Welcome! April 2, 2008
Posted by Don in Pleasure.trackback
Welcome to Smooth Motions, a discussion group for Monte Johnson’s and Don Rutherford’s seminar Epicureanism, Ancient and Modern (aka UCSD Phil 285, Spring 2008). The goal is to keep the conversation going outside of class–to follow up on topics we have started to talk about and to raise others that strike you as worth talking about. Anything is fair game, from technical points about texts and translations to whether Epicureanism can be defended as a “way of living.”
The title of the blog refers to Aristippus’ definition of pleasure as “smooth motion [leia kinesis] yielding a sensation” (Diog. Laert. 2.85). Monte will be able to tell us whether Epicurus himself ever uses exactly this phrase to refer to “kinetic” (or moving) pleasures. I know only of the famous excerpt from his lost book On the end, cited by Cicero at Tusc. Disp. 3.41: “For my part I cannot conceive of anything as the good if I remove the pleasures perceived by means of taste and sex and listening to music, and the pleasant motions [suaves motiones] felt by the eyes through beautiful sights, or any other pleasures which some sensation generates in a man as a whole. Certainly it is impossible to say that mental delight is the only good.” (L&S 21L)
This passage raises a significant problem for Epicurus’ account of the end in the Letter to Menoeceus as the absence of bodily pain and freedom from disturbance (131), but I am here raising only the small point of whether his definition of kinetic pleasure is distinct from that of Aristippus, or whether a case can be made that suavis should be translated as “smooth” (rather than “pleasant” or “agreeable”)?
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Regarding the question whether Epicurus himself uses exactly this phrase I cannot say, although it is clear to me that he would consider “smooth motion yielding a sensation” to be a paradigm of so-called kinetic pleasure. Consider the following fragment: “You tell me that the stimulus (ki/nhsin) of the flesh (kata sarka) makes you too prone to the pleasures of love. Provided that you do not break the laws or good customs and do not distress any of your neighbors or do harm to your body or squander your pittance, you may indulge your inclination as you please. Yet it is impossible not to come up against one or other of these barriers: for the pleasures of love never profited a man and he is lucky if they do him no harm” (Fragment LI, ed. and tr. Bailey, Epicurus: the Extant Remains).