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Epicurus Today

Episode 104 - More Torquatus and a Question: Was The Ancient Epicurean Movement A Cult?

Date: 01/13/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2320-episode-one-hundred-four-more-torquatus-and-a-question-was-the-ancient-epicurean/

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Transcript (Unedited)

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Welcome to episode 104 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and we’ll 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. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. At this point in our podcast we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean Ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we’ll continue with Torquatus’s narration but we’ll devote the majority of the episode to responding to several questions that listeners at EpicureanFriends.com have asked. Let’s now join Joshua reading today’s text. But these doctrines may be stated in a certain manner so as not merely to disarm our criticism but actually to secure our sanction. For this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man of the wise man as continually happy. He keeps his passions within bounds. About death he is indifferent. He holds true views concerning the eternal gods apart from all dread. He has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life if that be the better course. Furnished with these advantages he is continually in a state of pleasure and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains. For he remembers the past with thankfulness and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and agreeableness. Nor is he in dependence on the future but awaits it while enjoying the present. He is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little time ago. And when he says: “And when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure. And pains, if any, befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation.” “It was indeed excellently said by Epicurus that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path, and that his greatest and most important undertakings are executed in accordance with his own design and his own principles, and that no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life which is without end in time than is reaped from this which we know to have its allotted end.” “He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate.” “He laid the greatest stress on natural science. That branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words and the natural conditions of speech and the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions. “And when we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition, are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena, from which ignorance, more than anything else, terrible panics often arise.” “Finally, our characters will also be improved when we have learned what it is that nature craves. “Then again, if we grasp a firm knowledge of phenomena, and uphold that canon which almost fell from heaven into human ken, that test to which we are to bring all our judgments concerning things, we shall never succumb to any man’s eloquence and abandon our opinions.” “Joshua, thank you for reading that. Before we started today, we had a discussion about how we were going to attack these two sections, 62 and 63, which you’ve just read. And if we are successful, we may in fact not even be able to finish a single sentence before the end of an hour goes by today, because there’s some background material and circumstances and issues that we ought to deal with before we get into this. “In the prior sections of Torquatus, we’ve been focusing on the big issue that everybody’s always interested in. What is the goal of life as pleasure? What is the relationship between pleasure and virtue? And we’ve spent most of the last several weeks talking about those issues that Torquatus started off the discussion with. Torquatus is now going to turn his attention, and he’s done that maybe for the last week or so on what we’ve been discussing on the podcast. He’s now turning his attention to a series of details, or maybe a better word than details would be foundational issues that relate to the question of pleasure and virtue and how they should be considered. We’ve used the word corollaries as we started this discussion that he says that he’s moving on to some corollaries about Epicurean philosophy. But I think as we look at that word, corollary may imply to some people that these are sort of subsidiary or secondary issues. But I believe when you look carefully at what we’re about to discuss, these are really so foundational that they precede in importance the issue of pleasure versus virtue. They are the foundation on which Epicurean comes to the conclusion that pleasure is the goal of life rather than virtue. And it’s interesting, we’re going to relate the discussion today, I think, to a couple of issues that have been raised on the EpicureanFriends.com forum, which we’re very pleased to be able to do that. It’s great to have interaction with other people who can’t necessarily participate on the podcast with us, but can give us ideas and questions to deal with. And what has been asked in recent days on the forum is an issue that has come up over and over and over again. The question of, was Epicure setting up a cult? Was he some kind of an arrogant leader of an oppressive or, again, the best word is cult that people like to use. It’s a word that has all sorts of negative connotations to it. It probably has been drained of almost anything positive that might actually have been there. And so we have to deal with the question of what is Epicureus doing with this philosophy? We’re going to be discussing a series of detailed positions. And the question arises, did Epicureus require all of his students to believe all of these positions? Was there some kind of a test that in order to become a member of his school or member of a certain community that you had to believe certain things and not stray too far from a certain list? We’ve got this list that we’re going to be discussing in Torquatus, which is very similar to a list that also occurs in Diogenes Laertius in his history of the life of Epicurus. It’s very fascinating. And one of our other people on the Internet, Don, has gone through and divided our Torquatus section we’re talking about into an outline. We haven’t had the opportunity to compare that outline to what’s in Diogenes Laertius, but it’s clear that it’s very similar. So we have this material from Cicero in the words of Torquatus that really predates Diogenes Laertius by at least 100 years, maybe even 200 years. It’s unclear to me exactly when Diogenes Laertius was writing, but Cicero was writing obviously around the 50 B.C. time period. And I think everybody concludes that Diogenes Laertius was writing at least 100 A.D. or maybe even after that. Joshua, does anybody have a different impression of when Diogenes Laertius was writing? Am I wrong about that? Oh, I have absolutely no idea. Yeah, okay. All right. And so the issue as we review a list of doctrines becomes, again, how many of these are essential to Epicurean philosophy, that you should believe them or not? What is Epicurus’ role in presenting these to his school? Is he a lecturer who is debating his students? Is he saying, you must memorize these things? And if you don’t, then you’re going to be thrown out? Is he saying… And there’s a specific question about how arrogant Epicurus might have been, because there are sections in the text about Epicurus criticizing other philosophers. And you can read certain phrases to indicate that Epicurus held that he was the only philosopher. But it’s all very murky in the text. And how one approaches the question is going to be, I think, decided by just your general attitude towards the philosophy as a whole. So, with that long introduction to what we’d like to talk about today, before we go into each one of these specific positions, let’s talk in general about, first of all, to what extent is it fair to consider Epicurus and the Epicurean school of the ancient world to have been a “cult”, unquote. Which probably requires you to first think about what the word “cult” really means, before we just jump too far into describing what the Epicureans were. So, Joshua, what is a cult? And let’s set the stage for discussing to what extent those accusations against the Epicurean school should be considered to be serious. Right. So, the first thing I want to absolutely make clear is that I think these are very fair questions. I’m going to give a name check here. The forum user who raised these questions was reading Norman DeWitt’s book, which we highly recommend, but which is not without problems. But the forum user’s name is “Smoothie Kiwi” and in two separate threads this person has raised first the question of “Was Epicurus really arrogant?” And then also the question of “Was Epicureanism a cult?” And so, I just want to say that first of all, I think these are absolutely fair questions. These are fair game. And I don’t want to seem like we’re antagonistic to the question being raised, because I don’t feel like we are. Certainly I don’t feel like I am. Yes, you’re exactly right. Exactly right. Right. So, I guess I think the first thing I want to do, if you look in the thread on the title “Epicureanism and cult-like mentality?” I’m scrolling down. I’m looking for Nate’s answer. His answer was, “It was totally a cult.” Yes, I remember that. I’m going to paraphrase what he says next. What he says next is, there’s a difference between the way the word “cult” was defined, maybe not even defined. Denotatively, the word is quite similar to the way it was used in classical antiquity. Connotatively, as you suggested earlier, it’s very different. The connotations of that word, as you said earlier, are very negative in the modern age. Whereas in classical antiquity, the word essentially had no real connotations. It was just the definition. The definition is, “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” And then there are two other definitions here, one of which is the more modern definition. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange and sinister. And then the third definition, “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.” So that’s really the starting ground here, is to understand that there’s a difference between the ancient and the modern definition of the word “cult” and what those two things really mean. And to kind of flesh that out a little bit, in antiquity you had the prevailing sort of Greek, you know, the pantheon of the Greek gods. But you would also have, because Greece was a trading nation, a seafaring nation, you also had gods from other lands coming in. So you had a cult of Isis, for example, that would be centered in a particular area. You would have a cult of Dionysus, which was, from my understanding, not native. Or maybe I’m thinking of Bacchus in the Roman times. But you’ve got these gods that are coming in from Persia, they’re coming in from Egypt, maybe coming in from the north. And in each case, you have particular sites that are especially associated with them. And then, of course, the sort of seminal reference in any Epicurean texts to what an Epicurean clearly thought of as a cult was in Lucian’s book “Alexander the Oracle Monger.” Right? That’s a prime example of a cult, isn’t it? You’ve got this guy who clearly is out to con people out of their money and into influence and power for himself. He faked the birth of a material snake god, claimed that he was the only oracle for that god, and was, I think as Lucian put it, the scene of his depredations with the whole Roman Empire. So his influence grew to be absolutely tremendous. There’s one instance recorded by Lucian in which even Marcus Aurelius, who was the Stoic Emperor of Rome at the time, took his advice and went into battle and was absolutely routed. And the response from the oracle was, “We predicted there would be a great victory, but we didn’t predict from which side.” So, now that we’ve got the foundation laid, the question is, was Epicurean philosophy, or was the Epicurean school, maybe that’s another distinction we need to make, was the Epicurean school, particularly as it was practiced in classical antiquity, a cult? And as I said, I think this is a fair question. You had something to say? Yes, Joshua, before you go too far, you’ve introduced the issue of Lucian and Alexander the Oracle Monger. And I just want to insert one quote from that that is just so relevant to this question. Because you rightly, in my mind, raised up the issue that Lucian was pointing out that Alexander was an example of what we today would think of as, like you say, a cult. Somebody who was manipulating other people. Somebody who was forcing them to believe as he did through imposition and through lying and all sorts of other very negative forces. But there’s a paragraph in this, this Alexander the Oracle Monger story by Lucian is well worth everybody taking the time to read the entire thing, because it’s very interesting, very well written, like just about everything Lucian did, and very much on point. Let me read what he said about the people who were being taken in. And Lucian was writing this letter about Alexander to his friend, Celsus. So here’s the quote. “At this point, my dear Celsus, we may, if we will be candid, make some allowance for these Paphlagonians and Pontics. The poor, uneducated fatheads might well be taken in when they handled the serpent, a privilege conceded to all who chose, and saw in that dim light its head with the mouth that opened and shut.” And here’s the important point. “This was an occasion for a Dermocritus, nay for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus perhaps, a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight. One who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that although this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.” And that’s the point I wanted to emphasize as we go through all this. To me, it’s a very legitimate question. There’s very many good reasons for raising it. But it’s almost, I think by the time you end the analysis, it’s almost an absurd accusation when you think about that the Epicurean school was focused on skepticism and research into the real facts of life, opposition to claims of authority that had no reality to them. And that’s what Epicure stood for as much as anything else. So the idea that the person who’s teaching this radical skepticism and radical challenging of authority was himself guilty of being what we today consider an imposture, a cult of the worst type, it kind of is absolutely the reverse of what appears to be the truth when you look at the text. But that’s what we’re here to do is to look at the text and talk about all these things. So I’m sorry for that interruption. Go forward. No, you’re good. But just to push back a little bit on what you said, that’s a very convenient out for any Epicurean to use, but it’s also used by people who really are in cults. Right. People who are cults will say the same thing. They’ll say, oh, or you say we’re in a cult, but we’re just dedicated to finding truth. Correct. And then run into the issues of skepticism and whether there is such a thing as truth or not and so forth. So you keep going, Joshua. There’s so many different directions you could go. You’re going in a more articulate way than I am. So go ahead. Well, that’s kind of you. But OK, so then the other question that was raised apart from the idea of whether it’s a cult, but it’s an interlocking question, is the question of whether he was arrogant. And so on that front, Smoothie Kiwi, who, again, I absolutely thank for raising these questions, has asked, I’m left with a sour taste in my mouth. This is after reading DeWitt, which is not what we want. We don’t want people to have a sour taste in their mouth. That’s indicative of some kind of a pain disturbance. So my response going into this here, I want to jump ahead, first of all, to where he says claiming the right to be called a wise man as opposed to a philosopher. This is an area where I need a better foundation in Greek drama. But philosopher is a word that I think has good connotations today. But for quite a lot of people who lived in classical antiquity, philosophers were thought to be a subject for absurdist interpretations, weren’t they? Like sophists. Yeah, yeah. Which still has a negative connotation in English today. What’s that play? Is it the clouds or something? He’s got Socrates in there. And basically he drags out these people who are playing, these actors are playing philosophers. He drags them out and just makes them make complete fools of themselves in front of an audience. Because to call yourself a lover of wisdom in itself is somewhat pompous, isn’t it? It is. To call yourself a philosopher. What is the standard accusation against all philosophers except that they live in an ivory tower? They have no connection with reality. The ivory tower, I think, does come from that play you’re thinking about. And that’s at least I consider it to be a very, very valid accusation. If you’re so much into if you’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good, according to some of my religious friends who use that cliche. But that’s a legitimate criticism. It is. It is. And even today, when I was in college, I double majored in history and English, but I tried really hard to get a minor in philosophy. I just ran out of time and didn’t want to take more than four years. And majoring in philosophy is sort of the ultimate in the minds of most people, sort of the ultimate fluff, you know, course to take. Because people see philosophy as a sort of impractical and overly intellectual and arrogant would be the word that Smoothie Kiwi has used. An arrogant pursuit almost to look at yourself as being a lover of wisdom, thereby implying that other people are not lovers of wisdom. You know, Joshua, right. And you’ve triggered in my mind. I hope this is not too far of a tangent. But one thing this is a broad subject that we’re talking about in general. I’m about to make a very specific comment. There are texts that still survive that talk about. And there’s a good article out there that if you Google the Epicurean criticism of Socrates, that you can get what I’m about to say out of that material. That the Epicureans, you’re talking about Socrates and his position about the wise man and so forth and how that looks arrogant. Part of what we’re dealing with here is that the Epicureans were so practical that they resisted this idea of, today you’d call it the Socratic method. The question and answer that the just constant discussion and debate is the best way to get to the truth of things. The Epicureans liked to cut to the chase. They wanted to know what the person thought as quickly as possible without a lot of mumbo jumbo, without a lot of misdirection, without a lot of hiding the ball. And so it is recorded from antiquity that one of the Epicurean criticisms of Socrates that they focused on as much as anything else was that that’s exactly what Socrates did not do. He claimed that he was looking for a wise man. He wasn’t even wise himself. And all he could do was ask questions and he never really could really find truth in anything. He didn’t know anything except that he didn’t know anything. If I remember correctly, that’s one of the positions he took. That’s the only thing he was certain of was that he wasn’t certain of anything in a sense. And the Epicureans reacted against that from the idea, almost like when you’re talking with children. That’s not the way we teach children and not that we want everybody to be considered a child. But sometimes in life, you just have a limited amount of time to talk about things. And so you really want to get it out there quickly, what it is you believe. And I’m going to turn it back over to you in just a second, Joshua. But one way that came out, as I understand, and what DeWitt talks about a lot, is that Epicureans advised the use of outlines. In the letter to Herodotus, he specifically says that what he advised people to do, you can’t know all the details and keep all the details in your mind at a particular time. So the way you use the information is not try to access the details at every moment of your life, but to keep in your mind an outline of the major headings, the categories and the topics, the important ideas reduced to sort of a set of principles, which is kind of what the principle doctrines of Epicureans really are. But one effect of that is when you reduce things to an outline, if you’re not the person who prepared the outline, then you don’t really understand necessarily how he reached those conclusions. And it begins to look like some kind of a rote method of learning where you’re just supposed to memorize something. And I think that’s an unfair criticism, ultimately, because he wasn’t telling people these outlines and telling them to memorize them for the purpose of stopping there. Because if you don’t understand it, then you’re not going to have the effect of the medication of the Tetra-Pharmicon. If you don’t understand why not to fear the gods and why not to fear death, then you’re going to fall back into fearing them again. And here I’m going to turn it back over to you, Joshua. But one effect of using outlines comes through in DeWitt because DeWitt specifically says that he does this. He says specifically at the beginning of his book that he’s adopting Epicurus’ method of using outlines. So the chapter one of Epicurus and his philosophy, the DeWitt book, is a very high level summary of positions. It’s kind of like what we’re reading in Torquatus. It’s a list of positions that Epicurus took without taking the time in that first chapter to explain the subtleties of each position. It’s a very broad statement of the foundational principles. And then in the succeeding chapters of his book, DeWitt goes through and explains in much more detail what each of the headings of the outline really mean. But in the meantime, if you just start reading chapter one, if you just focus on the outline, if you just focus on the general allegations and general conclusions, you can, I think, get a false impression that these conclusions are somehow the equivalent of Moses coming down from the mountain with a list of 10 positions. That’s a good analogy here or a good contrast, maybe I should say, because the Moses Ten Commandments method is this is revelation from God. You must believe it. You must have faith in it. You must follow it. God said it. I believe it. That settles that kind of a position. And the Epicurean position is exactly the opposite of that. It is that you’re supposed to understand the details and the reasons for these conclusions. And if you don’t understand them, then it’s really going to be worthless for you to have read them in the first place. But one artifact of the way the Epicureans presented their position is that they would start, it appears, with the conclusions and they’d start with the final positions and then move to the details. So you have to give it time to let them present the full explanation before you really begin to understand it all is the is a general position I would take about a lot of things we’re discussing. And I apologize again for the length of that tangent, Joshua. And I’m sure you probably have no idea where you were when we were last talking. Well, the thing at first, the thing I would say is that is an excellent point that taking the synoptic view or the outline view of a philosophy and presenting it as a series of doctrines first and then explaining them next. That certainly does invite the kind of criticism that you’re talking about. So in order for us to actually get to the text eventually today, I’d just like to rapidly kind of go through my thoughts on both of both of the questions. Was he arrogant? And was it a cult? Basically, on the question of was it a cult? As I said, Nate has said it totally was a cult. It was movement, a small group of small movement dedicated to the veneration of a person or an object. In this case, the person of Epicurus, but more important than Epicurus is what he taught. And we’ve often said, I think, in various ways on the forum, on the podcast that we think Epicurean philosophy is a series of what our natural conclusions to derive from the way things really are. The way we phrase that sometimes is even if Epicurus had never lived. Yes. People would have figured this out eventually. Yes. Right. Because when you get past the outline view, when you get past the list of doctrines and you get to the argumentation that builds up to the conclusion of each doctrine, it really does proceed from maybe a thorough or a good understanding of nature the way it really is. I do want to bring up on this question of was it a cult? There is a book whose authors seem to have had some anxiety on this point. Francis writes a few days in Athens because in that book she has a chapter where one of the characters has just returned from an extended stay at a Pythagorean commune. The situation was such in the Pythagorean school that they really did have a list of very arbitrary rules. Things like you’re not allowed to eat beans, for example. And I know there’s there’s a background to that as well that I have gone into. But the way that the character describes it in Francis writes book is I’m quoting from a long ago memory here, but she says something to the effect of they were twelve perfect specimens of mechanism with one mind to govern all. In other words, the mind Pythagoras governs all the bodies because there is no there is no objection. There is no sort of discourse. You just receive the truth from him and you just live it the way he tells you to live it. I think she included that in her book because like I said, I think there was an anxiety there that the Epicurean school did bear a resemblance to that not as extreme as what you see in Pythagoras, but it is there. So as I say, it’s a fair question. Okay, we need to bring Martin in a minute, but let me address what you just said there about Francis Wright. And so just to be clear, I think what you’re saying she did was she emphasized that the Pythagorean school really did deserve the criticism of being a cult because Pythagoras was in fact setting himself up as almost an infallible authority figure who everybody had to follow his position almost exactly as closely as they had to follow his position. And I think there’s also allegations that he didn’t allow his students to speak or something like that. There was something about how you really had to have been indoctrinated into the cult before you were given much ability to even participate in it. So I think what you’re saying is that Francis Wright brought that up as a means of contrasting Epicurus against that and just making sure that that was an issue that was out there. There’s also another side of Francis Wright that if somebody’s really getting into that, they would want to pursue as well. Because I think Francis Wright personally took a different view of theory and conclusions than Epicurus did. I think there’s a couple things that Francis Wright deviated from Epicurus on. And you’ll find towards the end of the book, there’s an elaborate discussion about how all of philosophy should really simply be observation. Because anytime you move from observation to conclusion in her mind, you’ve gone too far because you can’t prove that that’s true. I think she’s wrong about that. I think she misleads there as to confusing what she’s saying with what Epicurus was saying. But it’s part of this whole issue of epistemology and when is it appropriate to say that you’re certain about anything. She personally eventually took the position, I think you can find in some of her other writings outside of that book, that she just really did not want to address any of this physics or astronomy or anything about whether the world is eternal or not eternal or space is infinite or not infinite. She really went to the position that all of those things don’t make any difference and you shouldn’t concern yourself with them at all because you can’t observe them. So just therefore don’t even pay any attention to them. So building up in Francis Wright is this tension in her position versus Epicurus on epistemology. You’re right, of course, because she presents him as a strict, thorough empiricist, which I don’t think he was. Right, right. All of these issues we’re discussing today are very deep and they unfortunately get involved in all of this epistemological questions, this canonics issues that are very difficult to bring out in detail. Some of which, though, we’re going to be talking about here as we eventually get to Torquatus. But I’m not sure we’re going to get very far with Torquatus today because we’ve got a ways to go yet. And Martin has already said that he would like to be the devil’s advocate on some of the things to say that we want to we really want to do bring out these questions because they occur over and over and over again. Is it not the first time? It won’t be the last time. I mean, some of the translations of Dodge and these Laertius say that Epicurus held the wise man as a dogmatist. And of course, I don’t know that there’s many words that strike fear and loathing in the modern mind than to say that this person is a dogmatist or dogmatic. That’s just universally condemned. And so you have to dig into the definition of what that meant. And you’ll see other translators don’t even use that word at all. They just say simply that Epicurus held the wise man takes firm positions on things. But all of that is part of what we’re dealing with in this accusation of arrogance and cult-like mentality. So I’m sorry, Martin, are you ready to jump in? Yeah. So as I said before on this arrogance. So from today’s perspective, for today’s custom, yes, Epicurus was in some ways arrogant. So he described himself as self-taught and didn’t refer his philosophy to the older sources. And the reason for this, how he saw it justified, was that because he made something new. But of course, it wasn’t completely new. He took parts of democratic atomism, but modified it. And from today’s perspective, that means you quote this atomism as the part where you started with. And then based on that, you created something new. But he chose not to do it the way it’s done based on the philosophical and scientific traditions we have today. For him, it was indifferent. He positioned himself as just the original thinker of all of this. And from today’s perspective, that is wrong and arrogant. Yes, that is an allegation that is generally made against him. And again, you kind of have to deal with the issue that we don’t have all of his own writings. So we don’t really know what he himself said. But that is an accusation that his critics made against him. And so while we don’t have the ability to verify it ourselves, really, because we have so few examples of his own text. But it clearly is an allegation that’s out there that needs to be guarded against. So, yes. Yeah. But then in his defense, we can say then that these traditions we refer to didn’t exist at that time. Or at least we have no clear indication that they existed. Because all this had just started to show up that we had written down philosophy. And things were going to be established. So that means there was not really a tradition where this was then violated in an arrogant way at the time of when people were same-sexed. Right. And specifically as to Democritus, you have the hugely important issue that Democritus basically ended up, or the logical conclusion of the atoms moving totally mechanically, is that there would be arguably no free will, no ability to control your own future, none of that at all. And Epicurus reacted strongly against that. And that apparently is where the whole swerve comes from, that he concluded that you cannot reconcile total mechanism and mechanics of atoms with human free will. And, of course, Cicero accuses him of making no changes related to Democritus except some changes that are for the bad, which is what he’s accusing the swerve issue of being for the bad, because Epicurus had no description of the real mechanism of the swerve. But anyway, the point being, even with Democritus, who Epicurus’ atomism is most closely identified with, Epicurus made important modifications to what Democritus had come up with before. And I’ll just say further on that point, I just don’t really even believe the accusation. The idea that he would refuse to talk about things that Democritus or Plato or somebody else had said in every context. If he’s running a school and his students are asking him questions, then half the questions they’re going to be asking him are going to be about things that they’ve read in some other philosopher’s book or something like that. So, again, I know I’m just too much of a partisan there, but in terms of his taking the position that he’s the only philosopher who ever lived or the only one who you even need to know about, that just seems overbroad, seems likely to be overbroad to me. But anyway, keep going, Martin. That was actually all what I had to say on this arrogance. Then we had this cult thing. Okay, probably his school had a bit of elements of a cult, but I don’t see the indication that it was an outright cult in itself. So it had some cult-like elements like what was mentioned there. But this one I wouldn’t see from today’s perspective where cult really has something like inherently evil in itself. And what it assured in his time, these cult-like elements, was that it was pretty much the only school which did not really get into splintering off into subschools, which were against each other. So it seems that didn’t happen. So it means for the subsequent several hundred years of existence, there were no rival schools bringing up from within the epicurean schools. So that means that one was something that then maybe helped them with the structure of these outlines and then going gradually into the details to understand this. So that this one really then helped to keep that teaching consistent. Yeah, let me mention a couple of other things that are consistent with what you’re just talking about, Martin, that people who are just starting to read may not know about. It’s preserved very clearly in Diogenes Lertius that you’re right, the school largely was able to stay intact without a lot of obvious splintering for several hundred years. But there were differences of opinion, and Diogenes Lertius preserves at least two of them in his text, and Cicero Turquatus here preserves it as well. That some Epicureans later on, instead of having three legs to their canon, considered that there were actually four legs. And so they deviated from Epicurus in an epistemological issue that you’d have to read into the details to really, that’s beyond the scope of what we can talk about today. But then there’s the other issue that Turquatus himself has already brought up in what we’ve been reading. He said that Epicurus took the position that it is not necessary for you to use elaborate philosophical, logical argument to prove that pleasure is the goal of life. He said that you just base your conclusion on observation of the young or other species, and you conclude that nature gives no other method for deciding what to do and what not to do other than pleasure and pain. And he specifically said that’s really what you ground all this on. But Turquatus himself preserves that there are other opinions about how far you have to go in arguing the logic of that position. And Turquatus himself says that he takes a different position and says that it is important for you to discuss the issue of pleasure logically. And that reminds me that there’s probably another one as well preserved by Turquatus, because in the discussion of friendship, which we’ve discussed, I think, earlier in these episodes as well, there was apparently significant disagreement about what is the origin of friendship. And Turquatus says that he himself takes the position that’s slightly different than a pure Epicurean position about where friendship begins. It’s something to the effect of, does friendship begin and stay with the issue of it being of pleasure to yourself? Or how do you explain the origin and continuance of friendship? And it’s clear from that discussion in Turquatus that there were differences of position among the Epicureans about how to argue those things. So they did have differences of opinion within themselves. It was not a totally monolithic situation where people were excommunicated if they took a slightly different position. And now I’m on a roll. Let me make two other comments. You can certainly see, back on what Joshua was saying earlier about how legitimate these questions are, when you read Lucretius, the openings of each of the six books, I always forget which one is which, but there’s the opening that basically says Epicurus was a god. He starts talking about what a god is and what a god is not. And he says, if you really want to talk about someone who truly deserves to be thought of as a god, Epicurus fits that better than most other examples do. So people can laugh and say, ha ha, he’s calling Epicurus a god, so he thinks Epicurus is better than anybody else. But I think that’s a false conclusion. And then there’s another book where he starts talking about Epicurus as a father figure, which is probably a better analogy for the accurate Epicurean position about how to regard Epicurus. You know, you don’t consider your father to be a god. If you’re realistic, you know, your father can make mistakes. But you have a lot of affection for your physical father and for the things that that person has done for you. And I think that’s the root of this issue of affection. The Epicurus thought, and I would agree with them today, that Epicurus personally, as a human being, deserves a lot of credit for having done what he did. He didn’t have to be the leader of the school. He didn’t have to write all these books. He didn’t have to risk all that he risked himself to accomplish what he did. And his achievement is really monumental. I mean, we’re still talking about Epicurus 2,000 years later in ways that compare him favorably to most other philosophers or even human beings in terms of his positions over thousands of years. He deserves a lot of personal credit. And he’s benefited us tremendously by providing us this information, this perspective on life. And so I think it would be pretty ungrateful and pretty, I heard someone use the word churlish lately. It would be churlish or childish or ungrateful to take the position that the Epicureans should not have had personal affection for Epicurus. Even those who didn’t live with him, who didn’t know him, who came after he was dead, it’s still logical to be grateful to somebody who has benefited your life in a profound way. And it’s hard for me to say that that’s a wrong attitude, even today, to take towards Epicurus. So that’s an even longer rant than normal. Joshua, bring it back to reality. Okay, well, I have a checklist of what makes a cult. Okay, great. All right, I’m just going to go down them quickly. And by going down this list, you are going to cement the achievement that we are not even going to talk about the first sentence of today’s passage before we have to finish today. You predicted earlier on. Because then, after I talk about this, we have to talk about Diogenes von Wanda. When I read this list, you’ll see how he’s a great source on some of this stuff. All right, the group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment. Okay, I’m sorry, what are you reading now, Joshua? This is Dr. Steve Eichel, or something. Checklist of characteristics about cults. Okay, gotcha. All right, so the group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment. Well, that rules out us, because obviously he’s dead and isn’t coming back. He told us that. That doesn’t rule out the original garden, so we’ll keep that in mind. A living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous or unquestioning commitment. I think Smoothie Kiwi made a reference to these portraits of Epicurus, as on a finger ring, for example. Most of the rings, I should say the plurality of surviving rings from classical antiquity that bear images of people on them are portraits. The plurality of those, I understand this to be true, are portraits of Epicurus. I don’t know that. And, Joshua, just to make sure you remember this, you said earlier that you wanted to talk about the issue of him sitting for portraits and so forth. So don’t forget that part. Right, right. Well, because that’s how we got the rings, isn’t it? And the statues and so forth. Yeah, yeah. And to me, I would even look at it a different way than what Smoothie Kiwi has brought up. I don’t think sitting for portraits is necessarily an arrogant thing to do. I mean, I have photos taken of me relatively frequently, sometimes not by my choice. It’s my mother’s choice to get everybody together and take a picture. But I’m guilty of a selfie or two occasionally. So the group is preoccupied with bringing in new members. This is an interesting one because I mentioned on the forum in that thread that one of the principal methods of attracting new people to the garden was they wrote and disseminated literature. So there’s an element of truth to that one. They did have a goal of bringing in new members. Then we get to the third one. Joshua, before we go to number third, let’s just make sure we include. There’s a lot of good scholarship that that’s the purpose of sitting for the statues and the portraits is that those portraits and statues were used as sort of a recruiting tool. They didn’t obviously have the Internet or newspapers and so forth. Number three on the list, the group is preoccupied with making money. This is what I really think of when I think of a cult is you’ve got people like Alexander the Oracle monger, right? Yes. Didn’t believe a word. Well, who knows? He was he was a strange person. He might have believed some of what he was saying. That’s the problem with people who lie for a living is you end up believing your own lies. But clearly, as you read Lucian on that topic, this was a business for just raking in cash. Epicurean philosophy, by contrast, there’s a rule preserved in at least Diogenes Laeritius. I don’t know. I can’t think off the top of my head if it’s preserved elsewhere. But he specifically declined to make the garden a commune. He specifically prohibited money being held in common among his followers. Exactly. That’s a huge reason. And he gave a reason for that. He said, because it indicates a lack of trust. Yes. Number four on the list. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. I certainly hope that’s not the case on the EpicureanFriends.com. We’re answering questions right now, and I do not discourage them. I love these questions. It’s hard to say exactly what the day-to-day instruction was like in the garden without knowing, so it’s difficult to answer some of these questions. And then you’ve got mind-numbing techniques such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines, are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders. And there’s no corollary there, is there? Be careful there. Be careful there. You know where I’m going to go. Right. I think you’re exactly right. There is no parallel there in what is recorded. Of course, what I’m saying about being careful is I know that there are people out there who like to combine other traditions, and they find that chanting and incense and things like that are helpful to them, and I’m not going to criticize that. And if they find it helpful, go ahead, Joshua. That’s the distinction, isn’t it? It’s a different thing to choose the practice for yourself than it is to have the leader tell you to do this, isn’t it? That’s part of it. But it actually may go deeper than that in terms of repetition and chanting and, I mean, mind-clearing techniques and so forth. That’s way beyond the scope of what we have time to address today. I personally am skeptical of those things because I do fall into that definition that you’re reading there. I consider those things often to be associated with manipulation of people and an encouragement to sort of clear your mind of things, when, in my opinion, you probably should be filling your mind with things and ordering your mind and not just trying to get these things out of your mind, but to come to terms with them. So I’m kind of personally very careful and cautious about those things myself. You’re taking the anti-cult view. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The leadership dictates in great detail how members should think, act, and feel. For example, members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, etc. I’m sorry, date, change jobs, or what? Date, change jobs, get married, what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and all this stuff like that. No, there’s absolutely no sense that this was going on, was there? No, no. If you wanted to stretch and look for something, you could make the point in Epicurus’ will that he suggested that, I think, it’s Metrodor’s daughter be eventually married off to someone who was within the school. But in my opinion, that’s totally legitimate taking care of the child of a dead friend, and nothing wrong with that whatsoever. There’s no evidence that Epicurus had set up a dating and marriage factory. And of course, of course, in that particular aspect of things, you have all of this Epicurean advice about how cautious to be about marriage and so forth. So, again, it would be almost exactly the opposite. Right. I’m just going to pick a few more out here. I don’t want to have you on the group teaches or implies that it is supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group. For example, collecting money for bogus charities. So, convincing you that things that you would have thought were immoral before you joined the group are moral after you joined the group because they serve the higher purposes of the group. And I don’t think we see that at all in Epicurean. No, it’s a very different perspective because, of course, Epicurus, you know, you can see somebody arguing that Epicurus. Well, what is it in Lucretius where in book one he talks about you may be concerned that you’re entering into a realm of evil because we’re teaching you to be skeptical about religion. But the truth is that it’s religion that creates so much evil in the world and not what we’re teaching. So, that’s probably relevant to what you’ve just brought out is, yes, Epicurus teaches people to question what they used to believe. And if you conclude Epicurus is right, then Epicurus says you should fight against it if you think it’s wrong. You should embrace it in the end and its implications if you think it’s right. So, that means you may conclude that something that you previously believed was right is now not so clear to you. Yeah, I’d give you that, but I wouldn’t go as far as what it says here, which is to say – I wouldn’t say, for example, that, okay, we’ve studied Epicurus and we’ve learned that pleasure is the goal of life. And so, to pursue that exalted end, any means that we use are justified in pursuit of it. Right. Conning other – you know, you can come up with your own list there. Right. The issue there would be that the reason those things are not valid is because they won’t, in fact, lead to pleasure. But you’re certainly right in the general direction you’re going. I just would be cautious about the issue of – if he’s saying that Epicurus teaches you that your previous orientation of right and wrong needs to be challenged, then he’s right on point because he’s definitely telling you that. Yeah. He’s giving you a new orientation and suggesting you look at this and then come to your own conclusion. Let’s see. He has a polarized us-versus-them mentality which causes conflict with the wider society. This is a difficult one, isn’t it? The first thing I would do here is pull in the inscription of Diogenes von Melinda, where he specifically says that he’s writing this down not just for Epicureans, not just for people living in his town, not even just for Greeks. But he’s saying that I’m writing this down even for the foreigners who live amongst us, who are – he says something like, who are our brothers and sisters. So there is the idea in Epicurean philosophy that it’s kind of open to anyone. And there’s another thing on the list that says that cults are – how did it word it? Typical – like most of the members are middle class. And in Cicero, we have a clear claim from an antagonist of Epicurean philosophy that that’s not the case. Epicurus was appealing to people who other philosophers did not appeal to and didn’t even want to talk to, really. He was appealing to people scooping up men from the crossroads. Did you say that the list of cult signals is that the members of the cult are generally middle class? Is that what I heard you say? Yeah, that was – well, it wasn’t on this list. It was – it’s actually on Wikipedia. How does it – specific factors in cult behavior are said to include manipulative and authoritarian and mind control, communal and totalistic organization, aggressive proselytizing, systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle class communities. I don’t think I’ve really heard that allegation before. What does that mean? Middle class as opposed to higher educated? Or middle class terms tends to be an economic term as opposed to – Oh, no. I look at it as completely the opposite that you’ve just taken. I say middle class as opposed to like working class. Okay. Because I’m looking at like people who have the money to go to India and, you know. Okay. So you’re looking at it as people of means who do have some ability and some education and some wealth. Yeah. And who are living with a sense of ennui, shall we say, or kind of a world weariness. Okay. I see. I’m going to say this and you can take it out if you want to. Okay. Go ahead. It is the case that most school shootings happen in relatively upscalive – Yes. Yes. And part of the reason for that is thought to be this disillusionment of middle class youth. Yes. Yeah. That’s a very valid – So to me, that’s where this is going is it’s these kinds of people you’re either going to – well, I’m not going to phrase it that way. But anyway, I’ve only got a few more here. I think Don might agree with this one. Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group. Not expected, not required, but if you certainly have the time, we love to have it. It helps everybody if people have time to devote. But no, nobody’s going to be excommunicated because they don’t have enough time, I would think. Yeah, yeah. And then the last one on the list, members are encouraged or required to live and or socialize only with other group members. This wasn’t even true of Epicurus himself, right? He went out into the city and went to watch other philosophers as they lectured and went to the religious rites and mysteries and all that. Just like many of these, you could probably find a couple of passages. I think even Principle of Doctrine 39, the one that talks about the happiest man as one who’s going to live among other people who are of like mind and he’s going to separate himself from others to some extent. I mean, you can find texts that can be used to support arguments. But again, for every argument against it, there’s going to be a countervailing argument. And in that sense, it’s an obvious point. It seems obvious to me that you have your greatest happiness among people who are your friends. Your friends tend to think, to some extent, generally a little bit like you. And so it’s just logical that you are going to generally want to surround yourself with people who generally are compatible with you. That does not seem to me to be anything evil or cultish to do that. But you can certainly see how all these arguments are possible. And I don’t want to imply we’re coming to the end since we’re so long today anyway. But the point would be that everybody has to make this decision for themselves. The point that I would be confident in making is I personally, through my reading, am confident that once you read enough into the text, once you think enough about what Epicurus is talking about, you are not going to conclude that Epicurus was a cult in the modern sense who needs to be rejected because of that. You’re likely to conclude the opposite, in fact. If there’s anybody out there who’s out there deprogramming, they used to have the Moonies and you’d have people who would want to go deprogram their children from being in the Moonies. That would be the side that Epicurus would be on is attempting to deprogram people from other. Like you said, Joshua, everybody can say that about their own viewpoint and say that the other person is wrong. But still, I’m just confident that when people of fair-minded ability read the material, they will not conclude that this is a problem with Epicurus. One final point I want to make here. We’ve touched on it in a couple of different ways, but when you read all of the available texts, it becomes very clear that the Epicurean school was unusual for its time in how open it was. I mentioned Diogenzo and Wanda and opening up the school even to non-Greeks, which was unusual, but it was open to women. And women not only were allowed to come to the garden, but actually to engage in the intellectual work of the garden, to engage in writing responses to other philosophers, for example. Then there’s the slave question, which I don’t even know if we’re going to go into that. Right, but it’s there. It’s something that people will bring up. And at least one of his slaves was a part of the garden. They said Miss, or the one called Mouse or something like that. And there’s an interesting, and I’m taking this from, what’s his name? William Ellery Leonard, was that the translator’s name? Was he the guy who translated the inscription of Diogenes and Wanda? No, that’s Martin Ferguson Smith you’re talking about now. There you go. So Martin Ferguson Smith translates this one passage in there where Diogenes and Wanda makes very unusual. It has a vision for society, a sort of utopian outlook on society and what it could become under Epicurean philosophy. And he includes, interestingly enough, that there would be no slaves. I was kind of shocked when I read that because I had understood that the earliest opponent of slavery on record was Bishop Gregory of Nyssa of late antiquity, who was a bishop in the Christian church. So here we actually have an Epicurean who’s, if not an abolitionist, as we understand that term to be, he could at least imagine a world where you don’t have or need slaves. And this is a response that’s often made is when people talk about the past and it’s like, well, you can’t judge them for having slaves because they couldn’t even imagine a world where there weren’t slaves. Well, interestingly enough, we do have an Epicurean who did imagine that. Right. Now, Diogenes of Ornander probably does, I don’t know what that church father period was, but Diogenes of Ornander is even later than Diogenes of Lurchius, I think. So he’s, they could be around the same time period, but he is. Unless your point is valid. I think he’s 200 years prior to Gregory of Nyssa. But anyway, I’d be curious to see if Martin has any response to the list of cult attributes or if you have any deeper response to that. Yeah, I have one comment immediately to this latest thing on abolition of slavery. This was actually a thought present in essence already before Epicurus. I read this in Popper’s work on, I won’t get the whole exact title. It’s about the free society and its enemies. So where he quotes Plato and interprets such that Plato mentions and discussed that essence, the citizens of essence came close to abolishing slavery. Well, what I’m remembering there now, in the Republic, Joshua helped us to, whether he was getting rid of all slaves, I don’t have a feel for that. I don’t know. I do remember there is a passage that is, there was a particular translation of a passage that has been heavily criticized in Plato. And it’s something to do with, okay, so here it says, Aristotle argued that if the world was just, the legal slaves would be freed. And if any natural slaves were by chance free, they should be made slaves. Yeah, you got this natural slave concept in Aristotle, if I confirmed correctly. Okay, so is this to do with like this, you got the gold man and the silver man and the bronze man? I think that’s Plato. But yes, I associate both Plato and Aristotle as having that position. My answer to natural slaves is so that this was a general justification in ancient times for making or keeping slaves. So that those who were natural slaves would not be willing to fight until their death to avoid defeat of their own group. And because in the way slaves normally were recruited, so to say, was in war, defeating the enemy army and the survivors then would become slaves. So that was a deal. So they survived and then become slaves to the winners. And so this is then the concept of the natural slaves. So those who don’t fight to their death then are those who are naturally slaves. And those who are not would rather than fall in battle, if their side was not the winner, then to survive as a slave. Martin, what you just said is very close to my understanding. I hate for us to close the episode spending too much time talking about slavery, though, because that is such a complicated and unattractive issue to be talking about. Maybe I can try to wrap this back in the other original direction by saying that if Epicurus was anything, he was anti-Platonist. And it’s recorded in Diogenes Luritius that he accused Plato of being a golden. And if you have to look for a strain of social attitudes in Epicurus, it’s got to be an anti-elitist strain. He’s constantly talking about not participating in the politics or the schools and the culture. And there’s all sorts of comments that people will argue about, but which seem to be, in my mind at least, targeted towards just be skeptical of all of these ideas that a particular culture might be suggesting to you. Which is not to say that you’re not going to have one yourself, but just that you’re going to be skeptical. You’re going to evaluate the details of it and decide what you think is right and what you think is wrong. And you’re not going to accept these things on authority. That’s the whole Platonic regime of the Republic is a beehive type of top-down philosopher-king manipulation of the lower people. And I don’t think there’s anything like that whatsoever in Epicurean philosophy. We are probably long already, but let’s talk about closing thoughts or just whatever in general you want to say. Josh, I’m a little late on this, but I did want to mention that Gregory of Nisa lived and wrote in the fourth century. And Dajan is one Wanda in the second century. So this is two centuries prior to the Bishop of Nisa. What I want to say at the end here is I hope that we’ve, I don’t know if we’ve satisfactorily answered Smoothie Kiwi’s questions. I know we have not satisfactorily explored the text passage we were going to look at today at all. But I do want to say we encourage these kinds of questions on the forum. It’s great to be able to talk about them on the podcast. I really did enjoy this episode in particular. And I think this is really helpful. I don’t know if we’ve been helpful, but I think the questions are helpful. Right. And I would say that I’m never satisfied that I personally have been very articulate in explaining any of this material. But I think, Joshua, you’ve done, and Martin, you all have done a very good job with it. But more than anything else, I’m just convinced that there are good answers to these concerns. There are good answers to, now that I think about it, we only sort of touched on the issue of dogmatism and whether Epicurus was a dogmatic philosopher or not. And what that means and so forth. But I’m just absolutely convinced that there are, and wouldn’t want anybody to take my word for it, but I’m just, based on 10 plus years of intensive reading on this and in my own experience, I’m just convinced that there are good answers to these questions. And that Epicurus derived his answers to these questions from a very thorough study of the nature of the universe, which is the physics. But also, and I have to keep encouraging people to study the canonics side, the epistemology side, the issues that are discussed in Philodemuses called either on signs or on methods of inference. These issues of logic and reason and how to apply them properly. That is so huge, and we don’t spend nearly enough time talking about it. There’s just a tremendously fertile field for development of people to dig into that and write about it and talk about it and bring out those issues. Because I’m convinced when you do, when you really do dig into them, you’ll find that a cult-like mentality is the exact opposite of what Epicurus was after. That he himself was committed to pursuing what he thought was the truth, to find whatever truth is available. And that’s essentially what he teaches. He teaches pleasure because he’s first convinced himself that there is a valid way of thinking and studying nature that does allow you to reach firm conclusions about some things in life. And that when you do that studying and when you do reach those conclusions, then you turn those into the ethical conclusions that he reached. But you simply cannot understand. You will not eventually stay with it. You will not appreciate where he’s coming from on the ethics and his discussions of pleasure and pain and virtue unless you dig into his views of the nature of the universe and his views of reason and logic and this canonical issue of the role of the senses. And all of those things that we don’t have assembled for us in a single text anymore like we’d like to have. But the elements, I’m convinced, the elements are still there. They are buried in Lucretius. They are buried in the letter to Herodotus, the letter to Pythocles, and other sources that do still exist. So I don’t know whether, I just would hope that no one would ever think that what we’re doing at EpicureanFriends.com has anything whatsoever to do with a cult. Because in the end, when we’re talking about these things, I enjoy expanding my circle of friends. But it’s all based on a joint desire to get at the truth of things, to understand the way the world really works. As Humphrey said, the way things are is his title of the Lucretius translation. I want to know the way things are. I don’t want to be imposed upon by some authority figure who tells me to believe something because I have to believe it. And I think that summarizes Epicurus’ attitude in what I read in these texts as much as anything. Martin, any final thoughts? No, I’m fine for today. Okay, very good. And Joshua, anything else? Oh, my final thought is we have finished our conversation. But that doesn’t mean that the conversation in general has to be over because we talk about things like this every day over on EpicureanFriends.com. And we welcome these kinds of questions. And thank you to Smoothie Kiwi for bringing them up. And thank you, Don, and all the other people who have been participating and asking questions. This has been one of the best episodes I think we’ve recorded in a long time because we had the input from our friends on the Internet to bounce off of. So I hope we can continue to do that. And we’ll take as much time as necessary to get through the rest of Turquatus because we have no schedule except our inevitable deaths at some point in the future. We’re many, many years away. Okay, well, we’ll close for today and come back next week. So thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Okay, bye. Bye.