Episode 025 - The Swerve Part Two: As The Basis of Human Agency
Date: 07/03/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1604-episode-twenty-five-the-swerve-part-ii-as-the-basis-of-human-agency/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 025 continues the discussion of the swerve, this time focusing on Book Two’s argument that atomic indeterminacy grounds human agency and the freedom of will. Martin reads Daniel Brown’s translation of the central passage, in which Lucretius argues that without some declination in the seeds, everything would proceed in fixed necessary chains, leaving no room for the will that we plainly observe operating in living creatures. Lucretius illustrates through examples: horses at the starting gates whose eagerness must gather through limbs before their motion can follow the mind’s command, and the resistance we exert against being compelled by external force. The episode then opens into a wide-ranging discussion of whether this account of agency can be reconciled with modern neuroscience, what Epicurus himself says about necessity, chance, and what lies within our control in the Letter to Menoeceus, and how hard determinism functions as a practical danger to the Epicurean life.
Elaine, drawing on her medical background, raises the central objection: Lucretius appears to separate desire and decision-making from the causal chain of matter — placing them above it — in a way that any modern neuroscientist would find unintelligible. Desire is mediated by molecules, which are ultimately composed of what Lucretius calls the seeds, so desire cannot stand outside the causal chain. The panel agrees that Lucretius’s physical mechanism is outdated, but that his philosophical insight — that the future is not fully determinate and that we participate in what happens next — remains sound. Cassius reads from the Letter to Menoeceus, where Epicurus distinguishes necessity, chance, and what is in our power, explicitly preferring reasonable action in uncertainty to submission to hard destiny, and describing fate as a worse master than even traditional religion. The panel converges on the position that the experience of agency is real, the future is probabilistic rather than fixed, and Epicurean philosophy does not require endorsing a naïve theory of uncaused free will.
The discussion touches on the natural and necessary desires framework and its relationship to praise and blame, with Charles’s late-night opera viewing (he stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Artaxerci) serving as a running example of how Epicureans evaluate choices. The closing passages of the Lucretius text — a poetic interlude comparing the invisible motion of atoms to an army on a distant plain that appears as a stationary glittering mass — are noted as a transition device before Lucretius pivots to the shapes and forms of atoms. Martin closes by observing that Lucretius is again working with a factually wrong physical model in service of a philosophical truth that stands on its own: the experience of agency is real, and the future is not determinate.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 25 of Lucretius Today. 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 Norman DeWitt. Before we start, here are our three ground rules. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it, which may or may not be the same as what you hear about Epicurus at other places today. Second, we aren’t talking about Lucretius with the goal of promoting any modern political perspective. Epicurus must be understood on his own, and not in terms of competing schools which may seem similar to Epicurus but are fundamentally different and incompatible, such as Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Atheism, or Marxism. Third, the essential base of Epicurean philosophy is a fundamental view of the nature of the universe. When you read the words of Lucretius, you’ll find that Epicurus did not teach the pursuit of virtue, or luxury, or simple living as ends in themselves, but rather he taught the pursuit of pleasure. From this perspective, it is feeling which is the guide of life, and not supernatural gods, idealism, or virtue ethics. And as important as anything else, Epicurus taught that there is no life after death, and that any happiness we’ll ever have must come in this life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion. Now let’s join today’s discussion with Martin reading the text from Book Two.
Martin: Besides, if all motion of the seeds be uniform and in a straight line, did one succeed another in an exact and regular order? Did not the seeds by their declining occasion certain motions, as a sort of principle, to break the bonds of fate and prevent a necessity of acting, and exclude a fixed and eternal succession of causes which destroy all liberty? Whence comes that free will? Whence comes it, I say, so sensibly observed in all creatures of the world, who act as they please, wholly rescued from the power of fate? And is that will, by which we are moved which way soever our inclination leads us, by which we likewise forbear to move, not at any particular time nor at any certain place, but when and where our mind pleases? And without doubt the will is a principle that determines these motions, and from whence all motion is conveyed to the limbs. Don’t you observe, when the barriers of the lists are thrown open of a sudden, the eager desire of the horses cannot start to the race with that celerity as their mind requires, because the spirits or particles of matter that maintain the course must be got together from all parts of the body and start through every limb and fitly united, that they may readily follow the eager desire of the mind? You see, then, the beginning of motion rises in the heart, proceeds then by means of the will, and is then diffused through every limb over the whole body. But the case is otherwise when we act as we are compelled by force, by the prevailing power and the great violence of another, for then we feel plainly that the whole weight of our body moves and is urged on against our consent, till our will restrains the motion through all our limbs. Don’t you see now that, though an outward force drives us on and often compels us to proceed against our will and hurries us headlong, yet there is something in the heart that resists and strives against that compulsion, at whose commands the spirits or particles of matter are forced through the nerves into the several limbs and members, and are curbed likewise by the same nerves and obliged to retire backwards? Therefore you must needs confess there is something else besides stroke and weight which is the cause of those motions, from whence this innate power of our will proceeds. We see nothing can arise from nothing, for weight, which is natural to bodies, hinders us to conclude that all things are moved by stroke or outward force, unless the mind should seem to act by some necessary impulse within itself. This is by motion that proceeds from weight, and overpowered we are compelled, as it were, to bear and suffer. This is occasioned by ever so little a declination of the seeds, which however is done at no certain or determinate time or place. Nor was the mass of matter ever more close or more loose, nor did the number of seeds ever increase or diminish; and therefore the same cause in which the seeds move now, the same motion they had for the time past, and they will be carried on hereafter in the very same manner. And the things that have been hitherto produced shall be formed again in the same way; they shall come into being, grow, and arrive at perfection, as far as the laws of their respective natures will admit. For this universe of things no force can change. Neither is there any place into which the least particle of matter may fly off from the whole mass, nor is there a place from whence any new seeds may break in upon this all and change the nature of things and disorder their motion. There is nothing wonderful in this, that when all the principles of things are in continual motion the whole should at the same time seem to be at perfect rest, though every particular body has a sort of motion peculiar to itself. For the nature of first seeds is so subtle that they lie far beyond the reach of our senses. And therefore, since you cannot perceive them by the eye, their motions are much less to be discerned — especially as we observe many things are discovered to us by our sight whose motions we cannot perceive, by being placed at a remote distance from us. For often the woolly flock upon a hill wander about and crop the tender grass wherever the sweet herbs, crowned with pearly dew, invite. The lambs, their bellies full, wantonly play and try their tender horns. All this to us, standing far off, appears confused, and like a steady brightness spread over the green. And thus a mighty army fills a plain, and moves about, and acts arrayed. The horse scour over the field and wheel at once, and in the center charge, and shake the ground with mighty force. The blaze of arms darts up to heaven. All the earth around glitters with brazen shields and groans beneath the feet of men engaged. The neighboring hills, struck with a noise, rebound to the skies. Yet place yourself upon a mountain top to view this wild confusion, and you’d think it was a fixed and steady light that filled the plain.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Last week we discussed the swerve in terms of how it leads to the formation of matter when atoms swerve into each other, and this week we’re talking about the impact of the swerve on what people generally call free will. There’s a lot in these sections. Anybody want to start?
Elaine: Yeah, you know, this is really difficult because, to me, in this section Epicurus did not have access to some information that we have now. He didn’t know about neurotransmitters and how the brain works, and so he has excluded decision-making and desire from the causal chain in a way that scientists now would not do. So if somebody takes this as the Epicureans today saying this is exactly how it happens, they would be right to ridicule us. But this is not, at least for me as an Epicurean, a good description of agency that can be supported by physics. So if you’re listening to this and you’re a scientist, don’t let this dissuade you, because it doesn’t bother me to have a more modern understanding of agency along with our knowledge about indeterminacy. I don’t think there’s really a conflict here, but it looks like it if you read this literally.
Cassius: Elaine, before we go too much further, maybe we should back up for just a second and keep in context what we know from the Letter to Menoeceus — Epicurus’s direct statement on agency — because I have that in front of me and maybe it would help to read that. Because he’s talking about several different things. I see I’m reading, I think, from the Bailey edition. He’s talking about the wise man: “the wise man understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain. He laughs at destiny, whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things.” So destiny in the common way of discussing it is one of the things that Epicurus was addressing. And in the next sentence he says the wise man “thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity and some by chance, and some are within our control. For while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame.” The reason I wanted to read that is that Epicurus’s ultimate position is clearly that some things do happen by necessity, and so there are so many different controversies involved in determinism and free will. I’m saying all that to agree with what you’re saying, Elaine, that Epicurus is not taking a radical free will position as some people might define it. Epicurean philosophy has a lot of necessity within it, as well as parts that are not necessity. In fact, I remember in the Letter to Herodotus there’s a discussion of how, from the formation of the universe, many things have occurred by necessity because of the initial motions of the atoms and so forth. Now I don’t know if that addresses exactly what you were talking about, Elaine, but I agree with you that somebody listening to this podcast, or reading this, or just thinking about Epicurus’s position on free will or agency — if they’re really into the different theories of determinism, you’ve got to be careful to unpack it all and not be too quick to categorize exactly where he’s going.
Cassius: Okay, yes — you being the doctor are definitely going to want to talk about that.
Elaine: Yeah, so I mean, anybody who has looked at modern neuroscience knows that desire to do something is mediated by molecules, which are composed ultimately of what he calls the seeds. So the modern concept of free will is different from agency, and it is all tied in with Christian supernaturalism and other types of, you know, “ghosts in the machine” kinds of things — that there’s some other kind of stuff, soul stuff, self stuff, whatever you want to call it, that’s directing these molecules to do what they do. But we don’t believe that there’s soul stuff or self stuff or mind stuff that is non-material. So all of these actions have to take place through interactions of matter and energy — there’s nothing besides that telling these particles what to do. And obviously desire happens: it comes about through actions of matter, so it’s not separate from the causal chain. That would be absolutely ridiculous to anybody studying neuroscience, and that would cause them to laugh at us and possibly discard the philosophy, which I don’t want them to do. So I think the Letter to Menoeceus is more along the lines of what we would support than what Lucretius has just said. But I wouldn’t let that make a biologist, a neuroscientist, or anybody who knows about those things say “this is the dumb defeat” — I wouldn’t go there. Because there is the experience of agency, and there’s also, as we’ve already discussed, the fact that the future is indeterminate. So I just think it’s quibbly to get caught up in whether this is a literal description of how things are. He makes out as if somehow our desire is a separate thing that’s not mediated by matter, and it’s not.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here. In my own mind I’m continuing to agree with you, Elaine, by what I’m about to say. I realize as I’m looking at the letter here from Epicurus that I sort of stopped in the middle of reading the important part. Because after the part that I read, the next thing says: “For indeed it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers, for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation.” And then he says: “As to chance, he does not regard it as a god as most men do, for in a god’s act there is no disorder; nor as an uncertain cause of all things, for he does not believe that good and evil are given by chance to man for the framing of a blessed life, but that opportunities for great good and great evil are afforded by it.” And then last, he says: “He therefore thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason.” All of which I’ve read again to say that I think Epicurus comes at this from a very practical point of view. If somebody gets caught up in theories of hard determinism, to me it’s very easy to fall down into the abyss of thinking that nothing matters — because whatever’s going to happen is going to happen and therefore there’s no reason for us to take any action in our own lives, no reason for us to discipline our minds, to work on a particular project in any particular direction, because we have no control over our destiny. So why even make the effort? And I know that’s a very simplistic argument and I know that people who are into philosophy are going to say, “Well that doesn’t address anything we’re really talking about.” But I think that’s what common, ordinary people — and I consider myself very common and very ordinary — those are the things I think go through people’s minds if they get introduced to the subject of materialism or determinism and they don’t have somebody like Epicurus attempting to give a reasonable presentation of it. They’ll just immediately recoil and say, “My mind is made of more than matter and void, because here I can think, I can make my own decisions, so you’re just full of bull.” And that’s not where Epicurus is going with all this. He is attempting — in my experience, he is addressing the greater danger, which is not that you think you have… You know, there are certainly people who think they can jump off a cliff and fly, and they’re crazy and they’re going to get killed because of it. But the greater danger — I don’t run into too many people who try to jump off their houses. What I do run into are people who think that everything is out of their control and everything is a subject of fate, that God has ordained that they’re going to be miserable for the whole rest of their lives. And to me that is the bigger problem and more common issue that has to be addressed. And I’ve said too much. Charles and Martin, what do you guys think?
Charles: Well, I forget the exact source of this, but I read that it was quite clear that part of the whole issue of why Epicurus believed in the sort of presence of free will, or the ability to influence our own causal chains, was so that we could have moral accountability for our actions.
Cassius: Now I don’t know about that, Charles. I know that there are people who are very concerned about the issue of moral accountability. In my early conversations with people about Epicurus, I know that there are people who are very interested in the whole issues of crime and punishment, and whether we should ever punish or hold somebody accountable for their actions or not. And that’s certainly a part of what we’re talking about. I don’t know that that’s the motivating force from which Epicurus comes. But Elaine, you want to say something? Go ahead.
Elaine: Yeah, that wording “accountability” makes it sound like there’s something other than pleasure that is our goal. I wouldn’t quite say that. But it can get interpreted in terms of pleasure — like, is what you’re doing working or not? That’s the most I can say about accountability.
Charles: I forget where the exact source was. I don’t think it was DeWitt, but it was more about justice, given the last ten of the Principal Doctrines, and so forth — that clearly is a huge issue.
Cassius: I’ve got the letter again in front of me. That passage says “but that which is in our control is subject to no master and to it are naturally attached praise and blame.” And you could certainly carve that out, and we could spend a lot of time talking about what praise and blame really means, and whether we act on praise and blame. And, like I said, issues of crime and punishment and justice and so forth are directly all related, and it’s a very emotional issue. It leads many people to take a position consistent with determinism, because whether they’re looking at themselves and their actions or looking at other people, you have all these issues involved of how to actually make decisions regarding whether somebody’s responsible for their actions or not.
Elaine: It’s like — I want to get back to the issues of agency before we get too far away from it.
Cassius: Yes, yeah, right, because I would be hesitant to say that we should be promoting a particular perspective on reality for another purpose — like that we would say, “Well, we want to say reality is this way because of another goal.” That would be pretty anti-science.
Elaine: I completely agree. Absolutely anti-honesty, anti-candor — all the things that Epicurus is supposedly into. And the reason that Epicurus was in favor of accuracy is that you cannot make accurate decisions for pleasure unless you are getting an accurate view of reality. So I want to make that clear. If you were to distort your understanding of neuroscience in order to support some other piece of this, then you’re losing access to factual information that could mess up your skill at getting pleasure for yourself, because you’re not working with what’s actually happening. So I would caution against that. But in fact, agency — obviously our desires occur because of matter interacting with matter, so it’s not some other thing going on. But we are participating in the creation of what happens next. The future is a participatory event. So to me it doesn’t really matter that particles which have been interacting with each other since I was conceived have produced my desire — there’s nothing outside of those particles which has resulted in my desire. That doesn’t mean that I am not, as a person, participating in what happens in the future, and that some god has not predetermined it.
Cassius: Martin, any comment on that?
Martin: No, no, no comment.
Cassius: Okay. All right. I’m agreeing with you, Elaine, too. I think agency is the initially important issue we have to delve into, and I don’t think there’s any way that Epicurus can be interpreted as arguing that we are just totally in control of everything that happens to us. I would relate it to the initial observation about pleasure and pain — he observes that pleasure and pain are what all young animals respond to immediately at birth. They obviously don’t have necessarily any control over what it is they find pleasurable and painful; they’re being led by nature in very basic ways to pursue certain types of pleasure and avoid certain types of pain. And they’re not responsible for being born the way they are. So there’s clearly an agency that comes into play at times, but we obviously don’t make ourselves from scratch.
Elaine: Well, even further — agency still happens. Agency is part of the causal chain. Agency is not separate from the causal chain, but the causal chain is not determinate.
Cassius: Will you say not fully determinate, or not in any way determinate?
Elaine: No, it’s probabilistic. That’s a good way of putting it. So, you know, using those words can trick somebody who doesn’t know anything about physics, but agency is not some special thing that happens outside of particle action. It’s not less determinate or more determinate than anything else, but it is still an active participation in what happens next.
Cassius: Before we go on — we’re almost halfway through today’s podcast — maybe we should look at specific sections of the text that we’re looking at today. Starting with what we have sort of set out as the first paragraph: from the beginning of what Martin read to him making the example of how motion rises in the heart, proceeds by means of the will, and is diffused through every limb of the body. So basically in that first passage he is just saying that there is some feature of will — and at least I guess his example is horses, implicitly talking about humans as well — but he’s saying, look at the way horses or any other living being like us is going to move: we make a decision to move and then the motion follows.
Elaine: Yeah, the part where he’s not distinguishing between molecular action and our action as an organism — so if you’re just talking about our action as an organism, we’re clearly not billiard balls getting knocked about by external forces. But within us we have this basically billiard ball dynamic. So he’s not making that clear, and that’s the part that’s going to bother people. But if you just take it as that we’re not like a table that can be moved here or there, that our desires are participating in the results — then that’s fine.
Cassius: And that’s kind of what he addresses in the next section that I’m looking at. He does start talking almost about billiard balls in terms of outward forces — he’s talking about that even when there are outward forces driving us on, we have the capacity to resist those outward forces. And that resistance apparently comes at the command of the mind. If you look at somebody who’s being pushed along against their will — if they resist at all, you’re still seeing an example of the mind acting against outside influences.
Elaine: Yeah, so when we would say maybe “internal particles belonging to the body opposing particles not belonging to the body” — perhaps, but all still matter.
Cassius: He’s describing a form of autonomy. Yeah. I see he includes in one of these sections: “We see nothing can arise from nothing, for weight which is natural to bodies hinders us to conclude that all things are moved by stroke or outward force” — then he ends by saying “this is occasioned by ever so little a declination of the seeds, which however is done at no certain or determinate time or place.” Again he’s not really explaining how the mechanism works. And in fact I want to repeat in today’s episode as well that I think a good article to read for somebody who is wanting to read more into the subject would be David Sedley’s “Epicurus’ Refutation of Determinism.” The reason that came to mind there is that I remember the sort of quip that David Sedley makes — that by citing the swerve of the atoms, he says that might explain why somebody is quirky, but it doesn’t necessarily mean why they have free will.
Cassius: And then the last paragraph goes off into discussing, or making an analogy with, how we observe a flock of sheep on a distant mountain appearing to be a single motionless body. What do you make of that paragraph?
Charles: Is that a horse or a cavalry — I’m wondering from the classical context. But I can’t really tie those two subjects together like that. It was a bit unclear, so maybe the translations will help.
Elaine: What he’s just saying is that when talking about things that are invisible, we observe an effect that doesn’t show us the particular action. So he’s giving an example of things that from far away don’t show us what the elements are that are producing the effect we see from a distance.
Cassius: Right. I was looking to see if we could tell anything about where he’s going. It’s almost like he’s about to change the subject by talking about the flock at a distance. It’s kind of one of those little poetic interludes.
Elaine: It’s connected, you know, but it’s a chance to focus on the poetry, I guess.
Cassius: It feels like there’s more to it. I haven’t read past this section in the Daniel Brown version, but… Yeah, I was looking at what comes next, and I believe he just turns the discussion to the shapes and forms of the atoms. He dramatically switches after that. So maybe that’s exactly what Elaine said — it’s a poetic interlude, and he’s about to dramatically switch the subject to talking about the nature of the atoms and their figures.
Elaine: Yeah, I mean, he’s made this point before about the seeds’ action — that we can’t see it. So it’s not really a new point; he just made it again.
Cassius: Right. It was an unusual section today. Okay, at risk of — I could cut this out if it doesn’t work — but here’s an example. Charles is obviously sleepy this morning. Charles didn’t get much sleep last night. Sleep is a natural requirement of humans. It’s not like Charles had the agency or the free will to just ignore the fact that he needed sleep last night. If you don’t get sleep, you get sleepy. And is that something to praise or blame Charles for, that he has a tendency to get sleepy at times?
Charles: No — it was through sheer free will. I decided not to sleep when it was already 3 a.m.
Elaine: I would say — as Epicureans would discuss with him — whether he had taken actions that were for his pleasure, whether he was a wise man, and if he got the pleasure he wanted from actions that he could have agency over, then those decisions were wise. It’s not a praise-or-blame thing; it’s an “is this working, is this not working” kind of thing.
Charles: I was watching my favorite opera. Maybe it was worth it. Artaxerci.
Cassius: I have no clue what Artaxerci is, so I can’t continue that line of thought there. But one point I do want to make before going further is that I think humor and an understanding of the enjoyment of discussion and so forth is a requirement of being an Epicurean. I can’t imagine an Epicurean who is not appreciative of humor and good nature. So I appreciate Charles taking my comments in that spirit. In fact, there’s a comment — I believe in Cicero’s On Ends — about somebody saying something with a smile.
Charles: As well as just the wit and sarcasm of Lucian.
Cassius: Yes, yes, yes. Or Democritus — isn’t he known as the laughing philosopher?
Charles: Yeah, he is.
Cassius: And not laughing necessarily in a sarcastic sense. Every time you read an article about what Epicurean pleasure means, you start reading things like, “Well, this is pleasure — what if everything is pleasure or pain? That means he took the position that you can just be basically sitting there contemplating your navel, and as long as you’re not in pain you’re having pleasure.” And some people will say, “Well, that just shows what a sunny disposition Epicurus had, because he could find pleasure in anything.” Which I don’t think is necessarily the right way to look at it. But to some extent it’s true that if almost anything you’re doing is not painful, then it’s going to be pleasurable. That’s a far divergent danger from where we ought to be right now, probably, because I just hesitate to wrestle with all the details of determinism and the arguments that people get caught up in, because that is a very emotional topic. You can certainly just dive into that hole and never come out of it again — which takes me back to Martin.
Martin: Yes, I’m here. I’m listening. He’s tired, like I am — well, actually I’m quite okay.
Martin: Yeah, it’s an interesting subject that kind of goes off… Maybe it’s like the issue of knowledge and dogmatism and so forth — it can seem to be something that ought to be put off to the side, and probably can be put off to the side, maybe, except for those people who are currently trapped or currently in a rut of being concerned about something like this.
Cassius: Like I said earlier, I kind of associate it in my mind with a sort of nihilism where you just become despairing and you’re really off in an unproductive area when you get too caught up in thinking that there’s nothing you can do with your life.
Cassius: It seems to be a growing trend. To feel despair, Charles?
Charles: I would just say nihilism, and to a lesser extent absurdism as well.
Cassius: It would be unrealistic not to comment that we are in very strange times right now in June of 2020, with all sorts of cross-currents in society going on, and it could probably be very tempting to get into a deterministic mindset where you feel like events are just totally out of your control. Of course, those who are into religion will go into the refuge of thinking that God’s in control, and all of the different theology involved in deterministic viewpoints of fate. We haven’t really used the terms fate and destiny or providence today much, but that’s a large part, I think, of what the practical effect of all this is.
Elaine: And I mean those words imply not just physics hard determinism, but actually some kind of entity who’s made up a narrative about your life and plans to play out that narrative. It’s very different from necessity.
Cassius: All right. With Epicurus saying that you’re better off being in religion than you are in hard necessity — I guess that means that he had people in his sphere, or people who were prominent at his time, who were in fact arguing a very hard necessity viewpoint of life. I think he calls them the natural philosophers, or physical philosophers, or something like that.
Charles: The physicists? Doesn’t he — or is it Timocrates — have a book against them?
Cassius: Yes, we’ve discussed that once or twice — there’s an “Against the Physicists.” Well, I personally relate this in my mind to some of the discussions of Epicurean views on theology or religion. I have to take the position myself that I think Epicurus was devoted to being honest and absolutely saying exactly what he thought, and that’s why therefore even if I disagree with his conclusions on theology, I’m still going to take seriously what he said. And I think I apply that to this as well. I have this sense that someone who gets enthralled by hard determinism — I see that as a very dangerous direction to go in, worthy of all sorts of warnings and encouragement not to go in that direction, almost as much or maybe even more so than religion. I mean, that’s almost explicitly what he’s saying in the Letter to Menoeceus — that this idea that you have no control over your future is worse than many types of religions.
Cassius: In fact, I think that’s also in the Letter to Menoeceus earlier on. You know what I’m talking about, Charles — he’s saying: “We must then bear in mind that the future is neither ours nor yet wholly not ours, so that we may not altogether expect it as sure to come, nor abandon hope of it as if it will certainly not come.” I think Elaine was talking about that earlier in the discussion. And then this relates also to that sort of well-known passage where Epicurus refused to state whether Metrodorus would be alive or dead tomorrow. If you remember — he’s apparently responding against determinism there by saying that you don’t have the type of destiny that would allow you to absolutely answer that question. That’s a deep subject that I’m not prepared to give anything particularly enlightening on, but it’s certainly part of the text that he said that and was fighting back against some type of argument involving necessity or fate or determinism.
Martin: But it goes beyond that, because it’s also something about logic. He saw this also as something like a refutation of the law of excluded middle applied to the future.
Cassius: Yes, I agree, Martin. I don’t know whether this is at all correct, but what comes to my mind there is that it’s almost like he’s saying: you cannot use words to create a prediction or a necessity about the future. You’re not God. Just by framing a logical construct, you’re not in reality creating something that causes an effect in reality. Maybe that’s the direction — I don’t know what all the different logical aspects of that argument are, but yes, that’s I think directly related to what we’re talking about. And of course I’m looking still at the letter, and the next sentence after the part about the future being neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours: “We must consider that of the desires some are natural and others vain.” Well, what is a natural desire other than something that’s sort of implanted in us as part of our nature? We didn’t dream up those desires ourselves. And so therefore we’re not wholly responsible for them being there. We may be praised or blamed according to whether we engage in them or not, but it’s certainly — if there’s a natural desire, it’s not something we just made up on our own.
Charles: That’s a whole other discussion, though. Oh man — I remember quite a few months ago on the Discord, a lot of extrapolation on what constitutes natural and unnatural. Very difficult to do.
Cassius: But just the idea that there are natural desires, I think, is a statement that these desires are implanted within us and not because we chose them to be. Charles is not to be praised or blamed because he gets sleepy — that’s natural.
Elaine: Might not have been very prudent, but —
Cassius: Right, that was my point. Decisions lead to whether you’re sleepy or not sleepy at certain times — within the constraints of biology. I mean, we don’t have control over whether we need a certain amount of sleep, but we can have some control over our schedule. And sometimes those choices are made for pleasure, like watching an opera. So it’s not for somebody outside of you to make a decision on whether that was wise.
Elaine: Right. Yeah, I’d say it was a night well spent.
Charles: Yeah, then that’s the wise person’s choice.
Cassius: I don’t think we want to get into an orgy of libertarianism here, but who gets to make that decision for you, Charles, other than yourself? Who knows your context better than you do? For all you know, you may have reason to think you’re going to be dead later today, and you may have wanted to spend your time in the most pleasant way you possibly could within the time you had available to you. It’s very difficult or impossible for somebody from the outside to know all of your circumstances. And what gives them the right to make that decision for you? As we continue our orgy of libertarianism…
Cassius: Well, we’ve probably gone far enough that we are ready to talk about closing comments — unless somebody wants to bring up another tangent.
Charles: Well, I guess one thing I’ve always had an issue with — when it comes to the three different types of desires — I’ve never quite understood why some of them are to be avoided if pleasure itself is good. Can you give an example?
Cassius: Well, there’s plenty of literature to support why they’re not “good” — the unnatural and unnecessary desires.
Charles: Oh, that’s a whole separate — exactly. It is a very different subject. Okay, so we have time, I guess. Yes.
Elaine: So my understanding of what he means by “unnatural” — it really looks like he talks about futile things, things that are impossible to have. So it’s desire for unreal things. A house made of gold — well, you could have a house made of gold, but it’s a desire for things that are not actually real, like limitless power — abstractions that don’t have a material basis where you can never satisfy yourself, because those things don’t exist. So if you get mired in desires like that, it makes no sense, because you can never achieve them and therefore you never have satiety, you never have the pleasure of attaining those things. Today we’ve gotten caught in a different meaning of “natural” and “unnatural,” where people are using those passages to mean “man-made” and “not man-made” — that is not what he meant. He meant “actually existing” or “not a thing.” And then “necessary for happiness” — we have talked about that before on this podcast. If you don’t need it for happiness, then there’s no reason to pursue it, whereas no matter what it is, if it’s a real existing thing and you can’t have pleasure without it, then you’d better pursue it. It doesn’t mean that there’s a preset particular thing to desire that will always bring a given individual pleasure or not pleasure.
Cassius: Yeah, I can agree with that, because you also have to remember the major context is that pleasure is pleasure. Pleasure is desirable. The natural/unnatural and necessary/unnecessary does not override the initial premise that if a thing is pleasurable it is pleasurable. So to me at least, the natural/unnatural/necessary/unnecessary analysis is your thumbnail rule that generally applies in estimating what’s going to happen as a result of your actions. But that doesn’t overturn the original point that pleasure is pleasure, no matter how despicable you might be in the way you’re achieving it — it’s still pleasurable; it’s just that your actions are going to have consequences that have to be considered. Again, I always go back to the On Ends version of the natural/unnatural discussion, because that’s where Cicero or Torquatus says that the principle of the organization is that those things which are unnatural and unnecessary are harder to achieve. And we got on that discussion because Charles brought it up as a footnote.
Charles: Yeah, to relate it to our discussion today as we begin to close — well, maybe it’s just the issue of natural and unnatural, and necessary and unnecessary. To some extent those are issues that are not originally within our control either.
Cassius: Yeah, because there’s agency involved in choosing them. The praise or blame may come in terms of how successful we are in achieving them. But again, if you talk about praise and blame — that’s Principal Doctrine number ten — no matter how despicable we might think the person is who engages in a course of conduct, if he ends up being successful in achieving the pleasure he’s after, we really have no reason to criticize him. And some of my favorites — all right, let’s go ahead and talk about closing comments for today.
Martin: Yeah, let me start then. So we again have a case where what Lucretius describes here is a model which is wrong — factually wrong — but what he wants to show with it is really a truth of the philosophy.
Cassius: It’s certainly a truth of human experience — which would almost start me back on the tangent of discussing what’s real and unreal and the whole issue of the canon of truth. Our experience, the things that are real to us, are the reality we live in, and that’s what we have to deal with. And at least the appearance of agency over certain things appears to be a reality to us.
Elaine: I will say: the experience of agency is real. And because subjective experience is the way that we interact with reality, it’s entirely valid. And the future is not determinate, and we are participating in what happens next.
Cassius: Charles?
Charles: I got nothing.
Cassius: Okay. Well, we’ll let the audience today assign praise or blame for our choices in discussing this. I think it’s good for us not to get overly bogged down in this particular discussion. We’ll move on next week just as Lucretius does to another aspect of how the atoms operate. Because we have so many more practical issues of life and death and existence after death and so forth that we’re going to be dealing with as part of Book Two. That’s where we’re going next, or soon anyway. So what’s our progress in Book Two? Are we towards the early middle?
Elaine: We’re still — we have not reached the halfway point yet.
Cassius: Okay, we have a long way to go. But we’ll get there. Well, okay, anybody have anything else for today? Otherwise we will come back next week. Hearing nothing —
Charles: Oh — no Robert’s Rules?
Cassius: No Robert’s Rules of Order are one of the most disgusting things. They are intended to do nothing other than suppress people or suppress thought. Some of the most infuriating times in my life have been listening to people talk about Robert’s Rules of Order.
Elaine: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to hear somebody else say that.
Cassius: I suppose it’s necessary to have a procedure, and I’m sure that it has the best of intentions, but oh my gosh — the way people exercise them is just as infuriating as anything in life.
Charles: When I was a page in the House, I did attend a few committees, and one of them — the Republicans were talking about a teacher re-licensure bill. Man, I was more tired than I am now, and we had to go through a mock committee with the rules of order. If you want an example of how infuriating and how anti-life it can be to pursue rules for the sake of rules, Robert’s Rules of Order might be near the top of my list as something that just shows you that anybody who is such a stickler for rules that they are never going to deviate from the rules without any reference to the purpose of the rules or what you’re trying to accomplish — oh my gosh.
Cassius: Yes. We might have to adopt that in terms of Epicurean philosophy as one of the modern examples of how to illustrate how rule-ism — or idealism for the sake of idealism — is just absolutely something you cannot live with. Amen. Okay, that’s probably a good place to stop. So we will talk next week again.
All: Goodbye. Bye. Thanks. Bye.