Key ideas of this chapter 

1. Wise people enjoy pleasures of life, but they don’t get excited about them. But they are not unhappy when pleasure is taken away from them. 
2. By connecting virtue with pleasure, it is easy to believe that you are being virtuous when you are carried away by pleasure. 
3. Even Epicurus did not advise his followers to be unconstrained. 
4. The wise enjoy pleasures without getting excited about them 

Conflicting thoughts create anxiety 

Our challenger replies (We may assume here that the challenger is someone from the Epicurean school of philosophy): 

They are ill at ease because many things happen to distract their thoughts. They are anxious because of conflicting opinions. 

This is true. Still these very same people, even though foolish, inconsistent, and certain to feel remorse, indulge in great pleasures all the same. When they do this, they are as far from feeling any trouble as they are from forming a right judgment. Often, they are crazy happy and laugh when they rave. 

The pleasures of wise people, on the other hand, are mild and well-mannered. It may almost look dull, kept under control and scarcely noticeable. They don’t invite pleasure, nor do they honour it when it comes on its own. They don’t welcome it with delight but mix it up with their lives and fill up empty spaces with it. It is like having amusing farces in the intervals of serious business. 

The unwise use philosophy as cover 

Let them not join incompatible things together or connect pleasure with virtue, a mistake which leads them to court the worst people. The reckless spendthrift, always drinking and belching out fumes of wine, believes he lives with virtue. He knows he lives with pleasure, and he hears others say that pleasures cannot live apart from virtue. As a result, he dubs his vices with a little wisdom and parades things he should hide. 

Even Epicurus taught pleasure with moderation 

Epicurus does not encourage people to go berserk, but the vicious hide their excess in principles of philosophy and go to schools that praise pleasure. They do not consider how sober and temperate (as I gather from Hercules) that “pleasure” of Epicurus is. They rush at the mere mention of his name and seek to get some protection and cover for their vices. In doing so, they lose the one virtue that their evil life possessed—being ashamed of doing wrong. Instead, they praise what they used to blush at, and boast of their vices. They can never be modest as they dignify shameful idleness with an honourable name. Your school lavishes praise upon pleasure. The reason it hurts is that the honourable parts of its teaching are ignored, and the degrading part is seen by all. [Although the “challenger” or “adversary” is not identified in Seneca’s dialogues, it would appear from this and the next dialogue that the challenger belongs to the Epicurean school.] 

Think about this 

Epicurus does not encourage people to go berserk, but the vicious hide their excess in principles of philosophy and go to schools that praise pleasure. 

---

In the TWELFTH chapter of his discourse On The Happy Life, Seneca tells us that, to be happy, we should stop pursuing pleasure, and instead pursue virtue. This is an excerpt from Stoic Happiness, a plain English version of Seneca’s On the Happy Life, published by The Stoic Gym. https://amzn.to/2I0mbVW

---