Episode 122 - Letter to Herodotus 11 - What it Means to "Exist" - Properties and Qualities
Date: 05/20/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2516-episode-one-hundred-twenty-two-letter-to-herodotus-10-what-it-means-to-exist-pro/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua reads sections 67-71, which address the incorporeal, independent existence, and the relationship between properties, qualities, and accidents/events of bodies; Cassius notes at the outset that the recorder was not turned on at the start, so the episode is somewhat shorter than usual. The core purpose of these sections, as Martin identifies, is the refutation of Plato’s realm of ideal forms and Aristotle’s essences: color, love, capitalism, and similar things exist only as qualities of material bodies under particular circumstances, not as independently existing entities in another dimension. The group uses “yellow” as their central example throughout, working through what it means to say yellow “exists” vs. what it means for an atom to exist, with Joshua observing that color is not a property of individual atoms (which have only size, weight, and shape) but an emergent quality of aggregates under specific conditions. The discussion of section 68 touches on the soul’s material existence — making the key connection that the incorporeal cannot act or be acted upon, and since the soul clearly does act, it must be corporeal — and the group acknowledges that “emergent property” is the modern philosophical term for what Epicurus describes. The episode closes with Lucretius’s declaration that Epicurus brought back “news of what can be and what cannot” as the landmark achievement that inspired the poem, and Cassius frames the entire properties-and-qualities discussion as the essential bridge between Epicurean atomic theory and the reliability of the senses for ruling out supernatural threats.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 122 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts. Today we continue in Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus, addressing some difficult material about the properties and qualities of atoms and bodies, and what it means to exist. We probably raise more issues than we answer in this episode, so please review the show notes and we’ll come back to these same issues next week. I need to apologize before we get started: the audio quality this week is not up to normal standards — hopefully fixed next week. For now, let’s join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua: Furthermore, we must clearly comprehend as well that the incorporeal in the general acceptance of the term is applied to that which could be thought of as such as an independent existence. Now it is impossible to conceive the incorporeal as a separate existence, except the void, and the void can neither act nor be acted upon, but only provides opportunity of motion through itself to body. So that those who say that the soul is incorporeal are talking idly, for it would not be able to act or be acted on in any respect if it were of this nature. But as it is, both these occurrences are clearly distinguished in respect of the soul. Now if one refers all these reasonings about the soul to the standards of feeling and sensation, and remembers what was said at the outset, he will see that they are sufficiently embraced in these general formulae to enable him to work out with certainty on this basis the details of the system as well. Moreover, as regards shape and color and size and weight and all other things that are predicated of body as though they were concomitant properties either of all things or of things visible or recognizable through the sensation of these qualities — we must not suppose that they are either independent existences, for it is impossible to imagine that, nor that they absolutely do not exist, nor that they are some other kind of incorporeal existence accompanying body, nor that they are material parts of body. Rather, we should suppose that the whole body in its totality owes its own permanent existence to all these, yet not in the sense that it is composed of properties brought together to form it — as when a larger structure is put together out of the parts which compose it — but only as I say that it owes its own permanent existence to all of them. All these properties have their own peculiar means of being perceived and distinguished, provided always that the aggregate body goes along with them and is never wrested from them, but in virtue of its comprehension as an aggregate of qualities acquires the predicate of body. Furthermore, there often happen to bodies and yet do not permanently accompany them accidents, of which we must suppose neither that they do not exist at all nor that they have the nature of a whole body, nor that they can be classed among unseen things nor as incorporeal. So that when according to the most general usage we employ this name, we make it clear that accidents have neither the nature of the whole which we comprehend in its aggregate and call body, nor that of the qualities which permanently accompany it without which a given body cannot be conceived. But as the result of certain acts of apprehension, provided the aggregate body goes along with them, they might each be given this name, but only on occasions when each one of them is seen to occur, since accidents are not permanent accompaniments. And we must not banish this clear vision from the realm of existence, because it does not possess the nature of the whole to which it is joined, nor that of the permanent accompaniments; nor must we suppose that such contingencies exist independently, for this is inconceivable both with regard to them and to the permanent properties. But just as it appears in sensation, we must think of them all as accidents occurring to bodies, and not as permanent accompaniments, or again as having in themselves a place in the ranks of material existence. Rather, they are seen to be just what our actual sensation shows their proper character to be.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. This is a very difficult passage, but I think potentially one of the more important ones. There’s more detail on this in Lucretius Book 1, in the section discussing how the events of the Trojan War were not something existing in eternity independently — they were events of the people who experienced them. The challenge today is to go through this issue of properties and qualities and provide a linkage between two fundamental ideas: that the atoms are not independently visible to us, and that we have to rely on our senses for all conclusions. This topic of properties and qualities is that bridge. Once you get that bridge in your mind, it has many important implications for how to apply Epicurean philosophy.
Let me start with section 67: the incorporeal. In order to exist, must we be able to validate something with our senses?
Joshua: The answer must be yes. If we’re talking about physical existence — or in the case of void, non-existence but space — we have to have validation from the senses, or from instruments that extend the senses. In the case of atoms, we cannot see them with the naked eye, but we know they’re true because that’s what physical bodies are made of, and now we have instruments that can see very small things.
Cassius: What does it mean to have an “independent existence”?
Martin: Something that exists without being linked to matter — hypothetically present but not physical.
Joshua: An atom has an independent existence — it doesn’t depend on anything else to exist. But color is not a physical characteristic of any individual atom. Color is a quality of an aggregate of atoms under certain circumstances, so it doesn’t have an independent existence — it relies on the underlying substrate of matter, which is atoms and void.
Martin: And Plato states that the only true existences are these ideal forms and everything we perceive are just inferior copies. This is what Epicurus is arguing against.
Joshua: Right. And it’s not just Plato. Aristotle and his essences is another bad idea. And then you have the even older bad ideas — propitiate the gods or something bad will happen to the community. It is very important to understand what things are capable of existing so that you can rule out spirits of the dead roaming around, and the independent incorporeal supernatural God who threatens you with hellfire. You need a well-established ground rule about what can exist.
Cassius: What is the difference between “independent existence” and “eternal existence”?
Joshua: They don’t mean the same thing, but in Epicurean physics they happen to both apply to the same two things: atoms and void. Nothing else has an eternal unchanging existence, and nothing else has an independent existence. Which makes them closely related concepts in practice.
Cassius: Let’s move to section 69 — the properties and qualities passage. He says we must not suppose that color, shape, size, and weight are independent existences, nor that they don’t exist at all, nor that they are incorporeal existences accompanying the body, nor material parts of the body. What should we think about color?
Martin: It does exist, but only as a property of the particular portion of matter which appears that color.
Joshua: And it’s not that it depends on the observer — if I’m not there to observe it, someone else could be. The atoms behave the same way whether we’re observing it or not. It exists as a quality of an aggregate of matter, dependent on the atoms that it is a quality of — their shape, arrangement, relationship to neighboring atoms.
Martin: In physics we can standardize measurement conditions and then color becomes something like a permanent property of a pure compound — it always has that color under standard conditions. What we see under varying circumstances is more like an accident.
Cassius: And section 70 says “the whole body in its totality owes its own permanent existence to all these” — meaning color, shape, size, weight — but not in the sense that the body is composed of properties. It is what it is because these qualities belong to it. A banana is not yellow; yellow is not a banana. We have to keep those attributes distinguished.
Martin: He uses the word quality in 70 — “the qualities which permanently accompany it without which a given body cannot be conceived.” So permanent qualities cannot be separated from the body without destroying it; heat is a permanent quality of fire.
Joshua: But “permanently” here means just for the life of its being — fire doesn’t last forever. It just means as long as fire exists, it will be hot.
Cassius: And then in section 71: “we must not banish this clear vision from the realm of existence… rather, they are seen to be just what our actual sensation shows their proper character to be.” He’s telling us to accept what the sensation tells us, even though we might need to check it by additional observations. This is getting close to a statement that all sensations are true in a certain sense — we shouldn’t dismiss yellow as an illusion simply because it lacks independent existence. We should accept what the sensation tells us while understanding what category it belongs to.
Joshua: The significance comes from what Lucretius says about Epicurus: that he brought back “news of what can be and what cannot” — the deep-set boundary marks, the benchmark set forever. That’s what inspired 7,000 lines of dense Latin hexameter. It was precisely that Epicurus went looking for the very limits of existence.
Cassius: And you can praise him for that as Lucretius did — or you can ridicule him. But in either case the significance of this is that you’re asking: what things are possible, and what things are not? You can have a sure confidence about something and maybe be wrong about a particular fact, but at the moment you have that sure confidence it is a pleasure. What you can rule out — spirits of the dead, an interventionist supernatural god, eternal punishment — removes anxiety from your life.
Martin: I agree with what was said.
Joshua: My closing comment is that if people listening are hopelessly confused about accidents and qualities and properties, it is quite possible to get through life without thinking too much about these things. But for those who want to push forward in greater understanding of Epicurean principles, there is a lot more here than we’ve been able to dig out. Compare this to Lucretius Book 4 on illusions and to the conclusion of Book 4 on why we trust the senses. Distinguishing reality from unreality is a pretty important part of improving your life.
Cassius: Well said. We’ll come back next week to the next couple of passages, which continue basically on the same theme. Thanks for your time today, and we’ll be back in a week. Goodbye.
Joshua: Thanks. Goodbye.
Martin: Bye.