Episode 146 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 02 - The Three Divisions of Epicurean Philosophy
Date: 11/01/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2715-episode-one-hundred-forty-six-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-02-the-three-divi/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing the DeWitt series, the episode maps the three major divisions of Epicurean philosophy as recorded in Diogenes Laertius: Physics (the nature of the universe, humanity’s place in it, and the foundations of a natural as opposed to supernatural worldview), Canonics (epistemology — how you process evidence, form opinions, and determine whether confident knowledge is possible), and Ethics (how you should live after understanding the universe and the criteria of knowledge). The discussion opens by canvassing where each panelist first encountered Epicurean philosophy: Cassius through Lucretius; Joshua through Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve and then the Stallings translation of Lucretius; Martin through a German-language edition of the primary texts with sympathetic commentary; Callistheni through online reading, then Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean, then the Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Letter to Menoikeus.
The primary surviving sources are surveyed: Diogenes Laertius as main compiler, Lucretius’s poem, the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription, and the fragments gathered by Hermann Usener whose concordance organized all scattered Epicurean material by topic from sources including Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch, and many others — the website attalus.org follows the Usener classification. Epicurus apparently combined canonics with physics; the Letter to Herodotus and especially the Letter to Pythocles both weave physical explanations with epistemological reasoning, as in Pythocles’ use of multiple-cause explanations: when you cannot eliminate all but one explanation consistent with the available evidence, intellectual honesty requires holding all viable possibilities rather than adopting a pet theory. DeWitt reconstructs three levels of physics texts: the Twelve Elementary Principles (reconstructed from repeated themes in the Letter to Herodotus, Lucretius, and Diogenes of Oenoanda), the Letter to Herodotus as a mid-level epitome, and the full thirty-seven Books on Nature — with scholarly debate (Sedley) over whether Lucretius worked from the full thirty-seven books or from an intermediate epitome. For ethics the surviving texts are the Principal Doctrines and the Letter to Menoikeus; Epicurus’s dedicated treatment of canonics was in a book he called the Canon, which is lost, so it must be reconstructed from the Principal Doctrines, from Lucretius Book 4, from Philodemus’s On Methods of Inference (De Lacy translation), and from Sextus Empiricus.
The question of where beginners should start receives extended discussion. Martin argues the Letter to Herodotus is both the most difficult and the most logically fundamental of the three letters; Cassius agrees it provides a foundation without which the Letter to Menoikeus is easily misread, since “don’t fear the gods” based solely on the logic that a perfectly blissful being would not bother with us looks very different from “don’t fear the gods” grounded in atomist physics demonstrating there are no supernatural beings. Joshua reflects that he went to the Letter to Menoikeus first and only reached Herodotus and Pythocles later; Callistheni found the same path through ethics. General conclusion: the Letter to Menoikeus is where most people will start in practice, but serious students should move to the Letter to Herodotus and Pythocles as soon as possible. Callistheni argues that the nature of the gods is foundational from the start: if you believe God is involved in human lives, you approach the entire universe differently, and it’s only after settling that question that everything else falls into place. The discussion of the gods’ place in the curriculum raises the question of the possible lost seventh book of Lucretius — DeWitt believed it would have been on the nature of the gods — and the observation that Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens likewise saves its full treatment of Epicurus’s views on the gods for the near-end of the book.
The hostile tradition receives additional attention: the same pattern seen in the Catholic Encyclopedia last week is traced through Lucy Hutchinson, Denis Lambin, the 1743 Daniel Brown translation, and on to Thomas More’s Utopia and Dante’s Inferno. By contrast, Joshua cites the very different classical reception of Lucretius — Vitruvius’s prediction that “numberless people after our time will approach the writings of Lucretius as if they were speaking directly with him about nature,” and Ovid’s declaration that “the verses of sublime Lucretius will perish only when a single day shall consign the world to destruction.” Pierre Gassendi is noted as a major figure in reintroducing Epicurean studies in the West; DeWitt observes that the French and Italians have generally been more sympathetic to Epicurean philosophy than the English, and Joshua notes that Montaigne quotes Lucretius frequently and appreciatively. Next week will cover DeWitt’s section on true and false opinions about Epicurus. Callistheni closes with a vision of an internet-based clickable outline of Epicureanism; Cassius mentions that a primitive version exists at newepicurean.com/outline.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 146 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. Each week we’ll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. This week we take a look at the three major divisions of Epicurean philosophy.
Last week we started our discussion of general aspects of Epicurean philosophy by introducing some basic points that Norman DeWitt was stressing about the way we should have a proper understanding of where Epicurus fits in the world of Greek philosophy and what Epicurus was trying to do. Today we’re going to extend that outline view from last week and get into a little bit more detail about what remains from the Epicurean writings of the ancient world — and once you go looking for an understanding of Epicurean philosophy, where do you start? How do you begin the analysis? How do you begin to break things down into categories, which we’ll then fill in over time with additional details?
It’s recorded in Diogenes Laertius that Epicurean philosophy is broken down basically into three distinct sections. The first is the physics — the nature of the universe as a whole, examinations of the way things are and humanity’s place in that universe, the place of the earth in the universe, the place of humanity on earth, and the general issues of how things work from a natural as opposed to supernatural basis. The second division is canonics. The word often used to describe that is epistemology, which is sort of the science of how you know anything at all — how do you process evidence, how do you gather evidence, how do you form opinions on the evidence that you gather, and is it possible to come to conclusions that you can have confidence in, or is knowledge impossible as some people argue? And then the third general division is ethics, which is basically the question of how you should live after you understand the nature of the universe through the physics and the way that you think about things through the canonics.
There are those three general categories, which are represented to us today in a number of letters and other documents that are primarily preserved by Diogenes Laertius, but there’s also other documents including the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda and very importantly the poem of Lucretius on the nature of things. Of course, we were organizing our presentation of Epicurean philosophy according to the commentary of Norman DeWitt, and we’ve talked about why that particular book is a good place to start. But students who are serious about Epicurus are going to want to read the original texts as quickly as they can. In my case, I think the first thing I read was Lucretius’s poem — I didn’t really even know who Diogenes Laertius was when I started out. And Lucretius’s poem is one of the major ways that Epicurean philosophy was transmitted to the modern world. So let’s talk about that. Joshua, where did you start when you first started reading Epicurus?
Joshua: I think probably what I started with when I started reading about Epicurean philosophy was a book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Swerve. And from there I probably went more or less straight into the Stallings translation of Lucretius, and then going more so through the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings. So it actually took me quite a while to get into the letters really.
Cassius: So then just like me, you started with Lucretius. Martin, where did you start and what do you think is the best place to start?
Martin: I started with an extended text of Epicurus that I was looking for something entirely different — that led me to buy the book with this extended text and that’s how I got into it. It was a German translation from someone with a funny name — Kraushaar. So he wrote his German translation but it’s very similar to the one from Bailey. There are some differences but he seems to have consulted Bailey’s translation. What I found from his comments is that he is also very sympathetic to Epicurean philosophy, which is maybe different from Bailey. And that helped me probably to really understand it because the raw text was a bit tough to read. I mean, it was clear enough to me that I saw part of it was really what I actually had thought by myself before, without even thinking that this was a philosophy. And then I saw it worked out as a whole consistent thing by Epicurus.
For people who are okay with reading raw philosophical texts — it’s a bit tough for someone not accustomed to that, especially the Letter to Herodotus, which is a difficult read. But if someone is up to it, I think it’s the best way to start with Epicurus himself, because then you really get right into it and you’re not too much affected by secondary literature, except of course the translator will have influenced the translation.
Cassius: So where you stand today, if somebody were wanting to get started, would you tell them to go to Diogenes Laertius and those extant remains first, or to Lucretius?
Martin: No, Lucretius is definitely for later. I think whatever version of the extant remains of Epicurus himself is suitable — that’s really the best way to start, unless you are not familiar with difficult philosophical texts.
Cassius: Okay. And among the four of us, probably Callistheni is the most recent to reading in the Epicurean material. Callistheni, do you have any thoughts as to where somebody might start if they’re getting into Epicurus for the first time?
Callistheni: Yeah, basically I started skimming websites, reading different things on the internet, and then I came across a book, How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well by Catherine Wilson. I had found that at the library, but something about that wasn’t really feeling right, and I wanted to go in some sense to the horse’s mouth, as the cliché goes. So I went then to the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings and the Letter to Menoikeus and studied those. And somehow that worked best for me.
Martin: One more comment: DeWitt’s book is of course what I’d recommend as the next step, not as the first book, but after you’ve got into it. Because then the next book would be DeWitt, as that one gives really the best entry.
Cassius: There are several different places that you can start, but going to the actual texts in Diogenes Laertius is really something people are going to want to do. It’s a shame for most of us that the most well-known compilation of Epicurean material is by Hermann Usener — but of course that’s in German, or at least in the original languages of Greek and Latin. There are some English translations and versions of Usener available. Do you know if it’s in German, Martin?
Martin: Oh, I’ve never read that one. I saw the name occasionally.
Cassius: Well, the reason Usener is important is I think he was really the first person to go out there and attempt to gather all the fragments from all sorts of different sources — not just the major ones like Diogenes Laertius, but he goes out to lots of different ancient sources and attempts to bring, as you would expect from German scholarship, a categorization model and organize them in a topical manner that people generally still tend to follow. You’ll see references to Usener in many of the websites and other books. His is a kind of concordance — he made an effort to arrange things by topic from these different sources. It’s very useful because there are many isolated fragments either by Epicurus or statements about things that he said from other writers — for example, Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch and all sorts of other ancient writers. Usener is the one who has collected the most exhaustive list and tried to put them in one place. For example, one of the sources on the internet that’s really good is attalus.org, A-T-T-A-L-U-S dot org. And attalus uses the Usener method of classification.
Another aspect: as Diogenes Laertius says, Epicurus tended to combine the canonics — the epistemology — along with the physics. It seems fairly logical to do that. It ends up making the division more like two than three, but Lucretius and the Letter to Herodotus from Epicurus both tend to cover the nature of atoms and how things come together in the universe, and also what we have left of Epicurus’s discussions about how to think. One of which was this whole issue of trying to do things in outlines as a method of thinking. Anybody have any comment on why you would choose to discuss epistemology or canonics at the same time as physics?
Joshua: You mentioned the Letter to Herodotus, but for me, the most interesting example of this is in the Letter to Pythocles. Because it seems like in the Letter to Pythocles, he gives a physical explanation of something — maybe he’ll give three or four physical explanations — and then he cites the epistemological reasons for why we think we know what is true and what is not true. And so that would be, for me, the best example of it. The reason you would want to do it is so that in something like, for example, the size of the sun — which has become this huge controversial issue — you can not only state maybe kind of what your opinion is about the size of the sun, but also you can express the limitation of human knowledge when it comes to this issue. And so anyone who reads that passage fairly critically is not going to emerge with the conclusion that Cicero emerged with, which was that the sun was a foot in diameter. That’s not the way that Epicurus approached the issue — simply to lay down the fact which you must believe. That was not his method. Maybe even more important to know how you think you know what you think you know is true, rather than just thinking that it’s true.
Cassius: Joshua, that’s a great point. That issue of the sun is in the Letter to Pythocles rather than in Herodotus. And that leads to the well-known position that Epicurus took about manifold causes — that it’s not so important, especially when it’s not possible to reach a conclusion, to insist that there’s only one single explanation. In Pythocles, he talks about the stars in the sky: you have limited information, you’re not able to get up there and see them close at hand. And so if you’re going to take any positions at all, you have to realize that there may be more than one explanation of the rising and setting of the sun, or eclipses, or even the size of the sun. There may be more than one logical explanation that conforms to the evidence that you do have and doesn’t contradict any of the evidence you do have — but there’s not sufficient evidence to eliminate all the possibilities except one. Sometimes you’re going to be left with several that could be true. And in those cases, one of the more important positions Epicurus takes is that when you can’t be certain there’s only one explanation of a phenomenon, you don’t take the position that there’s only one explanation. You don’t just pick one as your pet theory and ignore the rest. You honestly accept that there are multiple possibilities and go forward based on those multiple possibilities. That’s a good example of how epistemology is contained in the Letter to Pythocles.
The Letter to Herodotus also starts out with a section on the different types of philosophy and different types of knowledge. And remember, I think it’s Lucretius Book 4 where there’s an extended section on illusions and on whether it’s possible to have any knowledge at all — how if somebody says that nothing can be known, then you should basically disengage from further discussion with that person, because when they take any position at all, even that nothing can be known, they’re actually taking a position. And it probably does make sense to combine canonics with physics because physics is basically the evidence that you can see through your senses about the things around you — the atoms, the bodies, the things that change, the things that don’t change — and the technology of knowledge is tightly intertwined with knowledge itself.
It appears that Epicurus wrote a separate document referenced as something similar to the Twelve Elementary Principles. We consider it a separate list from the Principal Doctrines, which are mostly about ethics. It looks like he had a separate list of twelve fundamentals of nature, which probably were the ultimate distillation of his physical principles. That document does not exist today, but people like Diskin Clay and Norman DeWitt himself have reassembled what they think were the twelve principles based on the way the information is presented in the Letter to Herodotus, in Lucretius, and to some extent through the fragments of Diogenes of Oenoanda — because you can see that the major points are repeated over and over again. So one of the places you would start in getting a high-level summary of the physics would be this list of twelve elementary principles.
And I think we’ve had some discussion back and forth, Joshua, in the past about how many other summaries there were. DeWitt thinks there were basically three levels: the Letter to Herodotus as one basic document of physics, and then a larger epitome — what DeWitt calls a second epitome of physics — which is what Lucretius was using as the basis for his poem. And then at the most detailed level, there were the thirty-seven Books on Nature by Epicurus himself. Whether Lucretius was working with the full thirty-seven books when he was writing his poem, or whether there was a middle-level epitome that he had in front of him —
Joshua: I can’t remember who it was, but basically the conclusion that this person came to was that Lucretius was adapting the full thirty-seven Books on Nature. Might have been David Sedley, now that I think about it. The opposite is also true: that you could use Lucretius to sort of reconstruct an outline of the thirty-seven books.
Cassius: I guess the important point is that whether there were three levels or just two, the whole purpose of organizing things into an outline view is that they should all be consistent with each other, no matter how many different summaries there were.
And in the ethics, we have the Principal Doctrines — which apparently were not originally divided into exactly forty different sections — and of course the Letter to Menoikeus, which is devoted to ethics. And then presumably much more that’s in the thirty-seven Books on Nature and in many other works that Epicurus wrote. And then the canonics were represented in a book that Epicurus wrote that is known as the Canon, but that work is lost. So to the extent we know about Epicurus’s epistemology, we have to reconstruct his view from the Principal Doctrines, from the epistemological sections of Lucretius and the other texts available, and also from Sextus Empiricus, who does include discussion of Epicurean epistemology. And the Philodemus work on methods of inference — there’s a De Lacy translation called On Methods of Inference, and David Sedley has an article referring to it under the title On Signs. Canonics is probably the area that’s been least examined in popular Epicurean writing, and probably the most productive to pursue further, because it’s a very deep subject. There’s the statement in Diogenes Laertius that Epicurus did not consider logic to be part of his canon of truth. That’s a very deep statement to consider, and while he did use logic in certain ways, there were limitations to it that he thought were important to discuss.
One of the things we read a lot in Norman DeWitt and other sources is Epicurus’s relationship to Plato, and even Aristotle and Pyrrho, on the issues of skepticism. And DeWitt stresses several times that one of the major thrusts of what Epicurus was doing was to examine the question of whether you can have confidence in knowledge or not — whether you should be a radical skeptic like Pyrrho and others at that time were exploring. He considered Plato and even to some extent Aristotle as being more skeptical in their results than they needed to be, because they were not confident that sensation could lead to knowledge. They thought you had to have an additional approach through a form of logic — the ideal forms that Plato discussed, or the essences that Aristotle pointed to. And that’s a really significant point of Epicurean philosophy: to trace how Epicurus rejected part or all of that analysis and attempted to ground confidence in knowledge on the senses themselves and the proper processing of information from the senses. And that’s ultimately what the epistemology of Epicurus is all about.
I’m curious what we think about this idea that the Letter to Herodotus should be the first literature put into the hands of a potential Epicurean. And of the letters, the Letter to Herodotus is presented first in Diogenes Laertius — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was intended to be presented that way to new students. Martin or Callistheni?
Martin: Yes, I mean, of those what we have, it’s the most difficult one. Actually I started with this one and it didn’t put me off. But someone who has less stamina, who is just exploring and doesn’t yet know much of it, might actually be put off by that pathway.
Cassius: That’s a great general comment. Whether you’re talking about Lucretius or any of this material, the person who doesn’t have a general background can very easily get put off by the unfamiliarity of the material, by the way it’s written. That really describes my whole experience with Epicurean philosophy, especially through Lucretius. I attempted to read Lucretius several times over the course of twenty or more years and never made it very far because it’s so different. And of course Lucretius contains so many references that are very specific to the Roman time period. All of this material for a normal general reader is going to contain a lot of unfamiliar things that are very hard to process. That’s why I generally suggest that somebody start with a commentary like Norman DeWitt to put everything in perspective. But the Letter to Herodotus is the general examination of the formation of the universe — the nature of atoms and void, how they come together, how bodies form from atoms, the properties of atoms which are eternal versus the changing appearances of bodies. It’s very deep material, not easy to just pick up and read from the very beginning. But nevertheless, I would argue today that it probably is the most important and fundamental of the letters, and I wouldn’t recommend anybody pick up any of the three without having read some background first. But I really do think you’re not going to get a good understanding of the Letter to Menoikeus — which everybody wants to read first — unless you understand where he’s coming from in the Letter to Herodotus and even, to some extent, in the Letter to Pythocles.
Martin: Yeah, I agree with this one. From the logic construction, it’s more fundamental and preferable to be first, but like I said, it’s a hard start.
Cassius: It is a hard start. For example, when Epicurus talks about death being nothing to us, people will reduce that down into “don’t fear the gods” — as if it’s sufficient to simply say that and move on. But if you don’t understand that the reason you don’t fear the gods is that everything is natural and that there are no supernatural beings, that everything is ultimately made up of matter and void — to me, that totally colors why you don’t fear death and why you don’t fear the gods. Somebody could say, well, I don’t fear God because God is love and God loves me and God loves humanity. And that would be absolutely divergent from Epicurean philosophy. And you wouldn’t even entertain such a position if you’ve first gone through the Letter to Herodotus and the Letter to Pythocles and understand Epicurus’s position about the way the universe works. Joshua, you raised Lucretius — I bet you’ve got some thoughts.
Joshua: I think I was as guilty as anyone else of maybe skipping — particularly the Letter to Pythocles was something I didn’t read until very late, because you hear about the Letter to Menoikeus as being sort of the most important letter, and so that’s probably where I started. And maybe it would have been better if I had started with the Letter to Herodotus, but it’s hard to say.
Cassius: Well, the way the world is, the truth, bitter or sweet, is that most people are going to go to the Letter to Menoikeus first. But nevertheless, for those who are really serious about understanding Epicurean philosophy, as soon as you can — at least through commentary — going through the Letters to Herodotus and Pythocles will provide a foundation that really informs everything else.
Now, on this subject of the gods, there’s another controversial point in this text. It appears that Lucretius’s poem presents a challenge to scholars: it appears to end horrifically, without much wrapping up, without much conclusion — no effort to put a bow on anything he’s been writing up to that point. And so there are a number of theories. One of them is that he simply didn’t have time to revise the poem before he died. And then perhaps the most extreme view is one that Norman DeWitt seems to share, which is that there’s a whole seventh book either missing to us or simply never written, and that the subject of that lost seventh book was on the nature of the gods. This was another practice I gather of the early Epicureans — the gods are something that you come to later on in your study, almost even at the end. Because if you just start out with them, you’re bound to either be scared off by charges of impiety or atheism, or you’re simply not going to understand the claims being made.
Even if we look at a book like Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, it’s interesting because she waits until nearly the middle of the book to begin to present Epicurus’s positions on various aspects of philosophy. For the first whole part of the book, Theon, the Corinthian who’s new to the Garden, is completely ignorant about anything actually being taught there — he hasn’t bothered to pick up a single book and read it. And so at the very, very end of that book, you have her interpretation of what Epicurus had to say about the gods. So maybe I wonder: is that still the proper way to approach this, to take this issue of the gods as something to be studied later?
Joshua: But it seems to me you really do need to start with the nature of the gods first, because it just affects how you approach the whole thing. Why are you even studying the nature of the universe? If you believe in God, then the whole universe is just God and you have a different kind of approach. Whereas if it’s just humans on the earth and we’re responsible for so much of everything, we’re not relying upon God to take care of the earth, to take care of us — then suddenly it’s really our responsibility to really understand the world and understand where we are. And so you really do need to start with understanding the nature of the gods.
Cassius: Martin?
Martin: Yeah, I mean, what we can get from all this is that we have to start from somewhere with everything — and that refers back to what we discussed before. First you get a brief overview of everything and then in steps you go to the details.
Cassius: Yeah, I think that’s what makes the most sense to me too. Joshua raised Lucretius — both the beginning and the end of Lucretius are going to catch people by surprise if they just pick up the poem and start reading. The first thing they’re going to read is about how Venus and Mars are playing around in the sky and telling the birds and the bees to continue the procreation of the species, and Lucretius asking Venus to calm Mars down so that the civil wars in the Roman period when he was living would be calm enough for him to write his poem. And then of course at the end, you have all this discussion of the plague of Athens, which is just death, death, death all around. If you just pick up one of those books without having been prepared, you’re going to be very confused.
And another example: if you were to start with the Letter to Menoikeus, the very first thing that he talks about with the gods is that the reason you shouldn’t fear them is not because they’re only made of atoms and void or that they’re natural. The reason he gives in the Letter to Menoikeus and Principal Doctrine 1 is that the gods aren’t what we think of them — that a god that is perfectly blissful and self-sufficient would not take any interest in punishing enemies or rewarding friends on some small planet far away from where they live. So that’s actually not a physics argument as much as it is a logical type of argument that derives from the physics, but it’s not just directly physics. And of course when you think about the letters, you don’t really know what the people Epicurus was writing to already understood about Epicurean philosophy. Maybe he’s talking to people who are very familiar with Epicurus, who’ve read some part of the thirty-seven books or some other epitomes and understand the twelve elementary principles about how everything is made up of atoms and void. So maybe they understood the physics, but maybe they didn’t.
So what’s important to get from the very beginning is whether these gods are supernatural and whether they’re interfering in our lives or not. And maybe it’s not so important at the very beginning to understand why they’re not interfering — and certainly it’s probably not important from the very beginning to start speculating about whether they speak Greek or how tall they are, which are details that do exist apparently in some Epicurean texts, but which would be, from most people’s perspective, little more than speculation and not very important for how you’re actually going to live your life.
Not only is the nature of the universe being natural and not supernatural important from the beginning — the nature of gods as being part of the natural universe, there being no heaven and hell, death being the end of our existence, our consciousness — there’s also the basic point of, in the end, what is the goal going to be? You don’t want to leave people in suspense for too long. Once you’ve eliminated the idea of following God or the idea of working hard to get into heaven, once you’ve eliminated those as reasonable methods of organizing your life, you’d better tell people fairly quickly what the right way to organize your life is. And so in the Principal Doctrines and the Letter to Menoikeus, there’s a lot of initial discussion about the role of pleasure and pain — which are feelings — and the ultimate goal, alongside words like calmness, peace of mind, and all sorts of other concepts that are relevant to what it means to be happy. The whole issue of happiness, what that means, how pleasure relates to it, all of those things are touched on very quickly in the study of Epicurus, so that you know where you’re going.
And so to some extent, what is going on here is that Epicurus is choosing to present to his students early in the process a series of firm statements, suspending for the moment the idea of proving them or even giving the full arguments behind them. You can either just jump into some book you don’t understand and hope you’ll eventually find your way, or you can listen to someone who is going to give you a general summary of what you’re about to read — and then at least for the moment, you don’t necessarily accept or reject it, but you at least understand the direction you’re going in.
It’s interesting because this method of expressing dogmatic general statements as an overview of the philosophy is one taken by Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve. There’s really only one chapter in that book that is very good at giving an overview of Epicurean philosophy, but the approach he takes is actually very similar to what we’re going to see in DeWitt’s book here. And this is where DeWitt returns to his warning again: another reason it’s important to understand the general direction you’re going in is because you need to get an idea pretty quickly whether the people you’re reading from are generally supportive of Epicurus or generally attempting to undermine what he says. Because other than the texts we have from Epicurus himself, other than Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenoanda, much of the other material we have about Epicurus is written by people who were hostile to him. And although they may have recorded information accurately — and in many cases we do think they did — the way they present it and what they present cannot be received uncritically.
We discussed this last week, Joshua. I think you raised some of the translations of Lucretius, especially early English ones. All you have to do is go through the introductions to those books written in the 1700s and 1800s — people just fall all over themselves to distance themselves from the positions taken by Epicurus, as if saying: I’m presenting this as my gift to scholarship, but I want to make it clear that I don’t believe a word of what he’s saying about there being no life after death or pleasure being the ultimate end of life. From Thomas More’s Utopia to Dante’s Inferno, the different Jewish scholars who call heretics by the name of Epicurus — there’s just an almost unending list of denunciations of Epicurean philosophy out there in Western literature for the last 2,000 years.
Joshua: And what’s interesting is how differently things were — particularly Lucretius — how differently he was accepted by his peers, by Roman poets in the time he was writing. There was a much greater tendency to praise him and his ideas than what we find particularly throughout the Renaissance and the modern age. Lucy Hutchinson was an early English translator of Lucretius; Denis Lambin was a French translator and scholar. And I think the Daniel Brown version of 1743 has some repudiating words in the front — anyone who would attribute to the translator the ideas of the author, he says, is “a precise fanatic in the Republic of Letters and the enemy of all serious learning.” But if you look at the ancient world, things were accepted much differently. I just came across a quote by Vitruvius about Lucretius that I won’t be able to quote exactly, but he says that numberless people after our time will approach the writings of Lucretius as if they were speaking directly with him about nature — and goes on to say they’ll have a conversation with Cicero about rhetoric, with Varro about the Latin language. And so Lucretius seemed to be able to get away with a lot more in classical antiquity, when these ideas would have been much more at home. And then probably my favorite quote comes from Ovid, who says that “the verses of sublime Lucretius will perish only when a single day shall consign the world to destruction.” So it’s a very different reception than from what it has been ever since.
Cassius: DeWitt points out that sometimes the French and the Italians are more sympathetic to Epicurean philosophy than the English. And of course, one of the major people everybody credits with sort of reintroducing Epicurean studies into the West is Pierre Gassendi, the French philosopher.
Joshua: Yeah, and Montaigne quotes Lucretius a lot and quite appreciatively. So I think you’re right to say that in France in particular there is much more acceptance of Epicurean thought than what you get in England.
Cassius: As we begin to draw today’s episode to a conclusion: next week when we come back, DeWitt begins a section on general true opinions versus false opinions about Epicurus. So I think what we’ll be doing next week is going through a very interesting list of general perceptions and labels that Epicurus tends to receive, and we’ll talk about whether those are justified or not — again, all with the purpose of allowing a reader of Epicurus who decides to pick up some Epicurean text to have some kind of framework to understand those texts before he gets lost in the detail. So Martin, any closing thoughts today?
Martin: No, nothing.
Cassius: Callistheni, any general thoughts for today?
Callistheni: Yeah, as this podcast was unfolding, I got this sort of vision of seeing an outline — which could be done online — where you could see the whole overview of Epicureanism, and then under each one, by clicking on it, more detail pops up and you could go to greater and greater detail. There are ways in which we could think about how to present the whole philosophy so that people can see the big picture and then kind of zoom into details. So as this podcast continues, I think we’ll probably be using a lot of what comes up in our presentations to flesh out the outline. So this is all very interesting and happy to be here.
Cassius: Very good. And you’re certainly right about the idea of using internet technology to present some kind of an outline format. It’s been several years since I made an effort to do that in a very primitive fashion. If somebody were to go to the website address newepicurean.com/outline, I used the technology that was available to produce a clickable outline that you can in fact open and close according to the categories that you’re looking to study. But it’s a very primitive and unsatisfactory version. So it’d be very good if we could work on more of an outline using the latest technologies. Okay, Joshua.
Joshua: I wish I had more to add, but I’m kind of out of ideas at the moment.
Cassius: Okay, well next week we’ll come back and discuss true opinions and false opinions about Epicurus and again put things in a wider perspective. So until then, let’s bring today’s episode to a close and we’ll come back next week. Thanks a lot and we’ll see you then.
Joshua: Bye.
Martin: Very good.
Callistheni: Bye.