Episode 035 - More Reasons Why Atoms Cannot Possess The Faculty of Sense
Date: 09/13/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1676-episode-thirty-five-more-reasons-why-the-atoms-cannot-possess-the-faculty-of-sen/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”In this three-person episode (Cassius, Charles, and Martin; Elaine absent), the group works through Lucretius’s remaining arguments in Book Two against the theory that atoms themselves possess sensation. Charles reads the first portion of text, covering three interlocking arguments: that blows which disrupt vital motion and then allow recovery show the seeds are not themselves sentient; that seeds could not themselves perform all the actions — laughing, crying, reasoning — displayed by the beings they compose; and that the existence of wise and foolish beings alike shows there can be no such thing as a “wise seed” or “foolish seed,” so there is equally no barrier to accepting that sensible beings arise from seeds entirely without sense. Cassius then reads the closing portion, in which Lucretius extends the letters-and-words analogy from Book One and ends with a remarkable passage urging the reader not to recoil from new ideas but to examine them with piercing judgment — embracing what proves true and fighting what proves false. The group compares Monroe and Bailey translations for the pivotal “return from the gates of death” sentence, and Martin connects the eternal persistence of seeds to modern conservation-of-particle-number laws.
Discussion then turns to related topics: the connection between Lucretius’s argument and Anaxagoras’s theory of homoiomery (that seeds are miniature versions of the things they compose), which Lucretius had already attacked in Book One; the “smooth motion” language associated with Epicurean pleasure, traced through Usener fragments 411 (Plutarch, Against Colotes) and 604 (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations); and the logical point that organisms visibly change — laughing at one moment, grieving at another — which rules out any fixed “laughing seed” or “weeping seed” and is best explained by rearrangement of entirely insensate atoms. Charles offers a careful reading of the final summary sentence, noting that seeds with fixed sensory qualities would be inflexible, incapable of the variation and recovery we observe.
The closing segment addresses the word “dogmatism” as applied to Epicurus. Martin explains that the negative modern connotation distorts a technical philosophical distinction: Epicurus held that certain things are knowable and staked confident positions on them, but he simultaneously demanded that every reader examine claims with a piercing judgment rather than accept them on authority. The group contrasts this with what Charles identifies as a growing online trend toward radical epistemic skepticism, and Cassius connects the issue to DeWitt’s observation that the Epicurean response to human fallibility is neither omniscience-seeking nor collapse into radical skepticism, but a principled middle path. The episode closes with the note that one more session remains before Book Two is complete and the group moves to Book Three, which addresses the mortality of the soul.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 35 of the Lucretius Today Podcast. 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. Now let’s join the discussion with Charles reading today’s text.
Charles: Besides a blow falling upon any animal heavier than its nature can endure, immediately torments it and confounds all its senses, both of body and mind, for the connection of the seeds is dissolved and the vital motions are wholly obstructed, till the force of the blow being agitated violently through the limbs dissolves the vital ties of the souls from the body and compels their scattered and broken to pieces to fly out through every pore. For what can we conceive to be the effect of such a stroke but to separate and dissolve the seeds that were united before? And then it happens, when the blow falls with less violence, that the remains of vital motion often get better. They recover and calm the greatest orders of the blow and recall everything again into its proper channel. They rescue the body, as it were, from the jaws of death and give new life to the senses that were almost destroyed. Else, why should creatures rather return to life from the very gates of death with new spirits than when they were just entering in, proceed on and utterly perish?
Further, since we feel pain when the seeds are shaking from their natural state and situation within, and are disordered through all the bowels and limbs by any outward force, and when they return again into their proper place, a quiet pleasure immediately succeeds. You may conclude that simple seeds cannot be tormented with pain nor of themselves be affected with pleasure, because they do not consist of principles or other seeds by whose violent motions they may be disturbed, or be delighted with any pleasure they can give, and therefore they cannot possibly be endured with any sense at all.
Again, if in order to produce creatures of sense, sense must be imputed to the seeds from which they are formed, of what principles I pray is a human race properly composed? Of such, no doubt, as laugh and shake their little sides, such as bedew their face and cheeks with flowing tears, such as can wisely talk how things are mixed, and such as search of what first principles themselves are formed. For all things that enjoy the faculties of perfect animals must consist of other seeds like them, and these must arise from others, and thus the progression would be infinite.
I urge further, whatever you observe to speak, to laugh, to be wise, must proceed from other seeds that can perform the same. But if this be ridiculous and downright madness, and things that can laugh can spring from seeds that never smile, and the wisely learned dispute are produced from foolish seeds and stupid — what hinders that sensible things may not as well be formed from seeds without any matter of sense at all?
Cassius: Thank you, Charles, and I’ll read the rest of the passage for today.
Lastly, we all spring from ethereal seed. We have all one common parent — when the kinder earth our mother receives the quickening drops of moisture from above, she conceives us and brings forth shining fruits and pleasant trees, the human race, and all the race of beasts. She yields them proper food on which they feed, and lead a pleasant life, and propagate their kind. And therefore has she justly gained the name of mother. The parts that first from earth arose return to earth again. What descended from the sky, those parts brought back again that heavens receive. Nor does death so put an end to beings as to destroy the very seeds of them, but only disunites them, then makes new combinations, and is the cause that all things vary their forms and change their colors, become sensible, and in a moment lose all their sense again.
You may know from hence of what importance it is with what the first seeds of things are united, and in what position they are contained, and what are the several motions they give and take among themselves. And from hence you may conclude that these first seeds are not the less eternal because you perceive them floating, as it were, upon the surface of bodies and subject to be born and die.
It is of light concern with what the several letters are joined in these verses of mine, and in what order each of them is disposed. For the same letters make up the words to signify the heaven, the sea, the earth, the rivers, the sun — the same express the fruits, the trees, the creatures; if they are not all, yet by much the greater part are alike, but they differ in their situation. So likewise in bodies when the intervals of the seeds, their courses, connections, weights, strokes, union, motions, order, position, figure — when these things are changed, the things themselves must be changed likewise.
Now apply your mind to the documents of true reason. For a new scheme of philosophy presses earnestly for your attention. A new scene of things displays itself before you. Yet there is nothing so obvious but may at first view seem difficult to be believed, and there is nothing so prodigious and wonderful at first that men do not by degrees cease to admire. Or see the bright and pure color of the sky, possessed on every side by wandering stars, and the moon’s splendor, and the sun’s glorious light. These, if they now first shone to mortal eyes and subtly presented to our view, what could more wonderful appear than these? And what before could men less presume to expect? Nothing truly so surprising would the sight have been — but now, quite tired and cloyed with the prospect, none of us vouchsafes so much as to cast our eyes up towards the bright temples of the sky.
Therefore, do not be frightened and conceive an aversion to an opinion because of its novelty, but search it rather with a more piercing judgment. If it appears to you to be true, embrace it. If false, set yourself against it.
Cassius: Okay, that’s the end of the text that we were going to discuss today, and we need to go back to the very beginning. But I have to comment — at the end there is something that Martin and I were just discussing before we began recording today, about how Epicurean philosophy and Epicurus himself would take what people call dogmatic positions. Epicurus took the position that knowledge is possible and certain things can be known. And if you know something, then you’re going to take a position with confidence that that thing is true. But even though Epicurus was what they call a “dogmatic” philosopher, he insisted that you question the things that come before you, and you should not allow yourself to be averted from an opinion because it’s new to you or because it’s not your current opinion. You have to search it, and with piercing judgment — and if it appears true to you, you embrace it; if it’s false, you set yourself against it. So you’re just never going to accept somebody’s word for something without challenging it if you don’t think it’s correct.
Alright, and that’s a tangent from the end of the text, but we need to go back to the beginning and start from there. So at the beginning we’re back to discussing the fact that blows and motion seem to affect sensation and affect thought.
Charles: Yeah, I was also looking at how he figured that cells regenerated. So we’re talking in that first paragraph about seeds being disrupted and then how they may in certain instances come together again.
Cassius: And that last sentence in particular is sort of a question — “else, why should creatures rather return to life from the very gates of death with new spirits than when they were just entering in, proceed on and utterly perish?” Maybe that would be easier to read in another translation.
Munro uses that sentence. Munro says: “for in what other way should the thing be able to gather together its powers of mind and come back to life from the very threshold of death rather than pass on to the goal to which it had almost run and so pass away?” And Bailey says: “for what other means could living things gather their wits and turn back to life even from the very threshold of death rather than pass on whither their race is almost run and pass away?”
So what’s the point of that whole passage — that a conscious living thing can be shaken up by an outside motion and almost die but heal itself or come back from the gates of death by the pieces coming back into their proper places?
Charles: Presumably what he’s doing with that argument is saying that that’s an indication that the pieces themselves are not conscious or sensible. They’re just a function. The sensing or the consciousness is a function of inanimate atoms.
Cassius: So it would be: further, since we feel pain when the seeds are shaken — relating it back to pleasure and pain. How the returning of the seeds to their proper place is followed by quiet pleasure. And that’s something we’ve talked about before. How there’s — whenever a pain ends — that sense of relief can be considered pleasure.
Charles: Right, and then there is the term of smooth motion that’s associated with Epicurus in certain passages. I’m not even sure where those would be, but this would presumably be an example of smooth motion being pleasurable while disordered motion, painful. I’m trying to remember where that’s from.
Cassius: I believe there is a passage in which Epicurus — the passage in which he says that he would not know the good except for the pleasures of music — and I think smooth motion is within that passage. Well, maybe it starts out another quote similarly, but the one I’m thinking of that starts with “I don’t know how I can conceive of the good” — that’s from Diogenes Laertius, was in the treatise on the end of life — he wrote, “I know not how I can conceive of the good if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight.”
Charles: Well, I did a quick Google on Epicurus and smooth motion. Maybe it’s from a different translation? From Athenaeus, the Deipnosophistae, there’s a repeat of that Diogenes Laertius quote. An alternate translation says: “as for myself I cannot conceive of the good if we exclude the pleasures derived from taste or those derived from sexual intercourse or those derived from entertainments to which we listen or those derived from the motions of a figure delightful to the eye.”
Cassius: Yeah, that’s close, it doesn’t have the word smooth in it. Well, another — looking in Usener — I use the attalus.org list of quotes. Usener 411, Charles: Plutarch, Against Colotes 27 — “no teacher is needed by themselves; these glorious, smooth and agreeable movements of the flesh, as they themselves assert, call to action even one who stoutly denies and refuses to acknowledge that he unbends and turns soft in response to them.” That’s a use of smooth motion there.
Charles: Did you say Usener 411?
Cassius: Usener 411, yes. And then Usener 604, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations Volume 2, talks about “nothing interests us except the bodily sensation of either rough or smooth.” So there’s smooth there. And perhaps there are other texts that are more clear on that.
Okay, well, the next paragraph — the last one that you read, Charles — makes the same point in a very clear way. He’s rejecting the idea that people are made of little people seeds. He’s making the point that the seeds themselves cannot talk about how things are mixed together. They can’t laugh or shake their sides or bedew their face and cheeks with tears, and they don’t ask questions about themselves. The seeds themselves do not debate their nature like we debate our nature.
Now maybe one of the more clear logical arguments there is at the end — in the third paragraph — where he says, whatever you observe to be wise, it would not be logical to say that wise people must arise from wise seeds, because we see that people can be both wise and unwise at the same time, so there’s no such thing as a wise seed and a foolish seed. And if therefore a seed can be either foolish or wise because we see people can be both, then the last sentence says — what hinders that sensible things may not be formed from seeds that have no sense at all? If you want to maintain that the seeds are foolish or wise, then why don’t you just maintain that the seeds have no wisdom at all?
Martin, thoughts so far?
Martin: It reminds me a bit of Anaxagoras’s homoiomery, which I guess a lot of Epicurean physics takes some inspiration from — or rejects.
Cassius: Or rejects Anaxagoras’s homoiomery, right?
Martin: Both.
Cassius: That’s what this is. It’s an argument that seeds can’t be little people. That’s homoiomery. Right, Charles?
Charles: Yes, it is — that we’re comprised of little people seeds because of the people. And corn is comprised of little corn seeds and trees are composed of little tree seeds or whatever. The seeds are miniature versions of the final thing. And because we are people, our constitution would be primarily those people seeds.
But I mean, Lucretius addressed this pretty early on. When you said that a few minutes ago about it being in Book One, I could not remember. But now that you bring up Anaxagoras, you’re exactly right. That’s one of the first things they kind of attacked, talking about how Anaxagoras had been wrong in suggesting that.
Cassius: Yes, because this is the second time he’s used the analogy of the seeds laughing, bedewing their faces with tears, and laughing — though in that context, in Book One, it was about laughing at other philosophers’ ideas. And here he’s just laughing at the idea in general, or maybe twisting it in a little bit different direction, saying that even if you think people are made of little seeds, obviously people must be made of different kinds of little seeds because some people are wise and some people are foolish. Well, if there can be wise seeds and foolish seeds, why can’t there just be seeds that have no sense at all?
And then at the end of that passage, he basically reaches what he is asserting to be the correct conclusion: that rather than the seeds having some special nature among themselves, what is important is how the seeds are joined together — what order and what motions and what connections they have. That’s what determines the result. And he uses the example — I think this was also in Book One — of how the same letters make up the words that describe the stars, the sky, the earth, the sea, the rivers, the sun — and those are very different things, but the same letters are used to describe them.
Charles: The letters analogy, I believe, was towards the end of Book One. I remember Lucretius was saying that you could take his words but change the verse and it’ll be the same — it was about the combination. I think we used letters as the example. I guess they both work. That would be maybe an analogy between atoms and molecules, or whatever — that the letters are the primary thing, but you can also take words and put the words in different order and create much different results. You don’t have to just worry about rearranging the letters. You can form words and just rearrange the words.
Cassius: The next part is interesting — how he talks about how death doesn’t destroy the seeds but disunites them. A little bit of a conservation of energy.
Martin: Actually, it’s a conservation of particle number. There are different laws of conservation for different types of particles. The seeds do not get destroyed by death — conservation of particle number. The number of leptons is preserved. But this has a twist — because if you create one and the antiparticle as well, then the number is also preserved because the antiparticles count negatively. And that just doesn’t exist in Epicurus’s philosophy at that time.
Charles: I actually haven’t heard of these different laws of conservation. You’ve got a Wikipedia article you’re looking at. What’s the title of the page?
Martin: “Conservation law” — and I also have a Stack Exchange forum open on physics.
Cassius: Well, why don’t we go on, Charles, unless you have more to say on that?
Charles: I think the last sentence is a good final statement on how the seeds don’t have sensation themselves. I’ll repeat it: “So likewise in bodies, when the intervals of the seeds, their courses, connections, weights, strokes, union, motions, order, position, figure — when these things are changed, the things themselves must be changed likewise.”
So if we were to work with the assumption that the seeds themselves have sensation attached to them, this would not be a consistent position. Like, in the first paragraph, when the seeds give out when there’s more weight applied to them — they wouldn’t be able to regenerate after nearly dying or being injured. If the seeds themselves just had these qualities fixed to them, they would not have that flexibility.
It’s a bit of an odd concept to juggle, but because in the third paragraph the theory that seeds possess sensation would require us to posit that seeds with sensation have uniform qualities of their own — the seeds that can laugh would not come from seeds that never smile, and the wisely learned are produced from foolish seeds, he says. And then likewise — “when these things are changed, the things themselves must be changed likewise.” If the seeds themselves had fixed sensation, they would be completely uniform and inflexible, which would also mean they cannot regenerate as stated in the first paragraph. And we also know this because our muscle tissue regenerates and strengthens.
Cassius: So what you’re saying to some degree is that what we do see in the world around us is that people and living things do vary over time — sometimes they’re crying, sometimes they’re laughing, sometimes they’re not doing either one. And so if they were made of seeds of only one kind, they wouldn’t have that flexibility to change both emotionally and physiologically. And the starting point of the analysis is our observation — we know from daily experience that people are changeable, so we have to account for that.
Charles: Yes, and the method of accounting for it — we could try to come up with a theory in which there are little seeds that are laughing and crying and thinking about themselves, all simultaneously existing within us, some coming to the front when we’re happy and others when we’re sad. You could try to go in that direction. But there’s just really no need to do that whatsoever, because you can explain all the variation that we see just through the rearrangement of atoms that have no sense whatsoever. They never laugh, they never cry, they have no thought processes — they just change their position, arrangement, and motion, and what emerges from that change is what we see.
Cassius: Yeah — I think when I think about this, I have to kind of start with the result, because when you try to just logically put these pieces together, you can go in so many different directions. To me it’s easiest just to think about what I know from my own observation: people do vary in emotions from time to time, and I have to account for that. The question then becomes how do you account for it. And you don’t have to have little living seeds in order to account for it.
Well, if we move on to the final paragraph — I’m interested in trying to go back to what I started with. I mentioned that Martin and I had been discussing the issue of dogmatism. Martin, would you be able to restate what you’ve observed as a potential pitfall that some people have when they come into contact with Epicurus and his position on what is known as dogmatism?
Martin: Yeah, the thing is that “dogmatism” as a word has a negative connotation, and then people can easily get put off if they get the impression that we have here a dogmatic position on something. But this is essentially based on the fact that we think there are things which are knowable — and if we state that, then this supports some level of dogmatism. And of course at the end of this passage Epicurus is saying that you’ve got to question everything, and if you think that something is incorrect you fight it, you question it, until you can either accept it and embrace it or you reject it.
Cassius: This passage starts out with several things. He first starts talking about a new question struggling to gain your ear, and then he says nothing is so easy that, no matter how easy it is, it’s still more difficult to believe when you first come into contact with it than after you’re familiar with it. Nothing is so great or so marvelous that after a time we don’t all gradually get used to it and understand it. He’s using the example of just looking up at the stars at night — if you were to look up at those stars for the first time it would be overwhelmingly brilliant to you. But all of us as human beings get used to that, and we don’t even bother to look at them anymore after a time. So he’s saying you can get used to even the strangest idea if you examine it closely enough and begin to understand how it can be. Do you guys agree that’s the direction he’s going, or would you put it differently?
Charles: That’s pretty much it — because looking at the Daniel Brown: “so surprising would the sight have been, but now, quite tired and cloyed.” That’s probably what the passage was going for.
Cassius: Munro ends that paragraph by saying: “Cease therefore to be dismayed by the mere novelty and so to reject reasoning from your mind with loathing. Weigh the questions rather with keen judgment, and if they seem to you to be true, then surrender to them; but if they are false, then gird yourself to the encounter.”
I think there are probably other examples in the Epicurean texts that say the same thing, but this has got to be one of the most clear commands: don’t take people’s word for things. Make sure you understand it yourself and you agree with it yourself — because if you don’t agree with it, fight it as hard as you possibly can. But once you become convinced that something is true, be convinced that it’s true, and not just skeptical thinking it could change at any moment.
Charles: I was going to say we need to start saving some of these quotes. If I understand what you’re saying there — I don’t know that I have a good list of it — but this passage itself is one that has always stood out for me in Epicurus and Lucretius as one of the most notable ones, stated poetically and very deep in meaning.
Cassius: Speaking of that — we’re almost done with Book Two, aren’t we?
Martin: We are just about closing in on the end of Book Two, that’s correct.
Cassius: I was looking at that before we started. We have basically just one more session after today, and then we’re on to Book Three. Book Two is rough. I think we’re going to find that now at the end of Book Two we’re largely finished with most of the very basic physics. He comes back to a lot of different aspects of things, but he certainly begins from here on to talk about more everyday issues like the soul and death and the different practical issues that come out as a result.
Martin: Book Three’s title is “Mortality of the Soul.”
Cassius: Yes. I think he felt like he needed to lay the foundation for how you reach these other conclusions, otherwise his assertions are just assertions. That’s something else that’s ironic about what Martin was saying a minute ago — people just recoil at the idea that Epicurus was a dogmatic philosopher, but Epicurus spent so much time explaining the reasons why he thought the way he did. He did not just say “believe this and take my word for it.” He explained it in excruciating detail.
Charles: There’s also the growing trend lately of skepticism in terms of epistemology. I’ve been seeing it more and more, like each passing day, it seems. On philosophy boards, forums, subreddits — stuff like that, within the past like three years.
Cassius: Well, of course it seems to have been a big issue in Epicurus’s time as well. So I guess you could extend it over maybe into nihilism, and that is certainly an ongoing problem. Since you’re not god, since you don’t have omnipotence or omniscience — I remember DeWitt just talks about this several times in his book — you’re not going to ever be omniscient, you’re not going to ever know everything you’d like to know. So you’ve got to come to terms with: what are you satisfied with? And what does it mean to be satisfied, what does it mean to be confident, what does it mean to say that you know something? Because you’re not omniscient. Does that mean that because you’re not all-knowing you cannot know anything? That’s your issue of skepticism — do you immediately fall down from realizing that you’re not omniscient into absolute skepticism? Or are there intermediate positions that make sense?
I’m not even sure it’s accurate to call Epicurus an intermediate position — I think that’d probably be wrong too — but he’s certainly in a different position. He’s neither: Epicurus does not believe in omniscience, nor does he believe in radical skepticism. He takes another position, that some things are knowable and some things are not, based on his definitions of all the words involved in that.
Charles: I’ve never thought about the connection between nihilism and epistemology. I guess there wouldn’t be any positive value attached to knowledge in that case, which would translate into things being known or there being a degree of certainty to the knowledge.
Cassius: Yeah, I don’t think they’re the same thing, but they can be similar. It seems that if you’re a skeptic it’d be pretty hard not to be a nihilist.
Charles: I think because of the growing trend — a lot of skeptics enter a very spiritual gateway. There’s a degree of humbleness or fallibility attached to being human upon knowing things with certainty, which again relates to the general negative connotation of dogmatism, or anything considered dogmatic. There’s a person in one of my Discord servers — they considered themselves partially Buddhist and partially Pyrrhonist, and they took a very staunch radical epistemic skeptic position on whether knowledge could even be obtained in the first place. And it tied into his spirituality.
Cassius: Charles — you said partially Buddhist and partially what?
Charles: Pyrrhonist. And it’s sort of a growing trend not just of Buddhism or Pyrrhonism specifically, but just epistemic skepticism generally.
Cassius: Charles, you’re calling it a growing trend — I’m not sure it’s the majority view. What do you think? Majority, minority, or what?
Charles: Definitely not majority, but I’ve been seeing it more and more on philosophy boards, forums, subreddits, within the past like three years.
Cassius: Well, I think in a recent podcast Martin clarified that one way of looking at certainty is — Martin, a p-value of 0.005?
Martin: It’s basically using a statistical test and then using a parameter from the statistical test. Depending on the context, you set a certain level, and then if the test supports a hypothesis you take this as proven, basically.
Cassius: Well, we’ll have one more session next week on Book Two before we move to Book Three. Anything else on today’s material?
Charles: No, I can’t think of anything to add.
Cassius: Okay. Martin, anything else from you?
Martin: No.
Cassius: Okay, we’ll close for the day then. Thanks a lot, guys. Talk to you next week.
Charles: Thanks, bye.