Episode 123 - Letter to Herodotus 12 - Events and Time (More on Properties and Qualities)
Date: 05/28/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2529-episode-one-hundred-twenty-three-letter-to-herodotus-12-events-and-time/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads a continuation of sections 70-71 on properties and accidents/events — noting poor audio quality this week — followed by sections 72-73 on the nature of time. The group works through Epicurus’s three-way distinction: permanent properties (without which a body cannot be conceived, like heat in fire), accidents or events (transitory, like war, poverty, or capitalism), and time itself — with Joshua quoting Shakespeare’s Antony and Lepidus on the crocodile from Antony and Cleopatra as a humorous illustration of the obvious-yet-profound nature of these distinctions. Lucretius Book 1 (line 445) is cited for its examples of accidents — slavery, poverty, riches, war, and peace — while the senators under colored awnings in the Colosseum (appearing red due to reflected light) serves as the episode’s central illustration of color as a contextual quality rather than a Platonic absolute. On time (sections 72-73), Epicurus instructs that time must be grasped through direct intuition — not treated as an independent existing thing — and measured by days, nights, movements, and states of rest; Martin connects Epicurus’s rejection of absolute time to Einstein’s theory of relativity, noting that while Epicurus did not anticipate relativity he is compatible with it. The klepsydra (water clock used at Athenian legal trials to give equal speaking time to prosecution and defense) and Cronus the god of time (who ate his children) appear as historical illustrations, and the episode closes with acknowledgment that properties, qualities, and time remain challenging topics requiring comparison with Lucretius Book 4 on illusions.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 123 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 the Letter to Herodotus on the continuing difficult material about properties, qualities, and the nature of time. I need to apologize before we get started that the audio quality this week is not up to our normal standards — hopefully we’ll have that fixed next week. Now let’s join Martin reading the text.
Martin: 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 wrestled 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 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 a 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. Moreover, you must firmly grasp this point as well. You must not look for time as we do for all other things which we look for in an object, by referring them to the general conceptions which we perceive in our own mind. But we must take the direct intuition in accordance with which we speak of a long time or short time and examine it, applying our intuition to time as we do to other things. Neither must we search for expressions as likely to be better, but employ just those which are in common use about it. Nor again must be predicated of time anything else as having the same essential nature as this special perception. As some people do, but we must turn our thoughts particularly to that only with which we associate this peculiar perception and by which we measure it. For indeed this requires no demonstration but only reflection to show that it is with days and nights and their divisions that we associate it, and likewise also with internal feelings and absence of feeling, and with movements and states of rest. In connection with these last again we think of this very perception as a peculiar kind of accident, and in virtue of this we call it time.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Today’s episode continues from last week on the issue of properties and qualities, and then in line 72 we shift over to time, which is also an extremely deep subject. Let me read a section from the Hicks translation — the Loeb edition — which renders this somewhat differently. Around line 70, Hicks says: “Again, qualities often attached to bodies without being permanent concomitants are not to be classed among invisible entities nor are they incorporeal. Hence, using the term accidents in the common sense, we can say plainly that accidents have not the nature of the whole thing to which they belong and to which, conceiving it as a whole, we give the name of the body, nor that of the permanent properties without which body cannot be thought of.” And Hicks has a footnote here: “Compare Lucretius Book 1, line 445, where slavery, poverty, riches, war, and peace are the examples chosen as elsewhere are rest and motion.”
So he’s describing these qualities which are changing. Let’s go back to section 70. What does it mean for the whole body to owe its existence to all its properties together, without those properties being material parts of the body?
Joshua: You know when someone asks you to describe what a thing is and you find yourself just restating the thing itself? Shakespeare does that brilliantly in Antony and Cleopatra. Lepidus asks Mark Antony: “What manner of thing is your crocodile?” And Antony replies: “It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth, it is just so high as it is, and it moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourishes it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.” And Lepidus says: “What color is it of?” And Antony says: “Of its own color too.” And Lepidus says: “Tis a strange serpent.” Antony: “Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.” That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here — things that cannot be separated from other things without fundamentally destroying the thing.
Cassius: I love that. And Lucretius in Book 1 around line 449 makes the same distinction. He says you have essential conjuncts — things like weight to stones, fire and heat to the sea, touch to bodies, and being not-to-be-touched to the void — these cannot be broken away without destroying the body. And then you have what he calls events or accidents: bondage, liberty, riches, poverty, war, concord — things that come and go with the thing remaining entire. You can remove capitalism from Joshua without destroying Joshua.
Joshua: And you can change the color of a rock without destroying the essential nature of the rock. So we have these two categories: permanent properties and transitory events.
Martin: I don’t know that the problem is so much about which category something falls into as understanding why this distinction matters for daily life.
Cassius: Well, the ultimate point — as Martin raised last week — is refuting the idea of Platonic ideal forms that are eternal and exist forever. He’s telling us that what makes up yellow is not something that’s an eternal form in another dimension. It arises from the quality of particular atoms under particular circumstances. So when section 70 says 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” — I think at that point it’s clear he’s talking about bodies, not atoms. You can’t break anything off from an atom. You can only break things from bodies.
Joshua: Right — and his conclusion in 71 is: “we must not banish this clear vision from the realm of existence… but just as it appears in sensation, we must think of them all as accidents occurring to bodies.” Yellow exists — it’s real. We just have to understand what category of reality it belongs to. The senators at the Colosseum sitting under red awnings appear to have red tunics, because of the light coming through. When they come out from under the awning, their tunics are white again. There is no mystical explanation for that — there’s an atomic physics non-supernatural explanation. The appearance of the senators changed, but that doesn’t mean the color red is haunting the world independently.
Martin: If we deal with pure chemical compounds, they may have a color which they always have under standard conditions. So standardized color measurement is something like a permanent property. But under varying circumstances, color is more like an accident.
Cassius: Good. Now let’s turn to section 72 and time. He says we must not look for time “as we do for all other things which we look for in an object, by referring them to the general conceptions which we perceive in our minds, but we must take the direct intuition in accordance with which we speak of a long time or short time.” Is time a quality or an accident? What is it?
Martin: He refers to measurement. He says it is with days and nights and their divisions that we associate it. So it’s not only by intuition — there is something like fairly accurate measurement of time.
Cassius: And there was a Greek god of time — Cronus, who ate his children. Zeus was hidden away and eventually came back and killed Cronus. Horus was an Egyptian god of the sky, not time. Were there people in Epicurus’s day who were saying time was itself a supernatural force?
Joshua: There were certainly people who said time was an independent existence — not just an attribute of things but something with its own properties and attributes. Like Father Time as a force. And the klepsydra — the water clock — was used at Athenian legal trials to give both prosecution and defense equal speaking time. The word comes from Greek: it means “water stealer.” The basic design appears across India, China, Egypt, and ancient Athens — any ancient civilization that needed to measure time used some version of it.
Martin: Yes, and regarding time being absolute — in Newtonian mechanics it was absolute, but since the theory of relativity, we know that time is dependent on circumstances like the speed of bodies. At no point does Epicurus indicate the existence of an absolute time. So his physics, as contradictory as it may be in other aspects, is open to the theory of relativity — not anticipating it, but compatible with it.
Cassius: That’s a remarkable point, Martin. He rejects time being an absolute, just like he rejects everything being absolute in Platonic or Aristotelian terms — except the properties of the atoms themselves. And section 73 calls time “a peculiar kind of accident” — something we associate with movements and states of rest, not something existing independently.
Joshua: And the reference to the Trojan War in Lucretius — the Trojan War was an event of the people who experienced it. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that he chose an ancient event rather than a contemporary war: he’s making a point about the difference in time between himself and the hundreds of years since the Trojan War, illustrating that there is no permanent nature to time either.
Cassius: So the ultimate takeaway: nothing has any eternal permanence and therefore nothing is entitled to be looked at as mystical or supernatural — nothing except the atoms and the void. That argument plays out through the entire discussion of properties, qualities, and time.
Martin: Nothing to add.
Joshua: No. I think what I would say to people who find all this hopelessly confusing: it is quite possible to get through life without thinking too much about accidents and properties. But I think for the philosophy heavyweights among us, there is a lot more here than we’ve been able to dig out. I’d suggest people compare this to Lucretius Book 4 on illusions and to the conclusion of Book 4 — why we trust the senses and why some things appear permanent to some degree and others don’t.
Cassius: Very good. We’ll come back next week and continue on with Herodotus. Thanks for your time, we’ll see you then. Goodbye.
Joshua: Goodbye.
Martin: Bye.