Tag Archives: pleasure

Epistle on Pleasure, by Panagiotis

Ι post here a remarcable letter as send it to me by a new Epicurean friend in the Garden of Thessaloniki. Panagiotis Papavasiliou is among us for a few months and he understood very well the issue on pleasure. Panagiotis would be fom now on our Scholarch in the Garden of Thessaloniki and for a duration of six months.

His letter to me is as follows :

Good morning Elli !

Thank you for the attachment containing Boris Nikolsky’s text, I have started reading it and it seems very interesting to me, since the topic on pleasure is the beginning and the mean and the end for us the Epicureans. Until I shall complete reading it so I could comment, I am submitting to you both my point of view about kinetic and katastematic pleasure, their relation to the concept of time, the description of pleasure through pain, and apathy.

By observing nature Epicurus distinguished the lucidity (enargeia) of two general emotional situations in which all living beings are, whether pleasure or pain, excluding even a neutral status. Also clear is the tendency of all living beings for pleasure, which he called it good, that is pleasure (hedone) itself and anything useful to achieve it, and trying to avoid pain (ponos), the evil.

We know that every human being needs energy to move and be kept alive, which we usually receive through food. For this reason the pleasure of the stomach is the basis of all. We can easily imagine someone not moving/acting by himself to replace the energy he loses necessary in operating at least the vital organs (e.g. if he doesn’t eat) and he do not accept external influences (e.g. if he isn’t fed); it is only a matter of time to exhaust his energy stock and die.

Organisms also interact with their environment through their sensory organs. This data is processed in their brain and then they decide on how to take back power from the environment to produce action once again and so on. More precisely, emotions inform (i.e. all the animals that feature emotions, like human) about the stimuli that favour the maintenance of life (pleasure) and those that lead them to death (pain). Therefore, a human in order to live happily will seek for acts that bring pleasure and will avoid those who bear pain. Epicurean theory is not fundamentally different up to here with that of the Cyreneans.

And here comes Epicurus, with the sharp eye to grasp what Aristippus of Cyrene could not, the dimension of time in relation to pleasure, its duration. The grandfather manages with the maximum good/tool of wisdom to break down the walls that keep pleasure inside the narrow bonds of the present, extending it to the past and to the future. According to J.M. Guyau, it is time that turns hedone into utility. We avoid a pleasure in the present that will cause pain in the future; we are already receiving the pleasure of an earlier choice that had cost pain etc. Even if you feel sharp pain at the moment, we can ease or even eliminate it by recalling pleasant memories, as we can spoil our mood prejudging a future (non-existing) pain. So we can describe Epicureans as Prudent Hedonists, while Cyreneans as Extreme ones.

So with the good of wisdom humans turn the pleasure felt, gained by movement (kinesis) and thus costing energy, into a situation (katastasis) pleasure is felt. And, naturally, I am not suggesting two different pleasures, but one and the same, examining it in relation to time. Kinetic pleasure has a more temporary duration, while katastematic has a more permanent. It does not sound to me that correct to call katastematic pleasure as static, because there is simply nothing static in nature. Even when being in a state of pleasure, we will definitely need kinetic pleasures to remain in that situation.

Let’s imagine a diagram such as ECG (cardio-graph), a hedono-graph, where the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical represents the sense of pleasure. On the vertical axis there is a maximum (100% pleasure and 0% pain), a minimum (0% pleasure and 100% pain), and somewhere among them an indefinite but directly perceivable limit when the sense of pleasure prevails over pain. When we feel pain the line moves downwards, and when we feel pleasure it moves upwards. Happy is simply a life that can move the needle of the hedono-graph as much as possible within the area above the pleasure-pain limit. As the gods of Epicurus were immortals, they did not lose energy to be substituted, so the index was stuck at 100% permanently. Unlike gods, we common mortal beings certainly have a mixture of pleasures-pains, in which whenever the pleasures outweigh pains (e.g. 70-30% pleasures-pains) we are in a pleasant condition.

This way I can understand the Letter To Idomeneus: “22. 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”. Something similar happens with the example you mentioned the other day Elli, suggesting that when I feel hungry but, since I know there food back at home that I am heading for, I only feel pleasure, not pain. In this situation I certainly feel my stomach pain from hunger, but through prudence I project and receive in advance the pleasure of some hot homemade food, which I consider safe to infer because that used to happen in the past. So I still potentially am in the same hedonic situation as before, bypassing the warning voice of the flesh via prudence.

As for the dilemma of “is pleasure the absence of pain or pain the absence of pleasure”, it really is a pseudo-dilemma, as most are, if not all. The essential difference here is in the disjunction “or” that uses the law of non-contradiction. In epistemological terms we can still use a reductio ad absurdum (Epicurus himself used it in order to prove the existence of atoms and the void) and every other logical method, as long as the inconceivability criterion is valid in any case. Though, using the method of Multiple Explanations (pleonachos tropos, or multi-valued or fuzzy logic) we prefer conjunction over disjunction, by suggesting both pleasure “and” pain. They both give us information about the emotional interaction we have with nature in order to make the necessary choices and/or avoidances when we seek pleasure, which is always the aim of our nature. The dying Epicurus, though he feels pain by the disease, he simultaneously feels pleasure, which is so much greater that he manages to keep blissful; he had finally remained in the hedonic situation that dominated.

Moreover, we will end up in Stoic apathy if we deny our passions, which all generally lead into pleasure and pain. The Stoics are they who deny both, saying that it does not matter what humans feel eventually, since whatever is predetermined for one to live, that he will live. Like Christians, trying to respond to the so-called “riddle of Epicurus” went so far as to deny the existence of evil (the riddle was not written by Epicurus himself, but it is attributed to him by the apologist Lactantius I think, who mentions it). We Epicureans not only recognize our passions, but our passions constitute a criterion for truth, and their “positive” side, pleasure, is the only “end” we recognize by our human nature.

I am sorry first for being late in replying, and second for the extent of my writing and the various repetitions. But I threaten you both that once I finish this article, I will come back with even more!

What do you say to share our chat with the remaining members, so that they would join in? Even better I suggest we place it on our forum.

I hope to see you in the evening.

Panagiotis Papavasiliou, Garden of Thessaloniki

postcard

The New Canon

Most people who have interest in Epicureanism are seeking to improve their lives and to fine-tune their search for happiness, so that they generally are interested in the ethics, the ripened fruits of Epicurean discourse.  And there is nothing wrong with enjoying the soul-nurturing sweet nectar of a wholesome, calculated wisdom tradition that has come down to us … it is in the sweetest part of the tree, after all, that nature has placed the seed that might take root if it finds fertile soil.  For some plants, it’s the flower that is the genitalia, and for others it’s the fruit.

The spiritual garden that is Epicureanism gives us many varieties of flower and fruits, mellows to engage us in the pleasures of sane philosophy.  But at the root of our coherent system lies always, invariably, the Canon.  We all know that roots are neither the easiest to digest nor the sweetest to our palate.  Some, like carrots, can be had raw.  Others, like yams and cassava, require that we treat them, boil them, or fry them.  They require preparation and slow digestion.  But only from the root, from the Canon, can the fruits of naturalist philosophy self-perpetuate in our soul.

The Canon is not just a theoretical system of epistemology, defined as the theory of knowledge and of how it is properly attained and verified.  It was also one of the 300 scrolls that Epicurus wrote, of which only fragments remain.  The original scripture of the Canon is lost to us.  However, we do know from indirect sources what the Canon taught and we are able to recreate its teachings to a great extent.

Nausiphanes, Epicurus’ atomist teacher (who had been Democritus’ pupil), was the one who invented the tripod, the three-legged stool used as criteria by which to judge reality.  The tripod, as Epicurus taught it, consisted of:

1. sense perception (hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste) – materialists must be empiricists because reality and nature are one and the same; they must accept the evidence before our senses as our firm, undeniable connection to reality

2. feelings (pain, pleasure) – this is how nature, via natural selection, guides living entities and helps them to recognize the survival strategies of their ancestors

3. anticipations (inherited instincts and innate recognitions) – the baby must pre-cognitively anticipate the nipple in order to engage in the pleasures of feeding; people must recognize each other as people in order to engage in the pleasures of socializing, we must recognize our primal panic and vertigo while in the presence of an awesome predator or while standing at the edge of a cliff in order to avoid being eaten or falling, etc.

Of all these, sense perception is of key importance.  While reason is certainly a useful tool to apprehend reality, if fed wrong data or if left to speculate without being grounded on nature, reason can churn out catastrophic, absurd, needless, or impractical conclusions.

Residents of Papua New Guinea, amazed at the wealth brought in by Westerners during the II World War, believed that if they built wooden planes and landing strips, their ancestors would fly in cargo from the heavens.  Reasoning without the Canon can lead to falling off a cliff … or to the development of cargo cults, dissonant worldviews that seek to blend childish imaginings with unanalyzed sense-data and should serve as a metaphor for all other forms of Platonism.  If the Papuans had based their worldview on the study of nature and sought tangible sources for their knowledge, they would have concluded that death is final, that the ancestors do not intervene and that it is needless to await their cargo, and would have sought to find the legitimate sources for cargo as the product of labor in other lands.

Is it not tragic that people in so many cultures await Messiahs who died thousands of years ago, in spite of evidence that all humans have a life span usually shorter than one century?  Christians and Muslims are joined by the cargo cult adherents who await John Frum, an American god that visited them during the mid-20th Century.

Without empirical data we do not have science.  We have speculation or day-dreaming.  There is nothing wrong with day-dreaming.  This is fine for when we are poets and writers of fiction, but it’s not naturalist philosophy.

INTELLECT: It is by convention that color exists, by convention sweet, by convention bitter.

SENSES: Ah, wretched intellect, you get your evidence only as we give it to you, and yet you try to overthrow us. That overthrow will be your downfall.

– Wheewright, The Presocratics, p. 183

The word Canon translates as ruler, measuring stick (for reality).  In other traditions (like Catholicism), the Canon has legal connotations, and the Canon should perhaps be thought of as the Law or Rule concerning knowledge that was set by nature.  It was a sort of materialist Bible, was of central importance to ancient Epicureans, and was dubbed “the book that fell from heaven” in derision by enemies, jokingly by adherents.  It constitutes, in our view, the most biologically-rooted of all known epistemological systems in Hellenistic philosophy. It clearly serves a life-based, life-affirming philosophy of this world and guides us to what is deemed (by nature) to be necessary knowledge.

Unlike other philosophies, we do not accept that life is inherently absurd and empty of meaning.  Instead, we see that nature has given us tools to apprehend reality and that these tools give us all the knowledge and meaning we need.  We often perturb our souls by seeking knowledge beyond what is necessary.  We need to know how to survive and eat, how to relate to others, how to stay warm during a winter, how to protect ourselves from legitimate dangers, how to be happy … we must know (KNOW, here not cognitively but experientially) the taste of food and the safety of friendship … but we do not need to know immaterial beings from other realms, we do not need to know immortality and endless time, or endless anything.  We also do not need to FEAR these spirits or endless time.  Nature has not given us faculties to perceive these things because, even if they existed, they are not and have never been necessary.

For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror therefore and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature. – Lucretius in De Rerum Natura II:56-62.

This is not to say that the knowledge that we gain by enhancing our senses (with microscopes or telescopes, for instance) is not good or that, because it’s acquired through artificial senses, that it’s less awe-inspiring.  But nature requires little of us.  Natural, unnecessary knowledge is icing on a cake compared to the little bread, water and fruits that we need.

One of the first modern attempts at reconstructing the wisdom of the Canon for a contemporary reader is Cassius Amicus’ The Tripod of Truth, An Introduction to the Book That Fell From the Heavens, which can be read online and is available from smashwords and from his webpage, newepicurean.com.  It’s ironic, having an introduction to the Canon but not having the actual work by Epicurus.  Cassius points to the section on the Canon in a previous work by Norman Dewitt as his main source.

Another very solid introduction to the Canon is the epistemology portion of the elementalepicureanism.com course.  There is much more that could be said about this subject and about each one of the three legs of the tripod. I encourage anyone interested in deepening their understanding to read these works, from which might emerge a New Canon, an actual body of literature.

This tangible source for our tradition should serve the didactic and spiritual purpose of the ancient one: to set up a firm foundation for materialist philosophers who wish to base their wisdom tradition on the study of nature and will accept no less than a scientific philosophy.  We must gain full awareness of how speculative philosophy and religion have the potential to produce unnatural beliefs and unrealistic expectations that can, if nurtured with full faith, torment the mortal soul.

No example of this is more universal than our unanalyzed fear of death and childish, arrogant rejection of our natural limits.  These have promoted the sacrifice of widows to their dead husbands, the tormenting of children and those in agony with visions of hell, or the promise of eternal damnation (and the reduction to the status of a social pariah) for those who can not honestly say they subscribe to this or that religious doctrine.  Lucretius, true and heroic Epicurean that he was, disbanded the false promises of unnatural worldviews and placed this advise on the lips of Mother Nature:

Why don’t you retire like a guest sated with the banquet of life, and with calm mind embrace a rest that knows no care? – Lucretius in De Rerum Natura III:938-9

The sad repercussion of not basing our assessment of (our natural fear of) death on the study of nature is oftentimes the development of a form of cargo cult.  This is, potentially, the difference between the forager who merely picks the fruits of philosophy and the Gardener who is a diligent keeper, nurturing the roots and even guiding artful bonsais to their maturity.  Lucretius contrasted the life of a calculated hedonist to that of adherents of other worldviews who nurture, instead, needless sorrows:

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant. – Lucretius in De Rerum Natura II:1

The spiritual task of an Epicurean is that of reconciliation and engagement with nature.  Imperturbability and flourishing are the by-products of the task.

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