Episode 145 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 01 - Chapter 1 - Introduction
Date: 10/24/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2710-episode-one-hundred-forty-five-part-01-chapter-1-of-epicurus-and-his-philosophy/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The podcast announces a new format: rather than reading through ancient texts, the next several episodes will present a general overview of Epicurean philosophy for the generalist reader who is not a professional philosopher, following the organizational plan of Professor Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1954). Chapter 1, entitled “The Synoptic View of Epicureanism,” is the focus of the discussion. DeWitt’s three stated purposes are noted: first, to organize the surviving data on Epicurus’s life into a biographical sketch; second, to present a new interpretation based on less amended texts; and third, to win attention for Epicureanism as a bridge of transition from classical Greek philosophy to Christianity — a purpose that is flagged as the source of a tendency in the book to overemphasize connections to Christianity that the podcast does not share as a goal, though the historical context in which the philosophy developed remains important to understand.
DeWitt’s opening claim is that Epicurus should be thought of simultaneously as “the most revered and the most reviled of all founders of thought in the Greco-Roman world.” The revered side is documented by Epicureanism’s seven-century flourishing across Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Judea, Egypt, Italy, Roman Africa, and Gaul, and by the near-deification of Epicurus in sources like Lucretius’s poem, Diogenes of Oenoanda’s inscription, and Lucian of Samosata’s tribute in Alexander the Oracle Monger — “that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.” The reviled side is illustrated by Maimonides and Jewish scholars who turned “Apikoros” — a transliteration of Epicurus’s name into Hebrew — into a byword for heretic and nonbeliever; by Cicero’s sarcastic disparagement even while admitting Epicurus’s popular appeal; by Alexander the Oracle Monger’s burning Epicurus’s works and throwing the ashes into the sea; and by the Catholic Encyclopedia’s use of Macaulay’s phrase calling Epicureanism “the silliest and meanest of all systems.” DeWitt’s point, and the podcast’s, is that this polarized reception reveals that there is far more going on in Epicurean philosophy than a simple prescription for how to be happy — that the rejection of supernatural gods, the denial of divine providence, the demolition of life after death, and the replacement of absolute virtue with pleasure-derived ethical reasoning constitute a radical restructuring of the fundamental mental framework that was recognized as threatening by every philosophical and religious tradition that depended on those foundations.
The “synoptic view” refers to the Greek root syn (together) + optic (vision): seeing things as a whole and in their proper relations to each other. Joshua quotes Thoreau’s journal — “it was not to see a few particular objects as if they were near at hand… but to see an infinite variety far and near in their relation to each other, thus reduced to a single picture” — as the clearest possible statement of what a synoptic view accomplishes. This approach is traced back to Epicurus’s own instruction in the Letter to Herodotus: since we do not always need every detail of the philosophy but we frequently need a general outline, we should use epitomes that let us understand how the details fit into the major headings. Cassius uses the analogy of assembling a skeleton before adding substance; Martin notes that even the tree in the forest is itself an emergent higher-order entity. Joshua raises DeWitt’s warning — drawn from a Philodemus complaint about “appalling inattention to the books” — that the synoptic view is no substitute for the details, and the reverse is equally true. Joshua’s closing analogy is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy: the project of compiling a universal encyclopedia is useful but ultimately worthless unless the knowledge is applied; and as the Lord of the Rings has it, the world is not in maps and books but out there.
The discussion of attitude toward Epicurus covers the Catholic Encyclopedia’s opening equation of Epicureanism with gluttony as an example of the technique DeWitt is describing: whoever establishes the first attitude colors the entire reading of the subject. Joshua raises a Philodemus quotation about Epicureans in his own day who were taking only the outlines and moving on rather than studying the texts. Cassius discusses the Epicurean canonics — the test of truth through sensation, anticipations (preconceptions), and feelings — and cautions against the superficial reading that “all sensations are true” is the whole story, using DeWitt’s later court-witness analogy: a witness who testifies honestly still only reports what they observed from their limited perspective; weighing the evidence is a different and necessary step after gathering it. Callistheni closes with a personal reflection: having entered Epicurean philosophy from the ethics and the goal of pleasure, she had not previously focused on the controversial aspects that arise from Epicurus’s engagement with the competing philosophies of his time — the denial of supernatural divine involvement in human affairs, the complete restructuring of the framework — and she now much more thoroughly understands both why it was reviled and how it fills a gap that neither atheism nor agnosticism alone had filled for her. Cassius announces that the coming episodes will continue through DeWitt’s chapters using this synoptic approach as the organizing framework.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 145 of the Lucretius Today podcast. Over the last three years, we’ve had a format where we’ve generally read a text at the beginning of the podcast. We’re going to deviate from that format as we produce a general introduction to the philosophy of Epicurus for the generalist listener — the generalist reader who’s not a professional philosopher, who doesn’t necessarily have a lot of background about Greek philosophy in general or Epicurus in particular. We’re going to do that not by reading through a text, but by following the organizational plan that was used by Professor Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy, which was released in 1954 by the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis. We’ll talk today a little bit about who Norman DeWitt was, the purpose of his book, what he set out to do in writing it. And we’ll go through his Chapter 1, which he’s entitled “The Synoptic View of Epicureanism.” We’ll try to present a general overview of Epicurean philosophy and why it’s of interest, and the best way to approach it if you’re not a professional philosopher.
Our podcasts have never been oriented toward professional philosophers. We’ve tried to employ them as much as we could, but the people who come to the EpicureanFriends.com forum are mostly not professional philosophers — we have not devoted our lives to the study of philosophy. And that is particularly a problem when attempting to jump into it for the first time. One of the things we talk about is that if a general reader just goes to the Wikipedia page on Epicurus and reads some of the main topics there, you’re likely to get a very insufficient picture of the philosophy as a whole. So what we’re going to do today, and for the next several episodes, is use the Epicurus and His Philosophy book to attempt to provide a more general perspective on Epicurus’s role in Western philosophy and how it might continue to be of relevance to us today.
With that as background, there are several statements in the preface we should mention before we get too far into this. One of the things is an aspect of this book that sometimes leads to criticism, which is that at the very opening, Norman DeWitt says that he had three purposes in writing the book. The first was to organize the surviving data on the life of Epicurus into a consequential biographical sketch and throw some light upon the growth of his personality and the development of his philosophy. The second is to present a new interpretation of his doctrines based on less amended, less revised remains of his writings. And the third is — and this is the one that causes some trouble — to win attention for the importance of Epicureanism as a bridge of transition from the classical philosophies of Greece to the Christian religion. So one of the things we do see in this book as we read through it is that DeWitt has a tendency to put more emphasis than most of us would on what he sees as potential connections between Christianity and Epicureanism. It’s certainly well known that of all the philosophies at the time of the New Testament, the Epicureans and the Stoics are the only ones actually mentioned in the Bible — there’s a famous passage in Acts 17. There’ll be instances like references to people like Thomas Jefferson, references to all sorts of other scholars that will prove to be of use and give us topics for discussion. But as far as the goal of this podcast, it’s not to build bridges between Epicureanism and Christianity. On the other hand, it is important to know the background in which the philosophy developed, and it developed in a philosophical context of its own that was very important to understand.
The very first thing that DeWitt chooses to stress in Chapter 1, that I think is significant for us to discuss, is the second sentence. At the very outset, the reader should be prepared to think of Epicurus at one and the same time as the most revered and the most reviled of all founders of thought in the Greco-Roman world. That’s something that bears some discussion because the material that people will read today about Epicurus comes to us either from people who like Epicurus a lot or from people who basically hated him and had lots of reasons to distort his philosophy, misrepresent what he said, and make him look bad.
Joshua: Well, you articulated the second part of that, but you haven’t really explained the first part yet — that he was the most revered of all founders of thought in the Greco-Roman world. What DeWitt goes on to explain, in overview, is how Epicureanism spread in the ancient world, how long it lasted — which was for about seven centuries — and how it flourished in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Judea, Egypt, Italy, Roman Africa, and Gaul. And Cicero, who is one of the many later commentators who reviled Epicurus in many ways, actually makes our point in this case when he complains about how Epicurus is scooping people up at the crossroads.
So you’ve got this issue where many people are actually on board with a lot of what Epicurus is saying. They’ve been surrounded by early efforts at philosophy culturally for their whole lives, but so much of it sounded to them like just dense, inane speculation about things that really don’t matter to people in their everyday lives. And so the more pragmatic people are and the more devoted they are to their own life and their families and what they’re going to do day to day, they’re not going to find very much utility in Plato and his ideal forms. So Epicurus comes along in this context and begins to articulate a very different vision for what philosophy is and how it should be lived — not just in the academy or in the symposium or in the gymnasium, but in our homes and on the street and when we go to work every day. And so it is a very different approach to philosophy that Epicurus is presenting here, and it’s because of that different approach that he manages to expand the interest in his philosophy — not just to all corners of the known world, but to all social classes and conditions. And that was something I don’t think had ever been seen before.
And then of course, as you say, he was thoroughly reviled — and that part hasn’t stopped. Maimonides and various Jewish scholars began to apply the word Apikoros — a transliteration of Epicurus’s name into Hebrew — to heretics and nonbelievers. So it gets to a point where Epicurus’s name becomes sort of a byword for everything that these people see as being grossly immoral or simply ill-founded. DeWitt will go on to make the corollary point, which is that Epicurus was anonymous when he was actually supported or when people found something useful or beautiful in his philosophy — but he was generally named when he was condemned. And that’s something you’ll see all the way through into modernity, unfortunately.
Cassius: You know, Joshua, one of the things we have on the front of the EpicureanFriends.com forum is the statement of Lucian of Samosata out of Alexander the Oracle Monger: “my object, dear friend, in making this small selection from a great mass of material has been twofold. First, I was willing to oblige a friend and a comrade. But secondly, I was still more concerned to strike a blow for Epicurus — that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.” And that’s the kind of very strong praise that supporters of Epicurus had for him. It comes through certainly in Lucretius’s poem, it comes through in Diogenes of Oenoanda, that Epicurus was seen almost as a savior-like figure. And of course Lucretius keeps the comparison to his being a godlike figure. So Epicurus is held in extremely high regard by his supporters.
But I think it’s very common today when people pick up Epicurus and get an initial understanding to think that he’s essentially a self-help author who is focused on happiness and just attempting to tell us how to be happy. And that kind of a goal, I think, strikes most people as so uncontroversial — why would anybody have any problem with Epicurus at all if all he’s talking about is how best to live happily? Even in religion nowadays, the general implication is that you want to be happy by following their particular religion. So it would seem like the goal of happiness is so uncontroversial that Epicurus should be just one of many people held in high regard throughout the history of Western philosophy. But that was not the case. From the Stoics to the Neo-Platonists to the Christians to Orthodox Jews, they all saw something deeper and more threatening than just a prescription for how to be happy. And that’s something people today, if they just go to Wikipedia, will not appreciate. When Epicurus came through and rejected Platonism, rejected the idealism of forms, rejected the idea that there was a supernatural creator that started the universe in motion and providentially attends to it — those were, and are, explosively divisive ideas. Even today, that kind of viewpoint on life can get you exiled from your community very quickly if you express it at certain times and in places that are not well-advised.
Joshua: I think we can maybe put a pin in that for just a moment by going back to what you cited — Alexander the Oracle Monger — and Lucian’s work to unsettle this fraud and charlatan from his position of wealth and power. And one thing he observed is that the behavior of Alexander and the people he was running with was to actually take Epicurus’s works and burn them in the town square and then throw the ashes into the sea. So that encapsulates exactly what DeWitt is describing here. He’s praised by Lucian and treated with utter contempt by Alexander. And anyone who reads that wonderfully written story will, I hope, know immediately which side to come down on.
And you have established, Cassius, the broader point, which is that Epicurean philosophy is not simply the sedate effort by one man to just make our lives a little bit happier. What it actually constitutes is a complete restructuring of the mental framework of how we should think about the most fundamental things — everything from nature itself, to human societies, to the nature of the gods. This is a radical reformation of thought at the time. And it’s mostly because of that that we have this interesting dichotomy between the people who absolutely love what he’s doing, like Lucian, and the people who hate him as much as they hate anything.
Cassius: And we’ll post this to the episode thread as well, but one of DeWitt’s first articles on Epicurus was entitled “Philosophy for the Millions.” And in that article, he sets out what you’ve just said there, Joshua, that Epicurus was in many respects leading a kind of reform movement. He was not just writing for a few friends inside closed walls. He realized what he was doing. He was writing letters to people all across that area. He was writing articles and books against other philosophers. He was a campaigner for his viewpoints, and he thought it was important to teach about them and show other people what he thought he had discovered and what he thought was the right way to live. So in many respects, Epicurus had this missionary aspect, almost an evangelization-type approach — if you look around you and see what you think is a world in misery due to improper beliefs about the nature of supernatural gods and improper beliefs about life after death, you’re going to want to express those views to your friends at the very least and to anybody who’s interested and sympathetic. Epicurus did not keep it all to himself as some private secret. Lucretius, Diogenes of Oenoanda, and others were engaged in spreading their viewpoints to other people. They were pamphleteers, as Cicero records.
Joshua: On that point about spreading their message and being pamphleteers, the next section is DeWitt’s attempt to articulate the procedures by which the Epicureans formulated the philosophy and then ultimately came up with a system to present it to other people. And this is where DeWitt gets his title for this chapter — “The Synoptic View of Epicureanism.” And I’m going to quote Henry David Thoreau’s journal because I think it’s on topic. Thoreau writes: “Many a man when I tell him that I’ve been onto a mountain asks if I took a glass with me, meaning a spy glass or a looking glass. No doubt I could have seen further with a glass and particular objects more distinctly, could have counted more meeting houses. But this has nothing to do with the peculiar beauty and grandeur of the view which an elevated position affords.” And then the important point: “It was not to see a few particular objects as if they were near at hand, as I had been accustomed to seeing them, that I ascended the mountain, but to see an infinite variety far and near in their relation to each other, thus reduced to a single picture.” Cassius, I didn’t get any input from you. Hopefully you agree that this is what I think it is — a good and very clear and concrete way of expressing what we mean by a synoptic view of the philosophy: to see an infinite variety far and near in their relation to each other, thus reduced to a single picture.
In fact, the word synoptic, which is Greek, has the prefix syn — S-Y-N — which means together or same, or things along those lines. And optic, of course, refers to the eyes or vision. So a synoptic view really means seeing things together. When you see things together, one thing that allows you to do is to see them in their proper relations to one another.
Cassius: Joshua, you didn’t get any response from me while you were talking because I was agreeing with everything you said and couldn’t say it any better. I was not aware of that reference from Thoreau, but I think that is absolutely on point. You mentioned a moment ago that we were only on the first page of this chapter, and I should mention that as we go forward, we’re not necessarily planning on doing a chapter a week or anything like that. I’d like to just spend as much time as we need to cover any particular point in as much detail as we think is appropriate.
Because what you’re saying is at the very top of page four of DeWitt’s book, the issue of the synoptic view is something that’s very important to Epicurus — not something that DeWitt just thought was a good idea. It is explicitly stated in the Letter to Herodotus that we should use what amounts to outlines, because we don’t always need to know every detail of the philosophy or every detail of any particular subject, but we frequently need to know the important points of it. We need to be able to understand how the details fit together with the headings, with the major points. But there’s no way that we can constantly refer in our minds to every detail. We have to have a system in which we understand how things fit together and what the really important headings and categories of things are. And that’s what I’m reading into what Thoreau is saying here: the whole purpose of being up on top of the mountain is not to see every little detail as if you were standing right next to it, but to take in the overall view of things and see how they all fit together.
I think we’ve made this point in some of our private discussions about the way we’re going to organize this, but what DeWitt is saying here in this first chapter is that he’s attempting to follow Epicurus’s own pattern. He’s attempting to set out for us in this first chapter the broad outlines of what it’s important for us to know about Epicurus, and then fill in those gaps as he goes. It’s almost as if you’re assembling a skeleton first and then adding things on top of it as you fill in the real substance. You don’t just point out certain details and expect people to understand how they fit together. This applies to what we understand to be the Epicurean criticism of Socrates — that Socrates would hide the ball. He would ask questions and never really answer them. Epicurus took the opposite position: he’s going to start out by telling you where he’s going, what the important points are, and that’s how you then know where the details fit in.
Martin: Maybe a small comment on the forest and the tree. Actually, you can argue the same about the tree. If you get very close to the tree so that you don’t see it as a whole, you see then the bark, you see moss on the bark, and you may not even consider it an entity of a tree. Or even more confusing, if you go into a virgin forest where fallen trees are just left and new trees grow on the old tree — is this now one tree or how many trees? Is this a forest in itself? So that means even a single tree is already something of a higher order, something like an emergent property that exists by convention as an abstraction.
Cassius: Great point, great point. And that is what we’re doing today, and for even several episodes — we’re not going to be diving into the specifics of whether an atom has an edge to it or not. We’re not going to be looking at different aspects of images or any of the more detailed applications of Epicurean philosophy. We’re going to attempt to provide this overall general perspective on Epicurus by which people who are not so familiar with it but who would like to understand where he’s coming from can see the big picture — not only the big picture of his own philosophy but where he fits within the larger scheme of Greek philosophy and Western philosophy as a whole.
So Joshua, you’ve mentioned one of the devices that DeWitt is going to use here in this book. He says there’s another device that was important to Epicurus, which was to establish an attitude toward a particular subject — for example, in starting out the Principal Doctrines, the very first one is a reference to the attitude to be taken about the gods and how they’re not to be feared and the reason why. DeWitt says that if only the disciple could maintain this attitude, it was felt that he would be rightly disposed to receive subsequent instruction about the nature of the gods. And if the reader habituates himself from the outset to think of Epicurus as the most revered and most reviled of all ancient philosophers, he’ll be rightly prepared to judge with impartiality the course of his life and the true structure of his doctrine.
Joshua: Cassius, I was indulging one of my guilty habits, which is reading the Catholic Encyclopedia on New Advent. And in the page on Epicureanism, they start out by saying that Epicureanism has two meanings, and the modern meaning is gluttony. And it seems to me that they’re using the same approach here — they’re establishing an attitude at the beginning of what they have to say, only in the case of the Catholic Encyclopedia, they’re trying to establish an attitude which will portray Epicurus in a bad light. And once you’ve grasped the point that the attitude you take when you approach a subject is going to color the way your readers interpret it, you can notice at the very beginning whether a particular writer or speaker is hostile to the subject or not.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that reminds me. Over the years, I know that I’ve relentlessly promoted this particular book as a really good place to start your study of Epicurus. And that’s the reason for this series — because as DeWitt is pointing out here, we don’t even really have in our minds in the modern world an idea of what Epicurus was doing. Most people know something about pleasure. Like you say, he’s now tagged with this idea that he was a glutton and a hedonist and that all he was concerned about was immediate pleasure, sex, drugs, rock and roll. And that’s really all that most people know about Epicurus. And that’s getting to be worse and worse of a problem as there’s less and less time and emphasis placed on explaining Greek philosophy or Western backgrounds in schools today. A younger person who knows nothing about Epicurus, if for some unusual reason they decide they want to look into the subject, what are 95% of people like that going to do today? They’re going to go to Google and put in the word Epicurus. And that’s going to take them to the Wikipedia page. And the Wikipedia page is going to say that Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals and discussing a wide range of philosophical subjects, and that the purpose of philosophy was to help people attain a happy, tranquil life characterized by ataraxia — peace and freedom from fear — and aponia, absence of pain. So much of that is so unoffensive and obvious that most people would want those things for themselves. Who doesn’t want happiness? Who doesn’t want freedom from pain? Who doesn’t want a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends? Those are such general goals that it seems unbelievable that anybody would ever have a negative thing to say about Epicurus at all.
But of course that’s not the way things worked for 2,000 years in the development of the cultural understanding of Epicurus. The Epicureans were real people just like us. They had a context in which they were living. And the context of that day was a set of philosophies that basically were not that much different from what we have today — that the universe was created by supernatural God, that that supernatural God was in control, that there was fate and in many ways a deterministic aspect of life in which you were either fated to have a particular result or the gods would intervene. And Epicurus was in the process of exploding the existing system by examining the foundations on which it was based and determining that supernatural gods don’t exist, that there is no life after death to punish the wicked or reward the good, and that virtue, which all these other philosophers had been holding up as the way to live your life, has really no meaning at all without reference to a goal higher than virtue itself — which ultimately Epicurus determined to be found in nature through pleasure and pain.
Let me get in one more quote here from the Catholic Encyclopedia. It’s the last sentence of their article on Epicureanism: “The whole philosophy may well be described in a trenchant phrase of Macaulay as the silliest and meanest of all systems of natural and moral philosophy.” The point we’re trying to make here — and of course we are going to reject entirely that line of reasoning — is that it matters where you start. That’s the attitude issue. No Epicurean, no leader of the school in antiquity, was going to draw up a list of books that could not be read. Of course the Catholic Church itself did that — the Index of Prohibited Books. We don’t have any record of the Epicureans trying to do that. In fact, the word that Cicero used was license — the license which prevailed in the Garden was so bad from his point of view that even a woman was able to read a work by Theophrastus and write a response to it. So we chose this book as the place to start because if we weren’t starting with DeWitt, we might be doing the same thing that Wikipedia does and just jump immediately to “the goal of life is pleasure, the highest pleasure is the absence of pain” — looking at a very complicated and subtle set of doctrines in isolation from the rest of the philosophy.
Joshua: I’m really glad you quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia there because that is certainly a great example of the revulsion with which people have treated Epicurus for 2,000 years. And that’s why DeWitt is emphasizing it here — because virtually all of the commentary, even today, is largely written by people who don’t agree with some of the major aspects of his philosophy, especially the morality. The idea of this “license” you were citing from Cicero is still a major issue in discussion of Epicurus today. There’s a general feeling among many people in religion and in certain types of humanism that we have to pursue the good as the ultimate goal. And that’s why they don’t like Epicurus — because Epicurus looked at that question of pursuing the good and said, well, we really don’t know what it means to pursue the good. We don’t know what the good is. Once you cast aside the idea that there are absolute definitions of goodness — that there’s no God, there’s no absolute rule that says virtue must be pursued — then Epicurus becomes the best guide for going back to nature for the answers. The Stoics will say “let’s go back to nature,” and many other types of people will say the same. But unless you then take a position on whether nature was itself created by supernatural God, unless you take a position on those questions, you’re not understanding the revolutionary nature of Epicurean philosophy.
The next point he’s going to make here is from the point of view of logic: this progression from the general to the particular constitutes a sort of chain arguments. So that might be a good point to bring Martin in, because logic is one of his areas of expertise.
Cassius: Yeah, the whole issue of chain arguments and deductive reasoning from evidence and so forth is going to be a huge theme of Epicurean philosophy. Any comment on that, Martin?
Martin: That would go much more in detail than we want at this first pass in the overview.
Cassius: Well, let me focus you on this though. I think what Joshua has raised here, that DeWitt is talking about, is that Epicurus certainly uses chain reasoning — starting with a particular observation or evidence or position and extending that by these “if this, then that” kinds of arguments. One of the points that’s important to raise here is that Epicurus is often considered to be just saying “all sensations are true” and that we just go by the senses as if that’s the only thing you need to know about Epicurean reasoning. But that doesn’t bring understanding. Observation through the eyes doesn’t tell you what it is you’re observing. And Epicurus is not just some kind of anti-intellectual, anti-logic philosopher who’s telling you just to go with your feelings in every moment. He actually talks about the process of what do you do with these feelings, how do you translate your feelings and your observations into conclusions, into action, into opinions that you can have confidence in.
Martin: Roughly on this one — DeWitt makes here some statements that it was never declared sensation to be the source of knowledge. Okay, that’s fine. Much less did it declare all sensations to be trustworthy. At least in this formulation, the latter one doesn’t really seem correct. At least if it was as simple as what sensations are true — it’s our interpretations of them which are not necessarily trustworthy.
Cassius: Right, and when we get later into the book and we read some of the detail about that, I have to say that is a great example of one of DeWitt’s strengths in explaining things. There are various meanings of the statement “all sensations are true,” various meanings and implications with the word “true.” A very memorable analogy that DeWitt gives later in the book is to the example of a witness in court who is attempting to testify about something they’ve observed. They’ve sworn to tell the truth. What you ordinarily think about a witness is that if they’re being honest, they’re telling the truth. But when you think about it, you always have to understand that a witness only knows what they see, only knows what they observe from their own limited perspective. And witnesses can make mistakes about what they observe. Their own opinions can be incorrect. They can be attempting to testify truthfully — attempting to tell you something honestly — but still not give you “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” as they say in court.
DeWitt will go into much more detail about that later, but the superficial statements about whether Epicurus believes all sensations are true have to be understood as meaning: all sensations are reported honestly. Your eyes do not have any intention to lie to you about what they’re seeing. Your ears don’t lie about what they hear. But because of distortions of all different types, what your eyes actually see at a particular moment may not be the clearest view of the thing they’re looking at, and you may have to take additional observations and compare all of those to determine which ones are the most repeatable and most accurate before you come to a conclusion about what is actually true. That’s what DeWitt is hinting at here — that certainly the senses are the foundation of all evidence that Epicurus considers to be correct. But weighing the evidence is actually a very different process than gathering the evidence.
Joshua: Because you raised that last point, Cassius, maybe we should talk a little bit about a quote by Philodemus in which he says something to the effect of his finding an appalling inattention to the books in his day. And so Epicurus thought, and I think rightly, that a synoptic view was a way to present the philosophy with — as Thoreau was saying — you take the whole thing in view, you’re not going to start out with one detail because you’ll have nowhere to put it.
I noticed this when I studied history in college. People think that history is just remembering dates and names — well, in fact, that’s far from being the point of a degree in history. But if you don’t have the framework of knowing, when we talk about the French Revolution, if you don’t know the broader context of what’s going on in that time, then describing something that happened there is not going to mean anything to you. So there is a necessary education in the broader context. And the problem that Philodemus is noticing is that the Epicureans in his time are taking the outlines, taking the epitome, taking the synoptic view as being good enough, and then just moving on. So one of the reasons that the last 300 pages of this book were written was specifically to fill out those details. That’s another pitfall of the synoptic view — nothing human is going to be perfect, and it requires diligence on the part of the reader to take what’s being said in one place and compare it to things being said elsewhere.
Cassius: Yeah, and Joshua, as you’ve made the point many times in the past, Epicurus talks about how he gets his greatest happiness from the study of nature. I think he was looking at a much broader perspective — the study of nature including human nature, which means you not only have to study the physical objects around you, but you have to understand your own thought processes. You have to understand your own sensations, your own organs of sense, the way they work. You have to understand the eyes, the ears, hearing, touch, taste, and the feelings of pleasure and pain. You have to devote a lot of thought to understanding what these things are and how they operate in order to use them successfully. When Epicurus says we should study nature, I think he’s talking about studying human nature — not just the stars and the planets and the atoms and physical things. We’re talking about the way our mind operates. And it’s only when we come to an understanding of these things that we really get the full benefit of Epicurean philosophy.
What we’re essentially doing here by going through DeWitt is we’re taking a synoptic view of the philosophy, which throughout the history of the podcast we have not really been doing. I think you referred to it in one of the chats as a course correction.
Joshua: Yes. As we begin to come to a close with today’s episode, I think what we wanted to do in this first segment is what DeWitt has attempted to do here — to put a perspective on the general position of Epicurus, why he’s significant, and some of the major pitfalls to avoid in studying him, sort of producing a set of expectations that people should look for as they study Epicurus.
I’ve heard so many times over the years when people start reading Epicurus that they were looking for practical advice on living more happily. And that certainly is a benefit that comes from the study of Epicurus after a time. But in order to get the real heart of where he’s going and really be able to apply it, you need the structure as well. In this book, DeWitt has attempted to provide what amounts to a textbook of basic positions of Epicurus. There are not that many other such books out there like that, even through today. There are some generalist books, but most go straight to the ethics and don’t provide this type of sweeping background. So that’s what we’re going to be doing over the next several weeks as we go through the rest of his book.
Cassius: Martin, any closing thoughts?
Martin: This is the philosophy in the traditional sense, which was meant to be helpful on how to make life decisions, how to live.
Cassius: Yes. What’s the phrase about vain the words of the philosopher which does not —
Joshua: Which does not accomplish anything for the health of the soul.
Cassius: Yes. Callistheni, any general thoughts?
Callistheni: Yeah, I found this very interesting, and it highlighted for me how Epicureanism is a worldview that is almost somewhat between atheism and agnosticism, because we can read about how Epicurus says that the gods were not supernatural and yet there is some element of the gods that he includes. It’s a complete restructuring of how to think, because if God is not involved in people’s lives, then there’s a whole different way of thinking about what the place of humans is within the world and life itself. So I think I much more thoroughly understand why Epicureanism was reviled — that word seems so harsh, but why it was reviled by people — because I kind of jumped in from the place of the ethics and pleasure being the goal of life and it being a way to create a happier life. But I hadn’t really spent so much time thinking about these controversial aspects that come from Epicurus dealing with the competing philosophies of his time. And yet even now we still have some parallels — there are people who feel very strongly about how God is involved in the lives of humans, and there are others who are atheist. So this philosophy seems to provide a worldview that is much needed for people like myself. I have often thought, well, maybe I’m atheist — and yet that worldview somehow hasn’t fully met my needs. And so Epicureanism is something that fulfills that need for me now.
Cassius: That’s a good reminder, Callistheni. The things you’ve just said are reflective of probably the target audience for this podcast. Again, as we said earlier, we’re not targeting professional philosophers. We’re here to attempt to make practical use of Epicurean philosophy and to discuss it in a way that’s useful to regular people who know that it’s important to have a philosophy and know that these issues are important, but who in many cases have given up trying to understand basic aspects of Western philosophical teachings because there’s just so much controversy and negativism that goes along with the general subject.
You know, as you were talking, my eyes are still on the Wikipedia entry for Epicurus, and I see one sentence that says most knowledge of Epicurus’s teachings comes from later authors, particularly the biographer Diogenes Laertius, the Epicurean poet Lucretius, and the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus — and with “hostile but largely accurate accounts” by Sextus Empiricus and Cicero. And the words that catch my eye are “largely accurate.” Well, it’s true that Sextus Empiricus and Cicero were hostile — they disagreed with Epicurus, they were writing in large part to refute him. But even this Wikipedia article is taking the position — it’s an opinion — that their viewpoints were “largely accurate.” And that’s the difficult question in studying Epicurus: you have to decide for yourself whether what the enemies of Epicurus are saying is correct, or whether what they have done in relating Epicurus in a negative way is wrong. From their material you can dig out truth, but you have to understand where people are coming from. That’s the point that DeWitt has been making in this first chapter, and it’s a theme that will continue to hit as we go through this series.
Joshua: I’m stuck in a loop over here. I keep thinking about the synoptic view of the synoptic view. And what I’m thinking about right now is the trilogy by Isaac Asimov called Foundation, in which the premise — which I’ll try not to spoil — is that we can save the galaxy by sending a group of people out to the edge of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia on everything that we know. And as I think about that project, which anyone who’s read that series will know how it turned out, I think about what we’re doing here today. There are basically a couple of points I really want to get across. One is that the outlines and the synoptic view, the epitomes — these are no substitute for the details. But the corollary is also true: the details are no substitute for the epitomes and outlines. And finally, the ultimate point I feel compelled to make is that neither the details nor the broader picture are any substitute at all for what really is going to turn out to matter. You need these for a foundation, of course, but it’s all going to be just a fundamentally useless project unless you take that final step, which is to apply what you’re learning — both from the epitomes and outlines, from the synoptic view, and from the particular details.
Goes right back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of the episode, which is that the map is not the territory. And just sitting in your room staring at maps — I can make a reference here to The Lord of the Rings, because of course that’s what ultimately got Bilbo Baggins out the front door of Bag End, the reminder that the world is not in your maps and books, it’s out there. And all of this is just a hobby or a minor interest unless you find ways to implement what you’re learning into every other part of your life.
Cassius: Very much agree with what you just said, Joshua. There’s so many things that you come back to — does the tree exist? Does the forest exist? Is it only one of the two? What does it mean to exist? You can get into an infinite loop of never really finding a resting place. And I think that’s where Epicurus was going: even though the sensations and the evidence are the data from which you assemble everything, the goal is ultimately to have an understanding. I would even cautiously relate this to our debates about kinetic versus catastematic pleasures — ultimately, while we value the activities of life and the sensations, you’ve got this sort of treadmill that unless you through understanding realize that it’s not necessary to continue it into infinity and that there’s nothing to fear about the end of life that comes through death, that there’s nothing to fear about the absence of a supernatural God, you can’t have confidence in your general approach to life.
In the end, you’ve got this general assessment in your mind about the nature of your life and whether you’re happy or not. There’s no way to put everything into a master framework, no way to come to a global perspective on things without getting up to that 30,000-foot level — or being at the top of the mountain that Thoreau was talking about — and taking in an overview of the situation. The overview is not a threat; it does not deprecate the details. But the details don’t deprecate the overview either. They’re both true, they’re both important. And if you don’t have the overview, you’re really just going to be like a rat in a maze looking at the wall that’s in front of you and going from direction to direction. And if that’s the trap you’re in, you can lose yourself to panic and anxiety, feelings of uselessness and hopelessness, nihilism. But if you get to a higher viewpoint of where your relationship is in nature and what your life is all about, then you can come to a feeling of calmness and confidence in approaching the day-to-day events of life.
And of course, this is Epicurus’s point in the Letter to Herodotus: you don’t always need the detailed analysis of the philosophy, but you always need the overview, the general assessment, the high-level view. And if you just jump into the ethics, if you just go to Wikipedia and read a few things about pleasure, you’re not going to get that overview. Okay, unless somebody has something else, we’ll leave it at that point for today and come back next week to continue our overview of the philosophy of Epicurus. Thanks, and goodbye.
Joshua: Thank you.
Martin: Bye.
Callistheni: Bye.