Episode 128 - Short Review of the Twelve Fundamentals of Nature
Date: 07/03/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2573-episode-128-the-twelve-fundamentals-of-physics/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”With Joshua and Don both unavailable, Cassius and Martin take a detour from the Letter to Pythocles to review the “Twelve Fundamentals of Physics” — a lost scroll by Epicurus referenced in Diogenes Laertius and reconstructed by scholars like Norman DeWitt and Diskin Clay from the Letter to Herodotus and Lucretius Books 1-2. Martin reads DeWitt’s version of the twelve fundamentals, and the group examines where DeWitt’s formulations differ from Diskin Clay’s more literal reconstructions — noting Clay’s work in “Paradosis and Survival,” “Lucretius’ Translation of Greek Philosophy,” and “Epicurus’ Last Will and Testament” — with Martin observing that Clay’s versions are more rigorous while DeWitt’s sometimes reflect what Lucretius says more than what the Letter to Herodotus says. The episode’s main philosophical point, drawn from DeWitt page 214, is that these fundamentals were the starting point of Epicurean education: their truth was established not inductively from sensation alone but deductively, then confirmed by sensation — and the entire program was not constructing a theory of knowledge for its own sake but building a philosophy that serves as a road to happiness. Martin explains modern atomic and metric standards (the cesium-133 definition of the second; the speed of light definition of the meter at 299,792,458 m/s) as a modern illustration of how all measurement requires an agreed-upon standard tied to reproducible phenomena — what Epicurus meant by the canon of truth as a measuring rule (kanon = straight edge or ruler), not merely a list of doctrines. Cassius relates all of this to the “Alexander the Oracle Monger” passage in Lucian, where Epicureans were identified as those confident enough to declare Alexander a fraud even before identifying the specific trick — the twelve fundamentals are what produce that confidence.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 128 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and this week we’re going to take a detour from the Letter to Pythocles while both Joshua and Don are away. For this one week only, we’ll discuss the Twelve Fundamentals of Nature. Now let’s join Martin reading those for us.
Martin: One. Matter is uncreatable. Two. Matter is indestructible. Three. The universe consists of solid bodies and void. Four. Solid bodies are either compounds or simples. Five. The multitude of atoms is infinite. Six. The void is infinite in extent. Seven. The atoms are always in motion. Eight. The speed of atomic motion is uniform. Nine. Motion is linear in space, vibratory in compounds. Ten. Atoms are capable of swerving slightly at any point in space or time. Eleven. Atoms are characterized by three qualities: weight, shape, and size. Twelve. The number of the different shapes is not infinite, merely innumerable.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. It’s just going to be the two of us today. Don and Joshua are unable to attend, so we’ll have a shorter than normal podcast and take a detour back into some very fundamental physics.
We’re in the middle of the Letter to Pythocles, and our next section will be the issue of the size of the sun. We’ve had a lot of recent discussions about that and some very deep subtleties about the epistemological issues involved. We’re going to defer that so we have the full team — Don, Joshua, and Martin — to dig into the canonical epistemological issues. So today Martin and I will discuss what is understood to be a book scroll by Epicurus called the “Twelve Fundamentals.” It’s totally lost — I’m not even aware of any fragments attributed to it — but it’s referenced in Diogenes Laertius.
Most commentators believe there was a scroll devoted to a summary of the key principles of Epicurean physics. Norman DeWitt in his book, and Diskin Clay in several essays — “Paradosis and Survival,” “Lucretius’ Translation of Greek Philosophy,” and especially “Epicurus’ Last Will and Testament” — have gone back into the Letter to Herodotus and compared it with Lucretius Books 1 and 2 to reconstruct these principles. I’m referring people primarily to page 156 and page 214 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy for this discussion.
This list Martin just read is DeWitt’s own reconstruction — not a surviving Greek or Latin text in those exact words. And Martin, you’ve observed some important differences between DeWitt’s version and Clay’s version even just for the first two items.
Martin: Yes. The first two from DeWitt — “Matter is uncreatable” and “Matter is indestructible” — are more narrow than Clay’s versions. Clay’s formulations are more compatible with modern physics; one could argue that Clay formulated things in a way that makes them more compatible with what we know today, which would be “cheating” somewhat. The question is what can we actually trace back to a source that says something equivalent to DeWitt’s formulation. DeWitt’s version probably reflects Lucretius more — Lucretius specifically says nothing comes from nothing “by the will of the gods,” which links that first principle directly to the question of whether gods created everything. In the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus states it more broadly.
Cassius: That’s a great point. DeWitt is more focused on what Lucretius says; Clay is more literally tracing what the Letter to Herodotus says. Neither is wrong — they’re coming from different angles. And this reminds me of the King James Bible problem: people will say the King James version is straight from God, but of course it was written in different ancient languages and every translation involves choices.
The main things we want to talk about today: first, what is the significance of a list like this and why is it important? And second, the relationship between observation and deduction in establishing these principles.
On the first: one of the things DeWitt really emphasizes is that these doctrines make it largely impossible to accept assertions like Plato’s realm of ideal forms — something eternal existing out there in which there is a form of a horse that exists in some other dimension — or any supernatural religious orientation. If there is nothing in the universe except atoms and void, if the matter is constantly moving, if there’s nothing outside the universe other than atoms and void, then there’s no other realm. No supernatural realm, no realm of eternal forms that we need to somehow access in order to understand reality.
Martin: That is the end purpose, yes.
Cassius: And the issue of combining epistemology with physics — Diogenes Laertius made the comment that the Epicureans tended to combine discussions of epistemology with discussions of physics. You almost have to start with both together because you’re not going to be able to talk about physics and your observations unless you have a theory of how knowledge is assembled. And on the other hand, you’re not going to have a firm opinion about the best method of assembling knowledge if you don’t take a position on the nature of the universe.
Martin: We don’t have to combine them — each just needs to be aware of the other to make sense.
Cassius: Which comes first — the chicken or the egg? In Lucretius, he basically jumps into “nothing comes from nothing” with examples you can see around you. He’s laying out a principle of physics and then immediately establishing its truth through citation to observation, which you also have to accept as a valid method of proving something. He could have said “nothing comes from nothing because Zeus says so,” but instead he says it and then lists a series of observations to support it.
Martin: Exactly. You formulate a theory and then try to refute it. If all attempts of refuting it fail, you accept that theory. Not because you’ve made 100 observations — there’s no magic number. You test the same theory with crucially different types of observations by different people. If all fits together, you conclude the model is adequate. And this is also an important distinction: scientists today understand they are building models, not claiming to access “the truth” in the Platonic sense. Plato and Epicurus were still thinking in terms of truth when they discussed physics. The modern view is that a model matches observations better than other models — that’s all you can say.
Cassius: This is your Pontius Pilate question — “what is truth?” And Epicurus’s position seems to be that you can be confident of certain things after a certain amount and variety of observation. You act as if you are confident, stop, and move on. And in order to live your life, you have to at some point accept something as established and act on it as if it’s repeatable.
I think this is connected to a passage from Lucian’s “Alexander the Oracle Monger” — the Epicureans were among those highly skeptical of Alexander’s claims. There’s a comment that what was needed was someone like Epicurus or Metrodorus who was confident that even if they did not understand the precise means of Alexander’s trickery, they would be confident it was trickery and could eventually discover the cause. That’s what these twelve fundamentals produce — that level of confidence, even without knowing every detail.
Martin: Yes. And that comes from this approach of: I have a model, I have tested it multiple ways, it has not been refuted. Therefore I have confidence.
Cassius: Let me read from DeWitt page 214. He says: “These twelve principles were the starting point for the Epicurean program of education, whether from the little epitome — which I think means the Letter to Herodotus — or Lucretius. The truth of them was not demonstrated inductively from sensation, but established deductively and only confirmed by sensation.” And then: “It should be borne in mind that Epicurus was not constructing a theory of knowledge, but a philosophy that would serve as a road to happiness… he was not working out a psychology, but merely showing how his system, based upon principles and the practical reason and evidence, was intended to operate.”
That’s an important point. People who come to Epicurus looking for immediate psychological help — techniques to apply right now to live happily — those techniques are downstream from this foundation. You can’t just read the Letter to Menoikeus and get everything. You have to understand the nature of the universe first, and then you’ll be much better equipped to derive the actual techniques for living well.
Martin: The Letter to Menoikeus is too limited on its own. The linkage between the physics and the ethics that Menoikeus contains requires understanding what we’ve been discussing.
Cassius: Martin, from your engineering physics background — can you just read the Letter to Menoikeus and get everything you need from Epicurean philosophy?
Martin: No. Someone who is telling me how to live my life needs to have an understanding of the universe that is basically the same as what I’ve come to. If someone says “your goal in life is to be happy and I know this because Zeus told me,” I cannot put as much credibility in their suggestions as I can if I understand they have a correct assessment of the nature of the universe.
Cassius: And this leads me to the issue of how we measure — the canon of truth. DeWitt and others talk about the word kanon — the canon — as being not just a list of doctrines but a measuring rule, like a straight edge or ruler. The whole point of a ruler is that you compare things to it. And on that point, Martin — you mentioned that the modern definition of the meter has become quite sophisticated.
Martin: Yes. The current definition: the speed of light is defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. The second is defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom. Then the meter is derived as the path traveled by light in a vacuum during exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second. In practice, you buy calibrated clocks and standards traceable through a chain back to a NIST laboratory that can reproduce this definition. All measurement ultimately requires an agreed-upon standard tied to reproducible phenomena in nature.
Cassius: And this is exactly what the kanon of truth is — a standard tied to reproducible phenomena in nature. Not an arbitrary decree. Not because God said so. You select something in nature that is repeatable and use it as your standard, then compare everything else to it. And when Epicurus talks about measuring everything by sensations, feelings, and prolepses — he’s saying those are the agreed-upon standards by which we compare everything else.
All of this is a bridge between where we’ve been today and where we go next week. We’ll turn our observations about the sun into something practical — looking at the way Epicurus phrased his assertion about the size of the sun and digging into that as deeply as we can to find something helpful for day-to-day living. Because the purpose of all of this is not just to line up observations but to do something with them — to live better.
Martin, any final thoughts?
Martin: What I just said before pretty much covers what I wanted to add.
Cassius: Great. This has been a very useful interim podcast. We’ll get this posted and then hopefully have at least one or maybe two more people with us next week to get back into the Letter to Pythocles. Thanks, Martin — see you next week. Goodbye.
Martin: Thanks and bye.