Episode 017 - All Things Are Not Made Of A Single Element, Such as Fire
Date: 05/09/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1537-episode-seventeen-all-things-are-not-made-of-fire-and-heraclitus-was-a-fool/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Elaine reads the Daniel Brown passage in which Lucretius refutes the pre-Socratic materialistic monists — Heraclitus (fire), Thales of Miletus (water), Anaximander (earth), and Anaximenes of Miletus (air) — and demonstrates that no single element can account for the variety of things we observe. Charles identifies each philosopher from the text, and Martin notes that while earth, water, and air can at least be understood as states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), fire is different in kind — it is a chemical phenomenon, not a compound or a state, which makes Heraclitus’s choice the least defensible of the four. The panelists draw a direct parallel to modern consciousness-monism: the claim that everything emerges from a formless consciousness runs into the same logical problem Lucretius identifies — you cannot derive form from something without form, and the paradoxical feeling this produces in an audience is not evidence of truth but of rhetorical confusion.
A substantial portion of the episode compares translations of two key passages. The first is Lucretius’s denunciation of Heraclitus as “famed for dark expression” and his observation that fools admire obscure, paradoxical language — rendered by Munro as “fools admire and like all things the more which they perceive to be concealed under involved language,” by Bailey as “they set up for true what can tickle the ear with a pretty sound and is tricked out with a smart ring,” and by Stallings with the blunt “idiots admire things all the more when they discern them hidden in entangled words… in phrases dyed a shade of purple.” The second key passage is the line where Lucretius says Heraclitus “contradicts his senses by his sense” — Martin Ferguson Smith renders this as “he uses the senses as a base for an attack on the senses and in doing so undermines the foundation of all our beliefs.” Elaine illustrates this with the example of cataract-distorted color perception: every sensation is what it is at the point of reception, and what people call “correct” perception is simply what is typical for a normally functioning human eye — the correction is always made by new sensory information, never by abstract reason floating free of the senses.
The episode closes with discussions of Pyrrhonian skepticism (Charles: the skeptic’s certainty about uncertainty is its own self-contradiction, which DeWitt points out), reductionism and infinite divisibility, hermeticism and the Kybalion’s “the All is Mind” as a modern representative of the same error Lucretius refutes, and the phrase “not even wrong” as a formulation Epicurus would have appreciated — it names the class of statements that cannot even be examined for truth value because they make no contact with observable reality. Martin mentions Kanada, the ancient Indian philosopher who theorized atoms from roughly the same era as Thales, as evidence that this line of inquiry was not unique to Greece.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 17 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who lived in the age of Julius Caesar and wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. Before we start with today’s episode, let me remind you of our three ground rules. First, our aim is to go back to the original text to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it — not simply to repeat to you what modern commentators teach about it today. Second, we won’t be talking about modern political issues in this podcast. Epicurean philosophy is very different from Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Atheism, and Marxism, and it must be understood on its own, not in terms of any conventional modern morality. Third, the physics presented by Lucretius is the essential base of Epicurean philosophy. When you study this, you’ll see that Epicurus taught neither luxury nor minimalism, but that feeling, pleasure, and pain are the guides that nature gave us to live by — not supernatural gods, not idealism, and not virtue ethics. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that there is nothing supernatural whatsoever, and that means there is no life after death, and any happiness we will ever have must come in this life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion. Remember that our home page is LucretiusToday.com, and there you can find a free copy of the versions of the poem we’re reading. In Episode 17, we’ll discuss how all things are not made of a single element, such as fire, contrary to what some philosophers of the time asserted, such as Heraclitus, who held that all things are made of fire. Now let’s join the discussion with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: Lastly, if nature, parent of things, had not compelled all things that perished then to be resolved into least parts, she could from them repair nothing that dies, for bodies that are formed of various parts can never be endued with properties which the first seeds of things ought to possess: as union, weight, and force, agreement, motion, by which all things act. And yet, suppose nature had allowed no end to bodies being divided, yet some bodies from eternity must have been which by no force could ever be subdued, but bodies that are formed of brittle seeds, and to be broken, could not have remained for ages infinite, vexed as they have been with endless blows, but must have been dissolved. Wherefore those sages who have thought that fire is the first principle of things, and from that alone the whole is formed, do greatly err from the true rule of reason.
The champion of these, Heraclitus, enters first the list, more famed for dark expression among empty Greeks than with the wise who search for truth — for none but fools admire and love what they see couched in words of truth, and that they take for truth which quaintly moves the ear, and painted over feats by witty jingling of the sound. For how such various beings could arise, I ask, if formed from pure and real fire? To say that the hot fire is now condensed and sometimes rarefied would not avail — the several parts must still retain the nature of fire, the same which the fire had when whole. The heat would be more fierce, the parts condensed; more languid when divided and made rare. There is nothing more than this you can derive from causes such as these. Much less so great a variety of things can be produced from fire or flame, condensed or made rare.
Indeed, would they admit in things of void, fire might then be condensed or rarefied. But this, because it contradicts their other schemes, they murmur at and will allow in things no empty space. So while they fear to grant this difficult truth, they lose the way that’s right, nor do they see by not allowing there is in things a void, all bodies would be dense, and out of all one only would be made, which could by force emit nothing without itself, as the hot fire emits both light and heat — which shows it is not composed of crowded parts without a void.
But if they think that a fire in all its parts may be extinguished, and so its body change — if they insist that this may once be done — then the whole fire must be resolved to nothing, and things new-formed from nothing must arise. For whatsoever is changed and breaks the bounds of its first nature dies, and is no more. What must still remain whole and unhurt, lest things to nothing should perfectly return, and then revive, and should again from nothing be restored? But now since there remain some certain seeds that keep their nature still the same, whose absence or their presence and their change of order change the nature of compound bodies, you must not think that these first things are fiery. If they were, what would it signify what seeds are absent, or what retire, what others take their place, how others may their rank and order change, since all would still be in their nature fire, and beings formed from them must wholly be of fire?
But as I think the case is thus: some certain seeds there are, by whose concussion, motion, order, sight, and figure fire is formed, and when their order is changed, they change the nature of this fire. But these first seeds have nothing fiery in themselves, nor of such a nature are they as to send forth bodies to be perceived by sense or be the object of our touch.
And now to say that everything is fire, and no true thing in nature does exist but fire, as this man does, is madness all. He contradicts his senses by his sense, and overthrows those tests of truth by which all things are known. For it is by them we know that thing which he calls fire, and this sense concludes it truly knows the nature of this fire. But then all other things it will deny, which are equally as true. This is to me a vain and foolish way to judge, for to what shall we apply, and what can be more sure than our senses to us, by which we fully know falsehood and truth?
Besides, why anyone should all things else disclaim and only fire allow, or say there is no such thing as fire and all things else allow? Either of this is in vain, an equal madness to believe. Wherefore those sages who contend that fire is the first principle, and that of fire all things consist; and those who make the air the first seeds of bodies; and such who lay that water is the sole cause of beings; or that the earth all things creates, and can infuse itself into the nature of things — do strangely err, and wander wide from the truth.
Elaine: I love that phrase — “wander wide from the truth.”
Cassius: I was about to mention how this whole thing also applies to Thales of Miletus, but then he mentioned that in the last paragraph, with water.
Elaine: Oh, okay. What are the four — say more about that. The four classical elements, Charles?
Charles: Earth, air, fire, water? Yes.
Elaine: Yeah. I believe Thales counted among one of the Seven Sages of Greece. I know Heraclitus was… This would be pre-Socratic as well.
Cassius: Well, and I think reading this whole section — keeping in mind where he’s showing how certain current thinkers were wandering wide from the truth — is good. Because that’s what this is: an argument against specific ideas that were around at that time. And that still are, I guess. Remind me as we get to the end of this — I want to mention some similar things that are going on now.
Elaine: I agree with what you’re saying — there’s lots to draw from this whole section. You know, one of the things that we are often asked about is Epicurean philosophy being dogmatic, and just what is truth, and do we take positions that some things are actually right and wrong, and what do right and wrong mean? Well, one thing you can certainly derive from this whole section here is that Epicurus is taking the position that Heraclitus is wrong in maintaining that everything is made of fire. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Epicurus is going to be dogmatic about everything he says in every subject. But there are certain things — he’s certainly taking the position that some things are right and some things are wrong. But that’s more of a conclusion than it is talking about the text itself.
Cassius: Let’s go back to the beginning. So this first verse takes up where we left off — about there being a limit to the divisibility of things, that you couldn’t just infinitely go on dividing down particles. There was a limit to that. And so this goes on from there to say that if things, when they perish, if they weren’t resolved into their least parts — if there were no least parts for them to resolve into — there wouldn’t be anything to repair, there wouldn’t be anything to make anything new out of, because there wouldn’t be any available particles. That’s how I understand that as the meaning there. Would you say?
Elaine: Yeah, I think he’s just again emphasizing, over and over, that the regularity of the universe comes from a particular source that is natural and not supernatural, and that that source — which can be counted on to be the continuity forever — is the nature of the elemental particles.
Cassius: But also, this is appealing to just our ordinary practical observations of things — you know, where would you get the material to repair anything from if you didn’t have available particles released from other things dissolving? Right — he’s not just making the statement “remember, there are elemental particles.” He’s making the statement: observe the way the world works, and you will see that there must be elemental particles. Right — that we’re making our conclusions based on observations, and not just “this seems like it ought to be.” He doesn’t say “take my word for it.”
Charles: So in this last paragraph, Lucretius is referring specifically to Heraclitus with fire, Thales of Miletus with water, Anaximander for the earth, and then Anaximenes of Miletus for air. And it’s clearly to call out pre-Socratic materialistic monism, with the belief that these common elements comprised everything. But like it was mentioned, this can’t be the case because you can observe those four classical elements with your senses, and they have distinct properties. And if everything was made up of those, they would have to have those properties — like he says with fire.
Cassius: Thank you, Charles, for looking that up. I think that adds a lot to this, because one thing that’s always important to remember is that there were specific reasons why these particular arguments were made. And there are additional arguments we might make today, which I will make when we get done with this. So you have to know what your readers are up against — that’s super helpful. And it clearly gives some background on what exactly Lucretius is talking about.
Elaine: Yeah. Who he is refuting. Right.
Cassius: And you know, that’s another general category of discussions that we frequently run into as well — how much do we wish to discuss what other people are saying? When you’ve got a background of everybody being taught something that appears to be wrong, you’ve got to discuss what other people are saying. Especially if you think that what they’re saying out there is the foundation of the way people are making their errors — then you have to call that out.
Charles: Yeah, and that’s a whole other discussion — like, how much time do you spend doing that? You don’t want to let them drive your agenda. Right — as much as is needed to get to your point.
Cassius: Well, that’s right, Charles. There’s not a specific rule like that that can ever supersede your goal of pleasure, so it’s going to depend on the circumstances.
Elaine: This isn’t based on any actual record, but I’m sure Epicurus talked about Democritean atoms in his On Nature before explaining his own ideas, or why he thinks they work the way he does.
Cassius: Yeah. That position that you take on elements of nature is very, very close to your position on where these elements come from, and so many of these other people are ultimately saying they were created by God. And that’s very close to a foundational problem. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay.
Cassius: So back to the passage at line 627 — this is more about: if there was no end to being divided, there’s no final point where you had your elemental particle, what he called atoms, if that were possible. But there were some of those particles that have existed from eternity. Help me through this — where’s he going with this?
Elaine: Well, one place he’s going, Cassius, is pointing out that if everything dissolves to nothing, eventually there will be nothing left. And what’s not stated there — but which is the presumption — is that there’s nothing new coming into existence from nothing. There are no gods or any other source that’s creating anything new from nothing to replace those things that have gone to nothing. So you do have both principles at work: nothing comes from nothing, and nothing goes to nothing. But the “nothing comes from nothing” is the one he started with.
Cassius: I guess I was talking more about the specific wording here in the Daniel Brown at line 627. But I don’t see 627 listed in these other translations. Let me go to Martin Ferguson Smith and see — this is more clear. Let me just read this little section of Martin Ferguson Smith, because I think that’s what he meant, but the wording there is real difficult for a modern ear.
So: “lastly, if it had been creative nature’s way to compel all things to be resolved into their smallest parts, she would no longer be able to renew anything out of them, because objects that are insufficiently bulky to have any parts cannot possess the essential characteristics of generative matter — namely the variety of interlacements, weights, collisions, concurrences, and movements that cause all things to happen.” That’s just a more clear translation to me. So I just want to make sure I get the gist, and then we get to fire.
Cassius: I was thinking about this and I intended to look it up and I did not — I don’t know whether we have a link here between the Stoic view of divine fire and that they trace that back to Heraclitus, or whether it’s different or not. Certainly the Stoics talk about divine fire a lot, and Heraclitus was saying everything is made of fire. I presume there’s probably a link, but I just don’t know.
Martin: I think not. I think this word “divine fire” is more something symbolic. I don’t think that they take it as an element.
Cassius: Okay. So what immediately attracts my attention in this section is: “none but fools admire and love what they see couched in words of truth, and that they take for truth which quaintly moves the ear.” So I want to read the Martin Ferguson Smith here, because I think it really brings that home. “For fools always have a greater admiration and liking for any idea that they see obscured in a mist of paradoxical language, and adopt as true what succeeds in prettily tickling their ears and is painted with a specious sound.”
Elaine: So I’m going to be careful here, because I have friends that I care about who are not Epicureans who enjoy the paradoxical. And, you know, if they get pleasure from that funny feeling that you get when two things can’t possibly both be true — that’s a property of language. It’s not a property of nature. Nature is not ever paradoxical. And I understand what they’re saying — it’s kind of a funny feeling; you get it and you think, “How can that be?” And I can understand why it’s enjoyable. So I’m not going to call them fools for having pleasure in anything. What you have pleasure in is what you have pleasure in. It’s a problem if you take it to be somehow more true than what you can observe.
Elaine: I have a colleague — I don’t know what his actual philosophy is — he’s very influenced by Alan Watts. Yes, right. And I know I’ve mentioned Alan Watts before, but my interest or my research into him has been sparked by this friend of mine. But he derives truth from paradox. Yes. Yeah — like he claims he does. It’s that certain feeling that you have, and I think everybody probably knows what I’m talking about. I’ve called it the “brain pretzel feeling.” It’s just — there’s just something impossible about what you’re thinking. They take that as a signal that they have encountered a truth, or achieved it. Yeah. So just because of personal relationships, I would not use the language “fool,” because I don’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings. But I think it’s a mistake. I think it’s an error. Not because nature doesn’t have paradoxes — it’s a language thing. And so if you enjoy the paradoxes of language, I don’t see any problem in that — that can be fun. Just don’t get that confused with what’s accurate. Two different things.
Charles: Yeah. It reminds me a lot of Pyrrhonian suspension of belief — can you say more about that? It’s a part of the whole skeptic thing, and this relates to dogmatism — or sort of like a rejection of dogmatism — like a very strong rejection, almost to the point where nothing can be known. Right. But it just ties into that: that all of these things are paradoxical, then we can’t know anything for certain. Right. They sort of have the state where they only know that things are contradictory. So almost — the skeptics, though — they’re more certain in their uncertainty. Mm-hmm. So they have kind of a little paradox there. And that’s what they feel is true.
Cassius: Yeah. Right. Which, as people point out — I remember DeWitt pointing this out — the response to the statement that nothing can be known is: well, then your statement cannot be known. You’re asserting something that you have no grounds for asserting. And so you’re asserting that your statement itself is unproven and unknowable. So a good paradoxicalist would say, “Exactly! Now you’ve got it!” And he said that was a product of wordplay. It is, absolutely. And so I don’t object to the fun of wordplay — I may be diverging a little bit from Lucretius and Epicurus on that — but you’ve got to know what you’re doing; you’ve got to be careful.
Cassius: Elaine — also, in what I was saying when I referred to DeWitt a minute ago — if I remember correctly, when DeWitt brings this up, DeWitt makes the point that pointing out the inconsistency in the assertion is not really a proof that the assertion is wrong. The person who says that nothing can be known is implicitly saying that his statement is correct, which is an inconsistency. But ultimately, just pointing out that he’s being inconsistent doesn’t necessarily give you the sense of confidence or certainty that you need to know that he’s wrong. So you’ve got to ultimately go beyond this wordplay, and back to your position on what is the source of truth. And the source of truth is the senses.
Elaine: Okay. And so let’s keep going with that, because there is an element of usefulness in their recognition that language ultimately leads to paradox. Because language, expressing always — it’s using symbolism, it’s using concepts. The word never has everything in it that the object you’re talking about, or the feeling, has. It represents — it’s used to communicate — but it is abstraction, inevitably. And that’s why you have words you can infinitely deconstruct, and it looks like everything falls apart. And that’s because the concepts themselves are not a replacement for reality. And so if you follow it all the way through, and you realize that these paradoxes mean there’s something wrong — there’s something fundamentally missing in the ability of abstract concepts to replace reality — then you’re actually on the right track. Because the truth is not in an abstraction, it’s not in a concept. Reality is reality. And if people will take it all the way to that and just say, “Well, it’s the limitation of language — we try to tie it to a perceived reality, to our senses, as much as possible, and admit that concepts are not the territory” — to me, that’s okay.
Cassius: Does anybody want to disagree with anything Elaine just said? Because I agree with what she just said, and I think it’s very well stated and very fundamental to what we’re doing.
Elaine: Because I’ve wondered if I would be clear about that. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot because of my friends who enjoy that paradox.
Cassius: Well, this issue of reductionism is recurring, because it probably has a direct parallel — this is why Epicurus rejected infinite indivisibility. If you take reductionism so far, you end up with absolute nothingness, and we don’t have absolute nothingness, so we just can’t accept absolute nothingness as the end result of the analysis.
Elaine: Yes. In concepts, or in physics, or in ethics.
Cassius: Well, in concepts you have that problem — that’s one of the problems with concepts. But in reality, in observed nature, you don’t have that problem. If infinite reduction were the case, then you would, in Epicurean analysis, have resulted over eternity in nothingness of the universe. There’d be nothing left.
Elaine: Nothing, yes. But we see that things do exist. Yes, yes. So there’s something wrong with the infinite reduction theory. Yes.
Elaine: I really just think this passage is one of the most memorable ones in the whole book.
Cassius: Yes. I was going to include the Munro and the Bailey versions as well, because there are variations of them, but I think they’re all well stated.
Elaine: Okay, great, great.
Cassius: And I’ll say it, because I know where you’re coming from, Elaine — that we’re not trying to insult anybody. But this is really an example of the aggressiveness, or just the strength — whatever you want to call it — of Epicurean doctrine. He is putting it on the line here, and he’s being very clear. And Heraclitus would be somebody who was well known and well respected, considered to be a great philosopher. And yet — this is the Munro version: “at the head of whom enters Heraclitus to do battle, famous for obscurity more among the frivolous than the earnest Greeks who seek the truth — for fools admire and like all things the more which they perceive to be concealed under involved language, and determine things to be true which can prettily tickle the ears and are varnished over with finely sounding phrase.” And I think the “varnish” is a good word that Munro uses there.
Cassius: I won’t read the whole thing that Bailey says, but Bailey says: “for fools laud and love all things more which they can discern beneath hidden, twisted sayings, and they set up for true what can tickle the ear with a pretty sound and is tricked out with a smart ring.” The “tricked out with a smart ring” has a kind of modern ring to it as well. But yes — okay, so let me read, since we’re doing that — let me read Stallings: “for idiots admire things all the more” — idiots! Yes, wow — “for idiots admire things all the more when they discern them hidden in entangled words, and set great store in anything that tickles the ear in phrases dyed a shade of purple.” That’s the poet, that puts it on the line. Yeah.
Elaine: So I guess what I would say these days — not that I object to a strong word; you know me, I’m gonna call it, but it depends on how much I care about the other person I’m talking to. I prefer to say: “You’re kind of on the right track, you just haven’t come far enough — you haven’t realized that language and concepts are not the same as reality.”
Cassius: Elaine, following on to what you’re saying — at least in my life, some of the people who are the closest and most important to me, and who I am most concerned about, are also some of the people who have, in my view, wrong beliefs about the nature of the world and the nature of religion and so forth. And so if you know the people who are involved, you have a much more natural sense of wanting to be compassionate and to stand with them. You’re not trying to hurt them by calling them fools or idiots. Right. And so you have to be careful with the way you express things. And again, the pleasure that they’re feeling in this sensation of language paradox is pleasure, and we have to always be careful not to say that any pleasure is not pleasure, because it’s subjective — and if the person is enjoying it, it’s pleasure.
Cassius: But what we have to come back to is: is this a dangerous pleasure? Because whenever you’re covering over some aspect of reality and not looking at it, it puts you at risk of making inaccurate decisions for your life that will not lead you to pleasure. So it puts you at risk of more pain than pleasure. And you can have pleasure accidentally, or by doing things that will lead to more pain — it’s real pleasure, but it could hurt you, in the big picture of your life. And that’s why we’re saying these things. Somebody looking for an example of that can find it right in the Letter to Menoeceus, where Epicurus says it would be better to believe the myths about the gods than to believe what essentially amounts to hard determinism. Because at least if you’re in a religion where you think that you can make the gods happy and they can make you happy, then you still have some means of controlling your pleasure and your happiness. But if you believe in hard determinism, then you’re barred from that.
Elaine: Oh yeah, right.
Cassius: But without getting into a discussion of determinism and free will again — the point being that you can derive pleasure from things that ultimately may be harmful to you. Right — I’m just agreeing with Elaine’s basic point that if you’re experiencing pleasure, you’re experiencing pleasure; the feeling is the feeling. It’s just a matter of how you’re doing it and whether the consequences of the means you choose are going to ultimately lead to more pleasure or lead to pain. You know, there are some people who can believe these wrong things and enjoy their whole lives. It’s just like you can lie down on the highway and not get hit by a truck — but that doesn’t make it a wise decision for the average person. So a person making a choice on their philosophy can look around and say, “Well, I see these happy people that are believing these things that are obviously not true.” Well, we can’t deny that. But then — what are your odds? If you’re not looking at reality, what are your odds for making accurate decisions for your happiness, for your pleasure? And that would be relatable to Principal Doctrine 10, which says that if you could be a despicable person and still experience a life of pleasure, then we’d have no reason to complain about that, because the resulting pleasure is the standard by which you judge whether something’s been successful or not. Right. It’s just that there are certain choices in life — such as lying in the middle of the highway — which are not very well calculated to lead to long-term pleasure. Yes.
Cassius: Okay. Where are we? At line 646 — where he’s going on more about fire. How could you get any kind of variety if fire was your only starting point? So, because for him the elemental particles were not all the same particle — if you were just starting from fire, everything would have the nature of fire, and you couldn’t have other things. And he says, “There is nothing more than this you can derive from causes such as these — you couldn’t have the variety of things you have.” And I think that — I mean, in modern physics there’s not just a single elemental particle; there’s more than one type of thing. Am I correct on that, Martin?
Martin: Yes. Yeah. So he’s got that down. That makes sense.
Cassius: And this is something a person reading this can just look around and see — obviously everything is not made of fire. We’re not all on fire. We have different properties. Elaine, do you want to continue through the next couple of passages? Because I know you had some points you wanted to make at the end, and I don’t want to go too long today.
Elaine: Well, this is more about — you know, you can’t just have one thing. So this is an important argument. Apparently the fire people were not agreeing that there could be any void, any space, so that you could condense or rarefy — spread out, diffuse the fire. But they’re saying, “No — you don’t have a void.” That contradicts their scheme that you could make everything out of fire. So it’s not just that they are incorrect in failing to observe nature — their idea is also internally self-contradictory. You can’t be right because it doesn’t hold together.
Cassius: And then the same thing in the next section — see if there’s anything you want to comment on that passage or the one labeled at line 676. Because I do think that when we get to the one labeled at line 691, we’ve got to spend a few minutes on that one.
Elaine: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I do think it’s important to read, because all of these are arguments on the obviousness of the impossibility of what they’re saying about things being made of fire. And I don’t think we necessarily need to belabor that. I think it’s important that people heard that when you read that part, or that they reread it. But these are quite obvious: it’s impossible that everything was made of fire.
Charles: I would want to add on to what Elaine was saying about line 646: in the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus does say that these atoms have different properties. Yeah, because if not, then the same exact logic would apply. Uh-huh. You can’t just have one elemental particle. Okay, so people who think that everything is made out of some kind of “God particle” run into the same problem. It’s not just one thing.
Cassius: So but really this — starting with line 691 — “and now to say that everything is fire, and no true thing in nature does exist but fire, as this man does, is madness all. He contradicts his senses by his sense” — let’s look at the other translations of that — “and overthrows those tests of truth by which all things are known.” That phrase is the one I want to emphasize. But yes, go ahead with the other.
Elaine: Right, so this is Martin Ferguson Smith — oh, wow. “Moreover, to do as Heraclitus does and declare that all things are fire and that nothing in the aggregate of things has reality except fire, strikes me as hair-brained lunacy, where he uses the senses as a base for an attack on the senses, and in doing so undermines the foundation of all our beliefs and the source of his own knowledge of the fire that he champions.” That is hugely important. Yes. Yeah.
Cassius: And so I like that — because in the Daniel Brown, he uses the plural in one place and the singular in the other: “contradicts his senses by his sense.” Someone might be tempted to think the second use means “reason.” But it’s not. He’s contradicting his senses with his senses.
Cassius: Well, and then you can’t get anything but confusion out of that. Some people might say that that’s evidence of the senses being unreliable. Yeah — they’re using the senses to claim that the senses are unreliable. That’s the same kind of self-contradictory assertion that you have to be able to step back and realize: hey, this is not going to work — to have this self-contradictory assertion. If you’ve got some authority, Mr. Skeptic, by which you can prove to me that there’s something more reliable than the senses, then I will step back and accept your authority, Mr. Skeptic. But I don’t know who you are. I don’t really even like you. I don’t like your nihilism. I don’t like anything about you. And I’m not going to listen to you — because I have my senses. My senses tell me that the world exists, and I am not going to just accept your attempt to confuse me into thinking that I can’t trust my senses.
Elaine: This is not to say that we can’t use our senses to refine our senses. Right — I’m nearsighted; I can’t see very well. So if I put on my glasses, I can see very well, and I can see the leaves and the trees and things that I couldn’t see before. And if I had cataracts — to see colors clearly — I would have to get those removed. But how do I know that I need to do that? It’s also by using my senses. So the senses are always the gold standard. And I’ve had conversations with people recently on an atheist or agnostic site where they say, “Well, no — you can trust instruments, but not your senses.” And I’m like, “Well, how do you read the instruments? Do you not ever use your eyes or your fingers or your ears? How is that information ultimately being transmitted to you? And how did you decide in the beginning that the instrument was accurate?”
Elaine: Your senses had to be involved. They think that instruments can give you, in quotes, “objective” information. I’m like — nope. You’re perceiving this output of the instrument with your senses. It’s not getting to you telepathically through logic. Right, right — you have to use your senses.
Cassius: That reminds me of one of — I think DeWitt’s strong points, his strongest arguments — when he analyzes the phrase “all sensations are true.” The word “true” has different meanings to it, and you have to unpack that, because every sensation is not going to be as accurate as another sensation. They need to be analyzed to determine the conditions under which they’re received. They have to be accepted at face value, but when you realize that the sensation is going to change as the conditions change, then you have to evaluate using new sensations what the old sensations have said, and decide which is going to be more consistent with future reality.
Elaine: Well, even further — if I’m seeing a color through a lens with a cataract in it, which makes the color muted, more yellow, then that is the color of the light that’s hitting my retina through the lens. It’s not wrong — that’s what it is. If my retinal cells are disrupted so that my color sensors are not working correctly, my brain is perceiving what my retinal cells are reporting. So it’s not that it’s not reality — it’s that there is a different color that we can see when the lens is clear. It’s a calculation of what is the “normal” color. Because if you’re in the eye doctor’s office and you’re being shown a series of slides, and that’s going to be the reality for the rest of your life, then you may as well conclude that that purple or whatever is the color — that’s the color that you’re going to see. So is it a color through a clear lens, or a color through a cloudy lens? Right — you’re subjectively perceiving that. And so a lot of times what we call “right” is what’s typical for a typically functioning human body. But it’s never not happening — it is happening.
Elaine: But this is where people go and try to say that reason and logic are superior to the senses — because they’re trying to say that there’s something out there called logic or reason that exists in the air by itself, and that that is your standard by which you’re correcting your sight.
Cassius: Yeah. But that’s not the case. That’s not correcting your sight — that’s correcting your sight by new observations, new observations of the same sense, the same sight. Yeah. And in some cases, you’re learning where your body may be atypical from most other humans. So that maybe you can’t tell green apart from red and they can.
Cassius: I think — you know — I think the Stallings translation can shed some light on this. It’s the same one about fire that we read earlier. “His argument then takes up arms against them, and so shakes the very bedrock of belief — for how does he perceive that fire of his? By trusting those same senses that deceive.” That is good. Yes.
Cassius: This — I’ll go on — the next line says, “This line of reasoning strikes me as lunatic and queer.” Goodness. Yeah. We can collect the words. Yeah — “dotage.” I remember seeing somewhere here in — “sheer” — yes, Munro says that it is “sheer dotage.” And then Bailey says it is “raving frenzy.” Yep. It’s telling us on — so what can we appeal to? So what can we use as our reference point? Yes. Yep.
Cassius: So this next line: “Again, why should anyone rather abolish all things else to leave the single nature of heat?” Okay — it seems to be equal madness to affirm either this or that. So there he’s saying: well, all right, so why’d you pick heat? Why not earth? Why not air? Why not water? What’s your basis for choosing this one thing?
Charles: That’s a good point. That reminds me of the non-supernaturalist or the atheist argument — you know, “Well, why are you atheist about all these other gods? Why did you pick this god?” Yeah. Yeah.
Martin: So I find it quite smart to have identified, more than three thousand years ago, air, water, and earth as elements. And of course we know they are not elements today. But still, to consider those as elements makes sense. But fire just doesn’t make sense — it’s nonsense. And the other thing is, in modern textbooks that refer to this, they try to save the four classical elements by identifying them as aggregation states, whereby fire corresponds to plasma. But I think this is really hiding the fact that those ancient thinkers really considered them as elements. I would rather still see it as an early theory on how to classify elements. Fire just doesn’t make sense, because fire — I mean, the other three are basically compounds or states in some sense.
Elaine: Well, that’s true, yeah.
Martin: But fire is just a phenomenon which comes with a chemical reaction. So that means it’s not even a compound.
Elaine: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah, you’re right. So fire makes the least sense out of all of those, because you could say solid, liquid, and gas as states of matter, and you could talk about things being compressed or spread out. But you can’t do that with fire.
Martin: Good point. It reminds me a bit of Kanada, the Indian philosopher from around the same time as Thales. But he talked about earth, water, light, and air as well as some other things as being atoms — but he never mentioned fire.
Elaine: Yeah, light is better than fire. It’s still weird, but it’s better than fire.
Cassius: “They strangely err, and wander wide from the truth.” Okay. So then this last section — he goes on to any kind of scheme that existed at that time where there was one single type of fundamental constituent of everything. So whether fire or water or earth or air — and claiming it could change into everything — is obviously impossible for the same reason that fire can’t turn into everything.
Cassius: So today — this is what I was thinking about — we have all sorts of different kinds of beliefs that consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality, which has no form, so that physical objects are an illusion. Or that physical objects are real but they’re created by consciousness out of consciousness. Have you heard people talking about stuff like that?
Elaine: Yeah. I recently saw a headline that even the universe has a consciousness.
Cassius: Yeah. But not even just that it has a consciousness, but that consciousness is the fundamental — that everything is emerging from that. So this same argument works against that. How are you getting something out of something that has no form? How are you getting form out of something without form? So somebody who enjoys that kind of paradoxical feeling is going to say, “Well, you know, that right there — that’s paradoxical. So you know that’s true.” And they stop there.
Cassius: And then the problems with that are multiple. People who believe that can then believe that — as some people I know think — we are each creating reality simultaneously from consciousness. So, like, “You don’t exist in reality — I’m creating you with my mind.” Right. So if you do that, you can never actually meet another person — you can only talk to yourself. But fundamentally, they have no explanation for how that could come about. How can something which has no form turn into form? They just stop with: “Well, there you go. There’s your paradox. So it’s true.”
Elaine: I’ve heard a very similar argument, but only when it applies to people you haven’t met in person. Oh my god. So once you meet them — they’ve come to life! Wow, interesting. They’re not real until they’re directly observed — when this condition has been met, whether that’s opening the box, or both of you driving to some restaurant and seeing each other.
Cassius: Charles, I was expecting you to have a comment on what Elaine was saying — the whole issue of people maintaining that consciousness is the primary aspect of reality and that everything is generated by consciousness. I mean, that appears in a lot of different forms, doesn’t it? That’s a very old line of thinking. Are there some obvious examples of philosophies or religions that take that position? Because it seems to be behind an awful lot of things.
Charles: And that whole category is called spiritual monism — right? Maybe not spiritual — maybe more ontological monism. The earliest school I can think of would be Hermeticism, which has seen modern revivals in works like the early 20th century Kybalion. And one of their first principles is saying that “the All is Mind.” I found the whole book to be nonsense, but some people live and die and swear by that book. That book was written in the early 1900s, but Hermeticism goes back to definitely pre-Christian. Was it around during Epicurus’s time? Before it? It was the root of Gnosticism.
Cassius: Okay. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God.” I mean, you’ve got immaterialism — that the immaterial generated the material, that the void generated the particles.
Cassius: Let’s see — it says here that Hermeticism emerged in parallel with early Christianity. Is that Gnosticism? Or what? And so it emerged in parallel with early Christianity, Gnosticism — so it was a little bit after Epicurus.
Charles: Well, that’s your dualism, I guess, too, isn’t it — mind versus matter, spirit versus body, all this? Yeah. But they were non-dualist because they thought everything really was this mind. Yeah — matter could be a property of mind. Well, it’s almost like it’s an optional thing, but it’s not in itself an actual thing.
Cassius: And I don’t know what you can say about that other than: where are you getting your information if you’re not using your senses? How am I supposed to know that that’s true?
Cassius: I suggest you could say about that that it is “sheer dotage,” that it is “raving lunacy,” that it is “widely straying from the truth” — those kinds of things.
Elaine: And then — you’re “off your head!” Love it.
Cassius: And you know, the modern science put-down is “not even wrong.” Yes. Yes. You haven’t even said anything that we can examine. So it’s “not even wrong.” That’s a phrase you see a lot. Like you say — modern — it’s kind of trendy. But I sense that it has a very good root to it, though. Yes, yes — it’s taking a position that there is a reality of some kind. Yes. Oh, it absolutely is. I feel like Epicurus would love that phrase.
Elaine: I think so too. Because it is a phrase that deals in an evidentiary analysis. It is taking a position that there is a standard of right and wrong — which would be the opposite of radical skepticism. Yeah. Oh, I don’t even want to say “logical” — that gets into abstractions. It’s taking an evidentiary position: “Don’t even talk to me about it. Show me. If I can’t examine it, you’re not even wrong — you’re beneath my time. I don’t even have time for that. It’s just imaginary.” It’s taking the position that right and wrong must be based on evidence, and right and wrong are not just arbitrarily assertable.
Cassius: Right. That’s what I mean — it’s not based on logic. It’s not based on reason alone. It’s based on — well, that’s the issue, Elaine — of “true reason,” I think, versus reason. Or maybe there’s such a thing as true logic versus logic. I mean, if you’re using logic or reason without connecting it to evidence of reality, then you’re out of court to begin with. But if you are using logic and reason connected to evidence of reality, then I guess that’s true reason. Yeah. Vera ratio — I think that’s used regularly in Lucretius. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Martin: I mean, this is agreeable if you want to talk about reality. If you just stay within something like mathematics, reality doesn’t matter. So then mathematics is essentially just logic. And so in that sense — so if you go wider than “we want to talk about reality” — then some special things like mathematics count as well. Right?
Cassius: I think math is a special language for sure. But you couldn’t just sit down with math and figure out the nature of reality — you would have to look at something.
Charles: A friend of mine — he was obsessed with the idea that nothing is knowable without math. Oh my goodness. And he tried mathematically proving that hedonism statistically leads to pain over time. And it wasn’t even based on the hedonic treadmill. Uh-huh. Well, if it led to pain over time, that it wouldn’t be wise decisions about pleasure — so if he’s ultimately trying to look for pleasure, then he’s a hedonist. I mean, it made no sense. Because the initial premise was that using just pure conjecture and mathematics to model decisions and outcomes that are very firmly grounded in reality — he couldn’t bridge them together. That’s my point.
Cassius: Yeah. Okay. This has been one of our better discussions — really interesting topics today. We probably need to bring it to a close though. So let’s think about closing comments.
Elaine: Can’t think of any, aside from — you know — don’t be contradictory. I want to say: reality itself is not paradoxical.
Cassius: Martin?
Martin: Oh, I — I have no summary statement.
Cassius: Okay. Anything else for today?
Martin: No, I don’t think so.
Cassius: Okay, well, hearing nothing, we’ll be back in another week or so. All right. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Okay. Bye. Okay.