Posts by Cassius

We had a very good followup discussion on this in today's zoom meeting.

Clearly people are coming at this from different angles, all of which are legitimate. The reaction of some, however, was "I thought this problem was settled," or to the effect that they did not understand why the question exists.

That was the intent of my followup to Raphael's post. In addition to the on-the-surface question of whether pleasures differ from one another, and in what contexts (if any) it is good Epicureanism to consider that some pleasures are different, better, or more valuable than others, I see a very practical application of this question being as follows:

Cicero, Plutarch, and many critics, including some "friends," say that Epicurean philosophy leads to the conclusion that the best life for everyone is the equivalent of "playing pushpins" - with pushpins being understood to mean any very simple, very unambitious, very safe, past-time. Is this a correct conclusion? If not, why not? {I trust it is clear that my own answer is a very firm "NO", but just in case lurkers read this in isolation I want the record to be clear.}

And while "Epicurus didn't do that" may be part of the answer, the full answer needs to be clear, concise, persuasive, and compelling, both philosophically and practically.

We'll return to this next Sunday and can continue in the meantime here on the forum.

Thanks for that post Raphael!

My first comment is to think about how someone outside our Epicurean analysis community might react to reading that.

I can imagine an outsider saying: "You mean to tell me he needs to write an essay to explain that the pleasure of artwork is different from the pleasure of eating, and that the pleasures of a great physicist have more impact on wider human affairs than a lion eating lamb? What's up with those guys that they have to write walls of text to say what everyone already understands?"

That's of course not to be critical of the post, but to say that there are issues going on behind the fact that we are having this discussion that need to be made front and center.

My outsider might say to me: "Is someone arguing that here is no difference between creating art or exploring physics and eating a steak? is someone arguing that a lion eating a lamb has the same impact on world affairs as a discovery in nuclear fusion? No one i know thinks that way, certainly Epicurus doesn't either, does he?"

And I would say to my outsider that therein hangs the tale. Epicurus doesn't say that the pleasures of eating and the pleasures of art and discovery are the same, or that one doesn't have more impact on world affairs or produce a greater impact on us individually.

And my outsider would say, "Then what is the problem?"

In another post we've got the full version of this article, but this brief section is an excellent summary of the position that the kinetic / katatastematic distinction was heavily influenced by the skeptic Carneades:

Quote

— From the comments on Cicero's treatise, you came up with an article about different types of pleasure in Epicurus. How adequately did the Roman orator translate his thoughts?

— In the treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" Cicero's dependence on academic doxography is obvious. One of the main sources for him, following which he expounded the teachings of the Hellenistic schools, was Antiochus of Ascalon, a philosopher of the Platonic school. In the era preceding Antiochus, the Platonists were skeptics, they denied the possibility of an exact and unambiguous establishment of truth, primarily engaged in discussions with other schools and the refutation of their philosophical systems. An important figure in this skeptical period was Carneades. In order to analyze and criticize the ethical teachings of different philosophical schools, he came up with a way to classify them. His classification was based on the principle of thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Carneades contrasted the teachings of two schools on a particular subject, for example, on the highest good, as a thesis and antithesis. He said, for example, that the Stoics see it only in the soul, and the Epicureans - only in the body.

Applying the dichotomy of soul and body to these schools distorts our understanding of them.

Of course, both the Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of the soul, but since they were materialists and monists, the very idea of the soul played a completely different role for them than for the Platonists. Carneades wrote that man is a combination of soul and body, and therefore the highest good must be sought in the combination of the good of the soul and the good of the body. This synthesis of thesis and antithesis was presented by the followers of Carneades as a plausible, most probable judgment, while still refraining from asserting the truth.

Antiochus of Ascalon, in a sense, makes a revolution within the academic school, becoming a dogmatist, that is, rejecting a skeptical attitude towards the knowledge of truth. But as dogma he affirms all the same judgments that his predecessors expressed as plausible and used in criticizing their opponents. That is, for Carneades, the judgment that the highest good should be seen in the good of the soul and body together is needed only to refute the insufficient teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans, and Antiochus turns this judgment into a dogma. He traces this dogma back to the "ancients", to Plato, his very first academic students, to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, believing that he is restoring their true teaching.

In my article "Pleasure in Epicurus" I suggested that Epicurus's opposition between dynamic and static pleasures, which we find neither in Lucretius nor in Plutarch, has nothing to do with Epicurean teaching. This opposition is quite absurd. It is assumed that for Epicurus the highest form of pleasure was simply the absence of pain - static pleasure. The other type of pleasure, which consisted of movement, or kinetic, he supposedly considered inferior.

At the same time, Cicero does not give a clear definition of kinetic pleasure: in some passages, movement refers to a change in the state of the organism (for example, when we eat or drink), in others - when something affects our organs of perception (say, listening to music). These two types of movement are difficult to connect with each other.

Epicurus did indeed write that the absence of suffering is pleasure, and even the highest pleasure, but he by no means rejected what Cicero called kinetic pleasures.

On the contrary, in some places he even extols them: in his suicide letter he says that when he had terrible pains associated with urolithiasis, memories of meetings and conversations with friends helped him overcome these pains. If we use Cicero's dichotomy, then such pleasure can be called kinetic, and it turns out to be stronger than the absence of "static pleasure".

These inconsistencies led me to turn to other authors who expound the Epicurean doctrine. As a result, I became convinced that the dichotomy of kinetic and static pleasure is found only in Cicero and in two other texts influenced by the same doxographic tradition: Diogenes Laërtius and Athenaeus.

What did Epicurus really mean when he called the absence of suffering the highest pleasure? He did not separate this state from the process of replenishing a deficiency in the body - he did not separate satiety from food. Epicurus simply wanted to say that the extent of our pleasure from food is determined by our satiety, and not by what exactly we eat. We will receive equal pleasure from ordinary bread and from luxurious dishes.

The limit of pleasure is satiety - this was the teaching of Epicurus. He disputed Plato's thesis, according to which we receive pleasure only in the process of, for example, eating, and therefore, if pleasure is a good, then a person striving for pleasure must constantly provoke hunger in himself.

Epicurus saw that satiety is also a part of pleasure, and that pleasure is not limited to the process of replenishment.

However, academic doxography aimed to contrast the Epicureans with another hedonistic school, the Cyrenaics. And the academics applied here the very same classification principle I mentioned: thesis - antithesis. They attributed to the Cyrenaics, who strove for momentary pleasures, a devotion to kinetic pleasure, and called Epicurus an admirer of static pleasure. In the very opposition of movement and rest, of course, a Platonic dichotomy is revealed, which is not at all characteristic of either the Epicureans or the Cyrenaics. In fact, everything was much simpler. Epicurus did not preach insensitivity, not static pleasure in rest. The main thing he wanted to say is that we can experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest joy from the smallest things, therefore pleasure is available to everyone.

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Oh wow that article has some very pithy analysis of his views on Epicurus I did not see at first. I'll create a separate post on that. It's very interesting to see a recent reflection by him on that thesis. He's had years to think about it and how to express it concisely.

Thank you again NKULINKA!

This is copy of the English translated version of the original which is in the Russian language magazine "Knife" of an interview with Boris Nikolsky, author the article "Epicurus On Pleasure." Thanks to @nkulinka for reporting this to us!

“We have remained the same people as the ancient Greeks”: interview with classical philologist Boris Nikolsky on the modernity of ancient tragedy and philosophy

Boris Nikolsky is a Doctor of Philology and a classical philologist. Boris Mikhailovich's main research interest is ancient Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, whom he has been studying for many years. In addition, his interests include philosophical topics, including Stoic logic and grammar, the problem of pleasure in Epicurus, and, more recently, the critical edition of medieval Armenian translations of Greek philosophers. Timofey Anufriev spoke with Boris Nikolsky about how his scientific career developed, why ancient Greek tragedy is close to modern people, and what are the prospects for classical philology in Russia.

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— How did you end up at the Philological Faculty? What influenced your choice?

— I got into the philological faculty primarily because my parents were philologists. At first, they did not want me to follow in their footsteps, and I myself did not intend to become a philologist. At school, I was more interested in mathematics, and my mindset can hardly be called humanitarian. However, in the ninth grade, I devoted so much time to mathematical studies that I eventually simply got tired of them, and I was drawn in the opposite direction — to philology, which my parents studied. At that time, I read a lot, and this choice seemed natural to me.

At first I enrolled in the Russian Philology department, but I lacked the feeling that I was learning a craft. Much of what we did there I could have done myself: just read books and think about them. There were only two subjects I really liked: Latin and Church Slavonic. So I decided to transfer to the Classics department, where they study dead languages.

I had no special interest in Antiquity itself at that time - at that time I knew almost nothing about ancient culture. I simply liked to study rare and complex, dead languages.

I really enjoyed Ancient Greek. Learning it is an intellectual challenge.

The morphology of the ancient Greek language, which is covered in the first year, at first seems chaotic and confusing, but then the structure of the language begins to emerge through this chaos, you understand that behind this chaos there is a clear structure, but in its historical development. At first, I approached ancient Greek from a linguistic or even mathematical point of view, until some of my teachers showed me the real charm of this language: we began to read authors in whom you could feel the intonation, rhythm, see witty linguistic devices.

But for quite a long time I was more interested in historical linguistics, which was the subject of my first term papers, rather than classical literature. In the end, however, the desire to read texts in Greek overcame everything else. So I began to study classical philology.

— Whom of your teachers can you remember, those you would like to tell us about?

— I studied linguistics under the guidance of the outstanding linguist Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin. He amazed me with the clarity of his thought, which was able to embrace the most complex and diverse material and find a clear structure in it. Then I moved from linguistics to classical philology, because I wanted to work with texts, not with lists of words.

My real acquaintance with the Greek language happened thanks to two teachers, who later became my closest friends - Olga Leonidovna Levinskaya (now Akhunova) and Nikolai Pavlovich Grintser. The first author whose texts we read together was Plato. It can be said that my love for the ancient Greek language arose precisely thanks to reading Plato. Although I am not a fan of his philosophy, reading him in Greek still gives me great pleasure. At the same time, my linguistic interests were quite strong, so at first I studied texts of grammatical content. My diploma was devoted to Greek grammarians, namely the linguistic thought of the Stoics - philosophers who largely created grammatical terminology.

Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to study with Nikolai Alekseevich Fedorov, who taught Latin brilliantly at the Department of Classical Philology at Moscow State University. But later we worked together on Cicero's text.

In addition to my teachers, I was greatly influenced by my senior colleague and friend Grigory Dashevsky. I met him later, when I was already working at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He taught me to read carefully, to see the author's thought in the smallest details of a work. And he showed me that ancient literature is not some special, completely separate elevated world, no, it tells us about ourselves and about our own lives.

— Do you consider yourself to belong to one of the traditions in classical philology, for example, to the Moscow tradition?

— In a sense, I am a member of the school of Yu. A. Shichalin, because he was Olga Levinskaya’s teacher. Perhaps, ultimately, my teachers’ interest in the subtleties of the meaning of words and particles goes back to him. From them, I also inherited an interest in the logical sequence of narration and text construction. This logic often escapes the attention of students — they spend all their energy on understanding the syntactic connections in a sentence, but do not try to discover what stands above the sentence and between the sentences.

— What interested you in Greek tragedy?

— At first, my perception of Greek tragedy was purely aesthetic. I have always liked dramatic dynamics, tension and relaxation in literature, as well as the architectonics of the whole, when the entire work is built around one main, central point. I began to read Greek tragedy in the original when I became a teacher. The first two works that impressed me most were Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hippolytus. Both of these texts have remarkable dynamics. In Agamemnon, the first part is static and long, permeated with tension from the expectation of disaster, suspense, and then it abruptly changes to an “explosion”, the murder of the king. Euripides’ Hippolytus also has its own dynamics — the rapid spread of news of Phaedra’s illness, similar to the spread of news of Chatsky’s madness in Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit.

At the same time, I felt that these two texts had a thematic integrity - significant words and images were repeated. But I did not immediately grasp the "point" to which these works were reduced; it remained a mystery to me, and I was fascinated by the attempt to resolve it.

At such moments you feel like a spectator of an ancient Greek theatre, watching a production and trying to make ends meet during the performance.

It was a little easier to “reconcile” them with Agamemnon, since many excellent works have been written about it, but comparatively few good works have been written about Euripides’ Hippolytus. So I began to study this text and Euripides in general, and did so for many years. I wanted to understand what the thematic center of this tragedy was. In the end, I think I managed to find it. I set out my understanding of this tragedy in the book Misery and Forgiveness in Euripides.

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— What can a modern person learn from Greek tragedy?

— First of all, almost every tragedy has universal human meanings. After all, we are the same people as the ancient Greeks were, and our culture comes from theirs. We can see this in the example of "Hippolytus". This tragedy contains a sequence of scenes, very similar to each other, in which a character makes a mistake and is blamed for it. But at the same time, in each scene, Euripides emphasizes the motives that push the characters to make mistakes, and these motives - ignorance, emotions and passions - were supposed to make the audience show indulgence towards the characters. In the last scene, which crowns the development of the theme of condemnation or indulgence, Hippolytus forgives his murderer, his own father. The main moral meaning of this tragedy is that people are very weak and easily make mistakes, and we must always take this into account and treat each other with tolerance. Already in the 5th century BC, such a meaning, very modern and close to us, was extremely relevant.

On the other hand, there is an aspect of tragedy that I discovered much later: when they were staged, they were politically topical. I came to this hypothesis against my will, because as a philologist, not a historian, I was inclined to read the text based only on itself. I wanted to see a work of literature as self-sufficient and autonomous. In the case of Hippolytus, I managed to see in the tragedy a timeless and universal meaning.

But when I began to study other tragedies in detail, it became clear that some works, although they have obvious structural integrity, their meaning does not become clear if you try to extract it from them alone.

In Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, the main theme is the transition from barbarism to civilization, and this is expressed in the cessation of family feuds and murders in the Atreid clan. The elimination of feuds and the transition from barbarism to civilization is accomplished through the help and intervention of Athena and Apollo. What universal meaning can lie behind this?

I then decided to look at the events that took place when the tragedy was staged, and discovered that it coincided with the end of the civil war in Argos, thanks to the help of Athens. After that, an alliance treaty was concluded between the cities. The assumption that the tragedy was timed to coincide with these events helps clarify the structure, which otherwise remains unclear. Thus, I came to the conclusion that the mythological plots of some tragedies served as political allegories and referred to specific historical events. Tragedies were not staged to be eternal.

Ultimately, we are faced with two ways of reading tragedy today. Either we can try to extract from tragedy a universal human meaning, which always exists in one form or another, but is not always the focus of the author's intention. Or we can relate tragedies to certain events that are happening now. The possibility of allegorical reading and applying the plot of a tragedy to what is happening around us exists, and a modern director could take advantage of this.

— There is a famous legend about the Greek tragedians: Aeschylus fought in the Battle of Marathon, Sophocles participated in it as a young standard-bearer, and Euripides was born in the year of this battle. What was the relationship between the "fathers of tragedy", how did their worldviews differ?

— I would combine Aeschylus and Euripides, despite all their differences. Yes, their styles are very different. Aeschylus thinks through every detail, every word. Euripides has many purely rhetorical passages and reasoning, he often changes register, moving from serious to comic. Nevertheless, both strive for semantic, thematic integrity of their works. Both construct their tragedy so that its parts are organic parts of the artistic whole.

Sophocles, in contrast, strives less for semantic integrity. Rather, he starts from some initial idea that enables the creation of dramatic emotions. In Oedipus Rex, such an idea was “ignorance,” and the entire work was built on the emotional development of this idea. His tragedies hold the viewer not with semantic content, but with emotional tension. This is why Sophocles is so beloved today, and loses less in translation.

— According to Aristotle, “Sophocles said that he represented people as they should be, and Euripides as they really are.” What innovation did Euripides bring to the genre of tragedy, in your opinion?

— Euripides was more concerned with depicting the world he lived in. But his difference from Aeschylus and Sophocles concerns not so much the subject matter of the tragedies as their aesthetics and style. This is evident in the behavior of his characters, their speeches and arguments. Even in metrics, he used an extremely free iambic to more accurately reproduce prose living speech.

The rhetoric in his tragedies is very close to the rhetoric of the sophists of his time.

He often builds even the structure of his tragedies on sophistic models, for example, "Helen". In the first half of the play we see deception, which becomes the cause of endless troubles, but in the middle of the play, deception suddenly becomes good and saving. This is undoubtedly a sophistic topos, presenting the same concept from two opposite sides: first, it is an obvious view (deception is bad and unjust), then a paradoxical one (deception is good and just). This is how the sophists, who were contemporaries of Euripides, built their reasoning. So in addition to classical models like Homer, Euripides drew no less inspiration from the living material of his time.

— Euripides is often accused of atheism, pointing to the unsightly images of the gods in his tragedies. Did he really try to dispel the aura of holiness around the Olympians?

— The immorality of the gods can, of course, be used as an atheistic argument. Sometimes the characters in Euripides' tragedies utter phrases like: "If the gods exist, then why do they allow this?" But these phrases come from the mouths of characters who do not understand the real will of the gods.

I am not sure that we can read Euripides' worldview from his texts. They were intended for a wide audience, and the attitude towards the world expressed in them should not have caused doubts among the audience. It is unlikely that Euripides would stage tragedies with atheistic content. Moreover, if we look at some plays, we will see that in them Euripides shows both divine power and the gods' favor towards people. Take, for example, the tragedy "Ion", at the beginning of which we doubt the morality of Apollo, who committed violence against Creusa and, as it seems to everyone, abandoned the child she gave birth to, but then Apollo is acquitted. In "Iphigenia in Tauris" Orestes constantly doubts whether Apollo's will was fair, who first forced him to kill his mother and then sent him to a distant inhospitable country, but then it turns out that everything happened as it should have been. I don't think an atheist playwright would create such tragedies.

On the other hand, at times Euripides does subject the gods to moral criticism.

In Hippolytus, the main culprit of all that has happened is Aphrodite. True, the goddess's guilt does not become an argument against her existence. On the contrary, Euripides points out to the viewer that she is incredibly strong and impossible to resist. The combination of strength and cruelty that we find in her image is the opposite of the combination of weakness and at the same time humanity that is characteristic of man. Something similar can be seen in Sophocles. For example, the goddess Athena in the prologue of Ajax is just as powerful, but in the same way her cruelty is contrasted with the humanity of Odysseus.

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— In his tragedies, Euripides reproduces religious cults, rituals and legends in detail. Where did he get such great knowledge of this? Could he have deliberately traveled around the country and studied this material or is there nothing unique in this for an educated person of his century?

- Yes, Euripides often connects the events of his tragedies with contemporary cults. But the cults he mentions are usually Attic. They were understandable to the Athenian public.

What seems to me much more interesting is the unexpected knowledge of the localities of the various regions. Barrett pointed this out in his commentary on Hippolytus. This tragedy describes with astonishing precision the details of the locality in which the events of the play unfold, the city of Troezen. Since I have had the opportunity to study this text for many years, I have visited the places described in the tragedy and have seen with my own eyes the veracity of Euripides' description. But Troezen was located not far from Athens, in northern Argolis, and was connected to Athens by special ties. As for distant lands, Euripides did not strive at all to depict them accurately.

— The playwright's closeness to the circle of philosophers suggests his sympathies for democratic circles. Here we can also recall the criticism of tyranny in the person of the Cyclops in the play of the same name. How did Euripides imagine democracy?

— First of all, it is worth understanding what democracy meant to the Athenians. It was established after the overthrow of the dynasty of the Peisistratids and throughout its history it was opposed to tyranny. Tyranny returned several times, for example during the reign of the "regime of the four hundred" or the "tyranny of the thirty", but such episodes did not last long. It is possible that the cult of Dionysus and the festival of the Great Dionysia, where tragedies were staged, were connected with the idea of democracy. Almost all performances in the theater of Dionysus were supposed to concern democratic freedom and its opposition to tyranny.

Euripides' play "Cyclops" is unique in its genre. It is the only fully preserved satyr drama - almost no similar works have reached us. The satyr drama ended the tetralogy presented by each playwright, it was preceded by three tragedies. Since we know this genre very poorly, it is difficult to say which elements in "Cyclops" are inherent to the genre as a whole.

At least this much can be said about the Cyclops. This play links the dramatic performance with the Dionysian festival - there is a happy ending, the play ends with the victory over the monster thanks to the help of Dionysus and wine. This victory marks the liberation from slavery to the terrible tyrant. The victory over the monster thanks to Dionysus could reflect the democratic idea of the entire Dionysian festival. It is not at all necessary to see in the Cyclops a reflection of some specific political events. This play could reflect the general democratic spirit of the Athenian theater.

As for Euripides' political views, it would be more correct to speak not of any specific views, but rather of his political commitment.

If some of his tragedies are indeed connected with political events, then this means that he participated in the political life of the polis. Moreover, such engagement does not at all imply a specific ideology. The poet could belong to some political circle and express its views and interests, as, for example, in the case of Aeschylus's Oresteia, the production of which was sponsored by Pericles and which obviously reflected the interests of his party. I would associate some of Euripides' tragedies with the political interests of Alcibiades, namely, The Trojan Women and the already mentioned Iphigenia in Tauris. Apparently, Euripides wrote a victory song, the Epinicium, in honor of Alcibiades' victory at the Olympic Games around the same time, so we can assume that he was personally connected with the famous politician.

So, on the one hand, there is a general democratic idea on which the entire political life of Athens in general and the local theater in particular are based, and on the other hand, there are specific political interests. Both have found their place in the plays of Euripides.

— Euripides is remembered as the last great playwright of Greece. Why did this tradition cease and after his death we no longer encounter authors equal to the Athenian tragedians?

— Unfortunately, we know very little about the tragedies of the fourth century. The reason for this is the peculiarities of the selection of texts, a selection that took place over centuries, but began precisely in this fourth century, when the canon of the great classical tragedians appeared. This canon included Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they began to be staged anew, new tragic poets had to emulate them and compete with them. Their fame did not allow later poets to break through the centuries, and only one or, perhaps, two tragedies of the fourth century have survived to this day. They have survived only because they were attributed to classical poets. This is "Res", attributed to Euripides and enjoyed great popularity in Antiquity. And, perhaps, this is "Prometheus Bound", attributed to Aeschylus, although disputes continue about its attribution. Prometheus is a remarkable tragedy, and if it was really written in the 4th century, it means that the level of tragic poetry at that time was still very high.

— You also wrote commentaries on Cicero’s treatise “On the Limits of Good and Evil.” How did you come to this topic and what did you discover for yourself in the philosophical work of the Roman orator?

— I came to Cicero almost by accident. As I said above, my diploma was devoted to Stoic logic and grammar, and I continued to study this topic further, in graduate school. Just then, N.A. Fedorov was going to publish his translation of Cicero's treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" and invited me to comment on this text. As a result, I discovered two philosophical schools, the Stoics and the Epicureans, and I still treat them with great love.

Almost nothing has come down to us from the Stoics themselves, but Cicero expounds the Stoic teaching in his works, proving to be one of the main and earliest sources for the reconstruction of Stoic philosophy. In the dialogue "On the Limits of Good and Evil" he expounds the ideas of other Hellenistic schools.

How accurately and reliably Cicero conveys the teachings of Hellenistic philosophers is a complex, not even historical-philosophical, but philological problem. Philological study of Cicero's treatises made it possible to find out how and for what reasons Cicero distorts the ideas of the Greek schools, to determine what was the "prism" through which he looked at them, and, having removed this "prism", to some extent to see their true meaning.

— From the comments on Cicero's treatise, you came up with an article about different types of pleasure in Epicurus. How adequately did the Roman orator translate his thoughts?

— In the treatise "On the Limits of Good and Evil" Cicero's dependence on academic doxography is obvious. One of the main sources for him, following which he expounded the teachings of the Hellenistic schools, was Antiochus of Ascalon, a philosopher of the Platonic school. In the era preceding Antiochus, the Platonists were skeptics, they denied the possibility of an exact and unambiguous establishment of truth, primarily engaged in discussions with other schools and the refutation of their philosophical systems. An important figure in this skeptical period was Carneades. In order to analyze and criticize the ethical teachings of different philosophical schools, he came up with a way to classify them. His classification was based on the principle of thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Carneades contrasted the teachings of two schools on a particular subject, for example, on the highest good, as a thesis and antithesis. He said, for example, that the Stoics see it only in the soul, and the Epicureans - only in the body.

Applying the dichotomy of soul and body to these schools distorts our understanding of them.

Of course, both the Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of the soul, but since they were materialists and monists, the very idea of the soul played a completely different role for them than for the Platonists. Carneades wrote that man is a combination of soul and body, and therefore the highest good must be sought in the combination of the good of the soul and the good of the body. This synthesis of thesis and antithesis was presented by the followers of Carneades as a plausible, most probable judgment, while still refraining from asserting the truth.

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Antiochus of Ascalon, in a sense, makes a revolution within the academic school, becoming a dogmatist, that is, rejecting a skeptical attitude towards the knowledge of truth. But as dogma he affirms all the same judgments that his predecessors expressed as plausible and used in criticizing their opponents. That is, for Carneades, the judgment that the highest good should be seen in the good of the soul and body together is needed only to refute the insufficient teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans, and Antiochus turns this judgment into a dogma. He traces this dogma back to the "ancients", to Plato, his very first academic students, to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, believing that he is restoring their true teaching.

In my article "Pleasure in Epicurus" I suggested that Epicurus's opposition between dynamic and static pleasures, which we find neither in Lucretius nor in Plutarch, has nothing to do with Epicurean teaching. This opposition is quite absurd. It is assumed that for Epicurus the highest form of pleasure was simply the absence of pain - static pleasure. The other type of pleasure, which consisted of movement, or kinetic, he supposedly considered inferior.

At the same time, Cicero does not give a clear definition of kinetic pleasure: in some passages, movement refers to a change in the state of the organism (for example, when we eat or drink), in others - when something affects our organs of perception (say, listening to music). These two types of movement are difficult to connect with each other.

Epicurus did indeed write that the absence of suffering is pleasure, and even the highest pleasure, but he by no means rejected what Cicero called kinetic pleasures.

On the contrary, in some places he even extols them: in his suicide letter he says that when he had terrible pains associated with urolithiasis, memories of meetings and conversations with friends helped him overcome these pains. If we use Cicero's dichotomy, then such pleasure can be called kinetic, and it turns out to be stronger than the absence of "static pleasure".

These inconsistencies led me to turn to other authors who expound the Epicurean doctrine. As a result, I became convinced that the dichotomy of kinetic and static pleasure is found only in Cicero and in two other texts influenced by the same doxographic tradition: Diogenes Laërtius and Athenaeus.

What did Epicurus really mean when he called the absence of suffering the highest pleasure? He did not separate this state from the process of replenishing a deficiency in the body - he did not separate satiety from food. Epicurus simply wanted to say that the extent of our pleasure from food is determined by our satiety, and not by what exactly we eat. We will receive equal pleasure from ordinary bread and from luxurious dishes.

The limit of pleasure is satiety - this was the teaching of Epicurus. He disputed Plato's thesis, according to which we receive pleasure only in the process of, for example, eating, and therefore, if pleasure is a good, then a person striving for pleasure must constantly provoke hunger in himself.

Epicurus saw that satiety is also a part of pleasure, and that pleasure is not limited to the process of replenishment.

However, academic doxography aimed to contrast the Epicureans with another hedonistic school, the Cyrenaics. And the academics applied here the very same classification principle I mentioned: thesis - antithesis. They attributed to the Cyrenaics, who strove for momentary pleasures, a devotion to kinetic pleasure, and called Epicurus an admirer of static pleasure. In the very opposition of movement and rest, of course, a Platonic dichotomy is revealed, which is not at all characteristic of either the Epicureans or the Cyrenaics. In fact, everything was much simpler. Epicurus did not preach insensitivity, not static pleasure in rest. The main thing he wanted to say is that we can experience the greatest pleasure and the greatest joy from the smallest things, therefore pleasure is available to everyone.

— Ancient philosophy as a way of life is becoming increasingly popular today. In your opinion, what is this connected with and what prospects do you see in it?

— I think this popularity is connected with the specificity of Hellenistic philosophical schools. They allow one to get rid of fears, negative emotions and experiences. Later, this role was taken over by religion, and in our time — by psychology and psychoanalysis. Of the psychologists who turn to ancient philosophical ideas, I am close to Viktor Frankl, who reminds me of the Stoics with his reasoning. He opposed himself to Freud, often on exactly the same grounds on which the Stoics can be opposed to the Epicureans.

As for turning to ancient philosophy today, I can tell you a funny story. A few years ago, someone from the international Epicurean community wrote to me, thanking me for my article on pleasure in Epicurus. They told me that my conclusions were just what they needed, because the members of this community wanted to enjoy, and all the historians of philosophy constantly explained to them that Epicurus was not for pleasure, but for the absence of all feelings. After my article, modern Epicureans realized that they can still enjoy with a calm soul, while following the precepts of Epicurus.

— How do you see the future of classical philology in Russia?

— It is hard to watch what is happening now. My professional life coincided with the heyday of classical philology in Moscow and in Russia in general, and now I see how its decline is beginning, everything is collapsing. Classical philology is a science that cannot exist in a single, closed country. It is an international science. In the Soviet years, the pre-revolutionary tradition was partially preserved in St. Petersburg, while in Moscow classical philology in the proper sense of the word practically did not exist, precisely because of the lack of any contacts with the world. It was impossible to get the necessary books, not to mention personal communication with scientists, participation in conferences and everything else.

Our science could not exist without live communication with colleagues.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the country gradually began to open up to the world, contacts with Western scholars appeared, the Internet emerged, making articles and books available, and in this atmosphere a new generation of classical philologists grew up. Now I work in France and I can say that the Moscow school of classical philology is not inferior to the French one. For now, it continues to exist, but we do not know how long this political nightmare will last, and there is less and less hope that Russian classical philology will maintain its high level.

— For a long time you headed the department of ancient literature at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but recently you left. What are you doing now and what are your plans for the future?

— My last project at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences was commentary on Aristophanes. If in the case of tragedy the unit in which the author's thought is reflected is the tragedy as a whole, then comedy is constructed in a completely different way. Its integrity is rather external, the author's attention is directed to each specific joke. Comedy has, of course, a single plot, but this does not exclude the significance of each individual joke. This can be compared to a circus performance in which there is a general plot, but at the same time each individual act is important in itself. Aristophanes' comedies are a collection of such acts. Commentary addressed to each joke therefore turns out to be an ideal way of interpreting comedy.

When I left Russia, the first country I visited was Armenia, where I spent six months. I was hired by the Matenadaran, an institute that preserves and studies ancient Armenian manuscripts, and I had to choose a topic in which I could, on the one hand, use my knowledge as a classical philologist, and on the other, study Armenian monuments. Together with my Armenian colleagues, we began publishing medieval Armenian translations of Greek philosophers made in the 5th–8th centuries. There are quite a few of these translations, and they are contained in many manuscripts, many of which have never been critically published. Our work involves comparing different manuscripts, preparing a critical edition of the Armenian text, and comparing the Armenian text with the Greek original. Quite often, knowledge of the Armenian translation allows us to correct the Greek text. In addition, we also deal with such issues as the principles of translating words and grammatical constructions.

I find this work very interesting. Imagine, I have always worked with an author who has been interpreted and republished many times, and now I am working with completely new and unstudied material. In addition, I like working on many specific individual problems. Each phrase is a task that needs to be solved.

— Have you already learned Armenian?

— I don’t speak modern Armenian, but I have learned to read Grabar, the classical Armenian language, which is different from modern Armenian. In its grammatical structure, it is similar to Greek, but a little simpler. But it is lexically complex, since the words in it are not similar to the vocabulary of European languages and do not evoke any associations. I learn Armenian from ancient translations of Philo of Alexandria. He is a Jewish author who wrote in Greek, and I read him with a parallel text in ancient Armenian.

Ha! It certainly sounds likely that Elli and I were the people referenced "from the international Epicurean community! Thank you very much for finding the article!

Quote

As for turning to ancient philosophy today, I can tell you a funny story. A few years ago, someone from the international Epicurean community wrote to me, thanking me for my article on pleasure in Epicurus. They told me that my conclusions were just what they needed, because the members of this community wanted to enjoy, and all the historians of philosophy constantly explained to them that Epicurus was not for pleasure, but for the absence of all feelings. After my article, modern Epicureans realized that they can still enjoy with a calm soul, while following the precepts of Epicurus.

May I ask one question? Why, at the beginning, is there a shift in name:

Boris Nikolsky is a Doctor of Philology and a classical philologist. Boris Mikhailovich's main research interest is ancient Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, whom he has been studying for many years.

Is that an artifact of the translation software? I ask because it does seem to me in the past that I have observed (maybe in different variations of the way Vladimir Putin is sometimes referenced) that there are naming conventions in Russian that seem very unusual to me.

Oh one more question: You don't see a photo of him anywhere do you? If so I'll add that to our material.

Thank you for restating that Raphael - that avoids a lot of ambiguity.

Nkulinka it's more trivia than anything else, but one of my favorite articles on Epicurus is by a Russian, Boris Nikolsky. Probably ten years ago now Elli and I spoke to him briefly by skype, but I don't know since then if he still lives in Russia or not.

File

Nikolsky - Epicurus On Pleasure

One of the most important articles on this site: Boris Nikolsky details one theory about the history of the "Kinetic / Katestematic" distinction.

Cassius

January 13, 2018 at 6:54 PM

Welcome to the forum NKULINKA -- very happy to have you. Take your time and let us know any way we can help. Don't hesitate to ask any question you like. There are none too basic, and it is good for us to know what people are interested in and in what areas we ought to provide more information.

Welcome to Episode 298 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we return to our series covering Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" from an Epicurean viewpoint.

After two weeks looking at Plutarch, today we are back in Part 3 of Cicero's book, addressing much the same issues within the framework of anger, pity, envy, and other strong emotions. This week we will be following up on last week's discussion about absence of pain as we move forward into Section XX, where Cicero continues to spell out dramatically the difference between the Epicurean goal of life and that of the other "more reputable" schools.

[media]https://www.spreaker.com/episode/67739526/media

I agree this could be a fruitful line to explore. It seems to be a key attribute of canonical faculties that they operate "mechanically" and without opinions of their own, and often here people have commented that there may be an aspect of "pattern matching" going on with prolepsis. (I started to say pattern "recognition" but that might not be the best word in this context.)

Thank you for the direct link Kochie!

Good idea Patrikios we can kick that around. The big barrier to it is that the Athens seminar is conducted in Greek and for Greeks, and I don't think they're entirely ok with the idea of listening in English, just as we aren't able (interested or not) to listen in Greek. That's been the major barrier in the past, other than in the single year that Christos (who is bilingual) coordinated a zoom. I suspect that if Christos had thought that that effort was worth the trouble it cost he probably would have done another one since then, but at some point we can look at that again because I know some of us would like to hear from him more than we do.

Episode 297 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. Today Joshua returns, and our episode is entitled: "Is Philosophy At War With Perfume?"

[media]https://www.spreaker.com/episode/67637588/media

Godfrey I am aware that your post is largely in agreement with prior posts, so that's good and I should not stir the pot

However on this part I am curious, because I would think that it would probably be a generality that a physicist would likely consider discovery as generically more pleasurable than many other pleasures, or else one would not choose to be a physicist as an occupation?

Quote from Godfrey

Even so, often a creative discovery is the result of "scratching an itch," or problem solving to remove a pain. Additionally, the creative process itself is often pleasurable yet often tortuous. All to say that the predominance of pleasure over pain might be quantifiable in retrospect for a very specific instance, but that it's ridiculous to try to make a generic statement ranking the pleasure of making a discovery as higher or lower than any other specific pleasure.

Another general comment about why I think topics like this are so helpful.

To me, when you drill down and realize that for an individual some pleasures are much "greater" than others in terms of intensity, duration, and parts of the body affected, you see clearly that some specific pleasures are much more desirable to you than others. All pleasure is pleasure because it is desirable, but all pleasures are not the same in every respect to all people at all times, or even to the same person at different times, and therefore as to specific characteristics, some pleasurable experiences can be more pleasurable (more intense, longer lasting, or affecting more parts of the body) than others.

This observations exposes as absolute B.S. the ascetic interpretation: that we should simply work to remove all specific pains, and therefore abrakadabra we are at the height of our individual experience of pleasure.

In my humble opinion no human being of moderate intelligence, and certainly not Epicurus, would make such an assertion. Epicurus' assertion was the philosophic one that when you have 100% pleasure you cannot go to 101%, and that consitutes the limit of pleasure. Epicurus never said to discard your common sense and experience and think that for you, a life of filing your fingernails is the equivalent of a life of a physicist going from discovery to discovery.

In order to experience the height of pleasure possible TO YOU, you must act to make sure that your pleasures are those that you in fact feel to be the best possible combination of pleasures to you. Obsessing over identification and removal of every pain does nothing to optimize your best mix of activities and therefore pleasures.

And that's why I will always maintain that what people are doing by discussing "Absence of pain" without explaining this context is playing into the hands of Cicero and Plutarch and all the other enemies of Epicurus.

We've discussed issues like this in the past such as whether we can construct a Calculus of Pleasure spreadsheet to help us plan our choices in life.

I recall my conclusion to have been that such an exercise is of definite value to ME, or would be for any other individual, but that it would be absolutely invalid to transfer or apply the results of my calculation to another person, because each person answers these problems differently.

So while the lion and the physicist both have their own scales and reports of pleasure experiences, by which they definitely do rank their choices and pleasures, I would say it is simply invalid to compare the pleasure of the lion to that of a physicist, or between ANY two individuals no matter how you dramatize their "value to the world," because there is no agreed objective standard by which to compare.

Past spreadsheet posts are below. I don't use anything like this on a regular basis, and I don't think it's practical to try to do so. However if I were faced with a big decision or evaluation at a particular point in time I do think something like this would be useful. And I am sure that others could design a better implementation as a spreadsheet or using other paradigms. The activities listed on the draft are far too general but were put there just as fillers. Despite the difficulties, I've always thought that it was too extreme to assert that calculations such as this are impossible or totally useless for an individual. Seems to me that the raw format is pretty much exactly how our minds work in evaluating choices, to the extent that we do use our minds to make decisions in a particular case.

Post

RE: A Draft Epicurean Pleasure Maximization Worksheet

I have attached to the original post in this thread an xls / Libreoffice Calc version of the spreadsheet which should be usable in any spreadsheet software. I prepared it in the free Libreoffice format so that it would be accessible to the most people. I will see about uploading this back to Google docs as well.

This should be the same document, in Google Sheets - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…dit?usp=sharing

Cassius

July 13, 2019 at 2:13 PM

Post

RE: The Normal Curve of Pleasure

Anybody coming across this thread and getting motivated to plot some bell curves might want to also consult the earlier thread in which a "spreadsheet" was discussed:

epicureanfriends.com/thread/?postID=3781#post3781 Even though pictoral and mathematical representations are limited, and cannot possibly capture the "feelings" that are involved in pleasure and pain, I continue to think that the process of working through them is useful, especially in that trying to formulate them emphasizes *how*…

Cassius

July 23, 2024 at 11:15 AM

This appears to be Steve's citation but I need a PDF or link to Gutenberg for more context:

"Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either."

This quote is found in Book III, Chapter I of The Rationale of Reward.

Quote from NewWorldEncyclopedia

Bentham's hedonism

Jeremy Bentham

Bentham believed any particular pleasure or pain had a determinate value, which could be measured and compared. He attempted to construct a scale of comparison and measurement of pain and pleasure. He called this scale the felicific calculus. He claimed that the value of a pleasure was to be determined by such factors as its duration and its intensity. Bentham’s hedonism may be labeled quantitative hedonism, since all pleasures and pains appear on the same scale, being measured according to the same set of criteria (such as duration and intensity).

This assumption—all pleasures and pains can, in principle, be subjected to the same such measurement—entails that all pleasures are ultimately of the same sort, and that no pleasure is by its very nature superior to any other. Bentham argues, "The utility of all these arts and sciences, …the value which they possess, is exactly in proportion to the pleasure they yield. Every other species of preeminence which may be attempted to be established among them is altogether fanciful. Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either."^[2] Bentham’s assumption that all pleasures and pains can, in principle, be subjected to such measurement entails that "push-pin may be better than as poetry." Pushpin was a simple child’s game played at the time, perhaps comparable to tiddlywinks. It all depends on the amount of pleasure one actually gains from the activity.

@Raphael can you comment on this, because this is not the way I understood your question:

Quote from kochiekoch

Old debate. Does push-pin give equal pleasure to poetry? It's similar to the debate here with the lion eating his/her prey and the scientist making the great discovery.

Jeremy Bentham supposedly said that push pin was the equal of poetry even though that's a misrepresentation from John Steward Mill, with Mill arguing the quality of the pleasure mattered. Poetry creating a superior pleasure to a children's table game in Mill's view.

Push-pin (game) - Wikipedia

My take on the debate on the thread here is that pleasure is pleasure and the two are of equal value in the moment, but the scientist with his great discovery has the greatest pleasure over time. He gets to enjoy the accolade's as his discovery is confirmed and also gets pleasure from contemplating his discovery. He can use it as well as a springboard for future discoveries and pleasures from that. All consistent with the Epicurean perspective of mental pleasures being superior because they can be enjoyed in the present, past and future.

Focusing on this sentence in particular:

My take on the debate on the thread here is that pleasure is pleasure and the two are of equal value in the moment, but the scientist with his great discovery has the greatest pleasure over time.

As for me, the pleasure I get from a great poem is not at all the same as the pleasure I get from push-pin. I can certainly differentiate the two and prefer one to the other, so I would not agree with the underlined section if the question is how "I" value them to me. The two are not of equal value to me no matter how long the experience.

I'd still like to find the Bentham citation directly to see what is being referenced.

My understanding of the dispute was that Bentham and/or others were considering whether pleasure could be reduced to units of some kind, in which context it would make senses to consider the greatest good for the greatest number by adding up all the pleasure units to see in which configuration the number is largest.

My further understanding of the situation is that this is impossible - or an invalid approach - because there is no objective standard by which we can compare pleasure units between individuals, which is exactly the issue with comparing pleasure between lions and humans. From the point of view of the lion the eating of the prey is an extreme pleasure, while from the point of view of the physicist the discovery is an extreme pleasure, but there is no "objective" way to measure the units of pleasure being created so as to say that one generated more "pleasure" than the other.

Are we are not trying to focus on the issues involved in comparing the pleasure of a lion to the pleasure of a physicist in order to dramatize the question of whether pleasure can be "objectively" measured? If not, then I don't even know what the discussion is about!

In this episode Joshua is back and he does not fail to deliver another memorable quotation to dramatize the issues. We're still (always!) on the topic of pleasure, and while Cicero gives us plenty of material from which to pick a title, for the present I have switched away from:

"Which Is More Helpful To Aid An Affliction: A Treatise of Socrates Or A Sturgeon?"

to

"Is Philosophy At War With Perfume?"