Posts by Godfrey

Does anybody recall where the phrase "hedonic calculus" was first used? It seems to me that a later Epicurean (Philodemus?) used it, but I can't put my finger on it. I'm curious as to what the original Greek (?) words were and what exactly they might infer. IDK whether or not that would be pertinent here, but I just want to add it to the mix.

That is a whole lot of text! Maybe provide that as a transcript below in the YouTube page?

Quote from Cassius

"Total absence of pain is the highest pleasure."

"Total" seems like a good clarification here

Quote from Don

And we know that we have to undergo some pain (ex., exercise) for future pleasure (ex., better health, longer life hopefully). I have no problem with that scenario.

That's specifically what I was referring to. It sounds like we're in agreement; I got thrown off by "simply"

Quote from Cassius

When PD09 refers to "intensity," location, and duration, are we talking about how pleasures differ from one another and how saying "absence of pain = 100% pleasure" does not tell us all we need to know about which pleasure to choose?

PD09. If every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted, and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another.

I think that the answer to this question must be "Yes!" If you want to describe an ethics of pleasure, you need to go into detail as to how to work with pleasure. You can't stop at "absence of pain = 100% pleasure", which is overarching and somewhat abstract.

Epicurus, as far as I can tell, developed at least three methods to approach a personal ethics of pleasure:

1) understand the difference between desires and pleasures, and work with the three categories of desires

2) examine the attributes of your various pleasures using intensity, location and duration

3) understand and work with katastematic and kinetic pleasures (which is difficult, given the dearth of texts on the matter)

These methods are not mutually exclusive, and in fact are mutually supportive. Or at least that's my current take.

Quote from Don

For Epicurus, pleasure is simply that feeling which is not painful derived from actions or states which do not result in struggle, distress, anxiety, pain, etc. Additionally, Pleasure comes in two "flavors" - that which is felt in a state of rest; that which consists in motion and activity.

I would add to this as per my comments above. Also, I'm not sure that I agree with "simply" in the above quote, Don . Some pleasures do involve various pains, but the resultant pleasure outweighs the pain involved in obtaining the pleasure (I think we all agree on that). I think what you're describing is pleasure resulting from natural and necessary desires.

Quote from Don

Now, I'm not sure what we are to glean from the translation referring to a "neutral state" ἀπαθείαις (apatheiais) because that's not one of the two feelings of pleasure: κινήσεσι and στάσεσιν. But that might have to wait for another thread.

Could it be that, early on, Epicurus had not yet settled on the idea of no neutral state? If so, could this give a rough idea of the approximate date the letter? (Just a thought for another thread.)

Just thinking over intensity, location and duration:

If Lucretius was deciding between spending a life as a shepherd or spending it writing didactic poetry, how would intensity, duration and duration apply? I tend to think of this breakdown in terms of maximizing overall pleasure. In this case:

- Duration for each choice is basically the same: his lifetime. He may consider that he can write poetry into old age, whereas he may not be able to herd sheep once his physical abilities decline. He could also compare whether one lifestyle would provide opportunities for more varieties of pleasure, whereas one might take up all of his waking hours.

- I think of location as referring to where in the body/mind feeling is experienced. It is interior to the body/mind, not something external. He could look at the physical (this is a location) pleasures and pains of being outside v being inside (outside v inside wouldn't be considered "location", but a particular external variable) in terms of how the pleasure of basking in the sun or the pain of being in the wind and rain. He may consider the mental pleasures of, say unfocused daydreaming or stream of consciousness philosophizing of a shepherd, or the mental pleasure of gathering knowledge of sheep and nature firsthand. He might compare this to the rigorous mental pleasure or pain of studying philosophy and composing verse.

- As to intensity, he may feel that he could experience much more intense pleasure with the poetic life, and a less intense pleasure with the life of a shepherd. He can then think about whether he prefers more or less intensity in this particular regard.

So thinking in terms of intensity, location and duration provides a framework for evaluating pleasures. I don't see this as a mathematical process of adding up hedons and dolons. It's an intuitive way of looking more specifically at what brings you pleasure or pain. A person may attempt to quantify from this, but that's pretty much beside the point. Even more, trying to count pleasure tokens seems to me to be counterproductive.

I don't know if I just clarified or mudding the issue....

I'm jumping into this late, but in response to Kalosyni 's post about mixed pleasures, I'd like to put in a plug for my current favorite categorization of feelings as being composed of the three aspects of intensity, location and duration (as can be discerned from the PDs).

Examining these aspects helps me to deepen my understanding of pleasure, and to realize that there are innumerable locations where we experience pleasure (big toe, little toe, stomach, thoughts about death, thoughts about previous happy experiences, stimulation of listening to music &c) and that I can maximize my pleasure partly by doing things that maximize the locations and duration of my pleasure. Because of the innumerable locations and potentially overlapping durations, pleasure is, most likely, always "mixed" overall (unless you're a god...). Part of maximizing my pleasure is understanding which locations of pleasure (which some people might refer to as "types" of pleasure) are the most personally satisfying, and in what intensities and durations.

I have a niggling feeling that k&k pleasures have a relationship to these three aspects. But I don't think that these aspects are a defining characteristic of k&k, or vice versa. I'm currently thinking of them as two mental models, and people can utilize whichever is most useful to them, or both. A third mental model is the categories of desires. The three mental models seem to me to work well together, reinforcing one another. But I see all three as well-conceived tools for helping people understand and maximize their pleasure.

This just appeared in my feed and may be of some interest here:

The Largest-Ever Roman Mosaic Found in Anatolia is Revealed to Be Even More Expansive — Colossal (thisiscolossal.com)

Excellent episode! Joshua , it brings me great pleasure to see that you so firmly share my distaste for Cicero.

The thought occurred to me after hearing Joshua 's comparison of Books 1 and 2: how would Cicero's argument be affected if the two books were presented in the opposite order? Meaning Cicero's ranting first, then answered with Torquatus' explanation, giving Torquatus the last word....

I've only had a chance to read IX, but to my mind, all of the arguments are spurious.

- Classifying desires as three or as two, one of which has two parts: the latter may be important if you're concerned with a system of classification, but the former is, to me, more useful. Cicero is only making an argument about form, not about substance.

- His principal technique seems to be to set up and tear down a straw man. He defines something in a way that has little relation to the idea being examined, then proceeds to tear apart this definition of the idea.

- Cicero defines desire very narrowly and negatively, and completely misses the point that Epicurus has a deeper understanding of desire than he, Cicero, does. (The same as with pleasure.) Understanding that desire isn't an evil to be banished was a major innovation of Epicurus', and his classifications are key to that. Cicero, at least to this point, tries to totally eliminate that by centering his argument on the outmoded (or simply wrong) definition of desire, which lumps all desires into what are correctly considered vain desires. By doing this, he's completely missing out on the nuanced and practical conception of desires in Epicurus' philosophy.

- Cicero was part of the privileged class, and he would use any means to preserve that distinction. He may have been an effective lawyer, but he is an extremely shallow and narrow minded philosopher. In his writings his main project seems to be to tear down any ideas foreign to his own, rather than to honestly and deeply examine such ideas. To this point in this passage he's done just that, and reads to me like a buffoon. But, unlike him, I'll try to keep an open mind going forward.

With a nod to Lucretius, something like "Venus, life force, thriving on pleasure...."

It always amazes me how willing the "moralists" are to engage in slander, and how stridently they do so. Goes with the territory I suppose.

Quote from Pacatus

Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, supported that unrestrained intercourse could cure dysentery.”

That one's news to me!

I've been taking a qigong course this year. At one point, in answer to somebody's query, the instructor posted a chart with guidelines for sexual release. I don't remember the details; something like every day when in one's 20s, every thirty days after one turns 60 (don't quote me on those!), and a sliding scale in the decades between.Apparently one or more students had been instructed by others to retain their semen and were having various ailments. So, at least for some schools of Chinese medicine, sex is considered to be healthy. (I personally don't have much understanding of Chinese medicine: just passing along an anecdote.)

This paper by Emily Austin has an interesting take on death which might be pertinent.

(Can't remember where I got this; I'm not sure if I'm re-posting what somebody else posted or not...)

One way to process the death of a child is to understand that, just as my being dead is nothing to me, being dead is nothing to the child. They no longer exist and so aren't missing out on any hypothetical pleasures. The pains that they may suffer before dying are a different discussion, and those pains may be heartbreaking.

If it was our child, after the initial grief has mellowed, we will probably often feel sadness when we think of what the child would be doing if they had lived. We see somebody else their age and maybe feel sadness or envy that our child isn't alive, experiencing various joys, and thereby bringing us various joys. We will always have emotions regarding the child, but these have nothing to do with any actual future the child might have had: we have no way of knowing what that might have been. The only sense in which the child being dead is bad is in the pain it brings to those still living.

To my mind, both we and the child can only experience physical reality (which is both bodily and mental, since the mind is physical). So there is no point in wracking one's brain as to whether there is a loss of potential for something which will never occur and, at best, is only an abstract projection of something that might have occurred.

Quote from Don

I also enjoyed hearing Kalosyni say, "I'm beginning to dislike Cicero more and more." I couldn't agree more!

Quote from Titus

Can you specify what you mean with Aristotelian?

I used that term to associate with duty ethics and virtue ethics, which to my extremely limited understanding are grounded to some extent in Aristotle's ethics. Probably Plato's as well. My exposure to Aristotle is limited, so I may have used that term rather loosely. I think it's fairly accurate, but my main point was to contrast duty and virtue ethics with pleasure ethics. My take is that the former are grounded in ideas that tend toward abstractions whereas the latter is grounded in physical reality and therefore provides a more effective guide to a pleasant life.

Interesting discussion!

Quote from Cassius

I keep putting "temporarily" in brackets only because we all know that we'll get hungry and thirsty and want more pleasures every couple of hours so long as we continue to live. That observation doesn't matter to Epicurus, because he identifies *both* the state of acting to fulfill those desires, and the state of fulfillment, as pleasure, so the general condition of life is pleasure.

Using this example it seems to me that you could consider kinetic pleasure to be eating as well as relieving hunger and the temporary state of not being hungry. Katastematic pleasure would be the secure knowledge that you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

Referring to a prior point by burninglights , with this reading of k/k, katastematic pleasure doesn't necessarily arise from kinetic pleasures, particularly those of eating. It may involve pain and struggle to arrive at a point where you have the confidence that you don't have to worry about going hungry: activities such as planting crops, harvesting &c.

The actions that you might take to reduce this pain and struggle might include such things as cultivating a social order to provide a division of labor and a state of security. These two things would potentially provide additional pleasures such as friendship.

Quote from the article

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves “bouncing back” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth.

Quote from the article

While certain factors might make some individuals more resilient than others, resilience isn’t necessarily a personality trait that only some people possess. On the contrary, resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop.

To my understanding, ataraxia enhances resilience. It isn't the same thing as resilience, and resilience doesn't necessarily promote ataraxia. Ataraxia reduces the background noise which causes undue stress, anxiety and panic, so when a challenging event occurs you're more able to assess the situation and respond effectively.

The list in the article of how to build resilience strikes me as more Aristotelian than Epicurean. Some of the items overlap, such as friendship, self-care, seeking help, and healthy thoughts. What healthy thoughts are, of course, depends on your overarching philosophy. Purpose and meaning, at least for me, can be a gateway to virtue ethics or duty ethics. From my experience these add to the background noise, largely because duty and virtue are nebulous mental constructs. Living with pleasure ethics, on the other hand, you become sensitive to how your feelings are guiding you in a particular situation and, from there, can apply reasoning as to how best to deal with the situation given the pleasure or pain that it brings.

I like where I think burninglights is going with this.

One question to add into the mix of classifying pleasures into two types: how would a pleasure that doesn't fulfill a desire be classified? If active/passive, moving/still, fulfilling/fulfilled desires relate to k/k, where do pleasures like happening across a pleasant smelling flower, or feeling warm sunshine on a cool day fall in terms of k/k? I think of these as passive, moving (in that they're fleeting), and unrelated to desire. To me, these are kinetic, but I'm not sure how they relate to Cassius ' question 2:

Quote from Cassius

2 - Are (1) and (2) the the *only* type of pleasures, or are there (3) other activities / actions / conditions that also fall within pleasure which are not related to desires being acted toward or being fulfilled?