Ep. 208: Epicurus on Seeking Pleasure (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Attention. The Partially Examined Life Wall Calendar is for sale with free domestic shipping at partiallyexaminedlife.com calendar. Partially Examined Life Live 10 Year Anniversary show will take place on Saturday, April 6, 3:30 to 5:30pm at the Caveat in New York City and will be on Brave New World. For more information please see partiallyexaminedlife.compel-foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 208 is something like what is the wise way to live?

Or maybe what is the good for humanity? And we are considering Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 341 to 270 BC in and we read most of the Epicurus reader, including his letter to Menoeceus and the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican collection of Epicurean sayings, as well as some chapters from Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism from 2010 and Martha Nussbaum's The Therapy of Desire from 1994. For more information about these texts, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, as happy as Zeus with my barley cake and water in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:22 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, gorging myself on tranquility in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:29 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, ataraxic in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:33 Mark: All right, we return to Epicurus. We covered his metaphysics a couple episodes ago with Lucretius. We wanted to talk more about his ethics, which happens to be what most of the extant texts are about. And we had a couple of nice secondary sources to give us interpretations of the various fragments.

1:49 Wes: It was very helpful to read since what's available is so fragmented and not a kind of continuous whole. It's really nice to have the Nussbaum and the O'Keefe, just to kind of collect everything together and make it into a system, make it coherent.

2:04 Dylan: Obviously it would be nice to have the complete set of his 37 volumes of stuff to convince you. And so this is an extrapolation that might not be warranted, but in reading the letters and then also learning a little bit about like the conditions of the communal Epicurean settlements and the whole, as we saw in Lucretius, this idea of Epicurean worship, that there was something sort of prescriptive in the sense of saying, well, this is how things are. I don't want to minimize the thinking or anything like that, but once you have that and the basic Principles.

Then someone like Nussbaum or O'Keefe, they're really thinking through a lot of it rather than trying to get that from the original text. And it turns out not to be so hard. It reminds me a little bit, frankly, of reading Book 7 of the Republic on the cave, and then. And articles about how you understand the myth of the cave. So it's a relatively rich place to start with the fragments. But then it's nice to have some other hardcore thinking through it.

3:11 Mark: Right. There's not a lot to pull from the extant things. So we have here both the letter. So there are three surviving letters. Only one of them is about ethics, so we just kind of ignore the other two. And then these sayings and maxims, these are really for memorization.

3:26 Dylan: I'm sorry, you keep saying that. I just want to bracket that. We have to come back to the way in which the metaphysics and the ethics actually deeply link up to one another. The way he looks at the world feeds directly into the ethics.

3:39 Wes: Yeah, we'll get at that. I think with the gods and with death especially.

3:43 Mark: I did end up reading kind of expanded as I went, like with the O'Keefe.

3:48 Wes: Keefe.

3:48 Mark: We stuck to part three of his book, which was on ethics, but there are seven chapters within that, including the gods and death. And I was thinking like, oh, you know, we've already covered that last time. Let's talk about pleasure. Let's talk about what motivates human beings. Let's talk about how we should challenge our desires. But as I got into it, I did feel like, no, actually talking more about that other stuff is fine.

4:09 Wes: Have we said we're talking about pleasure yet?

4:11 Dylan: Yeah, no, that's a good point.

4:13 Wes: There will be lots of comparisons to Aristotle and Nussbaum makes a lot of good ones and the Stoics, because those are forms of virtue ethics. And I think arguably Epicurus falls within that tradition as well. We'll see how important the virtues are. It's just that whereas Aristotle and the Stoics, they make happiness the highest good and virtues as the key to happiness, but also ends in their own rights, intrinsic goods in their own rights that are not for the sake of anything else. We have this really interesting idea, and probably one that I think is more appealing in a way to most contemporaries, which is that those sorts of things can be explained away, can be relativized to pleasure.

So it's not even happiness per se that we're aiming at in the Aristotelian sense, which we'll get at Flourishing, but it's actually pleasure. So even when we speak about friendship and the virtues, things like courage, the really fascinating idea is that those things might be reducible to pleasure in the sense of how much pleasure do I get out of them? Or how do they help me escape pain? Things like that.

5:23 Dylan: And then the key to us getting happiness as the proper end of life is understanding the way in which we are rightly directed by our pleasures and to rightly read them and understand how to cultivate them in the proper way. And that's the key to happiness.

5:44 Wes: So we should say what kinds of pleasures we're talking about. Right? Because the sort of caricature of Epicurus that you see up until the Renaissance. Renaissance is the idea that when he says that pleasure is the highest good, he's just saying that it's a free for all, that we should do what we want and eat as much as we want, gorge ourselves and basically do the opposite of what any major ethical system taught heretofore. And it turns out that that's not the case. Right. Instead we get this version of hedonism actually turns out to be kind of a. An asceticism in a way.

6:21 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, a key sentence from the extant letter that's mainly on Menoeceus, I guess is how you pronounce it. The one that's mainly on ethics is just highlighting prudence. Prudence is the principle of all these things and is the greatest good. That is why prudence is a more valuable thing than philosophy. For prudence is the source of all the other virtues. That doesn't sound like hedonism in the pejorative sense. You wouldn't accuse somebody, you know, you're just too darn prudent.

6:51 Wes: Yeah. And the reason why we can't just choose hedonism in that pejorative sense is because it ultimately leads to more pain and pleasure. Right. We make ourselves unhealthy, we make ourselves miserable in the long run. And so we're not just looking towards the immediate gratification, we're thinking about long term effects of what we choose. And we're thinking about the bigger picture in other senses as well.

7:16 Mark: Just backing up a bit before that, a couple paragraphs before that. Toward the end of verse 128 in that letter, pleasure is the starting point and goal of living blessedly. We recognize this as our first innate good, and this is our starting point for every choice and avoidance. And we come to this by judging every good by the criterion, feeling it is just because this is the first Innate good, that we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes pass up many pleasures when we get a larger amount of what is uncongenial from them. So that leads pretty directly into prudence and why it's okay to forego some pleasures, why it's okay to accept some pains, because we have minds, because we can look forward to the future. But why do we want to say it's our first innate good, the starting point for every choice and avoidance? So he has a couple arguments for that. I know in various sources.

8:04 Wes: Yeah. Both O'Keefe and Nussbaum outline this very well. Part of the argument is just that we think about ourselves as these socialized creatures and we look around society and we see how sick it is. This is the way Nussbaum describes it. People chasing wealth and glory and sexual gratification and ultimately making themselves miserable and treating as good things which are not really good for them. And so Epicurus idea is that we ought to abstract from that. It's a very Rousseauian kind of idea where we go back to a kind of psychological state of nature, but one that is Rousseauian in the sense that it shows us a kind of natural good. So if you look at infants, for instance, this seems to be the paradigm, or what does Nussbaum call it? A sort of uncorrupted creature or a pre social right.

8:56 Dylan: I mean, that's why it's Rousseauian. It's before we're corrupted by society.

8:59 Wes: Yeah. And we want to see. Well, what is that? We're going to figure out what the highest good is by asking ourselves what this uncorrupted.

9:07 Mark: The uncorrupted witness.

9:09 Wes: Witness, yeah, the uncorrupted witness. What is the infant or the animal, the healthy animal? What do they desire? That is supposed to be one of the keys to figuring out what the highest good is. The other one is just experience. We just do phenomenology and say, look, just observe yourself and what you are always desiring and choosing. Observe the way you operate according to the pleasure principle. So those two things are the sort of foundational steps in deciding that pleasure is the highest good.

9:40 Dylan: We see around us animals that are contented and flourishing in their own ways, doing the things that they do, and they're driven by their desires. And it's a kind of phenomenology. I don't know if it's quite a metaphysics. It's at least a psychology of saying, doing what we would naturally do. And this uncorrupted witness is sort of the example of how we get a key on what we would naturally. There's nothing we would do that isn't good for us and that our desires are naturally drawn to our own pleasures and the avoidance of pain. That's why they're a good guide for our own happiness, because that's what they just do. They just do that. They put us in the direction of wanting to maximize happiness, maybe.

10:27 Wes: And the critical thing is that the uncorrupted witness, the infant or the animal, they're not choosing excess, they're not choosing extravagance. They're not doing things for the sake of power and wealth and domination and all that stuff. They have these natural limits. They're trying to avoid pain if they're hungry, they're trying to satisfy themselves until the hunger is gone. If they're distressed, they want to be, in the case of an infant would be comforted until the distress is gone. But there's no overreaching towards the things which go beyond what Epicurus calls these natural and necessary pleasures. And so that's sort of the key to the system.

11:04 Mark: Of course, just thinking about if one of my pets gets a hold of an excess of food, because they have these evolutionary drives that we don't know when the next meal is going to come along. So you should just eat everything possible right now and just assume that you'll be starving for the next few days. So this is certainly an idealization of animal nature.

11:24 Wes: They live in your corrupt household though, Mark, not in their natural conditions.

11:29 Dylan: It is an interesting question because it's not clear just in thinking about all the animal documentaries that watched. The idea of a corrupted animal, even one that isn't a pet, is crazy. Or maybe put it this way, that animals never do things that aren't poor choices in their own self interest as for reasons that are very, very similar to what we would call cravings for power or influence or other kinds of gratifications that you would just say are

11:58 Wes: what Epicurus, by the way, calls vain and empty.

12:01 Dylan: Yes, exactly. This is to me where the whole rational part comes. In the paragraph that Mark read at the beginning of at the end it says it is however, appropriate to make all these decisions by comparative measurement and examination the advantages and disadvantages. For at times we treat the good thing as bad and conversely the bad thing is good. So the fact that a pleasure is a good thing doesn't mean that it's a simple matter of just choosing it just because it's good, because not all pleasures are to be chosen. There's this whole problem of choosing, choosing the Right ones. Then there's a set of principles about how you choose those. But this is where some level, the rational, reflective part, comes in. And principle of utility, for instance.

12:45 Wes: And one of the interesting things about this is that it's kind of a meta level pleasure, pain, that's the most important. Epicurus distinguishes bodily and mental pain and pleasure. And of course the body and the mind are implicated in all pleasures. But the distinction here is between our anticipation of the future and our memories of the past. That's the mental category of pleasure and pain. And then the bodily would just be the things that we're feeling in the present and the mental are worse. And they are the big problem for us human beings because we spend a lot of time in a state of fear or anxiety, worried about.

We anticipate future pain, future misfortune. Our death is a big one. We anticipate perhaps punishment by the gods, or if we wanted to sort of make that more contemporary, we could say the punishment of our conscience or a bad conscience. So it's that metal level which is really Epicurus's focus. And the goal of his system is to produce what he calls tranquility or freedom from that sort of pain, the fear and the anxiety. And the way to do that in large part is not by making sure all our desires are satisfied, but by minimizing our desires, getting rid of the ones that we don't need so that we don't have to worry about them not being satisfied or have anxiety about a future of those things not being satisfied.

Oh my God, I'm not going to ever have a Volvo. I don't know why this occurred to me or something stupid like that. I get rid of all that unnecessary stuff and I get rid of the anxiety along with it.

14:28 Dylan: Well, a part of that argument is that the amount of pleasure that we actually get out of it from those rightly sized ones in a kind of trivial way, it amounts to wanting the things that you have and not wanting the things that you don't have and desiring the right things in the right amounts because too much of it leads to anxiety and all these other corruptions. And also that the amount of pleasure that we get out of it in that, let's call it the less heightened state, is actually at least, if not more overall pleasure, genuine happiness. So that the pleasure that we would get out of satisfying the desire to get that Mercedes, GLC or whatever it is, will never be satisfied in a way that that is actually tranquil, but only leads to more and more and more Desire, rather than being sated in any way.

15:29 Wes: Yeah, let's say a little bit more about that. Because this idea of tranquility, this idea that that's the highest pleasure, which is to say the highest pleasure is a kind of lack of pain and disturbance, is a really weird idea. Most of us would think that, no, it's not me being sated and comfortable, that it's more pleasurable, for instance, to be gorging on the filet mignon. That moment where we're eating or we're having sex or doing something really, really intense. That would be, under most people's analysis, the highest pleasure. But for Epicurus, it's going to be the state of tranquility, the state of not being bothered by desire, essentially being in a state of being sated, maybe the afterglow, the permanent afterglow, let's say.

16:15 Dylan: Yeah, and this is a point where it seems to be a contrast with stoicism, where that sense of tranquility strikes me as being one of fullness and the fullness of flourishing as being genuinely pleasurable and directed in that way. Whereas with stoicism, it more typically seems to be directed towards the kind of the defensive rear guard activity rather than the cultivating of that tranquility. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

16:45 Mark: I thought both of them aimed at tranquility. It's just that whether you're going to call it pleasure or not is the difference.

16:50 Wes: Well, with the Stoics, right, we saw in Epictetus there was that initial focus on avoiding disturbance by focusing only on the things that are under your control. And it turns out the thing that's under your control is your own virtue, is your own state of mind. That's what could be genuinely good or bad. And all the things external to that cannot be genuinely good and bad. And so we don't really have to worry about them. If we reason about things correctly and we understand them rightly, we learn to detach ourselves from that stuff. In this case, I think it's different in the sense that it's not a matter of detaching ourselves entirely from the external.

17:31 Dylan: To me, it's almost glass half full versus glass half empty. That in the Stoic case, it seems to be. You focus on the amount of detachment that you need to have and cultivating detachment. And with the Epicureans, it seems to be cultivating the right sort of attachment so that you are directed towards, well, what kinds of things should I hold on to rather than what kinds of things should I keep at bay? And those are different.

17:57 Wes: Yeah, you're still minimizing the attachment, you're minimizing desire and you're focusing on trying to get as much in your control as possible. And there's this idea in Epicurus that intense pains must be short lived and death is not a bad thing because it's just annihilation and we can't possibly suffer after death. But yeah, I thought I had thought this through and I'm looking at my notes, but I don't have a good comparison here for Stoicism.

18:27 Mark: I thought they both did have a sort of contempt of the ability of fate to affect our fortunes negatively. Stoicism takes this to extreme for exactly the reason that you said that only your virtue is under your control. No matter what horrible things are happening to you, you can make yourself so that you are undisturbed. You retain Ataraxia. For the Epicurean, I think it's a little more complicated. He does want it so that a lot of the things that we would regard as misfortunes, even debilitating illness. Well, at least you know, back in this time that this was written, if you had a really terrible illness, you'd probably be dead soon.

So not fearing the illness is comparable with not fearing death. That physical pain is disturbing, yes, but it is always on Epicurus view, going to be temporary. Either it'll be over in a few minutes and maybe you'll be dead, or maybe it'll just be done. It seems like that doesn't take into account the sort of long term debilitating physical ailments that you could be subject to. But we get this example again and again of his own letter to a friend when he was about to die, that he was suffering from these terrible kidney stones or something like that.

And he said, sure, this hurts, but I'm in Ataraxia. I feel good about this because I'm remembering all the nice philosophical conversations I had. So that demonstrates, you know, very similar to the Stoics, the way that you would overcome physical misfortune.

19:54 Dylan: In 131 of that third letter, he says, becoming accustomed to simple, not extravagant ways of life makes one completely healthy, makes man unhesitant in the face of life's necessary duties, puts us in a better condition for the times of extravagance which occasionally come along and makes us fearless in the face of chance. Those last two things, the last one relates to what we were just talking about, that when fate comes along and causes us challenges, the fact that we have been accustomed to a simple life allows us to be more well dispositioned in order to handle those challenges, but also in the previous one, to enjoy the moments of extravagance that come along and be able to hold them in a way that we don't become slavish to experience them without becoming slavish to them.

20:46 Wes: It's all just a bonus.

20:48 Dylan: Yep, the bonus prime rib and the bonus orgasm.

20:52 Mark: I still think we've addressed Wes's question of how weird it is that a state of simply not being perturbed ends up being defined as the highest pleasure.

21:02 Dylan: Maybe we should dig in a little bit more. It's not clear to me that the idea is really being unperturbed unless we include with that a kind of fullness that comes with that unperturbedness. It's not merely flatness, right. It's not like it is a fullness of pleasure. And that is, let's call it, balanced of contentment. If I eat a meal and it is the right amount and I'm done and I'm not on the floor, stomach ache because I overindulged. That's the kind of thing we're talking about, right?

21:36 Wes: O'Keefe has some useful stuff on this. We're talking here about the distinction between kinetic and katastematic pleasure. Cicero's objection to all of this. This idea that ataraxia, this tranquility, is the pinnacle of happiness. Cicero says, no, pleasure and absence of pain are not the same thing. Cicero uses this phrase, sweet sensation. We could think of our highest good as composite. We like both those things, but we shouldn't conflate them. And then Cicero will say, on the infant model, then kinetic pleasures would be the highest good, because they're not just seeking ataraxia, they are actively seeking to satisfy hunger and whatever other kinetic pleasures are involved in being a feeding infant.

And then O'Keefe has a nice little point about suppose you are in that kind of state of katastematic contentment. You're full, you're sated, you're not perturbed by desire. If someone hands you a bon bon and you get nice intense pleasure out of that, haven't you added to that? Because the idea here for Epicurus is also that that katastematic state is limiting. Once you've reached that, there is no way to add to that pleasure. That's part of the idea that it's the highest good. You've reached the limit and nothing can be better. Not even if you have the bon bon.

22:55 Mark: You can't exceed that, but you can change the character of it. So that's what happens when you have the bon bon is that it's just giving you more variety in your life. It doesn't actually raise the level of pleasure, but it is giving you variety. Which I think the implication of putting it that way is that the desire for variety is one of those unnatural, unnecessary pleasures. Is that right?

23:17 Wes: Yes. Natural but not necessary.

23:20 Dylan: Yes.

23:20 Wes: It's not the same as a vain and empty. It's natural in the sense because it's still eating. The natural but not necessary is where we vary to pleasure, but we're not removing any sort of pain. And so a luxury like meat falls into that category.

23:35 Mark: Curiosity, you know, wanting to try a different thing. Just wanting to have some variety in your life. I would think that is natural, though not necessarily vain, unless taken to extremes. Yeah.

23:45 Wes: You could see a lack of variety as something that becomes painful in a way.

23:49 Dylan: Yep.

23:49 Wes: The thing that Dylan was getting at is the idea that in the katastematic pleasure, we're aware of our own healthy natural functioning. And that sort of maybe contentment is the word that really is more satisfying than say, here's a bon bonus.

24:08 Dylan: And part of that is thinking about the integration over time. Right. And this is where the intensity comes from. There are some things that are intensely pleasurable, but then they end over time in pain. I mean, getting drunk might be pleasurable, but then to the extent that it's followed by a hangover, just feeling crappy

24:27 Wes: later, well, you gotta just keep drinking, Dylan.

24:33 Mark: That's your natural constitution.

24:37 Wes: That's the solution.

24:42 Mark: So this whole being unperturbed in recognition of your natural and healthy functioning, once you put it like that, then you've really, I think, opened the doors to a lot of kind of things. Right. Not drinking to excess, not doing anything to excess, but you know, just to all that functioning-lust stuff that you get out of Aristotle that we talked about with Nietzsche, that merely being sated is different than being in accord with your natural healthy condition. And there's a. Maybe the Epicurean, at least some of them. But again, this, I think, is even a place where Lucretius may differ from Epicurus.

And certainly the way Nussbaum describes it. Right. She uses that discussion of it's being uninterrupted in your natural functioning, which doesn't necessarily mean settled at all. So you could be athletic. I'm kind of, again, thinking of the progress from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius. And maybe is mirrored in the progress from Epicurus, who's A little more strict and stern about some of this stuff to Lucretius, who's, you know, using poetry is, as Nussbaum points out, is much more indulgent of sexual desire. Maybe, you know, there are at least legitimate kinds of that where Epicurus seems to have.

Want nothing to do with it. So there might be a whole range of things that you could argue that, yeah, this is actually part of normal, healthy human functioning. So pursuing those things, it's not just that you only move if you have a lack. Right. Which is something I had read into the Lucretius. Right. The gods don't lack anything, therefore they don't do anything. Right. Do you think that Epicurus thinks that that's true of the human animal? Or is it more this Aristotelian thing that Nussbaum was reading into him?

26:22 Wes: Could you explain that?

26:23 Mark: Again, the question is whether natural human functioning can involve something fairly ambitious.

26:29 Dylan: Seems to me it would. And the gods would be the example. I don't think the understanding of the gods involves that they don't do anything. Right.

26:37 Wes: Well, they just float around in space. Floating is doing something. I'm just kidding. But they do float around in space.

26:45 Mark: One of the Epicurean arguments that I don't remember where in the primary sources it is, but definitely discussed by our secondary readings. O'Keefe says this is one of the more unconvincing arguments that certainly the gods, unlike what the Stoics think of them, can't be in charge of the movement of the planets and in charge of coordinating this whole grand plan, because that would be a lot of effort and that would be too stressful for them.

27:09 Wes: Yeah.

27:10 Mark: So that's explicitly from Epicurus, I guess.

27:12 Dylan: Yeah.

27:13 Wes: And under one interpretation. Right. What O'Keefe calls the realist view. They are just space aliens floating around basically in space.

27:21 Dylan: Sure.

27:23 Wes: But he doesn't like the realist view because they still have to be bodies and they would still basically suffer from entropy and they'd have to fall apart. So the alternative view is that they are idealizations and thought constructs that are basically projected outside of us, that we actually create them with our thoughts.

27:42 Mark: I thought that was really a stretch on O'Keefe's part to try to attribute that to them. Based on one quote.

27:48 Wes: Yep. In Cicero, which looks like it's an error.

27:52 Mark: Yes. So it's page 53 of the reader, line 49. This is Cicero talking about the Epicurean's view. The gods are perceived not by their senses, but by the intellect and not in virtue of some solidity or numerical identity, but rather because the images of gods are perceived by virtue of similarity and transference. And since an unlimited series of very similar images arises from innumerable atoms and flows to the gods, our intellect attends to those images and our intelligence is fixed on them with the greatest possible pleasure. And so it grasps the blessed and eternal nature of the gods.

28:28 Wes: Where it looks like two should probably be from.

28:30 Unknown speaker: Right, right.

28:30 Mark: And so that's what the footnote in this says. This is the reading of the manuscript. Many editors accept the simple and attractive emendation from the gods. But Tim points at that and like, no, and we should say, Tim O'Keefe was one of our classmates. He was one of the more spirited. So he directly sent us e copies of this book. Thanks to Tim. Yeah, I just. I have good memories of him and

28:50 Wes: it's a very clear and useful overview.

28:53 Mark: Yeah, but this particular notion of, oh, well, if there are images that are flowing to the gods, well, what that means is that as you just said, Wes, the gods are a projection of excellences. It's a natural thing for us to do. In other words, like, if God didn't exist, man would have had to invent him. That kind of quote. This is basically what he's attributing to Epicurus, to the Epicureans, is that which I can't imagine, even if this was Epicurus's view, that he would have transmitted this successfully using this, this very subtle view.

29:25 Dylan: Well, he can't have gotten everything right.

29:27 Wes: But, Mark, you were getting at whether it can be ambitious, whether.

29:31 Mark: Yeah, oh, right, yeah. Can the natural functioning of human beings, if you say ataraxia, is just. Is it lack of disturbance, full stop, or is it lack of disturbance of the natural functioning of the human animal? Nussbaum gives the latter interpretation.

29:45 Wes: I see, I see.

29:46 Mark: Which opens the door to like, well, what is the natural functioning of the human animal? Well, Epicurus has said a lot about that. The natural functioning is to pursue pleasure, but only with prudence. Nussbaum adds some things to this. You know, that we raised her notion of the uncorrupted witness. But we're not supposed to try to be like babies or like animals because we have reason, which, as Nussbaum characterizes it, gives us better means, ends analysis. So we, even though the basic good, the highest good pleasure is right there in the behavior of animals and babies, what we should actually do based on recognition that that's the highest good. Well, animals and babies are not good at actually pursuing those things. They don't know how to predict the future in the way we can.

30:32 Wes: They're good at establishing what the end should be, but they're not good at the means part, at getting it. Yeah, we need reason just in the most everyday practical sense to get what we want. We have to engage in practical reasoning.

30:45 Dylan: Yeah. They don't judge utility well, so they become poor judges of prudence. What is going to be good for them and what is the outcome of those choices regarding their reactions to their desires and the way they appoint their desires and fulfill their desires, and whether they will be ultimately good for them. Not in a kind of teleological sense, but in a very pragmatic sense. It's useful in the end to being happy.

31:14 Wes: But Mark, to go back to your point, I don't know that we can say the highest good would be the undisturbed, healthy functioning. That sounds very Aristotelian, because we still need to relativize everything to pleasure. It has to be a lack of disturbance in the sense of a lack of pain, subjective feeling of pain.

31:33 Dylan: I don't like the relativizing it towards a lack of pain because it sounds, frankly, too stoic. Right. Because it's about pleasure, about cultivating pleasure, and not about simply minimizing pain as the way to cultivate pleasure.

31:49 Wes: It's this weird paradox, though. That's why it's hard to say, because it's this idea that the lack of disturbance is the highest pleasure.

31:57 Mark: And is he just renaming. He's insisting on using the word pleasure but in such a weird way that there's no reason to even call him a hedonist.

32:05 Wes: In thinking about that idea, we have to think about whether our tranquility is simply this idle state. Nussbaum rejects this. Is it simply satedness or a feeling of warmth and fullness or something like that, A lack of trouble? Or is it this more active. And maybe, Mark, this is what you meant by something more ambitious. But this more active pleasure in one's own functioning, which is how I think Nussbaum is coming down. But it's really, I think, kind of hard to say. But it can't be right. Like we're not going to get an Aristotelian model out of this, where it's our activity in accordance with virtue, where we're going to identify tranquility with activity in accordance with virtue and our awareness of our functioning that way and that being happiness. That's not what's going on. We need the virtues in order to get the pleasure.

33:00 Dylan: I agree with you, that's not what's happening here. But there are things that are filtering out pleasures that are part of how you attain this mode of tranquility and how you choose between the pleasures. So you need more than just this general direction. So you have this general direction that pleasures are a good thing, they're all good things. And that is sort of phenomenologically how we operate. And we can get convinced about that by looking at babies or the uncorrupted witness or animals and even reflecting on ourselves that we are just directed by our desires towards things that we find pleasant.

But then there are these things you have to add on top of it. You know, these principles like self sufficiency is a great good, that those well directed pleasures are cultivated such that you would call them prudent. It ends up being way, way more deciding on what the choice worthy pleasures are based upon their utility that in some ways seem to be at least a grab bag of principles that are filling a function similar to pleasure directed by virtue the way it does in Aristotle.

34:11 Mark: So I was looking for a quote in here for why do people act at all? And it's actually just in that letter, page 30, verse 128. For we do everything for the sake of being neither in pain nor in terror. As soon as we achieve this state, every storm in the soul is dispelled, since the animal is not in a position to go after some need nor seek something else to complete the good of the body and the soul. For we are in need of pleasure only when we are in pain because of the absence of pleasure. And when we are not in pain, then we no longer need pleasure. So it does sound very mechanistic.

34:43 Dylan: Yeah. And that quote right there feels like it's in tension with some other parts. I guess you would say that even like for being in hunger, that when we go get food we're quenching the pain of hunger. I suppose ignoring the fact that there are things that we want to eat but not because we're hungry.

35:02 Wes: Yeah, I was trying to think about all the different phenomenological cases of pleasure and pain. And it's enormous and they're so qualitatively different. And something like hunger, if you think about it, it's much different than if you burned your hand or something like that. And often there's an element of pleasure in the anticipation of eating. So when I get to that point where I'm hungry enough for dinner, do I call that pain? It's kind of a more complicated thing. So that's one of the weaknesses of this is just you would need a much more robust phenomenology of pain and pleasure because it's not clear that the idea of pain and pleasure is even concrete enough to perform the function that Epicurus wants it to perform.

In a way, they're very abstract ideas with very, very different concrete manifestations. But then also we get if O'Keefe is right, everything is reducible to bodily pains and pleasures. We can ultimately say, for instance, that friendship is just pleasurable in and of itself, that we just have this natural pleasure that we get from pro social feelings, let's say, or from loving or being loved. But it's all got to be instrumental. And it's not just any kind of instrumentality. It's instrumental in the sense that it's relative to our ability not to be worried about potential future bodily pain and pleasure.

So when we cultivate friendships we get a sense of warmth and safety and well being because of the confidence that they'll come to our aid. They will help us in times of need. But we're still ultimately thinking about everything and reducing everything to bodily pain and pleasure. That's O'Keefe's interpretation of all this. And I didn't analyze the primary reading well enough to know if that's right.

36:55 Dylan: That sounds right. In terms of characterizing the interpretation, he admits a kind of complication of interpreting all the let's call it mental pains and pleasures as bodily because that's mainly by virtue of acknowledging that well, whatever is mental is bodily.

37:15 Wes: Yeah, he gives that caveat about whatever is bodily is mental and whatever is mental is bodily because we're feeling a bodily pain in the way it's a mental mental state. What Epicurus is calling mental pains and pleasures are our memories and anticipations of pains, pleasures in the past and then possible pain and pleasure in the future and reasonings.

37:34 Mark: Right?

37:35 Wes: Yeah.

37:35 Mark: So on the principal doctrines, this is page 33 of the text. As soon as the feeling of pain produced by want is removed, pleasure in the flesh will not increase, but is only varied. But the limit of mental pleasures is produced by reasoning out of these very pleasures of the flesh and of the things related to these which used to cause the greatest fears in the intellect. In other words, this is a very restricted. The pleasure of figuring things out that Dylan often likes to talk about really only is legitimate and not vain in some way. If it's reasoning out, doing means end analysis about maximizing bodily pleasure. I should not eat this food now because I've already eaten and I'm already full.

38:16 Dylan: Wow.

38:17 Mark: I feel really good figuring that out. What a mental pleasure I just had. That's the limit of my mental pleasures.

38:23 Dylan: Does that mean the mental pleasures of philosophy or mathematics or music is all vain pleasures? Yep.

38:32 Wes: To the extent that you think that they are pleasurable in themselves, they're vain and empty. In other words, they are. They're not the naive, uncorrupted creature, sorry, uncorrupted witness types of pleasure. They are socially created. And so, yeah, you get the sense from all of this that any sort of higher, really socially dependent, distinctively human sorts of pains and pleasures, those sorts of things are necessarily part of the vain and empty, corrupt culture.

39:03 Mark: I don't think that music falls into that category though, at least some kinds of music, because in Lucretius terms, which presumably came from Epicurus, it's a soothing feeling in your ears. The soothing rounded atoms are skimming along the edge of your ears. So it's like feeling a woolly blanket.

39:19 Dylan: Okay. Music may be a different category, but I want to focus a little bit more.

39:23 Wes: I've never seen a cat or a baby really enjoy music though. But go ahead.

39:26 Dylan: Yeah, about these other intellectual pleasures. This is a place where it's most different from Aristotle or Plato or part of what Cicero's criticism is of it that these distinctively human rational inclinations and pleasures seem to be minimized. And Aristotle's saying that our natural state is to reach out, to know things

39:53 Wes: and to be social. Yeah.

39:55 Dylan: So both of them. But taking the first one, reaching out to know that in this interpretation you would say, well, that's part of our intrinsic pleasure seeking. And even in Plato, thinking about Socrates, eroticism, and that our philosophizing is fundamentally a bodily characterized desire to know, and that those are desires in exactly the same way. Those would, to me, sort of feel like they ought to be Epicurean. But in this interpretation of it, it means that they're not epicurean.

40:30 Wes: There's no reason that Epicurus couldn't have gone that way, as far as I can tell, and that there's no reason hedonism couldn't be this more sophisticated hedonism, like, because the whole friendship thing throws me. You know, O'Keefe gives this discussion of. In some places, there's this idea that you should love your friends as much as you love yourself. But how do you do that? Because it's all your reason for friendship. Ultimately it's all relegated to your pleasure. You do it just because it gives you pleasure. So how could you have any sort of selfless Valuation of your friends.

If it's all just a matter of, you know, your own egoistic pursuit of pleasure. But really in those places, I just want to say, well, it's just kind of basic. As social, self conscious political creatures, we don't have to try to reduce all of this to physical pleasures and pains. We can just say, look, there's just a basic pleasure in friendship. There's a basic pleasure in altruism and helping other people. And you could still be hedonist. You just say that, yeah, it's nice to taste a bon bon or to be touched. But there's also all this other psychological stuff that's not simply reducible to that.

41:44 Mark: See, I wonder though, if for instance, friendship, if that's gonna. He'd just want. I don't know if reducible is the word, but it has to cash out in terms of particular experiences. Right. Why is friendship in itself seem valuable to us is because of a lot of individual experiences of like, you know, a jolly back and forth that you and I are having or whatever. And you add those things up over time and you add the depth. So some of them have a more obviously sensual component than others. So you know, when somebody says something to you that just shows that they know you so well, you know, and you feel a closeness there. Like it's hard to, to say that, oh well, that's ultimately something physical, but neither is it abstract.

42:27 Wes: Well, what do you mean it's ultimately what now what did you use? Physical?

42:31 Mark: It would be hard if Epicurus is, is committed to saying that that's ultimately physical. Yeah, I'm not sure. Like, I think a lot of it could be physical instances that add up into something abstract.

42:44 Wes: So I think it's informative. And to think about just the whole process of becoming friends with someone which O'Keefe refers to this because there's a, you know, there's a heterodox interpretation where initially we're motivated purely by our own pleasure in the making of friends. You know, so we develop an initial kind of association, we go out for drinks. We don't know each other that well. In my experience. There's a lot of like aversion as well. I just rather stay home. Do I really want to go through the process of making a new friend? You see, you have to actually put in a lot of work and then you get to a certain point where you develop attachment.

That's the point where you value the friend or love them for their own sake. And we could give lots of psychological explanations for that, I think one of them would be that at that point there's been this mutual influence. We've sort of become constitutive of each other. So it's not just that my friend can see me for who I am after a long time of exposure. They can see me precisely because they've worked on me. They've made me seeable to them. And we've done that mutually. And there's lots of other things you could say about that sort of thing.

Yeah. When you talk about all the different forms of psychological pleasure we might get out of interacting with people, I don't think you could reduce most of it to something physical. And the deeper into the friendship that you get, the farther away from that it gets.

44:08 Dylan: But we don't want to merely call it pleasure by analogy. Right. Or do we?

44:12 Wes: No, no, there's a reason why we

44:14 Dylan: would call it a pleasure. And it would be in the same bucket of things that more straightforward physical experiential pleasures. And they're not merely abstracted from that either, but they're more complicated in that they aren't tied to a single physical experience. They're a combination of mental experiences, physical experiences. The contentment that you feel in being with a friend or the excitement. There's something physical about that. Right. That you feel contented or you feel the pleasure of just that rapport that is different than the pain of being angry at somebody. But it's not a simple one to one relationship with a given sensory experience.

45:01 Mark: Well, I wonder if we're not modernizing the picture in our head a little too much. From what I read here, like, the reason he valued friendship primarily is not he mentions like the nice memories he had of talking philosophy with his friend, but in specifically the way that what friendship meant to him was Come join the garden, my private civilization, where you will be surrounded by epicurean teachings at all times. Friendship was a mutual defense society. Right. So it doesn't even matter to some extent whether you find the individual pleasant or not. Like, are you committed to. To mutual defense.

45:38 Dylan: Yeah. Security or helping out each other. I mean, defense may be not necessarily only in the sense of you're going to defend against the marauders, but, well, mutual aid.

45:49 Wes: Yeah. For when you're in trouble or defend

45:51 Mark: against fortune is the way he puts it. Right.

45:53 Dylan: Yes.

45:55 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good point to emphasize because we are trying to think about this reducibility to physical pains and pleasures, but we have to the emphasis actually there is on the meta stuff. It's on the anxiety over stuff that might happen to me in the future, especially negative physical stuff. Me getting hurt, me getting killed, and the sense of security that friendship gives against that, the idea that I am protected. So you could still get this kind of second level. You can still talk about more complex emotions that are not strictly physical. They're mental, in a sense. And yes, they're reducible to the physical stuff, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have their own qualitative complexity and phenomenology in their own right.