A Smooth Contentment

On the Future Causes of Pleasures

This is the final entry of a three-part essay series on past, present, and future causes of pleasures.

In the first essay of this series, we studied a quote by Diogenes of Oenoanda that claimed that the cause of present pleasures can be in the future. This reminds me of some kind of covenant, agreement, or method of soliloquy, diary, or conversation with our future selves (for example, through ongoing and periodic revisiting our future goals, so as to systematically ensure that they are achieved step-by-step). This can take the form of New Year’s (or other) resolutions, of oaths, or simply weekly or monthly methods of following up with oneself and others in order to ensure that some meaningful or transcendental project will come to its completion sometime in the future. And yet,

We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come … It is better, in short, that what is well judged in action should not owe its successful issue to the aid of chance. - Letter to Menoeceus

The Light Cone Parable

Although we are only partially in control of our fate and our future, we should diligently steer them to the extent that it is practical to do so. But how should we feel about the future? When I asked some friends whether this passage in LM calls for indifference towards the future, our friend Jason said:

Are you familiar with light cones in physics?

In the context of having confident expectations of future pleasures, the further out in time one tries to predict, the hazier the prediction becomes because the chance of particle interactions we could not account for increases. Wherever that cone is pointed is where possibility exists. Outside of it, particle interactions are impossible. Instead of despairing when confidence decreases, we can anticipate that we pointed our lantern in a wholesome direction given how we have traveled already.

If it turns out we have unknown blind spots, we have cultivated a disposition of resilience and flexibility to accommodate new developments, thus fortune presents no difficulty especially when we have cultivated an Epicurean lifestyle full of reliable friends who can hopefully illuminate our blind spots with their own lanterns. I do not see this as indifference but contentment because of our anticipation of preparedness.

A Smooth Contentment

While we are on the road, we must try to make what is before us better than what is past; when we come to the road's end, we feel a smooth contentment. - Vatican Saying 48

This adage reminds us that we are to a great extent in charge of our future and, if practiced, gives hope that we can move from ignorance and confusion to wisdom, from fragmented and chaotic minds to psychic unity, from any form of danger to the stability of security, from trauma to health, from destitution to wealth, or perhaps it opens up the possibility of reconciliation with dangerous enemies so that we feel safer. It invites us to procure whatever important component of happiness is lacking in our lives today so that we enjoy not only the immediate and necessary pleasures but also—as Metrodorus instructs—we enjoy confidence in our future ability to procure them. This is why, the more I think of future causes of pleasures, the more this looks like planning and working on projects. While Diogenes cites a good fame after death as a future cause of pleasure, I think this preparedness and safety is much more stable as a source of pleasure.

We can think of instances where we reconcile with dangerous enemies that lurk nearby in order to procure a state of security for ourselves and our families in our communities. Or where we employ the tool of education in order to procure higher financial security in the future. Or where we are able to procure a great legacy for our inheritors, and this gives us pride and pleasure. Or where we systematically overcome and heal from some debilitating trauma or memory by re-habituation and building new experiences and patterns of thinking about our triggers.

In all these case studies, there seems to be the attitudinal requirement of a will to progress. The faculty of volition—the dynamic power that tries again and again, persistently, until it succeeds—must be recruited here. There must be an inner motion. It’s hard to conceive of the successful achievement of these paradigm shifts without the proactive participation of the patient who suffers from danger, trauma, fear, or other perturbations that act as signs by which we find opportunities for personal growth.

We can think of these as favors we do to our future self. We must be diligent and active in making plans for the future, while keeping in mind the correct attitude. Since we are not in full control of the future, we must be adaptable. The first ethicist of pleasure, Aristippus, was willing to put less faith in his ability to control what happens in the future than in his ability to adapt to it. 

Kyriai Doxai on Applying Reason to Time

While PD 3 refers to pleasures in the present, other Principal Doctrines refer to the past and future pleasures:

If every pleasure were condensed and were present at the same time and in the whole of one's nature or its primary parts, then the pleasures would never differ from one another. - Kyria Doxa 9

KD 9 recognizes that pleasures are not all condensed “at the same time” and indicates that there are ways to draw pleasure here and now from times outside of the present. This is one of the ways in which Epicurus challenges the previous proponents of pleasure-ethics in the Cyrenaic school, who taught that only active (kinetic) and present pleasures are valid, and who rejected the importance of the mental pleasures that we find affirmed in PD 20. In this way, Epicurus greatly awakened and expanded the pleasure potential in his disciples’ souls by proposing that we may engage in a practice of remembering past pleasures and anticipating future ones.

Chance steals only a bit into the life of a wise person: for throughout the complete span of his life the greatest and most important matters have been, are, and will be directed by the power of reason. - Kyria Doxa 16

By referring to the past, present, and future as being ruled by reason, Doctrine 16 accentuates the durational superiority (and greater dependability) of reason over chance. In KD 16 we find a rejection of fate, determinism, oracles, and other such beliefs and practices, together with the idea that we must apply the faculty of reason (logismos) to things that “have been, are, and will be”. This is related to our practice of KD 9, which also requires us to apply reason (and hedonic calculus) to how we think about to time, but how do we do that?

Aristippus of Cirene says that we only truly experience the present. Both the past and the future are not available for direct experience, but we can reason about them, nurture feelings about them, or imagine them here and now in the present. We must not avoid reasoning about them (this would result in avoidant behavior, which might cover up some perturbations and opportunities for self-overcoming related to the past and future). Instead, we must think correctly concerning the future and the past in order to cultivate a pleasant disposition. 

Finite time and infinite time contain the same amount of joy, if its limits are measured out through reasoning (λογισμῷ, logismo). - Principal Doctrine 19

Among the Epicureans, reason is demoted in the service of pleasure, but we see that reason nonetheless does have an important role in the disciplines of desire, in hedonic calculus, and as part of the soul-healing technologies. Reason helps us to reject the mindset that wants immortality and believes that time is scarce, and to instead be grateful and profit from the time we do have.

The Inner Motion

Let us consider the alternative to what Epicurus is teaching. If we, instead of actively steering our path to future pleasures, merely accept the role of being passive recipients of whatever befalls us, we will in all likelihood not live a life that is blissful (makarion) by whatever definition we use. Our boat will be unanchored, at the mercy of the tides and storms at sea. Left to the whims of fate, we may be sometimes able to live privileged or good lives, sometimes lives of great misery, and most often mediocre lives. These are all risks that we take when we fail to practice philosophy.

Based on what we’ve studied here, if rather than swerving in the direction of choice-worthy pleasures we consider all of our pleasures as externally caused (whether by a god, or by fate, or by others), we are squandering the redemptive potential of our nature-given dynamic willpower and reason. There must be an inner motion, a choice, an internal cause of our future pleasures.

The application of these powers allows us to have a defiant attitude towards fortune, and also to earn praise and evade blame through our diligent actions. In his Epistle to Menoeceus, Epicurus says:

The wise man laughs at fate, which is asserted by some to be the master of all things. For he holds that we are responsible for what we achieve, even though some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some by our own power, because although necessity is not accountable, he sees that chance is unstable whereas the things that are within our power have no other master, so that naturally praise and blame are inseparably connected to them.

In one of the Vatican Sayings, Metrodorus says he has “anticipated” fortune, and is prepared against it. Even if necessity and chance cause some of our conditions, Epicurus makes sure to remind us that some things happen by our own power and agency, and part of his ethical education involves understanding what this power entails. The bottom line is that the most important matters, the things that make life worth living, should not be left in the hands of fate. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, the Kathegemones’ practical teachings inspire us to set goals, to aim for some noble and blissful (makarion) quality of life, and to create lives worth living. They encourage the application of personal agency and autarchy in their disciples, arguing that we attach praise and blame to that which is under our control.

Norman DeWitt (author of Epicurus and his Philosophy, and of Saint Paul and Epicurus) evaluated these sayings and concluded that, just as other philosophers say that the unexamined life is not worth living, the Epicureans say:

“The unplanned life is not worth living”.