Episode 114 - Letter to Herodotus 3 - First Principles of Physics
Date: 03/25/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2435-episode-one-hundred-fourteen-letter-to-herodotus-03-the-starting-point-of-physic/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The episode returns to the same physics section (sections 39-45) with Joshua reading, focusing on why Epicurus considered these points important — not as a physics textbook but as a challenge to supernatural religion and Platonic metaphysics. Cassius observes that Lucretius makes the purpose explicit at Book 1, line 146: “nothing has ever been begotten of nothing by divine will,” tightly linking the first physics principle to the absence of supernatural creation. Joshua contributes the salamander story as an example of the danger of forming conclusions from a single observation, and tells the story of the Pirahã tribe — a Brazilian Amazon people described in a TED talk as radical empiricists whose grammar grammatically marks whether information was perceived directly, heard second-hand, or inferred, leading a Christian missionary to convert to atheism after failing to convert them. The group discusses Caecilius Statius’ quote on planting trees for the benefit of another age, the implications of “the universe always was such as it is now” for an Epicurean attitude toward the permanence of nature, and a brief discussion of multiverse theories versus Epicurus’ use of “universe” as everything that exists. The episode closes with Cassius reading the Torquatus passage from On Ends in which natural science provides courage to withstand the fear of death, firmness to face superstitious dread, and tranquility of mind.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 114 of Lucretius Today, a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
Today we continue our review of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus and continue on with the fundamental aspects of Epicurean physics. Now let’s join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua:
“Or the universe always was such as it is now, and always will be the same; for there is nothing into which it changes. For outside the universe there is nothing which could come into it and bring about the change. Moreover, the universe is bodies and space, for that bodies exist is witnessed by sensation itself in the experience of all men, and in accordance with the evidence of sense we must of necessity judge of the imperceptible by reasoning, as I have already said. And if there were not that which we term void, and place, and intangible existence, bodies would have nowhere to exist and nothing through which to move, as they are seen to move. And besides these two, nothing can even be thought of either by conception or on the analogy of things conceivable, such as could be grasped as whole existences and not spoken of as the accidents or properties of such existences.
Furthermore, among bodies some are compounds, and others those of which compounds are formed. And these latter are indivisible and unalterable, if that is all things are not to be destroyed into the non-existent, but something permanent is to remain behind at the dissolution of compounds. They are completely solid in nature, and can by no means be dissolved in any part. So it must needs be that the first beginnings are indivisible, corporeal existences.
Moreover, the universe is boundless. For that which is bounded has an extreme point, and the extreme point is seen against something else; so that as it has no extreme point, it has no limit, and as it has no limit it must be boundless and not bounded.
Furthermore, the infinite is boundless, both in the number of the bodies and in the extent of the void. For if on the one hand the void were boundless and the bodies limited in number, the bodies could not stay anywhere, but would be carried about and scattered through the infinite void, not having other bodies to support them and keep them in place by means of collisions. But if, on the other hand, the void were limited, the infinite bodies would not have room wherein to take their place.
Besides this, the indivisible and solid bodies, out of which too the compounds are created and into which they are dissolved, have an incomprehensible number of varieties in shape. For it is not possible that such great varieties of things should arise from the same atomic shapes if they are limited in number. And so, in each shape, the atoms are quite infinite in number, but their differences of shape are not quite infinite, but only incomprehensible in number.
And the atoms move continuously for all time, some of them falling straight down, others swerving, and others recoiling from their collisions. And of the latter some are borne on, separating to a long distance from one another, while others again recoil and recoil, whenever they chance to be checked by the interlacing with others, or else shut in by atoms interlaced around them. For on the one hand the nature of the void which separates each atom by itself brings this about, as it is not able to afford resistance, and on the other hand the hardness which belongs to the atoms makes them recoil after collision to as great a distance as the interlacing permits separation after the collision. And these motions have no beginning, since the atoms and the void are the cause.
These brief sayings, if all these points are borne in mind, afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things.”
Cassius:
Joshua, thank you for reading all of that for us this morning. As we discussed last week, this section seems to have been of particular importance to Epicurus. We have a tendency to gloss over this material and not consider it to be as directly significant to our lives as some of the ethical points or some of the other letters. But I want us to do what we can to make sure we understand where Epicurus is coming from.
This is not, in my view, a physics textbook. The Letter to Herodotus is a summary letter of the important parts of the great detailed work that Epicurus did. So he was pulling these points out of all of that detail and saying that his students needed to be aware of these in particular and keep them in mind and be able to use the implications of them. For today, I’d like to put aside whether these points are 100% scientifically valid according to 2022, and instead talk about why we think Epicurus would have thought these particular points to be important. He was not the type who did things for no reason. He didn’t belabor details of science unless they had a practical purpose. If it doesn’t bring happiness, you don’t do it — well, for most people, reading the details of physics doesn’t bring a lot of happiness. So why does he focus on these as particularly important?
Joshua:
I think he thought it was important because what he’s building here basically is a universe in which the gods, if they exist, are corralled off at the remotest possible distance from any interaction with humankind. And in the role the gods play in most religions — as creator beings — Epicurus has thoroughly rejected that argument in favor of the argument that nothing is created out of nothing. As he’s going to go into later, nothing is destroyed into nothing. And the ultimate conclusion of both is that the atoms and the void have always existed — just in different combinations to the combination they exist in now.
Cassius:
From the point of view of Epicurus talking to his students in Athens, he’s teaching them to base their conclusions on observations that everything does seem to need a seed. And I think you can also observe that he is teaching them a form of reasoning here. He’s expecting them to understand something about contradictions: if everything that we see is consistent with one conclusion, then we have a right at some point to make a conclusion. He’s using this observation that nothing is created without seeds to articulate a rule — nothing is created out of that which does not exist. And he’s not just making a simple observation — he’s saying that you have observed enough, humanity has observed enough, to reach the conclusion that nothing has been or is likely to be created from nothing.
Joshua:
I like the way you’ve expressed this — that we don’t immediately accept the first observation that we make. Eventually, after repeated observations, we come to the point where we can make a conclusion. We make a conclusion after repeated observations because your first observation, particularly in framing a rule, can lead you very astray. For example, this happened with the salamander. Salamanders are wet and slimy, and you wouldn’t immediately associate them with fire, but they do have this historical association with fire. What they observed is that they would throw a log onto the fire while camping — and in the time we’re talking about, you’re basically walking everywhere you’re going, starting a campfire is not uncommon — and after a certain amount of time, a salamander would crawl out of the fire. And so if you were going just by your first observation, you would say: I started a fire and then a salamander crawled out of it, so clearly salamanders are born in fire.
But the fact is the salamander was born to a female salamander at some point, crawled into a log, and then the log was thrown on the fire — so the salamander crawled out of the log, and by crawling out of the log also crawled out of the fire, if it was lucky enough to escape. In the second case of rats and flies appearing to be born in garbage — they’re born from seeds that may have been planted there by other rats and flies attracted to the garbage as a food source. So this is why it’s so important not to merely take the first observation and build your system on a haphazard approach to sense perception, but to have these rules in place for parsing information — the rules we operate under today we would call the scientific method.
Cassius:
Joshua, I think that’s a very good explanation. As I listen to you talk, for some reason the picture comes to mind of a primitive society — whether it’s 2,000 or 3,000 years ago — where their thought processes don’t seem to kick in to ever form a conclusion. They see a salamander crawl out of a log and think, “Oh my gosh, a miracle!” They see some sunset and say, “Oh my gosh, a miracle!” And they just see miracles under every rock. Their thought processes don’t seem to kick in to say, “Well, maybe I do need to look more closely and reach a conclusion and study the way nature operates.” That attitude of not only questioning but forming a conclusion about the results of the questioning seems to have been beyond those primitive societies for some reason.
Joshua:
Well, to be fair, we probably shouldn’t underestimate primitive tribes. Most of them figured out quite a lot about nature and they couldn’t survive for long otherwise. You can’t survive if you’re continuously wandering through life being awestruck in every direction and never making any progress. And there’s been research done on cave paintings — particularly primitive cave paintings of four-legged animals — where the conclusion was that these supposedly primitive people were actually more accurate about the anatomy of these animals than Renaissance painters. A horse has a certain gait, and the foot placement doesn’t vary, and while high painters of the Renaissance will tend to get this wrong, cave paintings generally get it right — because they’re out there in nature making observations all the time. In a sense they don’t have as much of a received culture influencing what they see.
Cassius:
You’re right and my analogy to primitive tribes is unfair to primitive tribes — they wouldn’t survive very long at all if they were doing what I’m accusing them of doing. I’m sort of abstracting out the essence of the issue — being willing to form a conclusion or not.
Joshua:
I posted a video somewhere and of course I can’t remember any of it, but there was a Christian missionary who flew into Central or South America into the Amazon basin and visited this tribe — the Pirahã. And what he found, and he’s got this video that I think was a TED talk, is that the Pirahã are the world’s great empiricists. They’re bound to perceiving things with their senses and are immediately skeptical of things they don’t perceive with their senses. He says this even reflects in their grammatical structure: when you give someone a piece of information — for example, “there’s a panther in the woods” — there’s a grammatical ending to how you say that which will indicate to the person listening how you got your information. Whether you saw it with your own eyes, whether you heard it second-hand, or whether you deduced or induced it from the local environment — maybe you saw a footprint and concluded there was a panther in the woods. And then when you tell someone else, you don’t just tell them what the information is — you tell them what the information is and how you got it, so they can examine it for themselves and decide whether or not they believe it.
I’ll try to remember to post that video on the forum thread for this episode. The upshot for this missionary was that he totally failed — not only did he fail to convert the Pirahã to Christianity, which they wanted nothing to do with, but they were asking him questions like, “Jesus — is he tall or is he short? Is his skin like ours or pale like yours?” And the missionary kept saying, “I don’t know, I never met him.” And the Pirahã would say, “Well, if you never met him, what did your father say? He must have met him.” And the missionary said, “No — he lived a long time ago, I never met him, nobody I know has ever met him.” And the Pirahã would respond, “Why are you telling us about him? This man who lived so long ago that nobody alive even remembers him — why are you trying to convince us of something about him that has nothing to do with us?” Not only did he fail to convert them — this Christian missionary who had undergone severe hardship to go into the Amazon basin and learn their language — he ended up converting himself to atheism in the process.
Cassius:
I remember you telling that story on the forum somewhere. You will definitely get a link to that and put it in the show notes for today’s episode. And you know, listening to it, the issue about conveying to other people why you’re telling them something — in regard to this first sentence about nothing being created out of nothing — when you go back over to Lucretius, I think the equivalent line is around line 146 in Book 1. Lucretius there says: “This terror then, this darkness of the mind, must needs be scattered — not by the rays of the sun and the gleaming shafts of day — but by the outer view and the inner law of nature; and here it is, whose first rule shall take its start for us from this: that nothing is ever begotten of nothing by divine will.”
So it’s very interesting to me that when Lucretius expands on this particular point — nothing comes from nothing — he ties it tightly to the observation that nothing has ever been begotten of nothing by divine will. He’s showing the significance in his poetry in a way that the Letter to Herodotus does not bring out as clearly. The implication in Herodotus is related to what we’re talking about — that no supernatural being is creating things out of nothing — but Lucretius narrows the point and brings it home by saying specifically: nothing has ever been begotten of nothing by divine will.
Joshua:
That’s great — and you know, there’s the famous Hymn to Venus, which ends with that passage that scholars think was probably put in the margin by a later scribe to show that Lucretius was confused, because it ends with the passage saying that for the gods must exist in deepest peace far removed from humankind. The theory goes that this is somehow a contradiction of the Hymn to Venus immediately before it. But right after the hymn he goes into “nothing is created out of nothing by divine will” — so in my view there is no confusion. This is confusion invented by scholars who are just misreading it.
Cassius:
Right. And Lucretius continues, to make it even clearer, by saying: “Fear forsooth so constrains all mortal men, because they behold many things come to pass on earth and in the sky, the cause of whose working they can by no means see, and they think that a divine power brings them about. Therefore when we have seen that nothing can be created out of nothing, then more rightly after that shall we discern that for which we search — both when each thing can be created, and in what way all things come to be without the aid of the gods.”
So by knowing that things come from nothing — that’s not the case — that’s going to be one of the building blocks by which we don’t get scared every time something new happens to us and think, “Oh my gosh, it came from nothing at the will of a god.” Anybody who thinks this is just a physics lesson — that’s not the way it would have been presented back in the ancient world, and it’s not what we’re doing in Epicurean philosophy. It’s not teaching physics. It’s teaching confident thinking to live happily.
Cassius:
Well — do we wish to blaze ahead at lightning speed to get to the third sentence of our discussion today before the podcast episode ends? “And again if that which disappears were destroyed into that which did not exist, all things would have perished since that into which they were dissolved would not exist.” Is that basically just the flip side of nothing comes from nothing — and so nothing goes to nothing — or does it lead us to any independent conclusion?
Joshua:
What it suggests to me is a kind of permanence to the structure of nature, and I think that can allay certain fears. We’re not on tenterhooks waiting for the rapture and for everything to fall apart, deeply afraid and yet pretending to be happy. We can just be happy because we live in a universe in which our needs are met, most of them quite easily, and the state of things is not going to change in its broad structure certainly for the duration of our lives. Eventually the whole world will go — but that’s quite a long way off, and in the meantime we can pursue pleasure, avoid fear and pain, and live happy lives.
Cassius:
You know, I wonder if there’s not some parallel there too with the issue of getting used to change. The older I get, the more accustomed I get to the idea of change and that things get older and new things get born. But there’s probably a difference psychologically between getting used to change versus the idea that everything in the world could just poof out of existence at a moment’s notice. It probably gives some degree of comfort to realize that even though we may be getting older, even though we may be getting less vigorous, it doesn’t mean the whole universe is going to disappear. And there’ll be things that come after us that we can take comfort in.
The next sentence continues that thought: “Furthermore the universe always was such as it is now and always will be the same.” And of course you can’t read that without somebody raising the issue of the multiverse and so forth. What’s he talking about with “the universe”? Martin — what is the right term to use for everything as a whole?
Martin:
The multiverse is not established at this point — these theories have been produced, but they cannot be proven and cannot be refuted, so they’re just ideas floating in nothing. The word “universe” when used classically was intended to refer to everything, without limit. So I think it’s fair to say that in classical writing when you see “universe” it’s intended to refer to whatever does exist without limit.
Joshua:
There’s a related concept here. There’s what’s called cosmic pluralism — the belief in numerous worlds in addition to Earth, possibly an infinite number — and we would contrast that with what Martin would be happy to call the many-worlds interpretation, which has some relation to the multiverse idea. But those are different from what Epicurus is saying about the universe as a whole here. There are variants of the many-worlds interpretation, but Martin, you can tell us that the many-worlds theory in contemporary physics doesn’t claim that people can move between these different universes?
Martin:
Yes — there are variants of it. The many-worlds theory is actually one of the relatively more convincing multiverse ideas. And no — the many-worlds theory does not claim that people can move between these different universes.
Cassius:
My understanding of what’s most important here is that these sentences are very broadly logical and to some extent abstract. He’s making an assertion about everything that exists, saying that everything that exists in total has always been as it is now and always will be the same — not that my Volkswagen Jetta has always existed, but that the atoms and the void that make it up have always existed, just in different combinations. And he’s asserting that whatever word you use for everything that exists, when looked at as a whole, the component pieces — which are constantly moving around, changing shape, changing form, changing combinations, just as they are now — have always done so and always will, because there’s nothing outside of this actual construction that could come into it and change it.
Is there not a parallel here between this and the law of conservation of matter — that matter is neither created nor destroyed? There’s also a quote preserved by Cicero from a Roman comic poet named Caecilius Statius, who says that “he plants trees for the benefit of another age.” The meaning being that if you plant an oak tree, by the time it’s big enough for anyone to enjoy its shade you’ll probably be long dead. The point though is that there’s a legacy to it — this handing something off to your fellow man. And the impetus to do that exists because we have this reasonable supposition that things are going to more or less endure. That’s the kind of idea that you don’t have if you think the world is going to end at a specific date because someone has calculated it.
Joshua:
Yes — we need to sell all our possessions and go stand on mountaintops and do what William Miller told us to do, because we know that on this day at this hour the Messiah is coming back to rapture us up into heaven.
Cassius:
Right — that’s why they call it the “end times.” Because time comes to an end at that point. Everything has been working toward that ultimate fulfillment and then it’s there. But we can reasonably expect that that’s not the case if the evidence supports that things will endure, and we have to do what we can to come to a conclusion as to whether we think that’s likely, because it will have incredible practical effects on the way we organize our lives.
Before we leave that, one more point: we were talking about nothing comes from nothing and nothing goes to nothing. Each of these relatively short sentences contains both a conclusion along with the evidence for it. When we talk about “the universe always was such as it is now” — the evidence given is: “for there is nothing into which it changes, for outside the universe there is nothing which could come into it and bring about the change.” That’s much more to me a logical deduction based on some kind of theory, rather than something you can observe — because by almost definition, you can’t observe there being something outside the universe. Is there a point to be made that this particular assertion is based on something other than observation?
Joshua:
I think this is like the thought experiment of the javelin at the edge of the universe — which I believe comes from Lucretius. You take the sense perception of watching what happens when you throw a javelin and it hits something solid or doesn’t hit something solid, and based on that you argue by analogy via a thought experiment to what would happen if you stood at the edge of the universe and threw a javelin. Either it hits something — in which case there’s body outside the universe — or it doesn’t hit anything and it keeps going — in which case there’s void beyond what we had assumed to be the limit of the universe. So this is not strictly empirical reasoning, but it is reasoning based on analogy from observable experience.
Cassius:
Joshua, now I think you’re trying to pull my leg — because you obviously must be wrong, because Epicurus is an empiricist and he does nothing he cannot just see and touch and feel and smell. Right?
Joshua:
Ha — right, and I’m using sarcasm there. This is an example of reasoning that is not strictly empirical. Martin, how would you square this?
Martin:
So it’s not empirical, but if you go by a very basic theory which helps provide explanations for whatever needs to be explained — he came up with this one, and it’s self-consistent. We can consider it that he just put it up as an idea and found that it provides consistency to his whole concept of metaphysics. We don’t even know whether he derived it logically — it may just be something he postulated that fits and provides internal consistency to everything else. It’s more like an axiom which can’t really be proven, but from which we can derive conclusions, and if those conclusions are not refuted by observation, then at least the axiom is not refuted — it “fits,” though we don’t know whether it’s true in some deeper sense.
Cassius:
Right — tentatively, it works. And this particular point here is probably deep enough to take us to the end of the podcast today, so we won’t try to read beyond this particular point. But the reason I thought it was important — and I think it still is — is that this gets back to the issue of how Epicurus reaches conclusions about things we cannot observe. He’s taking his observations and reaching conclusions from them in a way that we need to understand. We may end up disagreeing with something he concludes, but the very fact that he’s doing it is probably going to lead to some interesting understanding about where he’s really going with his philosophy.
Let’s come to closing statements. Martin, what are your final thoughts?
Martin:
I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
Joshua?
Joshua:
We’ve been wandering quite a bit in this episode, but I do think a lot of it has been very good and important. I’m really excited to keep plugging away at this letter. If you’re not reading Epicurus in his own words, or at least his words in translation, you can’t be certain that you’re really getting to the heart of his philosophy.
Cassius:
Well said. And you’ve prompted me to say this in closing — it’s something I discussed with Martin before the episode started. One of the things I observe is whether people read Epicurus and stop at a certain level. If they stop at “go after pleasure, don’t do things that cause more pain than you need to” — I don’t know that most people get as much out of it or hang out with it very long. But this is all so deep. It’s not obvious to us today exactly what he’s saying. This whole issue of how to integrate the approach to physics with real life — this is a tremendous amount of additional work that needs to be done. The issue of how to properly approach logical propositions was apparently a bitter fight in the ancient world between the Stoics and the Epicureans and even between other schools as to how their different versions of reasoning should proceed. These are never-ending disputes because they’re so important.
The manner of thinking through these problems of day-to-day life is still with us today. And even though it may be hidden behind discussions of atoms and void, once you dig into it and see what he’s doing — what he’s doing is extremely practical and extremely important and extremely beneficial. The best way to get the most out of reading Epicurus is to sit down and try to write it out for yourself, try to explain it to other people. That’s when you realize that your grasp of the subject is not what it needs to be — when you start trying to explain it to our hypothetical youth group that one day will hopefully emerge from the work of the EpicureanFriends.com forum.
Joshua:
Just to reinforce what you’re saying: I find it essential to keep going back to that sentence from our first episode introducing the Letter to Herodotus — where Epicurus says that this is the chief foundation of the peace and the pleasure and the happiness in his own life. That’s really what’s so important to take away from this letter. Our expectation is that by closely reading this text and other texts like it, we can find the same kind of peace and pleasure and happiness.
Cassius:
Well said, Joshua. And in closing, I’m going to recite what we currently have at the top of the EpicureanFriends.com forum — this is Torquatus again from Cicero’s On Ends: “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. When cognition and knowledge are 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, 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.”
Over and over, you see the same arguments being raised. We can do no better than those quotes. So let’s leave it at that for today and we’ll come back next week.
Joshua:
All right, thanks everyone.
Martin:
Okay, bye.