Episode 350 - Addressing A Listener Question On Flux and Real Life

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Welcome to Episode 350 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and helps us understand Epicurus’ position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 15 of Book Two.

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Summary

Prompted by a detailed forum comment from listener Patrikios, Cassius and Joshua pause their line-by-line reading of Cicero’s Academic Questions to address why the seemingly abstract dispute over knowledge and flux actually matters for how to live. Cassius connects Patrikios’s point — that constant atomic or quantum motion is the mechanism of reality rather than a fog obscuring it — to Diogenes of Oenoanda’s inscription answering Heraclitus, and to Epicurus’s insistence that logic and reason stay tethered to the evidence of the senses rather than speculating about what a supernatural designer could or couldn’t do. Joshua contrasts two literary responses to a changing, senses-only world: Keats’s “Lamia,” mourning a universe stripped of enchantment by “cold philosophy,” against Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, where the desert’s clarity (claritas, integritas, consonantia — borrowed from Aquinas by way of Umberto Eco and Denis McNamara on sacred architecture) is presented not as a doorway to another, ideal realm but as vivid, sense-based reality in its own right. Returning to Cicero, Joshua reads Lucullus’s account of the skeptics’ Sorites (“heap”) argument — that granting one small, probable step forces you, grain by grain, to grant there’s no difference between true and false perceptions at all — and the hosts argue that no incremental chain of “why not one more” can by itself establish or disprove anything; only some independent standard of proof, applied practically (as with a legal blood-alcohol limit), lets you actually draw a line and act. The episode closes with Lucullus’s own reply to the skeptics that inconsistency, not perception, is the real problem, and Cassius’s reminder that Epicurus is never interested in a life of suspended judgment.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 350 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

I want to start today’s episode by thanking one of our listeners, Patrikios, who gave us a very specific comment on our recent podcasts on Academic Questions. We’ll put the full post from Patrikios in the notes for today, but the essential point Patrikios is emphasizing is that it is in fact our goal to make Epicurean philosophy relevant and applicable to the way we live our ordinary lives. Especially when we’re debating some relatively abstract questions such as the nature of knowledge, that goal can seem to slip away at times, or it can be difficult to understand how these abstract notions of knowledge really do affect our day-to-day lives. So before we get started and move further into Section 16 today, I’d like to take a few minutes to address what Patrikios has brought up.

He specifically referenced the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription, where Diogenes erected in the town square a stone monument for passers-by to read — people who obviously, being passers-by, were probably not professional philosophers. And yet he included on his monument a section discussing the issue we’re mentioning here today, referencing that there are philosophers out there — Aristotle, or others; Heraclitus is probably more distinguished for this position — who emphasized that there’s a flux in things, and that it is therefore difficult, or impossible if you’re Heraclitus, to step into the same river twice, or to really understand what’s going on around you because of the constant change. Diogenes of Oenoanda emphasized that Epicurus held that, yes, there is a flux, because the atoms are constantly in motion, but that the flux is not so fast and so confusing that we are unable to understand the reality that’s important to us. That observation is behind much of what we’re talking about in Academic Questions and how Epicurus responded to the skeptical objections Cicero is discussing in these chapters we’re going through now.

Patrikios points out that physics itself has been in a kind of state of flux for many generations, from Newtonian physics to today’s quantum mechanics and so forth. But nevertheless, it’s still important for us to be able to have confidence in the decisions we make, and not let either the speculations of religion or some esoteric type of science that we ourselves don’t understand shake our confidence in our ability to live successfully. As Patrikios put it, the flux of the quantum fields is not a chaotic blur that prevents us from knowing reality — it’s the very mechanism of reality. And Patrikios continues: wasn’t Diogenes reminding us that we must not let the complexity of the underlying motion, whether it be the ancient flux or modern quantum indeterminacy, blind us to the reality that we experience? We should assemble, acknowledge, and understand the truth of our lives — the reality of pleasure, pain, and friendship — even if the underlying atomic or quantum structure is in constant swerving motion. I think Patrikios has hit the nail on the head with that final point, because that’s ultimately where we’re going.

In Epicurean philosophy, it is essential that we take a position and understand the nature of the universe. The big distinction Epicurus made that separated him from the other Greek philosophers is that he held the universe to be natural and to operate naturally, through the motion of atoms through the void, without the directing hand of a designer or a supernatural guide or a supernatural creator of any kind — nothing outside or beyond or above the universe to give it order. The things we see happen on their own because of the nature of the atoms moving through the void, and not because of some external force superimposing order on top of what we observe around us. That’s the fundamental Epicurean approach to reality, and it leads directly to the fundamental Epicurean approach to knowledge: that there is, in fact, nothing beyond the universe we live in. There is no source of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, objective truth in the hands of some god, or in the hands of some ideal form that is the real reference point, the true world that supposedly exists beyond this one. There really is only this world, as it is revealed to us, as we understand it through the information the senses and the anticipations and feelings give us.

That’s the point we come back to over and over again: Epicurus is not going to give in to the idea that the senses are insufficient to give us the evidence we need to understand the universe. Yes, logic and reason play a role, because we must use logic and reason to even understand that the atoms exist and that the atoms move through the void, since we cannot touch or see the atoms directly. So absolutely, Epicurus uses logic and reason in understanding the nature of the universe. But he is never going to allow logic and reason to get out beyond its expertise and its ability, which is constrained by the evidence of the senses. If there is no evidence from the senses which we can use to infer a rational understanding of the universe, then Epicurus is not going to speculate against the evidence we do have. He is not going to say, “well, maybe there is a supernatural God who can do anything, and if this supernatural God can do anything, then X, Y, Z” — and all the other speculative conclusions that logicians tend to dream up to try to mesmerize people who aren’t able to follow the logic of what’s actually going on.

And therefore, Epicurus is never going to give in to the idea that our world is not real. He’s not going to admit that this world is nothing but an illusion, nothing but a veil of tears that passes by so quickly we can never really understand what’s going on. Epicurus is going to insist that we take the evidence available to us and understand that this is our reality. And if somebody wants to speculate about illusions and things beyond this, nature is not going to stop them from doing that — nature will allow people to dream and imagine all sorts of ideal forms and all sorts of omnipotent gods and forces. The imagination is capable of imagining things, but the imagination cannot produce reality. The imagination humans have is itself part of reality. Epicurus is constantly calling us to what Lucretius says at the beginning of his poem: that there are limits and boundaries, deep-set boundary stones that we cannot transcend, that we have to understand we live in this universe, and the rules that we might like to have, or that we might want to dictate onto the universe — as the Stoics like to try to do — those don’t exist. It’s a fantasy, not part of reality. We are going to live successfully, if at all, within our own reality, not against reality or outside of it. So as Patrikios is saying, the flux is part of the universe, and our understanding of it is, in fact, the very mechanism of reality itself.

Now, one more thing before I turn this over to Joshua. As Patrikios has brought up, it’s not just the argument from religion that speculates there is a designer or a supernatural force — you also have people in certain fields who will argue, as Aristotle, to some extent, was talking about in terms of his view of the flux, that science tells us this flux is there and is impenetrable to our level of understanding. That the complexity — Patrikios used that word, an excellent word to use — of the underlying motion is beyond our ability to understand. And therefore, since we cannot understand the underlying complexity, that makes it impossible for us to understand anything. And we are left in a totally arbitrary position, with absolutely every opinion as valid as any other opinion. And when that becomes the case, then, as Lucullus and the Stoics have been warning us throughout our reading of Cicero, you can no longer make affirmative, strong decisions about the way you want to live your life. If all opinions are valid, then basically no opinion is better than any other for the success of your life.

So ultimately, when we start out talking about physics, we end up straight in the middle of ethical decisions. As Joshua has mentioned in the past, simply observing science tells us what is — but in the end, we have to decide how we want to live our lives, we have to pick goals for ourselves. Nature presents pleasure to us as what every infant of every species knows should be pursued. But as we grow older and our minds develop, we have to continue to understand that pleasure, properly understood — as everything that’s desirable in our lives — is in fact worth pursuing. It makes no sense for us to mesmerize ourselves into such a level of confusion that we no longer can take the position that anything in our lives is good or bad, worth pursuing or not, because it’s all just a matter of opinion, a matter of such flux that we cannot make any sense of it. If we’re going to live happily, if we’re going to follow pleasure, avoid pain, and pursue the things Patrikios is mentioning — friendship, and all the other things that are desirable in life — then we have to use our minds to understand that we are part of this constantly moving and changing universe, and that within our role in the universe we have the ability to affect what our future is going to be. If we want a future in which we experience more pleasure than pain, we have to take certain actions, take certain positions, understand certain things that will allow us to achieve that goal.

One more comment before I turn it over to Joshua. Sometimes, in the middle of discussing all this abstraction, I’m sure there are listeners who would say, why in the world do I need all this detail? I understand I want to be happy — it’s a given to me that pleasure is a good thing. Why do I care about all these arguments back and forth? Here’s an example: if you were raised on a farm, getting up with the chickens, watching the dogs and cats and animals go through the natural cycle of birth and death and change and pleasure and pain, connected with nature and never confronted with some of these arguments Cicero is presenting in Academic Questions, then you probably don’t need the level of detail we’re going into. But the reality of the world most of us live in is that education, science, knowledge — of which the artificial intelligence revolution is just the latest aspect of change — make it essential that we have a basic grasp of what’s going on around us and of the things that are going to affect our lives. If you’re living on a subsistence farm in the middle of nowhere in Australia, again, you probably don’t need all this. But most people in most industrialized and educated areas of the world do come into contact with these arguments we’re talking about. They don’t always come wrapped in Stoic dress; they don’t come delivered by Cicero or some Roman or Greek from two thousand years ago. But the argument that it is impossible to really understand what’s going on, that everything is so complicated and so difficult to understand that we should just throw up our hands and stop trying — that argument comes at us in so many different ways, from so many different directions, but it is essentially the same argument we’re talking about here in Academic Questions. What is our reality? Are we capable of dealing with it? And how and why is this important for us to understand?

If Cicero and Epicurus and Aristotle and Plato and these guys two thousand years ago — who we like to look down on and say, “you didn’t understand anything, our science is so advanced today, you’re just grasping in the dark, guys” — if they thought these issues were important, even in their relatively simpler world, it is even more important for us, in a much more complicated world today, to have a basic understanding of how to approach these problems. So, okay, I’ve gone on longer than I expected, and I’ve probably talked about too many different things, but thank you, Patrikios, for your comments on the forum about these recent episodes. Now let me turn it over to Joshua for his commentary.

Joshua:

Cassius, I think you’ve handled more or less this question of flux that was presented. What I want to talk a little bit about is the parting shot across the bow that comes from idealism as its influence and control begin to fade, as they have pretty significantly in the world we live in. I find a reflection of this in the poem “Lamia” by John Keats, one of the preeminent English poets of any age, but certainly of the Romantic period. The Romantic period was interested in restoring an idealist view as opposed to the cold materialist view that had come to be influential because naturalism and materialism were so influential in the development of science. In this poem, Keats is somewhat plaintive about the idealist view of things retreating and falling back while the naturalist view makes great progress. He uses the phrase “cold philosophy” — I think what he’s talking about is natural philosophy specifically, really what we would call science:

“Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”

This line about unweaving a rainbow follows from a dinner party in 1817 that Keats attended, also attended by the English essayist and poet Charles Lamb. Lamb had made a comment at this dinner party that Isaac Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors.

As we go into Academic Questions, we’re reading from the idealist point of view to some extent, even among the Stoics — reading a text that dates from a period when that view was nearly all-encompassing, and when Epicureanism was one of the few small bulwarks against this overwhelming, near-unanimous view among philosophers and the educated classes of these ancient societies. For some reason, the author I always think of when I’m thinking about the idealist view of things is Edward Abbey, in his book Desert Solitaire, because he’s got some truly great passages offering a response to this overwhelming view — so prevalent in the ancient world and still prevalent in our own time, though not having anything like the authority or popularity it once had.

At one point in his book, Abbey is waxing poetic about the desert and comes to the subject of dehydration:

“Dehydration. The desert air sucks moisture from every pore. I take a drink from the canvas water bag dangling near my head, the water cooled by evaporation. Noontime here is like a drug. The light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. To me the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting; I feel no temptation to sleep or to relax into occult dreams but rather an opposite effect which sharpens and heightens vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. Each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity that is undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm. Claritas, integritas, veritas. Only the sunlight holds things together. Noon is the crucial hour: the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence.”

Here is a point of view not interested in the poetry of the rainbow, or in whether Newton’s science had pulled apart the threads of the rainbow by explaining how it works — there is a clarity here, susceptible to the senses, that does not depend on metaphor or our knowledge of geometry or the ideal forms in order to understand something.

Abbey’s reference to claritas, integritas, and veritas comes from Thomas Aquinas, apparently, who said beautiful things possess these three qualities. Integritas refers to completeness and perfection — nothing essential is lacking, nothing extraneous is present. Cassius, you probably already see where I’m going with this, because we’re going to be talking about the Sorites syllogism today, and questions of completeness, perfection, and essentiality are very important to that question. Claritas, the third element, is the power of an object to reveal its ontological reality. I’m reading from a website called sacredarchitecture.org, in case anyone wants to follow up — the article continues, quoting Umberto Eco, who describes it as “the fundamental communicability of form which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing the object. The rationality that belongs to every form is the light which manifests itself to aesthetic seeing.”

Now, the third word in Abbey’s prose is veritas, but Aquinas didn’t actually use veritas, or truth, in his triptych — the word he used was consonantia, proportionality: the view that the dimensions of an object should suitably correspond to other physical objects as well as to a metaphysical ideal or end. The same “On Art and Aesthetics” site has another article quoting Dr. Denis McNamara, of the Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Illinois: “Integritas, claritas, and consonantia prove critical in building a church because, as a theological and sacramental revelation of the new heaven and new earth, a beautiful church will provide a fullness of theological ideas, being complete not only in all of its functional parts, but also in its sacred imagery. Moreover, these parts will be proportional to their nature, showing not merely an earthly meeting hall but an icon of a glorified reality, conventionally understood in architecture through sophistication of design, rich materials, and high levels of craft to be worthy of a church. This worthiness and glorification is made knowable to the mind of the viewer, for whom the church building impresses into his or her mind the signs and symbols of heavenly realities. This participation in the liturgy is the aim to be considered before all else, specifically because by perceiving heavenly realities in earthly matter, we have the opportunity to become heavenly ourselves, and we are suited to live happily with God for eternity.”

Now, when Abbey says each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm — claritas, integritas, veritas — he is not saying that the objects in the desert, the stones, the juniper tree, the heavy air at noonday, convey the ideal of another world, a world like heaven or the realm of pure being that we’re supposed to aspire to. He is using these words ironically, to suggest that the clarity associated with each stone or plant or grain of sand — and again, we’re coming back to the Sorites syllogism — appeals to the senses and provides information about this world. It is not about looking for another world. He does not think there is another world, and he does not project his own desires for another world, if he had any, onto the desert. The desert, he says, reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence.

So we’re presented with two alternative visions: the vision of John Keats and Charles Lamb, that science has undone all the poetry of the rainbow, and the vision of Edward Abbey standing in the desert at high noon, dehydrated, feeling a drug-like effect in his mind — but as he looks at the objects around him, seeing them with such clarity, the effect, whether it’s the dehydration or the light of noon or all of it together, has been to sharpen and heighten his senses. So keep that image in mind — each grain of sand existing in and for itself with a clarity undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm — as we go into the Sorites syllogism and start talking about grains of sand, not with any view from the idealists that they exist in and for themselves without reference to a different realm. That’s the key difference between these two images.

It really comes down to the individual to determine where they fall on this. When Heraclitus talks about the flux, about not being able to step into the same river twice, he’s not just talking about a river — the river is a metaphor for the entire world of sense perception. Hold any object in your hand, and even while you’re holding it, both you and the object are undergoing continuous change, from the underlying atomic structure to the temperature of the thing to the light and color playing across its surface. It’s not the same object it was a nanosecond ago, and it’ll be a different object again a nanosecond from now, and that’s true for everything. It’s not just that you can’t step in the same river twice — you can’t pick up the same object twice, sit in the same chair twice, work at the same table or workbench twice, get into the same car twice. All of these things are changing constantly, and the problem we’re going to get into with the Sorites syllogism is that any demarcation, any boundary we set between grains and a heap, is going to prove to be arbitrary. It’s not that if we think about it hard enough, or apply ourselves with great dedication, we’re going to find the exact moment at which it starts being a heap and the exact moment it stops being a heap. And if the boundaries we put in place with the Sorites syllogism are arbitrary, how much more arbitrary are the boundaries we put in place with these constantly and multifariously changing objects in the realm of our perception? With the Sorites syllogism we’re talking about incremental change — the addition or subtraction of one unit at a time — and that’s the only kind of change involved. With the objects exposed to our faculty of perception, the change isn’t incremental, it’s constant, continuous, fluid, ongoing, and there’s not just one kind of change but many different kinds coming together all at once.

I’m recording this on a cell phone at the moment, which will no doubt horrify some of our listeners, but what I don’t see in the room I’m sitting in are the wireless signals we use to communicate with each other every day. And I don’t know if radon gas exists in this room — it’s very common in the town I grew up in and still live in. There are things I’m surrounded by that aren’t available to my perception; they’re available to the perception of tools I can put to use to discover them, but these things too have an effect on the objects in my environment, along with temperature and radiation — all these kinds of changes coming together to transform objects that appear so solid and stable as we look at them. But these objects really are just like the river, or so Heraclitus thinks — that they too are changing constantly, continuously, fluidly, like the river.

I remember reading that when the British Museum closed during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the lack of human exhalation in the building was enough to drop the humidity to such an extreme low that it became a real problem for the protection of ancient artifacts — this imperceptible, very slight change in humidity, just from human breath in the building. Take that away because of the lockdowns, and you get this unintended side effect where suddenly the museum wasn’t equipped to handle what was lost, and they were watching the objects around them fall apart.

Now, with all of these great problems in philosophy, I think you have to decide for yourself how you’re going to live, what choices you’re going to make, and what you’re going to rely on. I don’t think, for example, that I could prove that we have free will, but I nevertheless live as if we do, because I can’t think of any other way to live. I can’t prove that the realm of pure being, the realm of the ideal forms, doesn’t exist, but I have to go by the evidence available to me in drawing conclusions. And yes, absence of evidence is not in itself evidence of absence, but I nevertheless have to come down to a workable, livable principle or decision to guide me through life. And the decision I’ve reached is that I’m not going to put my faith in the idea that there’s a realm of pure being out there, that the ideal forms are the pure, perfect, unchanging response to the world of sense perception, the world of the river you can’t step into twice. Relying more or less on the evidence of my senses, I’m able, I think, to come to at least a surface-level understanding of how things work, and I have access to the world of institutional research to supplement that knowledge. So while I certainly acknowledge the change happening all around me, I don’t feel I have to abandon hope of clarity — claritas, you might say — in understanding the world I live in. And I don’t feel I have to throw myself at the feet of the nearest Catholic theologian, or the nearest oracle, or the nearest idealist, or, for that matter, the nearest Stoic sage, in the hopes of finally getting some relief from the building pressure of confusion about the world we live in.

Cassius:

Joshua, some of the things you said about not being able to prove certain things really stood out to me. When we talk about proving things, we often add the prepositional phrase “proof to your satisfaction.” In other words, proof itself is an ambiguous term — we have to specify what level of proof, what standard of proof, what method of proof, proof to whose satisfaction, rather than just saying something “hasn’t been proven.” People in debates and arguments will often say that — well, that’s not proven. Proven to whom? Proven by what standard? All of those considerations factor into the questions Cicero is examining here. You’re never going to prove anything to Heraclitus. You’re never going to prove it to the satisfaction of a Plato, or of someone committed to there being a world beyond this one. You’re never going to prove that there isn’t, because there are so many logical fallacies involved in proving a negative — in establishing something with certainty when the whole basis for the conversation is speculation, imagination, or suggestion without evidence.

And of all the things we want to avoid, it’s this: for people who find arguments from complexity confusing, who say “well, everybody’s got a different opinion, how am I going to make a decision about something” — the reason you do have to make a decision is because you’re the one responsible for living your own life. You cannot simply suspend judgment about how to spend your time and say, “I’m just going to stay in my room and never walk outside of my house.” You may be able to do that for a very short period of time, but you are responsible for your life and the results that happen to you. You have to make decisions on some kind of grounds. So you may not be able to prove your view of how you’re going to spend your life to Heraclitus. You may not be able to prove anything to Plato, or to the Pope, or to any particular religious authority. But in the end, those people aren’t responsible for your life — you are. And you have to take action, which in many cases requires you to decide good from bad, right from wrong, as it applies to your life. An awful lot of Epicurean philosophy is about the practical decision-making required to produce a pleasurable, happy life.

Epicurus is never going to prove to Plato or to Socrates that his choice of a life of happiness based on pleasure is the right one. He can present the evidence and the reasons for his conclusions, but you can’t force somebody to agree with you. You can’t prove to everyone else’s satisfaction that you are correct. The only person who really needs to have confidence in your conclusion is you, because you’re the one who is going to profit or suffer from the results of your decision-making. Epicurus is telling you that your senses, and your internal faculties of pleasure and pain and anticipations, are what nature gave you, and you’ve got to use them if you wish to live successfully.

Now, we’ve gone on quite a bit longer on this point than I expected, but this is the kind of question we’re going to keep dealing with throughout the rest of Academic Questions. So, Joshua, if you have more to add, please do — or we can begin returning to our next section in Academic Questions, which is Section 16.

Joshua:

I’m always worried, as we go into a new section, that we’re drifting too far afield from an understanding of the broader context of where we are in the text. Here in Book Two, we’ve had Lucullus present to us his understanding of the Stoic view, and then he began to deal with some of the principal skeptical objections to that view — chief among them the syllogism Lucullus presented, which bore some resemblance to the objection in Lucretius about the square tower that looks round from far away:

“If the same object can produce two representations, and one representation is false and the other is true, and what is false cannot be perceived, but the representation that appears to be true is of such a character that a thing of the same sort may also seem to be false, it cannot possibly happen that some of these things can be perceived and others cannot. There is then nothing seen which can really be perceived.”

After he explained that, he gave us a sense of the axioms and propositions required by the skeptics to advance their point of view, and then in Section 14 he says, “Now, all this subtlety I consider indeed thoroughly worthy of philosophy, but still wholly unconnected with the case which they advocate who argue thus.” From Section 14 forward, we’re getting the presentation of some skeptical views along with Lucullus’s Stoic response to these objections to the original Stoic claim that knowledge is possible. As he said at one point, he’s responding most particularly to the New Academy — Antiochus, and possibly Carneades.

What he says in the opening paragraph of Section 16 is this: “On all these empty perceptions, Antiochus brought forward a great many arguments, and one whole day was occupied in the discussion of this subject. But I do not think that I ought to adopt the same course, but merely to give the heads of what he said.” He’s going to give a summary of what Antiochus said in a whole day of discussion on the subject of perception, and whether any perception is really reliable as to the truth of the thing in front of you — whether you can ever really approach that with the senses, given the problems presented by the prior syllogism: that if a true perception is indistinguishable from a false one, if the same object can present both to us, then how do you ever find any ground on which to say that perception is a reliable indicator of the things happening around you?

Antiochus here represents a kind of extreme, radical skepticism, far more skeptical than someone like Plato, who at least thought there was a realm of ideal forms he could appeal to as the ultimate test of what was true — whereas the radical skeptics say it isn’t even possible to know whether it’s possible to know anything. They’ve gone so far in the direction of skepticism that the question of whether knowledge is impossible is itself open to doubt, and they don’t speak like Socrates did with certainty on that question. As Socrates said, “all that I know is that I know nothing” — and from this New Academy perspective, we don’t even know that we know nothing.

So what follows in Section 16 is a presentation from that side. Rackham translates it this way: “In the first place, they are blamable in this, that they use a most captious kind of interrogation, and the system of adding or taking away step by step minute items from a proposition is a kind of argument very little to be approved of in philosophy. They call it sorites, when they make up a heap by adding grain after grain — a very vicious and captious style of arguing. For you mount up in this way: if a vision is brought by God before a man asleep, of such a nature as to be probable, why may not one also be brought of such a nature as to be very like truth? If so, then why may not one be brought which can hardly be distinguished from truth? If so, then why may there not be one which cannot be distinguished at all? If so, then why may there not be such that there is actually no difference between them?” And I think it’s Lucullus who says this next bit: “If you come to this point because I have granted you all the previous propositions, it will be my fault; but if you advance thither of your own accord, it will be yours.” It will be your fault that you’ve fallen into the trap of the Sorites syllogism.

Cassius:

Joshua, I agree it is confusing. Hopefully it will sort itself out the further we go. For the time being, given where we are in today’s episode and needing to wrap it up, we can probably stick with understanding the point regardless of who is advocating it. I think the point, especially in that last sentence — “if you come to this point because I’ve granted you all these propositions, it will be my fault, but if you advance thither of your own accord, it will be yours” — is that simply adding on incrementally, whether it’s another grain of sand, another possibility you’re suggesting God might have planted in your mind, or that God might be capable of doing, no matter what you’re talking about, simply proceeding step by step in a sequence like that is the responsibility of the person setting out the proposed conclusion, because it does not on its own jump out of the act of adding or subtracting. Adding another grain of sand to the existing grains does not in itself produce a heap, and suggesting there’s a series of things close to each other does not in itself explain why they’re close versus identical. This is, as Yonge says, “the system of adding or taking away step-by-step minute items from a proposition.” The truth or falsity of the proposition doesn’t come from these minute steps — if the proposition is true or false, it’s going to have to be established some other way, not simply by an incremental change to the proposition.

It’s going to go a lot further as we continue through Section 16, but granting a series of changes to a proposition doesn’t get you anywhere. As you indicated earlier in our discussion today, the question is a matter of proof, and in order to discuss proof we have to have an understanding of the standard of proof, of what counts as satisfactory proof. No matter how many grains of sand you add or subtract, you haven’t accomplished anything unless you have a standard of proof outside of that addition or subtraction. So, Joshua, what final thoughts would you add for today, with the knowledge that we’re going to come back and continue this next week?

Joshua:

I just glanced at Section 17, trying to figure out how to unwind all of this. There’s something in it to contrast with what Edward Abbey said about the effect of dehydration on his senses, which I think is kind of funny. Lucullus says:

“But from the whole character of this discussion, we may see the worthless nature of the argument of those men who wish to throw everything into confusion. What we want is judgment, marked with gravity, consistency, firmness, and wisdom. And instead, we use the examples of men dreaming, mad, or drunk. I press this point, that in all this discussion, we are speaking with great inconsistency, for we should not bring forward men sunk in wine or sleep or deprived of sense in such an absurd manner as at one time to say there is a difference between the perceptions of men awake and sober and sensible and those of men in a different condition, and at other times that there was no difference at all.”

That’s a practical response from Lucullus, and I think it’s a practical response also to the Sorites syllogism, which we haven’t even scratched the surface of yet. But you can see where he’s going with this: if the consumption of alcohol affects perception, surely it would be possible to apply the Sorites problem to the consumption of alcohol and say, if you do think, you Stoics or you Epicureans, that sense perception is reliable, how many drinks do you have to have before it becomes unreliable? At what point do you arbitrarily set a boundary in that process of incremental change? It gives you something of an idea of where all this is going. And for my part, Cassius — you’ve been much better about this than I have over the years — I’ve been surprised at the number of discussions, dialogues, and applications of the Sorites problem throughout all of our reading in Greek philosophy. It’s such a simple, logical problem, but it seems to have such interesting and widespread application.

Cassius:

I agree that it does, Joshua, and the examples you just gave remind me of the question we apply regularly to whether it’s okay to drive after you’ve been drinking. In some states, a .10 on the breathalyzer is the difference between being okay and going to jail — and what is the authority, what is the proof, that point-one is some kind of magic number? Of course, there is no such proof. You’re never going to prove to a person who wants cosmic certainty that a .10 breathalyzer reading, or any other result, has any significance whatsoever. And yet, in an effort to live successfully in the real world, we make decisions like that all the time — we come to a conclusion, we come to finality about what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do. That’s the kind of position we have to take in so many of these questions. As you’ve said, the Sorites question applies in so many situations because this is the practical reality of having to make decisions. And if we decide that our view of knowledge prevents us from making decisions, then we’ve got a problem. Epicurus is not interested in suspending his life, which he knows to be short and in which he’s not going to get a second chance. He’s not going to suspend his life and live like a deer in the headlights — he’s going to make decisions using practical criteria.

Okay, let’s bring today’s episode to a conclusion on that point. We’ll come back and get into the middle of Section 16 next week. Thanks again to Patrikios for setting us up for this discussion today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.