Posts by Cassius

Maceij I have no idea what your personal circumstances are and how much time you have to devote to these conversations, but as far as I am aware the most well-developed and well-researched statement of the opinions I am inarticulately arguing is Chapter 19 of Gosling & Taylor's "The Greeks on Pleasure." If you do not have a copy of that, check here. And if you ever have time to read it and comment, I am sure your thoughts on it would be very instructive to me, even if you do not agree with it.

I don't dispute that comparing the change in condition constitutes a pleasure. But the tooth has no memory, and I think the pleasure comes from comparing the two conditions,m which is an active motion of my mind, and is just one of many pleasures my mind is capable of generating. The healthful functioning of any part of the body **can** certainly be pleasurable, such as my tongue generates when eating, but the healthful functioning of my toe in most cases gives me no sensation at all. If I choose to think about my health, and relish it, that is an active motion of my mind in actively generating a pleasing thought, just like my mind can actively generate all kinds of pleasurable emotions which are positive pleasures. The active functioning of my mind is not "absence of" anything.

Why don't you explain it to me, Maciej? My teeth that are not in pain do not produce to me any feeling at all. And when a toothache is heeled, I can say that I feel better than I did before in total, but the tooth that is no longer hurting produces no sensation to me at all. Is "no sensation to me at all" the highest pleasure?

Great essay Eric! and it is a good thing that we enjoy that debate because it never goes away. And maybe that's why Epicurus basically laughed at it with:

VS42 - The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity.

Please click HERE to go right to the spot for the hypothetical.

The following is a hypothetical that should assist us in thinking about several important issues, including the nature of pleasure, its relationship to "absence of pain," and our comfort level with describing pleasure as "absence of pain." The question is set up by a short two minute movie clip - the final scene of the 1936 British HG Wells movie "Things to Come." What happens previously in the movie is not important to the hypothetical. By the end of the movie, the script has systematically eliminated almost every issue of social conflict imaginable. Both characters in the clip are from the same society, same economic and social background, have no religious position, and have very little at issue between them except the question raised in this sequence. In siding with one over the other there are no political, social, economic, or religious implications to your choice.

One character in the clip is named John Cabal - he is the taller, darkheaded man on the left who speaks first. The other character is Pippa Passworthy - he is on the right and speaks second. Both Cabal and Passworthy are leaders of their society, set somewhere far in the future. Both have just watched their children - Passworthy's son and Cabal's daughter - launched in a risky space shot toward the moon, from which they may very possibly die in the effort, and not return.

Both of the children enthusiastically wanted to go, but among the fathers there is disagreement. One argues that what has happened is good; the other argues that what has happened is bad. After watching the clip, please select which of the four responses most closely mirrors your thoughts. There are no wrong answers. Let's presume several important things: (1) Both Cabal and Passworthy are extreme and dramatized examples of their relative positions. Epicurus would endorse neither character in full - both would fall short of what Epicurus would recommend. (2) The four poll options are worded also so as to eliminate extremes as to the meaning of "absence of pain." Given adequate explanation, each option is fully defensible under Epicurean philosophy.

The hypothetical question ("Which Shall It Be?) is to be answered by choosing only one selection. Which of these four options most closely reflects your own viewpoint about pleasure, absence of pain, and which character you more closely identify with from this clip?

If possible, please explain your answer in the comments afterwards. Say what you selected, and why. But please select only one answer:

Just to continue while I am thinking about it, I perceive you embrace this formulation because you are Ok that what it really means is "when I am without pain I need no more pleasure because I am already in the highest state of pleasure possible" --- and so you interpret this passage as a full and complete endorsement of pleasure as the goal of life, Correct?

OK you have quoted a section of the letter to Menoeceus. And you are saying that not only is "freedom from pain" a good life, it is the best possible life.

What does it mean to you? What does the normal person interpret this to mean? How are you actually spending your time?

(Originally posted at Facebook) People, it's time to come to grips with controversies on a deeper level. We've been at work in this group for over four years, and yet never have we examined at close range the arguments arrayed against Epicurus in Book 2 of Cicero's "On Ends." Unsurprisingly enough, those arguments turn on criticism of Epicurus' definition of pleasure, and on the idea (asserted by Cicero) that Epicurus held painlessness to be identical to pleasure (an idea which in fact was held by an earlier philosopher):

Well,” I replied, “either Epicurus does not know what pleasure is, or the rest of mankind all the world over do not.” “How so?” he asked. “Because the universal opinion is that pleasure is a sensation actively stimulating the percipient sense and diffusing over it a certain agreeable feeling.” “What then?” he replied; “does not Epicurus recognize pleasure in your sense?” “Not always,” said I; “now and then, I admit, he recognizes it only too fully; for he solemnly avows that he cannot even understand what Good there can be or where it can be found, apart from that which is derived from food and drink, the delight of the ears, and the grosser forms of gratification.....

“Do you remember, then,” I said, “what Hieronymus of Rhodes pronounces to be the Chief Good, the standard as he conceives it to which all other things should be referred?” “I remember,” said he, “that he considers the End to be freedom from pain.” “Well,” said I, “what is the same philosopher’s view about pleasure?” “He thinks that pleasure is not desirable in itself.” “Then in his opinion to feel pleasure is a different thing from not feeling pain?” “Yes,” he said, “and there he is seriously mistaken, since, as I have just shown, the complete removal of pain is the limit of the increase of pleasure.” “Oh,” I said, “as for the formula ‘freedom from pain,’ I will consider its meaning later on; but unless you are extraordinarily obstinate you are bound to admit that ‘freedom from pain’ does not mean the same as ‘pleasure.’"

And later in Book 2, Cicero summarizes his argument this way: ""If pain is an evil, to be without this evil is not enough to constitute the Good Life."

Is Cicero right or wrong? On this last question, I think most people will agree with Cicero. I agree with him myself! If we can't articulate a convincing response to Cicero's criticisms - and a better one than Torquatus offered in the passages that followed - then we haven't begun to understand Epicurean philosophy. And if so, then our arguments don't deserve to be any better respected than those of Torquatus - a version of Epicurus painted by the hand of Cicero for the purpose of knocking them down.

Anyone want to take a hand at answering this first criticism of Cicero?

Mako there is an article by Alexander Brown entitled "Epicurus on Truth and Falsehood" which I can upload here (or you can get on JSTOR) if you like. It focuses on the details of some commentary by Sextus Empiricus which bears on "truth." But I'm not really sure that I recommend that to you, however, as it might be more technical logic and hair-splitting than you are interested in reading. After glancing back at it I had a hard time finding a passage that jumped out at me as being a clear statement on the issue we're talking about.

I checked Dewitt and he has chapters on the Canon of Truth, and its relationship with Reason, which you probably ought to read first if you have not already. To me the best overview of the system before digging into particular details is always DeWitt.

But let us know how deeply you want to dig into that part because you may not find that necessary. I think the basics are the epistemology parts of the PD's (Bailey version):

1. We must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception, to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise, all will be full of doubt and confusion.
2. If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.
3. If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.
4. If on each occasion, instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other nearer standard when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.

Plus a pretty direct expansion of the basic physics: If the universe is matter and void, and infinite in extent and universal in time, then there is no "absolute" point of perspective from which someone can say that anything is "absolutely true." And there are no "ideal forms" against which to compare for absolute truth, and no supernatural "god" to ask either. There are only particular perceptions of particular things at particular times, generalized into summary opinions / concepts, and the "test of truth" is whether our opinions / concepts correspond faithfully to the thing we are observing at the time, as measured by the information we get from our five senses, feelings, and anticipations. And it's also important to remember that the senses / feelings / anticipations are our test for what is "real" to us at any time, regardless of whether we move to another level of generalization by calling them "true."

After thinking about this and glancing back at the Brown article, I think what I would recommend as much as anything else if you are interested in reading on this beyond DeWitt is the Appendix by Phillip De Lacey to his translation of Philodemus' "On Methods of Inference." The surviving part of the work by Philodemus is very interesting, but I would say start with the appendix on page 120. DeLacey gives a really interesting review of the development of Epicurean logic and how it relates to what came before in Greek thought. It has been a while since I read this but I remember that when I did, I thought it was excellent, especially in helping distinguish Epicurus from Plato and Aristotle.

I think we got started on this because Hiram pointed out that you probably meant "real" when you wrote "true," and that might be good enough for now. But the issue of reason and logic in the canon is pretty closely related to the same topic, and if I recall correctly the De Lacey article is a really good place to start reading if you want more.

Yes the issue I think does go more to the matter of what is "real" rather than what is "true." The senses are our key to determining what is "real," but if the "true" is defined to mean "absolutely true at all places and all times" then nothing ever gets us to that point because that is an impossible standard.

Yes Mako we need to drop back to the issue of "what is truth" and what Epicurus had to say about that, and the implications of the physics. I am not able to answer that fully now or ever, but here are some initial comments:

What is "truth"? Many people seem to think that there is an "objective" truth from which we can conclude that everyone at all places and all times will reach the same conclusion. And in fact Epicurus tells us to have confidence in many conclusions, such as that the universe is infinite and eternal, that nothing exists except matter and void, etc. And he also says that unless we can be confident of things immediately in front of us, we can have no confidence in things that are hidden.

But from that we have to think about the meaning of "truth" and what that means between different people at different times and different places, because there is no central god or central observation point from which we can stand and say "THAT is the truth of ice cream, or cats, or whatever.....

"Do any of the three letters written by Epicurus mention or explain static versus dynamic pleasures? If not, then it is not essential. How about the principle doctrines? Even so, a list of doctrines is never as clear, as a letter. If not then it is not Epicurus himself. Not essential."

<<< To me that is the key and the start of the analysis. The great majority of this k/k analysis comes from Cicero with a little added personal commentary from Diogenes Laertius, which was probably written hundreds of years later even than Cicero. We don't have anything within 200+ years of Epicurus himself that even hints that Epicurus considered a distinction between "static" and "active" to be helpful. And if Epicurus dealt with it at all, it's a safe bet that he did so only to unwind the **harm** of thinking about pleasure as static, and to refute Plato, just as Wenham and Nikolsky indicate. The letter to Menoeceus, where this k/k category would certainly have been discussed if it were significant, does not devote a word to it. Instead it says the opposite - ALL pleasure is desirable, not some pleasures intrinsically more than others, or some pleasures intrinsically for the sake of others.

The only way to read this k/k distinction into Menoeceus is to presume that "absence of pain" means a state of non-feeling, and therefore "absence of pain" means "katastematic" under a different name. That's not just wrong, but absurd, given the clear intent of the rest of the letter and many other reliable statements that pleasure is a feeling we all recognize by nature, not an "absence of" anything else. Pain is to be avoided so that we can experience pleasure, not so we can experience a state of non-feeling. Any attempt to describe the pleasures that we experience when we are living without pain is simply a list of ordinary and familiar mental and bodily pleasures.

But I will go further than to say that "it is not essential." It's not just non-essential, it is terribly harmful to a philosophy based on feeling to state or imply that a state of non-feeling is the goal of life. That is sabotage of the highest order, the kind of thing with have to expect from a master lawyer with an agenda to defeat and wipe out Epicurean philosophy - which it has very nearly succeeded in doing.

Charity in dealing with a lawyer's motives is a dangerous thing! I like many aspects of Cicero, but I agree with Norman DeWitt here too: "I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it so completely."


And I think that conclusion applies to at least a significant number of the modern commentators who can see the same thing that Nikolsky, Wenham, and Gosling & Taylor see, yet who still argue that the Epicurean goal of life amounts to an absence of pleasure as that term is ordinarily understood.

Martha Nussbaum's "Therapy of Desire" is a widely known book with much commentary on the implications of Epicurean philosophy for psychology. These comments are not a review of the book and I do not intend them too be taken too negatively. However I think that a reader can more fairly assess the claims Nussbaum makes about Epicurean philosophy earlier in the book if the reader is aware of the ultimate negative conclusions she draws at the end. Here are several excerpts, mostly from the final chapters:

I am not sure how thoroughly I will be able to go through this tonight but Nussbaum seems to regularly describe herself as an Aristotelian (?)

"Here I side with the Socratics and Aristotelians..."

I do not agree that Epicurean philosophy slights development of critical thought, nor do I consider the Stoics to be superior in any way, or the Epicureans "authoritarian"

Nor do I agree that Epicurean philosophy subordinates truth and good reasoning to "therapeutic efficacy" (she presumably is referring to the goal of living pleasurably) nor would I consider the Stoics and Aristotelians superior in this department.

Certainly not a high assessment of Epicurus in this paragraph:

I reject this paragraph in totality:

Now I see why in the past so many Stoics I have run into like Nussbaum so much:

More anti-Epicurean assessment:

So Nussbaum considers Seneca "an advance of major proportions" over the Epicureans

I don't agree that Lucretius contradicts Epicurus, and I don't agree that Epicurus excluded marriage, sexual love, children, and political community

Look at fragment 113, also without wider context. Applied literally this one would be a prescription for living in a cave, and I would consider it significantly contradictory to other passages if it were not placed in context.

For example from Lucretius Book VI (Baliey):

"And so with his discourse of truthful words he purged the heart and set a limit to its desire and fear, and set forth what is the highest good, towards which we all strive, and pointed out the path, whereby along a narrow track we may strain on towards it in a straight course; he showed what there is of ill in the affairs of mortals everywhere, coming to being and flying abroad in diverse forms, be it by the chance or the force of nature, because nature had so brought it to pass; he showed from what gates it is meet to sally out against each ill, and he proved that ’tis in vain for the most part that the race of men set tossing in their hearts the gloomy billows of care."

Why would we ever strive or strain for anything, why would we ever sally out from any gate to meet any ill, if we were going to set a rule of never being occupied with much business, never tackling distasteful matters, or pushing ourselves to expand our capabilities?

So I would say this one requires gentle handling due to the lack of context.

That 112 is particularly interesting to me - I see it is a fragment not in a larger context - The latter part about not wanting to be in an occupation under the control of others makes perfect sense, but to say "the sum of happiness consists in our disposition of which we are master" is a very broad statement that probably has obvious context requirements as to the definitions of "sum" and "happiness." That would relate to the Ciceronian criticism that a man can be happy even while being roasted alive. I remember DeWitt deals with that by distinguishing happiness as being a reference to general attitude. But to equate happiness with disposition as full equivalents seems to me requires lots of caveats and definitions. I bet this is a phrase where scrutinizing the translation from the Greek would be interesting.

What I keep running into is the two extremes - some people want to define free will as "there are absolutely no limits on anything I want to do" which is obviously untrue.

Then there is "there is absolutely nothing I can choose for myself" even whether i pick salt or pepper, and that seems to me to be equally absurd.

It seems obvious to me that the common sense position is similar to what you have listed - some things are in our control, some things out,

Good breakdown Maciej. Everything in that list seems eminently sensible to me, and it is frustrating that people with other agendas seem to want to insist on definitions of "Free will" that no one in their right mind, on either side of the debate, should consider to be reasonable.

An excellent catch Maciej! The entire topic of "images" gets far too little attention in our online discussions, and it definitely relates to "free will." I think somewhere (maybe more than one place) Cicero ridicules the Epicurean treatment of images. Found one here:

CICERO TO C. CASSIUS LONGINUS (AT BRUNDISIUM), January 45 BC

I think you must be a little ashamed at this being the third letter inflicted on you before I have a page or a syllable from you. But I will not press you: I shall expect, or rather exact, a longer letter. For my part, if I had a messenger always at hand, I should write even three an hour. For somehow it makes you seem almost present when I write anything to you, and that not “by way of phantoms of images,” as your new friends express it, who hold that “mental pictures” are caused by what Catius called “spectres”—for I must remind you that Catius Insuber the Epicurean, lately dead, calls “spectres” what the famous Gargettius, and before him Democritus, used to call “images.”

Well, even if my eyes were capable of being struck by these “spectres,” because they spontaneously run in upon them at your will, I do not see how the mind can be struck. You will be obliged to explain it to me, when you return safe and sound, whether the “spectre” of you is at my command, so as to occur to me as soon as I have taken the fancy to think about you; and not only about you, who are in my heart’s core, but supposing I begin thinking about the island of Britain—will its image fly at once into my mind? But of this later on.

Maciej do you have an opinion on what Epicurus was saying about free will here? (Bailey translation):

"He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfil and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain; he laughs at (destiny), whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things. (He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity) and some by chance, and some are within our control; for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame. For, indeed, it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation. As to chance, he does not regard it as a god as most men do (for in a god’s acts there is no disorder), nor as an uncertain cause (of all things) for he does not believe that good and evil are given by chance to man for the framing of a blessed life, but that opportunities for great good and great evil are afforded by it. He therefore thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason. For it is better in a man’s actions that what is well chosen (should fail, rather than that what is ill chosen) should be successful owing to chance."

Text is here: https://archive.org/stream/Epicuru…ge/n89/mode/2up

This is a hot topic that flares up regularly. If anyone has anything to offer on this to get the ball rolling, please go ahead. Otherwise at some point I'll find a way to phrase the question so we can at least get the ball rolling. The key passages are at the end of the Letter to Menoeceus, one of more Vatican Sayings, and this from Lucretius: (Martin Ferguson Smith, the best and most recent translator, from Lucretius Book 2):

"Moreover, if all movements are invariably interlinked, if new movement arises from the old in unalterable succession, if there is no atomic swerve to initiate movement that can annul the decrees of destiny and prevent the existence of an endless chain of causation, what is the source of this free will possessed by living creatures all over the earth? What, I ask, is the source of this power of will wrested from destiny, which enables each of us to advance where pleasure leads us, and to alter our movements not at a fixed time or place, but at the direction of our own [260] minds? For undoubtedly in each case it is the individual will that gives the initial impulse to such actions and channels the movements through the limbs.

Have you not observed too that, at the very moment when the starting gates are opened,16 the horses, despite their strength and impatience, cannot burst forward as suddenly as their minds desire? The reason is that the whole mass of matter throughout the whole body must be actuated: only when the whole frame has been actuated can it respond with energy to the eagerness of the mind. So you can see that the initial movement is produced by the mind: it originates from the act of mental [270] will, and is then diffused through every part of the body."