Episode 307 - TD35 - How The Wise Epicurean Is Always Happy

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Welcome to Episode 307 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we continue covering Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations” from an Epicurean perspective. Today we continue our discussion with the second half of section 9 of Part 5 where Cicero criticizes Metrodorus and Epicurus for allegedly making high-sounding statements by being inconsistent for involving pleasure and pain in them.

As Joshua said last week, Cicero is criticizing Aristotle and Theophrastus for admittedly being consistent but at the same time being ignoble, while he allows that Epicurus and Metrodorus sound noble but at the same time being inconsistent for involving pleasure and pain in their formulations.

Cicero would prefer both consistency and noble langue, and he finds that in the Stoics.

Epicurus would respond that there is nothing ignoble about pleasure and pain, as they are the guidance that Nature herself provides. Further, Epicurus is being consistent when he realistically assesses that human happiness best defined as a life in which we always have more pleasure than pain (“more reason for joy than for vexation”) not an idealistic state of pure virtue from which all evil is absent.

The opening today will go back to this in VII:

For do not imagine that there is any utterance in philosophy delivered more distinctly or any promise of philosophy more fruitful or important. For what is the offer made ? that by heaven’s grace she will ensure that the man who has been obedient to her laws is always armed against the assaults of fortune, that he has within him all the support required for leading a good and happy life, that in fine he is always happy.

In this Episode we discuss:

• Is the Wise Man Always Happy?
• Illustration from Act 2 Scene 3 of Richard II

Transcript (Unedited)

Cassius (00:11):

Welcome to episode 307 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 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in Cicero’s Tusculum Disputations from an epicurean perspective. We are in part five, which is covering the question of whether virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life, and when we left off last week, we were in section nine and about to go to section 10, but today rather than going straight back into new material, I’d like to do something we don’t often do, which is go back over some of the material that we talked about last week to emphasize the implications of it because agree with him or disagree with him.

(01:22):

Cicero is a very intelligent person and he knows a lot of this material that we don’t have access to anymore, and he focused on certain things that he thought were particularly important in distinguishing the schools from each other. And when he says that something’s extremely important, I think it’s probably wise of us to pay attention to what he’s talking about, even if we disagree with his ultimate conclusion about the issue. So one of the things he says was back in section seven where he said, and today I am more frequently going to use the King Edition than the Y version for Do not imagine that there is any utterance in philosophy delivered more distinctly or any promise of philosophy more fruitful or important for what is the offer made that by heaven’s grace, she will ensure that the man who has been obedient to her laws is always armed against the assaults of fortune that he has within him all the support required for leading a good and happy life, that in fine he is always happy.

(02:32):

So one of the things I want to stress today is that this is the question that Cicero sees as most important in debating between the schools here. He wants to examine the question of whether the wise man is in fact always happy. He himself had been going through so much stress and tribulation in his personal and his professional life, so he was himself thinking about this question of how to analyze what he himself had gone through. Does the fact that he had been hit by these tremendous problems and felt the grief of them, did that mean that he himself was not a happy man? He had the most personal of reasons himself to be thinking about these issues and not just considering them as abstractions because he was trying to deal with his own problems and come out the other side in the best way possible.

(03:26):

So as he just said, that’s the question, and the promise is that if you are wise, you are always happy. But of course, when his daughter’s dying, when he’s in exile, when the country is in turmoil, he had to be feeling unpleasant emotions, unhappiness about those specific things. So how do you balance these things out? The specific feelings of unhappiness about specific situations against the promise of philosophy that if you’re wise, you’re always happy regardless of your circumstances. That’s the challenge that the stoics picked up and said to an extreme that there’s nothing that’s important outside of the virtue that goes on in your mind, that no matter whether your wife is dead, your children are towards your country’s being torn apart, you’re being torn on the rack, none of that makes any difference as long as you are virtuous. That’s a very difficult standard to hold, and no doubt Cicero understood that, but in this material that we’re going over, I think we see that that’s the side that Cicero decided to take in this argument.

(04:34):

He wants to say that these bad experiences he’s gone through are ultimately not significant because all that’s really significant in life is virtue, as we discussed last week as well. Another interesting aspect of this section is that Cicero is allowing his student to really make strong arguments against him. He’s allowing the student almost to insult Cicero and point out the contradictions in Cicero’s own point of view, which draws an even starker picture of the importance of this particular question. The student says at the beginning of section eight that he agreed that if the only thing that’s good in life is virtue, then nothing is good except virtue. But the student pointed out to him that that argument is clearly open to debate because Cicero, even your friend Brutus, to whom you’re writing this book, even your teachers Aristo Antiochus, they don’t accept that statement because Antiochus repeatedly says in his books that he thinks that a happy life does lie in virtue, but he doesn’t think that prevents other things being good besides virtue.

(05:45):

Virtue. That’s the question we discussed last week in terms of Aristotle and Theophrastus that they held that there are three types of goods, the goods of the body, the goods of the mind, and external goods with the goods of the body and these external goods not being tied to virtue only the goods of the mind being essentially those of virtue. And Cicero says that yes, and I had these disagreements directly both with Antiochus and with Arista, and Cicero says that he himself took the position that no one can be happy when they’re surrounded with evil things. The problem that that observation raises is that the wise man can definitely be assaulted with pains and things that are external to him just as Ciro had gone through him himself. And therefore, we cannot admit according to Cicero that the problems or pains of the body and of fortune are actually evil because if they’re evil and we cannot prevent them from coming into our lives, then the wise man is not insulated from evil and therefore the wise man cannot claim to be constantly happy any more than Cicero could have claimed to be constantly happy when his daughter died and the world around him was falling apart.

(07:00):

And Cicero reminded the student that what Antiochus had said was that, yes, Cicero virtual alone is able to render life happy, but that doesn’t mean that your life is going to be supremely happy. Antiochus took the position that what you need to remember Cicero is that most things in life get their name from that which makes up the majority of their substance, such things as strength or health or riches or honor. If your life is saturated with those things, people still say that you’re strong, healthy, rich, and honorable, even if there are small deviations in your life from those good things, even if you have a little bit of weakness in a particular part of your body or a little bit of ill health in a particular part of your body or you’re not quite as rich as you would like to be, or maybe you have something in your life that’s not totally honorable.

(07:54):

If the majority of your life is honorable, most people will say that you are honorable or rich or strong or healthy. If your life is in the majority that way and Antioch has said Cicero, you need to look at the happy life in the same way that even though that some part of your life may not be happy yet, happiness gets its name from the greater part of it. Cicero tells the student that Cicero’s own reaction to what Antica said was that it was not an entirely satisfactory because it’s not consistent. Cicero says, I don’t understand what the man who is happy lacks in order to be happier because if he’s missing something then he’s not happy. And as to those people who say that a thing gets its name from the majority of which it’s composed, yes, Cicero says, I agree with that in certain cases, but in the subject of good and evil, these guys like the Aristotelians are saying that there’s three kinds of goods and three kinds of evil of the body, the mind and external, and it makes no sense to me.

(08:59):

Cicero says that if you’re lacking the goods of the body and you’re lacking external goods, you’ve only got one of the three types. It makes no sense that someone who’s lacking two out of three of the goal or who is plagued with two out of three of the evils of life should consider themselves to be happy, much less to consider that their lives are supremely happy. Cicero is saying, are you going to tell me that a man who has the goods of the mind but who does not have the goods of the body and external goods, are you going to tell me he’s supremely happy? That makes no sense at all according to Cicero. And that takes us into section nine where Cicero points out that that’s the position that Theophrastus actually defended. And as we get further into this, we’re going to find this question raised in terms of the rack and the wheel, the question of whether the happy life can mount the wheel or not.

(09:57):

All of these different exotic ways of asking the question ultimately go in the same direction because Cicero says that Theophrastus took the position that in fact receiving lashes being on the rack, being tortured, having your country ruined, being exiled, being childless, having your family die, they do in fact make life wretched. And of course, as Cicero points out, these things can happen to anybody. They’re not within your control to prevent disease and the ruin of your country and all these other bad things from happening At times you can certainly try to reduce them, but you can’t prevent them from happening just as Cicero could not prevent them from happening to himself. And so Cicero says about Theophrastus that I don’t agree with this conclusion, but I admit that there’s consistency within it because if you’re going to admit that being tortured, having your country ruined, all these other bad things are in fact evil, then you’re going to have to admit that there’s more than one kind of good and that the happiest life is going to require not only virtue, but also the goods of the body and the external goods, the latter two of which are simply not completely within your control.

(11:10):

And if two out of three are not completely within your control, then you do not have the ability to claim that the wise man is always going to be happy. That’s one of the things as we get into this further I want to discuss, Epicurus does take the position that the wise man is always going to be happy, but he’s not going to attack it from this logical consistency point of view that Cicero is concerned about here because Cicero admits, Cicero sees the Aristotelians have gone off into a direction that they may think is realistic, but it guts our logic-based philosophy. This is where the stoics rose up against that line of thinking and said, no, I’m not going to admit that these things are bad. I’m not going to admit that the wise man can be plagued with evil things because in the end, I am indifferent to whether my wife and children get killed and tortured.

(12:01):

I am indifferent to whether I am placed on the rack. I would prefer not to be placed on the rack. I would prefer that my children and my wife not be killed, but ultimately the only thing that really matters in life to me is my virtue, and no one can take that away from me because that’s inside my mind and that is the way we should live. That is our goal in life. And the Cicero and the stoics may have lived 2000 years before Gene Roddenberry invented the spot character. This ideal of being able to suppress all emotion is near the root of their idea of the best life.

Joshua (12:39):

This has been very useful to get some clarity on what Cicero’s own thinking is like as we go through these books because usually it’s him criticizing Epicureanism, but he doesn’t really present his own view, but I think we’re able to get an insight into what his view is from these texts that we’re reviewing today, and I think here’s what he’s looking for when it comes to happiness and good and evil. He’s looking for unity of the good, whatever it is, it can just be one thing. It can’t be three things or five things or 10 things. It’s got to be just one thing because that’s how you get this binary state. You either have it or you don’t.

Cassius (13:18):

Joshua, let me jump in there for just a second. You either have it or you don’t, and that’s where you have control over it. When you’ve identified it all in a single thing that you have control over, which is this virtue that is a mental issue for you, then you’re insulated from all these other bad things in life.

Joshua (13:40):

Yeah, so first we’ve got this issue of unity, of good, and I think probably we can also infer from this unity of evil. He doesn’t want to allow that pain is an evil in addition to infamy, which for him is far worse than pain. He doesn’t want to allow that grief is an evil. He doesn’t want to allow that. Any kind of mental perturbation is an evil. So for Cicero, what is an evil? Well, the only evil is the direct opposite of his good and his good is virtue or moral excellence. And so his evil is infamy, which again is something you have complete control over. It’s important in both cases, and as you were just saying, the key thing about both the good and the evil is that they have to be within the control of the philosopher of the wise man, and that’s why he throws out pleasure.

(14:31):

That’s also why he throws out pain because he knows we can’t fully insulate ourselves from pain. Marcus Aurelius in his meditations in book 1116 says this as to living a life of happiness. This power is in the soul if it be indifferent to things which are indifferent and it will be indifferent if it looks on each of these things separately and altogether. And if it remembers that not one of them produces in us an opinion about itself nor comes to us, but these things remain immovable and it is we ourselves who produce the judgments about them and as we may say, write them in ourselves. It being an our power not to write them and it being an our power, if per chance these judgments have imperceptibly got admission to our minds to wipe them out. And if we remember that such attention will only be for a short time and then life will be at an end.

Cassius (15:33):

That’s a great excerpt from Marcus Aurelius to talk about because I would condemn that from an epicurean point of view as strongly as I possibly could. The reality of these problems does not go away because you wish them away or you tell yourself that they are not important. That is the worst kind of default on being a human being and actually dealing with your life, I would say.

Joshua (15:56):

Yeah. What he seems to be saying here is that this attention that we have to give to the false opinions and the false ideas that we’ve allowed to penetrate into our consciousness, we have not only the possibility but the obligation to remove them, but we don’t have to do that forever because our own lives are going to come to an end. So it seems to be the idea that this is kind of a burden, but it’s not one we’re stuck with for all eternity.

Cassius (16:22):

And that makes it to me even worse. Joshua, you’re just going to ignore that your wife and your children and your friends and your country are being torn apart and you’re not going to do anything about it because I am not affected by these things. I’m not concerned about them, and even if I were concerned about them now I’m going to be dead soon. I don’t have to worry about them anymore. I’m just going to be totally self complete within my own little cocoon of virtue. Is that not what he’s saying?

Joshua (16:50):

That is exactly what he’s saying. And thanks to our friend Brian, who’s done a lot of work on the ener material, we know that Epicurus himself in his own lifetime was responding to not a stoic and certainly not to Cicero obviously because he lived centuries later, but to a member of the mag school named SPO the mag who was a contemporary of Theophrastus, who Cicero is currently complaining about. And we know that Epicurus wrote books responding and criticizing this stil for going to exactly the kind of extremes that you are describing there, and we see that in the epistles of Seneca Stilo is quoted by Seneca in service of these kind of stoic views, which is this extremism. And Stibo says Seneca after his country was captured and his children and his wife lost as he emerged from the general desolation alone and yet happy spoke as follows to Demetrius called the sacker of cities because of the destruction he brought upon them in answer to the question whether he had lost anything.

(18:01):

And Stilo replied, I have all my goods with me. So his country was captured, his children and wife were killed or taken, and he’s asked whether he’s lost anything and he says, Nope, I got everything I need in my little virtue cocoon. I’m good to go. I don’t need any of those externals, and the loss of those externals is not an evil to me. It’s really quite an extreme position. People think that hedonism is extreme and that it’s going to lead people down a path of unbridled cross legacy or separatism, but really you have to take a look at what these other schools of philosophy are saying because I have a hard time thinking of anything that would be more starkly extreme than what we’re seeing in Cicero, in Seneca, and in the fragments that survive of stil Bo of Mera.

Cassius (18:53):

Yeah, this is stoicism and it’s so striking that this can be held up as the popular philosophy of today for people to get into that this is something that’s admirable. Well, Cicero thought it was, but there’s a lot of people who don’t see it that way, and Cicero had to admit himself that Theophrastus and Aristotle who said that there’s three types of goods that they were saying in effect that if you’re being tortured, you’re not happy while you’re being tortured. And Cicero says that Rast did not really say that explicitly anywhere, but that’s what he meant. And I Cicero cannot fault him for inconsistency because if you agree that being tortured is evil, then in fact you’re not happy while you’re being tortured. That’s where Thesist came up with this statement that fortune not wisdom rules the life of men. Cicero continued on that. Nothing more spiritless had ever been said by any philosopher, but I agree they were being consistent because if you think that pain is evil, then even the wisest of men is not going to be completely free of pain.

(20:04):

And as you pointed out at the end of the episode last week, Joshua, this is where we move into the discussion of Epicurus and metro Dous because Cicero then says, well, if I’m going to criticize Theophrastus, let’s also look at what Epicurus had to say because Theophrastus at least was consistent. I’m going to say CSRA says that Epicurus doesn’t even have consistency in his bath because what Epicurus is saying actually sounds fairly noble because Epicurus praises plain living. Epicurus also says that no one can live pleasantly unless one also lives honorably, wisely and justly. Epicurus says that Fortune has put little weight with the wise man, and Cicero particularly praises this statement of metros that I have caught you fortune and have occupied and blocked all your means of access so that you could not get near me. All of these statements that came from Epicurus and Metro Dous, Cicero admits are strong and virtuous and noble and highly praiseworthy, but Cicero then turns around and says that they make no sense because Epicurus and Metro Dous, you guys are the ones who were saying that pain is evil and that you wish to reduce pain in your life as much as possible.

(21:27):

We all know that you can’t eliminate pain, you’re going to have pain in your life. You’re being totally inconsistent by saying that the wise man who has pain in his life is happy because if he has pain in his life, he has evil. And how can we justify someone who is living with evil, calling that person happy or wise or virtuous, especially since your bodily condition and your bodily goods that you pray so highly epicureans, you can be robbed of those this very night. You have no ability to be confident that those will not be taken from you at any moment in time. How can you who claim to want to be happy, how can you play so much stock in bodily and external goods and not be just totally afraid every moment that they’re going to be taken away from you? You claim to want to be free from fear, but these other things that are out of your control are so important.

(22:25):

You must be constantly in terror of losing them. And that’s one aspect of this that I think we really do need to talk about too because as we know, Epicurus does say that the wise man is always happy. Now, how can Epicurus be saying the wise man is always happy when Epicurus also knows just as in his own case with his kidney disease, that your bodily goods, your external goods can in fact be taken from you at any moment? How do we reconcile those two considerations for Epicurus to say that the wise man is always happy, even given these possibilities of bad things happening to someone? Cicero looks to logic as his answer and to placing all of your goods in virtue and taking the position in your mind that nothing is important to you except your mind’s assessment of whether you are virtuous or not, let anything in the world happen to you and your family, it makes no difference.

(23:26):

So long as you assess in your own mind that you are virtuous, Epicurus is absolutely not going to take that position. Epicurus is saying the opposite. In fact, Epicurus is saying something dramatically different because Epicurus places the standard of what is real in life in the sense not in logic. Epicurus is saying that if you taste something pleasant, if you feel something pleasant, if you see something pleasant, these things are real. And in fact, even in a dream, if something comes to you and you actually feel it, you consider that to be real. That is the opposite of a position that Marcus Aurelius to the stoics are taking and trying to dismiss these very strong feelings as being real. He’s saying they’re not real. I’m indifferent to them. I don’t prefer them to happen, but they’re not ultimately important in life. What is ultimately important in life is my assessment of whether I’m virtuous or not, and from an epicure point of view, that is just absolute nonsense because what is real in life is what your senses, anticipations and feelings bring to you, and that is what nature gives you as a judge of what is true and fault, what is right and wrong, and that’s your starting point, not your logical sistic assessment of the meaning of the word good, which epicure says these peripatetics and others are just walking around endlessly trying to debate and parse and define in new ways so that they can convince themselves that they’re right.

(24:58):

And that’s where Quata says, if they would just look to Epicurus, he would disabuse them of errors like this because Epicurus would point them back to nature and not to their sistic logical ideal forms.

Joshua (25:14):

We do get a sense in Lucious that even though for Epicurus he doesn’t have this hard line like stoics and Cicero do between what is in our control and what is out of our control, he doesn’t patrol the boundaries of internal and external in the way that they do. We find in Lucious reference to the same kind of fortification, but in lucious, we’re not fortified from what is external to us necessarily. This is what Lucious writes. He says, nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teachings of the wise tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power o minds of mortals blighted by your blindness amid what deep darkness and daunting dangers life’s little day is passed. To think that you should fail to see that nature importantly demands only that the body may be rid of pain and that the mind divorce from anxiety and fear may enjoy a feeling of contentment. So we are in this passage partially talking about things that are external to us, what epic would call unnatural and unnecessary desires, the desire for eminence, fame, power, wealth, and so on, the desire for things that rise up to infinity and can never be satisfied. That’s part of the conversation here, but what do you make of the passage?

Cassius (26:58):

I see fortifications as being extremely important to everybody, including the epicureans, and when I hear what you’ve just read from lucretius and he’s talking about the fortifications that are involved in true philosophy that allows us to see and be free from these ills that other people are experiencing. To me it jumps out that it’s a question of what kind of fortifications you are constructing and how you’re building your fortifications. Are you building your fortifications like the stoics through sistic reasoning and defining virtue as the goal of life and saying that these bad things that can happen to you are not evil, that you’re even indifferent to them, that they don’t make any difference because all that matters is virtue. That’s one type of fortification, a fortification of aloofness and apathy and division away from the rest of the world and other people, and thinking to yourself that what really makes a difference is not the reality of this world, that the reality that makes a difference is in the world of ideal forms.

(28:06):

In the words of Plato or in the world of heaven, as many religions would say, they place their treasure in heaven, not in this world. Epicurus is not going to do that, but he still wants fortifications. He still wants to reduce pain as much as possible. That is in fact one of the ways you express the idea of pursuing pleasure is you pursue pleasure by eliminating pain from your life to give your pleasures room to expand and to occupy your life. So where Lucretius is talking about occupying these heights and observing people who are under the assault of all of these problems of life, that is a type of fortification, but it is a fortification that is grounded in the study of nature and acting consistently with nature, listening to the instructions of nature and not just going off in these false ideas that are simply not true.

(29:02):

The person who is not concerned about burning in hell for an eternity has constructed a fortification of understanding that help cannot possibly exist, that the universe is eternal, the universe is boundless, and there is no supernatural or non-natural area outside of the universe that he could be sentenced to after death, that there is no supernatural God that could do such sentencing. The idea that the person who is insulated in these heights knows that there is no God chasing him every moment to punish him in this life for doing evil things because he knows that such things make no sense and that they cannot exist. We could of course keep going on with illustrations in that direction, but I think the important point to bring home now would be that absolutely Epicurus and the epicurean would’ve wanted fortifications against the troubles and pains of life. Just like Cicero is saying, philosophy promises, but the epicureans want real fortifications.

(30:04):

They want truth and reality and that’s the way to build your fort not on ideal forms, but on the grounding that nature gives you through the feelings, the anticipations and the five senses. That’s where reality is in an epicurean point of view. The ultimate reality is here in this world the ultimate reality is not in some other world of ideal forms or religion as Plato Socrates and ultimately here the stoics and Cicero or casting, there are a lot with, so I don’t think there’s any issue with the fact that everybody agrees that you want fortifications, you want a rational understanding of how to deal with the problems of life. It’s all a matter of where you find these fortifications and how you construct them. And Cicero is dismissing the epicurean fortifications and I think in turn an epicurean would dismiss what Cicero is arguing.

Joshua (31:02):

I think you made good points there. There is one other place where this comes up. Lucrecia says in book six, around line 24, that Epicurus therefore cleansed men’s breasts with truth telling precepts and fixed a limit to lust and fear and explained what was the chief good, which we all strive to reach and pointed out the road along which by a short crosscut track we might arrive at it in a straightforward course. He showed two, what evils existed in mortal affairs throughout rising up and manifold flying about by a natural call it chance or force because nature had so brought it about and from what gates you must Sally out duly to encounter each and he proved that mankind mostly without cause arousing their breast. The melancholy tumbling billows of cares for even as children are flurried and dread all things in the thick darkness. Thus we in the daylight fear at times things now the whip more to be dreaded than what children shudder at in the dark and fancy sure to be this terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the ray of the sun and the glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature.

Cassius (32:20):

Joshua, that wording is directly applicable to what we’re talking about today because these things that we’re talking about, the death of your loved one being tortured, your children, your wives, your family, your society being destroyed, those things are evils. They are not something to consider as indifferent to you. They’re not something to put aside and think that, well, they’re not important to me because I’m a virtuous man and nothing that happens to me will knock me off the pedestal of virtue. That is just simply ridiculous. These bad things are to be avoided to the extent that you possibly can and you’re not going to avoid them by just locking yourself up in your room and saying that you’re not affected by the rest of the world. As Lucretius says there, you’re going to Sally forth from the gates of the fortress that you have erected and you’re going to deal with these things.

(33:10):

You’re not going to just sit and wait for them to happen to you and think that everything’s going to turn out fine for those who love the Lord. You’re going to learn about nature and prepare yourself to understand the things that can happen, the things that do happen, the things that will happen, and take a proper reasoned understanding of the nature of things to deal with them. Those things that you can change, you will those things that you can’t change. You will understand that they are bad, but they are not though enough to make you want to despair and give up life because while bad things do happen to good people, you are still as a wise person, as Quata says, able to find more reason for happiness than for despair, more reason for joy than for vation. You’re not going to ignore these bad things.

(34:03):

You’re not going to act as if they didn’t happen, but you’re going to put them into context and not take the position that they’re not important, but that there are other things in life that can counterbalance them just as epicurious when suffering from kidney pain was counterbalancing. That pain with the joy that came to him from his association with his friends and from his teachings of philosophy that doesn’t make the pain of the kidney disease go away, but it allows you to see that life is worthwhile keeping and living as long as you can be confident that continuing to live is the better course that continuing to live is going to bring you more pleasure and pain in the widest sense of those words. You’re not necessarily going to be forever young and forever pursuing the stimulations that you can pursue when you’re 25 years old, but there are other compensating pleasures that you can find in virtually every moment of life.

Joshua (35:04):

So at the end of section nine, there Cicero response to metro dous by saying, but you metro Dous, seeing you have stored up all good in the flesh and marrow of the body and have defined the highest good as bound up with a stable condition of body and an assured hope of its continuance, have you blocked the approaches of fortune? How? Why have such a good you can be robbed this very night? And then in section 10, Cicero continues, he says, but all the same. The inexperienced are caught by these statements and owing to views of this kind. There is a mass of men who think in this way. It is however the mark of an accurate reason or to look not at what each particular thinker says, but at what each one ought to say. Take for instance the very view which we have maintained in this discussion.

(35:55):

We wish the good man to be happy always. It is clear who I mean by good men, but we say that men equipped with and distinguished by all the virtues are wise as well as good. Let us see who are to be described as happy. For my part I think it is those who are compassed about with good without any association of evil and no other sense underlies the word happy when we use it, except the fullness of combined good and complete separation of evil virtue cannot secure this. If there is any good besides itself for there will come as it were a throng of evils. If we regard them as evils, by which I mean poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, the fall of one’s country exile and to crown it all slavery in all these distressing conditions and more still can happen.

(36:59):

The wise man can be involved for chance occasions, them and chance can asail the wise man. But if these are evils who can show that the wise man will be always happy seeing that he can be involved in all of them at one in the same time. Therefore, since they reckon the things I have enumerated above to be evils, I do not readily allow either my friend Brutus or those who have taught us both or those thinkers of old Aristotle, precipitous sates, palermo to say also that the wise man is always happy and if the noble distinction of this title of wise most worthy of Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato so delights them, let them constrain the soul to despise the things which dazzle them strength, health, beauty, riches, distinctions, wealth and count as nothing, the things that are their opposites, then will they be able in clearest accents to claim that they are terrified neither by the assault of fortune nor the opinion of the mob, nor by pain or poverty and that they regard all things as resting with themselves, nor is there anything beyond their control which they reckon is good as it is, however it is in no way possible to allow them both to utter sentiments of worthy of a really great and lofty character and reckon his good and evil, the same things as the common herd of mankind, ambitious of such glory.

(38:32):

Epicurus starts up and he too saved the mark, thinks the wise man always happy. He is caught by the grandeur of the thought, but he would never say so if he attended to his own words for what is less consistent than for the man who says that pain is either the highest or the only evil. To suppose also that the wise man at the moment he is tortured by pain will say how sweet this is. Philosophers therefore must be judged not by isolated utterances but by uninterrupted consistency.

Cassius (39:08):

Joshua, that is such an important and clear paragraph to explain what is really going on here. And although I think this has to be taken very carefully, the phrase that jumps out at me is relevant. Here is the famous one that is used nowadays from the Supreme Court Justice who said that consistency is the hobb goblin of little minds. Now in general, you wish to be consistent and consistency is good, and so when Cicero praises consistency and he deprecates inconsistency, I don’t think we should ever for minute admit that Epicurus is being inconsist. Consistency is good, but the problem that Cicero is having here is he’s seeking to pin words with absolute definitions and use those same definitions in each and every context and circumstance. And that’s just not the way the world works. That’s not the way nature is. There is no absolute good, there is no absolute evil.

(40:14):

And to say that I can tag something as evil and thereby realize that it can never enter my life and take the position that no matter what happens, it’s not significant to me is a ridiculous use of language and words that leads to tremendous numbers of problems. Epicurus is not inconsistent. He is taking the position that there is no outside this world standard that tells us when something is good and when something is evil, the only standard for good and evil exists in this world and it comes through nature and pleasure and pain. Nature requires us to analyze the circumstances and decide whether the ice cream that we’re eating is good as it is on the first bite easily or is terrible as it would be if we were being force fed hundreds of spoonfuls of ice cream. The same thing can be good at sometimes and evil at other times, which is exactly what Epicurus says in the letter to Manus that sometimes we’ll consider the good to be bad and the bad to be good.

(41:27):

It’s not good and bad that determine what is desirable. It is pleasure and pain that determines what is desirable. And those two words, pleasure and pain are even themselves something to be cautious about because defining something as pleasurable is not the same thing as experiencing it as feeling it as pleasurable. Pleasure and pain do exist as abstractions, as words. We understand what is meant by the word pleasure and meant by the word pain, but ultimately somebody can tell me that something is pleasurable and I can find it extremely painful because it is ultimately my feeling that I have to consult at each moment, not the definition in Merriam-Webster as to whether something is pleasure or pain. Consistency comes through understanding that nature is the standard through pleasure and pain and that we don’t create the standard through our words and our definitions and our syllogisms and our thoughts about ideal forms or beautiful things floating in heaven somewhere it’s this world and this reality and the moment by moment feeling that we get from it that determines what we should consider to be desirable and what we should consider to be undesirable.

(42:46):

And so as I think you’re going to talk about perhaps Joshua Dewitt points out how totally ridiculous and unjustifiable this accusation from Cicero here is Epicurus certainly did not say how sweet it is in regard to being tortured or in regard to his kidney pain or anything else that is Cicero. And I note here that this is Cicero speaking for himself. This is not the words of some epicurean speaking. This is Cicero alleging that Epicurus is holding it to be sweet, to be tortured, and that is absolutely fault and absolutely the reverse of what Epicurus was saying. Epicurus did say according to Dogen Lius that the wise man on the rack is still happy. But that is because Epicurus understands happiness to be a psalm, to be a total outlook of how you are experiencing your life at that moment. And Epicurus is saying that the wise man, just as he in his kidney disease has the ability to summon memories, to summon his friends, to summon other experiences to offset against those bad things that are happening to him. Then you can experience kidney pain, you can experience being tortured, but you can still as a person look at the total experience of your life and say that I am glad I am alive. I am more glad that I’m alive than unhappy, that I’m being tortured. I am more happy to be alive than I am upset that I have kidney pain and I can consider myself to be happy because that majority experience is something that my mind can provide to me even in the midst of these external circumstances that I cannot control.

Joshua (44:36):

So on this subject that we’ve been going through over the past few episodes of this question of indifference and how they relate to happiness, I find that Shakespeare’s Richard II in Act three, scene two really goes far in the extreme direction that Cicero himself is going. And this is somewhat long, but I’ve read it before on the podcast, but I think it’s very relevant to what we’re talking about, king Richard says, of comfort, no man speak. Let’s talk of graves of worms and epitaphs, make dust our paper and with rainy eyes, write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills, and yet not so for what can we bequeath save our deposed bodies to the ground, our lands, our lives and all our bowling brooks and nothing can we call our own but death and that small model of the barren earth, which serves as pace and cover to our bones.

(45:39):

So he’s involved in a war here against Bolingbrook and he’s losing and he’s getting very desperate. He says, for God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, how some have been deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts. They have deposed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed, all murdered for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps death his court, and there the antic sits, scoffing his state and grinning at his pump, allowing him a breath, a little scene to monarchies be feared and killed with looks, infusing him with self and vain conceit as if this flesh, which walls about our life were brass, impregnable, and humor. Thus comes at the last and with a little pin bores through his castle wall at Farewell King, cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood with solemn reverence, throw away respect, tradition, form, and ceremonious duty for you have but mistook me all this while I live with bread like you feel, want, taste, grief, need friends subjected.

(46:55):

Thus, how can you say to me, I am a king? So Richard II here is compass round as Cicero might say with evils, and he’s talking about the things that he is subjected to by necessity, things that he has absolutely no control over. I don’t have a choice. I have to live by eating food. I need friends. I feel grief, I feel want or desire for things that I don’t have. When I experience all of this and immortal and subject to die, how can you say to me that I’m a king? So he’s going in the same direction as Cicero goes, but he reaches a conclusion that is not exactly the same as where Cicero is going because Cicero would say that these are all indifference and that the wise man can withdraw into his fortified castle wall and be safe even though as we see in this passage, well, you’re still not safe from death.

(47:51):

But what do you do when you have someone like Richard II who maybe doesn’t have what it takes to look at friends and these other things that we all desire and see them as indifference to see friendship as something that is actually quite important. Epicurious places a very high priority on friendship, but for Cicero, he has to see it as indifferent because it’s something external to us. What do you do when you encounter people who can’t see things the way you do? Are they just doomed as Richard II is doomed to misery? It’s true that if we don’t consider the people close to us to be preferred indifference as they say, and if our happiness somehow connects with them being in good health and not in pain and being able to interact with them, we do know that we’re going to lose these people one day, but if we consider their loss to be as indifferent as their presence, then what would be the point of trying to find more friends? What would be the point of trying to overcome our grief by connecting with other people and focusing on other relationships to get us through it? This is the kind of, I’ve used the word extreme to describe this view. I think it is very extreme and I don’t think it’s very healthy.

Cassius (49:11):

It’s extreme, it is unhealthy and it is disgusting. This whole stoic orientation to consider the most important things in life that nature gives to us as indifference, as preferred or not preferred indifference. I just find that, again, not just wrong, it’s disgusting and it should be treated that way. To hold up stoicism as something that is good and to be admired is to totally invert the proper order of things in this world. I think of the way that Nietzsche denounced stoicism and the type analysis he applied to it is I think exactly correct. Now in regard to Richard, in your Shakespeare analogy, it’s not clear to me exactly where Richard comes down in the end. Other than that, he is feeling the frustration that even though he is a king, these bad things are still happening to him and he’s feeling frustrated. Don’t call me a king because I have ultimately no power to deal with these issues.

(50:18):

Well, this is where Epicurean philosophy comes in and where Epicurus would tell Richard or anyone else who is in the middle of experiencing a bad circumstance that these bad things are a part of reality. They are in fact something we consider to be evil or any other word we want to apply to it, painful, anything else that conveys how disagreeable they are in fact, and so Epicurus looking at Richard, I would say, would say, you have a choice, Richard. You can become a stoic. You can follow Cicero, you can follow Plato, you can follow Socrates, and you can decide that these bad things that are happening to you, they really aren’t important because what’s important in life is being a good person and being virtuous. And when you think like that, you can look at your wife and children and friends and family and country being burned at the stake and going up in flames, and you can just put that aside and be indifferent to it because that’s not important.

(51:25):

All that’s important is virtue, and I think epic Curse would say there’s another way of looking at things, Richard, and that is to acknowledge that these things can and in fact do happen in life and they are real and that they are important and that therefore what makes sense for you to do in your life is to take all the action that you possibly can to prevent them from happening, to reduce the numbers of those things that do happen, and then to realize that as Thomas Jefferson said, the greater part of life is sunshine, that you still can be happy, that you are alive and that you have lived because of all of the good things that you have experienced. And if you think it’s going to be the better course for you to go down with the ship, to go down with your country and die for your country or die for your family as the circumstances might warrant, then you may wish to take that step and you can do so confidently knowing that when you are dead, your troubles are over because you will not be suffering any pain after that point.

(52:33):

You will not be punished for an eternity in hell for laying down your life for someone that you love. You can do those things confidently with a true philosophy that throws out these fantasies that Socrates and Plato and these other religions are telling you are true. So you can approach these problems realistically and make the best of them and make the best choices as you deal with them. You can deal with these problems in a rational, calm way that makes sense in that context. You can consider yourself to be happy and to have lived the best life possible to you, even though you are not able to always prevent these external things from happening to you. Let’s close at that point for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicure and Friends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about these or our other discussions about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.