From The "Golden Mean" to tbe "Summum Bonum" - Useful or Deceptive Frames of Reference?

Yes we may be tilting windmills so I am not inclined to add much more at the moment, other than that I have never had a good feeling about the Tetrapharmakon and I would not accept its wording as being from Epicurus or authoritative. At very best it is a very loose version of the first PDs, and "God only knows" who wrote it and whether it was written as a good or bad example of Epicurean thought (I understand the associated fragments were substantially targeted at combatting errors, but I gather the context is so lost that it is impossible to tell in what sense the Tet was used.)

At the moment I am resting at the point that all these words are abstractions, with pleasure being the least abstract and most concrete as a feeling, which everyone can sense in themselves. The other words are much more abstract, with Good and Evil being the most abstract, and I suspect that is why Nietzsche wrote a book suggesting we need to go "Beyond" them.

Maybe we should look to the practical result of this:. The choice of a single word helps us debate with Plato and Aristotle, but it doesn't solve our moment by moment need to make decisions, and that is where we look to all forms of pleasure and pain which may result from our actions.

There is no tangible definition of "Good" to which we can refer to make any decision beyond referring to the resulting pleasures, and no tangible definition of evil other than the resulting pains.

Attempting to collapse all of the analysis into "Good" and "Evil" is likely unworkable except as a debating tool, and worse - it can easily serve as a cloak which obscures the natural fact that our only natural guides are pleasure and pain.

Another thought to add: I think DeWitts translation of the same span of time argument makes sense, but not so much his conclusion as to what it means.

VS42. The same span of time embraces both the beginning and the end of the greatest good.

Doesn't Epicurus say that Pleasure is the alpha and Omega of the blessed life, which is a fairly similar statement?

To me, Dewitts translation makes sense as part of the same argument we are having now about "the good.". It's not a statement that life is the greatest good, but that the greatest good (pleasure) takes place only while we are living and isn't an abstraction that is beyond our own lives. To me that's parallel also to the "escape from death" statement which also criticizes harping on "the good."

I would tentatively classify this as another example where DeWitt is going in a better direction than the standard commentators but misses just slightly in his wording of his conclusion.

And I think we are building up a considerable list of references from which the takeaway is that we should be careful about how and when we refer to "good" and "evil."

Given that I think Lucretius was doing his best to be a fundamentalist Epicurean, I'd like to see what we can get from him on this point beyond the already-mentioned "Divine Pleasure Guide Of Life."

At the moment I can't recall whether summum bonum appears in Lucretius at all.

Quote from Nate

OR, is it our suggestion that any adjective implying "greatest" is inappropriate to link to the noun meaning "good"?

Those are very helpful cites. I am thinking that the issue is not so much the adjective but the noun.

In other words IF we could agree on what "good" means, and that there is more than one, then we could pretty well establish that of all of them, pleasure would be at the top.

But are we really clear on what "good" means, and whether there are more than one "goods" or a "single good?" I'm still remembering a comment that Kevin G made recently that the Stoics held Virtue to be a single unified thing, and DeWitt talks as if Epicurus held that perhaps in some way pleasure is unified as well.

I am afraid we are in the middle of a "one and many" argument that is mostly conceptual and difficult to unwind.

So to recap, I doubt the argument is really so much about the "summum" as it is about the "bonum."

It appears to me that Epicurus started with the observation that all living things pursue pleasure and avoid pain, using "feeling" as the guide, but then he was warning against translating that observation into an improper concept of "good." I feel like we are straying into Frances Wright territory too of needing to be careful in moving from an observation to a conclusion. We can "observe" feeling but it is much harder to be sure that what we are observing is "good." In fact, in Frances Wright terms, is "good" only a "theory"?

It is beginning to appear to me that Epicurus was willing to make that step and talk about "good" but that he was warning to be very careful about it. By talking about a highest good we are presuming that a single highest good can be ascertained, and I am not sure that Epicurus held that. Most of us I think would agree that there are many pleasures, and that it is impossible to rank those pleasures on any kind of absolute scale. But doesn't "highest good" tempt us to do just that, unless we are very careful to observe the differences between the word "good" and the word "pleasure"?

Quote from Nate

Is there a good that is equal to or greater than pleasure? If we cannot identify a good that is at least equal to pleasure, then I think we can safely say that pleasure is not just a good, but rather the good, the "greatest" good.

I think we crossposted and I did not see this initially. I think you're probably right that we cannot identify a "good" higher than pleasure, but now I am concerned that I do not know what "good"" really is!

And that reminds us of course of the statement that we would not have the ability to conceive the good without the pleasures of sex etc......

Diogenes Laertius: [06] They say that he wrote to many other women of pleasure and particularly to Leontion, with whom Metrodorus was also in love; and that in the treatise _On the End of Life_ he wrote, ‘I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight.’

Is that too not a warning from Epicurus to be careful in using the word "good"?

And again - I am not saying we shouldn't use the word "good." What we may have may be similar to the "god" issue where Epicurus uses the same word but vests it with very different attributes and views it in different ways than does the rest of the world.

Although I think she carried this too far, I think we need to consider what Wright said in Chapter 15:

Quote

“I apprehend the difficulties,” observed Leontium, “which embarrass the mind of our young friend. Like most aspirants after knowledge, he has a vague and incorrect idea of what he is pursuing, and still more, of what may be attained. In the schools you have hitherto frequented,” she continued, addressing the youth, “certain images of virtue, vice, truth, knowledge, are presented to the imagination, and these abstract qualities, or we may call them, figurative beings, are made at once the objects of speculation and adoration. A law is laid down, and the feelings and opinions of men are predicated upon it; a theory is built, and all animate and inanimate nature is made to speak in its support; an hypothesis is advanced, and all the mysteries of nature are treated as explained. You have heard of, and studied various systems of philosophy; but real philosophy is opposed to all systems. Her whole business is observation; and the results of that observation constitute all her knowledge. She receives no truths, until she has tested them by experience; she advances no opinions, unsupported by the testimony of facts; she acknowledges no virtue, but that involved in beneficial actions; no vice, but that involved in actions hurtful to ourselves or to others. Above all, she advances no dogmas, — is slow to assert what is, — and calls nothing impossible. The science of philosophy is simply a science of observation, both as regards the world without us, and the world within; and, to advance in it, are requisite only sound senses, well developed and exercised faculties, and a mind free of prejudice. The objects she has in view, as regards the external world, are, first, to see things as they are, and secondly, to examine their structure, to ascertain their properties, and to observe their relations one to the other. — As respects the world within, or the philosophy of mind, she has in view, first, to examine our sensations, or the impressions of external things on our senses; which operation involves, and is involved in, the examination of those external things themselves: secondly, to trace back to our sensations, the first development of all our faculties; and again, from these sensations, and the exercise of our different faculties as developed by them, to trace the gradual formation of our moral feelings, and of all our other emotions: thirdly, to analyze all these our sensations, thoughts, and emotions, — that is, to examine the qualities of our own internal, sentient matter, with the same, and yet more, closeness of scrutiny, than we have applied to the examination of the matter that is without us: finally, to investigate the justness of our moral feelings, and to weigh the merit and demerit of human actions; which is, in other words, to judge of their tendency to produce good or evil, — to excite pleasurable or painful feelings in ourselves or others. You will observe, therefore, that, both as regards the philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of mind, all is simply a process of investigation. It is a journey of discovery, in which, in the one case, we commission our senses to examine the qualities of that matter, which is around us, and, in the other, endeavor, by attention to the varieties of our consciousness, to gain a knowledge of those qualities of matter which constitute our susceptibilities of thought and feeling.”

Note - this isn't the only deep part -- most all of Chapter 15 is deep and related to this issue.

Note on this passage from Wright:

Maybe I am feeling inadequate, or I want to flatter us in this discussion, or something, but whenever I read that paragraph, and especially now in regard to this current discussion, I see this argument as"DEEP" and very possibly brilliant. It's not something that someone can pick out from a couple of readings of Diogenes Laertius at twenty years old, no matter how smart someone is.

We've been studying Epicurus for quite some time, reading lots of commentators and articles, and I don't think I've seen much anywhere that gets at this issue like she does here. These are not the thoughts of someone who has had only a couple of years of exposure to Epicurus, not unless those were *very* intense years, with some very good people with whom to compare notes.

It seems Frances Wright had access to numbers of relatives and friends who were into materialist philosophy, so maybe we can still yet discover in her circles some other writers who she herself bounced off of to gain some of her insights. And that continues to be my point on this: Yes - All praise to Frances Wright for giving this to us, but I want more of it, and maybe more of it actually exists that we can find in the future.

Just to be clear about Wright, here I think is the heart of what we need to be concerned about:

"...Certain images of virtue, vice, truth, knowledge, are presented to the imagination, and these abstract qualities, or we may call them, figurative beings, are made at once the objects of speculation and adoration. A law is laid down, and the feelings and opinions of men are predicated upon it; a theory is built, and all animate and inanimate nature is made to speak in its support; an hypothesis is advanced, and all the mysteries of nature are treated as explained."

She didn't use the word "good" in this list, but I am thinking this is what we need to avoid doing ourselves with "good" and "evil," so as to avoid being sucked into the games that other schools play when they try to do exactly that.

We're on firm ground when we are discussing pleasure and pain, but much less so in discussing good and evil.

My answer to that question to Don is that some (but not many) don't have the mental capacity to see the full extent of the philosophy. Also it may be a reference to the reality that some people are sickly and die almost from birth, and never develop the capacity through no fault of their own.

And this also touches on "how long do you have to live in order to live a full life?"

But that "full life" is probably another one of those conceptual traps like "the good."