Episode 319 - Is the Key To Happiness Found In Supernatural Causes and Geometry?
Welcome to Episode 319 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.
Last week we completed our series on Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations,” and this week we start a new series that will help us with canonics / epistemology. We will eventually move to Philodemus’ “On Signs” / “On Methods of Inference,” and when we do we will refer to David Sedley’s article on “On Signs,” and the appendix in the translation prepared by Philip Lacey, both of which are very good but difficult.
To get us acclimated to the issues, we need a little more Cicero from his work “Academic Questions.” This is much shorter than On Ends and Tusculan Disputations but gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and shows how Aristotle and the Stoics (and Epicurus) responded to those controversies.
Once we get that overview we’ll be prepared to tackle Philodemus and get a deeper explanation of the Epicurean view. This week will will start with a general introduction and get into Section 1.
Out text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:
Transcript (Unedited)
Section titled “Transcript (Unedited)”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 319 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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 text 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 this study of epicurus@epicureandfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. Those who’ve been listening to our podcast over the last year might well think this is the Tus and Disputations podcast or that it’s the Cicero podcast. And as we start a new series this week, it’s going to seem pretty similar because we’re going to go through a series of discussions on Cicero’s academic questions before we come back to one of the primary epicurean texts such as Phil Edemas on Signs or something else that gets us into epicurean canons.
We’re going to make an excursion first into the relatively short book called Academic Questions because that is going to give us a summary prepared by Cicero from the best sources available at the height of the Roman Republic of the schools of thought that had been pursued by the greatest of the Greek philosophers up to that time. Academic questions as a title does not really tell you what the discussion is all about, but as we’ll begin to get into today, he’s referring to the Academy of Plato and the development of the Central River of Greek thought from Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato Aristotle down to the stoics, largely with the exclusion of Epicurus because of all of the names that are associated with these core Greek philosophers. It is Epicurus who most strongly deviated from many of the conclusions that these other philosophers had reached. Epicurus spoke about many of the same subjects because that’s what everyone was talking about, but in many situations Epicurus had a very different answer from the others, and in order for us to understand Epicurus answers, we need to understand what the others were saying and why the others were fighting among themselves.
What had happened from Pythagoras and the earlier philosophies up to this point to cause the schools to split apart over issues that can seem to be obscure to us today, but were held to be extremely important back in that period of time. One way of getting at what we are doing right now is to recall that in practical terms, it is the goal of most people certainly including those of us on this podcast, to live happily and in that regard, I remember earlier in my reading of Epicurus going to the Epicurus reader from Inward and Gerson and reading the introduction to that book which was prepared by DH Hutchison and it starts out this way. Do you want to be happy? Of course you do. Then what’s standing in your way? Your happiness is entirely up to you. This has been revealed to us by a man of divine serenity and wisdom who spent his life among us and showed us by his personal example and by his teaching the path to redemption from unhappiness.
His name was Epicurus and Hutchinson says, this is the sort of thing you might’ve heard an epicurean preaching in the market square of an ancient city. If it sounds like a religious message, that’s no coincidence. Epicurus was revered by his followers as though divine a sage who had answers to all the important questions of life. What attracted converts was the prospect of personal happiness for which Epicurus offered clear philosophical advice. Now proceeding on from there, the first question that came to my mind then and stays with me to today is what does it mean to be happy? Can we presume that everyone understands the word happy in the same way? Is it a universal goal of all men to be happy? And if it is, how do we understand that goal? Basically what is the meaning of being happy? And there’s a tremendous number of different ways of approaching that question and giving some kind of a definition or explanation of what it means to be happy.
But in that context, my mind always immediately flips over to the statement ofo of oiler in which he addresses the subject of happiness. And in fragment 32, his exact quote is this quote, if gentlemen, the pointed issue between these people and us involved inquiry into what is the means of happiness? And they wanted to say the virtues, which would actually be true. It would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness, but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature? I say both now and always shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greek that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life. While the virtues which are inopportune messed about by these people being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end are in no way an end but the means to the end.
So I’ve always thought that was a very eloquent way of dogen of or ander pointing out very sharply that we don’t even know what happiness means and we first have to dig into the background of deciding what happiness means before we can even talk about how to proceed towards the goal. If we don’t understand what the goal is, there’s no way we’re ever going to reach it by playing around with techniques that have not been defined and understood in the context of the goal. And that brings us to our decision to proceed from the series of episodes we’ve had on ethics through Tus Gun Disputations back into this new book Academic Questions, which is going to examine the background that led to the varying positions on the ethics that we’ve discussed in Tus and Disputations. And then once we do that, we’ll be in a position to understand the more detailed explanation that Phil Edemas gives us in own signs once we see the context in which these issues are being debated.
Now as we get started in book one of academic questions, we need to set up for you who is speaking because as usual, Cicero is going to enlist the fiction of a number of different speakers being involved just as he did in own ends where he allowed Quata to speak for Epicurus. In this book he has basically two main characters himself and Varo who are representing the different viewpoints, and he’s going to talk about where these viewpoints came from and it will help if we spend a few minutes talking about the general context of the discussion that Cicero presents.
Joshua:
That’s right, Cassius, we have before us another dialogue of Cicero. What we encountered in cul and Disputations was actually one of his weaker dialogues in the sense that the interlocutor who we refer to as the students in the course of that text has a very limited speaking role. And what we’re going to find in this text is that the other speakers, and particularly Varo who we haven’t really encountered before is that Varo is going to have a significant amount to say. So let’s read the first paragraph here just to set the stage for what’s happening. And this is Cicero speaking. In the first paragraph he says, when a short time ago, my friend Atticus, and that’s Titus Pomp, Atticus the Epicurean, when Atticus was with me at my villa in the district of Qai news was sent us by Marcus Varo that he had arrived in Rome the day before in the evening and that if he had not found himself too tired after his journey, he should have proceeded at once to see us.
But when we heard this, we thought that we ought not to suffer anything to delay our seeing a man so intimately connected with us by an identity of studies and by a very longstanding intimacy and friendship. And so we set out at once to go to see him and when we were no great distance from his villa, we saw him coming towards us. And when we had embraced him as the manner of friends is after some time we accompanied him back to his villa. And as I was asking a few questions and inquiring what was the news at Rome, Atticus interjected, nevermind those things which we can neither inquire about nor hear of without vation, but ask him rather whether he has written anything new. The muse of varo has been silent much longer than usual, though I rather suppose he is suppressing for a time what he has written than that he has really been idle.
You were quite wrong, said varo for I think it very foolish conduct in a man to write what he wishes to have concealed. But I have a great work on hand where I have been a long time preparing a treatise, which I’ve dedicated to my friend here, meaning me, Cicero, which is of great importance and is being polished of by me with a good deal of care. Now at this point, Cicero responds to what Varo has just said, Cicero replies, I have been waiting to see it your manuscript. I’ve been waiting to see your manuscript a long time Varo, but still I have not ventured to ask for it. For I heard from our friend Libo, with who Zeal you are well acquainted for I can never conceal anything of that kind that you have not been slacking in the business but are expending a great deal of care on it and in fact never put it out of your hands, but it has never hither to come into my mind to ask you about it.
However, now since I’ve begun to commit to a durable record, those things which I learned in your company and to illustrate in the Latin language that ancient philosophy which originated with Socrates, I must ask you why it is that while you write on so many subjects, you pass over this one, especially when you yourself are very eminent in it. And when that study and indeed the whole subject is far superior in importance to all other arts and studies, so what we’ve found out is Cicero and Atticus who were close friends, we’re waiting at Cicero’s Villa Kuai, they receive news that their mutual friend Varo has arrived at Rome and they immediately make way to go and see him and talk with him about the news of the world, what’s going on in Rome, what’s going on in the wider Mediterranean sphere, but they also want to know what’s going on in his literary life.
What are you working on? What are you writing right now that we can talk about in part as we get a glimpse here from Atticus in part to take our minds off of the things that we cannot think about without vaccination, we can’t think about what’s going on in the city, we can’t think about the political climate in Rome without causing ourselves mental anxiety. So let’s take our minds off that and let’s put it onto literature and philosophy and this is VA’s response. He says, you are asking me about a matter on which I have often deliberated and frequently revolved in my mind, and therefore I will answer you without any hesitation still. However, speaking quite offhand, because I have, as I said just now thought over the subject both deeply and frequently as I saw that philosophy had been explained with great care in the Greek language, I thought that if any of our countrymen were engrossed by the study of it who were well versed in Greek literature, they would be more likely to read Greek treatises than Latin ones.
But that those men who were averse to Greek science and to the schools of the Greek philosophers would not care the least for such matters as these which could not be understood at all without some acquaintance with Greek literature. And therefore, I did not choose to write treatises which un lorded men could not understand and learned men would not be at the trouble of reading. And you yourself are aware of this, for you have learned that we cannot resemble arminius or rubius who without any art discuss matters which come before the eyes of everyone in plain ordinary language, giving no accurate definitions, making no divisions, drawing, no inferences by well-directed questions, and who appear to think that there is no such thing as any art of speaking or disputing, but we and obedience to the precepts of the logicians and of orators also as if they were positive laws.
Since our countrymen consider skill in each of these branches to be a virtue are compelled to use words, although they may be new ones, which learned men, as I’ve said before, will prefer taking from the Greeks and which unlearned men will not receive even from us so that all our labor may be undertaken in vain. But now if I approved of the doctrines of Epicurus that is to save Democrats, I could write of natural philosophy and as plain a style as arminius for what is the great difficulty when you have put an end to all efficient causes in speaking of the fortuitous concourse of Corp Puskis, this is the name he gives to Adams. You know, our system of natural philosophy, which depends upon the two principles, the efficient cause and the subject matter out of which the efficient cause forms and produces what it does produce for. We must have recourse to geometry since if we do not, in what words will anyone be able to enunciate the principles he wishes or whom will he be able to cause to comprehend those assertions about life and manners and desiring and avoiding such and such things.
Cassius:
Joshua, thanks for reading what you’ve read so far. You’re stopping at the moment in the middle of section two before we move on to the second part of section two in which he says things about Epicurus that are going to be even more significant for us to deal with than what’s been said so far. But the bottom line is that Cicero is setting up this discussion with Varo who is going to represent basically the old academy and the traditional mainline view in which may be one of the most important aspects for this. Part of our conversation is that Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had held that knowledge is indeed possible in a certain way, not directly through the census without the assistance of logic, but as you’ve just read from varo through the use of geometry and the manipulation of words and concepts that do not have the ability to be tied directly to a sensation or a faculty given to us by nature.
That’s behind the reference to geometry here, but what we’re going to be addressing is that both Varo and Cicero are going to be taking the position that they cannot explain things in extremely simple and superficial terms as they accuse the epicurean of doing when they refer to ammo or rubious, they’re talking about epicurean, who they’re accusing of being overly simplistic and thinking that the census can give them access to truth. But one of the most important things of what you’ve read so far is this statement about the different perspectives that are involved in analyzing causes, whether in fact there is an external cause that operates upon matter and gives meaning and mission and goals to everything, or whether from the viewpoint of Democrats or Epicurus, the atoms themselves are without any prior cause that the atoms themselves are eternally existing and that all that happens arises from the properties and motions of the atoms through space.
That’s a huge difference in perspective that is being identified here at the front of this discussion as it deserves to be because that divide about whether there is some other worldly force that is controlling this world or whether this world operates on its own devices and methodology is going to determine ultimately your conclusion about what happiness means, how to live your life, everything about your life, whether everything that you see around you is an illusion or not, what is in fact really real. And in this first section, Varo has said that’s why we have geometry to tell us what is really real and that has profound implications for all other decisions that will follow after that. I
Joshua:
Think our main takeaway point today, Cassius needs to be in highlighting the profound differences in thought in procedure that existed between the academy and the Epicureans. Sort of the myth of the modern view of Epicureanism is that its main antagonist was the school of the stoics, the school of Zeno. That is a view that the early Epicureans would not have understood, not only in part because stoicism came later than Epicureanism, not by much but a little bit later, and that for Epicurus, what he’s really responding to in his own time were the claims of the academy. The academy was the Goliath that needed to be brought down. It was the driving force in Greek philosophy and Epicurus his own lifetime. And from Epicurus point of view, it had gotten quite a lot of things wrong, almost everything of importance. Interestingly enough, it’s interesting that people can arrive at such wildly different conclusions, but the differences that exist between the conclusions that Plato drew and that Epicurus drew, it’s a chasm of difference that separates them and part of our project is to analyze that difference, to figure out why it exists and to figure out if we can, what is the significance of that for us because neither Platonism nor Epicureanism are really dead.
These are philosophies that continue to exist and continue to inform opinions and actions and the lives of people today and they continue to do so after having morphed in surprising ways throughout history. For example, one of the things we’re going to find is that a lot of what we encounter from the academy is going to resurface throughout the history of Christianity because Christian doctrine found Platonism to be very palatable while it found epicureanism to be abhorrent. So that’s going to color the story of this as we go through it.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, and it’s probably important to immediately point out why the Christians found Platonism and stoicism more palatable than they did Epicurus, and of course the obvious answer to at least part of it is that Epicurus held that there is no external causation beyond the world itself to explain how matter operates and how life is formed and how human affairs go on through their courses without the supervision of any kind of God. Obviously they’re going to object to the simple conclusion that there is no supernatural God. But there’s another aspect of it as well, which we’re already almost into in this discussion, which is just simply the question of whether there really is an answer to these questions or not. In a sense, when you start with Pythagoras and Plato, even though they did not recognize the efficiency of the senses as does Epicurus, they did hold that knowledge of a certain kind was possible.
Now for them, Pythagoras and Plato geometry and these abstract sciences that don’t connect to the senses but have an internal logic of their own, those are sufficient to produce knowledge. It’s just that not everybody can do that. You have to be a specialist in order to do it, but at least to some extent they did have an idea that there are answers to certain questions and in that respect, the stoics and the epicurean had some similarity with them in that both Epicurus and the stoics believed that there are ways to determine answers to at least some questions. They did believe that some knowledge is possible even though they very greatly and how to obtain that knowledge. What we’re going to find as we go through the book further, Cicero himself here in this book is going to speak for the developing questioning of skepticism that of course is identified with piro but also just simply takes the position that it is simply impossible to come to an answer to any of these questions and we therefore cannot answer them and we just have to take whatever comfort we can in saying that some things are more probable than others.
So one of the real themes that we’re going to be talking about as we go through academic questions is going to be this question of skepticism, but the question of skepticism is tightly related to this issue of what is the true nature of the universe and whether there is any way for us to have confidence about the true nature of the universe. When you believe that there is an external force operating on matter to which your senses do not give you direct contact, you either have to throw up your hands and say there is no real answer, or you have to say that there’s a science or religion of things like geometry and divine revelation that give you contact with those things. So there’s a number of different questions rotating around what we’re talking about, but here in the beginning, Varo is pointing out that Epicurus stands over here to the side saying that the entire discussion about other worldly affairs makes no sense. While everybody else is going to talk about other worldly forces and say that through geometry or some other specialized technique we can have contact with it.
Joshua:
The feeling that I get as we stand on the threshold of this tradition that goes from pythagoreous all the way through Platonism and Aristotelian and the stoics is that it kind of feels like entering a funhouse of mirrors or whatever they’re called where reality is presented to you in a way that it’s not just that it’s misleading and it can’t be trusted, it’s that it’s actively trying to trick you. In the republic, Socrates uses the examples that in your ascent to the heavens and you’re ascent to the world of pure being and you’re ascent to the realm of the forms, the senses are a kind of gross material that weigh you down, that tie you to the earth and you’re trying to sever those ties because what they’re presenting to you is fundamentally a lot. So it’s important to have that in mind. You say that even in the old academy, it’s not total skepticism, it’s not total rejection of all knowledge that these people, Cicero as well as Varo and Plato and the others, that they are allowing for some things to be knowable, some things to be graspable, and that is true, but it is nevertheless important to reiterate what a weird alien world we are entering.
This is the world of Zeno, Valle and his paradoxes, right? The world where in a foot race between swift footed, Achilles and the tortoise, Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise so long as the tortoise has any amount of a headstart because before Achilles has gotten halfway to where the tortoise was at the start of the race, the tortoise will have moved and then Achilles has to go halfway to where the tortoise is now, but in the meantime, the tortoise is still moving. And so what this paradox is attempting to demonstrate is that it doesn’t matter how much time you give Achilles according to this procedure of taking half of the length that you need to go and then taking half of the remaining length after you take that half, Achilles is not getting anywhere and he is certainly never going to catch up to the tortoise.
It’s beyond clear that he’s never going to reach the finish line of this race. Neither of the tortoise nor Achilles are ever going to get to the finish line. This is the weird funhouse mirror world that we’re entering when we entered the school of Ris and Plato and Socrates and those that think like them when the rejection of sensation as a method of inquiry means everything that you think is a lie and much of what you think is the lie turns out to be certain truth. It’s clear to me now that this episode is not going to be anything more than most generalized overview of what the main questions are, but I think it’s important to keep those main questions in mind.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, let’s talk a little further about your House of Mirrors analogy because I think that is a really good one here. Houses of mirrors can be lots of fun when you go to the fair, when you go to a circus, when you understand that there’s a game involved here that you’re going to eventually walk out of the House of mirrors and return to real life having enjoyed the process of seeing the distortions in the house of mirrors but not living within the house of mirrors. And I think it’s important to think about the fact that these games such as the tortoise and the hare, the argument that motion is impossible, that it’s impossible to walk across a room. There’s a strong analogy to a House of mirrors experience, but the important thing about the House of Mirrors is that you’re going to exit the House of mirrors and live life in reality when the fun is over.
And to a significant extent, the advocates of the House of Mirrors analogies and philosophy don’t want you to ever leave that house of mirrors. They want you to accept as a conclusion that your senses cannot tell you what reality is. They want you to feel like you are trapped in that house of mirrors forever and that only they as your guide are going to be competent to help you deal with that. They’re not trying to give you a new method of understanding the world that will then allow you to live more happily. They’re trying to destroy your confidence in what nature has given you through the sense to live your life. It’s not a game. Philosophy can be deadly earnest. If your ability to have confidence in the sense and your ability to have confidence to live your life is destroyed by their word games.
I would submit that these other advocates of these word games, they didn’t really expect you to believe that it’s impossible to walk across the room. They didn’t really expect you to believe that it’s impossible to move because you are always moving halfway and you’re never getting to a destination. Their goal is to undermine your ability to use logic and reason along with the senses, to arrive at a practical way of living life. And I think that’s what Epicurus is attempting to deal with. He knows that you’re going to be confronted with these word games. He knows that most people are not professional philosophers and willing or able to spend the time to unravel them. He’s going to give you the key to understanding that they are not something to worry about in the first place, that they’re not some profound truth. They’re not some divine revelation of another world that is superior to ours.
They’re basically nonsense. And the confident ability to dismiss these allegations as nonsense is essential if you’re going to live happily. We’re not going to go further today in reading additional texts, but let me add the one sentence that we’re going to come back to next week. The last thing you read was, well, we must have recourse to geometry since if we do not, in what words will anyone be able to enunciate the principles he wishes or whom will he be able to cause to comprehend those assertions about life and manners and desiring and avoiding and such things? And here’s the next sentence for those men referring to the epicureans are so simple as to think that the good of a sheep and of a man are the same thing. That’s what we’re going to come back and spend a lot of time talking about next week.
But that is a good way of stating the question, what is the good of a man? What is a man? What is a sheep? Is the good of a man the same as the good of a sheep or is it totally different? And the answer to that question has to be based on an analysis of whether a man is a semi divine being who partakes of some fire from an other worldly source or whether he’s essentially like a sheep and like everything else made up of Adams moving through the void in a natural universe, you can’t answer the question of whether the good of a sheep and the good of a man are the same thing without taking a position on the nature of the universe. And you can’t take a position on the nature of the universe if you say, well, no knowledge is possible.
It’s impossible to take a position on anything. So how can I ever determine whether the good of a sheep and the good of a man is the same thing or not? You’re immersed in a world of mirrors in which there is no obvious reality. And that analogy, which sounds an awful lot like Plato’s cave analogy has to be dealt with. Is there a reality that you can get in touch with by listening to an expert philosopher or an expert scientist technician who can take you by the hand and lead you out of the cave into this true world of sunlight and wisdom outside this world? Or is there a way for you to understand what’s going on in this world where you live that does not require you to give up your senses and give up your judgment and trust someone who may or may not have your best interest at heart?
Joshua:
Well, the point that you’ve arrived at there, Cassius, I think is where we were headed all along, which is we have been talking about this Pythagorean and Platonist funhouse of mirrors, but it really is the view of people like Plato and Socrates that for us the equivalent of that is the cave. We are in the cave, we are sitting on the floor of the cave and there is a recess in the wall of the cave behind us. On the edge of that recess is a series of figurines, and then deep back into the recess, there’s a light or a fire. And so the light casts the shadows of the figurines onto the wall of the cave in front of us, and that’s our world. That’s the world of change. This is why we’re talking about going all the way back to Pys, but we have to clue people like Peric colitis whose idea was that you cannot step into the same river twice.
That part of the problem with nature and the problem with sensation is that nature constantly changes and it’s this constant flux in nature that is the reason the senses are unreliable, and it’s the reason that knowledge is so hard to attain from a skeptical point of view. So I mentioned earlier, according to people like Plato, it’s the senses that are lying to you. It’s the senses that are not the key to gaining empirical knowledge about nature. The senses are lying to you about nature and deceiving you about nature, and that’s what’s happening in the cave. You’ve got the cave wall in front of you with the light and the shadows just playing across its surface and from Socrates and Play-Doh, their point of view is that is the world of living experience. That is the world of living experience for every person in the world.
You look around you in whatever room you’re sitting in right now in the car you’re driving in, you notice the changes, you notice the flux, and you realize that for someone like Plato, this world is the world of the lie. We’ve entered the matrix now and we are being deceived by the very tools with which one would think biology has equipped us to ferret out true information about the world that we’re living in, but it’s false information and that what we really need if we want to get out of the cave is geometry. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates as a very famous line, he says, the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for knowledge of the eternal. We are surrounded by the ephemeral, we’re surrounded by the flux, but we’re looking for something stable and steady, something we can hold onto, and that is only to be found in the realm of the perfect, pure, unchanging, stable world of being.
The world of the forms and sensation will never get you there. Sensation is an obstacle when it comes to approaching that perfect real. So that’s the point. We look at their philosophy and we say it’s a fun house of mirrors. They look at us and they say, you are groping around in the dirt in a cave, and you think that the world of your limited myopic experience is all there is and there’s nothing more pathetic than that. And so those are the stakes. As we go through this text, we’re going to encounter that there are arguments on almost every field, every topic under consideration. We’re going to realize that the epicureans and the blatantness were opposed to each other, but this is the central core of that opposition.
Cassius:
Joshua, that’s a very good summary of the situation. It can be very frustrating, but when people start studying epicurean philosophy nowadays, we live in a world where things mostly are going fairly well for us, and so when we pick up a book on Epicurean philosophy, going back to where we started our discussion today, you pick up a book on Epicurean philosophy like the Epicurus Reader, and it starts out with a discussion of do you want to be happy? Of course you do. What’s standing in your way? Let’s talk about how to be happy. Well, that’s not the way it was approached in the time of Epicurus because he had this context of debate going on in which even a relatively young and new student understood like dogen of lander, that the question is not how to be happy. The question is, what is happiness? We’ll discuss how to get there.
Once we’ve established what it means to be happy and establishing what it means to be happy is a matter of getting to the bottom of the way the universe really operates. Is there really a supernatural purpose, a supernatural force that steers everything because if there is you darn well, better do everything you can to align yourself with that. Or as Epicurus said, does the universe operate naturally without a supernatural force so that you can discard any concern about arbitrary capricious out of your control, supernatural forces and get down to the business of living happily as nature has provided not as a supernatural force has provided? That’s really the starting point of the discussion and only when you answer those basic issues about the way the world operates, can you move to the practical question of how best to carry out and get to their own goal?
Shouting the question is not what is the means to happiness. It’s not how is virtue going to get you to happiness? The question is, what is happiness? What is virtue and how you identify your own nature and your own goal in the absence of supernatural guidance? Before we close today, Joshua, we can anticipate that some people out there might be thinking about the question of whether Epicurus himself does provide an answer to that question of what is happiness, and we’ll be discussing that as we proceed, but do you have any thoughts already? We’ve raised the dispute about how to define happiness and whether there can be an answer to the question. What direction do you think Epicurus took for that?
Joshua:
That’s a huge question, but the thing that stands out for me is that Epicurus often expresses things in negative terms. It is not such and such and such. He’s not saying, thou shalt do this or thou shalt not do that, or whatever. When I look at the letter to Menkis, the paragraph that stands out to me is the 1 32, which is controversial and is going to need some explaining before it’s taken at face value. But once you’ve understood what he’s really saying here, I think that it makes clear the kind of work that we need to do. In Section 1 32, Epicurus says this, for it is not continuous drinkings and reveling nor the satisfaction of lust nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the grounds for all choice and avoidance and banishing mere opinions to which are due.
The greatest disturbance of the spirit of all this, he says, the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Where for prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy. Where from prudence are sprung all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly nor again to live a life of prudence. Honor and justice without living pleasantly for the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life and the pleasant life is inseparable from them. Okay, someone who knew me quite well might wonder why I have chosen section 1 32 and not Section 1 29. Section 1 29 reads this way and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life where we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us and from pleasure. We begin every active choice and avoidance and to pleasure.
We return again using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good and since pleasure is the first good and natural to us. For this reason, we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them and similarly, we think many pains better than pleasures. Since a greater pleasure comes to us and we have endured pains for a long time, every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good. Yet not every pleasure is to be chosen even as every pain is also an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided and would seem to be upon a superficial examination. The one that someone like me especially would argue for is the best from this letter, the best example of the happy life, but in section 1 32, we get a much broader foundation for what that life looks like.
He says in the beginning that we dispense with drinkings and reveling and luxuries and so on even though they are pleasures, but what we’re really looking for is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds for all choice and avoidance, banishing mere opinions to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit and we’re looking to cultivate prudence or what he also refers to as esis practical wisdom, the kind of good sense that helps you navigate difficult situations. But here we have the idea pleasure is the good pleasure is to be pursued, and while he does say it’s not continuous drinking bouts and reveling, we are looking for the pleasant life and the pleasant life. Properly considered for epicurus is one that is marked by a thoughtful philosophical approach, sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance. We are not just throwing ourselves into the ball pit of every pleasure that comes our way.
We are not just consuming everything that we can consume for the sake of the delight and satisfaction that it gives us. We are living our lives as if there are consequences for the things that we choose and the things that we avoid, and we are living our lives in pursuit of the best foundation for a proper, complete and accurate understanding of nature and human life and we are discarding things that conflict with that. To me, this gets us close, this gets us close to a test of what we can describe as a happy life because it’s easy to say that pleasure is happiness or pleasure is the good, but immediately the question gets thrown back in our lab. What do you mean pleasure is happiness? What do you mean pleasure is the good, and here in section 1 32 we have a much more complete descriptions of the happy life.
Cassius:
I think you’ve done a very good job, Joshua there in answering that question as you came to a conclusion there, you were using the word test several times and I think that that’s really one of the keys to this Epicurus is providing us the tests of what happiness really comes down to in telling us to look to pleasure and pain, that we can’t simply live moment by moment in the immediate pain and pleasure of every experience because he tells us we specifically sometimes will have to choose pain in order to get more pleasure. The question becomes what is it you’re looking to as your guide and what is your test? And you’ve done a very good job of laying out how epicurus points to pleasure and pain and the faculties given to us by nature. The contrast that is so important to understand is what we have seen today even in the opening of academic questions that Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, even Aristotle, the main line of Greek philosophy, they’re looking to things not like pleasure and pain, which they think is the way sheep would live.
They’re telling you to look to geometry, to propositional logic, to syllogisms, to all sorts of word games that they think they can use to come to a reality that is outside of the senses and outside of this real world that we live in and that’s what the fight is going to be about. As we go through academic questions, we’re going to be brought up to speed to the point of the average 20-year-old Roman in 50 BC who will understand what people are arguing about and that way will be in a position to understand Epicurus is answer to these questions. We come back next week and continue to explore those questions. In the meantime, please drop by the Epicurean French forum and let us know if you have any comments about this episode. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.