From Vol. 1, Issue 10, October 2019
Use pleasure but don’t indulge in it
Key ideas
- The mind thinks of many vicious forms of pleasure: arrogance, excessive self-regard, boastful superiority, insulting others, and laziness.
- Virtue makes all this disappear.
- You become cheerful not because of excessive pleasure, but by a moderate enjoyment of it.
The pleasant life is also a virtuous one
The challenger says:
You deliberately distort what I say because I also say that no one can live pleasantly unless they also live honorably. This cannot be the case with dumb animals which measure their happiness by their food. I loudly and publicly say that what I call a pleasant life cannot exist without virtue.
Vice is full of enjoyments
Yet, who doesn’t know that the greatest fools drink the deepest of pleasures? Or that vice is full of enjoyments; or that the mind suggests to itself many perverted and vicious forms of pleasure: arrogance, excessive self-regard, boastful superiority over others, a short-sighted – no, a blind – devotion to your own interests, overindulgent luxury, excessive delight from trivial and childish things, talkativeness, taking pride in insulting others, sluggishness, and the drowsy and dull mind that goes to sleep?
Use pleasure but don’t indulge in it
Virtue makes all this disappear. She plucks you by the ear, evaluates the value of pleasures before you can use them. Even when she allows their use, she attaches little importance to them. Her cheerfulness is not due to pleasure, but its moderate use. When moderation lessens pleasure, it damages your highest good [and therefore,]:
You devote yourself to pleasures, I check them.
You indulge in pleasure. I use it.
You think it is the highest good. I don’t even think it’s good.
You do everything for the sake of pleasure. I do nothing for its sake.
Think about this
No one can live pleasantly unless they also live honorably. This cannot be the case with dumb animals which measure their happiness by their food. I loudly and publicly say that what I call a pleasant life cannot exist without virtue.
Disclosure
THE STOIC online magazine is distributed free to subscribers of the Stoic Gym. (Third party vendors may charge a fee.) The costs associated with it are 100% underwritten by the publisher, The Stoic Gym, and the personal resources of the Editor, Dr. Chuck Chakrapani. The Stoic Gym neither solicits nor accepts donations. The expenses incurred are mostly subsidized by the revenues associated with the sale of books. Affiliate Links: Amazon links in this magazine are affiliate links. If you purchase anything from Amazon using these links, you will not pay any more but The Stoic Gym will receive a small commission, which will partially contribute to the cost of producing THE STOIC.
In the TENTH chapter of his discourse ON THE HAPPY LIFE, Seneca tells us that, to be happy, we should stop pursuing pleasure, but 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.
Books
The Stoic Gym publishes books on Stoicism and Plain English modern versions of the ancient Stoic writings. You can get the following books free right now.
The Stoic Magazine
THE STOIC is a free full-color online monthly magazine. It is free four our subscribers.