Episode One Hundred Thirty Eight - Letter to Menoeceus 5 - Pleasure Part One

For anyone interested, here is my commentary and translation:

Letter To Menoikeus: A New Translation With Commentary : Don Boozer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A new translation of the Letter to Menoikeus (Menoeceus) by Epicurus with commentary.

archive.org

Furthermore, on the one hand, there are the natural desires; on the other, the 'empty, fruitless, or vain ones.' And of the natural ones, on the one hand, are the necessary ones; on the other, the ones which are only natural; then, of the necessary ones: on the one hand, those necessary for eudaimonia; then, those necessary for the freedom from disturbance for the body; then those necessary for life itself. [128] The steady contemplation of these things equips one to know how to decide all choice and rejection for the health of the body and for the tranquility of the mind, that is for our physical and our mental existence, since this is the goal of a blessed life. For the sake of this, we do everything in order to neither be in bodily or mental pain nor to be in fear or dread; and so, when once this has come into being around us, it sets free all of the calamity, distress, and suffering of the mind, seeing that the living being has no need to go in search of something that is lacking for the good of our mental and physical existence. For it is then that we need pleasure, if we were to be in pain from the pleasure not being present; but if we were to not be in pain, we no longer desire or beg for pleasure. And this is why we say pleasure is the foundation and fulfillment of the blessed life. [129] Because we perceived pleasure as a fundamental good and common to our nature, and so, as a result of this, we begin every choice and rejection against this, judging every good thing by the standard of how that pleasure affects us or how we react to considering experiencing that pleasure. And because pleasure is the fundamental and inborn good, this is why not every pleasure is seized and we pass by many pleasures when greater unpleasant things were to result for us as a result: and we think many pains better than pleasures whenever greater pleasure were to follow for a longer time by patiently abiding the pain. [130] So, all pleasure, through its nature, belongs to us as a good; however, not all are elected; and just as all pains are entirely evil by their nature, so not all are always to be shunned.It is proper when judging these things to consider what is advantageous and what is not advantageous for you; in other words, what the consequences will be. We consult the consequences of our actions; because, on the one hand, pleasure over time can lead to pain; and on the other hand, pain can lead to pleasure.

Quote from Don

on the one hand, there are the natural desires; on the other, the 'empty, fruitless, or vain ones.' And of the natural ones, on the one hand, are the necessary ones; on the other, the ones which are only natural; then, of the necessary ones: on the one hand, those necessary for eudaimonia; then, those necessary for the freedom from disturbance for the body; then those necessary for life itself.

Several points. Not necessarily original, just on my mind.

There are two primary categories of desires:

A. Empty/fruitless/vain/groundless ones

B. Natural ones

So, whatever desires are not empty are natural

Of the Natural ones, there are:

A. Just natural ones (these are sometimes qualifed as "not necessary" in some parts of the text but not here; here it says they're "only natural")

B. Those natural AND necessary

Of these natural AND necessary ones, there are:

1. Those necessary for eudaimonia

2. Those necessary for the freedom from disturbance for the body

3. Those necessary for life itself

I have a hard time figuring out what falls into B1. What is "necessary" for my well-being? If I translate it another way, what is "necessary" to make me happy?

However, what if we look at it differently? Is B1 concerned with mental disposition and B2 specifically addressing physical disturbance? Is eudaimonia primarily mental or both mental and physical? But then how to integrate B3 into the mix? I'm convinced it is NOT a hierarchy but rather a classification system.

For B2...

127i. αἱ δὲ πρὸς τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἀοχλησίαν, αἱ δὲ πρὸς αὐτὸ τὸ ζῆν.

ἀοχλησία "freedom from disturbance"

σώματος genitive singular of σῶμᾰ

σῶμᾰ "the body; one's material body or existence"

“then, those [necessary] for the freedom from disturbance for the body; then those [necessary] for life itself.”

There are some translations that interpret αἱ δὲ πρὸς τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἀοχλησίαν to mean only things like clothing and shelter - those things that provide "freedom from disturbance" for the body, that is for one's physical existence. That isn't literally what is written so that is simply one interpretation. Those kinds of things - clothing and shelter - would seem to fall under the final category of those necessary for life. So, this category should catch those between eudaimonia and those necessary for life. This is an interesting category.

I would contend that those "necessary for life itself" are those essentials at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: food, water, shelter, sleep, air, etc. Again, clothing and shelter would seem to fall into this category.

67. I do not think I could conceive of the good** without the joys of taste, of sex, of hearing, and without the pleasing motions caused by the sight of bodies and forms.

οὐδὲ γὰρ ἔγωγε ἔχω τί νοήσω τἀγαθὸν** ἀφαιρῶν μὲν τὰς διὰ χυλῶν ἡδονάς, ἀφαιρῶν δὲ τὰς διʼ ἀφροδισίων, ἀφαιρῶν δὲ τὰς διʼ ἀκροαμάτῶν, ἀφαιρῶν δὲ καὶ τὰς διὰ μορφῆς κατʼ ὄψιν [those by way of shapes and along with vision] ἡδείας κινήσεις [pleasing motion].

• οὐδὲ γὰρ ἔγωγε ἔχω τί νοήσω [thinking/conceiving] τἀγαθὸν
• I do not believe I am about to be thinking/conceiving of the good
• ἀφαιρῶν μὲν τὰς διὰ χυλῶν ἡδονάς,
• to take away the pleasures of taste/flavor
• ἀφαιρῶν δὲ τὰς διʼ ἀφροδισίων,
• and to take away those through sexual desire,
• ἀφαιρῶν δὲ τὰς διʼ ἀκροαμάτῶν,
• to take away those through hearing (song and speech)
• ἀφαιρῶν δὲ καὶ τὰς διὰ μορφῆς κατʼ ὄψιν [those by way of shapes and along with vision] ἡδείας κινήσεις [pleasing motion].

**"the good" τἀγαθὸν This is the same word used in the Tetrapharmakon as well as the same word used in other texts that talk about "The Good"

Joshua made an interesting point when he said, if I'm quoting correctly, that desire is a Feeling of pain.

My understanding is different, but I think that it's a valuable point to discuss. I've made the point in other threads that desire and pleasure should not be confused. However I've been on the fence about desire and pain. For now I'll push the idea that desire is not a pain but that it leads to pain. I think that current neuroscience shows pleasure/pain and desire to be caused by different chemical processes: maybe Don or reneliza would care to weigh in on this.

PD10 and PD11 both mention pain and desire, which is why I was previously on the fence. But as I read them now, it appears that these PDs treat them as different things.

PD10 "If the objects which are productive of pleasures to profligate persons really freed them from fears of the mind—the fears, I mean, inspired by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, the fear of death, the fear of pain—if, further, they taught them to limit their desires, we should not have any reason to censure such persons, for they would then be filled with pleasure to overfowing on all sides and would be exempt from all pain, whether of body or mind, that is, from all evil.” Hicks (1910)

This seems to be making a clear distinction between pain and desire.

PD11 "If we had never been molested by alarms at celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by the misgiving that death somehow affects us, nor by neglect of the proper limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need to study natural science.” Hicks (1910)

However this one isn't so clear. But for now I'm sticking to the idea that desire is not a Feeling.

Wonderful and potentially very fruitful discussion!! Having this many insightful and curious people on the podcast and on the forum is a boon!

I realize I'm heading deep into the weeds with this post, but, as is my habit, I wanted to try to get at what the ancients thought when they used the word we're translating as "desire": epithymia επιθυμία. Where did it show up? What connotations did it have? How was it defined at the time?

I found this paper:

A Semantic Analysis of Desire in 4 Maccabees and its bearing on Romans 7

A Semantic Analysis of Desire in 4 Maccabees and its bearing on Romans 7

www.academia.edu

Granted, it's looking at 4 Maccabees and Romans 7, but I found its diagram on page 4 very interesting (screenshot below)

For those who don't read Greek, I'll transliterate that table and provide some translations:

Pathos (see LSJ definition below)

1. Hēdonē (pleasure) 2. Ponos (pain)

Under pleasure and pain, there's a series that from the paper the author says it's a sequence:

Hēdonē

{epithymia (desire)

|

hēdonē (pleasure)

|

χαρά khara (joy - NOTE: one of the two named "kinetic" pleasures, too!)

So, first comes desire, then pleasure, then joy in this scheme.

On the other side:

Pain

{phobos (fear)

|

ponos (pain)

|

lypē/lupē (pain, grief, distress; see LSJ below)

So, fear then pain then the feeling of distress as opposed to joy in the other column)

The middle word θυμός thymos is tricky. I've placed the LSJ entry below. Basically, those sequences make up the mind or soul.

I'm sharing all this because I found that sequence in the middle interesting and the distinctions made among the components potentially intriguing for the discussion. I haven't read the whole paper yet but the diagram popped out. These texts were written c. 50-150 CE so several hundred years post-Epicurus but still within the classical Epicurean time period albeit from a very different perspective. However, those words were common ways of speaking about pain, pleasure, feelings, desire, etc.

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, ἐπιθυ_μ-ία

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, π , πάγ-χαλκος , πάθος

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, πα?́θ-η

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, θυ_μός

Epicurus uses ponos for pain here:

486. Pain does not consist in being deprived of things, but rather in bearing the avoidable distress caused by groundless opinion. οὐκ ἀπορεῖν τούτων πόνος ἐστίν, ἀλλὰ φέρειν μᾶλλον τὸν ἀνόνητον ἐκ τῶν κενῶν δοξῶν πόνον.

However he also uses other words for pain elsewhere (especially words connoting disturbance, etc) but πόνος is here in 486.

I may take you up on your idea with Latin although I am woefully ignorant of that language. If someone else wants to jump in the linguistic pool, come in!

As a first step, just saw this paper

The Meaning of "Will" (Voluntas) in Augustine

This article (published in Augustinian Studies 37.2) argues that Augustine uses voluntas as a translation for Stoic horme^, i.e. impulse toward action; it uses…

www.academia.edu

But I'll have to try and figure out what got used in Lucretius and Cicero in relation to Epicurean themes.

More resources of varying academic rigor:

The Passions according to the Stoa

Concupiscence - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chastity and Lust

Way too Christian but I thought this might be helpful:

§ 4. Ἐπιθυμία / epithumia = DESIRE, LONGING, LUST

[Latin: desiderio]

1. In classical Greek: In Homer and the pre-Socratics ἐπιθυμία / epithumia denotes the direct impulse towards food, sexual satisfaction etc., and also desire in general. In the first instance there is nothing morally objectionable or even suspicious about it. Plato and Aristotle still use the term in a neutral sense; however, they encourage theoretical and practical aloofness from the sensual world. Thus from the Stoics onwards ἐπιθυμία / epithumia acquires a negative connotion in philosophical circles.

So, it looks like the Christians and Stoics started using epithymia/epithumia (u/y both transliterate Greek upsilon υ) negatively for "lust" but it didn't start out that way.

Perseus Search Results

Not that many instances of desiderio in Lucretius? Must be using another word for desire.

PS. From this...

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/book/9789004233447/B9789004233447-s003.pdf%3FpdfJsInlineViewToken%3D966890815%26inlineView%3Dtrue&ved=2ahUKEwiEo8n5qID6AhUck4kEHQeLA2Q4FBAWegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw1kgQQsgiQfZVuUg1iIKfwP

It appears the usual Latin translation of Greek epithymia was voluntas.

Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, vŏluntas

So in Lucretius...

Perseus Search Results

So more than desiderio but not as many as I'd expect. Assuming there are more in Cicero.

To bring this back to the discussion started on the podcast, it seems to me that desire (epithymia/ voluntas) is a feeling (falling under the pathē) but also an act of will so to speak. From that table above, desire (epithymia) is a feeling of something that results in some pleasure. The opposite of desire is fear (phobos) which appears to be a feeling repelling against something that leads to pain. There are only two categories of feeling because you can only be attracted or repelled by feelings leading to pleasure or pain.

Discuss

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From that table above, desire (epithymia) is a feeling of something that results in some pleasure. The opposite of desire is fear (phobos) which appears to be a feeling repelling against something that leads to pain.

I'm not sure I can get on board with the underlined part above. Lucian opposes fear to hope, which I think is nearer the mark;

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And from this point, as Thucydides might say, the war takes its beginning. These ambitious scoundrels were quite devoid of scruples, and they had now joined forces; it could not escape their penetration that human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope (ἐλπίδος καὶ φόβου) and that anyone who can make these serve his ends may be sure of a rapid fortune.

Which drives me on to my next (tentative) conclusion--that fear and hope are both kinds of desire. Desire is everything that happens when you see things as they are, and wish that they were different. When unscrupulous scoundrels prey on hope and fear, they prey on desire.

And now for the tricky part--if I defend my thesis that desire presents as a feeling of pain, how do I avoid the path that Cassius is rightly concerned about? In truth I don't think there's a real problem here, because I don't think that pain is necessarily "bad" or "evil". If I lean against a hot stove, I ought to be thankful that nature has furnished a biological alarm system warning me to move quickly, or risk serious injury. Rocks and gods and corpses can get by without pain, but not me--I need pain in order to go on living. Some rare people don't experience pain, and are at high risk for an early or sudden death;

Congenital insensitivity to pain - Wikipedia

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Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is one or more extraordinarily rare conditions in which a person cannot feel (and has never felt) physical pain.[1] The conditions described here are separate from the HSAN group of disorders, which have more specific signs and cause. Because feeling physical pain is vital for survival, CIP is an extremely dangerous condition.[1] It is common for people with the condition to die in childhood due to injuries or illnesses going unnoticed.[1][2] Burn injuries are among the more common injuries.

So I don't want to lose the sensation of pain. I also very generally don't want to experience the sensation of pain--it's necessary, and very natural, but it doesn't feel good--I'd rather experience continuous pleasure.

I think it's like that with desire. I understand that I have a 2 or 3 pound mammalian brain, and that, having that, I am driven almost constantly by the desire for things that are likewise desired by nearly all other mammals--the desire for food, water, shelter, warmth, sex, rest, etc. In addition to these are the particularly human desires, cultivated by things like community engagement, culture, society, economics, etc.

I cannot fulfill all of my desires. Moreover, Epicurus recognized a tendency in us to develop new desires when we have worn out or satisfied the old ones. If desire is a kind of pain, as I argue, and if I cannot fulfill all of my desires, the question naturally arises as to what I should do about them. It is by no means obvious or self-evident that, because desire is a kind of pain, the only thing left to do is to spurn desire, suppress it, condemn it, or bury it in a hole. I have basically four options; I can try to fulfill them all, and inevitably fail. I can spit contempt on them all, and probably end up dead sooner than later. I can proceed more or less reactively and without a plan, satisfying the easy desires as they pass and seldom reaching far for the difficult ones. Or I can develop and establish a plan of choice and avoidance, with the goal of maximizing pleasurable outcomes over the course of a whole human life. Some desires will have to be put by; some will have to be vigorously rejected; some will be indulged for the sake of pleasure, and some other few will be made into something like a life's ambition--the desire which, well-chosen, will become the theme of a life well-lived.

Can we expect such an outcome from desire, if desire is a kind of pain? Why not? Pain is not nature's moral or judicial punishment--pain, like pleasure, is one of nature's guide-posts. Desire and pain direct us toward lives of pleasure and remembrance--the happy memory of all that we have come to enjoy in our lives. If there is an opposite to desire, then let that be it.

Quote from Joshua

...I don't think that pain is necessarily "bad" or "evil".

I agree with much of Joshua 's post. A point to clarify, at least in my mind, is that rather than being bad or evil, pain is a guide pointing away from health. Pleasure is a guide pointing toward health. If you ignore your pain (or have CIP) then you can expect results harmful to your well-being. When you overdo pleasure seeking, pain will generally guide you back to reasonable pleasure seeking.

Pleasure is a guide toward healthy outcomes, pain is a guide away from unhealthy outcomes. Desires are neither. Or both. In this way they are different from pleasure and pain; they're more like attractions rather than guides.

The question remains whether they are feelings, sensations, thoughts, or something else....

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I think I can work up a good head of steam to argue that desire is at the root of what it means to be alive, which is why advocacy of suppression of all desire strikes me as so "evil."

Yes, but that's not my position either.

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I think an argument can readily be made that these feelings of desire are not problems, but the healthy functioning we should wish to occur, and that we find these spurs to action pleasurable rather than painful.

But that's exactly what pain is--a healthfully functioning signal that something is wrong and needs to change.

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When we lose all desire, we die. In a very real sense life IS at root the desire for pleasure. Robots and the dead cannot feel or desire. Is not in a very real sense life the ability to desire?

This is true also for pain.

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Would the Epicurean gods feel pleasure in their blessedness if they did not desire that pleasure?

It's not clear to me how desire for a thing and the experience of a thing can reside together--the pleasure fulfills the desire. I'm no longer thirsty after I've drunk...

If the gods desire what they already have, this sounds more to me like they're jealous of what they have, which seems to imply a fear that they could lose it.

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The question remains whether they are feelings, sensations, thoughts, or something else....

This is really what we need to figure out. I could be convinced (maybe) that desire is not necessarily a kind of pain, but I really reject including it among pleasures. The very existence of desire indicates a lack of satisfaction.