Episode 066 - The End of All Things (But Not Of The Universe Itself!)
Date: 04/13/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1943-episode-sixty-six-the-end-of-all-things-but-not-of-the-universe-itself/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Don reads Book Five lines ~91 onward, Lucretius’s program for the rest of the poem: the mortal nature of our cosmos, origins of life and humanity, language, and the “dread of deities” that generates religion and superstition. Discussion covers the Epicurean critique of treating stars and planets as divine beings, how fear rather than reverence drives temple-building and worship, and how the dissolution of “the three bodies” (seas, earth, heavens) applies to our local cosmos but not to the infinite universe as a whole.
The panel examines the Latin anima/animus distinction — animating life-force vs. rational mind — and the principle that everything composed of atoms eventually dissolves, except atoms, void, and the universe-totality. Cassius draws a parallel between this hierarchical structure and Epicurus’s approach to pain and pleasure. Don references Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s neuroscience work on pleasure and displeasure as a foundational touchstone, paralleling Epicurus’s method. The episode closes with a discussion of Epicurean empiricism and the logic of reasoning from observation to general conclusions.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 66 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’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 66 we’ll continue our discussion of Book Five at approximately Latin line 91. Now let’s join Don reading today’s text.
Don:
And what remains but now is the order of my design requires to convince by proper reasons that this world is formed of mortal seeds, that it began to be and must have an end, and to show how the seeds of matter were united and disposed to produce the earth, the heavens, the sea, the stars, the sun and moon, and then what creatures sprung from earth and what never had a being, and how the human race with various language began to give names to things and to converse together, and by what means that dread of deities above first crept into the heart, which preserves the holy things throughout the world, the temples, the lakes, groves, altars, and images of the gods. Besides, I shall explain the course of the sun and moon, and by what overruling force nature directs their motions, lest you should suppose these luminaries travel their constant stages freely and of their own accord between heaven and earth, and by their kind influence promote the growth of fruits and the whole animal creation, or conceive that they are rolled about by the will of the gods. For those who well know that the gods live a life of ease, if they should wonder by what power the world is carried on, especially in the things they see over their heads in the heavens above, they relapse again into their old superstition. They raise over themselves a set of cruel tyrants who the wretches’ fancy can do all things, because they know nothing of what can or what cannot be, or by what means a finite power is fixed to every being, and a boundary immovable which cannot pass. And therefore, to keep you no longer in suspense in what I promise, take a view in the first place of the seas, the earth, and the heavens. This triple nature, these three bodies, my Memmius, these beings of so different a frame, three so wonderfully formed, one day shall put an end to, and the whole mass and fabric of the world that has stood for many ages shall tumble to pieces. I know how this future ruin of heaven and earth seems strange and surprising to your apprehensions, and how difficult it is to convince you of the truth of it. This is a common case when you offer a subject to the ear it has been unused to, and which you cannot discover with your eyes nor feel with your hands — the ways by which knowledge and belief generally find a passage to the breast and affect the mind. I’ll go on, however. The very nature of the things, perhaps, will give a credit to my words, and you may soon see the whole fabric of the world shaken grievously by terrible convulsions; but the commanding power of chance remove that day far from us, and let reason rather than the thing itself convince us that all things dissolved by the last dreadful crack will fall to ruin. But before I attempt to deliver these truths, more sacred and much more worthy of belief than what the Pythonist delivers from the tripod and laurel of Apollo, I shall first offer some encouragement against your fears. Lest, being under the check of religion, you should by chance imagine that the earth, the sun, the heavens, the sea, the stars, the moon being animated by a spirit diffused throughout the whole were a deity and would remain forever, and consequently that all those deserve justly the same punishment as the rebel giants for their impiety, who by their argument should assault and break down the walls of the world and would extinguish the sun, the bright luminary of the sky, and pronounce a sentence of dissolution upon things in their own nature immortal. And yet these things are so far from having anything of divinity about them, and so unworthy of being ranked in the number of the gods, that they may be thought rather to give us a notion of something as remote from sense and vital motion as possible. Are we not to imagine that the powers of mind and soul can be united with all sorts of bodies? As there are no trees in the sky, no clouds can be in the deep sea, nor can fish live in the fields, nor can there be blood in wood or moisture in stones. The soul therefore cannot come into being alone without the body, nor can she exist separately without the nerves and the blood. If this could be, the powers of the soul would feel sometimes in the head or shoulders or even in the very bottom of the feet, or in any part of the body, and so you would perceive it diffusing itself through the whole body, as water poured into a vessel first covers one part and then spreads over the whole. Since therefore there is a proper and determinate place in the body for the mind and soul to be and increase in, we have the more reason to deny that they can continue or be born without it, or that the form of life can reside in rotten clods of earth, or in the fire of the sun, or in the water, or in the lofty regions of the sky. These therefore are so far from being endued with a divine understanding that they are incapable even of being animated with common life.
Cassius:
Thank you Don for reading that, and that was very well read for your first endeavor with us in the podcast, so again, thank you very much.
Don:
You’re welcome.
Cassius:
A lot in this section, and we’ve traditionally gone paragraph by paragraph, but does anybody have any particular place they’d like to start? Hearing nothing, let’s just take the first paragraph. Just in general though, as I’m listening to you read that, Don, this to my mind summarizes some of the deepest parts of what Epicurean philosophy is all about in its assessment of the nature of the universe being natural and not supernatural. Sometimes I think you could just put the whole ethics aside, and this is just obviously so key to them — that they reach these conclusions that the soul does not last after death and that there’s no supernatural beings creating the universe. So at least in these passages, I think he’s hitting that home pretty hard.
Don:
Yeah, and I think it gives a nice scheme — an outline to the whole structure of the poem too. I mean, he starts out with the world formed of mortal seeds, what it began to be, what has an end, and all those sorts of things, and he’s just laying out where he’s going to go and where he’s been.
Cassius:
Right, right.
Don:
I did find it interesting that whenever he talks about the dread of deities, he talks about it coming into the breast. Where is that line — “the dread of deities above first crept into the heart” — and I think it’s interesting that he uses the word pectora in the Latin, and that’s where the heart, the breast — that’s where the Epicureans saw the seat of the intellect, or the animus, or whatever it is. It’s that center of the chest that you feel emotions from. And I thought it was kind of interesting that he actually used that metaphor of creeping into the heart, and that’s where it’s located.
Cassius:
Yeah, and I kind of think what you’re talking about is he’s sort of relating it to the images aspect of things, as opposed to the observation through those five senses. Is that part of what you’re thinking about?
Don:
I think so. I think the phrase itself — the dread of deities — has the sense of dread, awe, fear, anxiety, apprehension. All those sorts of things come into that if you are looking at the nature of these supernatural deities. They’re going to give you all kinds of problems.
Cassius:
Right. Which of the paragraphs of what we have before us today are you looking at?
Don:
I believe it’s — I don’t have the line number, but it’s the “dread of deities” — let me grab that — “and by what means that dread of deities above first crept into the heart which preserves the holy things throughout the world.”
Cassius:
Yes. Okay. I think when I made my comment about the images, the word that was interesting to me there was “crept into the heart” — almost as if it crept in without our conscious activity in assessing it, almost as if it was a natural thing. And so many times when you continue that sentence, I wonder — and I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the way it’s translated or the precise words — but I sometimes wonder whether he’s being sarcastic, because the next passage talks about “preserves the holy things throughout the world.” And so he starts listing the temples, the lakes, the groves, the altars, and the images of the gods. Is that just a statement of fact? Is he being sarcastic when he calls them holy?
Don:
I don’t think it’s sarcastic. I get the sense that he’s talking about some people who — and he even says later — some people who get the idea that the gods are incorruptible and blessed beings, but they backslide when they start to think about the way the planets and the sun and the moon and the stars go about their motions in the sky. They sometimes understand that, oh, well, I realize the gods are like this, but these individual beings, these planets and stars, actually have their own divine motions. And I think what he’s saying is that the dread of deities above first crept into the heart, which preserves the holy things throughout the world — and that dread, that awe, that anxiety about the deities is what makes people set things apart like temples and lakes and groves and altars.
Cassius:
Right, right. You know, at least in the way it’s worded here, he’s actually saying that it’s the dread of the deities — which of course would be improper under Epicurean philosophy. You should not be dreading the deities. So he’s saying it’s the dread of the deities that preserves the holy things throughout the world, as if a proper Epicurean approach to the gods would not have resulted in these altars, groves, lakes, and temples.
Don:
Exactly. Yeah, I would concur with that.
Cassius:
And of course in the next passage, where he talks about “lest you suppose that the luminaries travel their stages freely and of their own accord between heaven and earth” — again, I don’t have the full knowledge of Socrates and Plato and the prior guys, but I seem to read in the commentators that these other philosophers held that the stars and planets were actually gods themselves.
Don:
Right. I seem to remember — I don’t believe I wrote it down — but I seem to remember that some of this has to do with Plato’s Timaeus, and that’s the sort of idea that he put forth in that particular text, and Epicurus responded directly to the Timaeus in a specific book of On Nature, and then Lucretius used that as a text for his poem going back to Epicurus. But I think it’s interesting because he says you can’t believe that the planets are gods and have their own actions — that they’re not gods and further that they don’t have any life force themselves. Like he talks about the soul not being able to exist in the fire of the sun and the clods of the earth and that sort of thing.
Cassius:
And my eye is caught by what you cited previously about “relapsing again into their old superstition.” It’s possible that because we talk about this every week on Lucretius we may overlook one of the most basic aspects of it, which is that it is this misunderstanding — this error about the nature of the universe, which amounts to ignorance of the way things are — that leads people to have these fears and leads to the whole system of supernatural religion, and setting up a cruel tyrant who we fancy can do all things. So it’s really reminding me of just the educational focus of Epicurean philosophy. It’s not a “here’s your list of ten commandments to do and not do in your ethical life.” It starts out with an explanation of the way the world works, from which we will then come up with our best way of living.
Don:
Exactly. And then consider that the first line of the Tetrapharmakon is “don’t fear the gods.”
Cassius:
Right, right. And don’t backslide. You know, something else that catches my eye — “who the wretches’ fancy can do all things.” Now that sounds a little bit more like a modern reference to an omnipotent god maybe than I sometimes think the Greeks had about Zeus, because it seems to me their concepts of the gods were significantly more limited.
Don:
I don’t know whether this is a reference to a wider view of a god than the Greeks had, but it could very well be. I mean, I think you have talked in the past about the idea of the universe being infinite, but then I believe it was Martin who even said that the universe may not be infinite literally, but as far as from the relative stance of human beings it might as well be infinite. And I think the gods could be looked at the same way — Jupiter may not be infinitely powerful, but he’s going to be infinitely powerful relative to human beings.
Cassius:
Martin, let’s bring you back into the discussion.
Martin:
Yeah, actually I had an idea but I lost it. Ah — no — the one thing is that I’m not sure how well Epicurus knew about Jewish beliefs. And at the time of Lucretius, the Romans certainly knew about Jewish beliefs. And my understanding is that the ancient Jewish god was already omnipotent — so that means that was already a god like the Christian god — and that means here Lucretius may have known a bit more than Epicurus.
Cassius:
That’s a good point about that time sequence, because certainly Diogenes of Oenoanda mentions the Jews on his wall, and certainly you’re right that the Romans knew them, but as far as when Epicurus was writing they might not have had quite the same interplay. I interrupted you, Don — I think what were you going to say?
Don:
No, no, I was just agreeing. Okay — to sort of flow into the next part of the section that we read, I found it interesting where he talks about the triple nature, the three bodies, the three so wonderfully formed — the seas, the earth, and the heaven. That whole idea of three bodies or three natures just seems so reminiscent of so many different threes in both mythology and religion — the Christian Trinity, the Buddhist three jewels, the three Fates, Osiris, Horus, and Isis in Egyptian mythology. I just found the fact that he uses the number three there — “triple nature,” “three bodies,” “three so wonderfully formed” — that has too many parallels just to be by chance.
Cassius:
I agree that you’re right, and I wonder what his intent was — if it had a significance to the Epicureans as well as the people you’re talking about. I wonder if he used that as a physical manifestation of the triple nature, three bodies — sort of a natural division where you have the seas, the earth, and then —
Don:
Yeah, and the Latin word for the heavens is literally “the vault of heaven,” so everything that’s in the sky, which would include the planets and the sun and the moon and all that.
Cassius:
Okay, and that’s when he shifts the discussion to begin to talk about how these three separate natures, as wonderful as they are, will eventually come to an end.
Don:
Correct. And one of the things I found interesting there — I originally thought, well, if everything is going to come to an end, how can you talk about the infinite existence of the universe and that it existed eternally? And so I don’t believe he’s talking about the cosmos as a whole. I think he’s talking about just our particular manifestation of it.
Cassius:
Yeah, exactly. Our — this was sometimes called a “local cosmos” as compared to the universe, which encompasses all the cosmos. And our local cosmos is basically like a human being or any other thing that’s created out of atoms and void — it comes together, you exist for a while, and then you dissolve, and then you’re made into something else to reuse the atoms you already had. You know, the way you said that leads right into what I was about to say next, Don, because while you were talking I looked back at that list of what I understand to be the twelve fundamentals of nature that Epicurus has suggested, and I don’t see among them a statement that everything that comes together from atoms eventually breaks down into those atoms again. But I think that is implicit in Epicurean philosophy, and it would hold true for everything except, like you said, the universe as a whole — and then presumably Epicurean gods, if you start going down that road. But I kind of think it’s correct to treat the principle that everything that comes together eventually splits apart as a foundational physical premise. Do y’all agree with that?
Don:
Yeah. And the only thing — I mean it says the only thing that exists are atoms and void. So the universe itself is atoms and void, and the individual agglomerations of atoms in any particular place are just temporary constructions that are eventually going to die and break down.
Cassius:
Okay. Now you know the way you say that — we could really go off into a rabbit trail of discussing what the word “exists” means, because certainly, Don, I consider that you exist even though you are composed of atoms and void. So it has multiple meanings there. But I was trying to think if I can remember an explicit statement in Lucretius or in the Letter to Herodotus that everything that comes together eventually breaks apart. I guess it’s not explicit in one single sentence, but it certainly is pretty implicit in many of the discussions, and I guess it is implicit in this discussion right here — that’s what he’s saying about all of this, that we see will eventually tumble to pieces. And I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole, because I believe there is a section coming up in Book Five that I’ve noted in my Stallings translation around line 350-360 that talks about things that are eternal and that kind of stuff, so I will hold off on that.
Don:
I have a lot of marginalia in that section of my translation so we’ll save that for then. But I have Stallings here — just very quickly — her translation is: “Besides, there are three types of things that last forever.” And then she lists: atoms are one, the void is another, and the universe, the sum totality, will last forever since there is no place beyond and past the universe for things to leap to, or place whence there could come —
Cassius:
Well, that’s exactly the point then.
Don:
And that’s Book Five around line 350-360. So that’ll be a few sessions yet.
Cassius:
Exactly, exactly — if we go at about a hundred lines an episode, that’s three or four at least episodes away. And I know I think the next section that really struck me was the whole thing about the mind and soul not being able to exist without a body, and that seems to be what he drives home towards the last part of the section we read today. He’s saying that certainly the mind and the soul cannot remain forever united with the body, and for that reason even stronger, these bodies cannot be gods — right, because you can’t have a mind or a soul without a thinking body, and earth and the fire of the sun and all those sorts of things, there is nothing for a soul to attach itself to. The premise being that gods are supposed to be souls or animated forces or intelligent beings themselves.
Don:
And I found it interesting — this covers so wide an area. The only thing I could try was to go through and figure out where he used which Latin words and where. It looks like so in line 126 he uses animus and consilium — those are the mind of understanding. And then in lines 132 and 134 he uses animus. In 140 he then brings in both anima and animus, and in line 145 he talks about what it means to breathe life into things — he uses the verb animata, to actually breathe life into something. What I could try to wrap my brain around was that anima is a feminine noun — the root meaning of it is the breath, the air, or the life force, something that animates. Whereas animus is masculine and has the idea of reason and mind and intellect. So those two things have to exist together. And I found it interesting that the one place where he uses the pronoun “she” — whenever he’s talking about the life force towards the end here — that would be the feminine principle of the breath and the air and the animating principle of the body. “The soul therefore cannot come into being alone without the body, nor can she exist separately without the nerves and the blood.” So he’s talking about she there as the animating life force that makes a body actually live.
Cassius:
You know, the closer we get to discussing some very practical aspect of the body and the way we function, I certainly see how it’s useful to break down these different distinctions. But I wonder — philosophically or at the highest level that Epicurus is looking at things — do you see a distinction, Don, that’s important philosophically?
Don:
That’s a very good question. I think one of the problems too is with Lucretius writing in Latin and Epicurus writing in Greek, because I’ve seen that psyche in Greek can actually cover both of the ideas — both the reason and the intellect and the animating life force — and there may be a distinction between how the Greeks describe something and how the Romans describe something. So we have that difficulty to wade through as well.
Cassius:
And is there a distinction that’s really important for the basic thrust of Epicurean philosophy in terms of being natural versus supernatural? I’m trying to always keep in mind as we discuss the different concepts — what the purpose of identifying them really is. Martin, do you have any comment on that? Do you see a distinction that’s important between animus, anima, soul, spirit, mind, intellect? Obviously the more practical you want to get about describing things to somebody the more detailed you’re going to want to be, but philosophically speaking from a fifty-thousand-foot level, is there an important distinction, or are we simply talking about human life versus gods versus inanimate matter?
Martin:
I think you have to think about looking at a human being who is alive and then a human being who’s dead, and you have to — at some point it’s obvious, but whenever someone is dying — what is it that animates that person? And I think that’s what they’re trying to get at. There is a distinction between being alive and dead. But what does it mean to be alive? What gives life to something as opposed to a rock or a stone or the sun? And I think that’s what they’re trying to get at — what does it mean to be alive?
Martin:
Yeah — I didn’t really comment on this one, but it may be quite fundamental. At least in some religions it’s very fundamental, and that’s why it almost seems like some religions do feel it necessary to provide the idea of the soul, because they look at somebody who is alive and somebody who is dead and ask: what’s the difference? Oh, well, there must have been something that was there that’s not there anymore. And you don’t want to accept the fact that it doesn’t exist anymore, so there must be some sort of principle, some sort of thing that makes you alive versus dead. And I think it’s a hard thing to grapple with. One of the things that’s so difficult about Epicurus’s philosophy is that there’s nothing that exists after you die — everything is bound together, your soul, your spirit, your mind, your physical being, all clamped onto each other — and whenever those atoms go away, that goes away too.
Cassius:
Yeah. What you’ve just done there is, I think, what I see Lucretius doing — all this discussion of soul, mind, intellect, and the different subdivisions has importance, but at the most fundamental level I think you’re right that he’s looking for something very basic such as an animating principle, or some method of distinguishing the person who’s alive from the body that is now dead. And I tend to think that much of the philosophy is really gauged at that level. And I kind of think the same thing goes on with something like pain and pleasure. We talk about the division — and we’ve been talking about it lately, Don — some of the material out there about the difference between emotions and feelings and so forth. I certainly think it’s important to drill down and get the shades of meaning and divide up all those things. But sometimes I do think that Epicurus is really starting at a very fundamental level and that he’s really not concerned sometimes to be talking about the different types of pain or the different types of pleasure. Certainly at some point there’s definite discussion about dividing up mental pain and pleasure from bodily pain and pleasure — there’s a specific reference in Cicero that divides that up — but I do think there’s a sort of hierarchy of the way he approaches things. So that when he talks about pain and pleasure it’s almost like he’s talking about life or the anima that you’re talking about right now. He’s summarizing to an extremely high level his fundamental point. And in this sort of hierarchical outline of looking at life that Epicurus seems to be emphasizing — as he does in the letters, or in the Letter to Herodotus — you need this outline, these fundamental principles that you’re going to refer to every day, and not necessarily every detail. I just see a parallel there sometimes in a lot of things, so here talking about mind and soul and spirit and intellect, and I would suggest maybe there’s the same thing going on with pain and pleasure, and maybe things like the gods as well. In every aspect of the philosophy it seems like there’s a sort of telescoping level of analysis going on.
Don:
I would agree. I mean, I keep coming back to the Canon — with the sensations, you have the prolepsies, and you have the pathe, the feelings. You have pain, you have pleasure. You have on, you have off. You have attract, you have repel. And I think it starts out at a very basic fundamental level — you have atoms, you have void. You have right, you have basic distinctions between things that are a starting point and a touchstone of the analysis everywhere you go through. And that’s one of the things that I hesitate to bring up — you know, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, as I’ve done in the forum — but I think it’s so interesting the way she starts out at that fundamental level with pleasure and displeasure and the level of arousal, and that’s the thing everything else is built on. And I think it’s the same way with Epicurus. Here’s pleasure and pain, and the next modifier that you add to it is the beginning of that slope — which is good, and has to be there. You have to take that next step of analysis, but whenever you add a third quality to it, then there’s a lot more to discuss.
Cassius:
Everybody pretty much understands pain and pleasure, but even the issue of intensity — am I correct in analogizing intensity to arousal? Or is it more like, if we’re taking pain, it’s the difference between a pinprick and getting your arm cut off — some measure of significance?
Don:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that’s a very good way to put it. Which everybody who comes to Epicurean philosophy says: “Well, that doesn’t help me very much. You’re telling me to pursue pleasure and avoid pain — okay, well give me some specifics about what you’re supposed to do.” And it’s: “Well then yes, I’m giving you more specific — don’t just go for pleasure and avoid pain, go for the most significant pleasure and avoid the most significant pain.” Now that answers all your questions, doesn’t it? And of course it doesn’t.
Cassius:
Close scene. That’s all you need to know. Thank you for coming and joining us today — we’ve told you: avoid pain, pursue pleasure, and go for the most significant of beats. That’s all you need to know. But seriously — the end of the passage that we read today just seems to hammer home and hammer home the fact that the rotten clods of earth, the fire of the sun, water, the sky — you cannot imbue these things as either a deity or having a life in and of themselves. They are physical entities created by matter and void, and they have their own laws of motion that they are following, and they have no supernatural being in and of themselves.
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
Now the point I would like to emphasize there would be to take us back to the canonical issues that we debate regularly, and to observe the way he’s phrasing this argument. His argument is: “as there are no trees in the sky, no clouds can be in the deep sea, nor fish can live in the fields, nor can there be blood in wood or moisture in stones” — therefore you can conclude with confidence something else. And that’s the tricky aspect of it that we’ve discussed numerous times and probably will always discuss: the conversion of a certain number of observations to a rule and then applying it. One of the things I keep meaning to read is the work of Philodemus that talks about his methods of inference — I apologize, I can’t remember the title — but it’s a very interesting issue of how Epicurean philosophy is focused on observation above all, and yet this is an example of what Lucretius is expecting you to do with that observation: he’s expecting you to be able to reach a conclusion and then apply that conclusion in those areas where you find good reason. Because there’s obviously some kind of intelligent process of weighing going on about when you have enough information and when you don’t. Somebody can easily say, “well, you haven’t seen any fish living in your fields, but you need to come visit my fields because I’ve got them crawling all over the place” — those issues are real. But at least in terms of tracing what Epicurus and the Epicureans were doing, they did not reach the conclusion that there is nothing but observation; they believed there was a valid way of reaching conclusions based on observation.
Don:
Right. Because it comes down to it that there is nothing else. I mean, you observe things through your senses and that’s the way you get information about the physical universe composed of atoms and void. And what else do you have? I mean, you can make up ideal forms like Plato did, and those kinds of things, but that’s completely divorced from reality. And all of this argument is based on observation — none of it’s based on “remember that Epicurus said” or “remember that the goddess Athena said.” It’s all something that’s really directly observable by basically every human being who’s got a normal level of eyesight and the ability to observe things. And that dovetails back into what we were talking about with the worship versus respect of Epicurus — that you don’t necessarily take what he said as dogma. He’s the one who pointed out, here are the things you can do and here are the observations you can make, and you can respect him for bringing that to the fore. So there’s none of that in here — that it’s true because Epicurus said it was true. It’s all a statement and a presentation of the evidence combined with an expectation that you’re going to use that evidence in a particular way.
Cassius:
Right. I would be curious to get Martin’s take on the faculty of observation and how important observation is, especially as it compares to what Lucretius is talking about as opposed to modern science, and if there are both analogies and differences.
Martin:
Yeah, I mean observations are certainly analogous to what we do in science, at least in experimental science. It’s just done systematically and with a protocol, but basically it’s just very similar to what any person makes as observations.
Don:
And do you think that’s what Epicurus was talking about — systematic observations and then applying those observations? Is that the kind of thing he discussed?
Martin:
Certainly. I mean, it’s one of the major criteria of truth to observations.
Cassius:
Yeah, I don’t know if this makes any difference in the way of thinking about it, but as I’m looking at that last passage he starts out by talking about the things that you do see, and then he also adds to the argument the observation of things that you don’t see. “If this could be, the powers of the soul would feel sometimes in the head or shoulders or at the bottom of your feet or any other part of your body, and you would perceive it diffusing itself through the body.” So he also combines in his argument — I don’t know what you’d call that exactly — but of course you’ve got the cliché about “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” — or is it the other way around?
Don:
I think it’s the other way around — the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Cassius:
And you can’t prove a negative — those kinds of logical observations. How do you unwrap that? Obviously — if I’m looking out my window and I don’t see any pink elephants, that is not proof that there are no pink elephants anywhere. But it’s a pretty good start to the observation that pink elephants aren’t everywhere. Is there a way in which that cliché is partly valid and partly invalid, or does it have to be limited?
Don:
That’s a good question. It has to do with repeated observations and that sort of thing, because repeated observations of nothing is some evidence. Now I’m coming at it from my legal point of view — it may not be conclusive evidence for you to decide to base your life on, but it is some evidence, and at least it seems to me that the more observations you have, the higher the probability that that particular thing does not exist. You can’t say for certain, and I think that’s where science comes in too — that science will say there’s a high probability that there are not pink elephants, but we’re not going to rule out the fact that there may be an observation of a pink elephant somewhere. But until we see one we’re going to say we’re pretty sure there aren’t any.
Martin:
I agree we can be skeptical towards it for sure. I mean, if we just do one or a few observations we cannot really conclude much from that. But on the other hand, if a lot of observations are done and it’s never found, and somehow these observations are made under quite a wide array of different conditions, then we will empirically state that it hasn’t been observed. So we can from there do something like — it’s not really a logical conclusion, but it’s something like: it doesn’t happen.
Cassius:
Martin, are you familiar with that cliché? Is it current in German?
Martin:
Oh yeah, I mean, in this particular formulation I didn’t know it, but it’s certainly part of how — I cannot trace it back exactly where I encountered it in my studies — but in a different form I certainly encountered this many times.
Cassius:
Well, certain things kind of enter into the common discussion out there in the world. And now that we think about it, I think it’s interesting to consider to what extent it’s valid and what extent it’s invalid — or how you understand it in context to make the most sense out of it. Some clichés are better than others. Well put. Alright, that probably is enough on that cliché. Let’s begin to talk about closing comments for today, and we’ll begin to bring things to our conclusion. In our past practice we’ve generally gone to Martin to see if he had any closing comments first, and then going around the table. So Martin, do you have any closing comments for today?
Martin:
No, like most of the time no.
Cassius:
Okay, well I bet Don has some closing comments.
Don:
I think I’m good for today, because we’ve really seemed to bring out some interesting topics in the sections that we read, and I’m looking forward to hitting some more in the next section as well.
Cassius:
Yeah, this has been a good set of passages for today. And once again we’ve been down from our quota of four panelists — I think Charles is still on vacation but should be back with us next week, so in the next episode we should be back up to full strength. Okay, well with that I don’t think I have anything to add for today, so we’ll just break and come back in about a week. Thanks everybody.
Don:
Alright, thank you.
Martin:
Alright, thanks. Bye-bye.