Episode 111 - Torquatus Summarizes The Significance of the Epicurus
Date: 03/05/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2412-episode-one-hundred-eleven-torquatus-summarizes-the-significance-of-the-epicurus/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The final session on the Torquatus material completes sections 71–72 of Cicero’s On Ends, with Martin reading the Reid translation and Joshua reading the Rackham translation of the same two paragraphs. Section 71 functions as a poetic capstone in praise of Epicurus — whose doctrines are “clearer and more luminous than daylight,” derived entirely from nature’s sources and confirmed by the unbiased evidence of the senses (even infants and animals almost find voice to proclaim pleasure as the goal) — and calls for gratitude to the man who “guided all sane-minded men into the paths of peace and happiness.” Section 72 defends Epicurus against the charge of being uneducated: he refused education that did not promote happiness, and it is the others — the real “Philistines” — who ask people to go on studying until old age what ought to have been learned in boyhood. Discussion includes the close parallel between these paragraphs and Lucretius’s hymn to Venus; Martin’s analysis of why “starting from false premises cannot be true” is logically wrong; Joshua’s story of Eupalinos’s tunnel at Samos as a counterexample of geometry in practical service; Plato’s theory of musical harmony as the real target of the music criticism; Homer’s un-Epicurean gods; and the geometer Polyaenus who joined Epicurus. The episode closes with the call from the Letter to Menoeceus to “study day and night and you will never fall into confusion” — the result being to “live like a god among men” — and announces that next week the podcast moves to Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 111 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 Lucretius’ 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 completed our first review of Lucretius’ poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we complete the Torquatus material, and next week we’ll be coming back to discuss Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus. But for today we complete the Torquatus section of Book 1 of Cicero’s On Ends. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
Therefore, if the doctrines I have stated are more dazzling and luminous than the sun itself, if they are drafts drawn from nature’s spring, if our whole argument establishes its credit entirely by an appeal to our senses — that is to say to witnesses who are untainted and unblemished — and speechless babies and even dumb beasts almost cry out that with nature for our governor and guide, there is no good fortune but pleasure, no adverse fortune but pain; and their verdict upon these matters is neither perverted nor tainted — are we not bound to entertain the greatest gratitude for the man who, lending his ear to this voice of nature, as I may call it, grasped it in so strong and serious a spirit that he guided all sorrowful, sober-minded men into the track of a peaceful, quiet, restful, happy life? And though you think him ill-educated, the reason is that he had no education of any worth but such as promoted the ordered life of happiness. Was the man to spend his time in conning poets, as I and Triarius do on your advice, when they afford no substantial benefit, and all the enjoyment they give is childish in kind? Or was he to waste himself like Plato upon music, geometry, mathematics, and astronomy — which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one bit towards living a more agreeable, that is, a better life? For see, I ask you: was the man to pursue those arts and thrust behind him the art of living — an art of such moment, so laborious too, and correspondingly rich in fruit? Epicurus was not uneducated, but those persons are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful for a boy not to have learned are to be learned through life into old age.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that. That’s the Reid translation of the final sections of Torquatus. We’ve been reading the Reid translation all the way through so far. But because these are the final two paragraphs, and these are particularly important summary paragraphs, Joshua’s going to read the Rackham translation, which is really the version that most people run into when they find this on the internet. So Joshua, if you could read the Rackham.
Joshua:
If then the doctrine I have set forth is clearer and more luminous than daylight itself, if it is derived entirely from nature’s source, if my whole discourse relies throughout for confirmation on the unbiased and unimpeachable evidence of the senses, if lisping infants, may even dumb animals, prompted by nature’s teaching, almost find voice to proclaim that there is no welfare but pleasure, no hardship but pain, and their judgment in these matters is neither sophisticated nor biased — ought we not to feel the greatest gratitude to him who caught this utterance of nature’s voice and grasped its import so firmly and so fully that he has guided all sane-minded men into the paths of peace and happiness, calmness and repose? You are pleased to think him uneducated. The reason is that he refused to consider any education worth the name that did not help to school us in happiness. Was he to spend his time, as you encourage Triarius and me to do, in perusing poets who give us nothing solid and useful but merely childish amusement? Was he to occupy himself like Plato with music and geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy — which, starting from false premises, cannot be true, and which, moreover, if they were true, would contribute nothing to make our lives pleasanter and therefore better? Was he, I say, to study arts like these and neglect the master art, so difficult and correspondingly so fruitful — the art of living? No, Epicurus was not uneducated. The real Philistines are those who ask us to go on studying until old age the subjects that we ought to be ashamed not to have learned in boyhood.
Cassius:
Okay, thank you very much again, Joshua, for reading the Rackham translation. We are now at the end of our examination of the Torquatus narrative of On Ends, Book 1. The material is going to continue on as Cicero replies, and there’s a whole lot more that we’re not going to try to cover in this part of our podcast. But we’ve covered basically the ethics section, just as Torquatus said he was going to do. We’ve talked about the greatest good issue, the issue of whether virtue is truly the end of life, and then more recently he’s touched on the issues of physics and natural science and even a little bit of epistemology. And then most recently, over the last several weeks, we discussed the issue of friendship — potentially as a means of testing whether we really are going to be rigorously considering pleasure the end of life or not.
And then before Torquatus ends his presentation to Cicero, he finishes with these two paragraphs today, which I think you could summarize as emphasizing the significance of Epicurus and Epicurean philosophy. And he does it in a very poetic way. So we read not only the Reid translation, which is potentially a little bit more literal to the Latin, but also the Rackham translation, which is slightly smoother in the English and probably conveys the sense of appreciation even better than Reid does.
So if we start with the first line: “If the doctrine I’ve set forth is clearer and more luminous than daylight itself, and if it’s derived entirely from nature’s source, and if it relies throughout for confirmation on the unbiased and unimpeachable evidence of the senses” — this whole paragraph is talking about evidence issues. Any thought?
Joshua:
To be honest, in this paragraph, I see a lot of parallels to the opening hymn to Venus in Lucretius’ poem. Because in Lucretius’ poem you have one of my favorite lines in the entire poem — something to the effect of “for you laugh the waves of the sea and the calm heavens shine with shoreless light.” And so you’ve got that little bit about the daylight in there. Here, speaking about the doctrine itself, which is “clearer and more luminous than daylight itself, derived entirely from nature’s sources.” And as we go through, you get to — just as in the hymn to Venus — the animals themselves and their behavior as evidence of the truth. And then of course, almost at the end of the hymn to Venus and starting into the next section, you’ve got that long sort of praise of Epicurus — where what’s the phrase? He smashed the gates that separated us from nature, I believe is what it says there.
Cassius:
Yes, yes, yes. And he climbed the flaming ramparts of the world and brought back that information to us — which is the way by which we ascend to the heavens equal to the gods. And specifically there’s a line in there where he says “and brought back news of what can and what cannot be.” And about here — what is our evidence of what can be and what cannot be — what he says directly here is that what he’s relying on is confirmation from the unbiased and unimpeachable evidence of the senses. That seems to be the ground Torquatus is building his structure on.
He goes on to illustrate that point by saying that even infants and dumb animals prompted by nature’s teaching almost find voice themselves to proclaim that there is no welfare but pleasure and no hardship but pain. And this is full circle for us, because at the very beginning we had a long protracted argument in the Torquatus material — I think our first episode on it — about how we can infer from the behavior of an infant what the goal of life is. And so we’re brought right back around to the way we started.
Martin, before I jump back in, any thoughts so far?
Martin:
No.
Cassius:
I’m finding it difficult to figure where to jump in and divide this up, because there are so many different but important issues here. Let me just list a couple in sequence as I see them.
There’s that first issue about the evidence coming from observation of nature, and that that evidence is “more clear, more luminous than daylight itself.” So you’ve got that evidence issue. And then you have the point that there is no welfare but pleasure, no hardship but pain. And Reed calls that “no good fortune but pleasure, no adverse fortune but pain.” So there are all the issues wrapped up into whether there is any good but pleasure or any evil but pain.
And then when it says that the judgment in these matters is “neither sophisticated nor biased” — we almost have a reflection of the discussion of the senses, where they are pre-rational. That’s the “all sensations are true” issue, or at least an analogy there, because they’re not sophisticated or biased.
And then there is — go ahead, Joshua.
Joshua:
Well, the other side to the symmetry on that point is in the second paragraph. He’s going to go on to talk about Plato occupying himself with music and geometry and arithmetic and astronomy — all of which are sophisticated pursuits, and all of which, at least particularly for Plato, were bent to his philosophical will. So they were biased in that way. Nature’s teaching, which the animals and the infants themselves almost find voice to express, is neither sophisticated nor biased. That’s the foundation that Epicurus builds his philosophy on.
Cassius:
So there, Joshua, you’ve just raised in my mind that these two paragraphs — sections 71 and 72 — are almost parallel to each other, with 71 being a praise of Epicurus and 72 being an indictment of Plato and the Platonists and the people who are aligned with them.
And you know, Joshua, I want to fall back further. We discussed last week how it was interesting that we’re ending on friendship and how difficult an issue it may be, and how Lucretius had ended on the plague of Athens — which was a difficult issue. We talked about how Cicero had in front of him other books apparently about Epicurus. But didn’t Cicero also read Lucretius? Because isn’t there a reference where he had read it and commented on it to his brother?
Joshua:
Yeah, we do know that he read Lucretius. He actually — I think we have that note to his brother, or maybe we just have a reference to it — where he says that “the poet Lucretius is full of great genius, but also great art,” or something like that.
Cassius:
It would be impossible, I think, to say whether he read that before or after he wrote this. I guess we don’t know specific dates. We probably have a better idea of when this was written than we do of when he got a copy of Lucretius’s book, but a lot of this was going on right near the end of his life during the war period, so there wouldn’t have been a lot of time difference no matter what. I don’t know that he’s quoting Lucretius anywhere, but I do agree that there’s a lot of echoes — or of course it could be that Lucretius himself was echoing other writers who had been developing these ideas in the intervening period as well. So no telling where all these things come from, but there is a lot of reflection and parallel in a lot of this material.
The other thing I wanted to list is something in that first section. Of course there’s “feel the greatest gratitude to him who caught this utterance of nature’s voice.” So the accusation about whether Epicurean philosophy is a cult, whether the Epicurean movement was a cult — I would say that this is the best reflection of the proper attitude towards Epicurus: that we feel great gratitude to him. Not necessarily that we worship him. And then “grasped its import so firmly and fully that he guided all sane-minded men into the paths of peace and happiness, calmness and repose.”
There’s lots you could talk about from those words. But before we move on to the second section, it seems to me that here in his summary of praising Epicurus, he’s choosing to emphasize that Epicurus’s positions are basically things that he’s observed from nature. I generally don’t see Epicurus saying “do this” or “don’t do that” very often. He lays the foundation for what he is teaching by giving the evidence to support it, and then from that evidence it’s pretty easy to conclude what things make sense and what things don’t. He gives advice about whether to marry or not to marry, about whether to pursue fame, and all sorts of things — but all the advice is not based on authority. He doesn’t say “do this because I say so.” He’s not providing a Ten Commandments where God is telling you what to do. He always provides the basis for his reasoning.
Joshua:
Right. And what’s that advice he gave to that lovesick young man whose name I can’t think of — he said something like “go ahead and pursue it if you can also do X, Y, and Z.”
Cassius:
Go ahead. Yeah, yeah — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H more like it. But then he goes into the reasons why you’re going to have pitfalls at each stage. He never just says “don’t do it because I say so,” or “don’t do it because God says so,” or “don’t do it because it violates some rule of virtue.”
Joshua:
I have to give Cicero a lot of credit here at the end because this is really — I think stylistically — this is really beautiful language. I know you were keen to get to this one because it’s such a fine example of Epicurean prose coming from Torquatus through Cicero. I’m just looking at the two translations side by side and noticing differences, but they’re both well done.
Cassius:
Yes. I just don’t have any issue with the Rackham version here. Sometimes I think Reid gives more detail that’s helpful to understand some subtlety, but in this final set of paragraphs I think Rackham has captured it extremely well. Maybe it does make sense — let’s go ahead and just read the details of the second paragraph too, because everything we’re discussing today is sort of related to each other. It’s not like he picks up another topic as a whole. And if indeed there’s any truth to say that the first paragraph is praise of Epicurus and the second paragraph is sort of praise of him by indicting Plato, he starts to deal with these accusations against Epicurus.
“You are pleased to think him uneducated. And then the reason is that he refused to consider any education worth the name that did not help to school us in happiness.” So that’s a reference to a series of statements out there in the text. Joshua, and Martin, do you remember other references to that — something about “set sail from all culture” or “flee from culture” — that’s thrown out there regularly.
Joshua:
Right. And the distrust of poetry in particular — because of poets and their tendency to lie, particularly about the gods and the supernatural. I think that Norman DeWitt did a really good job on this question of whether Epicurus was educated or not. And he comes down firmly on the conclusion that not only was Epicurus widely educated, he was really going through the trouble of surveying the whole field. He wanted to know what the Cynics thought. He wanted to know what Plato thought. He wanted to know how Aristotle had adapted Plato’s thinking. He wanted to know what Pyrrho was thinking and what he learned when he came back from India. So there was a real thirst to understand what the claims were that were made by the other philosophers. I guess that’s education of a kind, isn’t it? It doesn’t get into music and geometry and arithmetic and all that. But certainly when it came to philosophy, there was a real desire to understand all of the arguments before he settled on just one.
And that’s why the whole issue of chaos was sort of his linchpin, right? His instructor couldn’t explain chaos. And I think most students in that situation would just sort of move on with their lives. But Epicurus not only came up with an explanation that would get around the chaos issue, but he built an entire philosophy to explain life, the universe, and everything.
Cassius:
Yes. Which was your reference last week to — what is the name of that book?
Joshua:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Cassius:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You know, I got two comments to make. One of them — when you referred to the DeWitt argument — I think I remember also that DeWitt points out that what Epicurus was reacting to in terms of opposing certain kinds of education was the general goal of the Platonic teaching and the different way that students were taught in Athens at that time. The purpose was to raise a good citizen. I mean, I guess that’s what Plato’s Republic is largely about — how you create a good state. And there’s a number of references to traditional education that Epicurus was opposed to. The reason he was opposed to it was that its purpose was not to raise a happy person, but to raise a good citizen for Athens — potentially a soldier and a statesman. And the goal of his education was very different.
And I know I found in Diogenes Laertius — it’s around section six apparently, again in the Letter to Pythocles — they say he wrote, quote: “Blessed youth, set sail in your bark and flee from every form of culture.” And then there are a couple of other similar references about his antipathy towards certain types of education. And he’s not opposing all education — he’s got specific ideas again. And that’s basically what this says, because he continues on and says that what essentially Plato is encouraging them to do is to peruse poets who give us nothing solid and useful but childish amusement, and then to occupy himself like Plato with music and geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy.
Now the next phrase is one that we’ve talked about several times with Martin, so maybe we’ll hold off on that. But first — what was supposed to be over the gate of the Academy of Plato? Something about “don’t enter here unless you know” — was it geometry?
Joshua:
Yeah. Because the belief that Plato had was that by studying Euclid and the way he used axioms and sort of logic to prove his geometric theorems, by analogy that was the way that you should progress in philosophy — which of course Epicurus had no time for that idea.
Cassius:
Yes. And the Pythagoreans — nobody knows them better than I do — but they were also based in a sort of numerology approach that was very intricate. I’ve mentioned many times before their idea that ten was the perfect number. Because if you have one point, that makes a point; if you have two, that makes a line; if you have three, that makes a surface; and if you have four, it’s a solid; and if you add all of those up, you get to ten. That’s why ten is the perfect number. And because ten was the perfect number, it had to be — whether it was true to the senses or not — that ten was the number of celestial spheres on which the planets and stars were attached, because his argument for why ten is the perfect number was that 1+2+3+4=10.
When I’ve said that last time, I followed up with my interrogation of why we instinctively know that that is a wrong method of analysis. And that’s probably still a question worth asking. But that’s clearly the direction — that’s not a good method of reasoning, and yet that’s what they were essentially recommending.
I’ve taken it out of order. It looks like the first thing in the list was “was he to spend his time as you encouraged Triarius and me to do, in perusing poets, which give us nothing solid and useful, but childish amusement.” Now, in trying to remember what DeWitt has said about that issue — do we think that’s mostly a reference to Homer? What do you think about that, Joshua, especially since you’re into the poetry aspect of it?
Joshua:
I know that Homer was certainly held in extremely high regard — the foundation of Greek culture, Greek education. Universal among Greeks would have been some knowledge of Homer. But the other side of that is Lucian of Samosata and his True Story, which he prefaces by saying that this is a “true story” because he’s the only one to admit it’s a whole pack of lies. So that’s the problem. I think that Epicurus — and you can find this in Diogenes Laertius as well — was proficient in his understanding of Homer, and sufficiently proficient that he could actually use references to Homer to justify his own position.
But there is a problem with poetry in Epicurus’s view — although I think even that has become somewhat a contradictory position, because what they’ve unearthed in Herculaneum from Philodemus suggests not only an affinity for poetry but a deep understanding and sort of a unique critical approach to understanding it. And I guess that’s the reference in Diogenes Laertius: that the wise man isn’t going to compose poetry, but is going to be the only one who can really criticize it properly.
Cassius:
Right, but Philodemus did both. In fact, he was known as a poet and an epigram writer before Herculaneum, before that whole thing was found, and then they found all his other works or fragments of them. You know, maybe one day we’d need a special episode on Philodemus’s poetry. Some of it’s pretty — I don’t know if it’s risqué or whatever, but it’s kind of wild if I understand correctly. It’s not like Lucretius’s serious philosophic poetry, is it? Have you read any of it, Joshua?
Joshua:
Yeah, I’ve read a little bit of it. It’s love poetry or something like that, right? It is, it is. And you kind of have to situate it in the context of what they originally knew him from — the Greek Anthology. And the Greek Anthology — which translates literally as “garland of flowers” — this is generally not serious work. There are funeral epitaphs and stuff like that, but for the most part this is sort of bawdy, humorous verse. You might think of it almost as limericks. I actually recently picked up a book called The Good Poem According to Philodemus, but I haven’t gotten very far.
Cassius:
I would think that the major issue in criticizing Homer would be the issue of the gods being involved in all of this history in ways that would be totally un-Epicurean — taking sides, falling in love with human women, doing all sorts of things with humans. I presume that’s probably — if you had to list the reasons why they are considering it to be “childish amusement” — would that be near the top of the list? Or do you think it’s something else?
Joshua:
Yeah, certainly the gods of Homer are completely contrary to Epicurus’s conception of the gods. First of all, he does not view them as having any interest in the human species at all. That’s the important thing. But also, the Epicurean gods are supposed to be devoid of all human faults like lust and envy and jealousy and anger. They don’t have any experience of that because they live in perfect bliss. So I think that’s probably a big part of it.
Cassius:
In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s picking out particular types of messages in certain types of poetry and art as the real focus of his issue. When he says “childish amusement” here, I don’t know whether there was a lot of children’s poetry being written in ancient Greece, but I think it’s probably more directed at the improper attitudes towards religion that most Greek poetry would have included.
And then Martin — this is time to bring you back in again, because this is one of the sentences we’ve talked about in the past. “Was he to occupy himself like Plato with music and geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy, which starting from false premises cannot be true, and which moreover, if they were true, would contribute nothing to make our lives pleasanter and therefore better.” What do you make of that sentence?
Martin:
It’s wrong.
Cassius:
Almost before you said that I was going to jump in and say: how would you most constructively interpret that sentence? Of course it’s not completely wrong. But what part is wrong?
Martin:
The wrong part is that it gets the logic very wrong. And I’m not sure about whether this is a cunning trick of Cicero — to have a very obvious mistake with logic written there so that he can harp on it later — or whether he just lets it stand, knowing that anyone knowing logic would immediately see that this position is wrong. Like we discussed extensively about half a year ago: if you start from false assumptions, by chance you can still come to conclusions which are true. So you cannot say that they “cannot be true.” They may still be true. It may be unlikely, or it’s often not the case, but they can be true. So that is the part which is wrong there.
And then as written there, “music, geometry, mathematics, and astronomy” — that one is probably not really the position, but rather the way these things are interpreted wrongly. So geometry is interpreted to mean more than it actually is, and mathematics is treated as something telling truth about the world — which it doesn’t necessarily do. And astronomy, in Plato’s approach, was also something where he did start with wrong assumptions apparently. And in music, it’s not music itself but rather Plato’s analysis of music where things go wrong.
Cassius:
Yeah, that makes sense when you explain it that way. Joshua, how would you approach that? What’s the constructive central message being presented here?
Joshua:
I think Martin has hit the nail on the head, and it’s most obvious with the situation of geometry in my view. It’s not geometry itself that is worthless — it’s the interpretation that they impose on geometry that leads them down the wrong path. I’ll give you an example. Here’s a little story for you.
Epicurus was born on the island of Samos, and long before he was born there was this king — Polycrates, that was his name — who wanted to fortify the island, or at least the main city on the island, because it has this really lovely natural harbor which gave great protection to his ships. But the problem was that the spring water that fed the city was on the other side of a mountain. And he knew that if you were to wall off the city, an enemy could just dump poison into the spring water, or change its flow, and basically starve the city of water. So he comes up with a solution: he hires a geometer named Eupalinos, who decides that the way to solve this problem is to dig a tunnel through the heart of the mountain at a constant grade, so that starting at the spring water on the north side of Samos, you can deliver water to the city on the south side of Samos. And so it took about ten years — but he had two crews on each side of the tunnel digging around the clock by torchlight, until they finally met in the middle. And they were able to meet in the middle because Eupalinos was really good at what he did. And it was geometry that allowed him to know that he was going to connect those two ends in the middle. The result was that the city had a constant supply of fresh spring water.
So I don’t think that Epicurus would call fresh spring water to support a city a worthless pursuit.
Cassius:
Right, right. Certainly that is conducive to health and happiness. Nobody wants to drink seawater or stagnant standing water. You want fresh running spring water flowing into your city — the kind of thing that you wouldn’t have anywhere else until Rome developed its aqueduct system. This was actually considered one of the greatest engineering projects of the ancient world. And because Epicurus grew up on Samos and very likely drank water from that spring through that tunnel, it’s certain that he would have known about it. So that’s the kind of thing that you can do with geometry and mathematics, not base it on false assumptions, and come up with something in the end that is good and conducive to health and humanity.
Practical is the word that jumps out at me — it’s a practical application of these sciences. We’ve hit pretty hard over the weeks on the logic aspect of it where Martin has been pointing out the issue of false assumptions. But we can probably profitably spend a few more minutes on the other examples here. Music in particular is not something you would normally think about as starting from a false presumption and not being true. What do we think he’s talking about here in including music in this list? Lots of people think that music is a pleasure — it can be very pleasurable. Why is music included in this list?
Martin:
Because Plato made a theory of music which was apparently wrong. His theory of harmonic music — that there are forms of music which have to be pleasurable and other forms which are not, based on his theoretical concepts rather than what actually goes through the senses.
Cassius:
Great answer — one I would not have been able to come up with myself. And I’m not able to elaborate on that, but I guess that’s the harmony of the spheres issue?
Martin:
Something like that, plus how you would want to describe what music has to be in order to be pleasurable — rather than just going through the senses to determine what music we like or not — wanting to derive that from a theoretical concept. I’m pretty sure I read something to that end, and in this context it makes sense to refer to that nonsensical theory of musical harmony.
Cassius:
I did not expect you to come up with that answer, Martin, so I’m very pleased to hear it. Is that in the Republic, or do you know where that is found?
Martin:
No, I don’t have that at hand, but I’m pretty sure I read something to that end, and in this context it makes sense.
Cassius:
I do think that occurs in Lucretius as well — a reference to that being a negative issue. I’m tempted to think that issues regarding the word “harmony” are tied up in music. Joshua, do you have any more on that?
Joshua:
Well, I agree with the direction Martin’s going, and I would have said something to the effect of “music of the spheres” being somewhere near the root of the problem. But there’s another way you can look at this. I’m thinking of that HBO series Rome — I assume, Cassius, you will have seen that?
Cassius:
I’ve seen parts of it.
Joshua:
There’s this scene where Caesar and his army have crossed the Rubicon and they’re marching on Rome, and as the camera follows along with him and his army marching, the band is right behind him. He turns to the leader of the band and he says: “Can you play something more cheerful?” Because it’s sort of very ominous — you’re invading Rome — and he says, “Let’s can we just be a little happier about this?” or something to that effect. So there is an element there of the use of music in whether it’s in the army or in temples or in mystery cults or even in drama — a use of music for emotional manipulation, to persuade the audience or the soldiers. You know, or the people who are visiting your temple — maybe you want them to give a little more money. And so the use of music for that purpose I could see being one reason why he might be critical of it. Because it’s not the case that every boy in Athens had an iPod to just listen to music whenever he wanted. It was very often state-sponsored, or you’d have to go to the theater. They probably had music in the arena, at the Olympic games, that kind of thing. So there’s an element of the use of music there that I could see being a problem. But I don’t have any citations for that.
Cassius:
Well, now that we’re talking about it, I think that would be a key to unraveling a lot of this section: I don’t think anybody could credibly set out and prove that Epicurus was against all music. I’m sure there are passages where he is endorsing — if I remember correctly — dancing, and probably specific inclusion of music in certain places. So he’s not just blanketly condemning music. And if that perspective applies to everything else in this list, then he’s certainly not condemning all geometry, mathematics, and astronomy either. He’s condemning something specific about them, and it’s up to us to understand what he’s attacking.
I mean, the Letter to Pythocles is essentially a discussion of celestial bodies, which would be the astronomy issue. Of course maybe you go back and dig behind the Latin and maybe they’re actually talking about astrology. Astrology would be easier for someone like Epicurus to condemn. And in fact I think there are other texts in divination — or at least I don’t know if you guys remember what I’m talking about — but there’s some text to the effect that even if divination were true you wouldn’t want to use it, or something like that. But I can’t think of it off the top.
I mean, I guess this whole list is something you just have to not take at face value — that he’s attacking every aspect. As it says at the end of the sentence: “Don’t aid us towards living a more agreeable and better life.” And if you go to the next sentence: “studying arts like these will preoccupy you so that you neglect the master art, so difficult and correspondingly so fruitful — the art of living.” Yes. So that’s the problem. There’s an impediment to the real goal.
We haven’t reached that point in A Few Days in Athens, and I don’t know whether either of you can remind me of the name of the geometer or the mathematician who converted into becoming an Epicurean? They accused Epicurus of diverting him away from his expertise — it starts with a P, I think.
Joshua:
It’s Polyaenus, I believe.
Cassius:
Okay. Do you remember the story enough to comment on it?
Joshua:
Oh, yeah. I just remember some vague hint that when he joined Epicurean philosophy he sort of abandoned geometry and mathematics — but then I’ve also seen where that wasn’t the case.
Cassius:
Yeah. And you know, to write on these subjects — I don’t know whether that argument is solid, but I know that Frances Wright includes that specifically in her A Few Days in Athens, and she argues — whether she has any grounds for it or not — that instead of telling him that he was wasting his time, Epicurus was simply pointing out to him that your real need in life is to understand the goal of happiness and pleasure, and you need to devote some time to doing that rather than spending all your time calculating. It’s hard for me to argue that’s the wrong position. Yeah, I don’t think anybody would have to go to much effort to argue me out of calculating either — it’s not the first place I’d go. So there are certain people who enjoy that. Martin is probably the closest of the three of us to that.
Martin:
Yeah. I remember when I was younger, a friend of mine found some book about magic squares, where you put numbers in a square that add up to the same total in all directions. We found great fun for a while working on that. I started making bigger and bigger ones — took a very long time to get the bigger ones.
Joshua:
Is that what it’s called — magic squares? You add them up in different directions and they add to the same thing? I also used to do that, and I started making bigger and bigger ones. I don’t know the English name for that, but the kind of thing you might also call sudoku.
Cassius:
Well, I’ve never understood what sudoku is. Sudoku involves numbers?
Joshua:
Yeah. You’ve got nine squares arranged in a grid, and every square will have all the numbers between one and nine, and every line will have all the numbers between one and nine. When you go into sudoku on the easier ones, they’ll give you a lot of the numbers already filled in and you have to figure out what the other numbers are. And as it gets harder they give you fewer and fewer numbers, and so there are more possibilities — but there’s only one right answer.
Cassius:
And of course you’ve got an analogy in Rubik’s cube — kind of a similar issue. And this is stretching to even make a point here, but: you can certainly find some enjoyment in arithmetic or geometry for the sake of itself — but that’s a diversion if you haven’t got your life in order, sort of.
What about the last sentence in this, Joshua? My favorite one: “No, Epicurus was not uneducated. The real Philistines are those who ask us to go on studying till old age the subjects that we ought to be ashamed not to have learned in boyhood.” So what do you say to somebody who says that Epicurean philosophy is only for the educated and high-class people with lots of leisure time on their hands who have all sorts of time to read all these details? Is Epicurean philosophy something reserved for the intellectual elite?
Joshua:
Well, you kind of put me in a bad position there, because while I do think to really study Epicurean philosophy you do have to put in the time to actually read it — no, this is not something that’s restricted to Plato’s “golden men” or even his “silver men.” You can be an iron man and still read this and still get all of the use out of it that there is to get.
Cassius:
And the gold being at the top — was there silver as well? Was it gold, silver, and iron?
Joshua:
Gold, silver, and iron, I think.
Cassius:
Well, the analogy there, applied to all of this, is that proper philosophy isn’t reserved only for the smartest people. But there’s a statement that not everybody is capable of reasoning everything out that needs to be reasoned out — but in most cases people are. And this is an affirmative statement that we ought to be learning this in childhood, and not have to wait until old age before we finally figure these things out.
And I’m looking at comparing the two translations. You know, the word “Philistines” that Rackham is using — I presume that’s not in the original Latin. I presume that’s sort of an artifact, a biblical reference that Cicero would not have been incorporating. And if Reid is more literal, he’s really turning it on the issue of whether they’re uneducated and uninstructed, and Reid throws in the term “disgraceful” — could well be the case.
There are two other words in here. One of them we talked about before we started recording — the word “drafts.” And I have a really good source for this: one of the best poems in the English language. This is the second stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. I’m only going to read one stanza:
Oh, for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! Oh for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
So if you are a consumer of wine as I am, that is a really great passage. But of course in the Torquatus material, the drafts we’re drinking are outlined as “drafts drawn from nature’s spring.”
Cassius:
You know, what you’re inspiring me to think here, Joshua, is: okay, just like last week I came to enjoy the thought that friendship was being used as a test case — sort of like the plague of Athens in Lucretius — here he’s summarizing his argument in favor of pleasure as the goal, not with a logical summation, not with any kind of intricate formula. He’s gone back to the person of Epicurus and our feeling of gratitude for what he accomplished. And there might be something significant in that: ultimately, Epicurean philosophy is based on observation and a view of physics and so forth, but why are you doing it all? You come to the conclusion that you’re doing it because of the feeling of pleasure. And feeling is the issue — all the words in the world don’t and cannot evoke in you a feeling of gratitude like visualizing the person through whom you experience pleasure, who caused you to live this experience of pleasure that you would not have been able to do without.
Joshua:
You’ve already made the comment, and this is kind of almost a poetic summary — I think all the different things we’ve talked about today are true. And in addition it’s true that the reason, and ultimately the justification for it all, is not a logical proof — it’s a gut-level emotional reaction to the sensation of pleasure that you get in dealing with life in a certain way.
Cassius, as I think about this, I think about the idea: you’ve got this sort of gratitude for Epicurus. Lucretius has it. You’ve got it in Lucian of Samosata. You’ve got it in the Torquatus passage here. You know, this kind of brings up the question: how do other philosophers, when they’re describing, say, Zeno the Stoic — how do they describe him? I’d be very curious to see. I don’t know the answer to that. But what jumps to my mind is the death of Socrates in — I forget what book it’s included in in Plato — but I don’t know that people hold up Socrates’s life as something to show gratitude to. They hold up Socrates as a paragon of wisdom or virtue, somebody to admire, but not to feel gratitude to. If you were doing a Norman DeWitt analogy to Christianity, you might say that okay, we feel gratitude to Jesus Christ from that religious perspective. But as far as gratitude goes, I wouldn’t think that’s that big a part of the attitude you have towards, say, Nietzsche or somebody else. Of all the emotions those guys evoke, gratitude is not really it.
Martin:
I’m not really clear about the last sentence actually. So what is it that the boy should have learned — is it the portion of philosophy that’s important according to Epicurus, or is this the useless things like mathematics and geometry?
Joshua:
I think Martin is going very clearly in the right direction here. Because what it says — to use the Rackham translation, even with some caution around that word “Philistines” — “the real Philistines are those who ask us to go on studying till old age the subjects that we ought to be ashamed not to have learned in boyhood.” So to me he’s talking there about geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music — which Plato wants people to go on studying into old age. But Epicurus says no. The thing that you need to — yes, you should learn those, get a basic grasp of those things in boyhood. But the thing that you need to study both in boyhood and in old age, as he says very clearly in the Letter to Menoeceus, is philosophy. And specifically a philosophy that is going to bring you true health and lead to the best life. So my answer is: the thing you should learn as a boy is both geometry and music and mathematics — but you should also start down the path of learning how to live, which Epicurus has quite a lot of advice on.
Cassius:
Yeah, Martin, I’m really glad you asked that, because I don’t think I’d ever looked at it from that perspective before. I can see how somebody might be questioning exactly what you’re questioning here. And I would agree with what Joshua said.
I believe this sentence is the very last sentence before Torquatus turns it back over to Cicero again. So I’ve always when I’ve read this sentence applied it to basically everything that Torquatus has been saying before, which in my mind adds up to the issue of what is the goal of life and how do you incorporate philosophy into it. And all of these issues that we’ve been talking about throughout the entire Torquatus section.
So I do not think he’s limiting that to talking about having a correct understanding of music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. That would be part of it. But I’ve always interpreted what he’s saying as: these subjects — the subject of the nature of the universe, and pleasure being the goal of life, and these basic issues of how to think — are not all that complex. We ought to be able to study them even when we’re children and grasp a basic understanding of the fact that there are no supernatural gods, the fact that there’s no life after death, the fact that not virtue and not idealism is the way to live your life — but just like every other living thing, it’s by reference to pleasure and pain and the intelligent pursuit of a happy life.
With that as a framework, I always considered that this applies to the whole of Epicurus’s position. You are going to go on studying throughout your life things like astronomy, and even getting pleasure out of magic square games and arithmetic, and digging tunnels for aqueducts using geometry — you’re going to use those all of your life. So maybe the keyword is “learned” — when I see “learned” there in both of these translations, I kind of came to the conclusion that he meant that you really did come to an understanding of the basic concept early in life. You’ll never exhaust your application of even music and geometry and mathematics. But I do think you can learn the basic approach to life relatively early. There’s a lot of detail to fill in as science advances and so forth. But it’s been 2,300 years and still no evidence of the supernatural. It’s been 2,300 years and we’re no closer to finding the edge of the universe. So the basic architecture of his philosophy covers almost everything that is worth knowing for human life — particularly as it relates to the health of the mind and to the pursuit of pleasure. And I do think he has covered almost all of it.
Joshua:
Yeah. That’s where I think you and I are not very far apart. Because when you talk about the Letter to Menoeceus suggesting that everybody should study philosophy at every age of life, I think what he’s saying is that what he’s presenting in the Letter to Menoeceus is the answer about what is the goal of life. You want to say “what is the greatest good” — these issues that seem to be the ultimate issues of philosophy. Yes, you’re going to continue to study them your whole life. But the basic answers to those questions he’s presenting as having largely reached a conclusion about. And the point he makes at the end of the Letter to Menoeceus is: it’s not enough just to learn — he says “study on these and the like matters by yourself and with friends like yourself day and night, and you will never fall into confusion.”
So that’s the problem — Lucretius says it at the beginning of his poem. He’s speaking to Memmius, and he says that in spite of the length he’s going to to explain this, some day or other you will be tempted to fall away. Because you’ll hear the ranting of priests or the fallacious arguments of other philosophers. But just remember these things and study them day and night, and you will remember, and you won’t — as Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoeceus — you won’t fall into confusion. And the result of that — the result of studying both in youth and in old age, studying day and night — is that “by not falling into confusion over these matters, you will begin to live like a god among men, because surely no one lives a mortal life who lives among immortal blessings.”
Cassius:
Martin, you’re the one who raised the question. This is a great question to kind of conclude on. Have you learned your ethics lessons that you needed to learn, or do you have additional ethics lessons that you need to learn about the goal of life?
Martin:
Actually, I mean many of these things concerning ethics are well beyond what needs to be learned from scratch. It’s just refining my opinion on this. So there is no teacher for me to teach me something I have to learn by heart — or such stuff like that.
Joshua:
I think that it really doesn’t matter how well you learn it, how many times — this happens quite a lot on the forum where even I will say something that does not at a fundamental level accord with the basic philosophy of Epicurus. For example, I’ll say something like “friendship is the highest good,” but then there’s this whole problem of whether there are different levels of good or different levels of pleasure and all that. I think that continual study even of the basic issues is really the key thing, and you’re supposed to do it your whole life long. It’s almost like a matter of keeping yourself in tune or something like that. You don’t ever come to rest — your atoms are constantly moving, you’re constantly getting older, you’re constantly changing. You’re not ever at a point of rest where you’re finished until you die and the atoms disperse.
Cassius:
So I do agree with you that you’re going to continue to study the things that we’re talking about and refine your understanding and reinforce what you’ve concluded. And maybe this goes back into Frances Wright’s observations as well. But do you ever consider anything to be concluded in philosophy in your own mind? I mean, you don’t go back every day questioning — well, really, maybe there is a supernatural God who gave us virtue and we should follow that. I think at that level, in the Epicurean viewpoint, you’re not supposed to constantly debate yourself with that question.
Joshua:
Yeah, but at the same time, the symmetry of that is that I don’t daily wake up and ask myself whether one plus one still equals two. That’s true. So the fundamental outline of astronomy and mathematics and geometry and maybe even music — the architecture of those disciplines — doesn’t really change much day to day either.
Cassius:
So if we parse this last sentence — the real issue we’re talking about sounds like he’s focusing on those persons that are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful for a boy not to have learned are to be learned through life into old age. So is he really pointing at Epicurus, or is he pointing at the other people? What’s going on here is other people are saying about Epicurus: “He thinks that music and poetry and art and math and geometry and astronomy — these things are all worthless.” And Torquatus is saying: “Epicurus is not uneducated — he has a basic grasp of all those subjects. It’s the other people who are uninstructed who think that we need to go on studying those subjects into old age.” That’s the way I read it.
Cassius:
This is fascinating to me. I’m really glad that Martin, you brought up that question, because I think this is something I’ll be interested to hear what other people have to say on the forum as well. I always thought that was a little bit more clear than it is now that I’m actually talking about it. And that’s an example of needing to continue to study at any phase of life and learn more about it.
Any concluding thoughts?
Martin:
I think we’ve learned a lot and done a lot of good by going through the Torquatus material in general. And after today we’ll go to the Letter to Herodotus and we’ll start that next week and we’ll talk about that on the forums as the week goes on. But any general concluding thoughts on Torquatus in general?
Joshua:
Yeah, my concluding thought: so please go ahead, Martin — sorry.
Martin:
So this time I have a closing statement. Thank you, Joshua, for answering the question I raised here. I fully agree with the explanation on this one. I think we reached a good conclusion on this.
Joshua:
Yes, alright. My concluding thought is that this was not something I had really read prior to us doing this project. I had gotten an audiobook and I was trying to listen to it, but it was quite difficult. I mentioned before we started recording — I think people are going to have some questions as to why we didn’t get to the letters of Epicurus earlier in the discussion. But really, having come to the end of the Torquatus material, it’s so clear that there are a lot of really great sources out there, and even if they weren’t written by Epicurus himself they’re worth going through. And this is something that’s going to be worth reading time and again. So the struggle for me is going to be coming up with the discipline to actually read it time and again — but it has been, I think, an absolute pleasure going through it.
Cassius:
I very much agree. And first of all, I really appreciate your taking the time to have read the entire material, and we’ve got that out there on the internet available for people who want to listen to the full Torquatus section from beginning to end — which is probably the best way to absorb it all, to just listen directly without all of our commentary. But now they have both: they have our commentary and our discussion, and they have the full original Reid version that Joshua has recorded. Both are easy to find if you come to EpicureanFriends.com.
So we started out in the podcast with Lucretius, which is probably the most detailed presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us. And then we moved to the other extreme of using Torquatus as a very high-level summary of the ethical positions — which of course there are letters of Epicurus on as well. But the Torquatus material here is in some ways a more clear and more sweeping presentation of Epicurean ethics than even the Letter to Menoeceus is, to some degree. We’ve gone from extreme detail up to a very high-level outline. And where we’ll go next is to sort of the middle ground: going through Epicurus’s own letters. The Letter to Herodotus in particular goes back into more of the physics, but it also includes some epistemological issues about how to think and reason and the nature of knowledge — issues that are really important, especially at the beginning. So next week we’ll go to the Letter to Herodotus.
Thank you for being here today, and we’ll talk next week.
Martin:
All right, okay, goodbye.