Skip to content
Epicurus Today

Episode 102 - Corollaries to the Doctrines of Epicurus - Part Two

Date: 12/31/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2289-episode-one-hundred-two-corollaries-to-the-doctrines-part-two/

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

(Add summary here)

Transcript

Section titled “Transcript”

Welcome to episode 102 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the nature of things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum. We’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com. There you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics and we invite you to ask questions, make suggestions, and give us your reactions to the things you hear in our podcast. At this point in the podcast series we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of Lucretius’ poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we continue to examine a number of important corollaries to Epicurean doctrine. Now let’s listen to Joshua reading today’s text. By this time so much at least is plain that the intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body. We refuse to believe, however, that when pleasure is removed grief instantly ensues, excepting when perchance pain has taken the place of pleasure. But we think, on the contrary, that we experience joy on the passing away of pains, even though none of that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place. And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain. But as we are elated by the blessings to which we look forward, so we delight in those which we call to memory. Fools, however, are tormented by the recollection of misfortunes. Wise men rejoice in keeping fresh the thankful recollection of their past blessings. Now it is in the power of our wills to bury our adversity in almost unbroken forgetfulness, and to agreeably and sweetly remind ourselves of our prosperity. But when we look with penetration and concentration of thought upon things that are past, then, if those things are bad, grief usually ensues. If good, joy. What a noble and open and plain and straight avenue to a happy life! It being certain that nothing can be better for man than to be relieved of all pain and annoyance, and to have full enjoyment of the greatest pleasures both of mind and of body, do you not see how nothing is neglected which assists our life more easily to attain that which is its aim, the supreme good? Epicurus, the man whom you charge with being an extravagant devotee of pleasures, cries aloud that no one can live agreeably unless he lives a wise, moral, and righteous life, and that no one can live a wise, moral, and righteous life without living agreeably. It is not possible for a community to be happy when there is rebellion, nor for a house when its masters are at strife. Much less can a mind at disaccord and at strife with itself taste any portion of pleasure, undefiled and unimpeded. Nay, more, if the mind is always beset by desires and designs which are recalcitrant and irreconcilable, it can never see a moment’s rest or a moment’s peace. But if agreeableness of life is thwarted by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it inevitably be thwarted by the diseases of the mind? Now, the diseases of the mind are the measureless and false passions for riches, fame, power, and even for lustful pleasures. To these are added griefs, troubles, sorrows, which devour the mind and wear it away with anxiety. Because men do not comprehend that no pain should be felt in the mind, which is unconnected with an immediate or impending bodily pain. Nor indeed is there among fools anyone who is not sick with some one of these diseases. There is none, therefore, who is not wretched. Joshua, thank you for reading that for us today. We were coming back after a short episode last week because of the Christmas vacation in the United States. And I hope everyone has had a good holiday season so far and will continue to have one. We introduced the subject last week in our short episode of the issue of the relationship between mental and bodily pains and pleasures and how you compare the two, what their relationship is, and so forth. And it’s a very deep subject that has lots of implications to it that we can discuss today in much more detail since we now have Joshua back with us and have a panel of three to discuss it. So just as a reminder, the main thing that was stated last week was the fact that even though we hold that mental pleasures and pains spring from bodily pleasures and pains, the important thing to remember is that it does not follow that pleasures and pains of the mind do not greatly surpass those of the body. Because with the body, we perceive only what’s present to us at the moment. But with the mind, we perceive the past and the future also. It’s certainly a common criticism of Epicurean philosophy that the pleasures of the body are all that Epicurus was ever concerned about. And we’re going to spend a lot of time here talking about how that’s just not true at all. So starting with line 56, Josh. Yeah, I’m just going to jump in with the first sentence. By this time, so much at least is plain that the intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body. And this is more or less a statement of what you just said. And it has to do is, as you just said, with the idea that because the pain and pleasure of the body is limited to the present, but the pains and pleasures of the mind extend all the way back in the past. And they extend infinitely forward in the future in terms of hope and fear and memory. So as we go through this, I think one of the challenges of this, as you rightly said, this controversial teaching is going to be wrangling with the idea that the mind has total power to, I don’t know how I want to put this, but that the mind has a power to govern and to control and to suppress the pain of the body. Right. The idea being that no matter what’s going wrong with your body, your mind has complete power to do that. That’s something we’ve tried to stay away from, isn’t it? I guess we have to be careful exactly the way we say it. You might have used the word suppress there. I guess the issue would be not that the mind can make the pains of the body go away, because if there’s a pain in the body, there’s a pain in the body, but that you can offset that with pleasure. You know, there’s so many general topics to discuss in a subject like this. One of the perspectives seems to me to be that he seems to acknowledge that your life is going to be sort of a bundle of pleasures and pains all the time. You’re not just one feeling at any particular moment. I think you’re always going to have certain aches and pains and pleasures, not only in your body, but also in your mind. And to some extent, it is a question of what you choose to focus upon. So you do have that level of control of what you choose to focus on. And in focusing, you can kind of make the other thing recede into the background. I guess you can do the same thing with pain. I guess if you choose to focus on the pain in your big toe, you can make the most magnificent pleasures kind of fade into the background. But to say that they can completely control that, that would be where we have to be careful, I guess. That’s certainly a stoic position is you can, through willpower, just dismiss everything else. Well, let me just say, here’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to decide if we should bring in the bronze bull of Phalaris here or if we should do it later, because that becomes an interesting exchange. And to be honest, I can’t remember where that exchange takes place. Is that? It’s somewhere in Cicero, I think, where he’s accusing Epicurus of having a position that a man inside the bronze bull could still be feeling pleasure. And I remember that DeWitt talks about that as an example. Does it also occur in Dogenes Lertius? Yes, there’s a phrase in Dogenes Lertius about a man under torture still being happier. There’s so many big picture issues that we have to set the table with, I guess, before we dive into the details. And I’m not even sure, going back to where we were last week and the week before, it almost seems like Epicurus is constantly dealing with errors. And he goes from one error to another, to another, to another. And the error that was in the last several sessions was that of thinking that virtue is the end of life rather than pleasure. And now he’s dealing with, I think, another error, that of thinking that the pleasures of the body are more important, by definition, than the pleasures of the mind. He may be distinguishing himself from the Cyreniacs as well. They didn’t take the position that pleasures of the body were the only thing. How do you guys distinguish the Cyreniac position from Epicurus’ position? I think it was both. So the Cyreniacs are focused on the present pleasure and the bodily pleasure. So it’s not about mental pleasure. Yeah, I don’t really know, to be honest with you. And that’s, I guess, an area where I need to do more reading. When I picture the Cyreniac idea, it’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you will die. So I don’t think they’ve cordoned off mental pleasures as having a particular importance in their hedonistic world. As you’re saying, I think it’s pleasures of the moment. It’s pleasures you can enjoy right now because tomorrow isn’t promised. And so I want to get to the bull as well. I mean, we can scan over what we’re talking about today, each of these paragraphs. And I do think they all seem to be focused on this issue of mental pleasure versus bodily pleasure. Does anybody see any other major topic in what we’re discussing in 56 through 59 other than this issue of mental versus bodily pleasure? There is an interesting couple of words at the end of the first sentence here. He says, when present for an equal space of time in the body. Isn’t there something in, I don’t know where it is, in one of the letters maybe, something about how a short space of time and a long space of time amount to the same thing if you judge that time by wisdom? You’re right. There’s that that says that something about a long discourse and a short discourse have the same goal or something like that. I’ve seen variations of that one, I think. There’s another Vatican saying about what is it? The same span of time is both the beginning and the end of the greatest good, which is which everybody has a hard time deciding what that’s about. And then there’s just the general comment that you don’t need an eternity to experience the best life. Let’s get that exactly right. That would be number 19. Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure. And 20 is basically the same point as well. So this issue of span of time is something that’s definitely significant. Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking about. That’s the one I was thinking about. Because what we’re skirting around here is the whole idea of the limit of pleasure and and all that. He doesn’t go into it in this passage, but it’s kind of background for everything he’s talking about here, it seems to me. Yeah. And he does even mention the part about what happens when you remove a pain. Does it immediately get replaced by a pleasure or not? And what is that type of pleasure? And he mentions in that section that it’s not the same type of pleasure necessarily that stimulates the senses. So we probably better hold that off, too. But I don’t want to ignore the bull any further. What you’re talking about, of course, is the analogy or the hypothetical about what happens to the wise man who is boiled alive inside of the bull, which is a torture mechanism, I understand, that they came up with at some point. And the question was, is a wise man going to be unhappy while he’s being tortured? Joshua, is that the general question about is that a decent statement of the general issue or how would you focus it? Yeah, yeah. So it’s a it’s a bronze bull. It’s made of metal. It has an opening on the side that locks somehow. So you put the criminal inside the bull and then you light a fire underneath of it and you can imagine the rest. And I guess it was invented in Athens and proposed to Phalaris, who was a tyrant king of Sicily. So that’s where the idea comes from. But the point is made whether it’s this bull or whether it’s any other painful death or torture mechanism. And so you bring in Epicurus’s death himself, who died of, I think, while passing kidney stones. Is that not it? That’s what I understand the situation to be. Yes. Right. So at the end of all these analogies, you have this basic problem, which is when you’re enduring terrible pain in the body. Are you still able, on balance, to live a happy life? Because you can still experience the pleasures of the mind if the mind has not been totally shattered by the pain. But the reason we bring up this particular analogy is because, as I think we’ve hinted at, this is a very controversial one. The idea that Epicurus would have claimed that you can be happy even under torture, that’s a very controversial idea, is it not? It is controversial, and it is what is stated in, I don’t have the line number, endogenes, laertius, but it’s after the letter to Pythocles, where he starts talking about the different things that the wise man will do. And this gets into your questions, is he talking about a sage, and what is a sage, and does everybody have the ability to be a sage, and things like that. But I think this is tied tightly to the philosophical debates that they were having about whether the wise man is, in fact, able to overcome all adversity through his wisdom or not. Because once you identify wisdom and virtue as the goal of life, and once you have that possession, then supposedly under their logic, nothing else can affect you. You’ve achieved the goal of life, and you are impervious to pain or to negative things because you attained the state of perfection that cannot be destroyed. Let me read the section from Diogenes, laertius. This is one part of it that I cite a lot. He’s talking about the wise man. He says, when once a man has attained wisdom, he no longer has any tendency contrary to it or willingly pretends that he has. He will be more deeply moved by feelings, but this will not prove an obstacle to wisdom. That’s a very controversial statement there, which I would always throw at those who think that Stoicism and Epicurus are the same. And he continues on, a man cannot become wise with every kind of physical constitution, nor in every nation. Boy, you could get some controversy out of that. But here’s the key sentence. And even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy. So Epicurus has stated, apparently publicly, that even under torture, the wise man is happy. And if I remember correctly, what Cicero does is ridicule that as if Epicurus is saying that the wise man is experiencing pleasure by being under torture. And Cicero says that’s obviously not true. Epicurus is absurd and on and on and on. You should therefore consider Epicurus to be an idiot because he’s taking a position that’s obviously not true. So that’s what I think you’re bringing up to discuss, Joshua, is that happy is a word that we’re going to have to focus on the definition of because the wise man is probably not experiencing complete pleasure while he is under torture. Now, he could be, I think where you’re going is he could be trying to offset that pain through the memory of better times and pleasures in the past and maybe even of the future. So the wise man under those conditions would attempt to offset his pain in that way. But can he will that pain completely away? I think the answer would be no. Yeah, I think I completely agree with you there. I don’t think it is possible to sort of just will it away, particularly under the kind of extreme torture that we’re talking about here. And Joshua, I’m doing you a disservice. I should have continued to read two more sentences. I’m sorry. It says, even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy. Only the wise man will show gratitude and will constantly speak well of his friends alike in their presence and their absence. And here’s the next part. Yet when he is on the rack, then he will cry out and lament. But there is a second sentence there that says when he’s under torture, he’s going to cry out in pain. He’s not going to ignore the pain. He’s not going to be able to ignore the pain. The way you read that, I don’t have the text in front of me, but are we sure that the second person there, it sounds to me like you’ve got the main guy who’s going to be happy on the rack, but he’s going to be in anxiety when his friends are in trouble. And when his friends are on the rack, he’s going to be crying out in agony. That’s the way I’m hearing that. That could either be true or it could be an artifact of my reading, or it just could be just totally a misreading by both of us of what he’s saying. When I look at this text, I don’t make that distinction, but you could easily be right. And so somebody trying to dig into this is going to have to look at that text and decide whether he has shifted the focus from himself or to his friends. I don’t guess, Martin, do you have any comment on that? No, I don’t have a comment on that one. Yeah. Joshua, I can certainly see why you have raised that point, because not the least of which is the division that occurs, and I think I’m reading from the Bailey version of this, that he seems to have inserted another thought in between that and the rack. So we’ll have to, for the purposes of the podcast today, hold that thought and come back to it when we have a chance to study it more deeply. But I wonder if you could say, what difference does it make? I wonder if you could say that the torture that somebody might be talking about would be watching somebody else being tortured. You could torture a wise man by torturing his friend. If the wise man does have that stoic reserve of total imperviousness to pain because of his wisdom, then that stoic wise man isn’t going to cry out when he himself is on the rack or when his friend is on the rack. It’s not going to make any difference, is it? Yeah, I can’t imagine any stoic would present the case that way. But that does seem to be the implication, doesn’t it, of the whole structure of the philosophy. But, of course, I’m not well read in the philosophy enough. You’re talking about stoicism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is not, like I said, this isn’t the face of themselves that they would put forward, right? That they’re such bad friends that even if their friends were being tortured, they wouldn’t care. Well, I don’t want us to go too far back off into discussing stoicism, but I think that this would be an area that if you had some stoics here in our panel, which hopefully we’ll never have. But if we had some stoics here on the panel, you’d probably have the modern stoic versus the ancient stoic. And I think where you’re coming from, Joshua, is you’re saying that a modern stoic would not want to say that. But I do believe that an ancient stoic would say that and did say that. They took their philosophy to its logical conclusions that virtue and wisdom are the only thing worth having in life. And when you have those, you don’t need anything else whatsoever. And you won’t be affected by anything else. And so I think they would say that their stoic wise man is impervious to bodily pain or even mental pain because he has virtue and virtue is complete in and of itself. At least I think that’s what Epicurus would have been familiar with as the position of a blatantist who was logically carrying out his thoughts. Yeah, I don’t doubt that because there are other traditions in the world where I remember reading a story in Buddhism once where this young person went to live with a group of monks under a bridge or something, and they were living in abject poverty. And then one of the older practitioners died. And then the other monk said to the new monk, well, we don’t have to go begging for food today because he’s left some there. And the new monk immediately threw up, right, because he didn’t want to eat the dead man’s food. And then the older monk who was still living said, get out of here. You know, if you’re not willing to become indifferent to this kind of thing, you’re not going to make it. I think that’s a good illustration, Joshua. And I think that this is an issue that we regularly run into with people as we’re discussing Epicurean philosophy is that they tend to approach it from a very practical point of view, a very modern point of view. And they’re looking at this and they’re seeing Epicure is talking about how to compare bodily pain to mental pain. And they’re looking for some kind of a self-help psychology mechanism that will help them fine tune their own life to be as happy as possible. And I do think that that’s there. But I think that when you get really rigorous about philosophy, you’re going to have an ancient stoic lined up against your Buddhist example. And I think you’d have an Epicurean example as well of people who are really mentally looking out at what they think are the logical conclusions of their philosophy. And that Buddhist example is perfect. If you’re rigorously going to be a Buddhist, then you’re not going to have any concern about where that food came from. So what is the conclusion that we draw from the bull and torture? As I think you kind of haphazardly summarized just there, we had this discussion about the modern stoics versus the ancient stoics. Yeah, I do believe that the ancient stoics would take the course of indifference while their friends were being tortured because I have this other example. One thing I want to talk about a little bit here, because you don’t see much of it in this passage from Cicero, it’s the passage all seems to have to do with how to respond when things go horribly wrong. Like when you’re being tortured or your friends are being tortured, but it doesn’t offer any sort of prophylactic, you know, a way to live your life to where you can sort of pen off most of these troubles. And probably that’s on purpose because you can’t fence off all problems forever. But it’s nice to look at those as well. I think look at ways where you can sort of protect yourself from the kind of problems that we’re talking about here, because what you want is what he says in section 18. What a noble and open and plain and straight avenue to a happy life. Certainly we want a happy life. So how do we get it, Cassius? Right. And I think that the answer to where you’re going with that is that Epicurus is telling us as children, as babies, as small animals, we all pursue pleasure and instinctively know that that’s the right thing to do along with avoiding pain. What causes most of our troubles is that we make mistakes and get led off on different paths about what our goal really is. And he has started off this discussion with a long presentation of the error of the path of pursuing virtue instead of pleasure. And now he’s moved at he has established the point that it is, in fact, pleasure, just like you thought when you were a child. That is the goal. He now is going after the mistakes that some people make about how to pursue pleasure. And they need to realize, I think he’s saying in all of the sex, that the pleasures of the mind can be at least as important as the pleasures of the body. You know, I’m going to relate this to a discussion that is going on right now on the forum. We constantly talk about the issue of the gods and what role the gods have. And we get into the debate about whether the gods are real in terms of whether they do exist somewhere in the universe or whether they are just mental constructs. And that can be an interesting debate, but it’s probably not the real important issue. Number one important issue is that there’s no supernatural gods and we need to not worry about it. But I think what Epicurus is doing with the god situation as well is he’s talking about what you said a minute ago. What is the goal and how do you define the direction that you should be going in? And you don’t get to the happiest life just by sealing yourself in your cave with your water and your bread and your cheese. There are tremendous opportunities of all sorts of mental, emotional pleasures out there that can be pursued successfully if you pursue them intelligently. And so I would say that one issue that he’s addressing here in this section would be the mistake that some people are going to make, even Epicureans, especially people who consider themselves to be hedonists, which is a word that I really don’t like. People who focus on bodily pleasure and pleasures of the moment of the body in particular without thinking about not only the bad results of pursuing them sometimes, but the other opportunities that are available in terms of mental pleasures and opportunities. The issue of friendship is not necessarily a purely bodily issue. You can live bodily in your cave with bread and water for some degree of time, at least, without friends. But he’s constantly telling us that the pleasures that come through our friends are among the greatest that we can have. Those, I think, would be mental pleasures of relationships that clearly can and do surpass the pleasures of the body. You have to have food and water and drink and so forth to survive. But those alone are not sufficient to provide the happiest life. You need friendship and the other pleasures that come through the mind to really successfully be as happy as you might wish to be. So I would say that the majority of what he’s targeting here would be the issue that someone just focus on bodily pleasures and especially bodily pleasures of the moment as the meaning of life. Those people who just gluttons who pursue food, pursue alcohol, pursue the immediate attractions of the body that are, in fact, pleasurable for a period of time, but which bring with them pains that make them not worthwhile in the end for us. So let me just pick out a couple of other sentences. You read the first sentence. The second sentence that goes with it, we refuse to believe that when a pleasure is removed, grief instantly ensues, except when perchance pain has taken the place of pleasure. But we think, on the contrary, that we experience joy on the passing away of pains, even though not that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place. And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain. I think he’s talking about the way of looking at pleasure. You’re not just focused on immediate bodily stimulations, as people probably accuse the Epicureans of being. I’m kind of intrigued by 58 here. He says, It is not possible for a community to be happy when there is rebellion, nor for a house when its masters are in strife, much less can a mind that strife with itself taste any portion of pleasure, undefiled and unimpeded. So this framing here is very sort of common. It’s actually, there’s a passage in the Bible that says something like, a house divided against itself cannot stand. And then, of course, in his seminal speech, Abraham Lincoln used the same expression. What’s interesting in that case is that he’s starting with the house divided against itself and using that as a metaphor more broadly for the nation. Whereas what Torquatus is doing here is he’s using the community as a metaphor for the individual mind. Yes. So he’s going the reverse direction here. I don’t know if there’s anything to be made out of that, but it is interesting to notice. Yeah, it’s interesting to notice. And I think it’s pretty effective. I mean, I guess most of us have had enough experience to know, for example, in our own households, if the husband and wife or the members of the family are arguing with each other all the time, how unpleasant that can be. And how little can be accomplished when you’re constantly fighting with each other in any kind of a relationship situation. So I think we all understand how unproductive and bad that is. And so we then apply that to our minds. I guess the word cognitive dissonance comes to mind and so forth. That if your mind is constantly going in different directions, if you’re not sure of the direction you want to go in, if you’re constantly debating with yourself, if you’ve got analysis paralysis is, I guess, the phrase that people use. Then you never accomplish anything if you’re constantly at war in your own mind. And that doesn’t even address the issue of whether you’ve got these mental pains of worrying about something. If you’re just simply debating yourself about what direction you want to go between alternate good directions, pleasant directions, you’re never going to accomplish anything. You’ve got to be able to select from among the options before you before you can pursue one. Martin, we haven’t heard much from you today, too. I got to get you involved here. Sure. It’s probably because, Cathy, I don’t have something to say about it. Joshua, you were about to say something. Go ahead. Let me see if I can pick something else out of here. Well, he goes right on immediately after talking about the community divided against itself as a metaphor for the individual mind divided against itself. He goes on to say, but if agreeableness of life is thwarted by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it inevitably be thwarted by the diseases of the mind? And he goes on to say the diseases of the mind are the measureless and false passions for riches, fame, power, and even for lustful pleasures. To these erratic griefs, troubles, sorrows, which devour the mind and wear it away with anxiety. But what he doesn’t, I guess, at least I’m not seeing it here. One thing we have tried to sort of drive home, I think we talked about this at the end of the Lucretius discussion, was the kind of mental sickness that doesn’t come from a philosophical problem and can’t be solved by one. You’re talking about clinical issues of mental. Right. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that we read briefly when we were going back over to Diogenes Laertius. One of the things in that list of the wise man is that a man cannot become wise with every kind of physical constitution, nor in every nation. So I think Epicurus is not primarily a doctor, but he certainly would recognize that if you’ve got diseases of the mind that derive from the physical constitution of your particular mind, then you’re not going to be able to deal with those philosophically. You can’t heal a medical problem by thinking about it in most cases anyway. I guess that’s the direction you’re going. Yeah, more or less. Yeah. And so after we’ve had the discussion about these kind of clinical problems that arise in people’s minds, then he goes into these other issues of which I think, broadly speaking, things like greed and jealousy and grief and sorrow and anxiety. Those are broadly the main categories he’s talking about here. So what it partially becomes here in the end is how to sort of control the way you think, how to control the way you moderate your own desire and control the way that you respond to events that happen to you. And so what I’ve just said there will naturally invite a comparison to stoicism, but I don’t think it needs to. We all have to find a way to decide how our mind is going to respond to grief, for example. And what that doesn’t necessarily include is a presumptive indifference to grief. I don’t think that the agony of grief, in order to remove it, I don’t think it requires indifference. I think it requires a kind of mental and emotional healing. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I think you could say the same about troubles, sorrows and anxiety. Anxiety is, I think, a huge problem that a lot of people are suffering from. But the way to get around, well, I guess anxiety, that’s kind of what we were talking about there with, that borders on a clinical problem in the mind. But in all of these cases, there are measures that you can take. I shouldn’t say in all of these cases. But in most of these cases, there are measures that you can take to moderate your expectations, to try and balance these griefs and troubles with other pleasures and with long-term hopes. It’s possible, for example, if you’re unhappy in the situation you’re in, to use that to galvanize you to change the situation that you’re in. I don’t know. I’m bouncing around here. What do you have? Well, the very last thing you brought up is one of the big points as well, in that a Stoic or certain types of other Greek philosophers would say that it’s not possible for you to control any of those things. Because fate and determinism are so strong that you have no real control over anything that happens to you. And so the only thing you can do, therefore, is accept your fate and get used to it. And that leads, in my mind, to the words like indifference and apathy and so forth towards those things. I really see many of the things that you’re discussing, Josh, are coming back to that deeper question of the Stoic perspective of whether the mind can somehow, through devotion to virtue and focus on virtue, whether you can rise above all of these physical and real-world annoyances and thereby be impervious through your philosophy of willpower, basically. Versus Epicurus, I think, taking a very different perspective, that clearly your mind is an important part of reacting and preventing bad things from happening. But that’s when I was reading earlier the statement about the wise man will feel emotion more deeply, but it won’t be an obstacle to his wisdom. I think Epicurus is constantly saying to pay attention to the reality of your feelings, never suppress them, never ignore them, and just work with them and not against them. Working with them meaning that you understand that the truth is that virtue is not its own reward, that feeling ultimately is the only thing that matters in life, and that your goal is not to somehow mentally, through logic, overcome all of the feelings and emotions and pleasures and pains of life, but to understand how reality works and thereby maximize the agreeable aspects of life and minimize the disagreeable aspects of life. Your mind is the critical part about it because Epicurus says that the wise man is going to order through reason the majority of his life. Everybody understands Epicurus is not anti-reason or anti-mind, but he is realistic about what the mind can do and what it cannot do, which is where the Stoics and Platonists are just totally out of school by thinking that the mind is able to do things that Epicurus would say it just cannot do. Boy, this is a deep discussion today, and I think as we look back on it, when we finish it, it’s going to be one of those conversations that just leads to more conversations as opposed to being one where we can just put to rest that we think we’ve got Epicurus down pat. This one has so many implications to it that it’s hard to even categorize what the implications are. Yeah, what I’m noticing, this is a particularly difficult topic to speak about extemporaneously because you do have to be very careful in the way that you use your words when you’re talking about diseases of the mind and how you can solve them. We don’t want to appear to be offering clinical advice, but the philosophy does offer certain options on particularly choosing pleasures over pains, for example, which we call the hedonic calculus or choice and avoidance. So there are options, and like I said, it becomes difficult to talk about them and talk about diseases of the mind. Joshua, Joshua, how difficult can it be to talk about it when Epicurean philosophy – well, let me finish. When Epicurean philosophy can be summarized as what’s good is easy to get and what’s bad is easy to avoid. Isn’t that all you need to know, Joshua? That what’s bad is easy to avoid and what’s good is easy to get. Yeah, I’m not sure that immediately clears the clouds that are over us right away. I think there’s a little more that has to be drilled down into here. But that’s your point about it being difficult to talk about these things extemporaneously, and probably it’s Epicurus’ point about being able to think about things in outline form and in terms of the highest level principles is that – I don’t mean to ridicule the tetrapharmacon there, but it clearly is a very high-level summary and viewpoint to say that what’s good is easy to get and what’s bad is easy to avoid. That’s a very, very abstract viewpoint, and you have to look at each of those words and think about what each of those words might mean and how they come together and how you got to this point of discussing it in Epicurean philosophy in order to make any sense out of that so that you don’t look ridiculous even. That’s what Cicero does so effectively with the bull and with the torture example. He’s saying that Epicure says the wise man is going to be happy even when he’s under torture. Ha ha, how ridiculous he is. And if you don’t understand the background, then that becomes an effective argument. If you don’t have a response to it, you’re going to fall on your face philosophically when you try to respond. Cassius, I’m curious. Have you ever seen the show The Good Place? I cannot even identify what that could possibly be about, so no. It’s relatively recent, and it’s one of those shows I almost can’t believe it ever got made, but it’s turned out to be incredibly popular. Well, not popular enough that you’ve heard about it, but the premise of the show is you start with this character who has died, and allegedly she’s in The Good Place. And then as you go through, you find out more, but really the core, core essence of the show is this prolonged discussion of ethical and moral philosophy. And so one of the more famous passages in the show is they’re talking about the trolley problem, and there’s a professor of ethical and moral philosophy who’s rather wishy-washy on the subject. And because they are in The Good Place or in a realm where the supernatural is possible, the guy just snaps his fingers, and suddenly they’re on the trolley, and they’re bearing down on the people who are about to be killed. And I think that what you just said there, what Cicero did with the bull, that was like he snapped his fingers that, okay, we’re in the bull now. Show me how you can be happy when you’re under the most agonizing, imaginable torture that you can think of. Yeah, and it’s very effective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very, very rhetorically effective, yes. It’s almost as if Cicero was known for that kind of thing. It’s almost as if being a lawyer is not a totally good thing sometimes, as if blessings don’t always come from every interaction with a lawyer. But you’ve got to be able to respond to it. You used the analogy earlier of, or something you said prompted me to think about cliches about ignorance is bliss and so forth. A lot of problems in life, if you ignore them, they will not just go away. They will get worse and worse and worse, and they will destroy you in the end unless you deal with them. So this idea that you can just simply choose what to focus on, let’s see, that pain in my back, I’m going to choose to ignore it today. Well, maybe that pain in your back is the early signs of cancer or something. And if you don’t go to the doctor and you don’t deal with it, you’re going to end up dead because you didn’t deal with it. And you didn’t listen to the warning signs of the body at a particular time. So the idea that you suppress emotion, I’m going to throw this in here too. For those people who are familiar with Ayn Rand, one of her statements was, emotions are not tools of cognition, which a lot of her people will throw around a lot. Meaning essentially what the Stoics are saying is that you don’t learn things through your emotions. You really have to be very careful about your emotions. You need to put them to the side and keep them totally under control at all times. But depending on how you interpret that statement of hers, that’s terrible from an Epicurean perspective, I think. Because Epicurus is saying you listen to your emotions and you deal with them after listening to them. You don’t just suppress them. You don’t just ignore them. You take into account what they’re telling you. Just like you take into account when you see something, you may be nearsighted or you may have all sorts of other vision issues, but you just don’t ignore what you’re seeing. It’s reported truthfully to you through the census. And then what you do with it is what’s important. But to ignore the information is almost always going to be not a good thing. I’m really rambling on today, and I apologize. Mark, I’ve got to get you in here somewhere before we finish. On this question of, is the wise man happy while he is under torture? Do you have a way in your own mind that you unwind that kind of a question? Yeah. The thing is, we had some solution to this one in the past, but it doesn’t show up here now. The way it was resolved was that happiness was essentially the summary. So that means it was over the whole life, reviewing the whole life until then. And about this one is still happy. Okay, it comes to a tragic end, which is not pleasant. It’s an unpleasurable end, a very unpleasurable end. But he knows. So that with the minutes, he will probably, or now, okay, maybe several minutes, this torture will kill him. And then he’s dead. So that pain is intense and short. But all his life until then was pleasurable. So in the end, he still had a happy life. Yeah. And the way you stated it, in my mind, you’ve raised a lot of additional issues as well, one of which is this question of time and whether happiness is gauged solely as a matter of length of time or whether it’s gauged in some other way. But I think the basic point you’ve raised, which I would agree with, would be that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness is a much more abstract term that you have to think about what it really means to say that somebody is happy. You can say with a lot of degree of confidence whether you can look at somebody and say whether they’re experiencing pleasure at a particular moment or not. But to look at them and say whether that person is happy at that particular moment is a much different question, I think. Joshua, I bet you have something to say on that, too. About how to define happiness in a context like this. That’s got to be part of the answer to the question of whether the wise man is happy even while he is under torture. What does it mean to be happy? So my problem is that I’m sitting over here on this completely different tangent of thought where I’m thinking to myself, I’m thinking, you know what? If Jesus of Nazareth was happy when he was being tortured, doesn’t that kind of render that whole project rather cheap and tawdry? What’s the point of putting on this whole show? If in reality, he’s filled with joy when he’s undergoing the torture. How dare you raise a very practical and enlightening question like that in the middle of this conversation? Because I think that’s a very important observation. So now I’ve kind of forgotten where we are here. Well, we were talking about what it means to be happy when you’re in the bull, when you’re being tortured. And if indeed Epicurus said that the wise man is happy even when he’s under torture, what did Epicurus mean by saying that? That’s kind of the whole problem there. It’s so difficult to talk about because in the worst moments of the pain I’ve experienced, I’ve never ever experienced anything in any way approximate to the kind of pain that you would experience in the bull of, what do they call it, the bull of Phalaris. So it makes it difficult to talk about. Well, I’m sorry, but I have to say this at this particular moment. I think that’s one of the reasons why Epicurus defined the goal of life to be pleasure and not happiness, because happiness is something entirely different and much more difficult to talk about than is pleasure. But go ahead. I’m sorry. Now I’ve interrupted you. Do you still have your train of thought at all? Well, it’s no problem because my train of thought was more or less petering out as you interjected. So but the main point I want to say is precisely what I’ve said is that it’s very difficult to talk about torture because I can’t even begin to fathom. You know, I fell out of a tree when I was in eighth grade and I broke both bones in my wrist. I snapped it clean in half. My hand was kind of just loosely attached by sinew. You might want to cut that out. That’s kind of a gruesome image. But the point is, that was that’s the most pain I’ve ever felt in my life. And in no way is that pain in any way linked to the kind of pain that you experience when you’re undergoing torture. So I guess I just don’t know where to go from there. Well, I think you’re just illustrating why it is such a good hypothetical, which is kind of like that issue of the trolley barreling down the track. It helps to focus the mind on an extreme situation so that you can really have a gut check about what you think is really the right answer. And to me, the answer is that this is the error with defining happiness as the goal of life. In respect to my Greek friends, this would be the issue with eudaimonia or any other word that you want to come up with to try to summarize in a single concept what the goal of life would be. That’s where I am at this point after my few years of reading into Epicurus is I don’t think you can easily or at all conceptually state what the goal of life for everybody is. I think that’s where Epicurus was focusing on the feeling pleasure as being the good feeling as ultimately what you find when you drill down deep enough in any direction. Ultimately, happiness as an abstraction as a concept requires a lot of mental gymnastics to think about. And I think he’s saying that trying to conceptually in your mind identify a single concept that is so overriding that it is your ultimate goal. I think he’s saying that you started on the wrong path by even thinking you can do that. That you should stay on the path that nature has set at the beginning, which is listening to your feelings of pleasure and pain and then using your faculties as best you can to be as successful as you can in maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, including mental, including physical, all types of pleasure and pain. And in fact, that’s where I see myself going in that direction every time I talk about this. I think that this is why I understand the word hedonism. I understand it’s a Greek term. I understand that you have to play with vocabulary words and you have to play the cards you’re given. But when I think of the word hedonism, I don’t think Epicurus would have liked that word either as a summary of his philosophy. I think that when you talk about everything that’s important to you in life, you’re talking about the things that you take pleasure in. And you’re certainly not just limiting that to the things you eat or drink or feel, feel in the sense of touching at a particular moment. The most important things to us by being here in this podcast, the most important things to us in studying philosophy through Epicurus is realizing that our mental understanding of things is of prime importance to our pleasure in life. And if we don’t understand these things, then I think that’s one of the last statements in our text for today is that nor indeed is there among fools anyone who is not sick with some one of these diseases. There is none, therefore, who is not wretched. And the lesson that seems to me to be drilled home here is that a proper understanding of all these issues is critical to not being wretched, not being infected with one of these diseases. So I think the reconciliation of the man under torture is that obviously the man under torture at that moment is suffering a lot of pain and he’s going to cry out because of pain. But that doesn’t mean anything other than that, that he’s being tortured and he’s under pain. It doesn’t take away from the fact that prior to that point had available to him a lot of pleasure. And after he gets out of the torture, if he does, he’ll have more pleasure available to him. But it doesn’t change the facts of reality that a true understanding of the nature of the universe is that pleasure and pain are ultimately the driving forces. So he’s wise in understanding that pleasure and pain are the driving forces, even at the same moment that he’s under a lot of pain because he’s being tortured. Boy, what an episode this has been. So one thing I tried to articulate earlier, but I didn’t get very far in doing is the idea that what we’re talking about here is things outside the mind generally that happen to the mind like torture or problems of desire and such that occur in the mind and that you need to deal with one way or another. One thing I don’t see much of and that I think is critically important, particularly as compared with stoicism, for example, is you have to recognize your ability, however minimal, to make changes to the immediate structure of your local world. Right. So you can make changes that can prevent a lot of these problems from happening in the first place. It’s important to know how to respond to them when they do happen, but even better is to is to forestall these kind of problems before they come to you. You mentioned the issue with the back pain, for example. One thing you do if you’re experiencing chronic back pain is you could go see a physician and then you don’t have to deal with the worst of it later down the line. Epicurus has some interesting things to say about friendship. He says, and I can’t remember where exactly, but he says basically we should try to make everyone that we make our acquaintance with, we should try to make them our friend. And insofar as we are unable to make them our friend, we should at least do everything we can to ensure that they don’t become our enemy. So those are the kind of changes that you can make to your immediate world and to, I think, really forestall a lot of these problems. Obviously, problems like griefs, it doesn’t really matter what you do, that’s going to come to you eventually. Troubles, sorrow, I think troubles you can mitigate in some ways, but it’s just something to think about that we can’t prevent these problems completely. But there’s a lot that you can do to diminish their effect on you with what you might call engineering controls is what I’m thinking of. But there are changes you can make in your own life to make pleasure and happiness the more likely outcome. I think you’re exactly right in everything that you’ve said. I think that’s one of the most important distinctions between, although the Stoics would deny it, I think that Epicurus lays the philosophy that says it’s possible to do that because you have a certain amount of free will. And the rest of his philosophy is all geared towards explaining that you have to go out and understand nature so that you can do exactly that. As you were saying that, I would cite as one text for that point, Joshua, the opening of Book 6 of Lucretius, where he talks about, And he showed what evils existed in mortal affairs throughout, rising up and manifoldly flying about by natural, call it chance or force, because nature had so brought it about. And this is the part. And from what gates you must sally out duly to encounter each, meaning which I’ve always taken that as almost a military type analogy that you’ve got a fortress, which you’ve erected to try to keep out these problems. But sometimes you have to sally out from the gates of your fortress and go out and encounter them and defeat them so that they don’t cause you more trouble in the future. So this control of experience is a phrase I remember from DeWitt. I think that is core to what Epicurus was advocating is that you don’t just use your willpower to try to close out everything that’s going on around you. You get engaged with what’s going on around you so that you can prevent bad things from happening to you and enjoy good things at the same time. Okay, we’re probably getting close to the end. Before we do closing statements, any general comments further? Sometimes you have something on your mind, Joshua or Martin, anything you want to be sure to include today? No, my mind is very empty right now. Okay, well, Martin, do you have any closing comments today? No, also no closing. Okay, all right. And Joshua, now that I’ve phrased it in that direction, do you have any final words before we wrap up today’s episode? No, no, I don’t. What I’ve just said a little bit ago, I think, is for me the important takeaway, which is we can talk for a long time about the kind of problems that arise and how to deal with them when they arise. But the other part of that equation is doing things to prevent them from arising. And so very critical, I think, to take that away from this passage as well. Somebody like Joshua said just a couple of episodes ago that even once you understand the philosophy, you’re just at the beginning. You’ve just reached the point where you’re applying it. And just because you understand it, you’re – I guess that was the phrase you used. You’re only at the beginning of what you need to do to work with Epicurean philosophy. Understanding it gets you started, but then you have to live your life and apply it. Yeah, I don’t exactly remember what I said three weeks ago, but I certainly agree with myself. Okay, well, with that, let’s close for this week. I appreciate your time today and appreciate those who listen to us regularly and the comments that you give to us about each episode. If you have any questions or suggestions or comments on anything that we say, because by no means are the things that we say the last word. We’re doing the best we can, and hopefully we’ll stir some thoughts and produce in those who listen to us some responses and commentaries that will help us by extending these thoughts in a more articulate way than we’re able to in the podcast. With that as our goal, we’ll do it again next week. And I think next week will be New Year’s, but we should have a normal episode next week. We’ll see when that time comes. But thank you for your time today, and we’ll be back soon. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks. Goodbye. Goodbye.