Blogosophy

Badgerbag comments:About ataraxia:Yet if you're

Badgerbag comments:

About ataraxia:

Yet if you're always trying so hard to live without pain doesn't that mean you're afraid of pain? Isn't pain and loss inevitable no matter how virtuous you are and how studiously you avoid it?

I'm not trying to be very logical here, but if you love other people, doesn't your happiness depend on them and their continued existence? Isn't fear for the future sort of built in to relationships with others? I would question that minimizing risks maximizes happiness. Unless you treat other people with detachment, so that they are appreciated yet still in the category of "small luxuries" that you could live without, doesn't that mean "no love"?

It also seems a bit to me as if Epicurus thinks of pain and happiness as limited commodities that are used up or gambled away.

And what if empathy is necessary for happiness, and the development of empathy requires pain? Doesn't wisdom require pain as well?

I know I'm missing a lot of your point here but... at least it's some response. You need some real philosophers reading this and commenting!

My response

I think the Epicurean response would be along these lines:

If pain is inevitable, does it make sense to fear pain and strive to avoid it?

Of course you're afraid of pain! Pain hurts: that is clear sensory evidence. If it is necessary to suffer some amount of fear or mental unease in contemplating the future in order to plan to avoid it, then at worst that is one of those minor ills which we put up with for the sake of the greater future pleasure, namely the avoidance of that foreseeable catastrophe that heedlessness will bring on. "If you do not on every occasion refer each of your actions to the ultimate end prescribed by nature, but instead of this in the act of choice or avoidance turn to some other end, your actions will not be consistent with your theories." Certainly pain and loss are inevitable, but it doesn't follow that they cannot be mitigated in any way by forethought or proper understanding. (An example of the former might be not binge-drinking in the evening to avoid the hangover the following morning; an example of the latter might be to realize how foolish you're being if you tell yourself "I just have to have that new pair of boots/vacation to the Bahamas/sports car/yacht or I'll be miserable!") Also, though much of his philosophy involved reasoning about pain and pleasure, he held that once you understood, it was not particularly difficult to live without pain and fear ("What is necessary is easy to obtain...").

Epicurus understood that there were two kinds of pain: physical pain and mental pain. According to him: "Continuous bodily pain does not last long; instead, pain, if extreme, is present a very short time, and even that degree of pain which slightly exceeds bodily pleasure does not last for many days at once. Diseases of long duration allow an excess of bodily pleasure over pain." (It might be argued that in some cases modern medicine has tipped that balance, allowing even diseases of long duration to inflict continuous bodily pain in excess of bodily pleasure, but that's a discussion for another time.)

As far as mental pain, there were two chief sources: Fear of death, and fear of the gods (and the afterlife). Death is nothing to fear: "Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us." If death does not cause the dead pain, it's foolish to allow the fear of it to cause you pain now. Lucretius offers the further argument: Consider the time before you were born; we do not consider the infinity of time when we didn't exist before we were born an evil thing, so why should we regard the infinity of time when we no longer exist after our death with horror? As to fear of the gods, if they exist they are perfectly indifferent to us, for anger and partiality would necessarily rob them of their blessed perfection (there are other arguments, too, which I'll deal with some other time).

As far as we can tell, to Epicurus this wasn't just idle theorizing; he died after two weeks of agony from kidney stones, but at least according to his followers, he died cheerfully and at peace with himself (in a warm bath after a draught of unmixed wine). Here is (according to Diogenes Laertius) one of the last letter he wrote, to Idomeneus:
On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus.

Does love make us hostages to fortune?

If it does, then that's just another of those pains that we have to put up with in order to achieve the more significant pleasure of loving and being loved. What's more, friendship is the best bulwark against misfortune possible, and one of the greatest sources of pleasure (c.f. the letter above). But it's possible that a stronger case can be made: that the loss of a loved one is not so horrible as it seems--certainly not horrible enough to more than offset the joys of all the times prior to that loss, once you understand the groundlessness of fear of death and the gods. For how much of the grief that you experience stems not from your selfish consideration of the hole the loved one's absence leaves in your life (a real consideration, though very much mitigated by the memories that you have of them and the understanding that the loved one's existence was not and could not have been essential, the way that something like breathing is essential, however romantic it is to imagine otherwise), but from your empathetic fear of what they might be experiencing in death or the afterlife (entirely imaginary and groundless; nothing can matter to them any more, and fear of death on their account is no more justified than fear of death on your own)?

Are happiness and pain limited commodities?

I don't think so; at least I don't see how. If that's the impression I gave, it's just something wrong with my summation. In fact, Epicurus appeared to have argued the opposite: that given the correct understanding pleasure is for practical purposes infinite in obtainability if not intensity (presumably pain could also be, on a similar argument, if one's understanding was incorrect, but I don't think there's any evidence that he examined that point). More specifically, he argued: "Unlimited time and limited time afford an equal amount of pleasure, if we measure the limits of that pleasure by reason." This is a bit cryptic, and similar points in the Principle Doctrines are even more so, but I think that the clear thrust is that it is foolish to fear that your life will have less total pleasure than another, longer life, let alone that an infinite life, offering infinite duration for pleasure, is so much to be preferred as to render it sensible to rob ourselves of our current pleasures to wallow in envy of that infinite life. It's also clear that Epicurus believed that memories of past pleasures are very much something that one can enjoy in the present and weigh against present pain (while memories of past pains can easily be dismissed), and since these necessarily accumulate over a properly lived life, happiness seems neither limited nor a commodity. It's not clear whether the latter point can be reconciled with the former, although I suspect that it could if you considered that no matter how long you live, there are only so many pleasant memories that you can process at once in the subjective now.

What if empathy is necessary for happiness, and development of empathy requires pain?

Epicurus was an empiricist, not an idealist, and empirically it doesn't look like the world is going to run out of painful experiences to teach empathy by any time in the near future. IOW, he was dealing with the world as it seemed to be constituted according to his senses and reason, not as it might be if everyone managed somehow to embark on his program so successfully as to avoid pain and fear entirely. Later philosophers, particularly philosophers of religion, would worry about such cases a lot (particularly when trying to answer Epicurus's riddle), but it wasn't on his map as far as I can see. In any case, if a certain amount of developmental pain is avoidable, but necessary for future happiness, it's pretty clear that Epicurus would have been comfortable with seeking it out.

Real philosophers

I think that Epicurus would have strongly rejected the notion that it requires real philosophers to do philosophy; the whole point of opening his teaching to women and slaves (something that let his detractors slander him with holding orgies at The Garden) was that he thought everyone could benefit from philosophy. I happen to agree with that; I think it's a real shame that the practice of philosophy has become so rarified as to be all but unintelligible to even the smart, educated lay-person. Posted by joshua at May 20, 2003 08:57 AM