fwiw here's my commentary and translation of the characteristics of the Epicurean sage: https://sites.google.com/view/epicureansage/home?authuser=0 Thank you for your work here on Substack. I've been thoroughly enjoying reading your articles.
Thanks Don! I like your innovation of a thematic rearrangement. I would change "will not marry" to "will marry" though. A few early editors adopted that unjustified emendation, but the manuscripts say "will marry" and I think essentially all of the modern editions accept that reading.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. I was taking the Perseus text at face value (and the British Library images are no longer available). Sure enough, as you have on your original text, codex Parisinus gr. 1759 has Καὶ μὴν καὶ γαμήσειν καὶ τεκνοποιήσειν τὸν σοφόν! I'm working on correcting my translation and notes.
Probably the easiest way to compare different manuscript readings and have more transparent editorial decisions is to use Bailey's 1926 edition (the only edition of the Greek text with an English translation, commentary, and full critical apparatus). Used copies can be kind of expensive, but it's been digitized on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/EpicurusTheExtantRemainsBaileyOxford1926_201309/
It's interesting how Stoic critiques are often based on distortions or straw men. I keep wondering, why don't they understand what is being said? I get that they don't agree, but there's something weird about not understanding.
I looked over what Donald Robertson had written. He made a mistake in interpreting Seneca's letter (#9). I don't know where he got that translation from, but the Latin for that sentence doesn't mention the Epicureans. From context, Seneca is referring to the followers of Stilbo, who is generally associated with the Cynics, and in which case the sentence makes sense. It doesn't make sense for the Epicureans.
I like and envy your ability to translate and analyze this, but it seems to me that this reads more like common Hellenistic Greek philosophical property than distinctly Epicurean doctrine. Not caring about his own burial, not being swept up by Eros, not becoming a tyrant but also not going full Cynic, none of that feels specific to Epicurus alone, it reads like the shared middle ground most of these schools were circling.
This also seems close to the Pyrrhonist criteria of action, following the customs and laws around you without needing a theory, especially a non-evident one, about why they're objectively correct, and not getting seized by desire or grief past the point of function. Different starting reasoning, Epicurus is calculating pain and benefit, Pyrrhonists are declining to assert the dogma either way, but both land in the same undramatic, unshaken middle regardless.
You're not wrong that Epicurus usually endorses fairly normal, widespread virtues. Still, there are some elements here that set the Epicureans apart from some of their philosophic rivals. The most obvious in this excerpt is probably the clear advice to steer clear of politics. The next bit will have some more such distinctions, such as saying that the Epicureans will teach philosophy but not publicly, or that the wise man will "declare his principles and not express puzzlement" (there's one for you Pyrrhonists).
Anyways, I kind of like that Epicurus is not totally obsessed by internecine conflict between the philosophical schools, but spends the bulk of his time on the popular misconceptions that hinder normal people's pursuit of happiness. The kind of points you mention are useful corrections of popular opinion, even if some of them might be shared by multiple schools: pointing out that concern for one's burial, overwhelming erotic passion, or the pursuit of power are not actually helpful for happiness are still worthwhile positions to make clear.
As for the Epicurean deference to common social norms and its similarity to the Pyrrhonist criteria of action, I think this points to why I find the Pyrrhonists relatively wise in terms of their behavior, but rather pedantically hesitant as to their theoretical grounding on this point. The Epicureans are happy to say that we should usually follow our community's standards of conduct on prudential grounds, because failing to do so will lead to adverse social consequences that would be detrimental to the tranquility and pleasure of our lives. To me it seems like the Pyrrhonists implicitly have a functionally equivalent belief in the choiceworthiness of the more tranquil, ataraxic path. They just don't want to call this a "belief."
Nearly all of Epicurean *conduct* is composed of similar inferential extrapolations towards a goal with which the Pyrrhonists essentially seem to agree. In many cases, then, Pyrrhonist critique of Epicurean "dogmatism" often seems to boil down to our failure to preface every piece of advice with "probably" and "it seems to me," which is a rather weak distinction when both parties would behave in the same way.
If I recall correctly, at the beginning of Epicurus' philosophical career, he criticized the Aristotelians and Platonists. In response, they decided to violently run Epicurus out of town. This would explain part of Epicurus' subsequent thinking.
I think the "probably" and "it seems to me" aren't doing what you're reading them as doing, they're not hedges softening the same underlying claim, they're marking a different kind of claim entirely. When you say the tranquil path is choiceworthy, that's an assertion about the good, arrived at through calculation, but still a settled, non-evident claim about what's actually valuable. A Pyrrhonist following the same path isn't asserting that. They're reporting that it appears preferable, per the criteria of action, without signing onto any claim about whether it's good in some further, objective sense.
Take the politics line from the excerpt. Steer clear of politics isn't really about politics, it's about dogma, since politics is one of the more reliable places dogma gets manufactured and defended at volume. Dogma is the disease, and disturbance is the symptom. An Epicurean avoids politics because he's calculated that the pain outweighs the benefit, a real, held conclusion. A Pyrrhonist avoids the same thing because political certainty is exactly the kind of non-evident terrain where people mistake conviction for knowledge, and staying out of it isn't a belief that politics is bad, it's just declining to catch what's going around.
That distinction looks pedantic right up until the moment it isn't, when the previously obvious path stops looking obvious. An Epicurean holding "tranquility is the good" as settled now has a belief to either defend or revise. A Pyrrhonist just notices the appearance shifted and follows it, no belief was ever standing there to begin with.
I hear the Pyrrhonists say that ataraxia "appears preferable," but that they do not make any objective claim as to its choiceworthiness. And it's true that Epicurus declares in a seemingly straightforward way that ataraxia is worth pursuing. I know this is the preferred Pyrrhonist vocabulary. But I think a lot of people find this distinction trivial, with pointless qualifications sometimes being attached on either side.
On the Pyrrhonist side, insisting that the preferability of avoiding pain is an appearance rather than evident seems dubious. As long as you stay away from philosophers and talk to normal people, "for humans, pain is bad" seems just about as evident as "if I kick this dog, it won't like it." I assume that Pyrrhonists would put the second claim down in the "evident" category, but just because the first one relates to humans and has ethical implications, they seem to remove it from the realm of the evident. The claim itself seems very similar, however.
On the Epicurean side, while we are often summed up as making an absolute claim of moral realism when we say "pain is bad and pleasure is good," it is entirely arguable that we are simply putting forward what we view as the most useful definition of "good": that which is empirically observed to be desired by the human animal. (Of course, people often find that achieving certain desires comes along with other consequences such that the net result, if they had accurately forecast it, would not have been desirable, but that doesn't invalidate the general concept--"good," if it is to be a useful term for human goals, should be related to human preferences.)
I'm not clear what you mean in your final paragraph when you say that a Pyrrhonist will notice that an appearance has "shifted" in relation to the claim that "tranquility is good," and then smoothly follow it onto a different path. Don't all Pyrrhonists consistently pursue ataraxia? Has any Pyrrhonist ever decided that they would rather be troubled?
To bring it back to our "laws and customs" starting point, Doug Bates writes that the Pyrrhonist follows those customs because they see that going against them "produces difficulties" (Pyrrho's Way, 93). If that is a universal conclusion applicable to the whole species of "Pyrrhonist," then that claim seems to be exactly what Epicurus would say: the wise Epicurean will follow the laws because to do otherwise would produce difficulties. These difficulties are obvious, undisputed, evident, and undesirable. Epicurus simply says "what is undesirable is self-evidently bad, as far as humans are concerned." His metaethical claims need not be read as going beyond Bates’ implicit "the Pyrrhonist would prefer to avoid difficulties."
My overall perspective, then, is this: It seems to me that both Pyrrhonists and Epicureans pursue ataraxia. Both recognize that abandoning groundless opinions is very important towards this goal. The Pyrrhonists put almost all of their rhetorical efforts into that element, however, with only periodic small asides that well, yes, you do want to be prudent like a normal person in your actual life and actions if you want to be untroubled. Epicurus thinks that prudent decision-making is undervalued by essentially all other philosophical schools and that routinely practicing clear-eyed hedonic calculus will definitely produce a less troubled life than if one neglects and undervalues practical decision-making. We need to talk about prudence a lot, and bluntly saying that pleasure is good and pain is bad is the most practical, concrete, undistracted way to have those conversations.
You’re right that a lot of people find the distinction between is and appears to be trivial, but it’s at the heart of the Pyrrhonist logos.
As for “insisting that the preferability of avoiding pain is an appearance rather than evident seems dubious” - this position is not much different from Epicurean hedonic calculus, in which sometimes pain is embraced because of later benefits (e.g., dental work). While the pain is evident, the preferability is an appearance. It’s ultimately uncertain.
I don't think the dental work comparison is really apropos to the point I was trying to make. Sure, hedonic calculus may have some uncertainty, and so a dental procedure that causes some definite discomfort for the (uncertain) hope of avoiding (imperfectly quantifiable) pain is selected based on probabilistic calculation, rather than deductive certainty.
My point was something more like "if a dentist offers to uncomfortably hold my mouth open for an hour, while poking me repeatedly with their sharp implements, *while* telling me the procedure is completely unnecessary and offers zero prospect of benefit, then I will clearly reject that proposition, because it seems evident to me that discomfort and pain are undesirable." I think Pyrrhonists wouldn't hesitate to make the same decision, and so calling this preference for pleasure over pain a mere appearance rather than evident seems rather pointless to me. Epicureans would be fine admitting that there are all kinds of uncertainties, estimates, and probabilistic calculations in deciding what course of action will lead to the most pleasure, but we don't see any realistic reason to think that pain qua pain would be desirable.
I see that your distinction between “appearance” and “evident” is crucial to the point you’re trying to make. I noted it in your prior comment but I decided digging into it might be a distraction. It looks like I was wrong about that.
With translations of Pyrrhonist texts from Greek, “appearance” and “evident” are closely related technical terms. We have:
Phainomena = (physical) appearance
Phantasiai = (mental) appearance
Enargeia = evident
Adelon = non-evident
The way I understand Epicureanism to work is:
Eidōla = physical particles streaming off objects.
Phantasiai = the immediate, true-by-definition sensation produced when eidōla hit our sense organs.
Enargeia = the direct, uninterpreted, vivid self-evidence of that raw impression when observed clearly
In Pyrrhonism, phainomena and phantasiai are involuntarily forced upon the mind, where they are enargeia. However, if the mind adds to this, such as stories of causation, those added things are non-evident. In that category of things that can be added is a judgment of whether something is objectively good or bad. The phainomena may lead to a phantasiai of any kind of reflexive pathos (e.g., pleasure, pain), and while that phantasiai is evident, it is only subjectively evident. In other words, it seems this way to a particular person at a particular point in time under particular conditions.
fwiw here's my commentary and translation of the characteristics of the Epicurean sage: https://sites.google.com/view/epicureansage/home?authuser=0 Thank you for your work here on Substack. I've been thoroughly enjoying reading your articles.
Thanks Don! I like your innovation of a thematic rearrangement. I would change "will not marry" to "will marry" though. A few early editors adopted that unjustified emendation, but the manuscripts say "will marry" and I think essentially all of the modern editions accept that reading.
Thank you very much for pointing this out. I was taking the Perseus text at face value (and the British Library images are no longer available). Sure enough, as you have on your original text, codex Parisinus gr. 1759 has Καὶ μὴν καὶ γαμήσειν καὶ τεκνοποιήσειν τὸν σοφόν! I'm working on correcting my translation and notes.
Probably the easiest way to compare different manuscript readings and have more transparent editorial decisions is to use Bailey's 1926 edition (the only edition of the Greek text with an English translation, commentary, and full critical apparatus). Used copies can be kind of expensive, but it's been digitized on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/EpicurusTheExtantRemainsBaileyOxford1926_201309/
Good suggestion. I literally looked at the digitized manuscript for this one: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8470453h/f497.item
Nice job with that translation.
It's interesting how Stoic critiques are often based on distortions or straw men. I keep wondering, why don't they understand what is being said? I get that they don't agree, but there's something weird about not understanding.
I looked over what Donald Robertson had written. He made a mistake in interpreting Seneca's letter (#9). I don't know where he got that translation from, but the Latin for that sentence doesn't mention the Epicureans. From context, Seneca is referring to the followers of Stilbo, who is generally associated with the Cynics, and in which case the sentence makes sense. It doesn't make sense for the Epicureans.
After I wrote this, I looked in the comments on that article. You'd not only pointed out the same error, but he ignored you.
Wouldn't want to discard a good hit on the Epicureans just because it's completely fabricated!
Among certain Stoics - including this one, as I've seen the behavior before - "virtue" is that in which the ends justify the means.
I like and envy your ability to translate and analyze this, but it seems to me that this reads more like common Hellenistic Greek philosophical property than distinctly Epicurean doctrine. Not caring about his own burial, not being swept up by Eros, not becoming a tyrant but also not going full Cynic, none of that feels specific to Epicurus alone, it reads like the shared middle ground most of these schools were circling.
This also seems close to the Pyrrhonist criteria of action, following the customs and laws around you without needing a theory, especially a non-evident one, about why they're objectively correct, and not getting seized by desire or grief past the point of function. Different starting reasoning, Epicurus is calculating pain and benefit, Pyrrhonists are declining to assert the dogma either way, but both land in the same undramatic, unshaken middle regardless.
You're not wrong that Epicurus usually endorses fairly normal, widespread virtues. Still, there are some elements here that set the Epicureans apart from some of their philosophic rivals. The most obvious in this excerpt is probably the clear advice to steer clear of politics. The next bit will have some more such distinctions, such as saying that the Epicureans will teach philosophy but not publicly, or that the wise man will "declare his principles and not express puzzlement" (there's one for you Pyrrhonists).
Anyways, I kind of like that Epicurus is not totally obsessed by internecine conflict between the philosophical schools, but spends the bulk of his time on the popular misconceptions that hinder normal people's pursuit of happiness. The kind of points you mention are useful corrections of popular opinion, even if some of them might be shared by multiple schools: pointing out that concern for one's burial, overwhelming erotic passion, or the pursuit of power are not actually helpful for happiness are still worthwhile positions to make clear.
As for the Epicurean deference to common social norms and its similarity to the Pyrrhonist criteria of action, I think this points to why I find the Pyrrhonists relatively wise in terms of their behavior, but rather pedantically hesitant as to their theoretical grounding on this point. The Epicureans are happy to say that we should usually follow our community's standards of conduct on prudential grounds, because failing to do so will lead to adverse social consequences that would be detrimental to the tranquility and pleasure of our lives. To me it seems like the Pyrrhonists implicitly have a functionally equivalent belief in the choiceworthiness of the more tranquil, ataraxic path. They just don't want to call this a "belief."
Nearly all of Epicurean *conduct* is composed of similar inferential extrapolations towards a goal with which the Pyrrhonists essentially seem to agree. In many cases, then, Pyrrhonist critique of Epicurean "dogmatism" often seems to boil down to our failure to preface every piece of advice with "probably" and "it seems to me," which is a rather weak distinction when both parties would behave in the same way.
If I recall correctly, at the beginning of Epicurus' philosophical career, he criticized the Aristotelians and Platonists. In response, they decided to violently run Epicurus out of town. This would explain part of Epicurus' subsequent thinking.
Him being run out of Mytilene.
I think the "probably" and "it seems to me" aren't doing what you're reading them as doing, they're not hedges softening the same underlying claim, they're marking a different kind of claim entirely. When you say the tranquil path is choiceworthy, that's an assertion about the good, arrived at through calculation, but still a settled, non-evident claim about what's actually valuable. A Pyrrhonist following the same path isn't asserting that. They're reporting that it appears preferable, per the criteria of action, without signing onto any claim about whether it's good in some further, objective sense.
Take the politics line from the excerpt. Steer clear of politics isn't really about politics, it's about dogma, since politics is one of the more reliable places dogma gets manufactured and defended at volume. Dogma is the disease, and disturbance is the symptom. An Epicurean avoids politics because he's calculated that the pain outweighs the benefit, a real, held conclusion. A Pyrrhonist avoids the same thing because political certainty is exactly the kind of non-evident terrain where people mistake conviction for knowledge, and staying out of it isn't a belief that politics is bad, it's just declining to catch what's going around.
That distinction looks pedantic right up until the moment it isn't, when the previously obvious path stops looking obvious. An Epicurean holding "tranquility is the good" as settled now has a belief to either defend or revise. A Pyrrhonist just notices the appearance shifted and follows it, no belief was ever standing there to begin with.
I hear the Pyrrhonists say that ataraxia "appears preferable," but that they do not make any objective claim as to its choiceworthiness. And it's true that Epicurus declares in a seemingly straightforward way that ataraxia is worth pursuing. I know this is the preferred Pyrrhonist vocabulary. But I think a lot of people find this distinction trivial, with pointless qualifications sometimes being attached on either side.
On the Pyrrhonist side, insisting that the preferability of avoiding pain is an appearance rather than evident seems dubious. As long as you stay away from philosophers and talk to normal people, "for humans, pain is bad" seems just about as evident as "if I kick this dog, it won't like it." I assume that Pyrrhonists would put the second claim down in the "evident" category, but just because the first one relates to humans and has ethical implications, they seem to remove it from the realm of the evident. The claim itself seems very similar, however.
On the Epicurean side, while we are often summed up as making an absolute claim of moral realism when we say "pain is bad and pleasure is good," it is entirely arguable that we are simply putting forward what we view as the most useful definition of "good": that which is empirically observed to be desired by the human animal. (Of course, people often find that achieving certain desires comes along with other consequences such that the net result, if they had accurately forecast it, would not have been desirable, but that doesn't invalidate the general concept--"good," if it is to be a useful term for human goals, should be related to human preferences.)
I'm not clear what you mean in your final paragraph when you say that a Pyrrhonist will notice that an appearance has "shifted" in relation to the claim that "tranquility is good," and then smoothly follow it onto a different path. Don't all Pyrrhonists consistently pursue ataraxia? Has any Pyrrhonist ever decided that they would rather be troubled?
To bring it back to our "laws and customs" starting point, Doug Bates writes that the Pyrrhonist follows those customs because they see that going against them "produces difficulties" (Pyrrho's Way, 93). If that is a universal conclusion applicable to the whole species of "Pyrrhonist," then that claim seems to be exactly what Epicurus would say: the wise Epicurean will follow the laws because to do otherwise would produce difficulties. These difficulties are obvious, undisputed, evident, and undesirable. Epicurus simply says "what is undesirable is self-evidently bad, as far as humans are concerned." His metaethical claims need not be read as going beyond Bates’ implicit "the Pyrrhonist would prefer to avoid difficulties."
My overall perspective, then, is this: It seems to me that both Pyrrhonists and Epicureans pursue ataraxia. Both recognize that abandoning groundless opinions is very important towards this goal. The Pyrrhonists put almost all of their rhetorical efforts into that element, however, with only periodic small asides that well, yes, you do want to be prudent like a normal person in your actual life and actions if you want to be untroubled. Epicurus thinks that prudent decision-making is undervalued by essentially all other philosophical schools and that routinely practicing clear-eyed hedonic calculus will definitely produce a less troubled life than if one neglects and undervalues practical decision-making. We need to talk about prudence a lot, and bluntly saying that pleasure is good and pain is bad is the most practical, concrete, undistracted way to have those conversations.
You’re right that a lot of people find the distinction between is and appears to be trivial, but it’s at the heart of the Pyrrhonist logos.
As for “insisting that the preferability of avoiding pain is an appearance rather than evident seems dubious” - this position is not much different from Epicurean hedonic calculus, in which sometimes pain is embraced because of later benefits (e.g., dental work). While the pain is evident, the preferability is an appearance. It’s ultimately uncertain.
I don't think the dental work comparison is really apropos to the point I was trying to make. Sure, hedonic calculus may have some uncertainty, and so a dental procedure that causes some definite discomfort for the (uncertain) hope of avoiding (imperfectly quantifiable) pain is selected based on probabilistic calculation, rather than deductive certainty.
My point was something more like "if a dentist offers to uncomfortably hold my mouth open for an hour, while poking me repeatedly with their sharp implements, *while* telling me the procedure is completely unnecessary and offers zero prospect of benefit, then I will clearly reject that proposition, because it seems evident to me that discomfort and pain are undesirable." I think Pyrrhonists wouldn't hesitate to make the same decision, and so calling this preference for pleasure over pain a mere appearance rather than evident seems rather pointless to me. Epicureans would be fine admitting that there are all kinds of uncertainties, estimates, and probabilistic calculations in deciding what course of action will lead to the most pleasure, but we don't see any realistic reason to think that pain qua pain would be desirable.
I see that your distinction between “appearance” and “evident” is crucial to the point you’re trying to make. I noted it in your prior comment but I decided digging into it might be a distraction. It looks like I was wrong about that.
With translations of Pyrrhonist texts from Greek, “appearance” and “evident” are closely related technical terms. We have:
Phainomena = (physical) appearance
Phantasiai = (mental) appearance
Enargeia = evident
Adelon = non-evident
The way I understand Epicureanism to work is:
Eidōla = physical particles streaming off objects.
Phantasiai = the immediate, true-by-definition sensation produced when eidōla hit our sense organs.
Enargeia = the direct, uninterpreted, vivid self-evidence of that raw impression when observed clearly
In Pyrrhonism, phainomena and phantasiai are involuntarily forced upon the mind, where they are enargeia. However, if the mind adds to this, such as stories of causation, those added things are non-evident. In that category of things that can be added is a judgment of whether something is objectively good or bad. The phainomena may lead to a phantasiai of any kind of reflexive pathos (e.g., pleasure, pain), and while that phantasiai is evident, it is only subjectively evident. In other words, it seems this way to a particular person at a particular point in time under particular conditions.