Today Seneca takes on the Epicureans. He says, "Even those very people [Epicureans] who declare the highest good to be in the belly, see what a dishonorable position they have assigned to it: and therefore they say that pleasure cannot be parted from virtue, and that no one can either live honorably without living cheerfully, nor yet live cheerfully without living honorably. I do not see how these very different matters can have any connection with one another. What is there, I pray you, to prevent virtue existing apart from pleasure?"
He will go on in the following days and show how separate virtue and pleasure are. But before we do, let's take a moment and understand what the Epicureans actually taught. They DID teach that pleasure is the highest good. But that didn't mean that we should eat to excess all the time, because that causes indigestion and was unpleasant. It didn't mean that we should drink wine and get drunk all the time, because hangovers are unpleasant and being a drunk can ruin you. They didn't go to orgies and engage in sexual adventures every day because they found that this makes the sexual act LESS pleasant, not more so.
The Epicureans were all about maximizing their pleasure - so they would abstain from food for awhile in order to enjoy it more later. They would be very selective in which wines to drink, and with whom they would enjoy sexual relationships so as to make those experiences the most pleasant possible. So we should realize they weren't licentious hedonists, but rather people who did all they could to make life as pleasurable as possible.
Seneca takes issue with this, though, and we'll see his arguments in coming days.
See you then!
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