De Finibus

by Cicero

Second Book

Chapter XIII

I now, following the authority of this man, will do the same as he has done; for, as far as I can, I will diminish the disputes, and will regard all their simple opinions in which there is no association of virtue, as judgments which ought to be utterly removed to a distance from philosophy. First of all, I will discard the principles of Aristippus, and of all the Cyrenaics,—men who were not afraid to place the chief good in that pleasure which especially excited the senses with its sweetness, disregarding that freedom from pain. These men did not perceive that, as a horse is born for galloping, and an ox for ploughing, and a dog for hunting, so man, also, is born for two objects, as Aristotle says, namely, for understanding and for acting as if he were a kind of mortal god. But, on the other hand, as a slow moving and languid sheep is born to feed, and to take pleasure in propagating his species, they fancied also that this divine animal was born for the same purposes; than which nothing can appear to me more absurd; and all this is in opposition to Aristippus, who considers that pleasure not only the highest, but also the only one, which all the rest of us consider as only one of the pleasures.

You, however, think differently; but he, as I have already said, is egregiously wrong,—for neither does the figure of the human body, nor the admirable reasoning powers of the human mind, intimate that man was born for no other end than the mere enjoyment of pleasure; nor must we listen to Hieronymus, whose chief good is the same which you sometimes, or, I might say, too often call so, namely, freedom from pain; for it does not follow, because pain is an evil, that to be free from that evil is sufficient for living well. Ennius speaks more correctly, when he says,—

The man who feels no evil, does
Enjoy too great a good.

Let us define a happy life as consisting, not in the repelling of evil, but in the acquisition of good; and let us seek to procure it, not by doing nothing, whether one is feeling pleasure,as Aristippus says, or feeling no pain, as Hieronymus insists, but by doing something, and giving our mind to thought. And all these same things may be said against that chief good which Carneades calls such; which he, however, brought forward, not so much for the purpose of proving his position, as of contradicting the Stoics, with whom he was at variance: and this good of his is such, that, when added to virtue, it appears likely to have some authority, and to be able to perfect a happy life in a most complete manner, and it is this that the whole of this present discussion is about; for they who add to virtue pleasure, which is the thing which above all others virtue thinks of small importance, or freedom from pain, which, even if it be a freedom from evil, is nevertheless not the chief good, make use of an addition which is not very easily recommended to men in general, and yet I do not understand why they do it in such a niggardly and restricted manner: for, as if they had to bring something to add to virtue, first of all they add things of the least possible value; afterwards they add things one by one, instead of uniting everything which nature had approved of as the highest goods, to pleasure. And as all these things appeared to Aristo and to Pyrrho absolutely of no consequence at all, so that they said that there was literally no difference whatever between being in a most perfect state of health, and in a most terrible condition of disease, people rightly enough have long ago given up arguing against them; for, while they insisted upon it that everything was comprised in virtue alone, to such a degree as to deprive it of all power of making any selection of external circumstances, and while they gave it nothing from which it could originate, or on which it could rely, they in reality destroyed virtue itself, which they were professing to embrace. But Herillus, who sought to refer everything to knowledge, saw, indeed, that there was one good, but what he saw was not the greatest possible good, nor such an one that life could be regulated by it; therefore, he also has been discarded a long time ago, for, indeed, there has been no one who has argued against him since Chrysippus.


Second Book, Chapter XIV


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