Living Near the Bone
Translation Tuesday: Vatican Sayings 25, 33, 35, 67–69, and 81
Recognize the necessary desires:
25. Poverty, measured according to the requirements of nature, is great wealth, while wealth without limits is great poverty.
33. The flesh cries out its demands: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. One who possesses these goods and expects them to continue could rival the happiness of Zeus himself.
68. Nothing is enough for one to whom enough is little.
Limit the unnecessary desires through gratitude:
35. We must not spoil the things we have through desire for things we don’t have. Rather, we must use our reason to remind ourselves that these also were things we once wished for.
69. An ungrateful soul is what makes a creature endlessly greedy for variety in its way of life.
Let go of the unnatural desires:
67. A free man is not able to acquire great wealth, for this is not easy to do without servitude either to the mob or to the mighty, but his life has everything it needs in unfailing abundance. And if such a man should come into wealth by chance, he would readily share his possessions to obtain the goodwill of his neighbors.
81. Neither great wealth, nor the honor and admiration of the masses, nor anything else that stems from unbounded desires, resolves the troubles of the soul or produces joy worthy of the name.
Commentary
Last week’s translation featured a selection of aphorisms from the Principal Doctrines extolling the virtues of the simple life. And my last two Friday essays have dealt with the Epicurean Classification of Desires, a central doctrine that helps us to distinguish between what is necessary for happiness and what is not—and shape our lives accordingly. Before leaving the topic, it seems appropriate to note that Epicurus had a good deal more to say about appreciating the simple pleasures of life while avoiding the lure of the “unnatural” desires. Today I’ll cover seven more aphorisms on the subject from the collection known as the Vatican Sayings.
A brief word on this collection before we begin. Unlike the Principal Doctrines, the Vatican Sayings are not an original and intentional collection, published as a deliberate whole during the lifetime of Epicurus. Instead, they are the assemblage of an anonymous scribe from many centuries later who collated a variety of somewhat random ethical aphorisms from Epicurus and his followers. Of the 81 included maxims, 13 are essentially repeated from the Principal Doctrines and so are usually excluded from printed editions. Some are known from other sources to be from Metrodorus (Epicurus’ closest philosophical associate and friend) and at least one other is clearly post-Epicurus-himself (describing in the third person “the life of Epicurus”), but many have no independent testimony and so are attributed to Epicurus, rather than to his followers, purely as a necessary convenience. This singular manuscript was discovered in the Vatican library in the late 1800s (you can view the digitized version here, starting on page 401), earning it the English name of the Vatican Sayings (VS) or the Latin title of Sententiae Vaticanae (SV).
On the natural and necessary
For convenience of commentary, it’s probably useful to group these thematically, as shown above (unlike the Principal Doctrines, the numbered order is not particularly meaningful anyways). Let’s start with three sayings that are all closely tied to the recently much-discussed-by-me topic of the necessary desires.
25. Poverty, measured according to the requirements of nature, is great wealth, while wealth without limits is great poverty.
The first of these is particularly sympathetic with Principal Doctrine 15, which I discussed last week, sharing that maxim’s concern with wealth “according to nature.” Today’s saying makes, however, a slightly more dramatic claim, at least rhetorically. (While Epicurus’ reputation as a stylist is not great, he certainly has a taste for this kind of sharp contrast or paradox.) According to VS 25, not only is the state of “wealth according to nature” limited and easy to attain, it is also synonymous with “poverty,” in the common usage of the term. The first half of VS 25 is a challenge to anyone who accepts this standard conception of “poverty”: People who the many call poor are not poor, in the true sense of being unable to fulfill their necessary desires. If you call yourself poor, you are probably wrong.
The second half of this paradox (“wealth without limits is great poverty”) is likewise a challenge to the language of the many. There are numerous people who are wealthy in the eyes of the world, but if they have no sense of limits and sufficiency, they will always be poor relative to their desires. According to Epicurus, a millionaire who is hungry to be a billionaire, or anyone who lives in a state of perpetually unsatisfied desire, is the one who is more aptly described as “poor.”
33. The flesh cries out its demands: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. One who possesses these goods and expects them to continue could rival the happiness of Zeus himself.
Here the physically necessary desires are listed in their starkly minimal essence: the actual requirements of our bodies are very limited. Now, it is true that Epicurus elsewhere describes us as having desires that are necessary “for happiness” in addition to those that are necessary “for life itself” and “to pacify the body’s demands,” so he should not be taken as maintaining that the demands of the flesh are everything we need as humans. But we should not mistake the desire for, say, sushi, fine wine, and cashmere blankets as being necessary for our contentment. All of the body’s discontents can be satisfied very simply.
(Occasionally, Epicurus—like Lucretius after him—will refer to the traditional gods as a rhetorical or literary device.1[1] That doesn’t mean he believes in the traditional stories about them.)
68. Nothing is enough for one to whom enough is little.
Another classic Epicurean paradox. If a person considers what is truly “enough” (that which satisfies all the necessary desires) to be “little” in his mind, then for that person, there is nothing that he will consider to be “enough.” If sufficient food, water, clothing, shelter, and friendship are dismissed as minor things, unimportant compared to the bigger projects of one’s life, then where will the line of sufficiency be drawn?
Perhaps this is a little hyperbolic for rhetorical purposes—one could technically imagine someone whose threshold for “enough” is just a little inflated—but I think it’s usually correct. The most reliable way of ensuring that someone possesses some mental threshold for “enough” is if they calibrate that word to the truly necessary desires, as Epicurus recommends. Typically, people never make a deliberate effort to define “enough,” and so they just unconsciously add more and more desires, lured on by the appeal of the next objective in their sights.
On the natural but unnecessary desires
The next two maxims are united by their tacit endorsement of one of the key Epicurean spiritual exercises: practicing gratitude as a remedy for the desire for novelty. Enjoying variety is not in itself bad—such pleasures, in themselves, belong to the category of the “natural but not necessary” desires, rather than to that of the “unnatural desires”—but letting such desires grow into urgent, driving passions in your life is not conducive to happiness.
35. We must not spoil the things we have through desire for things we don’t have. Rather, we must use our reason to remind ourselves that these also were things we once wished for.
Simple, but potent. So much consumption and novelty-seeking is relentlessly forward-looking: we are always thinking of the things and experiences we could get. Epicureanism recommends looking back, and thinking of the things we already have. This has two positive consequences. First, it may undermine the seeming urgency of those desires “for things we don’t have”—how plausible is the feeling that a stylish new sweater will bring someone happiness, if she already have five similarly stylish sweaters for which she once held out similar hopes? Second, it will enhance the pleasure of our current lives to reflect on all the good things they already contain.
69. An ungrateful soul is what makes a creature endlessly greedy for variety in its way of life.
Translators differ on whether ἐν διαίτῃ should be understood as referring narrowly to one’s “diet” of food (Bailey, DeWitt, Arrighetti) or more broadly to one’s “way of life” (Inwood and Gerson, Morel). In the Letter to Menoeceus, the same word is used once in clear reference to food, and then a second time with similar ambiguity to this case. Without the original context of this sentence, it is impossible to know which meaning is intended.
In truth, both are legitimate Epicurean positions. People are often greedy for variety in both their diet and in their lives more broadly. The word ποίκιλμα is standardly and correctly rendered as “variety,” but can also refer to a more literal “ornament” or “embellishment,” as in embroidery—this word for “variety” therefore suggests something that is inherently “extra” and beyond-what-is-necessary, a kind of superfluousness.
As discussed in the Classification of Desires essay, embellishments to one’s diet and lifestyle are perfectly benign in themselves. It is when one becomes “endlessly greedy” for such variety, when the hunger for novelty becomes overly intense, that there is a problem. According to Epicurus, the fundamental remedy for neophilia is gratitude.
On the unnatural desires
Finally, our last two sayings consider not the “natural and necessary,” nor the “natural and unnecessary” desires, but the unnatural ones, those founded on empty, groundless opinion. Two of the most prominent of such desires are those for wealth and admiration: while it may be natural to want adequate resources for your needs and the goodwill of your peers, there is no natural need for this to balloon into the superfluous accumulation of goods and chasing after the admiration of strangers.
67. A free man is not able to acquire great wealth, for this is not easy to do without servitude either to the mob or to the mighty, but his life has everything it needs in unfailing abundance. And if such a man should come into wealth by chance, he would readily share his possessions to obtain the goodwill of his neighbors.
This saying adds a few interesting reflections beyond the now familiar baseline observation that great wealth is not necessary for happiness. Some people might theoretically concede that wealth is not necessary, but still pursue it, perhaps claiming that they enjoy the process of gaining wealth, or that the costs of that process are smaller than the pleasure they get from the extra resources. Here, Epicurus adds a caution about the process of wealth accumulation: it often requires “servitude to either the mob or to the mighty.” Arguably, the exceptions to this have grown since Epicurus’ time: many “normal” jobs now deliver paychecks far in excess of what the necessary desires require. Still, I think the caution is worth bearing in mind: even if your livelihood is not derived from explicit service to a dictator, for example, work often requires unpleasant compromises of your preferences and beliefs. If your current employment requires subservience of any kind to people you do not admire, or labor in service to a project which you think is bad, then changing your employment—even at some financial cost—may well make your life more pleasurable on balance.
The second interesting suggestion here concerns what the wise man would do if he happened to acquire great wealth. The basic idea is that he would give it away, though it should be noted that this encouragement has neither the urgency nor the mandate of cost-effectiveness that you would encounter from modern effective altruists. Instead, the “donation” is entirely framed as an alternative, more effective egoistic action: since wealth gives negligible benefit, and may even be socially harmful to oneself (i.e. by attracting envy, theft, or sycophancy), it is better to convert it into social goodwill by giving it away.
I basically agree. The trickier question is to determine the threshold for when one’s resources become superfluous. Wealth operates differently today than it did in Epicurus’ time: we have investment options that are safe from theft, non-ostentatious, and that provide ongoing income. How to decide exactly what amount of wealth moves a person into the “time to give it away” category is therefore a fairly complex question that probably deserves its own essay at some point. For now, I will leave it at this: generally speaking, Epicurus is not particularly interested in advising people of normal means to give away their money. The necessary corollary to his ideas about the necessary desires, however, is that the accumulation of resources has steeply declining marginal utility and will at some point turn negative.
81. Neither great wealth, nor the honor and admiration of the masses, nor anything else that stems from unbounded desires, resolves the troubles of the soul or produces joy worthy of the name.
Let’s end with a fairly straightforward, but endlessly important encapsulation of the nature of the unnatural desires. Wealth and fame do not do the things that would benefit us most: they do not resolve our troubles nor produce real joy. Thoreau famously picked up this idea a few millennia later:
We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Crœsus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. (Walden, “Conclusion”)
Epicurus is often interpreted in a partial and uncharitable manner, with all of his prudential counsel and advocacy for the simple life assumed to imply a life of reduced vibrancy and joy. That’s not how it works. “Joy worthy of the name” does not come from wealth, which buys superfluities only. People will often protest that they enjoy their shopping, that they get pleasure from the things they buy—if they are not causing themselves great financial stress or other outright harm, then what’s the problem?
The problem is the missed opportunity. To spend your life collecting things is to miss “life near the bone,” life where it is sweetest. It is to voluntarily enlist yourself among the triflers, who spend their precious hours chasing shadows.
Look at your life. What are the great troubles that diminish your happiness each day? Are you stressed by your job, by your relationships, by the state of the world? Wealth and fame don’t make these better. (The desire for wealth is what keeps many people in their job—if you don’t care about wealth, and manage your money prudently, then you will have more latitude to find a an agreeable livelihood.) When in your life have you encountered “joy worthy of the name”? I would guess that that emotion did not rise up in you upon the acquisition of one more dollar, one more online follower, one more package in the mail, but from moments in which all thoughts of accumulation disappeared from your consciousness and you relaxed into peace and security, love and friendship, proximity to noble feelings or great beauty.
Recognize what you truly need. Let yourself be filled with gratitude for all that you already have. And let go of all the borrowed thoughts that distract you from what matters.
Original Text
[On the natural and necessary desires]
25. ἡ πενία μετρουμένη τῷ τῆς φύσεως τέλει μέγας ἐστὶ πλοῦτος· πλοῦτος δὲ μὴ ὁριζόμενος μεγάλη ἐστὶ πενία.
33. σαρκὸς φωνὴ τὸ μὴ πεινῆν, τὸ μὴ διψῆν, τὸ μὴ ῥιγοῦν· ταῦτα γὰρ ἔχων τις καὶ ἐλπίζων ἕξειν κἂν <διὶ> ὑπὲρ εὐδαιμονίας μαχέσαιτο.
[On the natural but not necessary desires]
35. οὐ δεῖ λυμαίνεσθαι τὰ παρόντα τῶν ἀπόντων ἐπιθυμίᾳ, ἀλλʼ ἐπιλογίζεσθαι ὅτι καὶ ταῦτα τῶν εὐκταίων ἦν.
69. τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀχάριστον λίχνον ἐποίησε τὸ ζῷον εἰς ἄπειρον τῶν ἐν διαίτῃ ποικιλμάτων.
68. οὐδὲν ἱκανὸν ᾧ ὀλίγον τὸ ἱκανόν.
[On the desires which are neither natural nor necessary]
67. ἐλεύθερος βίος οὐ δύναται κτήσασθαι χρήματα πολλὰ διὰ τὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα <μὴ> ῥᾴδιον εἶναι χωρὶς θητείας ὄχλων ἢ δυναστῶv, ἀλλὰ <συν> συνεχεῖ δαψιλείᾳ πάντα κέκτηται· ἄν δέ που καὶ τύχῃ χρημάτων πολλῶv, καὶ ταῦτα ῥᾳδίως ἃν εἰς τὴν τοῦ πλησίον εὔνοιαν διαμετρήσαι.
81. οὐ λύει τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ταραχὴν οὐδὲ τὴν ἀξιόλογον ἀπογεννᾷ χαρὰν οὔτε πλοῦτος ὑπάρχων ὁ μέγιστος οὔθʼ ἡ παρὰ τοῖς πολλοῖς τιμὴ καὶ περίβλεψις οὔτʼ ἄλλο τι τῶν παρὰ τὰς ἀδιορίστους αίτίας.
Technically, the “of Zeus” is an emendation of the manuscript. However, the maxim doesn’t make sense without it (“could rival ____ in happiness”), the corruption of the suggested κἂν διὶ to the manuscript καὶ is plausible, and we have other quotes that echo the same phrasing, so all the scholars accept it.