Episode 130 - Letter to Pythocles 04 - More on the Sun and Moon
Date: 07/16/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2593-episode-one-hundred-thirty-letter-to-pythocles-04-more-on-the-sun-and-moon/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads sections 94-98 of the Letter to Pythocles covering the phases of the moon, whether the moon and sun shine by their own or reflected light, eclipses, the regularity of heavenly motions, and the changing lengths of day and night; the central epistemological point hammered through every passage is the warning against becoming “enamored of the method of the single cause” — groundlessly throwing other consistent explanations out of court — while the positive counterpart is reasoning by analogy from observable terrestrial phenomena to distant celestial ones. Joshua introduces Christopher Hitchens’s observation on Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus — “we don’t have much to learn from what they thought about nature, but we have a lot to learn from how they thought” — as the best single-sentence summary of the letter’s purpose, and then traces the contrast between Epicurus’s open, analogical method and Aristotle’s essentialist hierarchy: from Aristotle’s scala naturae through the medieval Christian “great chain of being” (God down through angels, humans, animals, plants, minerals) to Dante placing Epicurus in the sixth circle of hell for heresy. Cassius reads Richard Dawkins’s 2014 edge.org essay “What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” — answer: essentialism — arguing that Plato’s treatment of living things as imperfect approximations to ideal forms prevented the discovery of evolution well into the 19th century, and the group connects this directly to the Letter to Pythocles’s insistence that natural phenomena must be explained by analogy with observable things, not deduced from assumed ideal forms. Joshua introduces the Fermi Paradox and Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory (from the trilogy The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) as an illustration of what Epicurus was getting at: that an infinite universe need not be a source of fear, and that peace of mind comes from withholding judgment until evidence is sufficient rather than from forcing a false certainty. The episode closes with a cluster of texts on belief and evidence: Benjamin Franklin’s sardonic remark that “it has pleased God in his goodness to mankind at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations from thunder and lightning”; Cicero’s line from On Old Age (the Scipio–Cato dialogue) — “if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err”; 1 Corinthians 15:19 — “if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable”; and DeWitt’s observation that Epicurus’s fate was to be “anonymous when praised, and named when condemned.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 130 of Lucretius Today. This is 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 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 Epicurus’s Letter to Pythocles and we look at more phenomena of the sun and the moon. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin: The waning of the moon and its subsequent waxing might be due to the revolution of its own body, or equally well to successive conformations of the atmosphere, or again to the interposition of other bodies. They may be accounted for in all the ways in which phenomena on earth invite us to such explanations of these phases, provided only one does not become enamored of the method of the single cause and groundlessly put the others out of court, without having considered what it is possible for a man to observe and what is not, and therefore to observe what is impossible. Next, the moon may have her light from herself or from the sun, for on earth too we see many things shining with their own and many with reflected light; nor is any celestial phenomenon against these explanations if one always remembers the method of many possible causes and investigates hypotheses and explanations consistent with them, and does not look to inconsistent notions and emphasize them without cause, and so fall back in different ways on different occasions on the method of the single cause. The impression of a face on the moon may be due to the variation of its parts or to interposition or to any one of many causes which might be observed in harmony with phenomena. For in the case of all celestial phenomena, this process of investigation must never be abandoned; for if one is in opposition to clear-seen facts, he can never have his part in true peace of mind. The eclipse of sun and moon may take place both by extinction, as we see this effect produced on earth, or again by the interposition of some other bodies — either the earth or some unseen body or something else of this sort — and in this way we must consider together the causes that suit with one another and realize that it is not impossible that some should coincide at the same time. Next, the regularity of the periods of the heavenly bodies must be understood in the same way as such regularity is seen in some of the events that happen on earth; and do not let the divine nature be introduced at any point into these considerations, but let it be preserved free from burdensome duties and in entire blessedness. For if this principle is not observed, the whole discussion of causes in celestial phenomena is in vain, as it has already been for certain persons who have not clung to the method of possible explanations but have fallen back on the useless course of thinking that things could only happen in one way and of rejecting all other ways in harmony with what is possible, being driven thus to what is inconceivable and being unable to compare earthly phenomena, which we must accept as indications. The successive changes in the length of nights and days may be due to the fact that the sun’s movements above the earth become fast and then slow again because it passes across regions of unequal length, or because it traverses some regions more quickly or more slowly, or again to the quicker or slower gathering of the fires that make the sun, as we observe occurs with some things on earth with which we must be in harmony in speaking of celestial phenomena. But those who assume one cause fight against the evidence of phenomena and fail to ask whether it is possible for men to make such observations.
Cassius: Martin, thank you. Before we get started, I was joking with you guys that we might not have much to talk about — but when I listen to the reading and look back at the text, and then think back about what we discussed last week on the size of the sun, it’s almost as if this letter ought to have been entitled “I’m Going to Teach You How to Think Properly, and for That Purpose I’m Going to Use the Sky as an Example.” Because every paragraph references what’s going on in the sky, but the emphasis is on how to think about what you see, not necessarily what the truth is about whether the sun or moon shine with reflected light. As Diogenes Laertius says, the Epicureans tended to combine their discussions of physics and epistemology, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here — physics illustrating the epistemology, and the epistemology showing how to come to better conclusions about the physics. So welcome back to this week’s episode. The first celestial observation he talks about is the phases of the moon — the waxings and wanings — and how we should approach that since we can’t get there to put our hands on it or get very close. We can only observe what we can observe, and we’re going to use the phases of the moon to talk about how to make good observations and think about them. Error comes not through the senses, not through the seeing, but in our opinions about what our eyes report to us. The eyes are not processing the information or telling us what to conclude — they are providing the raw data. So how do we assess the raw data about the waxing and waning of the moon?
Joshua: There’s a quote I wanted to bring in here from Christopher Hitchens — quite a polarizing figure, but he had something very specific to say about Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. He said: “We don’t have much to learn from what they thought about nature, but we have a lot to learn from how they thought.” I think you might take issue with the first part of that, Cassius, but the second part is absolutely what you were saying — the study of nature and the way Epicurus studies it tells us a little about the natural world but more than that, it tells us how we should think about the natural world, which line of evidence to use. That to me is the paramount interest in the Letter to Pythocles and so much else of what Epicurus and Lucretius wrote about nature. Whether they were right or wrong, whether some of what they proposed has been superseded — that’s not the interesting story. The real interesting story is what you get from just about every paragraph we’re reading: how do we think we know what we know is true about nature?
Cassius: I completely agree, and it’s not surprising Hitchens would say it more articulately than I would — he was very perceptive. My only quibble is with the first part, about what they thought. Their higher-level conclusions deserve more confidence than their detailed speculations. Their particular theories about lightning or magnetism or various details — absolutely, modern science has superseded those, and they’re more of historical interest. But their highest-level conclusions — the eternality of the universe as a whole, the fact that there is no supernatural realm outside the universe — I’m still willing to defend those because modern science continues to support them and there’s no reason to abandon them. But the details, for example about what’s going on with the moon — we have far better information about optics and the distance to the moon and can explain all that without the alternate possibilities he’s listing here. Back to the main point you were right on: this is one example. Looking at the moon in 200 BC is not much different from the way we look at things outside our galaxy in 2022 — we have limited information about certain objects, and we’re always going to have to decide what to do with that limited information. And that’s what he’s showing us: if we have multiple explanations that all account for something and we don’t have enough information to say which is right, we should stop at that level and wait for more information rather than adopt one pet theory and call everyone else ridiculous. The passage says — and this should jump out at us — “provided only one does not become enamored of the method of the single cause and groundlessly put the others out of court.” That’s a courtroom analogy and it resonates with me deeply. That’s what a court is — a jury or a judge looking at facts and attempting to rule fairly on them. If we groundlessly exclude evidence just because it doesn’t fit our pet theory, we’ve departed from the path of rational judgment.
Martin: I’d mostly agree, and maybe add one thing. The method he suggests for figuring out possibilities is by analogy. For things close to us — things we can take in our hands, look at, play around with — we can sometimes arrive at a single-cause explanation and rule out everything else. We have a set of things we know. And by looking now at phenomena far away from us — things we cannot handle or observe from a different perspective — we proceed by analogy from what we know. And of course there can be different analogies, all of them similarly valid to what we observe from a distance. That is why we cannot choose a single one.
Cassius: Reasoning by analogy is critical to Epicurus’s thinking — it’s discussed at length in the Torquatus section of On Ends as well, if I recall correctly. And the question comes up: what is the opposite of reasoning by analogy? The obvious answer is logic. But the two are not opposites — when we use analogies we also use logic. We need to be more precise: what Plato does is assume these ideal forms and then apply logic from those forms. With the assumption that his forms are true, he can logically derive explanations of celestial phenomena. But there is no way to establish the truth of Platonic forms independent of themselves. So that method is invalid from the start. It doesn’t matter how logically consistent you are in manipulating the forms — if the forms themselves are a false basis, you’re not going to produce good reasoning. What Torquatus was getting at is that starting with false principles, however logically applied, will not produce the kind of reasoning you would like.
Joshua: I think that’s well stated. And Martin starting me on Plato leads me to Aristotle, and from Plato and Aristotle I want to talk a little about Dante — because all of it has to do with how we interpret nature and how we approach its study, which I think is one of the principal points of reading the Letter to Pythocles. Aristotle had a completely different way of doing it from Epicurus. With Epicurus, it’s looking for edge cases and phenomena that can’t be explained, or have been explained badly, and remaining uncommitted about conclusions when the evidence doesn’t support them — he didn’t think magnetism was resolvable in his time, so he didn’t come to a conclusion about it. There’s something very strange and, in a way, alien about the natural world Epicurus inhabits. It’s a world where not all the answers can be known. That is not the world Plato and Aristotle lived in — they thought they could know the answers. And the problem is, if you think you can know the answers but you really can’t, given your limitations, the answers you come up with are guaranteed to be bad.
With Aristotle in particular — and I’m not deeply versed in him — there’s a tendency to approach nature as a system that subjects itself to classification and categorization. We do that today: classifying animals and plants genetically and phylogenetically. That’s not a worthless pursuit. But what it turned into, particularly for later Christian theologians, is Aristotle’s tendency to build a hierarchy — insects at the bottom, then mammals, then at the top the gods, and beyond the gods the prime mover. In the medieval period this became what has been called the Great Chain of Being. I’ll read from Wikipedia: “The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals, plants, and at the very bottom, minerals.” I can’t think of a better contrast with the way Epicurus thought and approached the study of nature. And it leads ultimately to Dante, who not only accepted the Great Chain of Being but built a hierarchical structure that goes not only up to God but down to Satan — with circles of hell — and at the very bottom, Satan himself. And of course Epicurus, in Dante’s schema, is in the sixth circle of hell: the circle of heresy. This is where you end up when you start from false assumptions and then go wildly wrong. Epicurus’s method — just observing a phenomenon with the senses and withholding judgment until you have better information — was so revolutionary in the ancient world and so thoroughly ignored for thousands of years after him that having these texts and being able to go through them is really something special.
Cassius: That’s excellent, and it connects directly to an article I regularly cite. Since you mentioned Christopher Hitchens, let’s stay in that firmament and go to Richard Dawkins. He has an article on edge.org from 2014 under the title “What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” and his answer is essentialism. Let me read the opening paragraph: “What I’ve called the tyranny of the discontinuous mind stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle or a right angle were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realized in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things. Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution, as late as the 19th century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think that the essence of rabbitness is prior to the existence of rabbits — whatever ‘prior to’ might mean, and that’s nonsense in itself — evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.” That is exactly the point Joshua just made, and it’s not only us talking today who think this is important — it can be traced directly back to Plato and Aristotle, and it’s a shame we can’t get more people who discuss the history of bad philosophy to talk about Epicurus’s reaction against it. But that’s our job, to some extent. There is no realm of perfect forms that everything else stems from. In an Epicurean universe there is no prime mover, no supernatural creator, no center of the universe, no absolute perspective that is the only correct one.
Joshua: I want to take another tangent, if you’ll indulge me — the Fermi Paradox and a proposed solution to it called the dark forest theory. The Fermi Paradox arises when you think about how vast space is, how many potential inhabited worlds there might be, and how long we’ve been looking for extraterrestrial life with quite advanced equipment, and yet we can’t find a thing. One proposed solution is the dark forest theory, which comes from a science fiction trilogy by an author named Liu Cixin — spelled C-I-X-I-N, Liu: L-I-U. The three books are The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. The dark forest theory says there is life in the universe and it is widespread, but we haven’t seen it because when a civilization gets far enough advanced and recognizes the danger it’s in, it hides. The reason we don’t see signatures of life or receive radio signals from other worlds is because they don’t want us to know they exist — because the minute you light up in the dark forest, you become a target.
Cassius: I’ve never heard that terminology before. It makes a lot of sense to me, and using the method of analogy from what we see here on earth — living things in the forest that are bold enough to attract attention — that’s exactly what the dark forest naming captures.
Martin: And coming back on this — it’s a response to the Fermi Paradox, which just posed the challenge. There are many proposed answers.
Cassius: This kind of thing could occupy a career of fascinating study — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The important point is that Epic Epicurus was promoting a philosophy he thought would apply to everybody, including people who can’t devote their lives to a complete study of any particular topic. Virtually everybody needs a method of analyzing their existence and where they’re going. The Epicurean framework provides the ability to take all this conflicting evidence and not leave you with total cognitive dissonance. It provides a framework in which just about anybody can incorporate disparate information into a worldview — as Cicero complained, it’s not a very complicated position ultimately: that pleasure is the goal, that there is no supernatural realm, that you can’t do in life more than the best you can with the time you have, and that you should follow the guide nature gave you of feeling pleasure and pain. If you don’t have a framework to put conflicting information into, you end up with constant cognitive dissonance. Let’s go to section 97. Joshua, did you have anything on the eclipses from section 96 first?
Joshua: Just one point. If you’re just coming in at this episode and want to know more about the size of the sun, you have to listen to Episode 129 — we spent the entire episode on it. But here: he says the eclipse of sun and moon may take place by the interposition of some other bodies — either the earth or some unseen body or something else of this sort. This dovetails with what I said last week. If the earth is going to interpose between the sun and the moon and cause a lunar eclipse, that tells us something about what Epicurus was thinking about the relative scale of those bodies — because if the sun and moon were tiny relative to the earth, you’d expect a lunar eclipse every night. Similarly, a solar eclipse caused by the moon interposing between sun and earth only makes sense at certain scales. So the multiple-explanation approach here implicitly allows for the sun and moon being much larger than they appear.
Cassius: And one other thing about section 96 worth noting before we move to 97: he says “we must consider together the causes that suit with one another and realize that it is not impossible that some should coincide at the same time.” It may be true that there are in fact multiple causes for what we’re seeing — not just that we don’t know which one is right, but that more than one cause is actually operating simultaneously. The analogy I’d draw is a car going down the road — you don’t know from the outside whether it’s driven by a gasoline engine, an electric motor, or something else. And in an infinite and eternal universe it’s almost a certainty that you’ll have a woven texture of antecedent causes all combining to produce a given effect.
Martin: Yes. But we should keep in mind that to make science feasible we often can identify a dominant cause and work from that — neglecting whatever else may be contributing.
Cassius: Very good point. Now to section 97 — the main topic never far from the heart of Epicurus: divinity. He says “do not let the divine nature be introduced at any point into these considerations, but let it be preserved free from burdensome duties and in entire blessedness. For if this principle is not observed, the whole discussion of causes and celestial phenomena is in vain.” I think there’s an intensity in this particular point that we keep returning to. If you need to think about gods, realize that true divinities are not going to be assuming burdensome duties — they’re not going to be micromanaging the stars. If you need a position on divinities, that is the position to take. But at a minimum, just understand that you don’t need to pick a single explanation when more than one is possible. Doing otherwise is what he calls the “useless course of thinking that things can only happen in one way” — being “driven thus to what is inconceivable.”
Martin: And another thing to mention in this context: if you refer something to arbitrary divine intervention, it’s not an explanation at all — it doesn’t explain anything. We get no understanding if we just resign ourselves to “it was divine intervention.”
Cassius: That’s an important point. The presumption is that we should want a real explanation, real understanding — because that’s the way we get peace of mind. Not everybody sees it that way. Some people think blind faith and taking things on authority is sufficient — they don’t need to understand for themselves, they can just commune with God and have it handed down on tablets. But that doesn’t give true peace of mind, because we’re always going to have doubt about whether we’re being imposed on or misled by people with their own agenda.
Joshua: I’ve been looking for a quote which I want to introduce here. It comes from Benjamin Franklin, who of course invented the lightning rod, and people tend to leave out the opening part. He says: “It has pleased God in his goodness to mankind at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and lightning.” He’s introducing this new invention — and he’s sort of riffing on this idea that traditionally lightning is seen as something that comes from God, and now he’s discovered a way to, as it were, steal fire from the gods like Prometheus and give mankind this gift. I can almost hear an undercurrent of sarcasm — “at length, it has pleased God to provide a solution” — as if to say: after having cursed mankind with thousands of years of suffering under lightning strikes, it has at length pleased God to provide a remedy. To even say it is to reveal its craziness.
Cassius: Yes, and Ben Franklin was a deist, not a believer in a personal God, so I think that reading is correct. He’s ruling out the supernatural explanation as simply absurd. Let’s move to section 98 to begin closing for today. The last example is the changes in lengths of night and day — the sun’s movements becoming fast then slow again because it passes across regions of unequal length, or traverses some regions more quickly or slowly, or because of the quicker or slower gathering of the fires that make the sun. And the conclusion: “those who assume one cause fight against the evidence of phenomena and fail to ask whether it is possible for men to make such observations.” That last phrase is important: we need to ask whether the people who come to us with single-cause assertions have any possible way of having verified their claim. When someone tells us that heaven is going to be an eternity of singing joyful praise — is it possible that they know that? Have they been there? Those questions answer themselves.
Joshua: I have another quote as we close. This comes from Cicero in his On Old Age — a dialogue with Scipio and Cato the Elder. He says: “And if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err; nor do I wish this error, which gives me pleasure, to be wrested from me while I live. But if when dead I am going to be without sensation, as some petty philosophers think, I have no fear that these seers when they are dead will have the laugh on me.” So that’s the intellectual world Epicurus is operating in, and he’s pushing back the only way he knows how — by trying to establish first principles, rule out the absurd, and approach the study of nature with method. He was the only major figure from the ancient world really willing to do that and push it as far as he did. And as DeWitt said, his fate was to be “anonymous when praised, and named when condemned.”
Martin: A petty philosopher is what you’re called.
Cassius: Indeed. That Cicero quote has so much in it. Epicurus would certainly admit that some people get pleasure out of religion — pleasure is good, and in the Letter to Menoikeus he says it’s better to believe a false religion than to fall prey to hard determinism and believe nothing you do can produce anything good for you. So what is the Epicurean answer when someone says “it gives me pleasure to think I’m going to heaven when I die”? I think at least one thing you can say is: it gives you pleasure right now — but do you really have evidence that it’s true? And what are you going to do when you’re confronted by the problems of life that cause doubt? Are you going to stick with blind faith regardless of what comes your way, or look for methods of actually dealing with reality? Simple blind belief in things promised without evidence carries a strong risk: if you’re wrong about it, you’ve wasted your life on something absolutely without reward. As Paul says — 1 Corinthians 15:19 — “if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” He’s saying: if you’ve staked everything on a promise that will never come true, you are of all people the most pitiable. The person he’s describing in that sentence is Mother Teresa during her dark night of the soul — those long periods where she couldn’t feel the presence of God — where what should have given peace of mind gave only suffering and anxiety. You can’t be confident in your conclusions if you don’t have good reasons for believing them.
Joshua: My closing statement would be: this is why so much of Epicurean philosophy reads like an evidence or proper-thinking textbook. It all comes down to what you’re going to base your conclusions on. Are you going to look for evidence? What kind of evidence are you willing to take? Are you going to live your life in some area entirely on authority — just because someone said so? The most important question — where you’re going to be in eternity — is extremely important, and you need a real position on it. The seemingly dry examples from this letter — eclipses, the length of days, whether the moon reflects or generates its own light — are test cases, shibboleths, things that give us pause and ought to cause us to question the most important things we think about.
Cassius: Okay — we’ve actually gone on a little long today. Any final thoughts, Martin?
Martin: Nothing to add.
Cassius: And Joshua?
Joshua: No, I think that covers it. By the time we edit it, I think we’ll have another good episode.
Cassius: Very good. Thanks for your time today. We’ll come back next week and discuss weather phenomena, and until then we’ll discuss these and other topics on EpicureanFriends.com. Thank you, and talk to you again soon.
Joshua: It was a pleasure.
Martin: Okay, bye.