Welcome to Episode 308 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we continue covering Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" from an Epicurean perspective. Today we continue our discussion with the second half of section 10 of Part 5 where Cicero criticizes Metrodorus and Epicurus for allegedly making high-sounding statements by being inconsistent for involving pleasure and pain in them.
As we discussed last week, Cicero identifies this question of whether and how the wise man can always be happy as one of the most important - perhaps the most important - in philosophy.
Today we will look at the four points that are summarized all-too-briefly in the "Tetrapharmakon," and we will expand on the meaning of each branch by referring to the full text of the first four Principal Doctrines, supporting statements in the letters and fragments of Epicurus, and to where Cicero has Torquatus reference them in Book One of On Ends, including:
XIX. At the same time this Stoic doctrine can be stated in a form which we do not object to, and indeed ourselves endorse. For Epicurus thus presents his Wise Man who is always happy: (3) his desires are kept within bounds; (2) death he disregards; (1) he has a true conception, untainted by fear, of the Divine nature; (4) he does not hesitate to depart from life, if that would better his condition. Thus equipped he enjoys perpetual pleasure, for there is no moment when the pleasures he experiences do not outbalance the pains; since he remembers the past with gratitude, grasps the present with a full realization of its pleasantness, and does not rely upon the future; he looks forward to it, but finds his true enjoyment in the present.
XII. Again, the truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. (3) Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them; I ask what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable? A man whose circumstances are such must needs possess, as well as other things, a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain, because (2) death is apart from sensation, and (4) pain when lasting is usually slight, when oppressive is of short duration, so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity, and its slightness to its continuance. When in addition we suppose that such a man is (1) in no awe of the influence of the gods, and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them, what circumstance is it possible to add to these, to make his condition better?
Episode 307 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "How The Wise Epicurean Is Always Happy"
If you get a chance it's always interesting and helpful to hear how new people came across the forum, and generally what part of the world they are in, and how they generally developed their recent interest that led them to dropping by.
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Here's a much better example of the way to understand this issue as stated by an articulate Roman Epicurean in 50 BC.
After over a hundred years of thinking about what Epicurus taught, you can place the key ideas in the context of how the wise man is always happy. Cicero identifies in Tusculan Disputations that how the wise man is in fact always happy is the most important question in philosophy.
The point about pain is not to callously say that what is terrible is "easy to endure," but that pain ultimately has no unbreakable power over us because it is almost always manageable, and when it is truly not manageable we can always defeat it by departing from life:
XIX. At the same time this Stoic doctrine can be stated in a form which we do not object to, and indeed ourselves endorse. For Epicurus thus presents his Wise Man who is always happy: (3) his desires are kept within bounds; (2) death he disregards; (1) he has a true conception, untainted by fear, of the Divine nature; (4) he does not hesitate to depart from life, if that would better his condition. Thus equipped he enjoys perpetual pleasure, for there is no moment when the pleasures he experiences do not outbalance the pains; since he remembers the past with gratitude, grasps the present with a full realization of its pleasantness, and does not rely upon the future; he looks forward to it, but finds his true enjoyment in the present.
And I would agree with the thrust of Don's comments that it does indeed appear that the Epicureans saw these four aspects as particularly important. But the four have to be stated clearly in order to be persuasive.
Here they are again in different order stated in much more full terms from earlier in On Ends:
XII. Again, the truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. (3) Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them; I ask what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable? A man whose circumstances are such must needs possess, as well as other things, a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain, because (2) death is apart from sensation, and (4) pain when lasting is usually slight, when oppressive is of short duration, so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity, and its slightness to its continuance. When in addition we suppose that such a man is (1) in no awe of the influence of the gods, and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them, what circumstance is it possible to add to these, to make his condition better?
So there's plenty of information from which to flesh out the full meaning of the fourth item of the list without just saying "what's terrible is easy to endure." Cicero is using the same grouping of four to identify the best way of life / how the wise man is always happy.
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For me, as I learn more about Epicureanism, I identify with most of the tetrapharmikos.
There is nothing to fear from gods or natural phenomenon, yes.
There is no afterlife of which to be suspicious, yes.
And Pleasure is easy to obtain, yes, but it's hard to measure.
while Pain can be easily endured, no, I'm not willing to acknowledge that this is a universal truth.
The problem in my view is not with the germ of thought that apparently gave rise to the phrasing of the fourth of the statements, but that the formulation makes it look like a claim to being an oracular claim to revealed universal truth when the full wording of PD04 is much more realistic and practical.
As bad or worse is that isolating it in this way strips the statement of its context. I'm convinced the context is the very stark question of "how can you be sure that you'll remain happy when the evils of the body and external evils are not within your complete control. That's the challenge that they were answering, such as in the way that Cicero framed it in Part 5 of Tusculan Disputations:
And this very thing, too, Metrodorus has said, but in better language: “I have anticipated you, Fortune; I have caught you, and cut off every access, so that you cannot possibly reach me.” This would be excellent in the mouth of Aristo the Chian, or Zeno the Stoic, who held nothing to be an evil but what was base; but for you, Metrodorus, to anticipate the approaches of fortune, who confine all that is good to your bowels and marrow,—for you to say so, who define the chief good by a strong constitution of body, and a well assured hope of its continuance,—for you to cut off every access of fortune? Why, you may instantly be deprived of that good. Yet the simple are taken with these propositions, and a vast crowd is led away by such sentences to become their followers.
Cicero may deride this as simplistic snake-oil that takes in the unsophisticated, but PD04 is very reasonable and unchallengable. Moderate pains can be lived with, and if pains get so bad we can't live with them and don't go away, we ourselves have the remedy in that we can terminate our lives. In no way does pain have the ability to hold us in its grip forever. We are in control, not pain. Metrodorus' formulation explains the calculation, especially when it is given in FULL:
VS47. I have anticipated thee, Fortune, and entrenched myself against all thy secret attacks. And I will not give myself up as captive to thee or to any other circumstance; but when it is time for me to go, spitting contempt on life and on those who vainly cling to it, I will leave life crying aloud a glorious triumph-song that I have lived well.
And that's why I see Dave's concern , which is so often shared by others, The Tetrapharmakon serves well as a memory device for educated Epicureans, but others who throw it around without knowing the full ideas that it outlines are often woefully misinterpreting it.
And to repeat for Dave and for lurkers, you NEVER hear the Tetrapharmakon formulation stated by Epicurus, or by Lucretius, or by DIogenes of Oinoanda, or by anyone else whose text is expansive and fully-preserved and completely clear.
The hazard is exactly what we see Dave stating. Dave thinks he has to reject something that he believes to be a well established and core statement of Epicurean doctrine when it is not.
Please welcome AUtC who tells me:
Hello, I would like to learn more about Epicureanism. I want to talk to others that are also interested in the same things. I have no background or deep education on Epicurean, other than what I have read online in a few spaces.
Thank you.
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We have found over the years that there are a number of key texts and references which most all serious students of Epicurus will want to read and evaluate for themselves. Those include the following.
"Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt
The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.
"On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"
"Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky
The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."
Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section
Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section
The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation
A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright
Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus
Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)
"The Greeks on Pleasure" -Gosling & Taylor Sections on Epicurus, especially the section on katastematic and kinetic pleasure which explains why ultimately this distinction was not of great significance to Epicurus.
It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read. Feel free to join in on one or more of our conversation threads under various topics found throughout the forum, where you can to ask questions or to add in any of your insights as you study the Epicurean philosophy.
And time has also indicated to us that if you can find the time to read one book which will best explain classical Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to most modern "eclectic" interpretations of Epicurus, that book is Norman DeWitt's Epicurus And His Philosophy.
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Welcome to the forum!
As for me personally this may be why i think the word "Quasi" always sounds fake or negative:
Eikadistes thank you for all that commentary!
I don't disagree with any of it but would mention only slight tone question as to "quasi." In my mind that word for some reason carries a negative connotation that evokes space ghosts, but I don't think what Cicero was conveying should be presumed to carry any baggage with it. I would infer it to mean only "something like" or "something analogous too" or "something that functions analogously" and I would not read more into it than that.
Having said that I agree with virtually everything you wrote there. *Everything* gives off images not just gods and not just things that are close or far away.
Now that I have scanned through once the entire book, I've refocused the title of the Zoom meeting. I am pretty sure that this is a work about which most of us are very unfamiliar, so let's just spend the meeting introducing ourselves to Bernier, Gassendi, and what's included in this work.
The paraphrase included at the Early Modern Texts website is useful, but now that I've reviewed the origina PDF at Archive.org l I'd say that we are better off going straight to the source, especially given that the EMT website glosses over or omits entirely part of the text.
We obviously aren't going to have time to go through this in detail, but i think most of us are going to want to add this to our reading list at some point, and we can usefully set the stage for that by talking about Bernier, Gassendi, and how the book is structured.
We're also going to want to make a list of caveats and/or criticisms that we can append to our links to it here at the forum so that new readers can have access to those into the future.
We'll probably refer mostly to the comments contained in this thread and of course to the Archive.org version of the book itself which is here:
So Francois Bernier is the person to whom we owe so much here for access to this material:
Bernier abridged and translated the philosophical writings of his friend Pierre Gassendi from Latin into French. Initial editions of Bernier's Abregé de la Philosophie de Gassendi were published in Paris in 1674 by the family Langlois and in 1675 by Estienne Michallet. A complete edition in eight volumes was published by Anisson and Posuel at Lyon in 1678; Anisson and Posuel joined with Rigaud to publish a second edition in seven volumes in 1684. Bernier objectively and faithfully rendered Gassendi's ideas in his Abregé, without editorial interjection or invention. However, Bernier remained uncomfortable with some of Gassendi's notions: in 1682, Estienne Michallet was again his publisher, putting forth his Doutes de Mr. Bernier sur quelques-uns des principaux Chapitres de son Abregé de la Philosophie de Gassendi.
Clear evidence of Gassendi letting his religion get in the way of his reasoning:
Gassendi seems to specifically repudiate Epicurus on the swerve and liberty, leading up to this statement:
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