The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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160 THE STOIC CREED
better nor worse for being praised. "True
beauty
needs no addition, any more than law, or truth, or
kindness, or self-respect. For which of these can
praise beautify,
or censure mar? Is the emerald less
perfect for lacking praise? or is gold, or ivory, or
purple? a lyre or a poniard, a floweret or a shrub?"
(Aurelius, Med. iv. 20). l
still
Epicurean Hedonism
The Stoic doctrine of virtue as the ethical end will
further be elucidated, if we refer to the contrasting
doctrine of pleasure. To the Epicurean teaching of
pleasure as the summum bonum, the Stoics were in
entire and absolute opposition. They attacked it with
unwearied persistence, and with many arguments
the
most striking of which were drawn from the psychology
of pleasure and pain.
(i) In the first place, they objected to the term "
plea
sure
as being ambiguous. It refers properly, they
maintained, only to bodily pleasures, or, in addition, to
such secondary pleasures as can be traced ultimately to
the body as their source ;
but the Epicureans often gave
it a wider connotation, and thereby gained an illegitimate
plausibility for their doctrine. 2 (2) In the next place,
pleasure, even as applied to agreeable sensation, has
two meanings (a) the positive signification of a settled
state, and the (b) negative signification of mere absence
of pain ;
and these two are by no means the same thing.
(3) Again, if pleasure be the highest good, then pain
J
See also Cicero, De Ojficiis, i. 4.
2 Clearly this was an ignoratio elenchi. If you are to vanquish
an opponent in dialectics, you must meet him on his own ground.