Episode 142 - Diogenes of Oinoanda (Part 2) "Reality"
Date: 10/05/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2686-episode-one-hundred-forty-two-diogenes-of-oinoanda-part-2-reality/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius reads in Joshua’s absence; the panel is Cassius, Martin, and Callistheni. Fragments 5 and 7 of the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription are examined: Fragment 5 criticizes Aristotle and the Peripatetics for holding that things are in such rapid flux that nothing is scientifically knowable by sense perception — an inconsistent position, because the very claim that one thing is white and another black at one time presupposes prior knowledge of the nature of white and black; Fragment 7 takes Democritus to task for saying that atoms alone among existing things have true reality while everything else exists by convention, which Diogenes argues would make it impossible even to live, since you could not protect yourself from fire or slaughter or any other force if conventional objects like fire do not truly exist. Cassius traces the Aristotle criticism to Philip and Estelle de Lacy’s scholarly apparatus to the Philodemus book On Methods of Inference, where de Lacy argues that Aristotle’s final position was that the senses alone cannot establish confident knowledge without reduction to a formal syllogism — a position the Epicureans reject root and branch, insisting that sensation is itself the foundational criterion. Martin defends Anaxagoras’s homeomeries (everything composed of smaller versions of itself) by analogy to single crystals, and observes that modern theoretical physics has arguably gone even further in the direction Democritus criticized: some physicists identify elementary particles with mathematical objects satisfying irreducible representations of the Poincaré group, making reality ultimately mathematical in a way that is equally problematic. The episode covers the full list of thinkers Diogenes surveys — Heraclitus (fire as elemental), Thales (water), Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes (air), Empedocles (fire, air, water, and earth), Anaxagoras (homeomeries), the Stoics (matter and God) — and pauses on the Stoic entry to note that treating God as an elementary constituent is precisely what distinguishes Stoic from Epicurean physics. The phrase “we shall bring charges against the said men not out of contentiousness towards them but because we wish the truth to be safeguarded” is read as a corrective to the charge that Epicureans care about pleasure rather than truth, while Cassius argues that the uniformity of the ancient Epicurean pattern — beginning not with ethics but with physics and epistemology — shows that no one can responsibly reach a conclusion about how to live without first examining the nature of the universe and the criteria of knowledge. Callistheni closes by noting that trust in the senses is the necessary underpinning for choice and avoidance.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 142 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius. Joshua is out this week, so it will be Martin, Callistheni, and myself. We continue with the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda and today’s discussion concerns the nature of reality and the differences between Epicurus and Democritus. I’ll read today’s text myself.
Cassius: Others do not explicitly stigmatize natural science as unnecessary, being ashamed to acknowledge this, but use another means of discarding it. For when they assert that things are inapprehensible, what else are they saying than that there is no need for us to pursue natural science? After all, who will choose to seek what he can never find? Now Aristotle and those who hold the same peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable, because things are continually in flux and on account of the rapidity of the flux evade our apprehension. We, on the other hand, acknowledge their flux, but not its being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense perception. And indeed in no way would the upholders of the view under discussion have been able to say — and this is just what they do maintain — that at one time this is white and this is black, while at another time neither this is white nor that black, if they had not had previous knowledge of the nature of both white and black. And as for the first bodies also called elements, which on the one hand have subsisted from the beginning and are indestructible, and on the other hand generate things, we shall explain what they are after we have demolished the theories of others. Heraclitus of Ephesus identified fire as elemental, Thales of Miletus water, Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes air, Empedocles of Akragas fire and air and water and earth, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae the homeomeries of each thing, and the Stoics matter and God. As for Democritus of Abdera, he did well to identify atoms as elemental, but since his conception of them was in some respects mistaken, he will be considered in the exposition of our theories. Now we shall bring charges against the said men, not out of contentiousness towards them, but because we wish the truth to be safeguarded. And we shall deal with Heraclitus first. You are mistaken, Heraclitus, in saying that fire is elemental, for neither is it indestructible since we observe it being destroyed, nor can it generate things. Even Democritus erred in a matter unworthy of himself when he said that atoms alone among existing things have true reality, while everything else exists by convention. For according to your account, Democritus, it will be impossible for us even to live, let alone discover the truth, since we shall be unable to protect ourselves from either fire or slaughter or any other force.
Cassius: Let me begin by noting what I think is a significant parallel between how Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenoanda organize their material. Neither of them begins with ethics. Both of them start with physics and epistemology. The question of how to live comes only after they have established what the universe is and how we can know anything about it. That is not an accident. It is a statement that you cannot responsibly reach a conclusion about the right way to live until you have examined the nature of the universe and the criteria of knowledge.
Martin: I agree that this is a good sequence. You need to know what is real before you can decide what to do.
Cassius: Fragment 5 makes the same argument Lucretius makes in Book 4 against the radical skeptics. Aristotle and the Peripatetics say that things are in such rapid flux that nothing is knowable through sense perception. But the answer is: they themselves claim to know that this is white and that is black. How could they know that unless they had prior knowledge of the nature of white and black? That prior knowledge had to come from somewhere — from the senses. So by making the claim, they have already refuted it.
Cassius: The attribution to Aristotle has caused controversy, because we think of Aristotle as a pioneer of systematic science. Martin, do you have a view on that?
Martin: I think this has to be a misinterpretation of Aristotle, at least in general. Aristotle is one of the pioneers of systematic science. He may have said in certain contexts that particular things are difficult to know because of flux, but I do not think he was saying generally that nothing can be known.
Cassius: There is a scholarly interpretation worth mentioning here. Philip and Estelle de Lacy, who translated the Philodemus work called On Methods of Inference, include a long appendix on the history of Epicurean epistemology. De Lacy argues that Aristotle had not fully broken free of Plato’s view of ideal forms, and that Aristotle’s final position was that the senses alone are not sufficient to establish confident knowledge unless you can reduce your statement to a formal syllogism. If that is what de Lacy means — that Aristotle required logical form rather than the direct evidence of the senses as the ultimate validator of knowledge — then I can see why Diogenes of Oenoanda would make the charge he makes here. The Epicurean position is that sensation is itself the foundational criterion. You do not need to construct a syllogism to validate what your senses tell you. The syllogism might be a useful tool in some circumstances, but it does not replace sensation as the foundation.
Martin: Even Epicureans do use syllogisms as tools for establishing what the sensory input means. So the issue is not whether syllogisms are ever useful, but whether they are the ultimate foundation. If you take the position that only something validated by syllogism can be known, you have disconnected knowledge from sensation altogether, which from the Epicurean point of view makes the whole project impossible.
Cassius: Precisely. And the practical danger of radical skepticism — of saying nothing can be known — is what the Epicureans are most worried about. Because that position, taken seriously, prevents you from making any reliable decisions about how to live. Epicurus takes a clear stand against it.
Cassius: Now the list of thinkers. Heraclitus said fire is elemental. Diogenes responds: we observe fire being destroyed, so it is not indestructible; and fire cannot generate things. Thales said water; Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes said air; Empedocles said all four — fire, air, water, and earth. Anaxagoras said the homeomeries of each thing. And then there is the Stoics: matter and God. That entry is worth pausing on.
Martin: The Anaxagoras homeomeries are interesting. The idea is that everything is composed of smaller versions of itself — that bone is composed of tiny bones. That sounds absurd for complex things, but for certain simple solids like crystals it does have some analogy. A single crystal is built out of elementary units of the same type. So in some cases the idea has a limited application.
Cassius: Almost like a fractal in some respects — where you look at a tree and find that each branch mirrors the form of the whole tree, and each smaller branch mirrors that.
Martin: The fractal analogy works up to a point but breaks down because fractals exist in mathematics and true physical self-similarity has limits. Eventually you reach a scale at which the self-similarity breaks down. But as a general intuition about the structure of matter it was not entirely without basis.
Cassius: The Stoics’ entry — matter and God — is the important one philosophically. That is exactly what distinguishes Stoic from Epicurean physics. The Stoics trace the universe back to a divine rational principle, a divine fire, a logos that underlies all of nature. The Epicureans say there is no God in the formation of things; everything reduces to atoms and void. The difference is not merely theological — it flows into everything about how you should live.
Cassius: And then the key line: we shall bring charges against the said men not out of contentiousness towards them but because we wish the truth to be safeguarded. I think that sentence is important as a corrective to a common mischaracterization of Epicureanism. Because Epicurus says that pleasure is the end of life, some people conclude that Epicureans are not concerned about truth — that they only care about what feels good. But this sentence makes clear that truth is what we are after, and that the reason we care about truth is that in the end truth is what allows us to live happily. You cannot build a genuinely happy life on false foundations.
Martin: That is also the basis of the refutation of Heraclitus. Fire is elemental is not just wrong because believing it makes us unhappy. It is wrong because it is factually refuted by observation: we observe fire being destroyed, so it cannot be indestructible.
Cassius: Fragment 7 is the most interesting philosophically. Democritus gets credit for identifying atoms as elemental. But Diogenes says he erred in claiming that atoms alone have true reality while everything else exists by convention. And the practical argument against this is: if fire exists only by convention and not truly, you cannot protect yourself from it. If a sword exists only by convention, you cannot protect yourself from being killed by one. You would be unable to live.
Martin: The word convention is puzzling here. I think what Democritus may have meant is that the objects we perceive — fire, a sword, a human being — are not real in the same fundamental sense that atoms are real. They exist as categories that we impose on configurations of atoms. They exist by human agreement about what to call things.
Cassius: And the Epicurean response is: that is not a useful sense of real. The fire burns you whether or not you consider it fundamentally real. The categories are not arbitrary impositions — they correspond to properties of the world that affect us and that we need to reason about. The compound thing that we call fire has properties that matter to us even if it is made of atoms. Dismissing it as existing only by convention does not help you live successfully.
Martin: This connects to the point I wanted to make about modern physics. Some theoretical physicists now identify elementary particles with mathematical objects — specifically, with objects whose state space permits an irreducible representation of the Poincaré group. In other words, at the very fundamental level some physicists say that what exists is ultimately mathematical structure. That goes even further than Democritus in abstracting away from sensory experience. And to me it has the same problem: if what is ultimately real is a mathematical object, and not something you can detect or that can act on you, then you have lost the connection to the world in which you actually live.
Cassius: And you’ve said it better than I could. That same problem — the disconnection between mathematical abstraction and practical experience — is what I think Epicurus is targeting throughout. The goal is not to have a theory of everything in some abstract sense. It is to have a picture of reality that actually helps you live successfully.
Callistheni: What I take away from this discussion is that trust in the senses is the necessary underpinning for choice and avoidance. If you cannot rely on what your senses report, you cannot make reliable decisions. That is the basic practical argument against the radical skeptics and against anyone who says that what you perceive is not truly real.
Cassius: That is well put. The senses, the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the preconceptions formed through repeated experience — these are the three criteria in Epicurean epistemology. None of them can be replaced by logical construction alone. They are the contact between mind and world that makes all reasoning possible. Thank you both. We will continue the inscription next week.
Martin: Bye.
Callistheni: Goodbye.