Epicurean Philosophy: Mental Pleasures and Pains Explained

The Epicureans distinguish between bodily and mental pleasures, deeming mental pleasures as more intense due to temporality and control over anticipations and memories.

### Epicurean Philosophy: The Distinction Between Mental and Bodily Pleasures
* 🧠 The Epicureans made a key distinction between bodily and mental pleasures and pains, with **mental pleasures being more important** to them.
* 🌱 They were materialists who believed that all that exists are atoms and bodies, and **mental pleasures and pains were connected to the body**.
* 👅 Bodily pleasures are purely sensory, like the taste of wine, while mental pleasures are more complex, involving **past, present, and future sensations**.
* 🕰 Epicureans believed that mental pleasures were often more intense than bodily pleasures due to our ability to **anticipate and remember**.
* 🧘 Wise people have the power to manage their anticipations and memories, focusing on **pleasant things to maximize mental pleasures**.
* 🏛 Epicurus stated that living pleasantly required living **wisely, justly, and honorably**, as living **imprudently, dishonorably, and unjustly** would lead to **mental pains**.
* Torquatus described mental diseases as examples of mental pains, such as a **mind divided against itself**, the **fear of death**, and **superstition**.

hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason IO, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated. And that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners. I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. Book one of Cicero's On the Ends. Torquatus is presenting the Epicurean position on ethics, and one of the key distinctions that Epicureans made was between bodily and mental pleasures and pains. This is part of what distinguished

them from other schools of hedonism. You'll notice in this work, they talk about the Cyrenaics and Epicurus. The Cyrenaics were a school that held that mental pleasures and pains were less important, or perhaps just the same as physical pleasures. The Epicureans placed great stress on mental pleasures and pains. There's a few things to say before going into their actual doctrine as we find it in this text. One of these is that the Epicureans, like some of the other philosophers of their time, were materialists. So, strictly speaking, all that exists are atoms and bodies (well, there's the void as well, but everything that exists is really corporeal). So, if they were here in the present day, mental pleasures and pains, they would say these are connected with our brain. There's nothing mysterious about these other than the fact that we don't quite have an explanation for how all of that takes place at this point. But they do think that you can still make some sort of distinction between corporeal pleasures, like the pleasures

of drinking a bit of coffee, or you know, feeling a nice sensation on your skin, say when you take a shower, or any other thing like that. And then what they're calling mental or in the Greek psychical pleasures, those pleasures of the soul. Now, they don't think that the soul is any sort of immaterial thing that floats around all by itself. There's no dualism here, but they are establishing a distinction. So, Torquatus is going to tell us that mental pleasures and pains derived from bodily pleasures and pains, he says a little bit later, arise from or at, you know, they have their origin in the body, and they're based on or they can be referred back to, is another way of translating it, sensations of the body. So, when we talk about mental pleasures, let's take an example that might be quite helpful. When you are, say, drinking a fine wine. Now, wine connoisseurs tell us that there's all sorts of things involved in it, and there's like procedures we have.

to go through so we can have the wine breathe, and all that, and just put that aside for a moment to think about the way that you taste a wine and the complexity of the taste on your palate. Some of that is purely bodily in the way that the Koreans would refer to it here, and certainly the act of drinking is something bodily. There's an effect on your tongue, actually a lot of different things going on, it's quite complex. There's mouthfeel, there's the alcohol and what that is doing, there's all these different receptors within your tongue and in your mouth, and there's the odor that's going up into your sinuses and nostrils. All of that is involved, and you've got some physical sensations there. Now think about when you're drinking that wine and you're comparing it to the wine that you just drank, and you're saying, This is much better. I like the taste of this. It's got these different notes or qualities to it that this was lacking over here. You're starting to move into

the realm of mental pleasures, there's a richer that you could call it manifold involved there, that the fact that we are not just bodily but mental beings, beings that have this incredible mind that can sort of reach into our, you might call it the source or treasure-house of sensations, and pluck all these other things out. That is the realm of the mental. So, mental pleasures arise from the body, there based on what's going on with sensation, but in some respect they take us beyond mere sensation of the present, and this is where we get to a very important point for Epicureans. Mental pleasures and pains, not all of them, but many of them, are in fact more intense than merely bodily pleasures and pains. Now you might say, well how can that be? They're arising from the bodily sensations, how can there be this surplus, this value-added there? Well, it has to do for the Epicureans with time, with temporality, with the kind of beings that we are that have not just merely a present but also a past and a future.

to take that example of comparing the wine that you just drank with the wine that you're currently drinking now and enjoying more. You're referring not just to sensations that you're having in the present through your body. You're referring to sensations that you might say you've stored up in your mind, and you're comparing the two of them, which is a mental act, and that is indeed, as he says, more pleasurable. So he gives you some, you know, interesting discussion of that here. He says, the body can feel only what is present to it at the moment, whereas the mind is cognizant of the past and the future. And he gives you some interesting things to think about, some not quite case studies, let's call them general examples. He says, granting that pain of body is equally painful, our sensation of pain can be enormously increased by our belief that some evil of unlimited magnitude and duration threatens to befall us hereafter. So, you know, for example, you sprained your ankle and you know it that hurts.

but you get up, and you walk on it, and you're like, oh, this sucks, maybe I'll put an ace bandage around it to stabilize it, and then you realize that this is the 20th time you've sprained that ankle, and each time that you do it, it keeps getting worse, and you think to yourself about the fact that as you age, your ankles are gonna become weaker, and you imagine the pains that are likely to befall you should you keep twisting and spraining your ankle year after year after year. No, there's no requirement that you do this, of course, right, but this is what people, in fact, often do. They feel a pain, and then that leads them to thinking about other pains, pains that haven't even taken place yet or pains that are no longer there for their bodies but are still there for their mind, and that can be much more intense. He also says the same consideration may be transferred to pleasures. A pleasure is greater if not accompanied by any

apprehension of evil so you think to yourself about you know enjoying a pleasure at the moment, and the fact that you're going to keep on getting to enjoy it, and nothing bad is gonna happen to you as a result. That's very different than a stolen pleasure where you do something, and you're like, oh man, I hope I don't get caught. Alright, that hope I don't get caught is a mental pain, and it's diminishing the amount of pleasure involved. In that case, you could also use another example that he doesn't bring up here, similar to the pain one, where you would say, I'm enjoying this pleasure now, and this is just a foretaste of how good it's gonna be. Think about what is going on when you're infatuated with somebody, and you first kiss that, right, and then you could, you might not actually be thinking about much of anything, you couldn't be thinking about the kisses yet to come, and how great it's gonna be when you move to higher and higher levels within.

your relationship right, and that would be more intense pleasure you're anticipating a future. So, this is very important for the Epicureans. They also point out the fact that we have some degree of control, at least if we're normally functioning, over our anticipations or expectations - those are the future - and over our memories - that's the past, the things that we carry with us, were the things that we project ahead of us. We can manage them. And so, Torquatus just so he touches on this. He says, just as we're elated by the anticipation of good things, we're delighted by their recollection. This is the way that we can give ourselves greater mental pleasures. And he says, fools are tormented by the memory of former evils. Fools, imprudent people, people who don't have the virtue of wisdom, think about bad things that happen in the past that hurt them, that made them sad, that caused them fear, or that disturbed them in some other way. And in doing so, they're in a certain way reliving it, sometimes more vividly, you know if you.

think about people who struggle with deep-set trauma that they keep on going back to over and over and over again. Or people who got slighted by somebody. The person insulted them once and may have forgotten the insults or may not even have been cognizant of insulting them. And now suddenly they play it over in their mind the rest of the day. Those are mental pains and they don't actually have to be feeling those. So where Cuates goes on, he says wise people have the delight of renewing in grateful remembrance the blessings of the past. They can dwell on the things that were positive and some of this would have to do with how we choose to look at things, how we choose to distinguish between what was good and what was bad, or how we frame things to ourself. So a wise person might look at the same exchange in which some insult took place and overlook the insult and think about all the other pleasant parts of the exchange and not allow that to ruin their day. And when they do that, they are engaging in a

practice that produces mental pleasures for themselves. They went through exactly the same thing as the foolish person, but they look at it in a different way. They choose to use your mind differently, and they feel pleasure as a result. So he says, We have the power to both obliterate our misfortunes in an almost perpetual forgetfulness and to summon up pleasant and agreeable memories. When we fix our mental vision closely on events of the past, then sorrow or gladness ensues according as these were evil or good. So if we see ourselves starting to get affected by something in the past, the Epicureans would say if it's negative, forget about it. Don't think about that unless there's some sort of usefulness in thinking about that past case. Think about the pleasant things instead or think about something else, and you'll feel pleasure. Likewise, when we're anticipating what's ahead of us, we have choices about what we want to focus on, and the wise person realizes this and the fool doesn't. This is why Epicurus, as Torquatus tells us.

has this famous passage where he says living pleasantly. Living in such a way that gives you pleasures over pains requires that you live wisely, soppy, enter honorably, enesta, and justly. You step if you do not doing that then you won't actually enjoy a life of full pleasure and you will likely incur a lot of pain. If you're living imprudently, dishonorably, and unjustly, you are inevitably going to feel pains, and these are going to be mental pains. And he actually talks about in this place as the Epicureans were want to mental diseases. When we have a physical disease, a physical disease gives us pain in some way, you know, it could be something chronic, it could be something acute, but mental diseases also give us pain, and they lead to greater pain than most physical diseases do. Physical diseases are either going to get better or they're not, and after a while you become accustomed to it, but mental pains some and stick with us for years and years and years, so he tells us what are these.

mental pains. Here are some examples. He says a mind divided against itself and filled with inward discord, you know, disagreement with itself, a person who is perpetually swayed by conflicting and incompatible counsels and desires. So, this leads to things like desires for riches, fame, power, licentiousness, ease, also grief, trouble, and sorrow, which no art can consume it with anxiety. If men fail to realize the mind feel no pain unconnected with some pain of body presence or to come, and then what else? Death, the fear of death that people struggle with. He says superstition that poisons and destroys all peace of mind. These are all examples of what Torquatus is calling mental diseases, things that infect our minds and lead us to have, you could say, unproportional or contradictory relation to the vast array of pleasures that are out there or that we can store in here, and they subject us to pains instead. So, this distinction between mental and bodily pleasures is very important from an Epicurean point of view. They will give the priority most of

Cicero, on the Ends bk 1 | Mental and Bodily Pleasures | Philosophy Core Concepts

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Gregory B. Sadler

Understanding Epicurean Philosophy of Pleasure

Gregory Sadler is an experienced philosophy professor and the founder of Reason IO, focusing on making philosophical texts more accessible.

In his new series, he discusses the key concept of bodily and mental pleasures and pains in Epicurean philosophy, distinguishing them from other schools of hedonism.

The Epicureans, as materialists, believed that all existence is corporeal, connecting mental pleasures and pains to the body, despite establishing a distinction from bodily pleasures.

The Relationship Between Bodily and Mental Pleasure According to Epicurus

Tasting wine involves both bodily sensations and mental pleasures, as the mind is able to compare and appreciate different tastes.

Epicurus argues that mental pleasures, stemming from both past and future sensations, are often more intense than bodily pleasures.

He also discusses how the mind's awareness of past and future can intensify the sensation of pain, providing general examples to support his point.

The Impact of Anticipating and Recalling Pain and Pleasure

Repeatedly spraining an ankle can lead to greater future pain and weakness, according to Epicurean philosophy.

Anticipating pleasure without fear leads to a greater sense of enjoyment, while the recollection of past evils can torment fools.

Epicureans believe that managing anticipation and memories can lead to greater mental pleasures and that imprudent people are haunted by the memory of former evils.

The Power of Mental Perception in Creating Pleasure and Pain

People have the ability to choose how they perceive and frame past experiences, with the power to focus on the positive and generate mental pleasure.

Epicurus suggests that by shifting our mental focus from negative to pleasant things, we can experience pleasure instead of pain.

The wise person understands the importance of focusing on positive memories and experiences, as living wisely is key to enjoying a life of pleasure and minimizing mental pain.

The Impact of Mental Diseases on Pleasure According to Torquatus

Torquatus describes mental diseases as inward discord, leading to a contradictory relationship with pleasure.

These diseases include desires for wealth, fame, and power, as well as the fear of death and superstition.

The Epicureans prioritize mental pleasures, emphasizing the significant impact of mental well-being on overall happiness.