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

0:00 Mark: So you think maybe we're ready to talk about different ways in which this was applied historically could be applied in our lives? You know, just the practical upshot of this. I mean, the whole Nussbaum's book is called the Therapy of Desire and is all about. I haven't read the end of the book, so I don't know what her ultimate conclusion is, but is looking at Epicureanism, as well as Stoicism and skepticism as practical philosophy as something that we can use to cure ourselves. And in fact, that is the function of philosophy, that is to set us on the right path, that we are spiritually sick under normal circumstances.

0:37 Dylan: You know, part of the context of this is a quote from Epicurus. Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of the body, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not throw out suffering from the soul.

0:59 Mark: Yep, that's Nussbaum's whole point throughout her book, and she has a couple chapters on Aristotle before the Epicurus is to explain this and to get into the. The contrast and comparisons of what it could mean for philosophy to be healing and, you know, what it has to claim to know about human nature, in other words, the proper human functioning, and then how it would recommend what tools it uses to steer us toward that.

1:22 Wes: And her chapter begins. I mean, there's a lot of useful comparisons to Aristotle in the chapter because there are a lot of similarities. But, you know, the difference she begins with is that Aristotle's whole method is to assume his whole method is to say, okay, well, what do people normally believe? What are the common ethical beliefs? And then he's going to analyze, you know, he's going to use that as data for the purposes of his analysis. And the assumption is that those beliefs are healthy, that our common ethical beliefs are healthy, and that also that we are aware of our beliefs for the most part.

The ones that are relevant to this line of thought, the way we help ourselves. The sort of self help activity for Aristotle and I suppose for Plato as well, involves dialectic where we subject our behaviors and our beliefs to rational examination. For Epicurus, it's going to be more therapeutic.

2:22 Dylan: Part of it being therapeutic is diagnosing that in important ways. We commonly become sick that way. We were talking about it earlier. We refer to the uncorrupted witness, but there of course be the corrupted witness,

2:37 Wes: like society has made them sick and that's why people are after money and fame and all that.

2:42 Dylan: Yeah. So I mean, and we already referred to Rousseau in this respect, the idea that contra Aristotle, where the civilization and the polis is the source of the transformation of human reasoning and virtue to be greater than it is all alone by individuals. That for Epicurus, society is often and most commonly corrupting of us and leaning to us to have unnatural desires, desires which are bad for us, that we have to therapeutically deal with by cultivating better medicine for our souls.

3:22 Wes: And that cultivation will not require us to be wealthy, liberally educated elites who can engage in philosophy and philosophical reflection. It'll be more open to a wider range of people for a variety of reasons that we'll get into. But the other part of this is just that the way Nussbaum sets this up is that on the Epicurean view, people are generally ignorant of what they believe and what motivates them. So they don't have the same sort of transparency, this access to the relevant beliefs for the sake of the ethical self examination. So it's one thing to say, hey, what should I do?

And is this right? Is that right? I think I should do this, but no reason tells me to do this. We're not any longer functioning on that level. We're talking about unconscious motivation. She's going to bring in psychoanalysis and stuff. And then if we are talking about unconscious motivation, then our whole technique for dealing with that can't be completely rational. It has to involve some other therapeutic method which he's going to call surgery ultimately.

4:26 Dylan: But this in contrast with Aristotle is not a cultivation of excellence with all, as you pointed out, Wes, all the concomitant dependencies about your fortune, regarding your birth, your fortune regarding the kind of education you had and all that sort of thing in your ability to realize that happiness through virtue. But you don't need to have those things ultimately, you don't have to be deeply self reflective about it. You can accept the Epicurean principles, not that that's the only way you do it. But you could just accept the Epicurean principles and just live that way and you'll just be happier.

5:09 Wes: Yeah, you could memorize. You can actually memorize certain. Say them over and over to yourself and not necessarily understand the justification. You could know all the metaphysical results, all the facts of the natural, they're atoms and all this stuff. You don't have to understand those explanations as long as you accept that.

5:27 Dylan: There is a funny way in which you could easily be non dialectical about your way of life as an Epicurean that Cicero bristles against. And Aristotle, including under Nussbaum's reading of it, would bristle against that there isn't the same cultivation both of excellence and of intellectual reflection and owning an argument, owning your own beliefs, your own actions, your own desires in a rationally reflective way, but you could simply cultivate them the way you cultivate a strong and healthy body by following certain rules. Is that all that bad?

I mean, is there anything really wrong with it? And the reason I would find myself scratching my head about it a little bit is because I believe in the patron saint of Socrates. And maybe I am the corrupted witness to the notion of owning your opinions as being part of overcoming the slavery of society, that kind of thing. You could certainly do that, but Epicurus seems to have the possibility of not doing that. Just I can have my independence. I can not be a slave to my desires and be happy. But without that kind of, it's called that intellectual component or even that component of excellence that someone like Aristotle would aspire to, that I can just have normal, everyday, you know, sitting on the porch, happiness.

6:59 Mark: Nussbaum contrasts either you could have serious dialectic and requirement that you learn philosophy, but then philosophy is elite. Or you could extend it out to the masses, but then it necessarily will be dogmatic and unphilosophical. But I'm just wondering if that's really an either or condition that for the Epicureans there's probably still going to be an inner circle of people who are engaging in dialectic and questioning and advancing on and things. And likewise, if you tried to take the Aristotelian view, which I think Thomas Aquinas did, and then try to extend it out, enforce it through the whole society, then you would be doing something that's not very philosophical when it comes down to spreading it to the masses, you would be turning it into dogma.

So I don't think it's inherent in, in the Epicurean system that it is more just A matter in its spreading, that it dilutes the philosophy.

7:58 Wes: So, by the way. Yeah, I don't think. It's not that Aquinas is dogmatic and unreflective per se, but, you know, any system could be promulgated that way. And, yeah, for the most part, what

8:09 Mark: his view led to in the church political system is kind of what I was thinking, not Aquinas's thought.

8:15 Wes: Right. I mean, one of her critiques is that she does think that ultimately that Epicureans are kind of trained. They're trained to refute their opponents, but they're not really trained to be open to look at alternative views and really sympathetically get to know them and evaluate them.

8:34 Dylan: And Cicero's criticism as well.

8:37 Wes: Yeah, because they're constantly under this need to perform this pragmatic function, which is to avoid disturbance. And because of that, I think she thinks that it undermines. If philosophy were just this, there would be a problem because there wouldn't be genuine inquiry and there wouldn't be the opportunity ultimately to do what philosophers do, which is influence the political scene, influence policymakers, influence society as a whole. Nussbaum's idea is that even if it's just some people, we want an actual dialectic going on, and so that that can trickle down to the masses through political institutions, essentially, and that we don't want to do anything to endanger that.

I mean, the other part of this is just that ethically, and I thought a lot about Mill here, I don't really think we can say that people can act ethically without being capable of doing some reasoning and engaging in some of this dialectic.

9:39 Dylan: Well, let's take the first one there. Part of that would seem to. And be acknowledging that vigorous intellectual activity, dialectic, or trying to do something like change society are all directions of activity that are away from tranquility. And even if I have a pleasure in figuring things out, like Mark pointed out that I like to talk about, for someone to try to figure something out that's really, really hard, there's inevitably a lot of pain and frustration associated with that. That describing it as very difficult means that there's something that is going to be deeply untranquil about it, and that would, on the face of it, be directly contrary to what Epicurus is characterizing as a happy life in which you would reflect on your happiness as being overall happiness was there because you arduously went through a very, very difficult.

10:45 Wes: Well, is hard work incompatible with ataraxia? Just occurs to me now that's exactly

10:50 Mark: what I was asking in terms of if the natural function of the human animal is engaging in hard work and struggle, then.

10:58 Dylan: Yeah, and I think it's complicated here, right, because we have these quotes about trying to get through hardship as being part of the well disposed epicurean by having the right dispositions with respect to your own desires. But that way of understanding it seems to be that you are weathering the challenges of fate as opposed to actively engaging in challenges for the betterment of your soul or your satisfying any variety of desires or vigorous activity. Like Mark was describing. That it's hard not to describe as being painful in some way, at least in the immediate sense. Even if at the end you're glad that you did it and that you have the pleasure and the contentment of having made the accomplishment at the end.

11:53 Wes: Yeah, so that works for Epicurus. We can have short term pains for longer term goals, but what is short, right.

12:02 Dylan: What if the challenge that you worked on was for 40 years? What if it was never sated? Right. What if you worked up for your entire life for the betterment of your society and it wasn't ever realized until after you died?

12:17 Wes: There has to be some pleasure in work itself, Right?

12:21 Mark: And clearly Epicurus himself was engaged in a political enterprise. I mean, he started the garden, this little society. And he published, as one of our secondary sources pointed out, he published all these things that were distributed far and wide. He was not, you know, he was not just concerned with his own pleasure. And I find it really hard to believe that he would be on his deathbed remembering. Oh, I remember having those wonderful discussions with you when I told you what to think. Like no, he must have actually been engaging in something like philosophical dialectic.

12:54 Dylan: Exactly.

12:56 Mark: For that to be pleasurable for him.

12:58 Wes: Well, there are, yeah. And there are also quotations about how. Yeah, he thinks that that philosophical reflection is actually very enjoyable. It's just that when you try and square that with this system, you have to start thinking about it being enjoyable because it serves this pragmatic function of getting you toward ataraxia. But again, that's what we mean by reducibility. That's a question because it could just be our subjective experience is just. Hey, hey, we're not necessarily thinking about the reduction part.

13:31 Dylan: Part of the problem is it's not just a philosophy for being chill all the time and not being affected by anything, which our emphasis on tranquility would seem to point us in that direction. The example of that Mark is reminding us of about Epicurus is he sets up this society and does all kinds of things that are contrary to social conventions of the day that would require in some fundamental way, being in conflict with the rest of society all the time. Right. It's not like he's writing all these pamphlets and these books and stuff like that. It's not like he's withdrawing and avoiding conflict, let's say. So whatever tranquility means, it doesn't mean that.

14:15 Mark: So I really liked the chill aspect of this. In contrast to stoicism. Right. Marcus Aurelius Stoicism is you've got your duty, and you got to do that. And that's the. You got to just put aside all the things inside you, the obstacles that are. That's just. That sounds exhausting. So I really liked this as a contrast to that until I got to the reading. Nussbaum and her going into depth about what it was like in the garden and her imagining what it would be like for somebody who's kind of seeking therapy through epicureanism, that it has to become a whole lifestyle, and they have to just repeat these things over and over again. It sounds like Brave New World.

14:54 Wes: Yeah. It begins with someone putting the chloroform rag over your mouth and your nose, putting you in a trunk, dragging you off the compound.

15:04 Mark: It does sound a lot like Scientology, doesn't it?

15:06 Wes: This whole.

15:07 Mark: This particular cult.

15:08 Wes: You're fed a diet of quinoa and tofu, and

15:13 Mark: if you complain, if you like, say, I like some of those desires that I had. Why. Why shouldn't I want to change the world? Why shouldn't I then? Well, I guess you need some more instruction. And if we can't get you with the soothing medicine, then we'll pull out the really strong medicine.

15:30 Wes: Yeah. And the strong medicine is. This leads us into something I wanted to talk about. The strong medicine is the stuff that's supposed to get at the unconscious. Right. The surgery part is that's the strongest thing you can do, and that's when there's this unconscious stuff which roots you. And the unconscious thing, I think, is primarily fear of death, the way that can operate unconsciously, which is, I think, actually really fascinating and would be worth unpacking. And then, so Nussbaum, this is the way, sort of, she. Towards the end of the essay, when she focuses on.

There are these alternative options to us engaging in dialectic and using our critical faculties. So memorization, confession, informing was the third one. And the idea of the memory repetition part is to awake a teaching in ourself so that it becomes powerful and so that it gets at the false beliefs that don't lie on the surface, that aren't conscious, that aren't susceptible to dialectical scrutiny. In other words, the way she puts it, you got to drive the teachings deep so that they will confront the unconscious beliefs. And then she gives, I think, a kind of stretched account of how there's something like.

Similar to psychotherapy going on in the sense that the epicurean would do that by examining the personal narratives of people, examining their. The story of their actions, their thoughts, their desires or dreams, basically their confessional stuff that would be the confession part of things, and then try to bring up the unconscious material to subject it to the light of day. That's a really interesting connection that she's making there. I'm sure the whole. The book as a whole is going to cash that out in a really fascinating way. But, yeah, I don't know what you guys thought of that.

I want to also get back, by the way, to Fear of Death, per se, before we end the podcast. But that seemed to be the upshot that the kind of climax of the Nussbaum essay is getting at that whole unconscious thing.

17:35 Mark: So, yeah, yeah, I don't know what to say without getting into some more, you know, the chapter after that in Nussbaum, she's actually talking about the thing we talked about at the end of last time, which is Lucretius's take on love. And she thinks this is one. You know, she really focuses on this because she thinks this is an example of a kind of mythology that we still retain today and that many of us are very attached to. Unlike, you know, nobody's like, I want to be afraid of death. You know, that even if there are unconscious things about that, and you might point out, like, oh, your artistic activity, that's actually, you're trying to be immortal, aren't you? There might be something unconscious about a lot of behaviors that end up reflecting on the fear of death. You're chasing fame, you're chasing.

18:17 Wes: Seeking power.

18:18 Mark: Yeah, seeking power. That's not going to protect you from death. And don't worry about it. You shouldn't be afraid of death.

18:23 Wes: You know the psychology of that, too. I think, like, you can really cash that out in a plausible way because it's not just a matter of physical death. The issue is not just physical death, but it's what psychoanalysts would call annihilatory anxiety. It's the idea that our psyche might crumble, something like that, or that our self image would be destroyed, or the idea that we would no longer, that all of our future attachments are doomed. And that is something that I think people function around, that sort of terror, not just the idea of physically dying.

So for instance, that's why injury to our pride can be so threatening. You know, someone gets humiliated and they lash out and kill a person for what seems like a trivial reason. I mean, I've read lots of accounts of this. The reasons people engage in second degree murder, like someone taking a fry off their plate, for instance. And it's often like friends and relatives, right? That's who gets killed. But the common kernel of those sorts of stories is humiliation, or what psychoanalysts would call narcissistic injury, which is felt as this like fundamental feeling of the possibility of psychological annihilation.

19:41 Dylan: Seth pointed out a couple episodes ago that merely saying, well, look, when you die, you're annihilated, so don't worry about it, there's nothing to fear about death is deeply uncomforting. Even understanding intellectually doesn't get rid of the fear of death in terms of the fear or the anxiety about annihilation for the reasons that you were giving Wes. I was going to read a couple things about Nussbaum's characterization of Epicurus as a psychologist.

20:11 Wes: All right, before you do that, I just want to say one more thing about this. It's a fear of the annihilation of our social natures. That's what I think is so interesting about this. Our social component, which involves this relationship to others, our ego structure is predicated on the idea of belonging to a social group. And so in our suicide episode, for instance, you saw with Durkheim the idea that people would be physically destroying themselves because of a sense of meaninglessness that comes from not being part of this greater socially cohesive whole.

And then in the psychoanalytic chapter that we read on suicide, or it was an unofficial reading, kind of the upshot of that is that ironically, very weirdly, it's crazy, but people are committing suicide as a sort of last ditch attempt of the ego to save itself from a sense of disintegration or humiliation or helplessness. And often that's loss of self esteem, loss of autonomy, loss of power, respect, status. All those things sort of go together. So you get this weird paradox where it's not even just fear of death, but it's people are willing to die for the sake of preservation of this psychological cohesiveness or the idea of psychological cohesiveness.

This is one of the things I find implausible about Epicurus is that the idea seems to be there's the Rousseauian element where you have the uncorrupted witness and all that and the more benevolent state of nature. Rousseau doesn't think we can return to that because all of our problems are just an inherent part of the social, including this annihilatory anxiety that I've described. You can't be socialized creatures without having that. Epicurus seems to think that we can somehow disentangle those two and become noble savages somehow through epicureanism, that is, that we can conquer this corrupting social element and have things be libidinally simple.

22:16 Mark: I did lose the thread of why you went from fear of death to reasons that we fear of psychological disintegration. He's just simply not talking about that. You're saying this is just a missing element.

22:28 Wes: Because the idea is that fear of death operates unconsciously in our pursuit of power and status and things like that. And I'm modifying that to say it's not fear of physical death, but fear of annihilation of the psyche, which is something different because it can happen regardless of whether or not you think there's imminent physical danger. You can feel like you could be psychologically annihilated then to hook this back.

22:56 Mark: So it seems like maybe a thing that an epicurean should worry about is something like the integrity of self, that there's just no notion of that in, you know, I'm a pleasure seeking being. How can I mask my pleasure? I use friends to give me pleasure and to have mutual defense to ensure future pleasure. That he just has a very poor psychological model in terms of what our actual desires are. Is that the upshot here, the fear

23:24 Wes: of death is really on the right track though? Like I'm trying to take that seriously and say actually that really is fundamental because it's related to what makes us self conscious beings. It ultimately cashes out into fear of loss of the recognition of the other.

23:42 Mark: So Epicurus is saying fear of death is fundamental to our sicknesses, but we are not being unto death in Heidegger's sense. We are not. It is not. You're describing fear of death as in some way constitutive of being a conscious being. And you cannot shed it under any circumstances. Certainly not by hearing a couple of arguments about, hey, remember before you were born, you weren't worried about that. Well, don't worry about it after you're dead either, or when you die, it's not happening to you because there's no you anymore for it to happen to. There you go. Those are the two arguments.

24:15 Wes: All you can do is sublimate it. So that would be the alternative. So the idea of sublimation, you can't rid yourself of it, you can only sublimate it.

24:22 Dylan: And you can recognize that you are affected by unconscious desires and fears and bring them to the surface. And so that you might be able to therapeutically deal with them, but you won't be able to get rid of them, and you won't be able to dialectically convince yourself of them.

24:43 Wes: You want to change the way fear of death operates in your. Remember the object. That's the sort of the schema, the set of concepts by which one interprets the interpersonal world, interprets the social world. You want to change the way in which fear of social annihilation, which has very early roots, or loss of separation, individuation. This all relates back to Kristeva as well, how that operates in one's relationships with people. So that's another thing. It's not like you lose it.

25:13 Dylan: You want to have the right response to your unconscious. And you want to, by knowing something about it, you want to be able to respond to it. And control is not the right word, but you want to manage it.

25:27 Wes: Yeah, we want to have ultimately healthy relationships with other people and without that destructive stuff unconsciously entering into it and leaving us in situations that are just baffling because we don't see how it's operating.

25:41 Dylan: Yeah, there's a way in which knowledge is power in this respect, but it's not that it quenches the problem. That's where this notion of therapy becomes pretty salient. Right. Is that you are constantly having to cultivate and deal with it. You have to.

25:59 Wes: It's habituation.

26:00 Dylan: Habituation. There you go.

26:02 Wes: You develop a new relationship with a therapeutic object, a person who can operate therapeutically, but become a testing ground by which you change that schema, change that set of concepts via which you process the social world. And so you would instinctively react to people differently and have different relationships and have a different relationship with yourself. That's the idea. Again, it's something to be treated with skepticism, but it's the fundamental idea.

26:29 Mark: So I'm going to take this whole digression as a sincere attempt to modernize. You know, how would you get the juice out of this in that respect? I guess the thing I want to focus on is the ethical aspect. That one of the great liberating things to me was the thing that we already outlined in our Lucretius episode. Which is the gods don't care what you do, so do what you want pretty much, and do what you really want. And how do you figure out what you really want? Well, that's what this therapy, according to Nussbaum, comes down to, of how you interrogate yourself.

And Epicurus thinks he has the right answer, that what you really want is to maximize pleasure, where pleasure means something very particular. And the way that cashed out, in terms of the way that they lived, as Nussbaum describes it, seems pretty horrifying, right? It's highly regimented, highly disciplined. Everybody's just constantly in your business. And I would think that as a modern Epicurean, if somebody was going to go be the Ryan Holiday of today, maybe there are people doing that for epicureanism that I don't know about, really should be.

Can we ditch that aspect and retain the freedom and the challenge to know thyself? And the idea that society and most of the things that we're worried about really are baseless. Like, I kind of see this as kind of like the hierarchy of. I was going to say the hierarchy of needs, but the hierarchy of what counts as a big deal. So when you're really young, like, it's, I want that candy. I want to achieve this thing. And you kind of figure out as you get a little older, like, okay, that was me being a kid. That's not a big deal. What is a big deal?

Are these getting a good job. Okay. But if you're very philosophical, then you figure out like, well, getting a good job. Like, okay, yeah, there's practical upshots of whether that happens or not. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal. It's not the end of the world if you fall away from that. Maybe the more philosophical position is to be above that kind of stuff. And maybe following Epicurus, just don't even join a lot of these rat races. Just try as much as possible to simplify your life and get away from that. Well, what's the alternative?

Usually people that take that are looking toward there's something spiritual, there's something higher. Right? It's what I look like in God's eyes, not these worldly temptations and rat races that I can get pulled into. But the Epicurus takes it one farther that it's actually. There's not even a God judging you. So it actually goes back to the first level. Right. The thing that actually matters is, do I get the candy or not? But it matters way less than you might have thought. As a kid, that's the overall cycle, as I picture here.

28:56 Wes: It just occurred to me while you're talking about that. Because the idea is right, that there's all these desires that we have that are socially implanted in us, that are based on false belief. And if we just get rid of the false beliefs therapeutically, then the desires go away. That's the therapy of desire in question. But what is the false belief exactly? What is wrong with pursuing fame and fortune and sex and romantic, passionate romantic love and things like that?

29:24 Dylan: Is it so clear that absent society there aren't false beliefs about the way our desires should be directed? Is it so clear that this natural state is always directed towards our own? Eudaimonia? But let's go with the first one you said. I mean, is it so wrong that we would want to be famous or be powerful, or be the greatest at something?

29:47 Wes: In what sense? Are they vain and empty?

29:49 Dylan: Well, they may be vain, but are they empty?

29:52 Wes: So the way I would cash that out is that the pleasure that we think that we're going to get in fantasy, that posited pleasure never can be cashed out when we get it, it's never enough. There's no limit to it. There's no natural limit to the vain and empty desires in the way there is to the natural, necessary desires.

30:13 Mark: But is that bad?

30:13 Dylan: I mean, let's take the quest for power, right? Why is the fact that you could never have enough power a problem?

30:22 Mark: The normal Schopenhauer interpretation. I don't know why I'm attributing Schopenhauer. It goes back to these Hellenistic guys, of course, is that it's just. It's an endless cycle and have more misery than not.

30:33 Wes: Yeah, you're in a kind of rat race. You're on the treadmill and you're never satisfied. I guess one thing is just the kind of pain that stirs you to be active in that direction. It sounds like particularly bad and chronic. It involves anxiety. I think the idea is that you're after power because you feel insecure about the way the world might treat you if you don't have power. Those sorts of things. But I think also I thought of De Beauvoir and the idea of lack. And this is kind of relevant to Lacan too. But just the idea that fantasized pleasures can take on a significance that they don't really have.

They come to represent other things. So when we fantasize about having the nice car, we're not just fantasizing about the immediate pleasures of having the nice car. We're also fantasizing about admiration. But even then, we're not realistically thinking about what the envy and admiration of others means. Does that really fulfill the lack in question? I mean, ultimately, that lack of, for de Beauvoir, just comes down to subject, object, distinction. Comes down to us being individuals, operating in a world that is distinct from us. And we can't ever undo that distinction.

And so the vainness and emptiness ultimately comes down on this interpretation, to this fantasy of getting rid of desire altogether and getting rid of this distinction altogether. That can't go away. So in that sense, it really is a completely deluded sort of belief by which we function.

32:07 Mark: I think it's amazing how over time, your insistence on this pessimism about our ability to be happy, that I don't even challenge it anymore. Certainly these guys, Aristotle across the board, all these Hellenistic guys that we're considering, would just roundly deny anything like that Lacanian, where there's just a fundamental lack that nothing can fill and we can only sublimate These guys that do believe that there really is a proper functioning of human beings. And that if we do that, then we can call ourselves happy.

32:38 Unknown speaker: Yep.

32:39 Wes: I don't think that what I'm saying is actually pessimistic. You know, I don't think someone like de Beauvoir would deny that we could be happy or certainly not psychoanalysts, who are basically practicing virtue ethicists. Right. They think that we're trying to make people healthy, which is a very Aristotelian idea, like psychologically healthy. I don't see the pessimism in it. I think it goes to this deep existential layer. But that's not a reason for us to be pessimistic. As long as we don't function under the delusion that we are going to be in heaven.

Right. So, I mean, one of the things that psychoanalysts encounter in patients a lot. Right. Is these very delusionally high expectations about life that are kind of infantile, kind of regressed and childish. And being an adult involves giving up those vain and empty desires and actually having a realistic sense of what life has to offer and being able to enjoy that with gratitude, which is another thing that Epicurus focuses on. So I think that's a very optimistic, ultimately viewpoint. And, yeah, you could call people who mature to that level.

You could definitely call them happy and definitely call them virtuous.

33:46 Mark: But there's just a difference between a view of human nature where whether you think that society as it is now corrupts it or inevitably corrupts it or something. Presumably even the Epicureans, they thought they could make a perfect Epicurean society in which they would be no longer these corruptive elements. They believed in the perfectibility of man. And maybe this is just something that we need to get over. And the first thing we read about this was the Freud Civilization and Its Discontents that just inevitably because of civilization, we can be happy.

We can, as you say, oh, it's very positive that, you know, I can sublimate and thereby have healthy relationships and stuff. But that's what that is. It's sublimating an underlying rage, an underlying lack of fitness between the human, animal and society. We can mitigate the damage that that lack of fitness does, but we can never actually get rid of it. We can never actually, you know, construct a society that we do fit. For instance.

34:44 Wes: Yeah, the. The conflict between our social component and our instinctual components, that's inevitably there. And there's no perfect solution.

34:53 Dylan: Yeah.

34:53 Wes: I mean, it's worth thinking about the extent to which virtue ethicists think there's a more perfect solution, or is there a natural, to some extent, the same sort of mismatch. But, yeah, you might be right. Maybe they think that there can be this complete accord between the social and the political and the psychological, or let's say, the instinctual.

35:13 Dylan: See, I wouldn't characterize this whole way of talking as pessimistic, but as acknowledging that there's a constant activity required, that whatever happiness is, it doesn't involve lack of action. So in that way, it's work. You have to be doing things to maintain your disposition, your own personal activity, the way you look at the world that is involved in you being happy. In similar ways, other kinds of pleasures involve work. In maybe the Aristotelian sense, the work of just activity and even habit has activity and work involved with it. And in that way, this is the way I interpret a phrase like Wes was using, like, well, we have to be more adult about it and understand the gives and takes of life and how we have to be involved in that.

And if we're too childish, naive, we think that, well, when we get to a certain place and get a certain balance, it's just going to stay that way. And for us to get surprised and upset or agitated and angry or any other kinds of neg, you know, unhappy about the dissolution of a given state of affairs that requires us to go back and put things back together, that's just us being childish about the way life really works.

36:33 Wes: There are these two layers to suffering. I mean, one of them is just deprivation and then one of them is the meta level. Again, it sort of lines up a little bit with the Epicurean account. And the meta level is just, why can I have this? This is wrong. I deserve this. Other people have it and I don't. That's the narcissistic pride component. And that's way more painful than just the deprivation.

36:58 Dylan: There's a way in which being hungry and as you say, being deprived has one kind of pain associated with it. And there's a whole bunch of other pains that are really our own damn fault because we have the wrong disposition with respect to what we ought to have and ought to want.

37:12 Wes: I think that's right. And I think that the bulk of our suffering, well, it depends, but there's a lot of needless suffering around that sort of thing.

37:21 Mark: Just that the suffering is enhanced by the mental, according to Epicurus. And I don't think we've made this actually clear, the pleasure, even though mental pleasures are parasitic on physical pleasures, it's all about kind of thinking about physical pleasures to come or having passed or something like that. At least that's. We read a quote to that effect earlier. But ultimately, and I don't remember exactly where this was, but he thinks that why the ataraxia is the highest pleasure, the simply the lack of pain is because of your reflective capability.

That it's not necessarily that an animal that that would be its highest pleasure is when it's satiated and just isn't pursuing anything anymore, but that it's the peace of mind that is a positive thing. Over and above. I wonder, based on what you've been saying, Wes, like, whether you would have to just consider that anybody that had that peace of mind is necessarily fooling themselves.

38:14 Wes: Wait, why would they be fooling themselves? I mean, I think we can have peace of mind. I don't see it as inconsistent.

38:20 Dylan: I wouldn't characterize it as fooling themselves. I think that your peace of mind would come along with the understanding that you're doing things to make that peace of mind, that it doesn't come without work.

38:32 Mark: Okay, so the question of what constitutes the work is going to vary between these schools. That it seemed like for the Aristotelian just being at work as the healthy kind of being that you are. Like there could be many things. That's why Aristotelianism blends so easily into Nietzsche kind of multiplicity from people have different natures and they require different Things, but it requires some sort of constant motion. And that's something that the Epicurean just in the idea that particles are always in motion. If something stops moving, it's dead.

Like there's definite reflections of that in their metaphysics. For the Stoic in particular, the work is work on yourself. That. That is the work that is required of you. And that is kind of what your duty is. And it's maybe your only duty. Like when you get to Marcus, you know, maybe you have duties to things outside yourself, but. But where that is coming from, I think even Marcus has to derive that ultimately from duties that you have. Because the only good is in your character. It's not in your circumstances, it's not in what you accomplish or don't accomplish in the world.

What is the work for the Epicurean? I mean, maybe I'm just asking the same question I was asking before. How close is Epicurus to Aristotle really? Is the work of the Epicurean to. Is the pleasure that Epicurus got out of his philosophy was in shedding his needless fears? Is that the work that he was undergoing, the work of his life, and that made him so happy because not only is he free of fear, but that he worked to be free of fear and is happy about that effort?

40:07 Wes: I suppose it depends on how much reasoning, continued rational activity is required to disabuse oneself of the false beliefs that are going to plague you and tempt you into the vain and empty area. Is it that we just do that and it's over, or that we have to constantly engage in some upkeep?

40:31 Mark: That's what I was getting at with the Freudian. Why a Freudian would think that the task is never over. So if you're just basking and thinking that you're the Epicurean sage, unbothered by anything, that actually there's probably things that you're even in having this attitude, there's some way that you're violating your own.

40:49 Dylan: Yeah, well, of course there isn't. I mean, it's just like exercise, right? Even if it's not training in the sense of trying to be excellence, if you don't do anything with your physical body, then it's just going to waste away and it's not going to do the things that it naturally can do. I guess I'm taking Nussbaum, and there's a little bit of this in O'Keefe, too, about what an Epicurean school or community would look like and what your activity would be in there. And there's all kinds of things that just seem very. Not traditionally monastery like, but there are things you're doing as part of the habits of the community and things you're repeating.

And I mean, I guess there's the Stoic practice as well that would be similar that you have a meditative practice that is part of the therapy for your soul that you engage in as part of what you're doing in order to maintain the right disposition of your soul. For Aristotle, it is doing virtuous things makes you virtuous, and so you habituate yourself by doing those things. You can't stop doing them, right? Because if you stop doing them, you'll drift away and you'll stop being virtuous, you'll stop being content.

42:03 Mark: Right. I guess part of what I'm asking is kind of is there an Epicurean sage which clearly the Epicureans thought that Epicurus was an Epicurean sage, right. That if you think that the strong medicine is to expel the unconscious fear of death. Well, once you've done that, you know, it certainly is not an overnight thing, but it seems like that's a one way ticket. I'm just not sure if they would think that Epicurus or somebody as advanced as he is, would have to engage in upkeep to keep from letting the fear of death creep back into his soul or something like that.

So like, clearly the Stoic, I was more inclined to think that like the Stoic himself, even the most accomplished Stoic will be repeating Stoic dogmas to himself to remind himself. Because human nature is so fundamentally against the Stoic principle that you can't actually reset yourself. You have to be constantly reprogramming yourself because it's never going to stick. But I'm not sure that the Stoic would actually agree with that any more than the Epicurean would be. This might not be a point of contrast between them. Any closing thoughts here?

43:12 Dylan: I would say that I found reading Epicurus interesting for all the reasons we said. And any of the books that I've looked at on him always point out that there's just so little to go on. So by all means, go pick up the Epicurus reader and take a look at it. But the fact is, is that a book like Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire or o' Keeffe's book Epicureanism provide really interesting discussions of what's at stake and what's going on with them, that you should get them alongside any reading of Epicurus.

43:47 Mark: I would just think that for a modern practical philosopher, like a Stoic, reading all of Epicurus and these Epicureans should just be part of the raw material that you're drawing from if you're going to treat your brain as an operating system that you want to rewrite to make yourself more rational. There's just so many parallels in here to Stoicism and it avoids some of the stuff that really bugs me about Stoicism. So, you know, if you're going to go for a purely practical philosophy, I'm not sure. It's puzzling to me that there's not a stronger modern contingent of this.

And I hope that listeners are going to correct me and say, yeah, actually there's a whole Epicurus society that gets together, not just the people who taste wine, but, you know, who read the philosophy and take this seriously and try to figure out how to modernize it and how to live intelligent, simple, non vain lives in this way.

44:37 Wes: I'm thinking now about why the way in which a Stoic and an Epicurean might account for, why not pursue power, for instance, and for the Stoic, well, power is not an actual good, but being virtuous is, and that's the key to your happiness. Whereas the Epicurean, I think, would appeal to this fundamental idea that that pursuit is vain and empty and they'd have to cash it out in terms of it not being conducive to pleasure in the long run, essentially involving an unsatisfiable desire. So I guess it's unsatisfiable desire versus something that just isn't actually good, even though it seems good. But I'm thinking out loud and I'm sure there's much more sophisticated things to be said about that.

45:27 Mark: Yeah, I just don't even know if that's a distinction between them. I think for both of them it's just not worth it. At least that's how I would interpret it. But again, we have the people like Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday giving an interpretation of Stoicism that allows you to try to be president or whatever crazy ass thing that I think Epictetus and Epicurus would both have dismissed as vain.

45:49 Wes: The other thing I was thinking, as my closing thought is just we didn't talk about Nietzsche and will to power because there is an alternative way of looking at things, which is to reject the idea that pleasure is actually what fundamentally motivates human beings. And for Nietzsche, it's actually power. And some of the things I've said about our constitution as social animals, I think I was trying to say that our directedness towards power is a function of that, and it can't be completely eliminated because of that. So I think that kind of squares up with the Nietzsche insight.

Not that I come down firmly anywhere on all this stuff because it's still very confusing to me. But that's worth a lot more thought, this alternative, really counterintuitive account, because commonsensically, we just say, oh, we want power for the sake of pleasure. We try to reduce that to the pleasure principle, but for Nietzsche, no, it's actually going to be more fundamental.

46:53 Mark: Did we ever actually bring up the idea in either of our discussions why five years of pleasure is just as good as ten years of pleasure? Did we talk about that in our Lucretius episode?

47:02 Wes: Well, we talked about it a little bit in this with the Bon Bon, where if you're at the ataraxic limit, then nothing can be added to it kinetically, so you can't just add up. If you've reached that limit of true ataraxia, then it doesn't matter.

47:16 Mark: Having more time for your life is not going to actually make it better. Another very weird, counterintuitive thing out there. One of the things that Tim O'Keefe brought up in his last chapter, there's a Nagel article against that whole idea of death. Maybe that's worth us reading some Nagel at some point. We'll definitely have a Will to Power episode eventually. I'm so glad that we finally got around to this guy. He should have been episode, Episode nine.

47:40 Wes: And I don't understand how anybody could not be interested in Sorry, Seth. Like it's so fundamental.

47:48 Mark: Next time we're going to be talking to Francis Fukuyama to discuss his book the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. Very, very exciting. We want to hear what you want us to talk about. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com, comment on the blog post for this episode, go on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. Lots of ways to reach out to us. Tell us what you liked, what you didn't like, what you want us to talk about. Our closing song is a very weird thing by a group called Ant-Bee. Called the Language of the Body, it features members of the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa's group, and the beat poet. There is David Allen, now deceased, from the British prog jazz group Gong. So that should tell you something about what you're about to hear. I and Billy James, the man behind Ant-Bee, talk about this very song on Nakedly examined music episode 68 nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night.

48:41 Wes: Good night.

48:42 Mark: Good night. How was the happiest time of your life?

48:57 Unknown speaker: And what's more I'm pretty dejected right now because in the bright lights of every night Pretty good faces and crazy head cases send their love to me. I'm just a pleasant in the fantasy of this place and space and it's a temporary game and the fame of the name is a brief last man but it doesn't last longer than the next best crest of the wave of the day so there's nobody around because to tell you what it's all about But I think you see through it all yeah, I think you see through it all and I wonder who you really are behind the bar with your blue tattoo and your peroxide hair and in your shield of your protection as you look in my direction oh, the language of the body is a question of suggestion There is no doubt there's no chance of any answer There is no doubt no chance of any answer There is no doubt no chance of any answer Cause I'm playing in the band so you understand I won't be round to find out.

It.

50:44 Wes: Sam.

51:09 Unknown speaker: It.

51:35 Wes: Sam.

52:55 Mark: And what's more I'm rj.

53:04 Wes: In the fantasy of spicy place and it's a temporary game and the playing

53:09 Mark: with the name is a big blast but it doesn't last longer than the

53:12 Dylan: next best quest of the wave of play.

53:19 Mark: Maybe there's nobody there Gets to tell

53:21 Wes: you what it's all about maybe there's nobody there.

53:43 Unknown speaker: Here.

53:48 Mark: Is the question but there is no doubt that

53:54 Unknown speaker: because.