Episode 117 - Letter to Herodotus 6 - The Doctrine of Infinity of Worlds And Its Implications
Date: 04/11/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2453-episode-one-hundred-seventeen-letter-to-herodotus-06-the-doctrine-of-infinity-of/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 117 devotes the entire session to section 45 of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus — the doctrine of infinite worlds — despite Martin having read a much longer passage through section 52. Martin explains that “worlds” in this context means at minimum a solar system and at maximum a galaxy, and Joshua reads parallel passages from Lucretius Book 2 (lines 1048–1077) affirming that the same physical laws governing earth must produce life in other regions of the universe. The discussion ranges widely: Giordano Bruno’s execution in 1600 partly for espousing cosmic pluralism, the European discovery of the Americas as a comparable challenge to religious orthodoxy, and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence as a potential antidote to nihilism, with Martin noting that the German word “nihilismus” first appears around 1736 and was popularized in Russia largely through Turgenev. The panel also debates whether “meaninglessness” is a distinctly modern problem that would not have troubled the ancient Epicureans, and closes with Richard Dawkins’ “lucky ones” passage and a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s journal — “You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave” — offered as the Epicurean answer to despair.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 117 of Lucretius Today. This is the 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 ancient 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 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. Today we continue our review of Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus, and although we move further into fundamental physics, we spend the entire episode talking about the question of whether there are an infinite number of other worlds like ours spread throughout the universe and the implications of that Epicurean doctrine. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
“These brief sayings, if all these points are borne in mind, afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things.
“First of all, there are infinite worlds, both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms, being infinite in number as was proved already, are borne on far out into space. For those atoms which are of such nature that a world could be created out of them or made by them have not been used up either on one world or on a limited number of worlds, nor again on all the worlds which are like or on those which are different from them. So that nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of the worlds.
“Moreover, there are images like in shape to the solid objects, far surpassing perceptible things in the subtlety of texture. For it is not impossible that such emanations should be formed in that which surrounds the objects, nor that there should be opportunities for the formation of such hollow and thin frames, nor that there should be effluences which preserve the respective position and order which they had before in the solid bodies — these images we call idols.
“Next, nothing among perceptible things contradicts the belief that the images have unsurpassed fineness of texture. And for this reason they have also unsurpassed speed of motion, since their movement of all the atoms is uniform, and besides, nothing or very few things hinders their emission by collisions, whereas a body composed of many or infinite atoms is at once hindered by collisions. Besides this, nothing contradicts the belief that the creation of the idols takes place as quick as thought.
“The flow of images preserves for a long time the position and order of the atoms in the solid body, though it is occasionally confused. Moreover, compound idols are quickly formed in the air around, because it is not necessary for their substance to be filled in. And besides there are certain other methods in which existences of this sort are produced. For not one of these beliefs is contradicted by our sensations, if one looks to see in what way sensation will bring us clear visions from the external objects, and in what way again the corresponding sequences of qualities and moods.
“Now we must suppose too that it is when something enters us from external objects that we not only see but think of their shapes. For external objects could not make on us an impression of the nature of their own color and shape by means of the air which lies between us and them, nor again by means of the rays or effluences of any sort which pass from us to them, nearly so well as if models similar in color and shape leave the objects and enter, according to their respective size, either into our sight or into our mind, moving along swiftly, and so by this means they produce the image of a single continuous thing and preserve the corresponding sequence of qualities and movements from the original object as a result of the uniform contact with us kept up by the vibration of the atoms deep in the interior of the concrete body. And every image which we obtain by an act of apprehension on the part of the mind or of the sense organs, whether of shape or of properties, this image is the shape or the properties of the concrete object and is produced by the constant repetition of the image or the impression it has left.
“Now falsehood and error always lie in the addition of opinion with regard to what is waiting to be confirmed or not contradicted, and then is not confirmed or is contradicted. For the similarity between the things which exist, which we call real, and the images received as a likeness of things and produced either in sleep or through some other act of apprehension on the part of the mind or the other instruments of judgment, could never be actually brought into contact with our senses, and error would not exist unless another kind of movement too were produced inside ourselves closely linked to the apprehension of images but differing from it. And it is owing to this, supposing it is not confirmed or is contradicted, that falsehood arises; but if it is confirmed or not contradicted, it is true. Therefore we must do our best to keep this doctrine in mind, in order that on the one hand the standards of judgment dependent on the clear visions may not be undermined, and on the other error may not be as firmly established as truth, and so throw all into confusion.”
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading all of that for us today. We have a longer selection of text now that we’ve jumped into after the last section, and I don’t know how far we’re going to get into this section. Sometimes I think we’ll go through it quickly and then we spend more time than I thought — but we did read through section 52, because this is the conclusion of the discussion of images which takes up the majority of this block of text.
But the discussion does not start off with images. It starts off with one of the issues dearest to my personal heart since I am always talking about space aliens. Section 45 talks about infinite worlds — both like and unlike this world of ours — and that the atoms would not have been used up on one world or a limited number of worlds, nor on all the worlds which were like or those that were different, so that nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of the worlds. Maybe one of the first things to discuss is the definition of worlds. Martin, most of this section is really in your department. What do you think he’s talking about with worlds?
Martin:
To me this looks like — at a minimum, what we today identify as a solar system, and at a maximum one galaxy. So we’re definitely not talking about the earth alone as what he is referring to. He seems to be talking about a segment of the universe that seems to be related to each other — a large grouping of planets and apparently stars as well. Clearly we’re not talking about just the earth itself as a planet; we’re talking about a large grouping.
Cassius:
Maybe we could also interpret it as other inhabited planets.
Martin:
Definitely. And that’s something I’m going to refer to by switching over to Lucretius, where as usual there’s some amplification of this. I think the majority of this material appears in Lucretius at or near the end of Book Two, around line 1048 to 1077 or so.
Joshua:
At line 1067 it says: “Moreover, when there is much matter ready at hand, when space is there and nothing, no cause, delays, things must we may be sure be carried on and completed. As it is, if there is so great a store of seeds as the whole life of living things could not number, and if the same force in nature abides which could throw together the seeds of things each into their place in like manner as they are thrown together here — it must needs be that you confess that there are other worlds in other regions and diverse races of men and tribes of wild beasts.”
And then at line 1077 he continues: “There is two that in the universe there is nothing single, nothing born unique and growing unique and alone, but it is always of some tribe and there are many things in the same race. First of all, turn your mind to living creatures — you’ll find that in this wise is begotten the race of wild beasts that haunts the mountains, and in this way the stock of men, and in this way again the dumb herds of scaly fishes.” And he continues on, making the point that since there is nothing of a single kind here on earth, he extrapolates that to indicate that that would be what we would expect in the rest of the universe as well.
Cassius:
He ends that passage talking about life on other worlds — that the same laws that govern life here on earth would operate there as well.
Joshua:
Exactly. And that to me is the fundamental thing to get hold of here: the rules of atomism that govern the way things are on earth — those rules are the same that exist everywhere else. There is no, as quite a lot of ancient cosmology had it, a higher region like the ether that operates by different rules. The idea that there’s one set of rules that governs everywhere — not merely here but as far as your imagination reaches into space and time — that the same rules under the same conditions in wildly different places will produce the same kinds of things. And probably worth pointing out that nobody would suggest the rules are going to work themselves out so as to produce other Joshuas or other Martins on other planets, but the general rules that have brought about life in the basically infinite variety we see here on earth — we would expect similar results wherever there are similar conditions.
Cassius:
The point being that whatever that process was that led to us having this podcast today, after millions and millions of years — there’s no reason to think that process is not going on in a somewhat similar way throughout the universe, and that it has always gone on in a somewhat similar way throughout the universe.
We could probably spend an entire podcast talking about the implications of that, so let’s talk about it. Joshua, you frequently have illustrations from the Middle Ages and earlier about the resistance of religion to Galileo or different scientific discoveries. I continue to believe that the issue of whether there is life in the rest of the universe is still something that’s going to upset a lot of religiously minded people if and when it is eventually discovered. The scientific community will be perfectly happy with it. Martin, could you tell us whether there are arguments that because we have not found life already through our efforts, that might be an indication it doesn’t exist anywhere else?
Martin:
Actually the scientific community is divided between biologists and physicists on this. The physicists, looking at how huge the universe is, tend to think it’s very likely that in many galaxies there are habitable planets where life would be expected — it’s one of the reasons we look for it, because we expect it. The biologists say the probability for the formation of life from non-living matter is so unlikely that they don’t think the universe is big enough for it to have happened even a second time.
Cassius:
That’s interesting — I’ve never heard that distinction between physicists and biologists. But certainly I take the view that when you’re talking about an infinite universe, or even an extremely and inconceivably large universe, what little we’ve discovered and what little we can actually see — it’s amazing how limited our scope of discovery really is. And when you start talking about the scale of the universe, if the nearest star is four light years away and it would take something like 400,000 years for our fastest spacecraft to get there, our ability to go out and actually find life on other worlds is so limited in scope that it would be foolish to rule it out even in our little proximate corner of our galaxy, much less the infinitude of galaxies that lie beyond.
What we really look for when we look for life on other worlds is the chemical signature of life in the atmospheres of those worlds — using tools like infrared and kinds of imaging that allow us to see things that give an indication that life might be there. But it’s not as if we can go to Alpha Centauri and drop a probe on a planet and start looking for alien beings, because it’s quite simply too far away.
Joshua:
Yes — and the other point I wanted to make is this: Cassius, you noted that the claim that there are other worlds possibly inhabited by life is different from the claim that there are other Joshuas out there just like me. And I need to correct myself here — the “many worlds theory” I’ve used before myself in relation to Epicurean philosophy, but Martin, you have been kind enough to steer me the right way, because what the “many worlds theory” or “many worlds interpretation” means in contemporary physics is nothing at all like what Epicurus meant. What Epicurus means is what we would now call cosmic pluralism, or the plurality of worlds. In the many worlds interpretation — which is an interpretation of quantum physics — you do expect to find an infinite number of Joshuas out there. But not necessarily in cosmic pluralism.
Martin:
Yes — and what’s the thing about the many worlds theory: you won’t find them. You only postulate they are there, but you have no way to verify it.
Joshua:
It’s neither empirical nor falsifiable.
Martin:
Exactly — that’s the same. So there is no way, currently or in the past, that anything of this could be verified in any form.
Cassius:
Joshua, when you started that line of comment, I wasn’t sure exactly which direction you were going to go. There’s another related discussion we haven’t been talking about recently, but I think we ought to mention it in this context — I’m going to bring this totally from out in left field. There’s also the issue of what Martin’s countryman Friedrich Nietzsche might call eternal recurrence: if you have an infinite number of bodies moving around for an infinite period of time in an infinite space, the suggestion is that those bodies might recombine at some point into the same combinations that they existed in before. You did refer to whether there were multiple Joshuas out there, and that’s exactly what we’re now talking about — the frightening thought that there could be multiple Joshuas or Cassiuses or Martins, either now or in the past or in the future.
We could spend all day on this topic, but before I get a comment from both of you about eternal recurrence, I want to remind everybody listening that this suggestion is right there in Lucretius as well. In the discussion of life after death, Lucretius specifically brings up the possibility that soul atoms could at some point in the future recombine in exactly the same combinations as before, but Lucretius makes the point that even if that were to happen, there is apparently no memory of what life had occurred in the past. Even if an eternal recurrence type of situation might occur, that would not change our viewpoint about whether the soul can exist outside of the body, because a recombined soul would be essentially a different one having no memory of its past life. Do either of you have any commentary on eternal recurrence?
Martin:
In Epicurean cosmology, the universe is infinite in size, with basically everything infinite — and then if anything happens, there is a finite probability, which means it is going to happen again at an infinite number of places for an infinite number of times. It’s just the effect of having multiple infinities acting on a finite probability larger than zero. But as Lucretius correctly figured out based on a model of atomism, the similar recurrences have no knowledge of each other.
Cassius:
Martin, let me dig into that for just a second. Under Epicurean cosmology, do we think that the ancient Epicureans actually did contemplate that there would be more than one Epicurus, more than one Martin, over an eternity of time and an infinity of space?
Martin:
Yes, but as I said, it’s irrelevant because there’s an even larger infinite number of very similar people where something is different. Maybe they got a different name but everything else is approximately the same — there was another person called something else who was not teaching pleasure as the highest goal, but something else.
Joshua:
This has tremendous mind-blowing implications. What do you think about the eternal recurrence argument and whether it has any meaning? I’m such an amateur on all of this. Nietzsche thought it was extremely relevant and extremely important, and that it had a tremendous benefit in combating nihilism in some way that I’m not even sure I fully understand. But I’ve read that this is something he connected the significance of eternal recurrence to.
Martin:
Atomism prevents us from finding any connection between these recurrences, because there’s no way that this assembly of atoms knows that there was a past assembly of this type elsewhere. There’s simply no transmission of information linking them with each other.
Cassius:
Martin, there’s so much to talk about. As we move further down the text we’re going to start talking about how mind and soul are really just particle-based — and I wonder, is it intuitively clear that if your body and your brain and all the particles in your brain were somehow reassembled in exactly the same position, would it not have the same memory as before?
Martin:
The thing is, it’s much more likely that we have something very similar. Among these infinite recurrences, the ones that are exactly the same are actually the relatively least likely. It’s more likely something is somewhat different — and the more something differs, the more likely it is to happen.
Cassius:
Martin, am I at least halfway correct that Nietzsche saw this as a potential antidote to nihilism?
Martin:
I have no idea on this one — what Nietzsche could have meant by that, I don’t know.
Joshua:
All right, I’ll try. I have almost never read Nietzsche, so when you brought this up I wasn’t even familiar with the concept. But certainly it’s true in something like the number pi that after the decimal point you have an infinite number of digits, with only ten options for what any one of them can be, and so the conclusion is that any sequence of digits of any length will repeat itself somewhere — probably not just once but an infinite number of times. One of the problems is that we talk about atoms and void as if this is something purely based on chance, but what we know about biology is that the mechanism by which Joshua got here is common descent by means of natural selection. So to replicate an exact Joshua would take more than just chance — it would take the environment that produced not just me but all of my ancestors going back to the smallest little creature in the sea. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s not something I think we should necessarily dwell on. I wouldn’t expect to go to Mars and find a Joshua there.
But is eternal recurrence as important philosophically, Cassius, as Nietzsche thinks it is? I have a tendency to think that the first issue is extremely significant because of its impact on standard religion. The religion of Christianity asserts that there is something divinely special about humanity — that Jesus has come to save us, that God’s special chosen people are involved, that God is just working his eternal plan for the universe through little old earth, that we’re the center of the universe and that everything revolves around us. I do think there is a very important issue involved in breaking free of that paradigm. There are a lot of people who would just have a tremendously upset worldview if, for example, intelligent life were discovered on some other planet.
And when you look at the trials of, for example, Galileo, and in particular Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in 1600 in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome — a huge part of that was cosmic pluralism. I mentioned transubstantiation as being one of the issues these people ran into when they espoused atomism, because in order to have wine changing into blood there has to be a wine substance and there has to be a blood substance, and if everything is just oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and a number of other elements, you don’t get that. But even more than that was this problem of cosmic pluralism and what it represented to the Church — you can find explicit references by church fathers and other church thinkers saying that there can’t be life on other worlds because there’s only one Jesus Christ and he’s only here. The funny thing is that in Mormonism you actually do get the other direction — not only is there life on other worlds, but if you’re a good Mormon after you die you get to be lord of your own planet.
Cassius:
Yes, yes. And before we go on — you mentioned the New World, and this is something we often overlook: even the discovery of the Americas was a radical challenge to established orthodoxy. You’ve got this holy book with the scriptures, and nowhere in the scriptures do you read about people living on other continents across a vast ocean who have never been contacted before and who have never been given the opportunity for salvation through Jesus or the Jews. That becomes a huge problem for religion. For Epicurus, not so much — he could have very easily predicted that. So at the very least in my view it’s extremely significant because of its impact on standard religion.
At the same time, I want to say this: I think it’s possible to go to a wrong extreme in the other direction as well. This may be some of what Nietzsche was talking about — the idea that once you start talking about how the universe is infinite in size and infinite in time, and telescopes just show what a speck we are on the edge of the universe, that leads certain people to despair. To think that they’re no different than dirt, that there’s no reason for them to care about their existence, because they’ve been torn away from the idea that they’re the special children of God and been thrown to the opposite extreme of thinking that we’re so small and insignificant in the great natural scheme of things that you fade into insignificance. And unless you have a framework to understand how you fit into that picture, you go from thinking you’re the center of the universe to thinking you’re absolutely worthless.
I think Epicurean philosophy would stand against that position as well, for a variety of reasons — but the whole issue of what is significant to us in terms of our senses is a lot of what Epicurus is talking about. He’s constructing a worldview in which you can consider yourself to be significant, and know what’s important to you and how to live your life, without thinking that you’re the child of some divine being.
Joshua:
Two things by way of response. First, by way of preface: we often overlook that there was actually somewhat less resistance to the idea of cosmic pluralism than we might expect in the nineteenth century. Scientifically literate people were probably more likely to accept the proposal that there was life on other worlds than people today — for the simple reason that they were beginning to understand the scale of the universe but had no ability to probe into it. The idea that if you peel back the clouds of Venus you’re going to find a thriving civilization was not necessarily a foreign idea to them. We know that when you peel back the clouds of Venus you’re going to find more clouds all the way down to a crushing, caustic, and horrible death. So we can say with confidence that on Venus, nothing like life on earth is going to exist.
But there’s a quote from Henry David Thoreau that I want to read before we close — from his journal, which ran to something like two million words over the course of his life. He says: “The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles. What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment.” And he goes on to say: “Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?” So you can look into the immensity of space and the plurality of worlds and the potential for life on other worlds, and you can see that as a cause for nihilism or for despair, or you can see it as a source for inspiration. This is the kind of thing that can make you understand that cosmic pluralism and the belief in life on other worlds is not necessarily a source for despair — it can be a source for wonder. When you look at a star you can imagine that another living creature on another world, totally unknown to us, could be contemplating the same star.
Cassius:
I think this is one of the major practical implications of Epicurean philosophy, which is why I keep coming back to it. Everybody needs a framework for where they fit into the universe, and if they reject the religious framework they need a replacement that does not lead them into despair and nihilism. And the issue of whether it is normal or not to go from rejecting religion to falling into nihilism — there’s something really deep here about the fact that yes, the universe is infinite in size and has existed infinitely in time, and yes, the only thing that has an eternal existence in that perspective are the atoms — but just because everything can ultimately be reduced to atoms moving through the void does not mean that what composes us as human beings lacks the ability to organize those perceptions into something that is extremely significant to us.
Joshua:
I completely agree. I did mention I had two points, and I totally forgot the other one — but this dovetails with what you’re talking about. This is a quote from Richard Dawkins: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. The potential people who could have been here in my place but will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred.” He goes on to say that we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.
What he’s really saying here is that even if we are alone in the universe — which I think is probably unlikely — even if we never find life out there, even if the discovery of life elsewhere radically shifts our understanding of things, which as an Epicurean it shouldn’t, we should never let go of that knowledge which ought to be innate in all of us but that we’ve forgotten: we’re very, very lucky to be here and to be able to even think these thoughts about nature and the universe.
Cassius:
I’ve never heard that quote from Dawkins before. I’ve always had the sense that Dawkins was in tune with many things that Epicurus would have said, and that would be a very good example of the attitude I think Epicurus would probably have. I don’t know about the word “lucky” — sometimes it has subtleties that might not be exactly right — but what I was thinking as I listened to that is that the quote carries the emotion, carries the feeling involved. Whatever word we might put on it, he’s conveying the sense that we should be happy to be alive, that we should be happy to have the opportunities we have. And I think that is core, absolute bedrock Epicurean philosophy — a combination or employment of science, observation, even logic and reasoning to come up with a worldview that makes sense for you and allows you to have that feeling. Because ultimately it’s that feeling that comes down in the final analysis to be what’s important.
So that was a great addition — I had not heard that before. And I want to at least raise this before we close. Martin and I were talking today before we started about Philodemus and his work On Methods of Inference, and here you have one of the clearest examples of how to think properly in Epicurean terms. There is clearly no direct perceptual evidence — no way of flying through the universe and seeing all these different worlds — that these infinite worlds and other living things actually exist. You can’t see those, so there’s no way you can verify it through that kind of direct observation. But when you observe here on earth that there’s generally no single thing of a kind, that there appears to be almost unlimited variation here on earth, the question is: is it reasonable to extrapolate that to the universe as a whole? And the issue of when and where and how to extrapolate our existing perceptions to the rest of the universe — this is the whole issue of logic and how to do that, what limitations it has, and how far to go with it under what circumstances. I think that’s what Epicurus is doing here: taking examples of what he can observe and extrapolating them to the unknown.
Martin:
Yes, that’s what he is doing.
Cassius:
And what are the possibilities? You can say that about the universe as a whole I just don’t know enough to have any conclusion whatsoever — that’s the agnostic position. But Epicurus is not simply being agnostic about the existence of other worlds and life in the rest of the universe. He’s taking a position. He’s saying there’s a reason to believe that these things exist. Not in the sense of taking it on faith without reason — he’s saying that the evidence is so clear in his mind that he considers it established.
Joshua:
I don’t know if I’d agree with the word “assertion” there. What it really is is a conclusion that must be true if the chain of reasoning that led to it is true. If you start with atomism and the idea of an infinite number of atoms in infinite void, this sort of necessarily follows from that — if there’s any method for cohesion among the atoms. The other option would be something like entropy where the atoms are all scattered and don’t interact with each other, but if that were the case we wouldn’t be having this conversation on this world.
Now, on the question of what agnosticism means — it’s worth noting that agnosticism is a neologism coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, the ardent early defender of Darwinism. His definition is something like: the position that the existence or non-existence of God is unknown or unknowable. That’s different from just saying “I don’t know” — you could say “I don’t know” but still believe it’s knowable. Understood in that context, agnosticism is a position about knowledge, whereas theism and atheism are about faith. So in my view agnosticism is not in fact a middle point between theism and atheism — it’s an overlapping point. You can be agnostic and an atheist at the same time, because you may not believe in God but maintain that the existence of God is unfalsifiable and therefore not knowable.
Cassius:
What you’ve just said makes a lot of sense to me. The practical implication I think is most useful: from the point of view of Epicurean philosophy, Epicurus consistently seems to me never to take the agnostic position. He always affirmatively asserts that there is not a supernatural being. And there’s a parallel here in this discussion of infinite worlds: he is not content to say “I don’t know whether there are any other living beings in the universe besides humans.” He’s affirmatively asserting that there are, and not in the sense of saying “probably” — more in the sense of saying the evidence is so clear that he takes it as established.
All right, seeing that the clock tells me we have successfully spent the entire episode on apparently two or three sentences in distinction to the long section Martin read, we ought to begin to come to a conclusion for today. Next week we’ll move over into the issue of images — that’s what the majority of the rest of this section, sections 46 to 52, talks about. And we’ll be challenged to think about the implications of what images mean for thought processes, just the basic biology of how our brains operate, and what it means to know or to think something. So there’ll be a lot of challenges next week as well.
Let’s bring today’s episode to a close by coming up with final comments. Martin, what are your closing thoughts?
Martin:
I just want to add something on nihilism. The first time this term shows up — the oldest reference is with the German word “nihilismus,” which is traced back to 1736. So it’s not that old. That was really just the first occurrence. It seemed it really took off in Russia first, in the nineteenth century — it occurs in France in the eighteenth century as well, but in the nineteenth century it really takes off in Russia. That’s when this term became more widely known.
Cassius:
Do you see famous philosophers’ names associated with that?
Martin:
Yes — Turgenev. Here I see Turgenev quoted. And of course Nietzsche took it on as well. Actually, as I recall, Nietzsche refers to Turgenev in the context of nihilism.
Cassius:
Turgenev — can you spell it?
Martin:
T-U-R-G-E-N-E-V.
Cassius:
Interesting. That’s a subject I think we’ll continue to come back to over time. I think it’s a deep implication of Epicurean philosophy — the Nietzschean line of thinking about atomism as an antidote to despair, nihilism, anxiety; I think all those go hand in hand. Do you have anything else, Martin, or shall we move to Joshua?
Martin:
No, that’s all from me.
Joshua:
All I’d like to say is that for anybody listening, if you have something to say about this idea of meaning or purpose in life — apart from something like the Greek telos, which is a goal — I’m specifically looking for the sense of meaning as the opposite of despair. I’d love to see some more on this, because I’m drawing a complete blank when it comes to the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks thought they weren’t going to go to heaven — they were just going to wander around for eternity as shades with no memory and no personality. It’s not like they had this idea that if they became Epicureans they would be losing some wonderful afterlife they were looking forward to. They didn’t have a wonderful afterlife to look forward to. I’m curious about the extent to which this idea of meaning or purpose is more of a modern construct — or at least a later construct — than maybe we think. I just don’t know the answer and would like to read more about it.
Martin:
One of my friends from a similar philosophical background said to me: “I don’t have meaning — I don’t need meaning, because I have pleasure as a goal.” But then he said, “In this way I give meaning to my life.” So depending on how widely you cast the sense of that word, you can include a life consciously focused on maximizing pleasure as something through which you create meaning for yourself.
Cassius:
I see what you mean there. Certainly people who are pursuing something eternal are going to look at that and say no, that’s precisely what they see as being despair — just an endless pursuit of pleasure that goes nowhere. Obviously that’s not how I see it, but that’s how they see it. Richard Dawkins, whom I keep bringing up, has more to say on this as well. He was asked, if you’re an atheist, what’s the meaning of life? And he responded: “What’s the meaning of a mountain? You’re just asking the wrong question.” I’m not sure that happiness depends on a sense of meaning or purpose in life. I think the mere fact that we exist when by all odds we really shouldn’t is so amazing and so wonderful, and there are so many opportunities available to us not just for pleasure but for intimate relationships and friendships, that the idea that I need something beyond that to look forward to renders rather cheap the experience that I’m currently having right now.
Joshua, your comment makes me think of two things. It seems like many of the people arguing against Epicurus are trying to equate meaningfulness with something eternal — as if by designating something as finite and temporal you’ve somehow shown it can’t be meaningful. And I think that’s a false assertion in the first place. For me it’s the complete opposite: I can’t imagine anything worse than playing harps on a cloud for all coming time. That would be torture, I think. But some people see it differently, and it’s not an option anyway.
The second thing about the assertion that pleasure and Epicurean philosophy are insufficient — these people want to throw out words like “meaningfulness” or even “flourishing,” other words, because they just don’t seem to be willing to accept enjoyment or pleasure as an acceptable word. But as Torquatus brought out, it’s clear in Epicurean philosophy: why do we do anything except that it brings us some kind of a good feeling, some kind of a pleasurable experience? You can use any words you want to describe it, but in the end it’s a positive feeling. What can “meaningfulness” mean other than a pleasurable or positive feeling that you get from doing something? So I see a lot of problems with these arguments against Epicurus — they’re ultimately playing word games, trying for ulterior purposes to spin what everybody recognizes as a positive feeling into something insufficient because that feeling is not eternal. There are a lot of logical problems with that as I see it.
Joshua:
And a practical problem as well. Whether you think immortal life is what you deserve or not, it doesn’t matter — because this is what you’re going to get. You’re not going to get more than that. And spending your whole life pretending that you’re going to get something more than that, or trying to convince yourself of it, is squandering the one thing that you have.
There’s a quote from Thoreau that I want to read last — from his considerable journal, which ran to something like two million words over the course of his life. He says: “You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land. There is no other life but this.”
That quite adequately conveys the thing I’m trying to say here — that living in the expectation of immortal life to come is not only hopeless and fruitless, I think, but it’s also in rather bad taste with the way you’re treating the life you’re living right now. It makes you out to be an ingrate.
Cassius:
That quote from Thoreau is probably the best place I can think of to stop the episode for today and bring us to an end until next week. Anybody have anything else? No?
Martin:
No.
Cassius:
Very good. Let’s close there and we’ll come back next week. Thanks very much.
Joshua:
Thank you.
Martin:
Thanks and bye.