How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Yeah I thought about not using the "rabble" word but I couldn't remember the "hoi polloi"! Actually neither term fits my target, because I don't mean to say anything demeaning about those who innocently misconstrue. My focus is on the strictly philosophical debate i referenced earlier, in with "pleasure" is the more technical term and "living pleasurably" is the more colloquial description. (I was thinking there was a passage about "the crowd" but couldn't put my finger on it.)

Quote from Cassius

Yeah I thought about not using the "rabble" word but I couldn't remember the "hoi polloi"! Actually neither term fits my target, because I don't mean to say anything demeaning about those who innocently misconstrue. My focus is on the strictly philosophical debate i referenced earlier, in with "pleasure" is the more technical term and "living pleasurably" is the more colloquial description. (I was thinking there was a passage about "the crowd" but couldn't put my finger on it.)

I was just thinking that we need to be clear that saying the "goal is pleasure" doesn't mean we don't voluntarily choose pain if it means attaining the "goal of living pleasurably." And that's not Stoic, that's Epicurus.

Quote from Don

I was just thinking that we need to be clear that saying the "goal is pleasure" doesn't mean we don't voluntarily choose pain if it means attaining the "goal of living pleasurably." And that's not Stoic, that's Epicurus.

Right, but it's possible to use the same construction and say that you voluntarily choose pain in order to achieve pleasure if you define the pleasure you're talking about as "the greatest net" pleasure or "ultimate pleasure." The wording is clearly tricky and I keep coming back in my mind that the use of the construction "pleasure" makes sense mainly as a reply, and in the context of choosing between, "virtue" or "piety" or "wisdom" or some other very high level abstraction.

To some extent definitely, but I think the distinction that I am making is that philosophy can be, from some perspectives, a word game which is a trap for the unwary. I do not believe Epicurus said simply 'don't play that game.". I think Epicurus realized that many people are already trapped by that word game, and he formulated the way out using the rules of his opponents ' games, as a means of liberating those who fell into the trap before the were exposed to Epicurus.

For such people, teaching a way out of the word game is an essential and valid approach. And I think that approach is at least as valuable today as it was then, because virtually everyone is captured by some variation of the virtue / rationalism game.

To expand now I am home, yes - I think this perspective is essential to understanding what appear otherwise to be ambiguities or inconsistencies in the philosophy. Epicurus is all about practicality, and yet he is frequently referring to "pleasure" which is about as broad a word as can possibly be.

I think the reason is that what we have preserved in the letters is the highest-level summary of the philosophy, which as such is necessarily stated in highly abstract terms. That leads to what I think is the key error of the "absence of pain" approach. Those people are attempting to take a highest-level summary and trying to convert it directly into a "what should I eat at noon today" level of detail. Talking about "Pleasure" was never meant to be that kind of immediately practical advice --- or better stated, the immediate practical use of the abstraction "pleasure" is to respond to the false assertion that it is not feeling, but Virtue or Reason or Piety that should be the goal of life.

I think if we had the reams of other material we would see the practical translation of this term into the details we are looking do, but that instead all we have is the highest level outline rather than the details we are expecting to find (having been conditioned by stoicism and religion to detailed do's and don't).

This is not shortsightedness or an error on Epicurus' part but an error on our part in thinking that what amounts to a high-level spec sheet can be used as an operating manual.

To state one more way, this is the "Philebus" issue. People who have fallen into the trap of the Academy or the Stoa or even the Peripatetics cannot escape the trap laid by Socrates in Philebus because they are in thrall to "logic." As such, they cannot think their way out of the implications of Socrates' questions, which boil down to the requirement that the greatest good must be describable in absolute terms as having a "limit.". They presume that more pleasure is always better, so they are forced to admit that pleasure has no limit, and thereby (according to the premises they have accepted) cannot be the greatest good.

Describing the limit of pleasure as the absence of pain has little if any "practical" appeal (real people always want to know which pleasures and which pains) but it is the precise answer to the logic trap which Philebus could not escape.

I think stating the issue this way is reasonably clear, but I do not think it is possible to appreciate the significance of this without reading Philebus for oneself and seeing the trap that was laid, and how Epicurus offers the way out.

Back in Athens most people would know the story of Philebus. Today very few do, so pushing this argument forward is going to require laying the foundation through Philebus. The same argument appears in Seneca so the Epicurean remedy can also be illustrated there, but of course Seneca long post dated Epicurus, so the real key is Philebus, which is focused on the issue of Pleasure.

To save time for anyone reading along, the heart of the sections in Philebus and Seneca I am referring to are:

SOCRATES: I omit ten thousand other things, such as beauty and health and strength, and the many beauties and high perfections of the soul: O my beautiful Philebus, the goddess, methinks, seeing the universal wantonness and wickedness of all things, and that there was in them no limit to pleasures and self-indulgence, devised the limit of law and order, whereby, as you say, Philebus, she torments, or as I maintain, delivers the soul. — What think you, Protarchus?

…

SOCRATES: Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to the class which admits of more and less?

PHILEBUS: They belong to the class which admits of more, Socrates; for pleasure would not be perfectly good if she were not infinite in quantity and degree.

SOCRATES: Nor would pain, Philebus, be perfectly evil. And therefore the infinite cannot be that element which imparts to pleasure some degree of good. But now — admitting, if you like, that pleasure is of the nature of the infinite — in which of the aforesaid classes, O Protarchus and Philebus, can we without irreverence place wisdom and knowledge and mind? And let us be careful, for I think that the danger will be very serious if we err on this point.

PHILEBUS: You magnify, Socrates, the importance of your favourite god.

SOCRATES: And you, my friend, are also magnifying your favourite goddess; but still I must beg you to answer the question.

…

SOCRATES: And whence comes that soul, my dear Protarchus, unless the body of the universe, which contains elements like those in our bodies but in every way fairer, had also a soul? Can there be another source?

PROTARCHUS: Clearly, Socrates, that is the only source.

SOCRATES: Why, yes, Protarchus; for surely we cannot imagine that of the four classes, the finite, the infinite, the composition of the two, and the cause, the fourth, which enters into all things, giving to our bodies souls, and the art of self-management, and of healing disease, and operating in other ways to heal and organize, having too all the attributes of wisdom; — we cannot, I say, imagine that whereas the self-same elements exist, both in the entire heaven and in great provinces of the heaven, only fairer and purer, this last should not also in that higher sphere have designed the noblest and fairest things?

PROTARCHUS: Such a supposition is quite unreasonable.

SOCRATES: Then if this be denied, should we not be wise in adopting the other view and maintaining that there is in the universe a mighty infinite and an adequate limit, of which we have often spoken, as well as a presiding cause of no mean power, which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, and may be justly called wisdom and mind?

PROTARCHUS: Most justly.

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We can find the same point made by Seneca in the following letters:

Quote Seneca’s Letters – Book I – Letter XVI: This also is a saying of Epicurus: “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.” Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Assume that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income, decks you with gold, clothes you in purple, and brings you to such a degree of luxury and wealth that you can bury the earth under your marble floors; that you may not only possess, but tread upon, riches. Add statues, paintings, and whatever any art has devised for the luxury; you will only learn from such things to crave still greater. Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping point. The false has no limits.

Quote Seneca’s Letters – To Lucilius – 66.45: “What can be added to that which is perfect? Nothing otherwise that was not perfect to which something has been added. Nor can anything be added to virtue, either, for if anything can be added thereto, it must have contained a defect. Honour, also, permits of no addition; for it is honourable because of the very qualities which I have mentioned.[5] What then? Do you think that propriety, justice, lawfulness, do not also belong to the same type, and that they are kept within fixed limits? The ability to increase is proof that a thing is still imperfect.”“