Posts by Cassius

Just as an aside, I am at peace with the idea that if I live for another 30 years into my doddering old age I will still be engaged in this precise debate til the very end.

There's no getting around it: people come to the discussion thinking about their own experiences, and they have their own definitions. I do that too.

But in order to be able to carry on a clear conversation, we have to take a lot of time to explain what the words mean in a particular context. Most of the good people who are smart enough to reject the mainstream and come to the study of Epicurus know enough to realize that the mainstream doesn't make sense, but they haven't taken seriously what the Platonists and Stoics were really saying. They don't get the implications of "virtue is its own reward" and what "good in itself" is really talking about. They think that the Platonists and Stoics and everyone else just wants to live a happy life, and the only thing that separates us is the details of how to get there.

I want to be clear than I don't think I am smarter than other people and I certainly could be wrong, but until you go through the details of the Platonic arguments in Philebus and elsewhere I don't think most people today will appreciate the differences and the depth of the word game that's involved in explaining those differences.

And that means that for the six or so years that this website has existed we have gone round and round on that issue. No matter how long it continues to exist into the future, and so long as new people come to the discussion, it will be necessary to go into it over and over again.

So I hope we all enjoy the ride and maybe every time we go through it we can find new and better ways to explain what it's all about.

The time to worry would be if we don't have this discussion, because that would indicate we are stagnant and not expanding.

Quote

To claim that pleasure is good, then, does not mean imagining that all pleasures are equally good (Jones, 1989: 49–50).

OK right off the bat I say to that writer -- NO! Clearly Epicurus says that all pleasure are good, and all pains are bad -- yes you have to drill down, but this is where I think Godfrey is clearly correct because now the emphasis is on choiceworthiness and desire, but that doesn't mean that they still aren't "good" in the sense of pleasing. I know that we are now going down the rabbit hole of the meaning of "good," but in these philosophical discussions I strongly think that unless we generally refer to "good" as meaning "good in itself" then we never get anywhere in being clear.

Quote

Epicureans therefore distinguished between two categories (Mitsis, 1988: 45–51; Preuss, 1994: Ch. 6).

I also of course question this. D.L. did so, per the quote above. Cicero did so. But show me an instance of an authoritative EPICUREAN doing that distinguishing.

As I read the rest of that I won't comment in as much detail other than to say that I don't doubt that Mil and Bentham were struggling with their formulations because they where in fact trying to distinguish higher and lower pleasures - which means that they were looking for a standard other than pleasure itself.

Unfortunately I have to say that the entire analysis of that excerpt strikes me as totally disastrous, for the reason that is explained amply in Philebus.

Once anyone starts down the road of saying that some pleasures are "more good" or "higher" or "lower" than others, then you are introducing into the discussion the strong implication that there is another standard - a standard outside of pleasure itself, by which you can rank pleasures into "more good" or "less good" or "higher" or "lower" or "more noble" or "less noble." You are then inevitably led to the conclusion that the "art of distinguishing the higher from the lower" is more important than pleasure itself. And what is the "art of distinguishing the higher and the lower"? Of course it's WISDOM (even call it PRUDENCE if you like) -- which are VIRTUES -- and you are led to conclude, as Philebus surrendered and concluded, that wisdom is the true target of life and not pleasure.

This thread is advancing my thoughts on this topic for the reason I stated to Kalosyni: "We all can feel at times what it means to "rest" and to have a "good attitude" and a "positive outlook" and similar emotions and feelings. We know that those are important to us, and so when we read (from the commentators!!!) that Epicurus was really interested in "resting" pleasures, we presume "Oh that makes sense and I totally agree!" and we end up endorsing the "kinetic / katastematic distinction" as if it were a really important part of Epicurean philosophy."

So I strongly think that was these commentators are doing. They are so immersed into the "psychological" or even "clinical" perspective that they assure themselves that because they identify in their own minds background feelings which they think are important, and they want to find that in Epicurus, they grasp at these few lines from DL and from Epicurus and say "See, this is where the Epicureans said what we modern psychologists say!" But they are trying to graft that psychological viewpoint on top of the foundational philosophic battle over these words and goals that was going on between Stoics and Epicureans after Epicurus himself was long dead. The danger in doing so is that if you start playing around with the debate about "the good" (which is what so much of Greek philosophy was all about) by changing it around to fit one's views of psychology, then you make it impossible to see what the foundational argument was all about.

We're continuing to go back and forth on this issue of whether pleasures can be "ranked" in our individual lives, or chosen between in daily life. Of course they can and should be chosen between, all pleasures are not exactly the same in every respect. But the very definition of pleasure is that it "feels good" to us and if some fundamental meaning is put on "good" of the "feels good" other than "pleasant," then you're implying that there is a standard outside and superior to pleasure.

So I assert that it is foundational that "all pleasures are good" and that cannot convey any meaning other than that "all pleasures are pleasing." It makes sense to say "some pleasures are more pleasing than others" because that is how we feel them to be (duration, intensity, etc). But to vaguely say that "some pleasures are more good than others" implies that there is a standard of choiceworthiness other than how pleasing they are.

Yes in strictly Epicurean terms we can define "pleasing" and "good" to mean exactly the same thing, and we can use those words interchangeably.

But the world is full of Stoics and Platonists and Peripatetics, and they assuredly do NOT mean "pleasing" and "good" to mean exactly the same thing. We as Epicureans are a very small minority, and if we don't make this distinction clear then we get swept up in the tide of Platonism and lose any claim to distinctiveness.

So the concluding lines of that excerpt are in my mind pure Platonism/Stoicism: "What matters is not just what we do but the reasons why we do what we do (Jones, 1989: 51)." That's where you end up, just like Philebus, when you decide to rank pleasures as "lower" or "higher" on a scale outside of pleasure itself (Lower or higher here implying "less noble" or "more noble.")

I would say strongly no to that last sentence of the excerpt -- "the reasons why we do what we do" rings of "virtue" ---What matters is not the "reason" (our understanding of "wisdom" or of "why") but the actual practical result - whether our lives are pleasing or not. Yes we want wisdom in order to produce pleasure, but what "matters" is the result (pleasure) not the too (wisdom).

And Cicero's own very unflattering views of Epicurus and of the role of pleasure and virtue (if he can be believed in writing this to his own son):

For now, one more comment as to Cicero's own views, this from the first part of De Officiis, which Cicero wrote to his son:

OK I have re-read the Wenham Article ("On Cicero's Interpretation of Katastematic Pleasure") and I do need to correct what I said above:

I now remember why I find Wenham's article useful, but not in the way of Gosling & Taylor and Nikolsky.

The key point of departure in Wenham is that when Wenham is forced to decide whether Cicero (1) misrepresented Epicurus or (2) misunderstood Epicurus, Wenham departs from G&T and decides to go easy on Cicero and accuse him of incompetence rather than malevolence. Here's the key part - Wenham is sure Cicero is wrong, but the question is WHY:

.... And so Wenham decides that CIcero simply must be wrong. The rest of the article gives his reasoning, which is where my memory was bad. Wenham says (I think rightly) that Epicurus held that pleasure is pleasure because it can be experienced, and so Wenham concludes that whatever katastematic pleasure it, is must be felt / experienced just like kinetic pleasure.

Maybe you'll read the article differently than I do, but where does that leave Wenham in describing what katastemtatic pleasure must mean (under this theory)? I've read over the article several times, and I think he's left right where we would expect. He can't and doesn't even try to define katastematic pleasure as separate from kinetic. All he does is conclude that whatever it is, it must be "experienced" or "felt" because that's the way Epicurus looked at pleasure.

So as I read it this article would implicitly support Don's current position, but I say that still convinced that the reason Wenham stops where he does is that he doesn't follow Gosling & Taylor to the logical conclusion that Nikolsky took them. Wenham chooses to believe that despite Cicero's sweeping knowledge, access to the Epicurean friends and teachers, and Cicero's own training in Epicurean philosophy, that Cicero simply "misunderstood" what Epicurus was saying.

That's where I would say that people should trust there instincts and always beware of lawyers!

And so i take the position taken by Norman DeWitt, another line I haven't forgotten despite my poor memory: "i do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it completely."

Quote from Don

In my study, I'm coming to the conclusion that katastematic pleasure refers to deriving pleasure from a stable (albeit temporary) state or condition while kinetic pleasure has to do with deriving pleasure from an action.

it will be beneficial as we go along in the future to to post sources so we can see what exactly exists in the Epicurean texts to support the respective reconstructions.

Quote from Kalosyni

For me the katastematic "pleasure at rest" is a mental sense of satisfaction and gratitude, a quiet feeling of joy...when everything is fullfilled.

See the difficulty there is that if you can "feel" the sensation of pleasure -- which I think is doubly clear when you refer to it as joy, then by definition according to the scholars what you are feeling is not katastematic pleasure - it is kinetic simply because you do in fact feel and enjoy it.

Once again I want to be especially clear: I am not criticizing yours or anyone else's descriptions of what you feel. What I am doing is pointing out that when you dive deep into the technical terms that they were using in ancient Greeks, there is a lot of specificity that we as "normal people" who haven't devoted our lives to studying ancient Greek and Greek philosophy don't have any way of knowing about.

In fact as I write this comment I think what we're talking about here is exactly what a large number of commentators are doing and have done to us. We all can feel at times what it means to "rest" and to have a "good attitude" and a "positive outlook" and similar emotions feelings. We know that those are important to us, and so when we read (from the commentators!!!) that Epicurus was really interested in "resting" pleasures, we presume "Oh that makes sense and I totally agree!" and we end up endorsing the "kinetic / katastematic distinction" as if it were a really important part of Epicurean philosophy.

To the contrary, I think Nikolsky, Gosling & Taylor, Wenham, and others (I'll include dewitt here) have totally demolished that argument and upended the academic viewpoint. They have done so not by showing that such pleasures don't exist - they clearly do! But rather the academic viewpoint has never been consistent with or perceptive in understanding what Epicurus taught. You can't follow the full argument without the information that Nikolsky provides, which is that this darned katastematic-kinetic distinction is an essentially STOIC method of categorization, and that it likely appears in Diogenes Laertius only because by 300 AD (when DL wrote) and even by 50 BC (when Cicero was trying to defeat Epicureans with word games) it had become common practice among philosophers to split up types of pleasures using those terms. DL was going through chapter after chapter of Greek philosophers attempting to explain their positions in terms that people in 300AD would expect to see, and in 300 AD most people interested in philosophy (not necessarily including Epicureans of the day) expected to hear about katastematic pleasure.

OK - again - these aren't my arguments, these are the arguments of people a lot smarter than me (Gosling, Taylor, Nikolsky, etc.)

But I will repeat too that I think Wenham points out a real key to the situation. If you always keep in mind that nothing trumps PD2, and that all good and evil comes to us through sensation, and without sensation we're dead, and that nothing that doesn't produce sensation is of any concern to us, then you will burn in your mind that "pleasure" (which we all seem to agree is the ultimate goal) must come to us through sensation - through experience. And is apparently universal among the literati that the definition of katastematic pleasure EXCLUDES pleasure that can be sensed. I leave it to you to unwind what that means as to "katastematic pleasure" as the ancient Greeks defined it, but I suggest to everyone that Epicurus was interested in pleasure that can be felt. Pleasure that can't be felt - no matter what term is applied to it, not only cannot therefore be the highest good, as so many allege, but I would allege in turn that if it can't be felt it is of no more concern to us than death itself.

Which makes it prime territory for the Stoics and other logicians, who apparently where the ones obsessing over the term.

I haven't re-read either the Nikolsky article or the Gosling & Taylor chapter, but if I recall one of my reactions to G&T it is that there is an in my view extreme difficulty in ascertaining what "katastematic" pleasure really is if it cannot be sensed. I tend to focus on the fact that that which cannot be sensed is nothing to us, as in PD2, and if we are defining Katastematic pleasure in that way then that poses real problems for the person asserting that it is important, much less that it is the true goal of life.

But to really dig into this it's necessary to go back in the history that G&T present, because what I am remembering is not just that any pleasure that can be sensed is by definition kinetic, it's really an issue of "change" or "motion" at the deepest level that is involved. In other words that's why the referenced "learning" but it goes further -- if you can sense any change at all, much less a beginning or an end, to the activity, then it's kinetic. In fact you pretty much have to rule out anything that is an "activity" or anything that you "feel" -- which gets into the complicated implications of "feeling" vs. "sensation." I personally think it's fair to say that if you can "feel" the pleasure then you're engaged in a kinetic pleasure, and that includes "feeling good" or "feeling appreciation for a work of art" or "feeling happy" or any other experience of life. In fact that focus on "experience" - if I recall correctly - is the point of the Wenham artlcle, because the argument would be that anything that can be "experienced" is kinetic -- meaning that katastematic pleasure (I get to the point where I hate even to type the word) cannot be "experienced."

Wenham - On Cicero's Interpretation of Katastematic Pleasure in Epicurus

(I'm really going out on a limb here because I haven't read Wenham in a long time, and my memory is already questionable - I hope I am at least partly right in citing him for that proposition. )

Edit:

OK yes glancing at the abstract indicates to me that while I may have to be corrected, there's probably at least some resemblance between the way I described it and the content of the article:

Well, "rest" is another word that has lots of shades of meaning.

"Coming to rest" in atomic terms is never anything more than temporary, while at the other extreme a thing like "horseness" was intended (in my view)to refer to something eternally unchangeable.

The opening of Chapter 19 of Gosling & Taylor's "The Greeks on Pleasure" is also very informative. In it, they observe that

" It has usually been taken as fairly unproblematic which pleasures are kinetic. All sensory pleasures fall into this category and

perhaps some mental ones such as learning. This determines Usener’s selection of passages, and it tends to be a point of

agreement among commentators who disagree about the nature of katastematic pleasure and its relation to kinetic." (my emphasis. Elsewhere in the book they discuss this further and make clear that kinetic implies change of any kind, which is why they include learning here, and when you think about the "change" component, it's sweeping in scope.)

At the end of the first paragraph is the sentence "But he [a commentator] agrees that all sensory pleasures are kinetic."

In other words, when you trace back the meaning of "kinetic" you find that it really means anything that changes, and that means not only bodily pleasure but also mental pleasure -- in fact ANYTHING that you can sense as pleasurable. Which logically leads you to the question, "Well if you can't sense katestematic pleasure (if you can sense it, it must be kinetic) then what good is katastematic pleasure?"

And I would say thus you're on the trail of the ridiculous position that there's something special called katestematic pleasure which is what Epicurus held to be the real goal of life.

I know my position here sounds radical and hard to accept, but read Nikolsky first (he's shorter) and then read this chapter. Gosling & Taylor - On Katastematic and Kinetic Pleasure Gosling and Taylor are well-credentialed academics and don't suffer from the disrepute in which DeWItt is held in some (not all) academic circles.

Quote from Kalosyni

So this highlights both the pleasure of rest and the pleasure of action...

....so both "the cake AND the frosting".

Yes that is the important point - Epicurus praised both (really ALL) kinds of pleasure, and there is no reason to differentiate between the static and the moving. If you can find the time please read the article by Nikolsky "Epicurus on Pleasure" and now that you see that Diogenes Laertius confirms that Epicurus praised both / all, and he never remotely said that the active pleasures are for the sake of the static (or vice versa) then you are prepared to see that the standard argument that you should go for pleasures of "rest" in all things is hogwash. There is no true rest in human life (or in the universe for that matter) because all atoms are constantly in motion. "Rest" is a fiction of the Platonic imagination because his realm of forms (which does not exist) is the only place where "things" allegedly remain immovable and the same. There is no "horseness" - only horses, and there are in my view no real pleasures that can be considered unmoving or at rest, only some which last longer than others.

Yes that does sound interesting. I gather "legal positivism" refers generally to the view that laws are created by people and not thought to be "natural law" or "absolute" so that would seem right to me, as would the view that justice is an integral part of the philosophy.

OK I just finished listening to the full address. Before I forget here are some preliminary comments:

(1) The only thing that jumps out at me as a major issue is that Tyndall says that Lucretius invented the swerve himself and that this was an innovation (a negative one) from Epicurus and Democritus. I am aware that some commentators take that position but I don't think it is justified by the full history and I would definitely warn people against this interpretation.

(2) All in all I do think this work deserves reading by most everyone here. It's a good snapshot of where people were in the late 1800's. But at the same time, "where people were in the late 1800's" doesn't translate directly into a bolstering of the goal of this forum (to promote Epicurean philosophy) because it also preserves what I would say are their failures in following up on Epicurus more supportively, which I think was readily possible. If I had more time I would extend this point to carry it through why England has proved itself largely anti-Epicurean even up through today.

(3) Related to point two I think is the nervousness I have whenever people focus on the Darwin arguments. I certainly see how they fit in with the liberation of the world from religion, but I have this gnawing doubt about them and I suspect the doubt is based on this: I personally don't think that any number of "purely scientific observations" about changes in life over the eons really adds up to a "philosophic" argument about the origin of life and the existence (or not) of supernatural gods.

(4) I think this is the issue that bothers me with Frances Wright. No matter how long your string of observations are, you are still at some point left to make a logical deduction about things you have not observed, and numbers of observations don't add up "by themselves" to a logical conclusion. You've still got to take a position on the "epistemology" questions of how you process the evidence into a conclusion. I realize now over time that this is why I personally am much more comfortable with the persuasive power of "nothing comes from nothing or goes to nothing" than some other people who are also strong fans of Epicurus are. To me personally, you could stack up all the observations of natural phenomena and the details of bees and flowers ad infinitum, and those would still have not nearly the impact on me as the argument that "we don't see anything coming from nothing or going to nothing, and we would if there are supernatural forces, therefore there are no supernatural forces." I think that's why I am also singularly unimpressed by Aristotle -- for all the apparent work he put into his process of categorization, that doesn't add up to anything special in my mind, and in fact it smacks of its own kind of "word-gaming" since his categories end up seeming very arbitrary to me.

Thats all I have time for right now but I suspect that's enough!

HA -- I want to say this for the record. Lately I am getting worried about saying "I was not aware." I am mostly joking and I don't think there is really anything wrong with my memory but with the forum software available I am getting to think I need to do a search here every time I get ready to write "I am not aware" or anything like that, because I bet in a good number of cases i I did the search I would find myself talking about the very subject a few years ago! I am sure no one else has that problem but we're going to need to be tolerant of each other on that score.

Very interesting - I was not aware of those takes. This is probably going to be one of those situations then where I think it is best to read everything together as if the doctrine numbers did not exist. A "things" approach would make sense too but I am going to bet that the closing paragraphs of the document were probably directed at relationships to other "people" for lots of reasons.

Quote from Don

Grappling with Epicurus's contractual nature of justice is not easy. Intellectually, it makes sense.

And I am not even sure that "contractual nature of justice" really conveys his views accurately either. I can see how it can be interpreted that way, and he does talk about agreement being involved. But when a particular agreement can at one moment be just but another moment become unjust (due to a change in circumstances) then it isn't just a simple question of "Did you make the agreement?" And "Did you break it?" (which I think is the way we tend to think of contract law.)

Justice is definitely one of the more difficult doctrines for us to understand, but I agree with Don that the problem is that our cultural attachment to contract and the idea of absolute right and wrong is so great today. Quite possibly if we looked at this from the perspective of a "family," (or at least friends) where we don't view agreements so formally and we release people from agreements easily, we might find it easier to understand Epicurus.

Because remembering PD39 he is saying that we try to make people into one family (or friends? Depending on the Greek) and for those who can't be made that successfully we to an extent separate from them. Maybe this is another situation like gods where he is stating that the common definition of the word needs to be understood differently.

So maybe we ought to be thinking about PD39 when we discuss the justice doctrines.

Quote from JJElbert

This strikes me as hugely important—is there something about the Epicurean conception of justice (as not morally absolute) that appeals to the slaveholder, but repulses the abolitionist?

I think that comment deserves a reply, just not the one I gave it before I moderated myself

I think that regardless of the specifics of the context in which Caldwell was involved, the American Civil War, it is widely true is that the Epicurean concept of justice is always going to appeal to the minority, to the dissenter, to the rebel --- to basically everyone who finds himself or herself in a minority position.

If we happen to find ourselves part of the majority and the establishment, then we like to think that such is the natural order of things, and we tend toward Platonism or Stoicism.

People who find themselves "on the outs" from society are always going to be searching for answers to questions about whether the views of the majority are "right" and "just" for some cosmic reason, or simply because the majority is numerically stronger.

Every time we get tempted to let our emotions pull us in the direction of thinking that one moral position or another is so compelling that it "ought" to be universally received, we've got to remember - I think - that the nature of the cosmos in the Epicurean worldview is that such absolute standards of authority don't exist. We can and we should act as vigorously as possible to see that we surround ourselves with things and relationships that please us, and we separate ourselves from things and relationships that cause us pain, so we get involved where it is reasonable to do so and we fight to defend what we think is just. But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that there is any absolute universal law or absolute justice that is behind our decision. Presumably across the species pain and pleasure does spring from a common background and we can expect that we aren't the only ones who measure pain and pleasure as we do, but I think it's fair to say that human experience is very wide on that score, and we have to expect that there are lots of people who disagree with us in most facets of life.

I think the bottom line is that no matter how much we may want there to be some cosmic force that writes our conception of justice and enforces it, Epicurus would say that such a cosmic force doesn't exist. That's true in the case of your question for both the slaveholders who thought god was on their side and the abolitionists who thought god was on their side. But we could also pick any other age and context and dispute, no matter how hotly contested, and analyze it in the same way.

I think something like that is the ultimate philosophic lesson. Whether we are part of the "in crowd" or the "out crowd" is not the determining factor - there's no fate and no human necessity. But that circumstance likely influences who it is who finds themselves motivated to study Epicurus and other views that justify "outsiders" and non-conformists, and who it is who stays closer to home and to "establishment" views like for example the Stoics.

Ok here is a much better second effort of an MP3 version of the Belfast Address: https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/e59f721c-d21…20-69259164f37e No doubt there are still some errors. Please report them and help me get a better transcript here: Tyndall - Address at Belfast

I still haven't completed a full run-through, and I hesitate to sound like I am fully endorsing this until I fully absorb his conclusions and where he leaves the argument - which I haven't yet been able to finish.

I note in scanning the latter part of the text that a lot of it cites Darwin, and that always gives me pause. I am of course well disposed toward Darwin and what Darwin stands for in the public mind, but I have never read much of Darwin himself to be able to know for myself. Much of the reason I mention this is that I am not an expert on Nietzsche either - by far - but I think I am aware that Nietzsche did not think highly of Darwin. Not that I consider Nietzsche a standard of perfection either, but given Nietzsche's appreciation for Epicurus I am concerned that there may be some deep-seated philosophic issues that I need to understand. In the meantime I think it's best if I continue to hold back in being as sweeping in an endorsement of Darwin as his work on evolution might indicate would be the case.

I note that Tyndall is touching on some of the deeper philosophical issues in this essay, so maybe in reviewing this speech he'll help us explore what I think is a similar issue: Why so many good scientific-minded Brits of the last several hundred years could end up being so good on "raw science" but so bad on philosophy. (And I say that as someone who is genetically primary a Brit himself, if I understand my DNA results!)

Ok Will do. I did already set up a separate thread on John Tyndall.

EDIT: Rather than move to a new thread I just deleted most of my comments, which were the ones that were really over the line. It's highly unlikely we need to discuss the War Between The States here any further than we already have, or might in the future, other than as Frances Wright's pre-war comments might be of interest. Too little to be gained and too much danger to go into that unless we find some figure who specifically discusses Epicurus.

As for Caldwell let's just focus on Caldwell's philosophical views and if we find enough there to talk about we can create a separate thread just on him.

The point of this thread is to "identify Epicurean figures of the past," and that's another limitation as to Caldwell -- if he was just commenting briefly he probably merits more the "general discussion" group anyway.

Probably we're bearing too close for comfort to politics, at least without knowing where some of the answers lead -- if you do discover more about his philosophic dispositions let us know!