Posts by Cassius

Quote from Rolf

my imagining of that scenario probably says more about what absence of pain looks like to me than an objective path to such. I do lean a little more Dude than Caesar

I do lean a little more Dude than Caesar

It seems like perspectives on the best life are like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other, at least in terms of mass popularity. But both ends of the swing have their place, and the pendulum doesn't stay in balance and keep swinging without both.

Probably could create a "sorites" question about a pendulum by stopping it with your hand and asking "At what point on it's path is the string and the weight acting as a pendulum?" You can isolate points all day long but no single point on the path of the pendulum captures what it means to be a pendulum.

It's interesting to see even this stated so "backhandedly."

So that's Philodemus writing about Metrodorus in the context of "Property Management"..... There's got to be more to be derived from the overall context of how these issues are being balanced. Clearly the more you have the more you have to worry about, and on the other extreme if you don't have enough you're clearly going to be confronting certain types of pains as a result. Presumably they were wrestling with the right way to express these issues just like we are.

Great finds, Eikadistes! Right on point as to why we sometimes choose pain for the sake of pleasure, and pretty directly contrary to that statement of Horace we've discussed recently.

Quote from Don

My vision of the jar is oil and water. They don't mix.

Yes I agree that's a key part of it.

Quote

I’m imagining someone laying down on a sun lounger, hands behind their head, saying “it doesn’t get better than this”.

To push back even harder on this point: All experiences of pleasure are real experiences of pleasure, but every time we say "for example" and imply that our example will impress another person as being a "highest good," we risk giving the impression that the person listening should immediately agree that this experience would be FOR THEM TOO the same kind of "absence of pain." No individual tree constitutes the forest, and singling out one example is always going to risk confusing the two levels that are being discussed. Forests exist. Trees exist. But the two are not the same, and a single maple tree is no more indicative of a forest than is a single pine or a single oak.

Many of us are so fed up with worthless abstractions that we think all abstractions are worthless, but that's not the case, and abstractions such as are involved in visualizing the best life are essential. We can't hope to reach a target without visualizing the target, but everyone's target is going to look different.

The "Dude's" lifestyle is no more or less necessarily indicative of the Epicurean concept of a best life than would be that of Julius Caesar. The concept of the best life is broad enough to include these two extremes and any number in between. Trying to tie down the best life into a single example isn't possible, and the idea that it might be possible can be very damaging, because trying to do so ignores the Epicurean viewpoint about the nature of the universe and the absence of absolute forms.

The Epicurean texts don't describe "the best life" in any but very general mental and bodily terms, culminating in the description of 100% pleasure 0% pain, which we ought to recognize is the best terminology that by definition can be achieved.

Quote from Rolf

I’m imagining someone laying down on a sun lounger, hands behind their head, saying “it doesn’t get better than this”.

I think that is *one* possible interpretation, certainly. But I'd push back on this example simply because it seems to be the default example that everyone jumps to suggest -- that the best experience in life is "taking it easy" and I don't think that is a healthy attitude. Aren't you in your 20's? At that age you have your whole life ahead of you, and would normally be making plans for what you want to "do" with your life, rather than the way you will "relax" during those times you are resting. I'm not trying to be too specific but I presume you know what I mean. "Resting" at the end of a journey is certainly a good thing, but so is the journey itself. Epicurean circles which perpetuate the notion that "rest" is the goal of life are playing right into the hands of CIcero and Plutarch and anyone else who for reasons of their own want to pigenohole Epicureans into a "wallflower" category.

Quote from Rolf

And this is why simply absence of thirst/hunger etc. isn’t enough to definitively say someone has reached the limit of pleasure. Am I on the right track?

That's the way I see it. Just like in Plutarch's examples it make no sense to eat or drink a little just to the point of getting rid of thirst and hunger, and then sit comatose until the desires for food and drink come back again. An Epicurean wouldn't live to eat (or drink) any more than to pursue any other "virtue" - the purpose of eating and drinking is to keep your body healthy so that you can then do more with it. Unless, that is, a particular person wants to admit, "Yes, I think the life of a cow would be lovely, and I'd be more than happy to graze in the fields all day staring at the ground."

Again, I am not knocking the pleasures of eating and drinking. I am knocking the idea that Epicurus held that these are more important to life than the other pleasures that we pursue after we eat and drink our fill. These "other pleasures" of mind and body are the real battleground in the argument.

Yes you "can" compete with gods for at last a time with only bread and water. But is that really the way you want to confine yourself to doing it?

Quote from Rolf

As for Chrysippus’ hand: How can it be said that the hand had reached the limit of pleasure if a hand massage would’ve been even more intensely pleasurable than the healthy resting state?

The answer is the contrast between "limit" and "intensity." Those are not the same thing. We're defining the limit of pleasure as 100% pleasure - pure pleasure - the state of experience when there is no pain mixed in. That observation tells you nothing about the duration, intensity, or parts of the body affected by the particular pleasures you are engaged in, and those are very different. Your question about the jar full of water and the jar full of chocolate milk is right on point. Both are pleasurable, but on occasion one of them can be much more pleasurable than the other. PDO3 refers to the limit of "quantity" of pleasure, not the limit of intensity, or duration, or part of the body affected. if you stretch the analogy beyond the point it was intended to make you cease making a valid point and start making a terrible one. All pleasures are pleasure, but all pleasures are not equally pleasurable. The very idea of stating a specific set of pleasures that should be the goal of every human being is an upside-down and perverse way of looking at the question, but that's exactly the way monotheists want to proceed in everything. They want to think that there is a central power, a divine god, that sets out "one way" that everyone should follow. And that's just hogwash. Nature and the feeling of pleasure are not so restrictive as to conform to and comply with Abrahamic theology.

Quote from Rolf

If you could take a look at this when you get a spare moment, it would be a big help!

The reason I haven't responded to that already is I am not sure how to pick out pieces of what you're written. If you'd like to ask specifics I could more easily address them. For the moment I'd say that any time there is an implication that one pleasure is absolutely "better" than another for everyone, you've got an abstraction that is going to bite you just like "virtue" bites the Stoics.

Quote from Rolf

One jar full of water, the other full of chocolate milk. Both jars are full of pleasure: Water is great, it quenches your thirst! But chocolate milk is sure a lot tastier

Yes, as above, I think that's an example that helps flesh out where the jar analogy stops being useful and starts being harmful, if and when it is presumed that everyone has the same jar and wants to fill it in the same way. That's just not correct and not a part of the philosophic issue.

Quote from Rolf

Another question: Would you say that absence of pain as the limit of pleasure is more of a theoretical goal? In the same way that the gods can be seen as mental ideal? Or is it something we’re expected to achieve on a day to day basis?

It is a theoretical goal but that is not to say it is a useless abstraction, as we've been discussing. A starting point here is that everyone wants the "best" life. But what is the meaning of "best?" Think about it for very long and if you're not a monotheist you'll realize there is no single best for everyone. But even then the question remains, what can you say about "best" other than that there is nothing better than best? Yes it's wordplay, but it's a logical question. There's can't be anything better than best. And if you're going to suggest that "pleasure" is the best life, then you've got to have an answer to the question of "what's the best life of pleasure? " And the answer to that question is that the best life of pleasure is one that is completely full of pleasure with no portion of that life being pain. I don't think we'd be discussing "absence of pain" at all were it not for this question and the need to construct a logical answer to it. And this is not speculation, it's spelled out by Plato in Philebus and in other places by other people, including clear statements to this effect by Seneca, and the references we've been discussing that Cicero has preserved through Torquatus that make no sense in any other way.

Quote from DaveT

and Alexa's voice at home.

Ah-HA! The virus is spreading from kochiekoch to you!

Quote from Rolf

I think what I’m struggling with is that to me, absence of pain sounds like a state in which I’m perfectly content and don’t feel like I need anything more. At the same time, my practical evaluation of Epicurean ethics is that of prudence and hedonic calculus. In my head, these two ideas don’t quite seem to align. It doesn’t feel so clear.

And I think it sounds that way to most people, and that's why Cicero and Plutarch use it like a sledgehammer against Epicurus, because understanding it as "being satisfied with the bare minimum of life" is deadly and no healthy person in their right might is going to accept that. (Of course there are many people who are not healthy or in their right mind who *do* accept that version, and that just makes the problem worse.)

All of these issues are very much a test like "the size of the sun is as it appears to be." If you are satisfied then of course you don't want any more -- that's the definition of being satisfied. The real question is knowing the difference between "when" you should be satisified, and when you shouldn't.

All of us have this baggage from being raised Christian (or religious in some way) with a mixture of Buddhism and Stoicism thrown in to emphasize that wanting pleasure or anything more than you currently have is a character flaw. That's as much the problem as anything else. If you were born on a desert island with nothing but nature teaching you through observation of how all other life lives, you'd never have a moment for thinking that you shouldn't sing, dance, fly, embrace, etc, just like all the other animals do when they satisfy their thirst and hunger.

But Epicurean philosophy can be twisted into justifying just such an outcome, and in that respect the result is worse than Stoicism or religion - at least those (or most of them) promise a life in heaven as a reward for asceticism now. The "Absence of Pain" Epicureans don't even get that -- they get asceticism for the sake of whatever it brings in this life, which is nothing.

As humans we live through using our minds properly, and Epicurus is pointing the way to proper thinking. Plato et al are wrong to say that life is neutral or suffering with a few intervals of pleasure. The right attitude is that life is enjoyable and needs to be enjoyed, and so we set our minds to enjoying every aspect of it that can possibly be enjoyed in mind and body, and that can include anything and everything that isn't explicitly painful.

I'd say the most helpful way of looking at things is to focus on how short life is, and how when it's over it's over. If you really focus on what that means, what kind of a human being are you if you don't want to use your time the very best way possible? If "pleasure" is everything that is desirable and "pain" is what is undesirable, then the right philosophic attitude is to pursue as much "pleasure" as possible.

All of these words have specific meanings that can be extremely helpful, or if misunderstood, extremely harmful. But this is the importance of philosophy. No one said this was easy - if it was easy there'd be hundreds of Epicuruses instead of essentially only one.

Looking back over your questions I'll go back to the best example I know of. You only have some much time in life to experience what you're going to experience. It is helpful to visualize your total lifetime as a jar, which you must decide how to use. The jar by definitional choice can contain only (1) pleasure or (2) pain. No part of it is ever empty. The palns and pleasures it can contain are all possible mental and bodily pleasures.

It's up to you to decide whether to act to control what will be in that jar. If you identify pleasure widely and understand that it's not just mental and physical stimulation but all kinds of mental and physical health, then it becomes possible for most everyone to see that it is a practical goal to work toward filling that jar with pleasures. If you DON"T view pleasure that way, then it will seem like and be a fruitless task to fill the jar with pleasure, and you'll never find a way to do it no matter how hard you chase stimulation.

That's the paradigm everyone is faced with, but they don't have to accept it. They can choose to drift through life and take no concern for what is in their jar, and as a result they will never be satisfied and their time will be spent on things that end up being more painful than pleasurable.

So in general I'd say that this is the big picture. Once you've got the big picture it's up to you to apply it - simply reading it or acknowledging that it exists doesn't accomplish anything. Time is always ticking, and the time that passes without working to maximize pleasure never comes back.

To me this isn't dark or discouraging, it's highly motivational, and it doesn't encourage me to spend all my time looking back and "feeling satisfied," it leads to a proper balance of appreciating past, present, and future, and acting appropriately toward them all.

Quote from Rolf

Would you say then Cassius that “the absence of pain being the limit of pleasure” is not something I have to hold in my everyday mind as something practical? It’s more just something for use in philosophical reasoning and debate

I think that having a mental image of the most desirable state is highly practical and even essential and is similar to projecting this as a "godlike life." For that reason I would say that it needs to be held in mind In the same way Epicurus tells Herodotus to keep an outline in mind and to be able to flip back and forth from high level to detail at a moments notice.

And I would also say that the expansive definition of pleasure to include appreciation of all nonpainful life, particularly mental appreciation of the benefits of a true philosophy, is also a daily or even hourly thing.

This isn't just for times of debate.

O2x Ohio - Again, welcome. It's good to have people from varied backgrounds and areas of interest. There are a number of academic articles on various aspects of Epicurean physics that might be of interest to you as well, so as you read let us know what you're looking for and we'll try to help.

From O2x Ohio:

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"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.

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Welcome to the forum!

Quote from Pacatus

just that faith, under any sensible definition, does not make it so.

Completely agree!

Quote from Pacatus

If empirical evidence is certain, one has no need of “faith” – one has certain knowledge. If the available empirical evidence is subject to revision via new observations, as it generally is (whether one acknowledges it or not), then it is not certain. Faith cannot make it so. But we can act on the best evidence we have.

Yes, we act on the best evidence we have. But I don't think the first sentence is obvious. No amount of empirical evidence is sufficient for certainty unless you have a working definition of certainty, and that's what the issue of trust / faith is all about -- or so I think at the moment.

I seem to remember that you Pacatus consider yourself to be either eclectic or skeptic or some combination rather than orthodox Epicurean, so I think we're getting here at some of the reason for that and lurkers reading this should be aware of that.

Epicurus appears to have had a working version of dogmatism in which he did consider certain things to be certain and beyond the expectation of need for revision. And of course that's highly controversial, and in the past and likely in the future will be a dividing line between those who consider themselves to be orthodox Epicurean vs those who don't. Of course calling yourself an orthodox Epicurean and a dollar might buy you a cup of coffee nowadays.

Quote from Pacatus

that they actually knew things by faith

I guess that's really the question of what we're talking about. Having confidence in something (the existence of atoms; life on other worlds, for examples) is pretty close to "knowing something by faith" depending on the precise meaning of those words.

Your confidence in your conclusion comes from your confidence in the analysis steps along the way even in the absence of "direct" observation, so I can see "knowing something by faith" to possibly be a correct use of those words, depending on the meaning of "faith." It all comes down to your starting point on what you accept as the facts on which to base the confident expectation.

Those look great! I really like the idea of combining the busts with the profiles and the mounting on a column.

Yes, Patikios, I think that is coming whether we like it or not. There will eventually be many competing models of Epicurus out there. I presume that means that the task will be not to simply provide the model with raw texts, but also to provide it with "instructions" on how to interpret them. There will eventually be Stoic-friendly Epicuruses, Buddhist-friendly Epicurus, etc just like there are no many different websites and takes on Epicurus.

Thanks for the offer of your experience so far. I'll message you on what you have done so far but if you and others will keep a watch out for other Epicurus AI engines that are already public and post about them here I will appreciate it.

This is definitely a tricky issue to navigate. I would think it really implicates issues of canonics and what Philodemus would be talking about in "On Signs/Methods of Inference." When is it appropriate to extrapolate from the known to reach conclusions about the unknown?

It's tempting to think of rationality as requiring direct evidence, but it's also common (in law for example) to reach conclusions based on "circumstantial evidence." We wouldn't normally refer to that as having "faith" or "trust" in something, but I suppose that's exactly what we're doing in trusting that the "circumstances" can indicate a reliable conclusion.

It really grates on the sensibilities to consider "Faith" to be an Epicurean virtue or a good thing at all, but I suppose it is and it's something to get used to discussing as part of the proper attitude toward Epicurean canonics.

"Trust" or "Faith" implies an object which we are trusting or having faith in. As general term in an Epicurean context, what would be that object? Here again maybe "Confidence" works just as well or better, and indicates where Cicero got that derogatory accusation in "On The Nature of the Gods":

Quote from On The Nature of The Gods Book One - VIII¶ (Yonge version)

After this, Velleius, with the confidence peculiar to his sect, dreading nothing so much as to seem to doubt of anything, began as if he had just then descended from the council of the Gods, and Epicurus’s intervals of worlds. Do not attend, says he, to these idle and imaginary tales; nor to the operator and builder of the World, the God of Plato’s Timæus; nor to the old prophetic dame, the Πρόνοια of the Stoics, which the Latins call Providence; nor to that round, that burning, revolving deity, the World, endowed with sense and understanding; the prodigies and wonders, not of inquisitive philosophers, but of dreamers!

Looks like the Latin is: "Tum Velleius fidenter sane, ut solent isti, hihil tam vereus quam ne dubitare aliqua de re videretur....."

Thanks Eikadistes. That's exactly the threshold question I was concerned about but didn't know enough Greek to be confident about. I feel sure we've discussed this in the past but it's hard to keep it in mind over time.

So it IS proper to see Epicurus as talking about "faith," and coming from him, he definitely isn't embracing any kind of "belief without any evidence at all" definition of the term.

Yep Dave it's amazing. It apparently had no problem understanding the audio, and then it found the major points and summarized them sometimes with more clarity than the original. It definitely didn't track 100%, and it also introduced some details that we did not talk about, but you'd have to think that this kind of summary would be better than many people could do even at college level and only then after many hours of work.

Lots of food for thought.