Posts by Cassius

Here's another list culled from asking for "all or nothing" propositions:

Quote

People often recognize certain situations as “all or nothing” because they intuitively understand that partial fulfillment defeats the thing itself. The categories differ, but the underlying structure is: either the condition is met, or it is not.

Examples:

• Being alive — One is alive or dead. People do not ordinarily think of “partly alive” as a meaningful condition.
• Pregnancy — In everyday usage, someone is either pregnant or not pregnant. People often use this as a classic example of a binary condition.
• Crossing a finish line — Either you crossed it or you did not. Finishing “90% of a marathon” is still not completing it.
• Passing a legal age threshold — You are either 18, 21, etc., or you are not. A person one day short does not usually receive partial recognition.
• Marriage status — In law, one is generally married or unmarried. Emotional commitment can vary, but legal status is treated as binary.
• A light switch being on or off — At the practical level, people think in terms of “the light is on” or “the light is off,” even if electrical realities are more nuanced.
• Winning a game with a specific condition — In games like checkmate in chess, once the condition is met, the result is decisive.
• A door being locked — If a lock fails to engage, it is not considered “mostly locked.” Security often works in all-or-nothing terms.
• Virginity or first occurrence events — Many people think of “first time” events as categorical. Either it happened or it did not.
• A password being correct — One wrong character and access fails. Computer systems often operate on binary thresholds.
• Passing through airport security with a boarding pass — Either you are authorized and admitted, or you are not.
• Signing a contract — Until signed, the agreement is often treated as incomplete; after signing, it becomes operative.
• Trust after a perceived betrayal — In personal life people sometimes treat trust as all-or-nothing (“I trust him” / “I do not trust him”), even though trust in reality may exist in degrees.
• Loyalty in war or politics — People often frame allegiance as binary: either one is “with us” or “against us.”
• Death in fiction and drama — Characters often say things like “You cannot be a little dead,” precisely because people naturally recognize some categories as absolute.

Some of these are truly binary by definition; others are socially or psychologically treated as binary even though, upon closer analysis, they may admit degrees. That distinction itself is often philosophically important.

Couple of specific comments:

Quote from Don

So you're trying to illustrate:

There are only two things in the set.

There can ONLY be two things in the set.

One is the opposite of the other.

And so on.

That's a tall order.

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I would say that's exactly what Epicurus and Lucretius are doing.

Quote from Don

I didn't like verdict, pregnant, or cardiac monitor either.

I'm pretty comfortable with the verdict aspet from my legal background, but I can see that those less familiar with US criminal law might not accept it so quickly. As to the cardiac monitor I can see how it works but it's obviously not an analogy Epicurus would have used.

As for pregnancy, all my life I have heard people say that "you can't be a little bit pregnant" as an illustration of pretty much precisely the point that it's "all or nothing" so I think that one clearly works, even though it's less than ideal.

In fact anything that illustrates an "all or nothing" principle is pretty clearly going to be relevant to the discussion.

Which leads to.....

The same process in the letter to Herodotus is below. This is not the argument of a technician listing out all the different observations that could be made of cats, dogs, trees, flowers, ad infinitum.

This is a logical high-level argument, based choosing to divide things according to what 'sense' reveals to us -- and we do this even though we ultimately conclude that these bodies are made of atoms, which the senses do NOT reveal to us directly.

The process of deducing the existence of atoms is a separate step, that follows this one, not the very same statement. But the logical step illustrated here is the starting point for the other, and if you don't accept the validity of this argument, you never get further, because you have to accept that it is valid to just what is perceptible before you can go to the next step of making claims about what is imperceptible.

Quote

Moreover, the universe is bodies and space: for that bodies exist, sense itself witnesses in the experience of all men, and in accordance with the evidence of sense we must of necessity judge of the imperceptible by reasoning, as I have already said.

[40] And if there were not that which we term void and place and intangible existence, bodies would have nowhere to exist and nothing through which to move, as they are seen to move. And besides these two, nothing can even be thought of either by conception or on the analogy of things conceivable such as could be grasped as whole existences and not spoken of as the accidents or properties of such existences.

Quote from Todd

When you add in the limit of pleasure, the AI is trying to describe that in terms of binaries too.

Just to be clear here, if there is going to be a failure in the article for trying rather than succeeding to describe something in terms of binaries, the failure is going to be mine, not that of "the AI".

I've already gone through this wording several times before presenting this version here, and I agree with all of it. Now can some of it be made better? Certainly, that's the reason for the discussion. But the basic principal is exactly what is stated in the excerpt from Lucretius that I placed above.

As to the entire universe, Epicurus is dividing everything between bodies or space. The same issues and questions being raised about the binary process apply to that division as well --- but nevertheless that is the process that Epicurus (here through Lucretius) was following, and they are doing it for a reason.

Philosophy requires us to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to consider the perspective from which we are looking at things and to realize that the perspective on the same things can shift and require new wording while still explaining the same phenomena.

"Pleasure" can be an immediate feeling in my thumb, or it can be the universal guide and goal of nature. The same for "happiness" - I can "feel happy" or I can consider "happy" to be a complex sum of all the experiences of life and mean totally different things for totally different people.

The issues are not "easy" to state but they can be made clearer than if we just ignore them and say "I like pleasure and I want to be happy" without any further attempt to explain what you mean.

Lucretius Book One:

1-418

But now, to weave again at the web, which is the task of my discourse, all nature then, as it is of itself, is built of these two things: for there are bodies and the void, in which they are placed and where they move hither and thither. For that body exists is declared by the feeling which all share alike; and unless faith in this feeling be firmly grounded at once and prevail, there will be naught to which we can make appeal about things hidden, so as to prove aught by the reasoning of the mind. And next, were there not room and empty space, which we call void, nowhere could bodies be placed, nor could they wander at all hither and thither in any direction; and this I have above shown to you but a little while before.

1-430

Besides these there is nothing which you could say is parted from all body and sundered from void, which could be discovered, as it were a third nature in the list. For whatever shall exist, must needs be something in itself; and if it suffer touch, however small and light, it will increase the count of body by a bulk great or maybe small, if it exists at all, and be added to its sum. But if it is not to be touched, inasmuch as it cannot on any side check anything from wandering through it and passing on its way, in truth it will be that which we call empty void. Or again, whatsoever exists by itself, will either do something or suffer itself while other things act upon it, or it will be such that things may exist and go on in it. But nothing can do or suffer without body, nor afford room again, unless it be void and empty space. And so besides void and bodies no third nature by itself can be left in the list of things, which might either at any time fall within the purview of our senses, or be grasped by any one through reasoning of the mind.

The link is in the title of the quote box, and I'll repaste it below. I haven't had time to figure out why it reads so poorly. Hopefully there's a better translation but I think this is a reputable website:

CHURCH FATHERS: The Stromata (Clement of Alexandria)

Quote from Todd

I was going to go through the some of the other examples, but I've realized that I just don't like this article at all.

It 's not easy to get comfortable with this approach because it's a difficult subject to get your arms around, but that's exactly why we have to get our arms around it.

it is going to strike most people as discretionary and debatable whether to divide things into binary classes in the first place. I can certainly see the objections. But that is clearly what Epicurus was doing. Why did he do that? Discussing these examples help get to the questions that have to be answered in order to understand why he was doing this and is the first step before applying it.

There are all sorts of gradations between light and dark depending on how these words are used and the circumstances you are talking about. Yet at the same time, it is also valuable to form individual circumstances into concepts, and then consider the concepts as discrete and mutually exclusive for purposes of being able to communicate and then apply the generalities as ideas.

That's why it's important to talk through these things.

If people who are sympathetic to Epicurus aren't comfortable with the approach - and I agree many of us/them aren't - then we can't expect others to get comfortable with it either. Yet this kind of categorization is exactly what Epicurus was doing in order to view things conceptually and construct a philosophy. And this kind of process is probably necessary in any philosophy that doesn't break down into absolute skepticism.

Epicurus is also asserting that a philosophy is exactly what is necessary in order to live happily and get the most out of life. There's no way to understand his expansion of the definition of pleasure without analyzing what he is saying philosophically. And I doubt we can do that without stepping through the analysis that for example David Sedley goes through in his "Inferential Basis of Epicurean Ethics."

it's not easy, and it won't make everyone comfortable (because people often prefer to avoid making decisions when they aren't backed into a corner to do so) but if it were easy there wouldn't be so much disagreement about philosophy in the first place.

Why use letters and form them into words? Why develop a language that's inevitably imprecise? Here's where I think we can say good things about mathematics, for example, because even though mathematics can't substitute for real things, mathematics helps us make all sorts of useful predictions about the way real things operate, so it is definitely useful so long as we keep in mind its limitations.

I doubt there's any better example of this than "pleasure" and "pain." There are literally innumerable examples of specific pleasures and specific pains, and they vary tremendously from each other. And yet it is still useful for us to speak conceptually about "pleasure" and "pain" as if there is some common element about them. And of course there is - we find pleasure agreeable and pain disagreeable. But those words "pleasure" and "pain" tell us absolutely nothing about the specific experience other than that we feel them to be desirable or undesirable.

If we don't talk philosophically and make this clear, we end up giving people the idea that the pleasure of cutting your fingernails is exactly the same experience as the pleasure of building a rocket ship to fly to the moon -- which is absurd.

If course that's the road the Utilitarians tried to go down in finding ways to calculate things like the greatest good for the greatest number, but it simply can't be done because all people and all circumstances have unique aspects to them.

So we have to be able to both talk intelligently in generalities while still being absolutely clear that everything is constantly in motion and no two situations are truly exactly the same.

I came across a text today that I would drop in here as it's either totally new to me or I had forgotten it. I don't know whether this translation is reliable either as it seems clunky. But it came to my attention in regard to Hieronymus. It seems very loosely and inaccurately written but it covers a lot of points about chief goods and the lifke. How in the heck did a Peripatetic end up concluding that "absence of pain" should be considered the chief good?

Quote from Clement on The Philosophers' Opinions On The Chief Good

Chapter 21. Opinions of Various Philosophers on the Chief Good

Epicurus, in placing happiness in not being hungry, or thirsty, or cold, uttered that godlike word, saying impiously that he would fight in these points even with Father Jove; teaching, as if it were the case of pigs that live in filth and not that of rational philosophers, that happiness was victory. For of those that are ruled by pleasure are the Cyrenaics and Epicurus; for these expressly said that to live pleasantly was the chief end, and that pleasure was the only perfect good. Epicurus also says that the removal of pain is pleasure; and says that that is to be preferred, which first attracts from itself to itself, being, that is, wholly in motion. Dinomachus and Callipho said that the chief end was for one to do what he could for the attainment and enjoyment of pleasure; and Hieronymus the Peripatetic said the great end was to live unmolested, and that the only final good was happiness; and Diodorus likewise, who belonged to the same sect, pronounces the end to be to live undisturbed and well. Epicurus indeed, and the Cyrenaics, say that pleasure is the first duty; for it is for the sake of pleasure, they say, that virtue was introduced, and produced pleasure. According to the followers of Calliphon, virtue was introduced for the sake of pleasure, but that subsequently, on seeing its own beauty, it made itself equally prized with the first principle, that is, pleasure.

But the Aristotelians lay it down, that to live in accordance with virtue is the end, but that neither happiness nor the end is reached by every one who has virtue. For the wise man, vexed and involved in involuntary mischances, and wishing gladly on these accounts to flee from life, is neither fortunate nor happy. For virtue needs time; for that is not acquired in one day which exists [only] in the perfect man since, as they say, a child is never happy. But human life is a perfect time, and therefore happiness is completed by the three kinds of good things. Neither, then, the poor, nor the mean nor even the diseased, nor the slave, can be one of them.

Again, on the other hand, Zeno the Stoic thinks the end to be living according to virtue; and, Cleanthes, living agreeably to nature in the right exercise of reason, which he held to consist of the selection of things according to nature. And Antipatrus, his friend, supposes the end to consist in choosing continually and unswervingly the things which are according to nature, and rejecting those contrary to nature. Archedamus, on the other hand, explained the end to be such, that in selecting the greatest and chief things according to nature, it was impossible to overstep it. In addition to these, Panætius pronounced the end to be, to live according to the means given to us by nature. And finally, Posidonius said that it was to live engaged in contemplating the truth and order of the universe, and forming himself as he best can, in nothing influenced by the irrational part of his soul. And some of the later Stoics defined the great end to consist in living agreeably to the constitution of man. Why should I mention Aristo? He said that the end was indifference; but what is indifferent simply abandons the indifferent. Shall I bring forward the opinions of Herillus? Herillus states the end to be to live according to science. For some think that the more recent disciples of the Academy define the end to be, the steady abstraction of the mind to its own impressions. Further, Lycus the Peripatetic used to say that the final end was the true joy of the soul; as Leucimus, that it was the joy it had in what was good. Critolaus, also a Peripatetic, said that it was the perfection of a life flowing rightly according to nature, referring to the perfection accomplished by the three kinds according to tradition.

We must, however, not rest satisfied with these, but endeavour as we best can to adduce the doctrines laid down on the point by the naturalist; for they say that Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ affirmed contemplation and the freedom flowing from it to be the end of life; Heraclitus the Ephesian, complacency. The Pontic Heraclides relates, that Pythagoras taught that the knowledge of the perfection of the numbers was happiness of the soul. The Abderites also teach the existence of an end. Democritus, in his work On the Chief End, said it was cheerfulness, which he also called well-being, and often exclaims, For delight and its absence are the boundary of those who have reached full age; Hecatæus, that it was sufficiency to one's self; Apollodotus of Cyzicum, that it was delectation; as Nausiphanes, that it was undauntedness, for he said that it was this that was called by Democritus imperturbability. In addition to these still, Diotimus declared the end to be perfection of what is good, which he said was termed well-being. Again, Antisthenes, that it was humility. And those called Annicereans, of the Cyrenaic succession, laid down no definite end for the whole of life; but said that to each action belonged, as its proper end, the pleasure accruing from the action. These Cyrenaics reject Epicurus' definition of pleasure, that is the removal of pain, calling that the condition of a dead man; because we rejoice not only on account of pleasures, but companionships and distinctions; while Epicurus thinks that all joy of the soul arises from previous sensations of the flesh. Metrodorus, in his book On the Source of Happiness in Ourselves being greater than that which arises from Objects, says: What else is the good of the soul but the sound state of the flesh, and the sure hope of its continuance?

Quote from Todd

But by treating those terms as equivalent you could easily give people the idea that you only experience pleasure if you are completely free from pain, which is obviously not what Epicurus said.

That is the huge problem that requires that whenever this is discussed an explanation is given. From the point of view of "any individual moment or experience," as in PD3, any feeling is either pain or pleasure but not both or either mixed or both or either.

But you're obviously correct that this is not imediately obvious, because people can and do jump to the conclusion that it means a feeling of essentially nothingness. Some people in fact will try to argue that some kind of sensationless floating is truly the ideal state, but to me that is bogus and absurd and should be recognized as such.

I think the explanation for the letter to Menoeceus is that Epicurus was writing to a student who could be expected to know the importance and implication of the "if you are alive you are experiencing one or the other" context that Torquatus argues to Cicero.

But clearly everyone today who does not have access to authoritative texts and teachers is highly likely not to know that or agree with that, and that's the source of the whole problem. It wouldn't have been a problem when lots of teachers and texts were around and anyone could easily find the explanation, but it's a huge problem now when you have very few sources explaining it, other than Torquatus, who almost no one takes the time to read in any level of detail.

So those terms "can" be interchangeable but as you observe, they aren't exactly the same set of letters in the same order, so they have to be explained in order for the point to be clear.

In the end I don't think there's a way around that, but to observe that there's no way around it is probably just to say what Epicurus and Lucretius stress over and over - that "philosophy" is necessary in order to live the happiest life possible.

Quote from Don

I'd think you'd want to go down the path of oil and water.

While oil and water don't mix, i doubt it is immediately clear that there is an obvious context in which those are the only two alternatives. Even if you're talking salad dressing there's probably spices and other things that i as a non-foodie don't even know about that people would try to include in the mix.

The best illustrations will have to combine both the points that (1) the two don't mix and (2) these two are the only two possibilities.

On this one also: In case it's not obvious from the word "illustration," I am particularly interested in identifying word pictures that can be turned into actual pictures, so that we can "illustrate" the point graphically in pictures that are even more impactful than words.

That's the reason why the draft article has a separate "purely logical" section, as purely logical assertions don't necessarily lend themselves to pictures. Venn Diagrams perhaps, but not pictures of real things. I'm hoping that we can come up with some down-to-earth and actual "pictures" for use in the future.

Many of these examples are open to "but what about" objections, and that aspect is addressed in the article. I don't think that pictures like the earth / moon / a planet shown from space, with the zone of darkness and light starkly defined, are rendered unusable by the fact that if you're actually on the surface there's likely to be a dawn or dusk effect while the light diffuses in a particular area. The point is to drive home the "either/or" nature of the choice.

I've considered and rejected a lot of possibilities because of that problem, but I don't think there's actually a bright line between what's usable as an illustration and what's not. What we want is something that's immediately graspable to reinforce the logic of the issue, even if it's technically possible to quibble around the edges. But the most effective are likely to be those where it's actually or close to impossible to quibble.

My attention today got diverted over to the "Absence of Pain" Substack article, but when I started the day my focus was elswhere. Initially, I was trying to come up with better and clearer ways to describe the principle that when you have a universe of two options, the absence of one is the presence of the other. That is something that needs to "click" in peoples' minds before they truly begin to understand how the terms "pleasure" and "absence of pain" can be interchangeable.

I have a draft of an article oriented toward that topic prepared, but I am not nearly 100% satisfied with it. This is one that would definitely improve with some feedback that would help reorder, add, or subtract from the illustrations that are in the list already. I've started with illustrations that can be found directly in the ancient texts, and added a few modern illustrations, but I feel sure there are others that have not yet been included, potentially even some better than any that are included here.

Before I consider publishing a version of this on Substack or even as a blog article here, I'd appreciate feedback on these illustrations / analogies from anyone so inclined. Does each one work fairly well? Others you can think of as better? Comment on which among each section are the most impactful.

As always, thanks very much.

Two and Only Two: Illustrations of the Epicurean Binary of Pleasure and Pain

Epicurus makes a claim that is both simple and radical: there are exactly two feelings, pleasure and pain, and nothing else. Every sentient experience falls into one category or the other. There is no neutral third state that is neither pleasant nor painful, no middle ground where sensation has somehow opted out of the binary.

This claim carries an immediate consequence that critics of Epicurus have resisted for two thousand years: the absence of pain is not a neutral condition — it is pleasure. Not a pale or diminished pleasure, not a placeholder waiting for “real” pleasure to arrive, but pleasure fully and actually present. When pain is gone, what remains is not a void. What remains is the other of the only two things there are.

The argument is logical, but logic alone rarely produces conviction. What makes an argument land — what makes it felt rather than merely followed — is an image that shows the same truth in a form the eye and the body can recognize immediately. Epicurus and Lucretius knew this. They built their philosophy on illustrations, not just propositions.

What follows is a collection of those illustrations, beginning with the ones the Epicureans themselves used and moving to examples from the modern world. But first, the underlying principle deserves to be stated clearly on its own, because it is a principle that runs through the whole of Epicurean thought — not just its ethics.

The Principle: When Two Covers Everything

The logical structure at work here has a precise form. Two categories are jointly exhaustive when together they cover every possible case — when nothing falls outside them. They are mutually exclusive when nothing can belong to both at once. When a pair of categories is both jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, a single consequence follows that cannot be argued around: the absence of one is, by definition, the presence of the other. Not probably. Not in most cases. Necessarily, always, without exception.

Pleasure and pain, as Epicurus defines them, form exactly such a pair. They cover every possible state of sentient experience — nothing falls outside them — and no experience can be both pleasant and painful in the same respect at the same time. This means that the moment pain is absent, pleasure is not merely likely or approaching or about to arrive. It IS present. The two conditions share a single boundary, and crossing that boundary in either direction is instantaneous and total.

This is not an empirical observation that could in principle have turned out otherwise. Epicurus is not reporting that he surveyed human feelings and found them to sort neatly into two groups. He is establishing a definition: these two categories, so defined, leave no remainder. The neutral middle ground that critics of Epicurus want to insert between pleasure and pain is not a discovery — it is a refusal to accept the definition. The person who insists on a neutral third feeling is in the same position as someone who insists there must be a third verdict besides guilty and not guilty, or a third position for a light switch besides on and off. The vocabulary for such a verdict exists; the reality it would name does not.

This same logical structure — two categories, jointly exhaustive, mutually exclusive, leaving no third option — is the foundation of Epicurean physics as well as Epicurean ethics. Everything in the universe is either body (that which can touch and be touched, that which impacts and receives impact) or void (intangible space, offering no resistance). Epicurus makes the identical move in both domains. He is not borrowing a physics analogy to illuminate ethics. He is applying one method consistently across everything. When you understand how the binary works in physics, you understand how it works in ethics — because it is the same logical instrument.

The illustrations below make this visible rather than just arguable. Each one shows, in a domain where the principle is already obvious to everyone, the same structure that Epicurus claims for feeling: two conditions, one boundary, no middle ground, the absence of one being the immediate and total presence of the other.

Part One: Illustrations from the Epicurean Texts

Bodies and Space — The Foundational Binary

The single most powerful illustration available is not borrowed from another domain. It is the foundation of Epicurean physics itself.

In the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus begins his account of the universe with a stark declaration: everything that exists is either body or void. Not atoms, specifically — body. That which is. And the defining characteristic of body is precisely its capacity to act on other things and to be acted upon: to push and be pushed, to touch and be touched, to impact and receive impact. Void — which Epicurus calls ἀναφὴς φύσις, “intangible nature” — is defined as its perfect opposite: that which offers no resistance, which cannot touch or be touched, through which everything passes without contact.

Lucretius develops this into a closed logical argument in De Rerum Natura Book I. Suppose someone proposes a third kind of existence alongside bodies and space. Lucretius’s answer is immediate: ask one question about this proposed third thing. Can it touch or be touched? Can it impact or receive impact? If yes — it is body. If no — it is void. There is no further category in which a third answer could be housed. The two definitions are jointly exhaustive. Any proposed third existence collapses back into one of the two the moment you press it.

This is the identical logical structure Epicurus applies to feelings. Propose a neutral state between pleasure and pain. Ask one question: is it painful? If yes — it is pain. If no — it is pleasure. Not the approach toward pleasure, not a neutral non-pain state waiting for something further to arrive, but pleasure present and actual. There is no room left for a third answer. Epicurus is not borrowing a convenient analogy from his physics. He is applying the same method, making the same move, closing the same logical door.

Before laying out the physics of bodies and space, Epicurus opens the Letter to Herodotus with a methodological instruction that applies with equal force to his account of feeling. We must, he says, “seize firmly the things that underlie our words” — the primary concept that each term points to must be clearly fixed — “else we shall leave everything undetermined as we dispute to infinity, or else we shall be using empty words.” This is not merely a logical caution. It is a precise diagnosis of what goes wrong in every dispute about pleasure that has run for two thousand years without resolution. The person who has never fixed a clear first concept of what pleasure IS cannot recognize it when it is present, cannot identify its arrival, cannot distinguish having it from lacking it. They will dispute to infinity about whether the Epicurean state of pain-freedom counts as pleasure — because “pleasure” remains an empty word for them, pointing at nothing definite. The binary is Epicurus’s instrument for ending that dispute by supplying the fixed reference point: pleasure is what is present when pain is absent. Once that concept is clear, the word points to something that can actually be recognized — and will be recognized, as a matter of course, by anyone who has stopped disputing long enough to look.

The direction of the question matters. Pain is the more immediately recognizable of the two states — when acute pain is present, no one fails to notice it. Pleasure, as Epicurus defines it, is broader and in many of its forms quieter: the pleasures of memory, of friendship, of philosophical conversation, of a body simply functioning without disturbance. These are real and fully present, but they are easy to overlook because they are not dramatic.

The therapeutic point of the binary is therefore corrective in a specific way. It is not an argument for complacency or low expectations — Epicurus himself maintained an extensive circle of friends, wrote and taught without ceasing, took active pleasure in food and conversation and philosophy, and encouraged everyone around him to do the same. The correction is not “stop seeking.” It is “seek from the right foundation, and recognize what you already have so that you can build on it intelligently.” The person who cannot recognize pleasure when pain is absent keeps seeking desperately and anxiously, driven by the false conviction that they have not yet arrived — and so misses both what is already present and the direction in which genuine additional pleasure lies. The person who correctly reads the binary can pursue friendship, philosophy, and the fuller pleasures of an engaged life from a position of clarity rather than chronic restlessness. Epicurus’s argument runs in the corrective direction: begin from what everyone recognizes (pain), establish that its absence is not a neutral waiting-room for something further, and from that correct foundation pursue pleasure actively and without confusion about what it is.

The image this produces is elemental: a particle of matter against empty space. Something, and the absence of something. Two conditions, one universe.

The Relay Torch — Fire or Cold Ash

In De Rerum Natura Book II, Lucretius describes the succession of generations as runners in a relay race passing the torch of life: “et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt” — “and like runners they pass on the torch of life.”

The image carries its own argument. The torch is either burning or it is not. There is no third condition for a torch: not “somewhat alight,” not “pre-ignited,” not “cooling toward neither state.” The flame either lives in the wood or it does not. The moment it goes out, what remains is not a transitional state — it is cold, dark, inert matter. Fire and its absence are the two conditions, and they leave no gap between them.

What Lucretius uses for life and death, the same logic covers pleasure and pain. Either the warmth of pleasure is present or it is not. If it is not, what remains is not an intermediate — it is the cold state, which has its own name.

The Storm and the Shore — Safety or Peril

De Rerum Natura opens Book II with one of the most famous images in Latin poetry: the man standing safely on shore watching a great storm at sea. “Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem” — “Sweet it is, when the great sea is troubled by winds, to watch from land another’s great toil.”

The image is explicitly about pleasure and its opposite. The man on the shore is safe; the sailors are in danger. These are not points on a spectrum. You are either in the storm or you are not. You are either battered by waves and wind or you are standing on solid ground watching. The coastline is an absolute boundary — cross it in one direction and you are in the sea; step back and you are not. There is no zone between the two that is neither shore nor storm.

Lucretius uses this as a picture of the contrast between the Epicurean life and the life of those without philosophy. The man who has secured the foundations of his understanding stands on the shore. Everyone else is in the water. The image does not allow for a middle position.

The Full Vessel — Complete or Not Complete

In the opening of Book VI of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes a life whose cup is already full — the man who has reached the limit, who has attained what pleasure is capable of delivering, and for whom additional accumulation adds nothing because the vessel is already filled to the brim.

The image of the full vessel is not merely decorative. It makes a specific argument about limits: a cup that is full is fully full. There is no gradation between “full” and “fully full.” The filled state IS the complete state. When you pour into a full cup, the liquid does not gradually become “more full than full” — it spills, because the condition of fullness has already been reached and is already total.

This applies directly to the binary of pleasure and pain. The removal of pain does not produce a half-state that is “not quite pleasure yet.” When the cup of pain is emptied, the cup of pleasure is full. The limit has been reached. Fullness is not an approach toward something further — it is the thing itself, arrived.

Health and Sickness — The Medical Binary

Epicurus explicitly compared philosophy to medicine and its practitioners to physicians. This was not a casual metaphor. He meant that the philosopher, like the physician, deals with a condition that is either present or absent — and that the goal of the art is to move the patient from one state to the other.

A physician examining a patient recognizes exactly two conditions: the body is either functioning as it should, or it is not. There is no clinical state called “neither healthy nor sick.” Such a state has no medical meaning. Either the infection is present or it has cleared. Either the fever is there or it is gone. When sickness is absent, health IS present — not as a separate subsequent achievement but as the immediate condition of its absence.

The Epicurean applies the same diagnosis to the whole of life. Either the pain of fear, anxiety, or bodily suffering is present, or it is not. When it is not, pleasure is present — because those are the only two things a feeling can be.

Sleep and Waking — Experience or Its Absence

Lucretius returns repeatedly to the analogy between death and dreamless sleep. The argument about death — that we need not fear it because it is simply the absence of experience — depends on the same binary. Either you are awake and experiencing, or you are in dreamless sleep and experiencing nothing. These are the two states of consciousness, and they leave no room for a third kind of being-conscious-but-not-experiencing.

The same binary holds for the sentient life more broadly. Either sensation is occurring or it is not. Either pleasure or pain is present, or sensation itself is absent — which for a living, functioning body means we have crossed from the question of what we feel into the question of whether we feel at all.

Part Two: Modern Illustrations

The ancient examples carry the greatest authority because they are Epicurus’s own instruments. But the same binary appears wherever nature or human technology has produced a condition that genuinely admits of no third state. The following examples work because they are real, not because they have been constructed to illustrate a point.

The Cardiac Monitor — Wave or Flatline

A cardiac monitor displays exactly two conditions: the undulating wave of a living heartbeat, and the flat line that replaces it when the heart stops. Every person who has ever been in a hospital or watched a film knows both images and knows their meaning immediately.

The flatline is not neutral. It is not the absence of a condition while awaiting a verdict. It is a fully real, fully specific state with a name and a consequence. When the wave returns, life IS present. When it does not, death IS present. No third line exists on the monitor — not because the engineers were insufficiently creative, but because nature has provided exactly two conditions to display.

This is the most immediately visceral modern image for the Epicurean binary. The wave is pleasure; the flatline is the other thing.

The Earth from Orbit — Day Side and Night Side

A photograph of Earth from space shows the terminator — the line that divides the sunlit half from the half in shadow. On one side of that line, every surface is in full daylight. On the other side, every surface is in full darkness. The line between them is the sharpest natural boundary visible from space.

Darkness is not nothing. It is not the absence of a condition while a third option is considered. It is a fully real state that exists on every surface the sun does not reach. When light arrives, darkness does not diminish toward a neutral middle — it is gone, instantly and completely, and light IS there.

The Pregnant and the Not-Pregnant

A phrase that already exists in common speech precisely because the logic is already obvious: you cannot be a little pregnant. Either the biological process has begun or it has not. There is no state of “not-pregnant but also not-not-pregnant” that one occupies while the question is pending. The moment the condition is present, it IS present — entirely, not gradually, not partially.

This example works because it is already culturally established as the canonical illustration of a true binary, recognized by anyone who has heard it.

The Verdict — Guilty or Not Guilty

A jury returns exactly one of two verdicts: guilty, or not guilty. The court does not recognize a verdict of “neither convicted nor acquitted.” Such a verdict would have no legal meaning — and more importantly, it would have no logical meaning, because the verdict is defined as the answer to a yes-or-no question. The defendant either committed the act or did not. The jury either finds this established or does not.

“Not guilty” is not a neutral outcome. It is a full verdict with full legal force and full consequences. It IS a decision, not the absence of one.

The court of sensation works identically. Either the experience is pleasant or it is not. “Not painful” is not a hung jury. It is a verdict: pleasure.

The Relay Torch — Ancient Image, Permanent Truth

The image Lucretius gave us belongs equally in this section, because it requires no historical knowledge to understand. A burning torch and a cold, dark torch: two objects, one condition present in one and absent in the other. No one needs to be told which is which. The eye reads the binary before the mind processes it.

The Logical Form — Argument Without Image

Two further examples work at the level of pure logic rather than picture, and are worth noting for that reason even though they do not reduce to a visual image.

True and false — every proposition is either true or false. There is no third truth-value called “neither true nor false.” This is the law of the excluded middle, and it applies directly: the proposition “I am experiencing pleasure” is either true or false. If false, its negation — “I am not experiencing pleasure” — is true. And “not experiencing pleasure” in a sentient being is the definition of experiencing pain.

Binary computing and the telegraph — at the physical level, every bit in a computer and every moment of a telegraph signal is either current-flowing or current-not-flowing. The entire digital world — every image, every text, every calculation — is built on a binary that has no middle position. A transistor gate is either conducting or it is not. A telegraph line is either carrying signal or it is carrying silence. These illustrate the principle with great logical clarity but do not reduce to a picture, and they require the audience to understand the underlying technology before the analogy can land.

The Common Structure

Every illustration in both lists shares the same structure:

1. There are exactly two conditions.
2. They are defined by each other — one is the presence of what the other lacks.
3. A third condition cannot be inserted between them because there is no logical space for it to occupy.
4. The moment one condition ends, the other IS present — not approaching, not about to become, but present.

This is what Epicurus means when he says pleasure and pain are the two feelings. He is not reporting an observation that could in principle have turned out otherwise. He is defining the terms in a way that closes the door on any third option by construction — the same way he closed the door on a third kind of existence between bodies and space.

The person who insists on a neutral middle ground between pleasure and pain is in the position of someone who insists there must be a third verdict besides guilty and not guilty, or a third state for a torch besides burning and not burning. A name can be invented for such a state — but naming is not finding. The test is not whether a word can be coined but whether the thing named can be located in actual felt experience. Anyone who proposes a neutral third feeling must eventually describe what it is like to be in it; and when they do, every description will draw on either pleasant or unpleasant qualities — because feeling itself is what the binary describes, and feeling’s own report always comes back as one or the other. A neutral state that can be felt as neither pleasant nor unpleasant cannot be felt at all, which means it is not a feeling. This is precisely what Epicurus warned against at the opening of the Letter to Herodotus: words whose referents cannot be located in actual experience produce endless dispute without result. The invented vocabulary for a neutral third feeling is a perfect specimen of the empty word — a name pointing at nothing that can be distinguished from the two states that are already there. What exists, when pain is absent, is the other of the only two things there are — which is pleasure, present, real, and complete.

Quote from Todd

Obviously it is the counsels that Epicurus opposed. But it could also be read as Epicurus opposing those schools, which is not true. Especially that word "directly". I would suggest re-wording this somehow.

I'm going to get to this in a future rewrite as well.

Again, Todd, thank you very much for the suggestion. The new section below has been added.

Argument 6: The Ancient World Already Had a Name for “Absence of Pain” as the Goal — and It Was Not “Epicurean”

This argument cuts to the heart of the historical record in a way that cannot be dismissed as a matter of interpretation.

The ancient philosophical world was perfectly aware that someone had proposed “absence of pain” — freedom from all annoyance — as the ultimate goal of life. They did not attribute this position to Epicurus. They attributed it to Hieronymus of Rhodes, a Peripatetic philosopher who lived approximately 290–230 BC, after Epicurus, and who had Epicurus’s works available to him when he formulated his own position.

The ancient sources are explicit. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromateis (Book II, Chapter 21, sections 127–128), records the ancient division of philosophical schools by their stated goals, explicitly placing Epicurus in the category of those who proposed pleasure as the end, and Hieronymus of Rhodes in the separate category of those who proposed absence of pain as the end. Cicero reports the same division independently in multiple works. In Academic Questions, he states it directly:

Quote

“Hieronymus placed it [the chief good] in being free from all annoyance.”

And in On Ends, Cicero stages a direct debate in which Hieronymus is explicitly named as the philosopher who held that “freedom from pain” and “pleasure” are two different things — and that “freedom from pain” is the true chief good — while Torquatus, the Epicurean spokesman, argues that pleasure is the goal and that freedom from pain is simply another name for the same condition, not a separate or superior alternative.

Several points follow from this with force:

• Epicurus and Hieronymus are listed as distinct positions by the ancient sources. No ancient commentator collapses them. The difference between “pleasure is the goal” and “absence of pain is the goal” was understood in antiquity as the difference between two different philosophers holding two genuinely different views — not as two formulations of the same philosophy.
• Hieronymus came after Epicurus and chose deliberately to differ. He had access to Epicurus’s texts. He was not confused about what Epicurus taught. He disagreed — and the ancient world recorded the disagreement as a matter of philosophical fact.
• Epicurus would have been fully aware of the “absence of pain” option and chose not to adopt it. The position was available to him. He defined pleasure — not mere freedom from pain — as the goal, the beginning, and the end of the blessed life. This was not an oversight; it was a deliberate choice between two positions that the ancient world clearly distinguished.
• The person who today attributes “absence of pain” to Epicurus is not reporting Epicurean philosophy. They are reporting Hieronymian philosophy and attaching Epicurus’s name to it in error. The ancient world would have recognized this immediately — not because the texts are ambiguous, but because the distinction between the two positions was the kind of thing that philosophers in antiquity took pains to establish and record precisely.

The practical implication is direct: if you maintain that “absence of pain” rather than pleasure is the true goal of life, you are not an Epicurean. You are a Hieronymian. The irony is precise: Hieronymus of Rhodes deliberately rejected Epicurus’s position — pleasure as the goal — and substituted his own: absence of pain. That substitution is what the ancient world recorded and attributed to Hieronymus. Today, Hieronymus is forgotten and Epicurus’s name endures — but the “absence of pain” position that Hieronymus invented as a departure from Epicurus has been wrongly reattached to Epicurus himself. Epicurus has been tagged with his own successor’s rejection of his own teaching. The confusion should be corrected wherever it appears.

great comments thank you!

It is gratifying to have a generally appreciative comment on this post from Greg Sadler, whose videos I have frequently watched, and who views I very much respect.

This thread is for discussion of: "Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About 'Absence of Pain'"

Blog Article

Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About 'Absence of Pain'

The Claim and Why It Matters

The claim that Epicurean philosophy is “primarily about the absence of pain” — that the Epicurean goal is a passive, featureless neutral state free from disturbance — is one of the most consequential misreadings in the history of philosophy. It transforms a vigorous, life-affirming system into something that looks, in practice, indistinguishable from the Stoic, Buddhist, or ascetic counsels that Epicurus directly opposed.

The arguments against this reading are…

Cassius

May 20, 2026 at 10:54 AM

Quote from Titus

Maybe this discussion about "absence of pain" is an "English" thing.

I don't know that it is limited to England by any means, but I'd say that England seems to produce the highest concentration of it. Further, it goes deeper than the "stiff upper lip" and "keep calm and carry on" style of Stoicism that became identified with England in WW2. My own ethnic ancestry is English and I'd love to be able to pin this down more thoroughly. I see it as a major problem to be fixed rather than a strength to be cultivated.

I've posted the list of arguments on substack:

Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About "Absence of Pain"

The Claim and Why It Matters

open.substack.com

I should have realized when I came up with an odd number of nine arguments that i was missing something.

I have now added in a tenth, which I actually think is one of the most compelling of all. I should not have forgotten it.