest good. Thus by that reasoning it is wisdom itself, and not any other good that's in the competition, that therefore must be considered to be the greatest good.

(And that's the analogy to "cookery" -- the cook must know how to combine the elements in order to produce the best result in the food that is eventually to be served.)

I am concerned that that what I am arguing is going to sound like "nominalism" -- which I understand to mean that words have absolutely no meaning except what we give them, with the presumption that everything is totally relative in life and no certainty is possible in anything. I don't mean to be arguing that. But to a certain degree it is true that words are just symbols that we assign in our human brains, and that process of assembling symbols seems to me to be the "opinion" part of the thought process, which Epicurus held is preceded (and guided or tested by) the three canonical faculties, including pleasure and pain. So ultimately I think Epicurus was stressing that the feeling of pleasure is the only ultimate guide, but that as soon as we translate any of this into "opinions" we have to be on the lookout for errors.

So to repeat something I've asserted already, I think we are always on firm ground when we talk about the feeling of pleasure as being the guide of life. But when we talk about happiness or "good and evil" and other higher-level concepts, it looks to me like Epicurus was saying something like "Yes use those words because you have to, but be careful how you use them and be careful what you're admitting when you use them."

I want us to at least get to the point where we can clearly articulate the issues involved. We're getting closer, but I am not sure we are quite there yet. However I think we will get there.

One way to make progress would be if we were all clear on what Epicurus was warning about in his "don't walk about uselessly talking about the good" statement, and also what Torquatus is talking about when he said that Epicurus didn't hold that logical argument was necessary to establish that pleasure is desirable. We ought to at least be able to agree that he was warning about *something* and be able to articulate what he was warning about.

I am working to try to catch up on editing this week's podcast and I realize I am doing everyone a disservice by not posting it before we got so far into this conversation. Not that we solved anything in the podcast, but I for one have probably been all over the board between here and in the podcast in trying to focus in on these issues. Will get it up hopefully later today.

I don't know that what Don and i are saying is really that different. The word "pleasure" is just like any other word - it is a placeholder for innumerable numbers of individual pleasures which we have to decide to choose or avoid. It is only one among several starting points for action, which is what I mean as "answering the philosophical question."

Obviously it's tremendously important to do that properly, because the major alternatives are "virtue," "piety," and "logic" (maybe I would add "nothingness" if we want to include certain other viewpoints). And yes i agree that answering that question is tremendously important so as not to associate with the wrong people and so as to know how to answer the question when it comes up. Identifying the greatest good solves those problems for us. It tells us to which school we should belong. And of course that is tremendously important.

But we still arrive at the same point once we identify "Pleasure is the Greatest Good:" because the daily question that has to be answered moment by moment is "What next?"

My view as to why Don and I seem to be dancing around but not appearing to agree is that we don't at this point have the same attitude toward the "role of logic'" question. I think Epicurus considered the Platonic / Aristotelian assertions of "logic' to be equally as deadly as the arbitrary assertions of religions, and that he was arguing against both with similar intensity. Even though Plato and Aristotle did believe in their gods, their error was not primarily one of religion - it was the way they were applying their logic. Therefore i think Epicurus saw TWO major enemies of right thinking, religion and improper use of logic, and what I am trying to do is to bring out that side of what he was attacking and what he was saying.

Just as with "gods' and "all sensations are true" and the subtleties of "absence of pain" (and probably more terms if I thought about it longer) I think that "pleasure" and "greatest good' have to be parsed for their deeper meaning and not taken at face value. Saying "pleasure is the greatest good" in his time was filled with implications that need to be brought and, rather than treated as if that formulation answers every question.

To repeat Wright, in a passage where I think she was right in seeing this in Epicurus:

"In the schools you have hitherto frequented,” she continued, addressing the youth, “certain images of virtue, vice, truth, knowledge, are presented to the imagination, and these abstract qualities, or we may call them, figurative beings, are made at once the objects of speculation and adoration. A law is laid down, and the feelings and opinions of men are predicated upon it; a theory is built, and all animate and inanimate nature is made to speak in its support; an hypothesis is advanced, and all the mysteries of nature are treated as explained."

And I don't consider this to be a "fight' in any way between me and Don but an extremely helpful way to get at some issues that I am not sure I previously recognized.

In the past I was criticized (not here) by harping too much on pleasure, and I hope to always continue to be criticized for that because I think that "pleasure" is the ultimate answer to these questions. But going into it as deeply as we are doing helps us understand (i think) where Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics were wrong and have to be attacked.

They weren't just wrong because they attacked Pleasure, they were wrong in their reasons for attacking it, which involved not just religion but their logic and/or their implications as to their logical analysis of "The Good." They didn't base their attack on Pleasure as "I attack it because Zeus told me so." They based their attack on Pleasure on a logical framework which Epicurus found to be in error.

Godfrey my reading is the answer to your question is yes. These programs like the zettlekasten system Seem to revolve around putting information in discrete notes with tags and an indexing system that lets you combine them in different ways.

Both obsidian and logseq are tools which index and make the linking easier.

The latest fad (which I think is going to last) is that these programs avoid complicated proprietary formatting like Microsoft Word uses and stick to very simple formation using asterisks and pound signs and underline characters and similar, which makes them readable by the human eye without a lot of computer code. That's what "markdown" is.

Libre office files are in Word or a type of XML format and it's my understanding that obsidian can read them, but can't manipulate them optimally like markdown.

But libre office and make other utilities can easily convert or export them to markdown if desired.

I now have most of the key Epicurean texts in markdown and I need to zip them up and upload that somewhere so that people can use them in either logseq or obsidian. Of the two I am finding obsidian more helpful for this.

In my Observation logseq is more of an outlining program useful for generating new content, and obsidian is lending itself to organizing lots and lots of large files and searching through them.

Wow Don thanks for the lengthy summary.

Maybe I am jumping to a conclusion too early but it does seem to me that the ultimate issue is still in the area of "What was Epicurus own opinion of discussing an 'ultimate good?'.

He clearly did use similar terms himself. So no one can argue that he did not talk about the subject.

The issue is more a question of what limitations or caveats did he imply in his usage that differs from the other philosophers.

It seems to me that he differs not only in selecting his ultimate good ("pleasure") but in warning against placing too much weight on the discussion.

Like one of the Frances Wright quotes above, it seems to me that the other philosophers we're implying a "magic" to the discussion in that once the proved logically there was an ultimate good, they thought they had actually accomplished something.

I read Epicurus as saying that the exercise really accomplishes very little other than answering the philosophic question that the others insist on asking. Once you have identified "pleasure" as the answer to the logic game, you're still at the very beginning of your analysis of how to act in a particular situation.

Which tells me that Epicurus was much less interested in the application of the logic game than he was in identifying that there is no supernatural god, and no life after death, and no logical magic that answers the truly practical question of how to live. What we are left with is "feeling" in the same generic sense as is any other living animal. Our reasoning ability lets us pursue far more elaborate means of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain than other animals, but we're ultimately all one big family of life doing the best we can with the time we have.

Quote from Kalosyni

"Cicero as a Source for Epicurus"

by Kyle Tebo

Kalosyni I read that article and it is directly on point as to Ciceros motives. It does a good job of collecting examples of Cicero's hostility. It does not really go further than that (that he was hostile) however so it doesn't help much with what Epicurus actually held. In fact the article raises an issue that I agree with (that Epicurus probably did not think the sun was only a foot wide) but then (to my reading) did not follow through with more discussion, which I gathered he intended to do.

Regardless, the article is a good summary. I think it leaves unanswered whether Cicero was negligent or malicious, but I think the examples point clearly toward malicious.

SInce all of us have unlimited time to read every possible article on this subject (joke!), here is the Packer article that DeWitt is referencing. I read it when I first found it several years ago, but don't remember much about it. I seem to remember that she questions Torquatus' illustration of the best and worst lives because she thinks that the description of the best life is too active, which is a position I disagree with, so I don't cite the article very often. But it's possible that the rest of the article touches on the issue that we are discussing here (the manner of presenting arguments about the "greatest good), so it might be worth re-reading.

File

CIcero's Presentation of Epicurean Ethics - By Mary Porter Packer (1938)

A study based primarily on De Finibus I and II

Cassius

February 16, 2022 at 1:27 PM

This thought just occurs to me:

Do we think that Cicero's Torquatus was mistaken to frame the discussion the way he did? If so, do we think;

1 ) Cicero intentionally or negligently misrepresents the Epicurean argument by doing this?

2) Cicero was accurately reporting the way Epicureans were arguing in 50 BC?

I ask that because if we begin to have a consensus that this form of argument was an error in talking to Cicero (who certainly did not agree with Epicurean definitions) then we might profit from figuring out how this happened.

And in that regard I have more "immortal" words from Norman DeWitt on Cicero's presentation of Epicurean ethics: "I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it so completely." (Note - this isn't necessary a reference to this part of Torquatus, but to Cicero's commentary on Epicurus in general.)

Quote from Godfrey

The quote from Godfrey references this quote from Don It seems to me that the "actual linguistic meaning" of"good", at its most basic, is simply "that which provides pleasure." "Evil" is"that which causes pain." I'm pretty sure we can all agree on this.

To me it becomes questionable when it's stated as "the Good", and that seems to be just a philosophical argument which leads down a rabbit hole and is of limited or no practical use. All of the examples in post #37 are "lower case" goods and make sense both practically and philosophically as far as I can tell.

I'll repeat this more clearly below but it seems to me that the issue is that while WE can agree on this, using Epicurean terminology, this terminology differs greatly from all non-Epicurean terminology and so is very confusing unless we constantly restate our context.

Quote from smoothiekiwi

surprised how little of a hedonist (in the modern sense of the world)

Yes, another occasion on which I can say "I hate that word" ("hedonist") this is where Elli's curse on the use of "isms" terminology rings the most true.

Quote from Don

Okay, good! Now, we're getting somewhere. So, as a generic adjective or noun in common speech, we all(?) can agree on this this meaning of good and evil.

Again as cited above, WE can, but the rest of the world strongly disagrees. How do we handle that?

Quote from Don

I am glad Godfrey cited "practical wisdom is the greatest good." Do we have problems with that statement?

Yes it seems like we can line up more than one "greatest good" description from Epicurus. At least this one, and then the one about escape from a deadly peril, seem targeted at a greatest good, then of course we have Torquatus saying that Epicurus held it to be "pleasure." I wonder how many we could come up with, if we tried to list them?

So in terms of getting somewhere can we even regroup far enough back to decide what our goal is here?

1. I think we agree that Epicurus held pleasure to be "good."
2. I don't think we agree whether Epicurus held there to be one or many goods, although it appears that maybe the weight of the evidence is that he held there to be multiple goods?
3. I don't think we agree (do we?) that Epicurus himself used the formulation greatest good (?) Unless we accept what Torquatus wrote we don't have that in Epicurus' own words do we? Something that implies that there are multiple goods and that pleasure is the greatest of them?
4. I think we may agree that Epicurus is using "good" with a different definition than most other philosophers (?)
5. Do we have even a proposal as to how to deal with using Epicurus' definition while acknowledging that the rest of the world uses it differently? In the case of gods we can call them "Epicurean Gods." Are we suggesting that in this context we need to use the term "Epicurean Good" or "Epicurean Greatest Good" to avoid confusion?

Excellent post and no need to worry about repetition. We'll be repeating this as long as we live.

Quote from smoothiekiwi

. In order to gain the maximum pleasure, we have to keep a balance, but the goal doesn't become the balance itself- it's only an instrument...

I do think that you're using the word colloquially, so that "balance" is find as an approximation of the issue, but in the end it is probably an important point that "balance" is not in itself a goal. We don't want a "Balance" of pleasure and pain, for example, or a balance between nutritious food and poison.

There are lots of ways to talk about this and I can't even begin to list them. I really don't care for the word "prudent" because of its modern connotations, but I guess that really is more in the direction we're looking for. We aren't looking in most cases for "balance" - we're looking for the "right amount" that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain.

My answer to that question to Don is that some (but not many) don't have the mental capacity to see the full extent of the philosophy. Also it may be a reference to the reality that some people are sickly and die almost from birth, and never develop the capacity through no fault of their own.

And this also touches on "how long do you have to live in order to live a full life?"

But that "full life" is probably another one of those conceptual traps like "the good."

Just to be clear about Wright, here I think is the heart of what we need to be concerned about:

"...Certain images of virtue, vice, truth, knowledge, are presented to the imagination, and these abstract qualities, or we may call them, figurative beings, are made at once the objects of speculation and adoration. A law is laid down, and the feelings and opinions of men are predicated upon it; a theory is built, and all animate and inanimate nature is made to speak in its support; an hypothesis is advanced, and all the mysteries of nature are treated as explained."

She didn't use the word "good" in this list, but I am thinking this is what we need to avoid doing ourselves with "good" and "evil," so as to avoid being sucked into the games that other schools play when they try to do exactly that.

We're on firm ground when we are discussing pleasure and pain, but much less so in discussing good and evil.

Note on this passage from Wright:

Maybe I am feeling inadequate, or I want to flatter us in this discussion, or something, but whenever I read that paragraph, and especially now in regard to this current discussion, I see this argument as"DEEP" and very possibly brilliant. It's not something that someone can pick out from a couple of readings of Diogenes Laertius at twenty years old, no matter how smart someone is.

We've been studying Epicurus for quite some time, reading lots of commentators and articles, and I don't think I've seen much anywhere that gets at this issue like she does here. These are not the thoughts of someone who has had only a couple of years of exposure to Epicurus, not unless those were *very* intense years, with some very good people with whom to compare notes.

It seems Frances Wright had access to numbers of relatives and friends who were into materialist philosophy, so maybe we can still yet discover in her circles some other writers who she herself bounced off of to gain some of her insights. And that continues to be my point on this: Yes - All praise to Frances Wright for giving this to us, but I want more of it, and maybe more of it actually exists that we can find in the future.