 So I'll do very little by way of introduction to the Cyranaics. I'll point out some facts to you. Like here's Cyrene, where Aristipus and then other members of the school are from. It's in modern-day Libya. So this is a North African philosophy. Although Aristipus himself traveled up to Athens and was in a member of the Socatic Circle. And the first half of the writing, the first half of the Diogenes Lyricist's entry that I had you read simply consists of anecdotes about Aristipus's life and a list of his writings. As far as his philosophical views go, basically all the Diogenes Lyricist's reports to us is that he enjoyed the pleasure that he found in what was to hand and he didn't take any trouble for the sake of enjoying what was not to hand. And also later he says, he laid down is the end that is the goal of life, the purpose of life, the telos of life. He laid down the end as the smooth motion resulting in sensation, a very enigmatic and cryptic, almost arachnid phrase, which I will unpack in due course. But what he is associated with is what we call hedonism. Now the Greek word for pleasure or enjoyment is hedony. And so hedonism simply means pleasurism. It's a philosophy that says that the end or purpose of life is pleasure. So we should all be able to get on board with this philosophy. Now, epicureanism is also a philosophy that takes as its end or purpose, pleasure. But epicureanism has what it presents as a much more sophisticated form of hedonism and characterizes syranaic and Aristipan hedonism as being a kind of crude hedonism. Because this view literally seems to amount to the idea that stop worrying about what the overall purpose or end of life is, or happiness or success in some kind of conventional terms. The point of life is like sex, drugs, and rock and roll, basically, is to just have, just to enjoy yourself as much as possible. And to engage in particular pleasures, like sex with particular people, eating particularly good food, drinking particularly good wine, sleeping in particularly late. These are what life is about according to this philosophy. So one thing is we can see that it's vastly different than a view that says, no, life is about an ascetic, devoting yourself to cultivating virtue, even if that means walking around naked in the snow like dialogenies of Sennach does. According to this view, that's just absolute madness. The point of life is getting individual pleasures. If there is any point in cultivating these virtues, it's because they would allow you somehow to get more immediate pleasures. Now, let me just ask what you made of the anecdotes. One thing that's nice about this entry on dialogenies lyricist is that in addition to the anecdotes, it also goes into details about how the philosophy developed. And I think it's a very nice introduction to the kind of philosophizing that we're going to be getting very deep into later in this course. But let me ask what struck you about the anecdotes about Aristipus, if anything. Or obviously, if you have any questions about them. What did you make of it? Yeah. Yes. He says somebody asked him what he got out of doing philosophy. And he said, it enables me to talk to anyone cheerfully. So one thing is that it allows him to be cheerful when other people would be annoyed. Or bothered. Or bored. So Aristipus doesn't suffer from those problems when he talks to people. And somehow, philosophy has enabled him to do that. He can find something interesting whoever he's talking to by probing what their values are and that sort of thing. And basically, trying to convince them that those values are flawed and they should focus on a lot more immediate things. But as you can see, he's also a master of turning phrases and turning things around. But I quite like this definition of philosophy. There was a similar thing attributed to diogenes. I can't put my finger on exactly where it was. But it basically said that, sorry, it's in section 63 of the reading on Diogenes of Sinoff on being asked what he, diogenes had gained from philosophy, he replied, this at least, if nothing else, to be prepared for every fortune or every turn of fortune. So I'm ready for anything. And this is a quite different thing. I'm able to talk to anyone cheerfully. I'm able to remain in a good mood no matter who I'm talking to. So one thing is that that reflects his values, hedonism, pleasure. He can take pleasure in talking to anyone. And that's what he thinks is valuable about philosophy. Philosophy equips you to be able to discuss anything with anyone, any kind of specialization and any kind of science or whatever. Because every science and every other form of investigation is just some aspect of philosophy, some division of philosophy. And so if you study one of these particular divisions of philosophy, like physics or biology or logic or psychology, then you can basically only talk to other psychologists or physicists or biologists. But if you study philosophy itself, you can talk to any of those people or to other philosophers. You see, philosophy feeds into all of those disciplines and takes what is useful out of those disciplines for its own purposes. But they don't necessarily feed into philosophy. So that is an interesting one. And we should compare other things that other people say about the value of philosophy. Another thing he says that a couple of lines later asked what advantage philosophers had. If all laws were to be repealed, we would carry on living the same way. So philosophers live in a lawful way because they understand the reasons why those have been done and they live in accordance with those reasons, not because the law is set up that way. And thus if there weren't any laws, philosophers would live exactly the same way. So it's kind of an anarchist point that we shouldn't need laws because either laws make sense in which case what they are prescribing should be followed because they make sense or they don't make sense in which case they shouldn't be followed. Now there's a problem there because laws might be configured in such a way that you wouldn't want to carry on living in that way if there weren't such laws. And so I think that it's more making a general point about the fact that philosophy gives you access to the reasons why good laws are how they are. OK, other things about this? Yeah? Well, my scholar assignment is on Saturday night. Good. And there seems to be a very large debate on whether Aristipus actually existed as a philosopher or if it was just literary construction. Do you think there's any merit in the theory? I don't know. I am not familiar with the arguments that say he didn't exist at all. So I'd like to hear some more about this. We have a lot of testimony that he was a pupil of Socrates. We have various people talking about interacting with him in addition to Socrates, like Diogenes and so forth. But and then we have a list of his writings. But you may have noticed in the list of his writings we actually have several lists. And every time Diogenes Laertius gives one of those lists, he says, but other people say he wrote nothing. And the names of some of the works seem to just be synthetic fabrications out of the anecdotes. So supposedly he wrote a work called Against Those Who Blame Him for His Love of Prostitutes and Old Wind. And that seems to relate to these anecdotes that shows him justifying his indulgence in prostitutes and fine wine and things like that. And so a lot of this does have a literary quality of a constructed character. And of course, this drawing, we have no idea what he looked like in all such of these drawings are completely fictitious and made up long after the fact. So there is ample room for doubt about any of this. So any one of these anecdotes, no one would want to stake their career on claiming that actually happened or he actually said that. So to my mind, it's likely that there was a person, Aristipus, and he did have students and he did inspire this school. But these anecdotes could have come out of his own writings or about legends about him that were then written up. And so we can't say that they are true. But again, I'm not familiar with the reason for doubt that he himself existed. There are other philosophers for which there is evidence that they supposedly didn't exist. So Epicurus denied that there was ever a philosopher named Lucipus that existed. But other sources tell us Lucipus was the teacher of Democritus. So there we actually have ancient evidence that says, no, this person is probably a literary construction. Does what kind of reasons were given in the book or have you been able to get into those? Well, there are a lot of reasons. There appears to be, it seems to be a more recent shift, where a lot of philosophers are going towards the view that he didn't exist simply because, well, mostly because of the ancient sources. They all seem very inconsistent with each other when it comes to Aristipus and in terms of his philosophy. Right. Well, and there really aren't that many sources. I mean, Dariusius Leriusus is one of the main ones. And even he only basically attributes these two statements definitely to him. But it's a bit like Peronian skepticism. Pirro wrote nothing, but he was a strong character that had a big influence on other people. And he was then later chosen as the sort of emblem of a certain skeptical school because of the fact that he would suspend judgment on everything and wouldn't come and try to live without having beliefs at all. And that figure was taken as the figurehead of a school that investigated the reasons why people shouldn't hold beliefs and how knowledge is impossible and that sort of thing. And so Aristipus, to my mind, I've always thought of him as having been this charismatic, kind of funny figure that was around, one of the less serious members of the Socratic circle. And then a later hedonistic school that rose up in the Hellenistic period and people whose names we have later are probably the ones who did all of the writing and worked out what the actual views are. And then they chose Aristipus as their figurehead. But we have a name. We have a place that he's from. We have some dates that he existed. We have testimony of other people saying he existed. So his existence is basically as well attested as anyone else that we've been talking about. But that's an interesting point. Yeah? So I was just wondering, going on that, do you think these anecdotes are made up by Daugini's laitress to bring out the philosophy of the person or to introduce other people? Daugini's laitress doesn't actually make up much stuff himself. He has these other sources of other biographers. And then he just basically copies out what they said. And so there are inconsistencies, because he's not trying to make the sources consistent. He's just revealing what other people have said about them. So I don't think these anecdotes are due to Daugini's laitress. But I do think that they are due to other Hellenistic biographers. And Hellenistic biographers are the least trustworthy people in the history of philosophy. So as I said, biographers is not actually a very accurate name. So they're not writing a biography like taking the facts of somebody's life and then telling us what it's about. As you say, what they're doing is constructing, and this might support the case that was just mentioned, constructing a literary figure on the basis of a set of ideas. So we know he was committed to pleasure. We know that he thought nothing else mattered besides pleasure. And then so we make up these anecdotes about things of what somebody would act like who was totally devoted to pleasure in that way. But on the other hand, why say that it was Aristipus and why say that the guy was from Cyrene and why say he was a member of the Socratic circle? I mean, all of those things don't actually make much sense. Why would a follower of Socrates have those views? So it seems like if you were trying to make up a story about a hedonistic figure, there's a lot of details here that aren't explained if it's just a literary construction. OK, yes? Sorry, in section 93, it says, there's nothing that's just honorable on the basis of nature but only by convention. So does he have an idea of whether it's natural good or not? So yes, he does. He does have a view. What does he think is naturally good? Pleasure. Pleasure. And he has a view about what's naturally bad. Pain. OK, but justice, honor, virtue, all of those things are conventional. OK, so in ancient Greece, there was this idea about honor, and it was this crucial thing that you had to have honor, and you had to be an honorable person. There's very specific standards of honor. Nobody cares about that anymore. No one cares about honor anymore. OK, and they had ideas about justice, but their ideas about justice are a lot different than ours are now. So those aren't, whereas pain probably felt exactly the same. Like tearing off somebody's fingernails had the same effect in ancient Greece as it does nowadays. OK, but what was considered honorable, or being of a good birth, or being eloquent, all of those things, they say, are just conventional. So therefore, those things ought not to be taken to be the end, as diogenes of synop and the cynics and the stoics and even Socrates have it. Those things are just conventional things that are made up. They're culturally relative. OK, so people in China have a different concept of what's honorable than they do in Mexico. But again, pleasure and pain is the same wherever you go. And so if we're really wondering about what the end of human nature is, and being a human in the natural sense, then it's not going to be something like that that conventionally can change in different times in different places and things like that. It's going to be something tied to our nature, and it's the same wherever you go. OK, so they certainly did hold such a view. Now, there were other hands. Yeah? I just wanted to say that for this reading, I thought it was pretty interesting how it highlights what Eresid is, right? Yeah, Eresid is. His relationship with Dionysius, I assume, is like a wealthy patient. How this contrasts with some of the previous readings where the philosophers are kind of depicted as almost strictly academic or hermetic figures. And I just wanted to ask, is this generally the role that philosophers would kind of assume in ancient Greece where they, in society today, where they sought out as generally advisors or tutors, and is that how they sustained them? Yeah, it's a complicated and somewhat touchy subject, actually, going through the whole history of philosophy. So let's start with Dionysius, who was actually not just a patron of philosophy, but he was a prince and a tyrant in Sicily. But he took on philosophers. He gave philosophers money, and he took them on as advisors. And he was one of the first people to do this. And he seems to have thought, OK, I'll get these philosophical ideas, and this will help me expand my power. And one philosopher that he took on was Plato. And so Plato's association with Dionysius is the first model of this idea of philosopher advising a king. And it didn't go well. So it went so badly that Dionysius ended up throwing Plato in prison, and he had to be ransomed later. And ransomed by Anna Saras, according to this account. But he was also archivist of Tarentum and other people were involved. So that didn't go well. So you would have thought philosophers learned their lesson and stopped trying to advise princes and kings. But Plato's pupil, Aristotle, when he was offered the job of tutoring Alexander, Alexander the small, he wasn't yet the great when Aristotle was tutoring him, then he took on that job. And arguably it didn't go so well. And Seneca, who we're going to be reading later, was the right-hand man and advisor to Nero. Nero, the guy who played the fiddle while Rome burned and so forth. So that one didn't go very well. And you can keep doing this and looking at these instances, and you get down to high digger in the Nazis and so forth. Philosophers advising kings. And a lot of it goes back to this idea in Plato that there's not going to be any rest to human ills unless either philosophers become the kings or kings become philosophers. And in order for that to happen, then kings need to be tutored by philosophers. They need to be advised by philosophers and so forth. Now Aristotle seems to have thought that the actual kings shouldn't themselves be philosophers. They should just have philosopher advisors. And that seems like Aristotle's model is that they give them advice. They play the Steve Bannon to Donald Trump kind of role. The ideas of people versus the ones that actually implement it. So a lot of these anecdotes about Aristipus interacting with Dionysus contrast with the way that Plato did. And it always seems like Aristipus has the upper hand in these conversations always turning things around with Dionysus. Whereas it didn't go so well for Plato. But that's because Aristipus is willing to do things like he has no problem taking money for teaching. So he'll show up and he'll disguise rich. And so he'll take his money. And that'll allow me to keep doing my philosophical activity. Plato and Socrates and people like that had an ethical problem with taking money for teaching. Thought it was a corrupting influence on how you would teach. But since Aristipus throws that stuff away, then he's more nimble in how he deals with Dionysus. And he'll also stand for more abuse coming from Dionysus and things like that. But yes, it is an interesting episode. And that particular figure is very important in the history of philosophy because of Plato's involvement with him as well. Yeah. Like for all of the Socrates were kind of like smart or like witty and all these anecdotes they're kind of like firing comebacks of people and stuff like that. Well, they portray them as doing, but that's basically because Hellenistic biographers, that's how they wrote and that's how they sold these books and so forth. And nobody wants to read about stuff that isn't funny and that doesn't really encapsulate their philosophy. But long technical discourses on logic like the kind of Chrysippus wrote and so forth, we'd be way happier if those that survived and Dionysus and Laertes had disappeared. But the fact about how book production worked in antiquity means this is what has been left and these other works of science and philosophy technical works were not copied. And so that's why we depend on this in order to present these influential figures because we don't actually have works that they wrote. Now, did I miss another question over here? Yeah. So, whatever, Arisippus was he considered like a heanist before he went to Athens and joined the Socratic Circle or would he say that he was influenced by just being around Socrates and that's what formed his new opinion of pleasure. He seems to have been influenced by Socrates to do philosophy and so working out a philosophical position and so forth may have been due to his interaction. So he may not have thought much about this before he ran into Socrates and then started thinking about it. Now, how close do his views conform to Socrates? In the one hand you might think they totally contradict Socrates. They say that virtue for example is just something conventional and not in accordance with nature whereas Socrates presumably thought that virtue was the end of human nature, virtue is identical with knowledge, knowledge is good, virtue is good, et cetera. So it looks like he came away with a very different set of views. On the other hand, there are even Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is depicted as embracing a kind of hedonistic position and actually arguing in favor of virtues on the basis of them giving you more pleasure and more enjoyment. So whereas pleasure and kind of hedonistic philosophy is attacked in the Gorgias and scrutinized in the Philebus in the Protagoras. These are names of dialogues by Plato. There is a kind of defense of a hedonistic position. So it's possible that Aristopuses could have heard about the position through those discussions and then ran with it and developed a whole philosophy based on pleasure. Now I think Dionysius Laertius mentions this but Xenophon, remember Xenophon wrote this memoirs of Socrates where he uses Socrates as a puppet to represent his own philosophical views to some extent, a lot like Plato does. And Xenophon gives us a depiction of Socrates having a conversation with Aristipus where he sets him straight about pleasure and Aristipus is refuted. Aristipus is defending a hedonistic viewpoint and Socrates refutes it and overthrows him. Okay, so that's an example of a piece of evidence that a theory that said Aristipus never existed would have to account for is the fact that Xenophon also depicts him as a really existing person. Again, that could have been a literary construction but could you really get all of these different authors to cooperate in creating a fictional thing and then there not being ancient evidence that it was fictional. But so hedonism is actually a modern term, okay? So it's not like he was a hedonist and then he showed up to this school and started defending hedonistic ideas. He started defending, he started hearing about views that say the point of life is this or that and he rejected those apparently saying no, the point of life is pleasure. Okay, so it probably arose in a dialectical context of disputing what really is the end. So let me tell you a little bit more about their views on pleasure and pain. For one thing, pleasure and pain might not be the best translation for what we're talking about because it really isn't necessarily just like, if your foot hurts that kind of pain or if you're drinking water and you're thirsty, that kind of pleasure, what they're talking about seems to include that but it actually seems to be a sort of all things considered state. Like are you feeling on balance pleasant right now or are you feeling grief and distress? Okay, so presumably you're feeling grief and distress as you're sitting in a classroom on a beautiful Friday afternoon and not feeling pleasure but you'll be able to go have lunch later or drink later or whatever and then you'll be feeling pleasure and then you'll be living in accordance with this but it's the overall feeling you have. So clearly it's possible to drink when you're thirsty and get pleasure, seem to get pleasure from that even if you're in grief or something but if you're in grief then you're not really experiencing this state that they call pleasure and if you are experiencing this state called pleasure then that excludes the other one. So it's a general state and it doesn't differ in quality or quantity. You don't have more pleasure or less pleasure, you're just either in this pleasant state or in this painful state and they have a sort of reductive definition of pleasure as being a smooth motion that results in sensation as opposed to pain which is a rough motion which relates, which results in a sensation. They argue that pleasure is agreeable and pain is repellent to all living things, all animals, all infants, all humans. This is a part of not just human nature but animal nature and from our youth up we're instinctively attracted to pleasure so you don't really need that sophisticated of an argument to show that pleasure is a good thing and pleasure is what we pursue. And when we're in this pleasant state we don't try to get any more, we don't need any more, we've already got it and when we don't have it we do everything we can to get back into that state and we shun nothing so much as being removed from that state of basically feeling good, having a good feeling, feeling enjoyment, feeling joy. Okay, so there's Aristipus' definition of the end and this idea about smooth motion seems to relate to a kind of materialist theory about how pleasure is produced in the human body and by analogy to certain things, like if you have a smooth feeling on your skin that's generally pleasant whereas if you have a rough feeling that's unpleasant or painful. It feels smooth when you're drinking water when you're thirsty whereas it feels rough in your throat when you're really thirsty and you're not being relieved by that. Yeah. I'll come to this. So they have some very specific doctrines about mental pleasures. So first of all, if you see people avoiding bodily pleasures they say that's due to some kind of mental disturbance. They do acknowledge the existence of mental pleasures and pains and they do not necessarily have them tied to bodily ones. So there is a philosophical issue about whether the definition of pleasure as a smooth motion resulting in sensation can account for these kind of mental pleasures where they say for example, you could have enjoyment in the prosperity of your country and that be just as enjoyable as your own prosperity although that's not actually moving anything in your body. Although they may have some view of the soul that there is some kind of movement within the soul that's a smooth motion when those mental things are being enjoyed as opposed to a rough motion. They hold that mental affections can be known like I can know whether I'm enjoying this thing or not but I can't ultimately know anything about the objects of those because I can't access things in themselves. I can only access the perceptions and sensations I have of them. They also claim that pleasure cannot be derived from memory of pleasure. This is one of the greatest, most unfortunate things about our existence. If we could only experience pleasure by remembering past pleasures we had, it'd be great. Or even expecting pleasures like once you get out of this hellish classroom and you meet up with your boyfriend or whatever it'll be a lot more pleasant for you but unfortunately you don't get pleasure out of that mere anticipation or expectation. And the movement that causes pleasure is exhausted in time and can't be recovered. You need to have further encounters with objects like drink and food and sex and music and things like that in order to get those pleasures back. But yet it is not due to sight or hearing alone. So for example, we can watch a movie, Game of Thrones or something that shows people being tortured and killed in a miserable fashion and yet get enjoyment out of that. So it's not merely the spectacle or what we're hearing. The reality of those things is actually painful but we can somehow get enjoyment out of it which shows that there is a mental dimension to this pleasure. But bodily pleasures they hold to be far better and far more vivid than mental pleasures and bodily pains far more vivid and immediate and concerning than mental pains. Yeah, so is pleasure and pain a perception of the smooth or rough motion or is it the motion itself? It's the sensation arising from the smooth motion. Okay, so that's how I'm presuming we account for this mental pleasure that in cases where we have mental pleasure there's actually some kind of smooth motion in the psyche, the brain or the heart or wherever the cognition is happening that produces this sensation. And the fact that bodily pleasures and pains are more important than their mental counterparts is like why we punish offenders with bodily pain and corporal punishment, why that's the effective way to do it. If you're trying to train a child by inflicting, it's a lot easier if you inflict pain on them than if you try to convince them or try to even inflict mental pain. And so they think that generally we're more justified focusing on the body than the mind. We should really be working on how to bring ourselves more bodily pleasure and less bodily pain and not worry as much about these mental things. Now, pleasure in itself is desirable and is always good. In other words, if it feels good, do it is basically the philosophy. But sometimes in order to get certain feelings of pleasure, we have to undertake painful things. Like in order to have the pleasure of sex, you need to undergo the pain of, you know, buying your girlfriend a Valentine's present or something like that. And it actually gets a lot more complicated than that. And so to figure out how to get these particular pleasures so as to produce what they call happiness is a really difficult, and they say, irksome task. So this is a crucial point that we need to go back to is what they say about happiness because this is the one and only philosophical school in ancient Greece with the possible exception of Peronian skeptics that we'll talk about next week, but that denies that the overall purpose of life can be characterized as being happiness or success, eudaimonia. All other schools, no matter what they hold that eudaimonia to consist in, agree at least on that platitudinous term. Yes, we all wanna be successful. The question is what is success? Is it virtue? Is it pleasure? Is it wealth? Is it health? There's big debates about what constitutes that, but basically everybody agrees that we want some general idea of success. These people reject that. They say, no, the actual end is just these immediate pleasures that we can experience. And happiness is just the total of those. However many of those you can get minus the amount of pain that you have. But you want happiness just because it means that you are in a more pleasant state. You don't want the pleasant state because it'll produce some general condition of happiness or success, like these philosophers say. You want happiness because it means it feels good. It's not that you wanna feel good so that you can become happier, successful according to some philosophical theory. So, and furthermore, they do not, as we'll see the Epicureans do, identify pleasure with the mere absence of pain or the absence of pleasure with pain. They think there's an intermediate state like sleep where you're not experiencing pleasure or you're not experiencing pain. It's neither here nor there. And that is not the end, mere removal of pain. Like that wouldn't be good enough to drive you in life to, if I said, well, I can make sure that you won't have any more pain in life. You won't have any pleasure, but you won't have any more pain. That wouldn't do it for a serenade. They want to make sure you can actually have a smooth motion resulting in a sensation that is to be experiencing pleasure. Okay, now there are, there are lots of other, we can specify things. And by the way, I have now uploaded all of the slides including these ones from today that have a lot of details we haven't been able to go over. And I've given some detailed breakdowns of modifications of serenade views by Theodorus, Anacerus, and Hagacius. And I want to end by mentioning some things about Hagacius, because in a way he's the most radical and perhaps influential of all of these figures. So for one thing, he holds that everything, all human motivations are essentially self-interested. And we, for example, we engage in friendships because they're enjoyable. And when they're no longer enjoyable to us then we break off those friendships and form other ones. And all beneficence, all gratitude, all of that is done for our own pleasure. Pleasure is exactly what motivates us. And, but Hagacius actually held that happiness is impossible. It's not just not our end, but it's not actually a concept that makes any sense because our body is affected with too many pains. These especially grow as we get older and these pains also result in mental anguish and frustration that increasingly block happiness as we get older. And he points out that wealth, poverty, even slavery, freedom, nobility, honor, all of that is irrelevant to pleasure, which is clear because any member of either of those opposites can experience pleasure or pain. So poor people can easily experience pleasure and wealthy people can just as clearly experience pain. So none of those is actually relevant. Now, Cicero claims that he wrote a book called Death by Starvation. And he was a teacher and his students were so convinced by his arguments that they went and killed themselves. And so he got the name the death persuader because he explained why you should all go kill yourselves, right, and making arguments like, well, it would be good if when you walked out of this door you got hit by a car and died. Better than that is if you had been able to die early, like at a very young age. Best of all, never being born at all, never having to deal with this miserable existence, which there's only the only recompense for it is small little pleasures that you may get to enjoy here and there. So actually, he's one of the first philosophers to have their academic freedom infringed on because since his students were all killing themselves, they actually banned him from teaching and said you can't teach this stuff anymore. It's having a bad effect. Now, why was, so, I mean, this is really interesting because it's like the gloomy aspect of hedonism. Okay, so think about this. If you really believe that the end or purpose of life is just a series, however many you can get of temporary, essentially bodily pleasures, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and you recognize, which you might not because you're all very young, but when you become an elderly person like me, this becomes increasingly apparent to you that you can't sustain having these pleasures very often. The more often you do, you get hangovers, you get addiction, you get venereal disease, you get your own health starts to fail, your body starts to fail, and this becomes more and more, this becomes worse and worse as you age, and of course it happens to everyone. Everyone dies in the end and everybody's body becomes corrupted. So if you both recognize that set of facts about the inevitable increasing misery of life and the view that the only end in life is to be able to experience temporary pleasures, then you might become convinced that it makes sense to kill yourself before you get too much pain. Now, in fact, theories justifying or policies justifying euthanasia, letting people end their lives, who are, have terminal illnesses or not even terminal illnesses, but have experienced too much chronic pain and say that they would prefer to end their lives. And maybe we should throw back at them, what are you, an erasthep and a hedonist? You wanna kill yourself just because of that? Why don't you sign up to the Stoic School and realize that pleasure is irrelevant to whether you should live or not. You should only be pursuing virtues and so forth.