Monday, June 25, 2012

Why knowing things is good

I’ve been thinking about some uplifting Epicurean sayings about pleasure and philosophy [1].
Here’s the first, Vatican Saying 27:
Ἐπὶ μὲν τῶν ἄλλων ἐπιτηδευμάτων μόλις τελειωθεῖσιν ὁ καρπὸς ἔρχεται, ἐπὶ δὲ φιλοσοφίας συντρέχει τῇ γνώσει τὸ τερπνόν· οὐ γὰρ μετὰ μάθησιν ἀπόλαυσις, ἀλλὰ ἅμα μάθησις καὶ ἀπόλαυσις. 
Bailey translates:
‘In all other occupations the fruit comes painfully after completion, but in philosophy pleasure goes hand in hand with knowledge; for enjoyment does not come after comprehension, but comprehension and enjoyment are simultaneous.’ 
Compare Diogenes of Oinoanda fr. 33.VI.11–VII.10 Smith for the idea that the pleasure and the cause of the pleasure can be simultaneous: we do not eat and then afterwards experience pleasure because of eating nor do we ejaculate and then later experience pleasure because of that [2]. In these cases what causes the pleasure and the pleasure itself are simultaneous.

This Saying is mostly concerned with pointing out that knowledge and pleasure come about simultaneously (at the moment I come to know something I simultaneously enjoy knowing that something). Knowing is just all by itself something pleasant. I don’t need to wait for that knowledge to be useful or to lead to some later pleasure; it’s pleasant all by itself and the pleasure occurs as soon as something is known. So, like the Diogenes of Oinoanda fragment, it might well be aimed at dispelling the idea that the Epicureans think that knowledge—like virtue—is good only in a crude way because of some later pleasure that it might produce. Instead, they want to say that knowledge is good because it is pleasant immediately and all by itself. The chronological claim is perhaps best understood as a claim about the nature of the value of knowledge. Knowledge is intrinsically pleasant and therefore valuable; knowledge does not have to wait to cause some later pleasure for it to be valuable.

The Epicureans clearly feel some pressure to recognise a value of knowledge that is not merely contingent on its producing some later pleasure while still holding firm to their hedonist axiology. Perhaps the idea is this: It is not pleasant to know some trigonometry just because it will allow me later on to build a house efficiently and live in a secure and water-tight dwelling. Yes, it will do that. But knowing that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to etc. etc. is just pleasant all by itself. Or, if we want a more specific example of some Epicurean ‘philosophy’, perhaps it is not pleasant to know that lightning is not caused by divine anger just because that will allow me to live a life free from superstitious anxieties. Yes, it will do that. But knowing that lightning is caused thus-and-so is just pleasant all by itself. (Compare Ep. Hdt. 78–9 and Ep. Pyth. 86 which also stress the necessity of a sufficient knowledge of such things for living a good life.)

It is still the case that the value of knowledge lies in its being pleasant, of course, but its pleasantness is intrinsic and inseperable. The Saying does not say whether it continues to be pleasant to know something. A lot would depend on the precise meaning of gnōsis and mathēsis. For example: if the latter means ‘learning’ in the sense of the event of coming to know something, then it will not follow that just because this is all by itself pleasant just when it happens, it will continue to be pleasant to have learned something. But the sense of the event of coming to know something makes best sense of the claim there need be no time-lag between the mathēsis and the pleasure. (This is not a common word in Epicurus. Nor is the cognate verb common. But compare SV 74: ‘In philosophical shared inquiry the one who is beaten gains more according to how much more he learns [prosemathen].’) The former, however, gnōsis, is more likely to mean an on-going state of knowing or understanding. (See, for example, its use in Ep. Hdt. 78–9). (It’s a familiar problem with ancient philosophical claims for the pleasantness of knowing that it is sometimes unclear whether they mean that it is pleasant to come-to-know or to continue-to-know, or both. And the reasons for making either claim or both claims might have to be different.)

[1] I’ve been thinking a bit about Epicureanism again lately because Pamela Gordon very kindly sent me a copy of her new book, The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus (Ann Arbor, 2012): very interesting it is too.


[2] For a recent discussion see D. N. Sedley, ‘Diogenes of Oenoanda on Cyrenaic hedonism’, PCPS 48 (2002), 159–74

2 comments:

Steffen said...

Thanks for this post. I have a few comments:

1) I'm not too happy with Bailey's translation.
"...the fruit comes painfully after completion..." for μόλις τελειωθεῖσιν ὁ καρπὸς ἔρχεται doesn't seem right. The adverb modifies the participle, not the main verb. Also, I'm not sure "painfully" is right (unless there is a special Epicurean use of this word). I suppose part of the meaning here is something like "with great effort", but I also have a feeling that there is a temporal or aspectual meaning at play emphasizing the duration of the action ("finally", "eventually"). I guess part of the reason for this impression is the shift between ἔρχεται and συντρέχει, which is another (semi-important?) feature not captured in Bailey's translation.

A possible parallel for this meaning of μόλις/μόγις is perhaps to be found at the opening of Book 6 of the Republic:
Οἱ μὲν δὴ φιλόσοφοι, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ὦ Γλαύκων, καὶ οἱ μὴ διὰ μακροῦ τινος διεξελθόντες λόγου μόγις πως ἀνεφάνησαν
οἵ εἰσιν ἑκάτεροι.
Ἴσως γάρ, ἔφη, διὰ βραχέος οὐ ῥᾴδιον.

2) Your reading of the Saying sounds very plausible. I'm curious about one thing, though. Your way of phrasing the point of the Saying is in terms of intrinsicality, contingency, and so on. However, the Saying appears to have a very strong focus on (non-)simultaneity. Why is that? I mean, given you're right about what the point is, why does the author focus so strongly on temporal sequence? Making a rather crude distinction, do you think the reasons are literary or philosophical?


3) You distinguish between two senses of μάθησις ("come-to-know" and continue-to-know") and take the former to be the relevant sense in this context. I'm inclined to think that's right, but could it mean both? I mean, what if the second sense involves activating previously acquired knowledge?

I'm not sure how plausible this is, but the reason I'm thinking along these lines is that I've recently come across a passage in Book 7 of the Republic where it seems that μάθησις has *both* the senses you note (I guess one could say that Glaucon is employing the first sense, while Socrates is making use of the second, but I'm not sure that's wholly satisfactory, especially given the emphasis on process (as well as product) in the lines preceding Glaucon's response).
Here is the passage (537b-c):

Μετὰ δὴ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, ἐκ τῶν εἰκοσιετῶν οἱ προκριθέντες τιμάς τε μείζους τῶν ἄλλων οἴσονται, τά τε χύδην μαθήματα παισὶν ἐν τῇ παιδείᾳ γενόμενα τούτοις συνακτέον εἰς σύνοψιν οἰκειότητός τε ἀλλήλων τῶν μαθημάτων καὶ τῆς τοῦ ὄντος φύσεως.
Μόνη γοῦν, εἶπεν, ἡ τοιαύτη μάθησις βέβαιος, ἐν οἷς ἂν
ἐγγένηται.
Καὶ μεγίστη γε, ἦν δ’ ἐγώ, πεῖρα διαλεκτικῆς φύσεως καὶ μή· ὁ μὲν γὰρ συνοπτικὸς διαλεκτικός, ὁ δὲ μὴ οὔ.
Συνοίομαι, ἦ δ’ ὅς.


Only a few thoughts.

Thanks for a great blog!

Steffen.

James Warren said...

Thanks.

1. I agree with you on μόλις/μόγις; 'eventually' is better. Having anything here that connotes pain just muddies the water.

2. I also agree that the temporal point is a little odd. After all, the Diog. Oin. fragment shows that the Epicureans were happy to identify cases of 'X causes Y' where Y is some pleasure and in which X is earlier than Y, or simultaneous with Y or even later than Y. The best I could come up with is the idea that the pleasantness of knowledge is immediate. I don't think they have clearly and explicitly sorted out different ways in which we might talk about something (here knowledge) being good because it causes pleasure. I think they want to say that knowledge is not merely instrumentally good/pleasant or perhaps that knowledge does not happen only sometimes to be good/pleasant. Unfortunately this is put in chronological terms but I take it that the idea is, as I said, that knowledge is 'all by itself' pleasant. You don't have to wait for it to turn out later to be of use, nor do you have to wait a while to take pleasure in some knowledge.

3. Yes, it is possible to think about activating previously acquired knowledge as μάθησις. Most radically, in some moods Plato will claim that all learning is that activation of previously acquired knowledge. And less radically we might think of 'bringing to mind' as a sort of (re-)learning too. All the same, one might demand some explanation why that kind of re-activation of previously acquired knowledge should always be pleasant. It does not necessarily follow that just because it is pleasant to come to know something for the very first time, for the very same reasons it is also pleasant to come to think again of that thing a little later. Plato, I think, has a bit of an issue with this in part because of some odd psychological and epistemological views but also because he tends to think of all pleasant experiences as kinds of fulfilments of lacks. Initial learning might plausibly be thought of in this way; it is less plausible to think of bringing something again to mind in this way too.

But thanks again.