Posts by Cassius

Quote from Godfrey

As I understand it, life is the greatest good. Pleasure is the guide to and goal of life.

That is DeWitt's formulation, of which the second sentence seems completely accurate as what Epicurus taught. As for the first sentence, I largely agree with it, but my current view/understanding of the issue leads me to focus on it being true only in the same way that DeWitt analyses the phrase "all sensations are true" -- as a statement where you have to be very careful with the definitions of the key words.

Here I think the main issue is that term "the greatest good." "Greatest" is probably clear enough, but "greatest good" has some major ambiguities, and i am not sure that Epicurus really endorsed a concept of a "greatest good" in the way that the term was used by the other Greeks. What is "good" other than pleasure? It is pretty clear that Epicurus held nothing to be intrinsically good - worthy of choice in and of itself - other than pleasure. And there are an innumerable number of ways to experience pleasure, none of which are intrinsically "better" than others in and of themselves.

I think in part DeWitt is focusing on his observation that "pleasure has meaning only to the living" and to the resulting observation that unless we have life, no pleasure is possible, which makes life that without which there is no possibility of experiencing pleasure. But life as a condition of pleasure is different from saying that something is a guide, or even a goal.

My current viewpoint is that a "greatest good" analysis (the framework with which Torquatus starts off) is probably not an approach that Epicurus himself thought well of, and probably arises from the Epicureans feeling obligated to respond to the Stoics and Platonists. Trying to define "greatest good" too precisely probably smacks more of a Stoic / Platonic tendency to want to come up with a precise definition in words of something that is inherently impossible to express completely in words. I think that is the feel we get from what Epicurus said that Plutarch summarizes as :

Plutarch, That Epicurus actually makes a pleasant life impossible, 7, p. 1091A: Not only is the basis that they assume for the pleasurable life untrustworthy and insecure, it is quite trivial and paltry as well, inasmuch as their “thing delighted” – their good – is an escape from ills, and they say that they can conceive of no other, and indeed that our nature has no place at all in which to put its good except the place left when its evil is expelled. … Epicurus too makes a similar statement to the effect that the good is a thing that arises out of your very escape from evil and from your memory and reflection and gratitude that this has happened to you. His words are these: “That which produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the nature of good, if you apply your mind rightly and then stand firm and do not stroll about {a jibe at the Peripatetics}, prating meaninglessly about the good.”

Welcome A_Gardener! I have heard Charles speak of you and I am glad that you decided to open an account here. None of us were born knowing about Epicurus so it is natural that we all go through a process of learning details that we were never taught when we were young, so it is only to be expected that people go through a process of weighing and judging. If we welcomed only people who were already fully "Epicurean" then we'd rarely if ever have any new people.

The rest below is the standard info that I post on every new user's welcome message, so I apologize for it being "boilerplate." However I think most of us here would agree that the sooner people read some of the material in the list, the sooner they will realize how deep their level of interest in Epicurus truly is.

Charles has probably already mentioned to you the DeWitt book, and I'll repeat that not out of slavish devotion to Dewitt, but because I really think that whether you end of agreeing with it or not, you'll find that DeWitt explains Epicurus in a way that is very different from standard modern presentations. DeWitt's qualifications were deep and he write's well, but the benefit of his approach is that he doesn't obsess on any detail (like absence of pain or atomism) but instead gives a very general overview of the wider scope of the philosophy and how it all fits together and compares with the other Greek alternatives. So if you have not read DeWitt's book you'll probably save yourself a lot of time in your formation of your opinions about Epicurus if you can read his book as soon as you have time.

Here's the boilerplate but again thanks for opening an account here!

Welcome A_Gardener! Thanks for joining us! When you get a chance, please tell us about yourself and your background in Epicurean philosophy.

It would be particularly helpful if you could tell us (1) how you found this forum, and (2) how much background reading you have done in Epicurus. As an aid in the latter, we have prepared the following list of core reading.

We look forward to talking with you!

----------------------- Epicurean Works I Have Read ---------------------------------

1 The Biography of Epicurus By Diogenes Laertius (Chapter 10). This includes all Epicurus' letters and the Authorized Doctrines. Supplement with the Vatican list of Sayings.

2 "Epicurus And His Philosophy" - Norman DeWitt

3 "On The Nature of Things"- Lucretius

4 Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section

5 Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section

6 The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation

7 "A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright

8 Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus (3) Others?

9 Plato's Philebus

10 Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)

11 "The Greeks on Pleasure" -Gosling & Taylor Sections on Epicurus, especially on katastematic and kinetic pleasure.

These are excellent examples of citations to eudaimonia, Elli. It is interesting to think about how it is we might be able to rival Zeus in eudaimonia, which is based on pleasure, rather than saying that we might rival Zeus in pleasure itself.

What do you think about that - was Epicurus intending to make that distinction?

Quote from elli

What are the mental images that are connected with concepts of words that the newborn baby has accumulated already in mind for the feeling of contentment as "eudaemonia" ? In neonates of some weeks, there are no words yet, not mental images with sheep and cows. Just senses and emotions/feelings that were born with them and are in the procedure of development and enrichment through experiences as their first social contact is within their family.

Right -- these babies are "happy" even though they do not know a single word, or a single point of logic, which shows that neither words nor logic are necessary for happiness at the earliest stages of life, to which we look as examples of those who are uncorrupted.

Quote from JJElbert

I've been somewhat scarce myself,

Far too scarce. If we'd had more of your poetry Oscar might not be taking a break

And whereever possible, it seems to me that Epicureans and the leading Epicureans gave examples in the form of "pictures" - such as referencing sheep on the side of the hill blending into a white spot, floating dusk for atoms, the shades at the Colosseum giving color to the Senators beneath them, etc. The point being that Epicurus necessarily had to use words, but his words were tied as closely as possible to "pictures" of things in everyday experience. And I think that is what he was referring to in the letter to Herodotus referring to following the first picture that a word evokes in order to not get lost in word games.

Quote

For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation, if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. (Letter to Herodotus)

So probably another example might be that we learn much more about happiness by observing (observing, actual or pictures) examples of smiling people, tail-wagging dogs, purring cats, playing children, etc. than we ever learn about happiness by listing out 50 different words in different languages that allegedly mean the same thing, or looking up synonyms in a thesaurus, or reading about the etymology of any word for "happiness" in a dictionary.

Clarity of expression in dealing with happiness or pleasure ultimately comes back to those personal experiences in examples, not stinging together a series of symbols that, but for our definitions, are absolutely meaningless in Nature.

I see I have uncovered a major new problem: Mike and I are time zone incompatible, and he gets going right when I am about to fall asleep! I will see what I can do to fix that, but in the meantime I am afraid I am out for the night. Keep up the posting and I will catch up tomorrow! (And stay away from the Volcano!)

Ha - I am going to make a somewhat embarrassing admission as to the Jackson Barwis material: Even though it is a computer voice, I had the Dialogue on Innate Principles rendered into "ivona voice" format, and linked it from that website to this location on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/JacksonBarwisCollectedWorks

At that location you can listen to a computerized British female voice read the Dialogue, and there is something about the presentation that I find mesmerizing to listen to - it is almost like Shakespeare or some kind of poetry, and to my personal taste it just sounds very compelling. It reminds me somewhat of the way
Frances Wright wrote about Epicurus in "A Few Days In Athens," which i also think was writ
ten in fine literary style even apart from the excellent content.

Ok I forgot I set this page up: https://newepicurean.com/resources/jack…ate-principles/

Probably I will never forget these two paragraphs, particularly the second one:

The innate principles of the soul, continued he, cannot, any more than those of the body, be propositions. They must be in us antecedently to all our reasonings about them, or they could never be in us at all: for we cannot, by reasoning, create any thing, the principles of which did not exist antecedently. We can, indeed, describe our innate sentiments and perceptions to each other; we can reason, and we can make propositions about them; but our reasonings neither are, nor can create in us, moral principles. They exist prior to, and independently of, all reasoning, and all propositions about them.

When we are told that benevolence is pleasing; that malevolence is painful; we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning, nor by forming them into propositions: but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls: and if on such an appeal, we could not feel within the sentiment of benevolence, and the peculiar pleasure attending it; and that of malevolence and its concomitant pain, not all the reasoning in the world could ever make us sensible of them, or enable us to understand their nature.

That last paragraph resonates with me as exactly the way I feel after reading Epicurus explain the nature of things -- I "feel" that his appeal to feeling as the guide is correct, and I think to myself that not all the reasoning in the world could ever explain to me why I take pleasure in the things I take pleasure in, and the way I am repelled away emotionally by the things i find painful. And whatever this faculty or mechanism is, it is at least partly mental, and I don't think it is active only in the area of pleasure and pain.

Great question JLR, and of course I cannot answer it with certainty, but I can tell you the direction i think the answer will be found: anticipations, in the DEWITT model, not the Bailey / Laertius model.

I think DeWitt is clearly correct that anticipations cannot simply result AFTER experience, or else they would never have been called PRE-Conceptions (and for other reasons DeWitt mentions).

I think the physics rules out "universal concepts" as being possible, even from atomic origin. However as DeWitt argues (I think I recall in several places) it is valid to talk about "human nature" as the accumulation of something over large amounts of time, and I think the answer is in following that line of thought.

DeWitt's chapter on anticipations I think is one of his most important contributions.

I will also say personally that I think he occasionally goes too far in calling them innate "ideas." I do not think they constitute innate "ideas" but rather dispositions toward the formation of ideas, not ideas themselves.

I do not expect you to take the time to follow this suggestion, but in my own mind I associate this with a theory that I have seen asserted in a particular place in a particularly engaging way: Jackson Barwis' 1776 work: "Dialogues on Innate Principles" written in response to John Locke's theories (and the "blank slate" argument in general). It seems to me that Barwis is correct in distinguishing innate "principles" from innate "ideas" which is the thrust of that fairly short but very entertaining dialogue.

I am not sure how i came across that but I found it on Archive.org, and set up this website to make it easier to read: https://jacksonbarwis.com Each of his works is very well written, but "Dialogue on Innate Principles" makes an argument that I think Dewitt would have done well to follow. Strip away the obviously superficial references to a creator and religion in Barwis' work and I think the potential parallels to anticipations being an "innate" facility are obvious.

I also relate this in my mind to Thomas Jefferson's observation of a similar type as to there being an innate faculty that does not rest on "knowledge" or "Experience" but on something else, which is again not "divine' but a part of human nature:

Moral Philosophy. I think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his Nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the [beautiful], truth, &c., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree. It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this: even a less one than what we call common sense. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings. The writings of Sterne, particularly, form the best course of morality that ever was written. Besides these, read the books mentioned in the enclosed paper; and, above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, &c. Consider every act of this kind, as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties & increase your worth.

Quote from JLR

This ability to categorize particular things as the “same thing” (horse, human, etc.) seems to point to universal concepts that are difficult to account for as strictly material (atomic) in origin.

So in sum I think your sentence there is very important, but that what you are observing does not point to "universal concepts" but to a human faculty - the faculty of anticipations, which disposes us in the direction you are looking - and gives us the disposition, which not all of us use, to exercise the ability to organize things into relationships, even though there is no divine order, no "essence," and no possibility of truly universal concepts.

Great post Mike.

"Besides, Epicurus is not big on definitions or essences of things."

I think there is a deep point here. Clearly he was not "big on definitions" in the sense of wordy and elaborate logical constructions, but it seems to me, especially in reading Lucretius, that Epicurus was focusing on definition by examples. It strikes me regularly that in Lucretius and I think Epicurus letters too that Epicurus uses the device of giving a lineup of examples each time he wants to identify something, such as when Lucretius first references atoms and immediately says he will call them by different names. Seems to me that this is a conscious form of "definition by example" which would be consistent with the premises of the philosophy being grounded in the senses.

Watch for that especially in Lucretius and I think it begins to jump out at you. They were teaching by pointing to real world examples rather than by setting up word-play definitions.

Thank you for the kind words JLR! Don't feel the need to accumulate the questions unless you prefer it that way. Ask them anytime, together or separately, here or in any specific subforum.

Glad to have you, and thank you for affirming my confidence that DeWitt's contribution to Epicurean studies really does stand out from the pack.

And also, thanks for the reference to the "others" - it's community and participation which make this work and there is no way we could be here without the active support of our moderators and regular users.

Ha! And that reminds me that a common language is no guarantee of understanding anything either, with the well known joke that America and England are two nations divided by a common language!

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Note: interesting history of that quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/04/03/common/

Quote from elli

for the purpose to give us with clarity what was the classic greek world that inspired the classic roman world.

Yes clarity is the issue! "Eudaemonia" spoken and used by Elli in explaining the benefits of the wisdom of Epicurus is a wonderful and clarifying thing. "Eudaemonia" or "ataraxia" or "aponia" spoken and written by a philosophy professor in a manner used to imply that the concept of the best life can only be understood by a Greek - or more precisely, only understood by a Doctor of Philosophy with a degree from a University -- is a very bad and misleading thing.

A professor who insists that only the original word form is acceptable the modern equivalent of Plato saying "Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here!"

So I would contend that one need not know a word of Greek to understand Epicurus, or a word of German to understand Nietzsche, or a word of French to understand Gassendi, or a word of English to understand Jefferson. It certainly helps, though, to make sure that we aren't being misled by the translators and commentators!

But of course, I will definitely admit that if we never learn Greek we will never be able to speak with the gods, even if we could reach them in the intermundia!

The plan is to do the whole book cover to cover, even knowing what a huge project that will be.

I'd like to do more podcasts in addition to this one, but going through cover to cover gives a unifying thread from episode to episode. No doubt some episodes will be longer and shorter than others, and no doubt also as the discussion gets really technical we'll spend as much time talking about the methodology and the context as we will the details of the passage.

To me the methodology of the book is what is so important, so we can hit on that week after week after week and never run out of material as to how to apply that methodology.

I agree with Elli and will go further. There was never any need, nor is there any need now, to use the word "eudaimonia" in English discussion of philosophy, whether Aristotelian, Epicurean or any other kind, because the word is just the original Greek word for "good spirits," as stated in wikipedia:

Etymologically, it consists of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit"). It is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics and political philosophy, along with the terms "aretē", most often translated as "virtue" or "excellence", and "phronesis", often translated as "practical or ethical wisdom"

Extending the prior recent comments about there being no bright line distinctions between men and other higher animals, there are no bright-line distinctions between Greeks and other humans. No matter how high a regard I may hold for Epicurus, he was a human being just like us, and he spoke an ordinary language just like all of us do, and unless and until he (or Aristotle or some other philosopher) specifically designated a technical term as having a technical meaning, we should presume that a word he used had the ordinary meaning and significance that it had to ordinary people. And so far as I am aware they did not - it is just a "catch-all" term that euphemistically describes what people regard as a good life, but that statement in itself "a good life" tells us nothing whatsoever.

To leave the word untranslated and focus on it as something mysteriously untranslatable - as in this video cited above- is just more woo-woo by philosophy teachers designed to hide the ball and imply that they themselves have access to some kind of esoteric wisdom that normal people who don't speak Greek do not.

And I would say the same about ataraxia and aponia - I would assert that "absence of disturbance" and "absence of pain" contain all the precision that those words have ever meant to convey.

Comments on other slides from the Aristotle / Eudaemonia presentation:

(1) (1:50 in the presentation) I think this one is significant because the implication, which is pretty much express, is that "first principles" are a source of knowledge. The lecturer is implying that E=mc2 is a "first principle" which is an independent source of knowledge separate and apart from observation. I believe that Epicurus would dispute this, and contend that E=mc2 is derived from observation, and is not itself an independent source of knowledge. The contention that "first principles" which are implied to be arising from logic alone, or from god, or from nature through reason alone, is something that Epicurus rejected and presumably for that reason removed "reason" from the canon of truth, leaving only the senses, anticipations, and feelings, which are direct contacts with reality and thus the ultimate source of everything that we believe to be true.

(2) This "middle ground" / golden mean wordplay by Aristotle is so superficial as to hardly need discussion. There is no basis for this categorization whatsoever other than Aristotle's personal assertions.

(3) For Aristotle, eudaemonia has nothing to do with pleasure, but is the sum of intellectual virtues + virtue of character. WHY, Aristotle, WHY would we care about these if they did not bring pleasure?????

(4) More groundless "moderation" wordplay, allegedly tied to "reason," by which we are to recognize "good" and "bad" behavior! All totally groundless. Why would be concerned about any of this gymnastics if it did not bring pleasure?

In sum: Epicurus would say that good and bad, right and wrong, are contentless abstractions that are meaningless apart from a particular context, and that context does not come through REASON, but through the feelings of pleasure and pain, which alone tell us what to choose and to avoid so as to make life worth living. It is as ridiculous to say that life gains meaning through reason as it would be to say that life gains meaning through "the English language' or "through the German language" or "the Spanish language" or through hammers or screwdrivers or yardsticks - or "friendship." All of those are nothing more than tools for the achievement of pleasure.

Elli correct me if I am wrong but you are discussing the general Greek background meaning of the word correct? In specific philosophies my observation is that eudaemonia as a term is most frequently associated today with Aristotle rather than Epicurus, and the Aristotelian definition is generally considered to be that stated in the graphic below.

I note that in the opening of that video the lecturer says that the argument against pleasure (he says bodily pleasure) is that it is not "peculiarly associated with human beings" and that a life of pleasure is fit only for "cattle."

That's the Ciceronian argument cited above - as if that were a reason to deny pleasure the guideship of life, simply because that's what all other living things do!

and so then of course what separates us from other animals according the video/Aristotle? REASON!

Thus pleasure is displaced as the goal to be replaced with "reason."

And thus we have the ambiguity and the dispute about the meaning of the word "happiness" which means one thing to an Aristotelian and something entirely different to an Epicurean:

"Pleasure is how we EXPERIENCE the good. Pain is how we EXPERIENCE evil."

Does that formulation not imply that good and evil exist even if we do not experience it? I think that is likely untenable in Epicurean theory.

Quote from Oscar

I don't know that we have only two feelings, there's also a feeling of indifference -- unless one thinks indifference as not being a feeling at all?

I think that that is one of the basic premises of Epicurean analysis, established in both the letter to Herodotus and in Diogenes Laertius, and that if this principle is not accepted then we're outside the bounds of Epicurean argument. That is an argument that needs to be addressed but I will personally have to postpone it until later. Suffice it to say for the moment that I think it is reasonable to state that any feeling which we can experience, if we experience it, is either going to be felt as desirable or undesirable, and that that is what is meant by pleasure and pain.

Hiram made the comment earlier today that it might be hard to explain to someone in the Phillipines facing a volcano that pleasure should be their concern.

How much harder would it be to explain to someone that they needed to lead an armed charge into an enemy line, or to order their own child to be killed for disobeying orders in that fight, all for the sake of pleasure? But that is exactly what Torquatus the Epicurean gave us as our example, and he is not ultimately arguing for absence of pain, but for pleasure, obtained by temporarily choosing to endure pain:

This being the theory I hold, why need I be afraid of not being able to reconcile it with the case of the Torquati my ancestors? Your references to them just now were historically correct, and also showed your kind and friendly feeling towards myself; but the same I am not to be bribed by your flattery of my family, and you will not find me a less resolute opponent. Tell me, pray, what explanation do you put upon their actions? Do you really believe that they charged an armed enemy, or treated their children, their own flesh and blood, so cruelly, without a thought for their own interest or advantage? Why, even wild animals do not act in that way; they do not run amok so blindly that we cannot discern any purpose in their movements and their onslaughts.

Can you then suppose that those heroic men performed their famous deeds without any motive at all? What their motive was, I will consider later on: for the present I will confidently assert, that if they had a motive for those undoubtedly glorious exploits, that motive was not a love of virtue in and for itself.—He wrested the necklet from his foe.—Yes, and saved himself from death. But he braved great danger.—Yes, before the eyes of an army.—What did he get by it?—Honor and esteem, the strongest guarantees of security in life.—He sentenced his own son to death.—If from no motive, I am sorry to be the descendant of anyone so savage and inhuman; but if his purpose was by inflicting pain upon himself to establish his authority as a commander, and to tighten the reins of discipline during a very serious war by holding over his army the fear of punishment, then his action aimed at ensuring the safety of his fellow citizens, upon which he knew his own depended.

And this is a principle of wide application. People of your school, and especially yourself, who are so diligent a student of history, have found a favourite field for the display of your eloquence in recalling the stories of brave and famous men of old, and in praising their actions, not on utilitarian grounds, but on account of the splendor of abstract moral worth. But all of this falls to the ground if the principle of selection that I have just mentioned be established,—the principle of forgoing pleasures for the purpose of getting greater pleasures, and enduring, pains for the sake of escaping greater pains.