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MANAGING MENTAL PAIN: EPICURUS VS. ARISTIPPUS on the PRE-REHEARSAL of FUTURE ILLS in This Paper I Will Expose a Difficulty Which

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MANAGING MENTAL PAIN: EPICURUS VS. ARISTIPPUS on the PRE-REHEARSAL of FUTURE ILLS in This Paper I Will Expose a Difficulty Which MANAGING MENTAL PAIN: EPICURUS VS. ARISTIPPUS ON THE PRE-REHEARSAL OF FUTURE ILLS MARGARET GRAVER In this paper I will expose a difficulty which arises when certain ancient schools attempt to devise a therapy or prophylactic technique for dealing with mental pain, and will show how this problem is differently addressed by Epicurus and by the Cyrenaic hedonists associated, correctly or not, with Socrates' friend Aristippus.1 By mental pain I mean, and take these philosophers to mean, a sen­ sation which is not only intrinsically unpleasant but is also essentially concerned with some intentional object. Philoctetes with his gangrenous foot and Niobe weeping for her slain children both experience something which Greek speakers call AV7T7J, but Niobe's pain is specifically a pain that her children have died. Remove that content from it, and her feeling can no longer be the particular feeling that it is. Moreover, in that a proposition may carry a tense marker, it is at least conceivable that one might experience mental pain in relation to some circumstance regarded as likely for the future or as long in the past. A prescient or reminiscent Niobe could conceivably be distressed to think that her children will die soon, or to remember their past deaths, and while opinions may vary as to the extent and severity of the prospective or retrospective feelings any real Niobe can have, even the conceived possibility of such feelings sets the mental experience apart from the corporeal. A foot does not ache that it will be injured; it does not ache that anything at all. The propositional content of distress or mental pain means that the manage­ ment of it will be theorized in a different way from that of corporeal pain. Pain of body will normally be addressed by application to the body, by bandages and ointments, by analgesic medications if one has them to give. Mental or psycho­ logical pain, being concerned with belief, may be addressed through belief, by various kinds of arguments-though such address may or may not be successful. No doubt one could remove Niobe's pain altogether, if one could convince her 1 The Cyrenaic "school" is held together by personal connections and by hedonist ori­ entation; it may never have been formally a school. The chronology of the school and the relation of its reported doctrines to Aristippus the Elder have been the subject of a long and to my mind rather sterile debate. For various accounts see Gosling and Taylor 1982, 40-43; Doring 1988; Laks 1993; Annas 1993, 227-36; Tsouna 1994; Brunschwig 1999; Long 1999. Those inclined to credit Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14.18.31-32 (Giannantoni IV 8.5g) may assume that "Aristippus" in this paper refers to the younger rather than the elder homonym. I may be allowed to point out, however, that if Aristippus the Younger was really "Mother-taught," then at least some of his views should presumably be as­ cribed either to his grandfather or to his mother Arete. 156 MARGARET GRAVER that what she saw was only a dream, or some elaborate acting job-that her fourteen children have not really died all in one day. Failing that happy reversal, one might still affect the mother's feelings b¥ modifying the belief-content of her grief in some other way, or by altering the manner in which she holds the characteristic belief. A Stoic or Platonist might seek to convince Niobe that al­ though her children have indeed died, no evil has transpired which is of a kind or severity to justify her extreme reaction. This last, however, is a case which a hedonist will find it much more difficult to make. Briefly put, the problem is this. In a hedonist system, it is fundamental to as­ sume that determinations about how to live should depend on a thoughtful con­ sultation of one's own feelings: the things we ought to pursue are those things that are productive of pleasure, and the things we ought to avoid are those that bring pain. This means that both pleasure and pain are treated as genuinely in­ formative: they give us information about what things are valuable or disvalu­ able for us, and we have to accept that information. We may accept it advisedly: as intelligent beings, we will often opt to skip some immediate pleasures or take on some immediate pains in order to get greater pleasures or avoid greater pains later on. But the feelings themselves, whenever they occur, must still be taken for reliable indicators of value. That both pleasure and pain (the mi()T/) are epis­ temologically basic in this sense is acknowledged by Epicurus when he lists them in his work on epistemology as one criterion of truth.2 Cyrenaic thought is even more deeply committed to this thesis, since it admits only the ml.err (in this case inner awareness in general) as foundations of knowledge. No Cyrenaic philosopher could have denied criteria! status to pleasure and pain.3 An especially wary hedonist would perhaps try to restrict the criteria! function to corporeal feelings, making delight and distress of mind somehow parasitic upon bodily experience and denying that these can ever be legitimate guides for action. But the general tenor of both the Epicurean and the Cyrenaic system is against their having taken such a hard line on mental feelings.4 Both are cen- 2 KD 24, Ep. Hdt. 37, 82, D.L. 10.31-32.; discussion in Asmis 1984; Long and Sedley 1987, vol. 1, 90; see further note 37 below. 3 The texts include Eusebius, PE 14.18.31-32; Plutarch, Adv. Col. 1120cd; Sextus Empiricus, PH 1.215); AM 7.191. ITci87) in these contexts refers to a wide range of sensa­ tions, sensations like whiteness or sweetness as well those of pleasure and pain. For a concise treatment of the issues see Brunschwig 1999; more detail in Tsouna 1998. 4 Epicurus's position is difficult here. On the one hand, he does claim that mental pleasure is somehow grounded in pleasure of body (Cic., Tusc. 3.41-42, Ath. 12.546f); on the other, his account of the blessed life, e.g. at Ep. Men 128, prominently includes free­ dom of disturbance in the mind alongside freedom of pain in the body, implying that the former is not reducible to the latter at least for the ordinary purposes of guiding action. The Cyrenaics deny flatly that mental pleasure is grounded in the body; see, besides D.L. 2.89, Clement, Strom. 2.21.130.7-8 (Giannantoni IV G4) on Anniceris, with discussion in Laks 1993. The report of Panaetius quoted by D.L. at 2.87 is sometimes taken to mean that for the earlier Cyrenaics mental pleasure is not included in the telos. But Panaetius' .
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