Translation Tuesday: Principal Doctrines 5 and 17

The connection between the virtues and the pleasant life

Not an untroubled man. Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel by Henri Vidal.

Principal Doctrine 5:

It is impossible to lead a pleasurable life without also living prudently, honorably, and justly. <It is also impossible to lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice> without living pleasurably. So whoever fails to do the latter must not be living prudently, honorably, and justly, <and whoever fails to do the former> must not be living pleasurably.

Principal Doctrine 17:

The just man is the most free from disturbance, while the unjust man is full of the greatest disturbance.

Commentary

When it comes to the key ethical writings of Epicurus that have survived, two texts stand out: the Letter to Menoeceus (which I recently translated across five posts) and the Principal Doctrines, a collection of forty maxims on mostly ethical topics. Both are considered to be authentic and essentially intact transmissions of Epicurus himself, relayed in their entirety within Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. (Depending on your translation, you may also see this text referred to as the Key Doctrines, Leading Doctrines, Authorized Doctrines, Sovereign Maxims, or Kyriai Doxai.)

In my opening translation on Untroubled, I covered the first four of these aphorisms, which are often regarded as encapsulating some of the most central claims of Epicureanism in compact form. Over the coming months, I will proceed through the remainder of the Principal Doctrines, with regular intermissions to share other small texts. In general, I intend to move systematically through the collection, but I will take some maxims out of sequence in order to form thematic pairings or small sets of related aphorisms. Today, I will proceed to Principal Doctrine (PD) 5, pairing it with the related PD 17. Both deal with an important subject: the connection between the traditional virtues and the life of pleasure. According to Epicurus, they are inseparable.

5. It is impossible to lead a pleasurable life without also living prudently, honorably, and justly. <It is also impossible to lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice> without living pleasurably. So whoever fails to do the latter must not be living prudently, honorably, and justly, <and whoever fails to do the former> must not be living pleasurably.

There are some philosophically immaterial disputes about the text of this maxim.¹ Brackets show scholarly additions to our received text, which I feel are generally well justified on the ground of both sense and the testimony of other texts. So, what exactly is the nature of Epicurus’ claim here?

It is important to understand the significance of the three traits that Epicurus juxtaposes with the life of pleasure: living prudently, honorably, and justly (φρονίμως καὶ καλῶς καὶ δικαίως). Most simply, these are all traditional virtues. Many critics of hedonism insist that followers of Epicurus reject the virtues, and that the egoistic pursuit of one’s own pleasure must necessarily conflict with a virtuous life. In this common conception, the demands of honor and justice are what hold us back from pursuing pleasure.

In a simple example, someone might find it pleasurable to possess some given object—a given person might want to drink a nice bottle of wine, own a big TV, or wear a fine Italian wool coat. If he is presented with an opportunity to steal such an object, the critics assert, he would do so if only considering his own pleasure. That is why we need to teach the importance of honor and justice: so that we will not act shamefully or unjustly out of low hedonistic motives.

Epicurus thinks this is wrong. Such a portrait of hedonism would only be accurate for the most unreflective person imaginable. Most people recognize that in most cases stealing will be hedonistically bad—there will often be a high likelihood of legal punishment or immediate retaliation. What Epicurus thinks we need to teach is thoughtful hedonism: we need to reflect that even when the danger of being caught seems low, it is non-zero. There is always some risk of being found out, so our peace of mind will inevitably be damaged by any acts of theft. Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, fancy wine, TVs, and coats are really not that valuable and consist mostly of “variation” rather than increase in pleasure.

One might wonder: doesn’t the mention of “honor” and “justice” imply some belief in those ideas as freestanding, independent virtues? I don’t think so. I basically agree with Norman DeWitt’s reading:

… By honor is meant the unwritten law that determines the conduct of a gentleman; and by justice is meant obedience to the written laws of the country.²

Epicurus mentions honor and justice as examples of the conventional, socially-constructed virtues because he is responding to those who are concerned about the potential Epicurean disregard for commonplace morality, so it is natural that he uses those terms. For himself, the traditional virtues only have instrumental value insofar as they promote hedonistic benefit—which they almost always do!

We don’t have a great deal of testimony regarding Epicurean conceptions of honor, but on the subject of justice he is quite explicit: “Justice does not exist as a thing by itself,” he writes in PD 33, but is rather “an agreement of mutual advantage, a covenant to not harm one another and to not be harmed” (PD 31). If justice, then (as well as honor, presumably), can be broken down into terms of advantage and disadvantage, then prudence—practical decision-making about how to best forward our own interest—is the connective tissue that leads to the essential alignment of pleasure and the conventional virtues. This is, after all, exactly what Epicurus said in the Letter to Menoeceus, where he embedded the first half of PD 5 more clearly in that prudential context:

Prudence is the foundation of all of this and our greatest good. Because of this, prudence is more valuable than philosophy, and all the other virtues are produced from it. Prudence teaches that it is not possible to live pleasurably without living prudently, honorably, and justly, nor to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasurably. For the virtues are necessarily intertwined with the pleasurable life, and the pleasurable life is inseparable from them.

As a further clarification of how living virtuously contributes to our own pleasure, it is helpful to look at PD 17, which applies the general principles of PD 5 to justice specifically. (Epicurus will have more to say on justice in the PD 30s.)

17. The just man is the most free from disturbance, while the unjust man is full of the greatest disturbance.

ὁ δίκαιος ἀταρακτότατος, ὁ δʼ ἄδικος πλείστης ταραχῆς γήμων.

Here, the “hedonistic” benefit of acting justly is identified specifically: the famous ataraxia, or tranquility. Ataraxia is the absence of tarache—disturbance or trouble. By acting justly, you can avoid a wide swathe of disturbances to your peace of mind—the actual imposition of legal penalties, the risk of legal penalties, and social disapprobation in all its forms from violent reprisal down to mild distrust.

Crooks and cheats are not good models for a peaceful life. The just, honorable, and prudent person, in contrast, is ataraktotatos—the most untroubled.

Original Text

5. οὐκ ἔστιν ἡδέως ζῆν ἄνευ τοῦ φρονίμως καὶ καλῶς καὶ δικαίως <οὐδὲ φρονίμως καὶ καλῶς καὶ δικαίως> ἄνευ τοῦ ἡδέως· ὅτῳ δὲ τοῦτο μὴ ὑπάρχει, οὐ ζῇ φρονίμως καὶ καλῶς καὶ δικαίως, <καὶ ὅτῳ ἐκεῖνο μὴ> ὐπάρχει, οὐχ ἔστι τοῦτον ἡδέως ζῆν.

17. ὁ δίκαιος ἀταρακτότατος, ὁ δʼ ἄδικος πλείστης ταραχῆς γήμων.

1. The maxim can be divided in two halves, each of which is generally thought to need some emendation. The first half reads:

It is impossible to lead a pleasurable life without also living prudently, honorably, and justly. <It is also impossible to lead a life of prudence, honor, and justice> without living pleasurably.

Interestingly, this same sentence occurs with the same omission in Letter to Menoeceus 132, which is generally attributed to the scribe-confusing repetition of the sentence. This correction is generally agreed upon, however, since the sentence doesn’t make much sense without it, and because that missing phrase is present in the version preserved in Diogenes of Oenoanda fragment 37. (Confusingly Vatican Saying 5 prints another variation of this saying, which doesn’t seem to resolve our difficulties here.)

The second half is more disputed, although ultimately not very consequentially. In my translation of the Bailey text, it reads:

So whoever fails to do the latter must not be living prudently, honorably, and justly, <and whoever fails to do the former> must not be living pleasurably.

Again, it is agreed that something must be done to make our received text make sense. The ambiguity in Greek comes from the fact that rather than having dedicated words for “the former” and “the latter,” Greek uses the demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that.” So the opening sentence here could in isolation simply be translated “Whoever fails to do this” (τοῦτο) or the like.

Bailey’s emendation, which I lean towards accepting, proposes that a short phrase referring to “the former” (ἐκεῖνο) has dropped out, but that the rest of the text can be retained. This makes this second sentence essentially a full repetition of the first; Bailey thinks the point is emphatic repetition and a subtle shift from a general statement to a practical “appeal to experience.” We could understand this, he suggests, as saying something like, “if in fact we see a man’s life is not pleasant, then we may be sure that he is not living virtuously,” and so on (Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains 352). In English, this reads as a little clumsy and repetitive, but I think that this is on balance our best option.

Some scholars don’t like this repetitiveness and want to emend more significantly. The popular text of Arrighetti (used by Inwood and Gerson’s translation), adopts a suggestion of Von der Muehll and removes text instead:

So whoever fails to do this must not be living prudently, honorably, and justly, and <whoever lacks the second> must not be living pleasurably.

In this reading, “this” must be taken as referring to the life of the virtues. The advantage of this translation is that it renders the second sentence into a snappy punchline instead of a laborious repetition. But to me it seems less likely. 1) I think “this” (τοῦτο) most naturally refers to the nearest antecedent in the Greek, which would be “living pleasurably,” rather than “living virtuously.” 2) It requires removing not just the repetition of “living prudently, honorably, and justly,” but also the initial verb “he does not live” (οὐ ζῇ), which cannot be as simply assumed away as a duplicate. And 3) Although it is repetitious, as Bailey points out, Epicurus also repeats both sides of the formula in the Letter to Menoeceus version, albeit in a more concise form, following the shared sentence with the follow-up, “For the virtues are necessarily intertwined with the pleasurable life, and the pleasurable life is inseparable from them.” Just because someone feels that Epicurus is being repetitious is not a good enough reason to delete text.

2. Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy 246