Posts by Cassius

EXCELLENT Point Elayne. That "might" be the same as intensity, but probably not.

I think the "vessel" analogy is always useful so we're talking about something that indicates "how much of the vessel is occupied" by the activity.

The trick will be somehow creating enough columns and labelling them sufficiently to accommodate all of the factors that you want someone to think about.

Thanks Godek. Are you good with Google docs and spreadsheets? Why don't we go ahead and actually setup a spreadsheet format as Hiram initially suggested? Your list of considerations is certainly a good start, but probably in terms of visualizing the final result setting up an actual spreadsheet divided into columns would be better.

Maybe Hiram pictures it differently but I am picturing a spreadsheet generally divided into two columns. And it's important to decide whether we are making a spreadsheet to analyze a single activity, or a list of activities that would then be ranked according to score. I am thinking the obvious choice is a LIST of activities, ranked by score.

Down the left in the margin would be column for the description of the activity. Then the left side would be taken up with a series of entries for ranking the elements. Sort of like this:

Godek could you also set up a "view only" link? I tried to view it but it is wanting me to sign in. I may be able to do that but not sure. If you set a view only link that should allow anyone in.

For example, in listing any pleasure, such as for example 'dinner on the town' I would thinks someone would need to consider --

- the duration of the pleasurable experience while it is ongoing

- the expected future physical pleasure (or pain) from the experience

- the expected future mental pleasure (or pain) from remembering the experience or from other longer-term ramifications of the dinner

- the "intensity" of the pleasurable experience (some kind of personal ranking system of intensity)?

- the repeatability of the experience (can it be done again in the future? how often?)

but those are just general categories and each one breaks down much further. It's probably also not possible even to come up with firm categories. But by listing the possibilities it opens up the issue to visualization.

in the end the entire exercise is necessarily subjective, but it would stimulate thought for the possible favors in "priority" to be listed.

What are some possibilities besides "duration" and "intensity" to describe the feeling?

Yes it would be interesting to think about how to rank the pleasures and pain. Each line on a spreadsheet could represent a particular pleasure or pain, but there would need to be multiple columns (or other method) to rank each one according to important factors such as duration, intensity, and ______???

Exploring what those factors (what columns to include and how to quantify them) would be and thinking about how to quantify them would be helpful, even if in the end it's ultimately *impossible* to quantify them symbolically.

I even wonder if in the end it is detrimental to try to quantify them. But working through the exercise of showing the *difficulty* of quantifying them would itself be useful, just to establish that point. (IE, If it is difficult of impossible for a single individual to quantify their own rankings, then it is certainly impossible for one person or group to prescribe the rankings for another person or group.)

to link, just click on the #3 (as in your preceding post, at the top right of the post) and you get a permalink that you can copy and paste anywhere. The forum software translates forum links into the name of the post, but it's still just a normal link. If you have any trouble with it let me know.

I see this works on desktop or phone.

Thanks Joshua!

Joshua I think all my life I too have been particularly struck by mortality and the knowledge that life is short. As I have gotten older and had a succession of pets come into my life and pass away, parents, friends, etc., that awareness has just sharpened.

Habit gains vigor through neglect? Can that be correct?

Thanks for including the cite, Hiram. It may be over time that it will make sense to move these to a special section on the fragments, but for the time being just including the cites as you are doing is a great help.

Very nice!

Given that definitions are so important in many of these issues (such as atheism),

maybe we in fact need to plan a preface that addresses the "definitions" issue that runs through so many of these questions.

In fact that may be a good way to start it regardless - to point out that because many of the important words are so ambiguous, we want to define exactly what we mean in as clear terms as possible.

Hiram can you cite the page number and the work from which this is believed to have come? Thanks!

It has been called to my attention that in many circles the term "free will" carries some kind of supernatural or religious implications, and that in those circles the terms generally used are "hard determinism" or "soft determinism" to indicate that no choices are entirely without preceding influences. I agree that it is important to be clear about what we mean in any context.

For comparative reference, I pulled out four translations of Lucretius Book 2 where this wording generally becomes an issue:

1. Daniel Browne edition of 1743:

2. Hugh Munro translation, late 1800's:

3. Cyril Bailey translation, 1930's

4. Martin Ferguson Smith translation, Hackett publishing (current edition):

Here is an excellent post by Elli with which I completely agree. I post it here to call attention to the part that I have underlined:

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The term of determinism denotes humans' unresistible desire to have something stable to feel secure, but it is the same issue that hides behind the fate, necessity, god, and the absolutes. The term of indeterminism denotes the instability and leads to chance, randomness and chaos that makes us, the humans, to not feel secure at all. It is an issue how we feel and judge the first causes of the phenomena that caused them in the materialistic reality. The idea by Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things" it is in consistency with the field of existensial psychology. It leads to the responsibility that we the humans are capable enough to do such actions to eliminate the obstacles that are against to our goal of pleasure, because we know for sure that the only we have is a unique life to live it in eudaemonia.

Imo Epicurus neither is a determinist nor an indeterminist, he is a probabilist. He measures the things in consistency with Physics, Canon and Ethics to eliminate as much as he can those probabilities that are obstacles to our goal of pleasure. The only obvious stability for Epicurus is pleasure that is a faculty to us by Nature, as he also declares when we do not have in our life eudeamonia we do everything to win it. For doing everything to win eudaemonia springs from the inner self that has the ability to visionalize and his future without to be afraid of it, because he knows what is happened to the past and what is happening to the present. For this reason the children the most important that are offering to us is the joy of present that is connected mostly with the future. For a society to loose its children it is like to loose its future. Something that happens to my country in the financial crisis as we abandon all of our hopes of the future by abandoning our children for leaving away from our society and welcoming children from other societies. This does not lead to the coherence and the future of a society. This does not lead to social contracts with fair laws that can be accepted by the like. Sorry, but I know what is happening around me. The immigration issue leads to chaos as it is an issue without control and without ending. As well as, the issue of banking financial system leads to chaos as the monetary system became a gambling, and has nothing to do with the past that there was a kind of a control and stability as it was connected with the gold.

So, the only solution that comes in our sight again and again is elimination of the desires and the absence of pain (feelings) to lead people of our societies to apathy and misery for accepting an inexorable determinism of our fate. No, this is a miserable slavery.

However, the inner self for Epicurus measures according to the past, the present and an expectation of future experiences and how many trusted friends has around for not feeling lonely and insecure, and for the present and for the future. To have real friends, means you have allies in life for feeling strong enough to fight against all the obstacles and these probabilities that are against to the survival of your common society. But for having friends it is an issue how to realize what friendship is, Epicurus said that is an immortal good. Today this great value has a value of a dime.

For the issue on future here is how Epicurus points out it in his letter to Meneoceus : We must then bear in mind that the future is neither ours, nor yet wholly not ours, so that we may not altogether expect it as sure to come, nor abandon hope of it, as if it will certainly not come.

I agree with everything Elli wrote there but I want to comment on the phrasing of this part:

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In the underlined section, note the switch from referring to pleasure to referrring to eudaemonia.

Compare that to this part of Diogenes of Oinoanda:

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"If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved inquiry into «what is the means of happiness?» and they
wanted to say «the virtues» (which would actually be true), it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this, without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not «what is the means of happiness?» but «what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?», I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life...."

Yes I know that eudaimonia / happiness were terms used by Epicurus himself in addition to "pleasure" but the point I would make is that without clearly tying happiness to pleasure, the implication creeps in (and is fully entrenched in modern society) that "happiness" is not necessarily related to pleasure at all, and that indeed pleasure gets in the way of happiness.

I think this is a huge communication issue that we constantly need to address. If we don't, all our discussions fall on ears that are worse than deaf -- ears that are programmed by opposing philosophies and religions to disparage pleasure. And maybe even worse, our words are used against us to infer that what we mean is that our goal is something other than / different than pleasure!

It appears Diogenes of Oinoanda saw the same issue.

Here is the argument against "essences" made by Frances Wright in A Few Days in Athens, Chapter 15. I would apply it to Epicurus' view of pleasure -- pleasure does not exist apart from the normal experiences of human life:

“What is in a substance cannot be separate from it. And is not all matter a compound of qualities? Hardness, extension, form, color, motion, rest — take away all these, and where is matter? To conceive of mind independent of matter, is as if we should conceive of color independent of a substance colored: What is form, if not a body of a particular shape? What is thought, if not something which thinks? Destroy the substance, and you destroy its properties; and so equally — destroy the properties, and you destroy the substance. To suppose the possibility of retaining the one, without the other, is an evident absurdity.”

I would say that the error OKeefe and others are committing is that they are attempting to conceive of a pleasure apart from experience, just as if color could be separated from things that are colored. And this is a huge error, because if Epicurus' intent in describing "absence of pain" is just to describe the experience of ordinary pleasures without any mixture of pain, then their whole argument toward asceticism is out the window - because the experience of living without pain means the normal day to life mixture of pleasures, with no mixture of pain.

Or, as Cicero described it: "a life of tranquility crammed full of pleaures"

Cicero, In Defense of Publius Sestius 10.23: “He {Publius Clodius} praised those most who are said to be above all others the teachers and eulogists of pleasure {the Epicureans}. … He added that these same men were quite right in saying that the wise do everything for their own interests; that no sane man should engage in public affairs; that nothing was preferable to a life of tranquility crammed full of pleasures. But those who said that men should aim at an honorable position, should consult the public interest, should think of duty throughout life not of self-interest, should face danger for their country, receive wounds, welcome death – these he called visionaries and madmen.” Note: Here is a link to Perseus where the Latin and translation of this can be compared. The Latin is: “nihil esse praestabilius otiosa vita, plena et conferta voluptatibus.” See also here for word translations.

Or as Torquatus described it in On Ends: "living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain"

"The truth of the position that pleasure is the ultimate good will most readily appear from the following illustration. Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain; he will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration and its continuance by diminishing severity. Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power; let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement."

This is another passage: "Peace of mind" is what really makes life pleasant." I think I would go so far to say that "peace of mind" is probably not itself a pleasure at all. A mind is always doing something and is never truly at rest. If you're lying down thinking about, or simply "realizing" what a wonderful life you have, your'e experiencing memories and actively thinking about certain things. You are calmly experiencing normal mental pleasures, not doing something in another category entirely.

And I think this may be related to the criticism of "essences" in Aristotle. There is no "essence" of yellow, there are only "things that are yellow." There is no such thing in the abstract as "peace of mind" - there are only minds that are calmly at peace because they are experiencing normal mental and bodily pleasures, undisturbed by pains of any kind.

What I am stating here is the "all pleasure comes through experience" argument made in the Wentham article here in the filebase.

The only way Okeefe can logically reach this result is to carefully emphasize the Tranquility /Absence of Pain argument as a link in his chain to conclude that some types of pleasure are better than others. That's why this issue is so important. If you don't deal with that argument clearly you end up with Tim Okeefe and the stoics.

If the focus is kept on "pleasure" as a feeling and "all pleasures are desirable" and that the main way to rule out choosing as particular pleasure is that you can reasonably predict you are going to experience more pain from the choice than pleasure, then you can stay locked on the "what will happen to me if I make this choice." If you stay locked on the practical result of the choice in YOUR situation then you don't worry about an artificial rule that the simplest choice is ALWAYS the best.

And that's why I think they hit the limit of pleasure is the absence of pain so hard. They want to read into that phrase that "absence of pain" is special kind of particularly valuable pleasure which is worth attaining at any price. Otherwise there is no way a sane person would sacrifice a lifetime of enjoyment in order to hunker down in a cave thinking that "being calm" is a substitute for that lifetime of pleasurable experiences.

This is where he heads into the weeds of saying that for Epicurus pleasure was not pleasure, and that he had his own "idiosyncratic analysis:

And here is the darned "kinetic" vs "static" analysis that I think Nikolsky demolishes as not Epicurean at all: