Episode 106 - The Epicurean Attitude Toward Fate / Fortune and the Role of Reason
Date: 01/28/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2353-episode-one-hundred-six-the-epicurean-attitude-toward-fate-fortune-and-the-role/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode covers two main topics from the Torquatus text in Cicero’s On Ends (sections 63–64). The first half examines the Epicurean attitude toward fate and fortune — including Principal Doctrine 16 that “in but few things chance hinders a wise man” — and relates this to the question of free will, the clinamen (atomic swerve), and the distinction between what is in our control and what is not. Joshua’s Chinese farmer parable illustrates the theme. The second half opens a discussion of Epicurean epistemology, focusing on Torquatus’s claim that “the logic of your school possesses no efficacy, either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate.” The episode ends with a discussion of how Pythagorean and Aristotelian cosmology went wrong through abstract logic detached from sense evidence, and previews a deeper dive into Epicurus’s approach to natural science.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 106 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. 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 completed our first line-by-line review of the poem, and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today, we return to the Torquatus text and look more closely at this list of core Epicurean doctrines. Before we get started, I need to apologize to our listeners this week because I experimented with a new microphone in the recording of this episode, and the result was much worse than normal rather than better. I’ll be back to my normal microphone next week, and in the meantime, I apologize for the lack of audio quality in today’s episode. Now let’s join Joshua reading today’s text, and let’s join the discussion.
Joshua:
He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy, either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate. 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.
[Our character] 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 kin, 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. Moreover, unless the constitution of the world is thoroughly understood, we shall by no means be able to justify the verdicts of our senses.
Further, our mental perceptions all arise from our sensations, and if these are all to be true, as the system of Epicurus proves to us, then only will cognition and perception become possible. Now those who invalidate sensations and say that the perception is altogether impossible cannot even clear the way for this very argument of theirs, when they have thrust the senses aside. Moreover, when cognition and knowledge have been invalidated, every principle concerning the conduct of life and the performance of its business becomes invalidated.
So from natural science we borrow courage to withstand the fear of death and firmness to face superstitious dread and tranquility of mind through the removal of ignorance concerning the mysteries of the world and self-control arising from the elucidation of the nature of the passions and their different classes. And, as I showed just now, our leader again has established the canon and criterion of knowledge and thus has imparted to us a method for marking off falsehood from truth.
Cassius:
Joshua, thank you for reading that for us this morning. We are going to be tackling these two passages that you’ve just read, which are listed as sections 63 and 64 in the text, and I don’t know if we’re going to make it all the way through both of them today. We’ll just go through them as fast as it seems appropriate for us to do so. If we need to take a couple of episodes, we’ll do that. But for the time being, we’ll try to tackle both of them today, because they’re probably the most directly targeted at the issues of epistemology and the canon of truth that we’re going to have in the letter.
We’ve come from several weeks in the past talking about the issues of the relationship between pleasure and virtue and all sorts of other problems. And from here, after these two sections, we’re going to move back into sort of the concluding section of the letter — we’re going to talk about friendship, and then the letter will begin to sum up and conclude. But for the time being, these two sections, 63 and 64, contain a tremendous amount of good information, just like what we covered last week. So we’ll go through it as efficiently as we can.
The very first sentence is an important one: “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.” Let’s stop right there, because that’s pretty much one thought. Joshua, I know you’re sitting in a cold car today as you’re recording this. I don’t know if your mind is frozen or not, but what do you think about that?
Joshua:
So we’re carrying on here with sort of what we started talking about in the last episode — what is the characteristic of the wise man? And this seems to be an obsession of ancient philosophy. We talked a lot about what constituted the life of wisdom. And what he goes on to say here is that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path.
This seems to have been a huge obsession in Epicurean philosophy — this idea that we’re not bound by fate, and even fortune, as we’re going to see in this passage. This idea that we’re not bound by fortune, or that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path, arises partially because of the Epicurean system of nature and the universe.
When you look at some of the other Greek systems for nature, they didn’t allow for this. Democritus, for example, believed in atoms and void. But he believed that atoms and void necessarily resulted in our having no free will. So free will is one of the most important subjects in philosophy, ancient or modern. And what Epicurus is saying here is that he’s already told us that we have free will — we already know that from his physics, in which he introduces the clinamen. Or I guess clinamen would be the Latin word for it.
Cassius:
The swerve. Yes.
Joshua:
The result of that is that we’re not bound by a lack of free will. Epicurus thought it was very important that we have free will. And not only do we have free will, we have the ability to order our lives in such a way that fortune or chance doesn’t impact the wise man.
For example, let’s say you’ve had the bad fortune to have your house burned down in a wildfire — and there’s been a lot of that going around these last couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a horrible thing to have happened. But what he’s saying here is that when you consider what’s important, you’re not going to be as impacted by something like that. This is not a Stoical sort of indifference to things. I’m not suggesting indifference, and I don’t think Epicurus is suggesting indifference. But by keeping in mind what’s really important, you sort of lose your obsession with things that are not as important.
Cassius:
Joshua, you know, in fact, you’ve corrected me. Every time I read this material, I come up with a different angle on certain parts of it. And I was prepared for you to just immediately talk about Principal Doctrine 16. But really, you’re right to focus on it the way you did, because even though this translation uses the word “fortune” — “that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path” — that really is the big issue he’s probably focusing on: fate and the word fortune.
The question is whether there is some force in the universe — whether the gods, or the three Fates, the old women spinning the threads of fate in Greek mythology — whether there is some force like a supernatural intent or providence that sets a particular path, such that everything is going to happen according to that path, or that decides to change its mind randomly and deviate from that path at unexpected times. And when you were talking about “obsessions,” clearly that’s one of the big questions of life, not only for Greek philosophers, but just: is there some force in the universe that is determining the events that happen?
I was led astray because this is clearly related to Principal Doctrine 16. But just to remind everyone — Doctrine 16 is: “In but few things chance hinders a wise man.” That’s pretty much exactly what we’ve been talking about. Then it continues: “But the greatest and most important matters reason has ordained, and throughout the whole period of his life does and will ordain.”
Now that changes the focus somewhat to a discussion of the role of reason in human life. So you’ve got maybe two issues in Doctrine 16: one is what we’ve been talking about so far in section 63 — the issue of fortune and fate — and then the text from Torquatus says “his greatest and most important undertakings are executed in accord with his own design and his own principles.” Whether “own design and own principles” is the same as “reason” is an interesting question that you could dig into the original Latin, and maybe original Greek, to decide if there’s a change there or if it’s exactly the same thing.
But if hard determinism was the situation and nobody could control any events of their life whatsoever, you wouldn’t even really need to be concerned about reason in the first place, because you’d have no ability to direct your own thoughts down any kind of path, reasonable or not. You’d be swept along like a leaf in the wind or some debris in a stream — no control over where you’re going.
But Epicurus — and this is in the Letter to Menoeceus as well — points out that some things are within our control and some things are not. This is a clear statement that Epicurus is saying that fortune “only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path.” He’s staking out his position that there are things that are unpredictable in life, but that if you order your life appropriately, you can keep that instability largely in control.
Martin, this is kind of physics in your area. Where do you weigh in on fate and fortune?
Martin:
And another way that he translates this concept — he translates it as “necessity.” So, for example, Vatican Saying number nine says: “Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity for continuing to live subject to necessity.” And that seems to get to the same idea.
Perhaps one of the most obvious and boldest manifestations of this argument — even in pre-human terms — is “winter is coming.” It’s coming for everyone. And if you’re a squirrel and you don’t want to starve over winter, you’ve got to lay aside some acorns. That’s the most obvious example of the kind of thing where you can take steps to avoid the problems that you know are coming. Some of the problems that are coming we don’t necessarily know about, but some of them we do. And to be caught off guard by something that you knew was happening the whole time betrays a certain lack of sense, a lack of wisdom.
Cassius:
Joshua, we’d be delinquent if we don’t also reference the latter part of the Letter to Menoeceus here. I’ll read from the Bailey translation — this is directly on point with what we’re talking about. The letter ends basically: “He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity and some by chance, and some are within our control. For while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant. But that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame. For indeed, it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers, for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation.”
“As to chance, he does not regard it as a god, as most men do — for in a god’s acts, there is no disorder — nor as an uncertain cause of all things, for he does not believe that good and evil are given by chance to man for the framing of a blessed life, but that opportunities for great good and great evil are afforded by it. He therefore thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason. For it is better in a man’s action that what is well chosen should fail, rather than that what is ill chosen should be successful, owing to chance.”
That’s really an elaboration of what we’ve been discussing here in the first part of the first sentence of our texts for today. Any further thoughts, Joshua and Martin?
Joshua:
Well, I was attracted to this idea that fortune or chance could be a god. And indeed, there was a Greek goddess — Tyche, I think, is how that would be pronounced — who was the goddess of chance, the equivalent of the Roman Fortuna, a capricious dispenser of good and ill fortune. This is one of the most commonly commented-upon ideas in general, not even anything to do with Epicurean philosophy specifically.
There’s all these different stories and anecdotes. I’m thinking of one I think came from China. Anyway, here’s the way it starts out: you’ve got this farmer in China with a horse that is really unruly, untamable. Then his son manages to tame the horse. An unruly horse is useless, but a horse that can be tamed has use. So his son manages to tame the horse, and his neighbor comes over and congratulates the man because now he’s got a horse he can actually use.
Well, then the next day his son falls off the horse and breaks his leg. So the neighbor comes over and says, “That’s bad luck, I’m sorry to hear that about your son.” And to all of these events, the response of the farmer is always the same — he says, “We shall see.” Because everything is a mixed lot, right? So now his son has broken his leg, the neighbor is sorry, and the father replies, “We shall see.” Well, the next day the Emperor sends people around to round up conscripts for an army he’s raising. But because the son broke his leg, he’s now exempt. And so the neighbor comes in again to congratulate the farmer on his son having broken his leg. And the answer to that, again, is “We shall see.” You can extend that sort of line infinitely. I don’t remember all the pieces that go into that story.
Cassius:
Joshua, let me stop you on that point. It may not seem directly relevant, but the feedback I’m getting is that the stories you tell on the podcast are some of the most helpful and best parts of it for the listeners. So we cannot ever slight any story that comes to mind — be sure you throw it in.
Joshua [attribution uncertain]:
The way it’s described is the capricious dispensation of good or ill fortune. So sometimes things happen to you totally by chance that are good.
Martin [attribution uncertain]:
Right.
Joshua [attribution uncertain]:
And the wise man — or the wise farmer in this case — knows that what appears to be luck may actually be bad luck, and what looks like bad luck at first may turn out to be a blessing later. So this varying perspective, depending on the later outcome, is what changes there.
But this story is not really about what the wise man does with respect to reason in order to plan to prevent particular bad outcomes. So that means we could also take some kind of action to prevent unwanted possibilities.
Joshua [attribution uncertain]:
I would have a response to that, but while you were talking I thought about the part of the story that I didn’t tell.
Cassius [attribution uncertain]:
So what’s the rest of it?
Joshua:
Oh, I remember how it started. He had a horse that ran away, and then the neighbor was like, “Oh, sorry to hear that.” And the guy says — the thing he always says — “We’ll see.” And that horse comes back with a whole herd. So now this guy’s got like eight horses. And that’s when the son has to tame the unruly wild horse that came back with them. And then it goes on from there.
Cassius:
And as we move on to the next sentence, you’re transitioning from one deep subject to a subject that is possibly even deeper than what we just discussed. Because now, for our listeners, Joshua is going to explain to us how and why no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life which is without end in time than is reaped from this life, which we know to have its allotted end. OK, Joshua, please explain that one for us.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. I haven’t stepped fully into that yet. But we do know, don’t we, that we’re not going to live forever. We are going to die — and because we’re Epicureans, we don’t think of that necessarily as a bad thing. We’d like to continue living, wouldn’t we? But when the bell finally does ring, we don’t need to throw a fit about it. We knew this was going to happen the whole time.
So the question becomes: how do we experience a life of pleasure when we know that that life will have its end? What Epicurus is trying to do here is to placate the concerns that people have about missing out. In his memoir — Christopher Hitchens wrote his memoir, called Hitch 22 — the reason he decided to write a memoir is because the National Portrait Gallery in England had put out a magazine with a picture of him and a couple of his literary friends in it, and at the bottom of the picture, the caption said “the late Christopher Hitchens with his friends.” Well, he wasn’t actually late yet. But so this sort of precipitated in his mind this major question that we all have about death. And he actually doesn’t feel very comforted by what he calls the Lucretian or the Epicurean position.
Cassius:
That’s what you’re beginning to explain for us, Joshua. And of course, while you gather your thoughts to re-attack the problem in just a minute, I should call everyone’s attention to the fact that this is explicitly dealt with in the Principal Doctrines, starting with Doctrine 18.
It’s mostly Principal Doctrine 19, but it’s also contained somewhat in Principal Doctrine 20. Doctrine 18 is: “The pleasure in the flesh is not increased when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied. And the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them, which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.”
But even more specifically, Principal Doctrine 19 — and he’s not just trying to comfort you; he’s making a specific statement about the nature of things that we need to understand: “Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.”
And then Doctrine 20 elaborates further. The end of this section is: “The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited, and unlimited time is required to supply it. But the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life. And we have no further need of infinite time. But neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life.”
So now, Martin and Joshua, Epicurus is really specifically taking a position that I think is one of his logical abstractions — largely a logical argument here, as opposed to something that you can really just immediately feel the truth of. The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited. From a bodily, immediate, emotional sense, we all think that we need to live forever in order to experience “the limits of pleasure.” But Epicurus is saying that when you think about it, the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of these things, can come to the realization that that is not necessary. And of course, that would be your ultimate reconciliation with the fact that your life is limited in time and that you’re not an Epicurean god who can live on forever.
But this is, to me, extremely deep and takes a lot of thought to even grasp what he’s talking about. And luckily, that’s why we have Joshua and Martin here to explain those things in great detail. So who wants to start?
Joshua [attribution uncertain]:
Two things there, Martin. I remember early in our podcast, we talked about something like “the area under the curve” — we were talking about the potential of attempting to diagram the area under the curve. I think that’s part of what you’re referring to. I don’t know whether we can go anywhere with that or not, because I can’t remember the details we talked about before. Maybe we can find it on the forum if we search back.
Second — your statement reminds me exactly of one of the analogies that DeWitt uses in his book. He talks about the pleasure of climbing to the summit of the Alps, or a particular mountain — Mount Everest. The pleasure of getting to the summit of Mount Everest is not particularly increased by simply staying there longer. Once you get to the summit, you’re at the summit, and you’ve achieved the height, which cannot further be improved. That’s part of this whole argument about the limit of pleasure and the issue of whether the best in life is something that can always be improved, whether it’s something that has a limit.
All of this is very deep and going to be beyond our ability to explore it with the detail it deserves.
Cassius:
Hopefully we’ll come back to it at some point. But we won’t leave it until Joshua has explained it to us from his perspective.
Joshua:
Well, what’s interesting to me is that there’s this anxiety about dying and not being able to experience the rest of the pleasure that life has to offer. But there’s a sort of twin anxiety there: an anxiety about eternal bliss. And I think there’s quite a large body of literature on the subject. People have a real anxiety about heaven not measuring up — about eternal bliss getting boring after a while. The way you express it, Cassius, is “playing harps in heaven.” I think that would get old after about 12 minutes. So I guess the conclusion I draw there is: we’re just an anxious species, aren’t we? But I’ve kind of lost track of where we left off.
Cassius:
Bouncing back and forth, I think you’re continuing to focus on the issue of reconciling yourself to the fact that you’re going to die at some point, and just stopping the anxiety that comes from that — dealing with the pain of thinking about the fact that your life is limited in time. And that’s certainly the practical side of it, maybe the whole motivation for what we’re talking about.
But it’s very interesting, too — and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to drag you into this part of it or not — but what Martin has talked about, I think it’s really fascinating to consider how Epicurus is logically attacking this problem. And although I don’t see it in these particular Principal Doctrines 19, 20, and 21, throughout some of the other texts there is a discussion of purity in terms of pure pleasure. There seems to be an argument that the attainment of pure pleasure is superior in some way to a particularly large volume of impure pleasure. And when I say “impure,” I mean mixed pleasures.
There seems to be an implication in some of the texts that another way of looking at the issue of the limit of pleasure is when that pleasure has been distilled down so that it’s totally pure and has no pain mixed into it at all. There’s something in Epicurus’s perspective that this attainment of a totally unmixed, totally pleasurable state is something that cannot then be improved. That’s Martin’s analogy — I don’t know if you’d call that mathematical or geometrical or calculus, Martin, but there’s something about that perspective that conveys meaning that’s not clear to those of us who don’t focus on the mathematical or the logical side of the argument.
Martin, can you say anything more about how you described it? Is it calculus that you’re talking about?
Martin:
No, it was thermodynamics. The idea is that we see pleasure as analogous to an intensive parameter in thermodynamics. One intensive parameter in thermodynamics is temperature. Similarly, just as we have a maximum pleasure where we want to be, for us it’s being at an optimum temperature — what we like to be. If it’s too hot, we’re uncomfortable or even suffer health consequences. And if it’s too cold as well. So we want to be at this optimum point. And that is what counts.
The amount of time — the integral of temperature over time — has no meaning for us. What matters is that, every time we can, we are at the optimum temperature under the circumstances we live in. And that is analogous to pleasure as well.
Cassius:
I’m trying to figure out how to transition that to this other analogy. But we’re also kind of talking about the “nothing new under the sun” question of variation, because that’s what Doctrine 18 was talking about — that the pleasure is not increased, but it’s only varied.
I guess the analogy might be that there’s no benefit from varying the temperature. If you’re talking about the optimum temperature of something, whether you go hotter or colder, you’re departing from that optimum point. And I think there’s some implication of that here with pleasure as well — that this theoretical goal of pure pleasure is not improved by variation of the pleasures that are within it.
It’s not something to worry about that you don’t just infinitely vary the pleasures that compose your experience, any more than it’s anything to worry about that you constantly fiddle with the temperature that Martin is talking about. When the optimum temperature is the optimum temperature, varying it up and down is not doing anything to improve anything.
And I guess that’s his point here about pleasure — that variation of the pleasure, simply substituting the components one for another within your total experience, is not really logically or theoretically improving your position. It’s only varying the nature of the position.
And so if you are focused on “I want the best life I can possibly have, I want the most out of life I can possibly get,” he’s telling you to analyze your life logically and realize that the life of pleasure — which has eliminated pain from it — need not last on and on and on infinitely. Once you’ve reached that optimum temperature in Martin’s example, or once you’ve reached this optimum situation in our Epicurean calculus example of having pure pleasure and no pain anymore, continuing on in time does not make it any better.
Joshua:
But this is true, Cassius — because you’ve got not only the pleasures of the body, but also the pleasures of the mind.
Cassius:
Exactly. And the past and the present and the future — if that’s what you’re talking about, too. The mind is controlling the body. I’m sorry, go ahead and elaborate. You’re doing better than I am there.
Joshua:
Well, what I would say about the pleasures of the body: it is pleasure, it is worthwhile, it is a good in itself. But the pleasures of the body — it’s difficult to have bodily pleasures that are not unmixed with some kind of pain or anxiety, because the problem with bodily pleasures is you experience them in the present moment and you can’t experience them retrospectively by looking at the past.
In fact, he expresses it — what’s the way that you rival Zeus for happiness? By having little bread and cheese, or something like that — by having your wants fulfilled and then being assured of having them fulfilled in the future. That’s the key thing: being assured of having them fulfilled in the future. But when it comes to bodily pleasure, you can’t be sure of having your expectations filled in the future.
But when it comes to mental pleasure, you can draw on the whole spectrum of pleasure throughout an entire human life. In fact, you can draw on pleasures you’ve almost completely forgotten. This happens sometimes to me — for some reason, I’ll remember something from my childhood that I’d almost completely forgotten. And then I’ll talk to my sister and she’ll say, “Oh, yeah, we did this and that.” And then something that you’ve almost completely forgotten, you can draw pleasure out of again in the present moment, because you have not just a body, but also a mind.
Cassius:
I think everything you’ve said is absolutely true in Epicurean philosophy and very valuable. I’m just overwhelmed by the number of issues that are involved here, because I think that’s a significant part of what he’s talking about. And my eye is drawn back to Doctrine 20 again: “But the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time.”
So clearly the mind is taking control of this problem. The body, the flesh, is not on its own able to understand anything — understanding is in the mind. And so, even as Epicurus is accused of being a pure bodily sensation kind of guy focused on the pleasures of the moment, he very clearly is not that. He very clearly is saying that you don’t let your body control your choices of pleasure, and you don’t rest your final understanding of the nature of your life on what your body is telling you. You have to think through what the body is telling you.
So you’re absolutely right. There’s a whole lot going on in the text here. Well, I’m trying to decide — we’re going to come to the end of our episode far sooner than I expected, and we have not really even at this point begun the discussion that I pledged was the topic today, which is the epistemology issue.
But why don’t we just at least read the next sentence and see where that leads us right now? Because he’s made this point that the mind allows you to reconcile yourself to death and not be a concern that you need to live forever. And then he continues and switches the topic: “He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate.”
Now, Joshua, I know that you constantly are telling your Stoic and your Platonic and your Aristotelian friends that “the logic of your school possesses no efficacy for the amelioration of life or the facilitation of debate.” So when you say that to your friends, Joshua, what do you mean by that?
Joshua:
Yeah, when you say “we’re going to move on to the next sentence,” it’s probable that we’re not going to get past the second sentence here. And Martin in the past has even given us a special presentation on this topic.
So what does he mean by the logic of your school possessing no efficacy for the amelioration of life or the facilitation of debate? Well, the problem is with logic itself, isn’t it? Because you’ve got this idea that logic in other schools is an epistemic source in itself — sort of like we view the senses as being a direct source of knowledge. There are some schools for which logic is a direct source of knowledge. Epicurus rejects that outright.
So the problem there is, as I just said, logic — and the problem with logic, apart from not being a direct source of knowledge — is that it offers no efficacy for the amelioration of life. The word “amelioration” is one that we don’t really use all that often. It means “the act of making something better” or “improving.” So logic has no capacity to improve life. Is that the way you read that?
Cassius:
Yeah. Yes. I certainly think he’s probably making the statement in the context of what he’s just been talking about — in terms of reconciling yourself to death and these ultimate issues of life that cause so much anxiety. I think he probably is making the statement in the context that you Stoics — and of course, at this point, this is Torquatus speaking, so he could clearly be talking about the Stoics, whereas Epicurus himself might be more talking about Plato or somebody else. But at this point in history, Torquatus is almost certainly saying that the logic of the Stoics and similar people does not produce any betterment of life.
And of course, that’s one thing to argue about. And then the second part is “the facilitation of debate.” So he’s even saying that your logic doesn’t even help with debate. That’s got to strike at the heart of a Stoic or a Platonic philosopher who stresses debate — the dialectical reasoning. He’s attacking the heart of dialectical reasoning and saying that the logic of their school possesses no efficacy for that.
Joshua:
So when I read the word “amelioration” — I mentioned improvement — but really, to me, this means the relieving of suffering. And I think that’s what Epicurus said: there’s that fragment, Cassius, you’ll know the citation, but something like “the words of the philosopher who doesn’t heal human suffering”…
Cassius:
Right. The words of the philosopher who doesn’t heal human suffering, or something like that. I think it’s a fragment — it’s certainly not a Principal Doctrine. It might be in the Vatican Sayings.
Joshua:
So logic, because it has no efficacy to relieve suffering, is in that sense vain — vain in relieving the suffering of human life. But then, as you say, it’s also vain because it has no efficacy for the facilitation of debate. And like you say, that has to be a sting to people — debate, or the show of debate, is so critical and crucial to their understanding of philosophy.
He’s just made the point again at the beginning of what we talked about today: that the wise man governs his life by reason. And so he’s making a distinction here between reason that is based on the senses, the information from the senses, and the study of nature — versus “the logic of your school,” which I think again needs to be read as an indictment of a sort of Platonic or Stoic or Pythagorean mathematics-based or abstract logic.
Cassius:
We have to have Martin in on this. Martin, as of today, when you think back about what we’ve been talking about in your past presentations — when Epicurus talks about “the logic of your school,” what type of logic do you think he is focusing his attack on?
Martin:
He’s not attacking propositional logic, because Epicurus himself — part of Epicurean reason — uses propositional logic. So that means he is not attacking this part of logic. But it’s rather the way logic is used by the Platonic school and its derivatives — in a way which logic is simply not disposed to provide for reality.
And so that’s what he’s attacking, and it doesn’t really come clear from the way it’s written here. But this is how it’s meant, because he doesn’t say “logic” — he says “logic of your school.” That means that school applies logic in a particular way. And this — especially what you mentioned there with dialectics — depending on how you put it, it’s actually an illogical way of doing things, and it can easily be used in a way that is just confusing things. So using it in an improper way, it will rather not facilitate the debate. But something like propositional logic, when applied properly, will facilitate debate and will also help us reason and make better plans for the amelioration of life.
Cassius:
I continue to see this whole question as one that we really need to understand better. I know I need to improve my ability to articulate it, obviously, based on what you just said. But it’s very difficult to explain to someone who is not into the study of the details of the types of logic even to get a grasp of what you could possibly be talking about. Is there any better way that you can articulate exactly what is wrong with “the logic of your school”? Can you summarize that in some way that can make sense to a relatively casual reader?
Martin:
Yeah, I mean, there are multiple ways where it goes wrong. It’s over-interpreted — the idea that you can, just based on reasoning, say something about reality without input from reality. In order to use propositional logic properly, you need to take your input from reality, and then you can also get conclusions which stand up to the test that they match reality. This is how logic can be used truthfully.
But you can also use logic in a wrong way, which gets you into paradox — pulling propositions from the air, so to say, without grounding them in reality, and then deriving conclusions which make claims on reality. That just doesn’t work.
Cassius:
So probably what I was misremembering a few moments ago is the issue with their propositional logic — that their propositions are not based on natural science and the evidence of the senses. Is that a better way of saying it?
Martin:
That is one of the things which is very common there — the input is wrong, and then there’s a chance that the output is also wrong. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it may be wrong. And the best way to explain this is probably going to be to refer to one of Joshua’s stories. I can tell he’s probably got a story to tell to illustrate this point. Right, Joshua?
Joshua:
Do I have a story to tell about propositional logic? Maybe a story about “garbage in, garbage out” might be appropriate. But let me try my best to get a grip on what Martin is talking about and what the problem with the logic of the Stoic school would be.
Well, there are two problems with logic, or with the way that people use logic. One: the wrong input will yield bad outputs. The other: using the wrong form of logic — using a deductive argument, for example, when you should have used an inductive argument — will yield false outputs.
For me, the rubber really hits the road on this kind of stuff when you get into cosmology. One of my favorite things to do is look at the different schools of philosophy and ask: what do they think about the way that the universe was formed and how things existed beyond just Earth? Because this is an area where we do have a limited ability to sense what’s going on, which the Epicureans made very good use of. And Lucretius gives argument after argument about why we know that the universe is made of atoms and void.
But for most schools, they end up arriving at cosmological conclusions — which persisted, unfortunately, all through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance — that have turned out to be just patently false. And Epicurus is occasionally guilty of that too. We’ve had a recent conversation on the forum about the size of the sun. It’s interesting that where Epicurus went wrong there was precisely in logic. But when you look at Aristotle’s universe, Plato’s universe, or Pythagoras’s universe, it’s like they got everything wrong — which is quite amazing. Whereas Epicurus, because he grounded himself so much in sensation, managed to get quite a lot right.
Well, one example that I like to use is in the Pythagorean school. They viewed the number ten as the most perfect number. The reason: if you have one point, that’s a point. If you have two, that’s a line. If you have three, that makes a triangle, which is a surface. And if you have four, that makes a solid or three-dimensional figure. And then one plus two plus three plus four equals ten. So based on that, he makes this logical leap — he’s already concluded that ten is the most perfect number. I don’t even know what it means to talk about a number as “perfect” — it’s like any other number. But he’s already made this logical leap to say that ten is the perfect number.
Now he makes a second logical leap and says: because ten is the perfect number, when you look at the heavens — which are more perfect than the earth — there must be ten crystal spheres around the earth. And this is where you’ve got the Moon on one sphere, the Sun on another sphere, spheres for different planets, a sphere for the eternal fire or sacred fire or whatever he called it. So that’s an example of how you can start with very little in terms of knowledge and then use logic to turn what little you know into absolute nonsense.
You can see that with Pythagoras and his cosmology — although keep in mind, when I blame Pythagoras, almost none of his writing survived. It could be his followers who are the real problem here. But Plato arrived at similar conclusions about the cosmos, and Aristotle as well. I had a post on the forum where I really went into Aristotle’s view of the solar system — a similar idea. You’ve got the Earth, which is immovable, stationary, and the center of the universe, and then all of the things that orbit the Earth in our solar system occupy their own crystal spheres as they go further out.
Cassius:
So as I said at the beginning of this whole discussion, I think cosmology is really one of the key areas in which logic can really lead these ancient philosophers astray — because somebody who comes up with a position that is consistent within itself but not grounded in reality… well, that sometimes doesn’t make any practical difference to anyone. But when you start talking about cosmology and whether the universe was created by a God, and whether there’s a supernatural realm of divine providence that controls our lives and tells us what to do and forces us into a fate — those are very important issues for most people to think about and order their lives by. And so those things do matter.
I think I’m basically just validating from my perspective, Joshua, what you just said: that’s the aspect of cosmology that Epicurus is most frequently talking about. I mean, he wrote a whole letter to Pythocles to discuss his views of cosmology because they’re so important.
Like I say, to repeat myself: you can create some logical construction that is internally consistent and yet absurd from a realistic point of view. But nobody really cares unless you’re trying to tell them how to live their life, or telling them something that’s important about the universe that affects their life. And these cosmology arguments are — even though some people are successful in compartmentalizing them (I’m thinking of Frances Wright and some of the material I’ve read from her after she wrote A Few Days in Athens, where she basically compartmentalizes those cosmological questions off and says, “I don’t care about that, it’s not going to affect my life and how I live it day to day, those issues are just not important to me”) — other people are not able to compartmentalize that. And I’m not sure they should. I’m not with the Frances Wright school on that. I think these issues are important.
So when people who use logic detached from evidence come up with something that ends up telling you how to live your life, you have to be particularly critical in the way you analyze that. I think that’s what Epicurus was doing.
We won’t get to it today, but this is more or less what Torquatus says in the next sentence, isn’t it?
Joshua:
Correct. “He laid the greatest stress on natural science because this branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words, the natural conditions of speech, the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions, that relieves the superstition…” We’re going to get into all this next week, probably.
Cassius:
But this is the ultimate answer to the problem. If your logic leads you astray into the area of cosmology, that can have an effect — as he goes on to say — that reverberates into your ethics and into your epistemology. And so if logic leads you astray there and you get that wrong, you’re going to get a lot of other stuff wrong as well.
And the part that he included was that it relieves us of superstition, emancipates us from the dread of death, and prevents us from being agitated through ignorance of phenomena — and that ignorance more than anything else causes terrible panics often to arise. And it also improves our character when we learn what it is that nature craves.
I think we want to not try to cover all that right now. We’ll come back to it next week and probably draw the line here on this episode. At this point, the focus of what we’ve been talking about today is fate and fortune and reason, and before we started, this issue about the logic of the Stoics and the Platonists. That’s where we’ll draw the line, because next week — where Joshua just read, “He laid the greatest stress on natural science” — that’s what we’ll elaborate on: how he lays stress on natural science, and what kind of methodology he suggests.
Joshua has raised the issue of the size of the sun. And I think if we were to go into that issue, what we find is that Epicurus based a lot of his reasoning on the issues of analogy, as opposed to abstract logic. And when you come up with reasoning through analogy, you can sometimes make mistakes because the things that you’re talking about are not in fact truly analogous — they’re different in some way that you did not understand before you started your reasoning by analogy. So there’s lots of details there that I think Martin can help us with from his physics and engineering perspective.
So let’s call it a day on this episode. Martin, what final thoughts would you have to add for today?
Martin:
You reach the maximum, and you don’t really improve it by staying there. Just like you don’t improve the view from Mount Everest by staying at the top of Mount Everest. You can look in different directions, you can vary the experience in that way, but it’s not going to be better — because there’s no higher place from which to get a higher perspective.
Joshua:
Well, the key thing to keep in mind is that distinction between bodily pleasures and mental pleasures. Both are worthwhile to pursue in themselves, but it’s the mental pleasures that are really lasting and that can really help us learn how to tolerate a finite rather than an infinite existence.
And I’m reminded of that by this quote by the English poet John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place and can itself make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” I can already see the wheels spinning in your head, Cassius, because I know that even that has its own limitations. And we would never suggest, for example, that the mind is a fortress and that anything that crashes against it can be repelled — because the mind can be sick, too.
But the key thing to remember is that because we have mental pleasures, we’re not bound by the temporal limitation of the physical. Of course, we are physical and we live in a physical, material universe. But because we have a mind, even if we’re experiencing troubling emotions or pain or suffering in the present moment, we can always find pleasure — whether it’s in the past or whether it’s in anticipating the future — that can make this moment better.
Cassius:
I would agree with everything you said. I’m trying to think if there’s any other perspective I could add to close the episode that might help. And what occurs to me to say there, Joshua, is that I guess a lot of people think Epicurus is teaching you how to pursue pleasure. And he certainly is. But I think he also needs to be understood as not purely a matter of the practical aspects of pursuing pleasure — he’s also got a philosophy that supports it, a philosophy that’s behind it, that contains lots of different pieces of information that people don’t always hear about.
They hear about “pursuing pleasure,” but they don’t often hear about the way he suggested that we go about it — in terms of the issues of reason and logic, and how his viewpoints compare and contrast with those of other schools. So hopefully we’ve brought a little bit of light to that subject today, and we’ll try to bring more light to it next week when we really dig into Epicurus’s version of the right way to think and the right way to pursue natural science.
With that, we’ll close for the day and come back next week. Thanks, everybody, and talk to you next week. OK, bye.