Posts by Cassius

Mike in my view "moderation" is a false Aristotelian category that tells us nothing. What we want is the RIGHT AMOUNT THAT MAXIMIZES PLEASURE / MINIMIZES PAIN and I would expect that to vary by situation, and rarely if ever being right "in the middle" for the sake of being in the middle. There are all sorts of jokes about how standing in the middle of the road will get you run over from both sides, worse than being only in one lane, and I think the principle behind that joke is sound. Postulating "extremes" and "middle" would seem to be valid only if there were absolute rules from which those positions could be judged, which would not make sense in an Epicurean universe. Certainly generalities can often be made, and it is often possible to tell when we eat too much ice cream and too little, but those measurements are going to vary by individual circumstances so that there is no reason that "the middle" ( which is meant by moderation) would be the right answer.

Quote from Mike Anyayahan

Did Metrodorus contradict Epucurus if wealth is preferable to poverty?

I would say that there is no contradiction because I do not believe that Epicurus did say, or would say, that wealth is always preferable to poverty, nor is poverty always preferable to wealth. And I would expect that if we had more of the writings of Metrodorus and Philodemus we would see that they held the same view, because it is so obviously related to the individual circumstances of the person involved. We see that kind of thing over and over, for example in the advice to the young man whose sexual appetites were apparently too strong, while at the same time Epicurus said that he would not know the good except for experiences such as the pleasure of sex.

That's the clear meaning of VS63. "Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess." which appears to be well documented, and is consistent with the underlying physics and so much of the rest of the philosophy. VS 23 can easily be read to be consistent with this by focusing on the contextual and non-absolute nature of the issue.

There are obviously times when more wealth is more conducive to happiness than poverty, and also some circumstances when less wealth is more conducive. Would anyone dispute that and suggest that there is a bright line that ALWAYS is the case? That's really the issue involved in much of the back and forth here. My position is that it is obvious that wealth and poverty are sliding scales that must be evaluated in context. That's the thrust as to every decision in life which is clearly established by the fundamentals of the philosophy.

So I would say that anyone who would contend that Metrodorus or Philodemus or any other reputable Epicurean ever deviated from that analysis would face a very high burden of showing from reliable and well-documented texts, in reasonable context, that showed such deviation. And if such texts exist, I have never seen them, despite my continuing efforts to keep aware as to new excerpts from Herculaneum.

Commentators to the contrary are generally observed, in my experience, to be using fragmentary texts, heavily reconstructed, and clearly are engaged in speculation, much as some people try to say the Lucretius' physics depart strongly from Epicurus, which arguments I have not found to be persuasive in any degree.

Quote from Hiram

The only favor I ask of you moving forward is never again to accuse me of making up doctrines or putting words in the mouth of Epicurus or Metrodorus without first consulting the sources in good faith. That is a huge accusation, and I would never accuse other of that in that manner, particularly without checking the sources first.

Hiram -- Courtesy goes in many ways, and I can't fail to note that your title of this thread, "The Neglect of Metrodorus' Economics" was from the very beginning an accusation that those of us here were "neglecting" something that you find to be important. In fact as I reread your first sentence here, is the essence of your accusation that I or others are complaining that you put words in the mouth of Epicurean leaders without checking the sources first? Or that you are putting incorrect doctrines in their mouths?

As far as the critical comments in this thread go, the essential point is that you are suggesting that "natural measure" constitutes an absolute test based on something other than pleasure, and that's a substantive disagreement that is separate from the issue of whether you are putting those words in their mouths. As far as "without checking the sources first" I am sure you have checked them to some extent, but as I see it you regularly fail to stress how speculative and reconstructed many of these quotes really are.

Both are issues of substantive disagreement, not intended to be personal insults. But they are serious issues of substantive disagreement, and at some point if you don't see it necessary to closely document your sources, and if you are also committed to looking for absolute-based standards of conduct not based on pleasure and pain, then I think we'll all conclude that it would be better to be more careful in what you post here rather than risk disagreement on substance appearing to be personal.

It's not personal - these are just very important issues.

Here is another example: "moderation / mean" is by no means the same as "managing wealth with anxiety nor fearing its loss! These are the words of a commentator trying to reach a preferred conclusion, not someone trying to be fair with the text and judge it from an unbiased eye.

Is it "poverty" that is a matter of indifference, or "wealth" -- we don't know as the word is in brackets!

Again totally out of context and unclear as to who "I" is, but this is what I would expect Epicurus to say:

This is also out of context, but still probably reinforces the disposition that one would expect Epicurus to say different things about poverty depending on the context. We shouldn't expect Epicurus to say that poverty is always evil any more than he would say that it is always good:

Ok so that essay is someone looking to draw parallels between Philodemus and Jesus, who also notes that Philodemus' Greek is "difficult." Many reasons for caution.

This clip (also from Tsouna) seems to me to be good reason to remember that even where we have a passage that is well preserved, it is not necessarily clear that the passage refers to Epicurean views, because the writers are quoting extensively from adverse writers:

Hiram what is the source of that clip? Does that clip not indicate by brackets that the word "moderate" (which is the key issue here) is reconstructed and not in the original?

This is from the Tsouna edition:

I agree with what Elayne is saying, but I would say that it is "possible" that Metrodorus or Philodemus would or did use the term "natural measure," because they have previously stated clearly that the only tool given by nature for our guidance is pleasure and pain, and in that sense feeling - pleasure and pain - ARE, or at least PROVIDE the tools for assessing, a "natural measure" of anything. But this is so obvious as to hardly need saying, and it does not lead in the direction of "happiness correlates to wealth up to 60-75 K income" except to state that such calculations are truly impossible either to expand to the world at large, or even to apply to any individuals within that statistical sample. This is nothing but Benthamite utilitarianism in action.

Hiram, we cannot ourselves even agree what the definition of "happiness" is. How useful is a survey about "happiness" really going to be without giving some explanation of what that term means?

But I really do not like continuing to debate issues like this without providing CLEAR references to the texts that are involved, and evaluating THEM for reliability, and that is as much my frustration with this discussion as anything else.

It ought to be right at the top of our list of things to do to establish What exact text we are talking about and how reliable it is. It is not a violation of copyright to cut and past excerpts from passages from any of these books we are talking about, and whenever we introduce something controversial we ought to start with our documentation of it so we know exactly who and what we are relying on -- because in every case we are NOT relying on Philodemus or Metrodorus or even Epicurus themselves, we are relying on a 2000 year chain of copyists and interpreters and commentators, of which well over 90% - especially the moderns - are hostile to the core ideas of Epicurus.

If indeed there is good documentation of the use of "natural measure of wealth" then lets by all means discuss it, along with all the details that go along with it, but Elayne's comments about the general situation are correct in my view.

Mike you're presumably reading my exchanges with Hiram in regard to Metrodorus and Philodemus on economics, which is covering some of these same issues. I do hope you will continue to write more and think "outside the box" of the kind of "make the best of a bad situation" approach that seems to be characteristic of Epicurean writers for at least the last fifty years.

Yes, "make the best of a bad situation" makes good sense in a way, but if it turns into a British-sounding "keep a stiff up lip" where you end up working to TOLERATE pain rather than to change the circumstances and rid yourself of it, then it becomes just another brick in the wall, and part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Quote from Hiram

If what bothers you about the "natural measure of wealth" is that it's a minimalist doctrine, then I would challenge you to interpret is non-minimally. I would not say "discard it", because there are two main issues:

No, it doesn't bother me that "natural measure of wealth is a phrase that is necessarily minimalist, because it can be interpreted as "right-sizing" wealth to produce the greatest pleasure. What bothers me is that you seem to be interpreting it and preaching it as minimalist, when (1) it is not, and (2) minimalism is clearly non-Epicurean.

Quote from Hiram

If I find a commentator like Yona who uses virtue as a referrent, then I'll switch the referrent to pleasure, but I won't dismiss the entire discussion for that reason, or the sources, or the moral questions being addressed which may be legitimate.

Well good luck on that, because in Yona using "virtue as a referrent" she is preaching virtue as the goal, so by accepting her premises as "legitimate" you are undermining the Epicurean view, which is the opposite of

Quote from Hiram

And so it seems to me that the natural measure of wealth is meant to rectify both errors, and that we should be critical of both, not only of the minimalist one.

Yes I agree let's be critical of both minimalism and money/capitalism/whatever word fits here. But the problem that requires me to make these comments is that I don't see anyone here advocating maximization of money, or else I would call them out just as I am calling out minimalism, which is what your phrasing ends up advocating.

As for the beneficial results of these discussions I agree they are definitely beneficial, because we are building a record where we can point others in the future who will then not have to start at the same point as we did in attempting to explore these issues.

I was going to put this in a separate thread but I think I will put it here. Some of you have probably seen this exchange on facebook. I really like the guy asking the question so I will just put the exchange here without names because I don't want this to seem to be a hit on him personally. LOTS of people do this -- even people writing here on this forum with the best of intentions, because they just refuse or can't grasp the issue of how contextual Epicurean philosophy is. So we have a huge task of getting this issue front and center and dealing with it. Here's the exchange:

Q. Epicurus argues that egoism will align with virtue, but isnt there possible scenarios where choosing pleasure will go against virtue?

Cassius:

Of course there will be conflict to anyone who holds that 'virtue' is objective or absolute, but to Epicurus, virtue has no meaning or use other than being productive of pleasure, so in Epicurean terms such a conflict will not occur. This is discussed at length in Cicero's On Ends by Torquatus. As to "egoism" that has no relation to Epicurean philosophy either because the goal is pleasure, not "egoism."

Q. what if my pleasure goes against doing the right thing?

Cassius: What is "the right thing"? There IS no "right thing"! You'll conclude that Epicurus is wrong in the end because you're accepting the premises of those who are against him and suggest that god or Plato can tell you "the right thing." Which is fine - everyone can accept or reject what they like, but at least be sure you understand the issue, and the questions you are asking indicate that you do not understand Epicurus on a very basic level -- which is true of a *lot* of people - because they refuse to give up the idea that their own perception of "virtue" is "the correct one."

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The reason I post this is that - among the people likely to read our Epicurean posts on the internet - we can probably count the number of people for whom this lesson has sunk in on the thumbs of one foot. This is a VERY difficult point for people to understand - they have been indoctrinated all their lives to believe that there is a "right" and a "wrong" and that their own views of "virtue" align with those abstractions.

There is no way that people will truly understand epicurean philosophy as long as they struggle with that point.

The relationship of this point to the article is that it is VERY easy for people to skip over this essential fundamental and presume that all they need to do is "take a pill" for anxiety and they need make no further adjustments. In that respect "giving up the pursuit of power, fame, and money" is just another PILL -- adopting that strategy without understanding the wider framework of WHY and HOW you should adjust your life ends up being almost worthless, because you'll just careen like a bumper car into another error.

I just read the article I linked and I completely agree with it -- but spurred by recent other conversations here (discussing consumerism), I would add more:

Major Point One is -- You have focused on several of the major causes of anxiety - improper priorities for fame, money, and power.

Depending on the audience, those are indeed common issues that need to be dealt with.

But in addition to those, Epicurus placed fear of false religion, and fear of death, even higher on the scale of things needing to be dealt with, so it's good not to forget those, and to keep those in context.

Also, you have said -

"Anxiety destroys you and the people around you. It destroys your present thereby destroying your future as well. It does this by forcing you to sacrifice what exists to pursue something that does not exist."

Yes that is absolutely true true -- misplaced priorities result in wasted time.

I would add that the real problem with anxiety is that it is PAINFUL, and that time spent on being anxious rarely ends up reducing future pain, or leading to future pleasure. It is as you say DESTRUCTIVE because it results in more pain and reduced pleasure.

Ultimately that result -- more pain, less pleasure, is "why you need to get rid of anxiety"

Major point two is - You have focused on things that we have some fairly direct control over, and can fairly easily deal with, just by a change in attitude. But there are many things in life that JUSTIFIABLY create anxiety - fear of getting mugged or murdered on the street, fear of disease or accident or simply fear of wasting your life.

Those things require affirmative work on your part (if they are preventable or reducible at all) to rearrange potentially many aspects of your life that go far beyond your attitude. They may require changing the location where you live, your occupation, the things you eat, the people you associate with -- all sorts of things that are not so easy as a simple change in attitude.

There's nothing at all wrong with your article but recent discussions reinforce in my mind that what we're talking about here is a hierarchical process where it is very easy to get focuses on one particular rung on a "ladder," (or use whatever "path" analogy sounds good) while at the same time forgetting that we are on a ladder and that the ladder leads somewhere.

Not only is it easy to forget that we're on a ladder and that the ladder needs to lead somewhere, the real problem is that tremendous numbers of people have never even been introduced, much less understand, what the true goal of life is, and that this life is our only chance to do whatever it is we want to do.

The first part of page one of the best surviving copy of Lucretius, Butterfield page 197

This sounds like a name that should live in Epicurean history: M. Valerius Probus

There exist two pieces of evidence regarding the editing or commenting of Lucretius ’ work (in the modern sense of these terms). First, a grammatical tract that survives only in an eighth-century manuscript (the so-called Anecdotum Parisinum), which perhaps ultimately drew upon a lost work of Suetonius, seemingly attributes an edition of DRN, annotated with critical symbols, to M. Valerius Probus (late first century ad ). Second, Jerome testified that, in the late fourth century, at least one commentary upon the poem was available to him (and this could be linked with Probus ’ work).

I still as of this date have not had time to read through this work, but as I do I will try to post some notes, such as this interesting footnote dismissing the claims that Cicero "emended" the text, and that Lucretius died of suicide due to insanity from a love potion:

Hiram I do not understand why you conclude that this subject is not of interest here. The SUBJECT is certainly of interest, but even in the title of this thread you are stating that the topic is "The NEGLECT of Metrodorus' Economics" and accusing me or others of "neglecting" it?

We don't have a disagreement as to the importance of the subject, we have a disagreement as to your interpretation of what Metrodorus or Philodemus said and meant, and that's where we need to focus the discussion.

So when you say:

Quote from Hiram

That requires an evolution of the discourse, obviously,

I don't think it is obvious at all what you mean. What kind of "evolution of discourse" is necessary in order to find reliable quotes, post them publicly, and analyse what they say? That is what I am trying to do by pointing out the basic context of the hedonic calculus, and then applying that general rule to economics so that we can judge in context what these fragmentary remains appear to say.

So when you say this:

Quote from Hiram

Concerning the use of “natural”, Epicurus specifically used this word in LMenoeceus in the context of hedonic calculus and choices and avoidances, and a few of the Doctrines mention “natural” as a category, so if we approach the text on property management in good will we will see the connection.

.. I am 100% in favor of posting the original quotes and their context, and attempting to tease out of them any new meaning or examples which we can find in them. It may well be the case that Philodemus and others give us lots of specific examples that, if we understand them clearly, can be used as examples of good analysis based on Epicurean reasoning and their personal contexts.

But in doing so I would expect the entire discussion to be held in the framework of understanding that there are no absolute rules of justice or any other type of virtue and morality, and that the overall goal and focus remains where it always is, in contextually pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. I cannot imagine that Metrodorus or Philodemus approached it any other way, and I say "cannot imagine" because I am aware of no evidence that they ever intentionally set out to deviate or reform Epicurus' own perspective.

So to repeat, when you say this:

Quote from Hiram

But if this is a subject that does not interest others we do not have to carry on with a study of economics. There will be another time and another audience for this.

I just think you are wrong to state that the subject "does not interest" me or others here. The SUBJECT is of great interest, but analyzing the subject in a framework that misses the ultimate context of the philosophy is something that I would expect us to have to debate with people Sergio Yona, who wrote that article referenced in this thread and concluded that the topic is about VIRTUOUS wealth administration:

Quote

"Despite the lack of detail regarding economics in Epicurus' extant remains, his followers especially Philodemus provide a rich and uniquely Epicurean account of virtuous wealth administration, and one that deserves much more than a simple acknowledgement of the hedonic calculus or a citation made in passing."

I expect to have to debate the role of pleasure with academics who are set on interpreting Epicurus from a minimalist perspective, but I would not think it would be necessary for us to be debating that here -- and yet that is the clear implication of the way you are wording your approach - that you are looking for a "natural measure" framed in Stoic / absolute / virtue terms rather than in terms of pleasure always being the end goal.

I know you and I disagree on the emphasis that should be placed on "pleasure as the goal" but THAT is really what we are going back and forth on here in this thread, not a question of whether others share your interest in the topic. If we could keep the focus on explaining things in a way that is consistent with Epicurus rather than crusading against consumerism in Alain De Botton style (such as this at the Daily Stoic) then I think we would be doing a lot more talking about what the texts actually say and less in describing them in language that obscures the main point. De Botton may be accomplishing great things in crusading against consumerism, but he is doing next to nothing to advance Epicurean philosophy, nor would he even seem to be embracing that as his goal. But promoting Epicurean philosophy IS our goal here, not picking and choosing some particular problem and presenting it in a way that can be read to undermine the core analysis.

I think at this point that the podcasting initiatives (such as Lucretiustoday.com) are the way to go, and that the Epicureanradio.com website is probably getting so little use that it is not worth even the small monthly cost.

I am therefore going to look for totally free hosting alternatives for that material. In the meantime and during the shutdown period, all of the existing programming is available here: