Episode 038 - Lucretius - Book Three - Epicurus Our Guide Who Dispels The Darkness of Error and Fear of Hell
Date: 09/27/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1703-episode-thirty-eight-start-of-book-three-epicurus-our-guide-who-dispels-the-dark/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This three-person episode (Cassius, Elaine, and Martin; Charles absent) opens Book Three of Lucretius with one of the most celebrated passages in the poem. Elaine reads lines 1–93, which opens with Lucretius’s extended tribute to Epicurus as the one who “first struck so clear a light from so great darkness” and liberated humanity from the terror of religion and the fear of hell. The passage describes the gods at perfect peace in their undisturbed abodes, introduces the theme of Book Three (the mind and soul, the removal of the fear of infernal punishment), and offers a sustained argument that fear of death is the root of virtually all human misery — avarice, crime, political ambition, shamelessness, betrayal, and even suicide. The passage ends with the famous image: as children tremble at everything in the dark, so we in open daylight fear things no more real than what children fear in the night — and the remedy is not the light of the sun but “the light of nature and the rules of reason.”
The rest of the episode is an extended personal and philosophical discussion of what Epicurus means to each panelist and how they came to Epicurean philosophy. Cassius articulates his sense of Epicurus as one of the greatest figures in Western civilization — the Roman Empire had been on the verge of adopting Epicureanism as the dominant philosophy, and Julius Caesar himself may have been an Epicurean. For Cassius, Epicurus provided not just liberation but validation — a framework to confidently reject supernatural claims, move beyond Thomas Paine’s deism, and resist the Platonic/Stoic consensus that values are eternal absolutes. Martin describes discovering Epicurus in 2016, entirely by accident: following a lead from a German politician’s memoir into the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, where Epicurus was mentioned, and then looking it up and finding a complete, consistent philosophy that matched his own. The key insight for Martin was the hedonic calculus — pleasure as the goal without needing anything supernatural — and the realization that a full ethics can be derived from naturalistic premises.
Elaine offers a counterpoint: she had arrived at the same conclusions independently before encountering Epicurus, so she does not experience him as a liberator but more as a peer — an ancient thinker whose philosophy matched her own “weird, idiosyncratic” views. She expresses caution about hero-worship, noting that setting up historical figures as leaders tends to go badly, conflating the person with the information and making critical engagement feel like betrayal. The group broadly agrees: cultishness and blind acceptance are exactly what Epicurus warned against — the same passage at the end of Book Two insists on piercing judgment before embracing any doctrine. But Cassius and Martin note the value of finding historical validation and like-minded community for conclusions one had reached in relative isolation. The episode closes with Elaine identifying what first struck her in Epicurus: the argument that it is possible to be satisfied — a direct counter to neo-Buddhist and Platonic assertions that desire is naturally insatiable. The group traces this to the Platonic distrust of the senses and feelings as evidence, and Cassius notes that this is why the “Day of Evidence” matters: evidence includes feelings, not just dry syllogism.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 38 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 Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. Today we’re beginning Book Three of Lucretius and we’ll be discussing the Latin text from line one to approximately line 93. Let’s join the discussion now with Elaine reading today’s text.
Elaine: O Epicurus, who could first strike so clear a light from so great darkness and direct us in the proper advantages of life — thee, the glory of the Grecian name, I follow. Thy steps I closely trace with mine, not so much from a desire to rival thee, as from the love I bear and the ardent passion I profess to imitate thee. For how can the swallow contend in singing with the swine? Or what can kids with feeble limbs perform in running with the noble horse’s speed? Thou great father, founder of philosophy, thou with paternal precepts dost inspire thy sons, and from thy writings most illustrious chief, as bees suck honey from the flowery fields, we feed upon thy golden sentences, golden and fit eternally to live.
For when thy reason first began to prove that nature was not formed by powers divine, the terrors of the mind all fled, the walls of this great world lie open, and I see how things are managed through the mighty void. The deity of the gods, their calm abodes appear, which neither winds disturb nor clouds overflow with showers, nor the white-falling snow congealed by sharpest frost does spoil. But the unclouded air surrounds them always and smiles on them fully with diffused light. Nature in everything supplies their wants; nothing at any time destroys their peace. But the wide tracks of hell are nowhere seen, nor does the interposing earth prevent our sight, but we discover what beneath our feet is doing in the space below.
In these pursuits a certain divine pleasure spreads round me, and I stand amazed that by the strength of mind all nature every way lies naked to our view.
Since then I have taught what are the first seeds and principles of things, how they differ in their figures and of themselves fly about beaten by mutual strokes, and from them all beings are produced — the nature of the mind and of the soul comes next to be explained in these my lines, and all the terrors of infernal pains banished and headlong driven quite away, that from the bottom so disturb the life of man, and cover all things with the gloom of death, and leave no place for pure and unmixed pleasure to possess.
For what men vainly talk, that disease and infamous life are more to be feared than the terrors of death, and they know that the soul consists wholly in the blood, and therefore they want no assistance from our philosophy — I would have you observe that those boasts are thrown out more for the sake of praise and popular breath, if their vanity by chance leads that way, than that they believe any such thing. For let these very men be banished from their country and driven into a desert far from human sight, stained with the guilt of the foulest crimes — yet they live on, afflicted as they are with all sorts of misery, and to wherever the wretches come they fall a-sacrificing and slay black cattle and offer victims to the infernal gods, and in this deplorable state they, with more than common zeal, apply themselves to the offices of religion. And therefore it is proper to view men rather under a doubtful fortune and observe how they behave in circumstances of distress. For then they speak truth from the bottom of their hearts, the mask is pulled off, and the real man shows undisguised.
Besides, covetousness and the blind desire of honors, which compel unhappy men to exceed the bounds of right and urge on the partners and assistants of their crimes to strive day and night with the utmost pains to arrive at the height of wealth — these plagues of life are chiefly nourished by fear of death. For infamy and contempt and sharp want seem far removed from a sweet and pure state of life and, as it were, hover about the gates of death. And wherefore will men, possessed by false fear, labor to avoid and stand at the remotest distance from them? They add to their heaps by civil war, and insatiable as they are, double their riches, heaping one murder upon another. They laugh with cruel delight at the sad funeral of a brother and hate and fear the entertainments of their nearest relations.
From the same cause and from the same fear, envy often becomes the tormentor of mankind. They complain that one is raised to power before their eyes, another to respect, a third distinguished by shining honors, whilst they lie buried in obscurity and are trod upon like dirt, and so they pine themselves to death for the sake of statues and a name. And some men from a fear of death conceive so great a hatred for life and the preservation of their being that in a gloomy fit they become their own executioners, not considering that this fear of death is the source of all their cares. This breaks through all shame, dissolves the bonds of friendship, and in short overturns the foundations of all goodness. For some we see betray their country and their dear parents, striving by that means to deliver themselves from death and the pains of hell.
For as boys tremble and fear everything in the dark night, so we in open day fear things as vain and little to be feared as those that children quake at in the dark and fancy advancing towards them. This terror of the mind, this darkness then, not the sun’s beams nor the bright rays of day can scatter, but the light of nature and the rules of reason.
Cassius: Elaine, thank you for reading that. This opening of Book Three is, like the openings of the other books, some of the best writing and most important material in the poem at large, and it really conveys the depth of feeling the Epicureans had for Epicurus.
It’s so easy to get tied down into the details of atoms and void and not realize that the big picture is that Epicurus is essentially one of the greatest figures of human history. How different the world would have been and history would have developed had Epicurus’s views become the majority and become the leading philosophical school instead of what actually happened after the rise of Christianity and the takeover by religion for so many centuries. You can read through Lucretius in these opening passages of these books and see that he’s looking at Epicurus as a father figure, or as almost a saint or savior in many ways, because of the significance of what he’s talking about.
The significance of Epicurus is not the details of atoms and void, but the liberation that he brings to humanity by realizing that we’re not the slaves of supernatural gods, not the slaves of religion, and that we do have the ability to come up with and understand a method of living that allows us to live happily. There’s just so much in this opening section.
And this is not a science course. It’s not just some kind of dry discussion of the way things are. The way things are is significant to us because we live our lives and we have feelings and we want to make the best use of the time that we have available to us. Epicurus is not just one of the landmarks that you can learn from as you go through life, but he’s really one of the most significant figures in human history, for the way he puts all this together and the way he popularized it. But for the development of the first century BC in the Mediterranean world, the Roman Empire was on the verge of understanding these views as the dominant outlook on life. I was mentioning earlier that we came across an article from a man who was advocating that Julius Caesar himself was an Epicurean. It just seems clear from what we have left to us from Cicero that so many of the leading figures of that time had seen the importance of Epicurus.
We know how Friedrich Nietzsche discussed that in several of his works, and there’s a depth of feeling that is involved in studying Epicurus that goes far beyond the science. So with that statement — what do you think, Martin? What’s your reaction to this passage?
Martin: Yeah, it basically uses a lot of poetry to state how Epicurus’s philosophy has liberated mankind from religion.
Cassius: Martin, I know that as people listen to our podcasts — especially the last ten or so — we’ve really gotten into the details of the atoms, and your commentary has often been about some of the details of the atomic theory and to what extent they continue to be valid, to what extent they need to be revised and so forth. So people listening to the podcast probably associate you as someone who really enjoys reading the details of Epicurean physics. So with that having been established as sort of your general perspective — how does someone like you evaluate these more general or more emotional aspects of Epicurus?
Elaine, help me ask that question better because you know where I’m going with it.
Elaine: I think you’re asking: what is the thing you appreciate most about Epicurus’s work — the science writing, or the how-to-live philosophy of pleasure? What is meaningful to you?
Martin: Of course the how-to-live. Because science — I mean, I’m a scientist, and we’ve done a lot more, we went way beyond Epicurus. So that aspect is just to see the consistency, and also to make clear that it wasn’t about the details of the science behind it. Those were just there to illustrate how everything can in principle be explained back to natural causes — and how many of these old explanations turned out to be wrong later, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we openly put pleasure as the goal, and this wasn’t obvious before. Or maybe it was obvious to some people, but it certainly needs argument in support of it.
When you go through it, Epicurus was living in Athens, surrounded by people who are discussing philosophy as a science of its own. It needs to be explained in terms where pleasure becomes supportable and legitimate, and you can understand the reasoning behind it — it’s just not arbitrary. A lot of people make arbitrary assertions about how to live. Maybe that’s one of the commonalities we all have: we’re looking for an explanation and a set of reasons why this one is, in fact, the best one to follow, and assertions aren’t good enough.
Cassius: Right. So — and I’m going to be interested, Elaine, in how your reaction is different from mine — I already came to the major conclusions that Epicurus came to without knowing that Epicurus had come to them. I hadn’t put them together in a way that could defend against some of these other philosophies, although I had a lot of the pieces. So I appreciated his defenses for his philosophy. But I already knew the modern basics of what we know about physics. I was raised an atheist, so I didn’t experience a feeling of having been liberated by Epicurus — I agreed with his philosophy because it was my philosophy, and that’s how I knew he was right, because he agreed with me, which is a real different thing from learning your philosophy from him and feeling liberated. So I’m curious — for you, Cassius, did you have this feeling like Lucretius is describing, that what Epicurus did freed you from misconceptions you’d had?
Cassius: Yeah, I would say generally yes. The explanation would be that I’m a lawyer by occupation and I consider myself more of a generalist. I’ve always been very interested in physics and science, but I’ve been more of a generalist — reading a lot of different political philosophers and general philosophers over the years. My perspective was that I’ve been aware and focused on the fact that there’s just so much disagreement in the world about all these issues — religion, non-religion, atheism, theism — and all this disagreement seemed to me to have no way to ultimately have any confidence in which one was correct. Maybe I was coming under the influence of just more and more skepticism over the years, just thinking that in the end there’s just no way to be confident about anything.
What seems to me to be the significance of Epicurus personally is that here is an example of someone who — and this is not a very attractive argument, but I do tend to take some account of what leading figures of history have said and who said what, and whether I think they’re the type of person based on their actions that ought to be listened to. And when I finally understood where Epicurus was going, I realized that here is probably the number one figure in Western civilization who people throughout history after him have recognized as having a unique take on these issues.
I came to my own conclusions as well, but you do like to think — you want validation, some idea that there are other people out there who see things the same way. That’s one of the tests of truth under Epicurus as well — you check your observations against those of other people. And if you don’t have some way to validate your observations against people who’ve reached the same conclusion, then that was at least in my way of thinking a big problem: if I’m the only person seeing this, maybe in fact there is something wrong with the way I’m seeing it.
Epicurus, when I’ve gotten into the details of reading what he wrote — and not just what commentators have been saying about him — seems to have really put the big picture together in a way I’ve not seen anybody else put it together. There are people who get various aspects of it that seem to me to be consistent, and then they’ll frequently just drop back and default on religion — or I went through a period where I was really into the deist arguments and Thomas Paine’s material specifically. His Age of Reason was a big influence on me. And now I think to myself that Thomas Paine didn’t go nearly far enough — he had before him these arguments from Epicurus that if you admit that there is a watchmaker or clockmaker, that still presents a problem when you think that everything is supernaturally based in the beginning, even if you think there’s no active intervention today.
So I guess — and I hope I’m not getting too far from your question in terms of the liberation aspect — I’d use the word “validation” more than liberation. But I think there is a large number of people in the world who are sort of generalists and who basically end up being beaten back and beaten down into submission, to thinking there is no reason to have confidence in any answer to any of these ultimate questions about whether there’s a god and life after death and things like that. And unless you can take confidence in a particular method of reasoning, you’re always going to be plagued with doubt that when you die you may go to hell and be tormented for eternity. The only way to get rid of that doubt for somebody like me is to have a system of understanding that seems to make sense and is based on evidence that seems persuasive. Even though the details of some of the physics may no longer be the best way to describe it, the general conclusions and the big picture just seem to me to be absolutely persuasive in dismissing virtue as a reasonable way to base your life, or any of these idealistic Platonic arguments about there being eternal values that are true for everybody all the time and in all places.
That was an issue in reading Cicero for me — to my legal background, I knew that there’s this rationalistic argument that there’s a basis in law that’s the same for everybody all the time in all places. And to see Epicurus directly confront that and say that is absolutely not the case and cannot be the case due to the nature of the universe gives you a framework from which you can just throw all the baggage away and start from scratch — but not arbitrarily, on a foundation that you can validate for yourself by studying nature.
So yeah, I retain a lot of this — Epicurus is a really special figure. And whether you consider him to be a father figure, or as he discusses at the beginning of one of the following books, consider him to be almost like a god — obviously that’s something figurative and not literal, depending on your definition of the word god — but it’s the kind of thing that I think is a significant part of Epicurean philosophy. It is not just a set of words in a book. There is a personal aspect to it, which is appropriate when feeling is so critical to Epicurean philosophy. You need to be able to feel why it’s right in addition to understanding the logical arguments that are presented in support of it.
And just to add: there are a lot of logical arguments dispersed through all this material that I think were necessary to Epicurus and necessary to many of us even today. Because if we come up in a framework where we’ve been educated under a system that forces us into this theistic or Platonic format, then we have to find a way to battle our way out of that box — and Epicurus is, in my view, the way to battle out of that box. I think the difference in our perspective, Elaine, is that I’m not sure you ever got caught in that box of Platonic idealism and the religious way of analyzing things.
Elaine: Yeah. I’m surrounded by it in the culture, so I don’t think any of us can probably be raised free of that. But I fought my way out of it before I met Epicurus — that’s what I would say. So for me I don’t see him as a liberator. I was excited to read him mainly because I thought, “okay, I can probably find other people who have what I had come to see as my really weird, idiosyncratic kind of philosophy that nobody else probably had, because I couldn’t find anybody with it.” And then — ah, here you go, this historical figure who thought this way. I bet there are other people out there who agree. That was my excitement about finding him, and also a feeling of affinity with him — thinking, wow, he thought this way, I feel friendly towards him, even though he’s gone.
When I read this I put it in the category of kind of guru worship, and it bothers me. Of the three of us, I may be the only one, but I have seen people make heroes out of other humans, and I have never seen it go well. It’s just a bad idea. And so I wouldn’t recommend to people that they do that with Epicurus. But people may disagree with me on that — and I think Epicurus probably would have disagreed, because he thought it was important to hold him and the other prominent leaders of his school, and the gods, in high esteem. That’s kind of a worshipful thing. And that’s just not — for me, it doesn’t lead to pleasure, it leads to disillusionment. Because then you find out: oh, this person was human! And people go — well, he had slaves, so we can’t listen to anything he said. That is one of the problems with setting up these heroes: the personality of the person gets conflated with the information they gave, and it can lead people to then discount the accurate things they said.
Cassius: Absolutely. I mean, there’s clearly a tension there that I think Epicurus would agree with you about — the issue of being extremely careful and not allowing something to turn into a worship situation or a cult situation, where you blindly and unthinkingly and inflexibly adopt a position that somebody else has taken just because they adopted it. That was one of the things we discussed in what you just read, Elaine — at the end of Book Two, about how if you come across something new you need to look at it closely and either embrace it or fight against it depending on whether you think it’s correct. You’re not going to take things unthinkingly.
On the other hand, when you’re dealing with children or somebody who needs to know something right now but doesn’t have the capacity to understand all the reasons behind it — I think it can be useful to set up examples of conduct that give them a visualization, while still keeping in mind that the visualization is not fully real either. It’s also something that has to be questioned and kept clear. Because even though you may think Epicurus or Thomas Jefferson or any figure of history had good attributes you want to emulate, you also know they were humans just like us, and they no doubt did things we would disagree with today.
Only the existing context is real. To idealize an idea, a person, or anything is going to lead to problems if you don’t continue to keep your grasp of the difference between the real and the ideal. Epicurus is not the ideal leader or an ideal man because there’s no such thing as an ideal man or an ideal leader. And I think that’s ultimately the essence of his philosophy — so if you understand where he’s going, you’re best acclimated to resist that.
I agree clearly that cultishness and worshiping people are a prescription for disaster. But I think Epicurus was teaching exactly that — that’s what you have to avoid. And yet at the same time — not to personalize this to your particular situation, Elaine or Martin — we tend to have a lot of affection for our parents and for the leadership they gave us when we were young. And we love them for that, and appreciate that — and it’s not just an intellectual assessment that my father was right or my mother was right. It’s a feeling of deep connection. And that’s maybe the friendship aspect of Epicurean philosophy, which is such a deep issue — you’re not just exchanging ideas, there’s feeling involved.
Elaine: Yes, I totally agree with that. And I do have affection for Epicurus — I feel like we would have been friends. I’m not sure he would have known what to do with me! But — I wouldn’t put anybody in a leadership position like that. And “affection” would be an accurate word to describe how I feel toward him, but not leadership. To me I feel more like we’re equals. Which is probably — I think some people in philosophy get the idea that, well, I got called to task on our Facebook page last year for being disrespectful to Nietzsche — that I wasn’t respectful enough, just because he was seen by that person as a great man, and I was not supposed to criticize him or poke fun at him for something he said. I think I called him “emo” and it probably wasn’t nice. So I don’t think we should fall into that trap. I think we should feel free to treat Epicurus and anybody as a contemporary. I don’t mean to discount him at all — I appreciate him very much — but I wouldn’t put anybody in a leadership position like that.
Cassius: I would see that as another issue of context. If you’re in need of a leader and you’re looking for a leader, then you start finding particular people to set up in that role. I would say Epicurus is a philosophical leader at the very least. If you’re going into college and you’re a philosophy student, you may end up really thinking that Epicurus is your number one leader in the world because you’re really engaged in philosophical debate. So yeah, I think what I’m trying to get at is: if people take that mindset, they will feel uncomfortable questioning, criticizing, or challenging that leader. That will just feel wrong to them — feel like a betrayal. Whereas, like with our friends, we can point out problems. If we’re making mistakes in our reasoning, we can tell each other that, and it’s not unfriendly. We can do the same thing with anyone we’re getting good information from, including our teachers.
I would say I’m okay putting Epicurus in a teacher role. But we have to feel comfortable questioning and challenging our teachers sometimes. And I think if I had been around in the Garden, can you see me — I would have been saying, “Epicurus, yeah, you’re breaking your own rule about your reasoning.” I think I would have called him on that, and I don’t think I would have felt like I was being disrespectful. I think he would have appreciated that, and not seen anything inconsistent with that attitude at all.
Elaine: What I’m hearing — and what you’re saying, Cassius — is just the healthy attitude that it is a big mistake to idealize people and things and movements, like we have today in so many different areas.
Cassius: But at the same time, Elaine, you would have your own circle of close personal friends and family who you discuss things with, and so forth — and they would correct you, and they correct me. But their significance to you is different than maybe the people you come into contact with on the internet. Everybody has — and this is the friendship aspect of it, which is such a deep issue in Epicurean philosophy — you’re not just exchanging ideas, there’s feeling involved.
Elaine: Yes. I totally agree with that. And I have affection for Epicurus. I feel like we would have been friends. I don’t feel like I would receive leadership from Epicurus — I feel more like we’re equals. I think we should feel free to treat Epicurus as a contemporary, and I think he would have appreciated that.
Cassius: You’ve been so quiet, Martin — what do you think about all this?
Martin: Yeah, I didn’t hear anything disagreeable from both of you. I mean, I’m more like Elaine — I recognized my own rudimentary philosophy in Epicurus’s philosophy, so it’s not that I needed it to figure this out. But it was like what Cassius said — it was very helpful in getting affirmation from an independent source. So before that, I was known to be abnormal — everybody knew I was abnormal — but in a way my professor actually put as abnormal in a good way. Still, it was abnormal, and maybe I’m completely wrong with my ideas. And if you then see there’s a whole philosophy out there for thousands of years that goes exactly in that direction, you lose this doubt.
Cassius: Martin, what were you doing that was considered abnormal?
Martin: Oh yeah, a lot of things. Eating dessert before the meal, often — then everybody who goes through medical residencies knows to do that because you might get paged. No points for things like that. And also, I put a lot more effort than the average German student into study. So that was also something abnormal — I would most — occasionally I would go out with the other fellow students during the PhD time, but they would go out way more often and I would just stay back until late that night in the lab. So that was, from a German perspective, abnormal. Here in Asia, it’s not abnormal at all.
Cassius: Interesting. Martin, I hope you understand that my comments are intended either to be joking or are always admiring of you and what I observe about you — and of course this caricature or stereotype I have in my mind about Germanic culture and Germanic attitudes toward science. So much of what we discuss comes down through Germanic attitudes — people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I don’t know much about most of these German intellectuals, but I think you’ve done a lot of studying, certainly a lot more than I have, about any of those. So that’s why I’m interested.
The stereotype is that there’s a sort of analytical, very scientific — I don’t want to say “detached” as much as — whatever has led to the understanding that German engineering is generally so superior to other types. There’s this analytical approach that is again — I use the word stereotype — of a German attitude. Which I kind of translate into just a general physicist’s attitude. And that’s where I’m interested in: when you said that you were considered abnormal, what was it that took you out of that mainstream stereotype and might have attracted you toward Epicurus?
Martin: Well, on the calculus — you put your effort in and reasonably you can expect to grow old enough to reap the benefits. So it’s different from the logic I heard from people who just don’t put any effort in — “but if tomorrow is Judgment Day then it’s all for nothing.” Well, it’s very unlikely that this happens. So if you go for what is likely, it just makes sense to put in hard study and hard work in your youth.
And how did I come into contact with studying Epicurus or Lucretius? That was much later — that was 2016. I was following leads about something unrelated, reading a book from one of the former Prime Ministers of Germany, and this led me to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. And there Epicurus was mentioned a few times, in connection with something that wasn’t even directly referring to his philosophy, but I was interested in that particular detail, looked it up, couldn’t find anything — and then by chance discovered Epicurus, because his philosophy is my philosophy. It was absolutely by chance, by following some leads in literature without really aiming at this. I read this politician’s book, then Marcus Aurelius — and I was looking from an eclectic perspective for bits and pieces of wisdom. I didn’t expect that I would finally find a consistent, whole philosophy that matched what I had.
Cassius: Were there particular parts of it that you identified as being similar to your own philosophy?
Martin: Yes — that was the hedonic calculus, pleasure as the goal. The key thing: nothing supernatural needed, you don’t need anything supernatural for everything you need in your life. And that then adds to it — now that that makes sense. What I wasn’t aware of was that you can build a whole ethics on this. Because the standing statement I learned in Germany was that when you do science you cannot come to ethics. But it was shown how you can come from science to ethics — when it’s not as conclusive as going from one scientific step to another, so you have choices, and you may choose not to do so. But you can come to an ethics based on the science.
Elaine: Some of the things that caught my attention first — where I considered myself a weird kind of outlier compared to my friends — were things like: that it’s possible to be satisfied, that we are not insatiable. That was a huge one. Because there’s this idea coming partly from Buddhism but maybe also from Judeo-Christianity that we’re naturally insatiable. Which I knew wasn’t true because it’s not what I observed happening. And then right in the beginning of reading Epicurus I saw it — I thought, well, there you go. I may be weird but there are other weirdos out there. I think that caught my eye even more necessarily than “pleasure is the goal,” which I didn’t realize was something other people would disagree with.
Cassius: You didn’t see any controversial nature in that?
Elaine: I didn’t — I didn’t realize how much opposition to that was actually at the core of why people were disagreeing with me on some of the other specific things. It didn’t occur to me that they didn’t want to be happy.
Cassius: And see, Elaine, I’m still working on better ways to articulate what I’m about to say — but when you said a moment ago that one of the things that impressed you was his observation that it is possible to be satisfied, to me that is so interesting. Because Epicurus is often considered to be an atomist, and he’s into physics, and that’s what we’re studying — so many of the details of his empiricism and his physics. But the issue of “it’s possible to be satisfied” is really more of a logical deduction or a conceptual argument to me than it is physics.
Elaine: At least to me, it’s an experience. Okay. So I would have these arguments with my sort of neo-Buddhist friends, and they would talk about how we’re insatiable, we can’t be satisfied, we’ve got to get rid of the ego, and I’m like — well, I don’t know. I’m satisfied quite frequently. I don’t want more to eat when I’m full. I don’t want to sleep more when I’m ready to get up. What do you mean? Why do you think we’re insatiable? And I never found anybody who didn’t argue with me on that. “Oh no, you know, there’s the hedonic treadmill, we’re insatiable.” I don’t — why, is it really like that for you? Do you think you ever feel like you’ve had enough of something? I found that very bizarre. So I was really thrilled to read that Epicurus would eat and get full and find that he was plenty happy, having plenty of pleasure.
Cassius: My comment on what you just said is that that would be one way to bring all this together — you’re focusing on the practical feeling experience of being satisfied, and therefore knowing that you can be satisfied. The same question can be evaluated from the different perspective of the logical arguments involved — Plato in the Philebus, arguing that pleasure cannot be the highest good because it can never be satisfied. And then Epicurus coming back with the argument that you can satisfy pleasure because the limit of pleasure is when all of your pain is gone and your life is filled with pleasure.
Elaine: I see that as primarily an experiential argument — not as a logical argument.
Cassius: I see it as both. But I see where you’re coming from, Elaine — that logic without experience based on it is worthless. The only kind of logic that really makes sense is what is based on experience and reality that we can confirm.
Elaine: I see it as something that is necessary for me in order to have confidence in rejecting arguments that are telling me it’s not true. You’re saying you didn’t ever think it was particularly controversial because you saw it as obvious.
Cassius: Well, maybe I’m just the type of person who has been brow-beaten into thinking that okay, it’s not obvious anymore, and I need an intellectual way of analyzing it and being comfortable that it’s true.
Elaine: I think that’s why people don’t understand it — because they’re ignoring their experience and feeding into this.
Cassius: But they’re told that they have to, Elaine. They’re told that their experience is worthless. Plato says that the horses you see in front of you are not real — the only real horse is the ideal horse in heaven, basically. So depending on the background you come from and your teaching, many people are brow-beaten into believing that you cannot trust your senses.
That’s the ultimate point of so much of Platonic philosophy — the senses are not trustworthy. So your feelings are not trustworthy. If you’ve been through any variety of Ayn Rand, you’ve been taught that emotions are not tools of cognition. You’re not supposed to use your feelings as a test of anything because they vary, they can’t be trusted. “Never trust your feelings” is a strong perspective in many of these philosophies.
And Epicurus goes head-on against that, totally turns it on its head, and says: how can you know anything? The people who tell you that you can’t know anything — they might as well be standing on their head. Because there’s only one source of solid confirmation of reality, and that is your senses and your feelings.
Elaine: Yes, and so that is another thing that when I saw him, I thought: of course. But until I saw all this together, I didn’t realize that’s why other people were not understanding these things — that’s why they thought they were insatiable. It was that they were Platonists. So it brought me a lot of clarity when I would have these conversations that I just thought were: why can I not communicate with this person? Now I know — because they’re Platonists. And it makes so much more sense to me. I don’t feel quite as weird talking to those people because I know what specifically is happening.
Cassius: This is another thing that when I saw Epicurus — I’m like: well, before I read Epicurus, I would argue about the atheists having their “Day of Reason” — “no, you need to have a Day of Evidence, because evidence is the primary thing.” And then I read Epicurus and thought: oh, you got that already. You were already there — how cool is that.
But one extension of what you just said is that the Day of Evidence you’re talking about includes your feelings as part of that evidence. Evidence is not just a dry syllogism in a Platonic sense. And that’s one of the reasons you do hear people come back and talk about Nietzsche on a regular basis about some of this, because Nietzsche was highly anti-Stoic and denounced the Stoics in very strong terms on these particular issues of idealism. He also saw in Epicurus how Epicurus had identified many of these issues and was fighting them before the rise of Christianity — and how, in his Antichrist book, he talks about Lucretius and how what Lucretius was combating were the religious views contained in Christianity and Judaism to some extent: life after death, fear of being punished, and so forth. Because the Stoic-Platonic line of thought ended up merging largely with this religious Christian-Judaic view of a theistic universe.
So you’ve got all of that — religion and Plato and the Stoics — aligned largely against Epicurus on the other side. And the big picture to me comes through Epicurus as the ultimate expression of that strain of Greco-Roman civilization that was the alternative path that could have been chosen but was not chosen, due to all the different influences of the rise of Christianity and religion and so forth.
But more pontificating from me. We probably ought to begin to come to the end of today’s episode — it’s been a particularly good one. As we make closing comments, it’s tradition to let Martin go first.
Martin: So it’s just to repeat what I said before: a lot of poetry praises Epicurus here, that he’s led mankind to get out of the grip of religion. Okay.
Elaine: I’ll just say that there’s some beautiful poetry here, and that I appreciate the feeling of enthusiasm about this philosophy and the affection that’s part of the practice of this philosophy — the affection for Epicurus, the affection for each other, that we’ve found other people who understand us despite the Platonic world not getting it. So I’m really glad about that.
Cassius: And my last thought would be that when you say that you appreciate the affection, you’re making in my view a deeply philosophical statement. It’s not just the dry scientific affirmation that yes, he got atoms right, or no, he didn’t get the size of the sun correctly but it was still kind of interesting the way he thought about it. It’s not just an intellectual assent to it. It’s a feeling that here is something that is of practical, pragmatic use for yourself and for other people who really want to live happily, want to make the best of their lives and the time that they have, and who see that life is worth living because of the feelings that you can experience while you’re alive.
So I’ll close on that note. Thanks everybody for your time today. We’ll do it again next week. All right, bye bye.
Elaine: Bye.
Martin: Bye.