Episode 148 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 04 - True Opinions And False Opinions About Epicurus
Date: 11/14/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2731-episode-one-hundred-forty-eight-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-04-true-opinion/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 148 continues the panel’s discussion of Norman DeWitt’s Chapter 1 list of true and false opinions about Epicurus from Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954). The episode opens by revisiting DeWitt’s point that it is a true opinion that Epicurus exalted nature — not Platonic reason — as the norm of truth, and a false opinion that he was an empiricist in the modern sense. This leads into an extended discussion of inductive versus deductive reasoning: Martin explains that induction draws general conclusions from particular instances (e.g., all observed dogs have four legs), while deduction derives particulars from general premises. The panel notes the practical limits of induction, the 95% confidence threshold commonly used in scientific hypothesis testing, and agrees that Epicurus would have acknowledged induction’s limitations through his multiple-causation method and his repeated phrase in the Letter to Pythocles — “nothing in phenomena is against it.” Martin proposes “axiomatic” as a better descriptor for Epicurus’s epistemological stance than either “dogmatic” or “skeptic.”
Joshua offers the duck-billed platypus as a vivid historical illustration: in August 1884, the naturalist William Hay Caldwell sent a four-word telegram — “Monotremes oviparous ovum meroblastic” — to the British Society for the Advancement of Science in Montreal, proving that egg-laying mammals existed and forcing a revision of prevailing biological classification. This is paralleled to Plato’s “featherless biped” definition of man, which Diogenes the Cynic famously refuted by plucking a chicken. The panel discusses the “problem of universals” — whether qualities like “yellow” exist independently of particular yellow things — connecting it to Frances Wright’s treatment of the subject in A Few Days in Athens. The fundamental divide between Epicurus (who grounded knowledge in nature and the senses) and Plato (who appealed to ideal forms accessible through pure reason) is emphasized, with Joshua invoking Christopher Hitchens’s formulation that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and Thomas Jefferson’s dismissal of the doctrine of the Trinity as incomprehensible.
The discussion then turns to DeWitt’s rejection of the caricature of Epicurus as a “moral invalid” or pacifist: Epicurus was a man of action with a combative, missionary nature, as evidenced by DeWitt’s early essay “Philosophy for the Millions.” Ancient stories of impractical philosophers — Thales falling into a well, Empedocles jumping into a volcano, Archimedes ignoring Roman soldiers — are contrasted with Epicurus’s practical engagement with the world. The panel also addresses DeWitt’s point that Epicurus was not a narrow egoist: unlike Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” model, the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure rightly understood includes friendship, choosing pain for greater pleasure when necessary, and sometimes dying for a friend. Vatican Saying 43 is quoted: “The love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious; and if justly gained, it is shameful, for it is unseemly to be parsimonious, even with justice on one side.” Finally, Cassius reads DeWitt’s summary of the Epicurus-Christianity connection — that Epicureanism “served in the ancient world as a preparation for Christianity, helping to bridge the gap between Greek intellectualism and a religious way of life” — and DeWitt’s second book, St. Paul and Epicurus, is mentioned. Joshua notes that in Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger, both Epicureans and Christians were outliers who opposed the oracle. Callistheni is absent this week. Next week: the biographical sketch of Epicurus and ancient Athens.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”[Intro]
Welcome to 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 Epicurean text, and we’ll 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. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius:
Welcome to episode 148 of the Lucretius Today podcast. Today we’re continuing with the list of true opinions and false opinions that Norman DeWitt has set out in Chapter 1 of his Epicurus and His Philosophy. Last week we got about halfway through the list, and today we’re coming back to where we ended last week on the issue of Epicurus’s views of truth and the method for determining truth. These are very complicated issues that we’re not going to be able to resolve today, or even treat them nearly as closely as they deserve to be treated, but we would like to give an introduction to the issues — which is the theme of what we’re doing — so that newer readers of Epicurus will understand that these issues are out there and be aware of them, so that when they come across them they can see how they fit into the big picture of Epicurean philosophy.
Cassius:
So last week we had begun the discussion of Epicurus’s view of truth, and DeWitt had said that it is a true opinion of Epicurus that Epicurus exalted nature as the norm of truth, and that this was a revolt against Plato, who had preached reason as the norm and considered reason to have a divine existence of its own. Epicurus taught that nature — the use of sensations, the feelings, and anticipations — are the standard for determining what we consider to be true. And just saying it like that is so superficial, but it gives us a starting point to discuss the issue. DeWitt points out also that it’s a false opinion to say that Epicurus was an empiricist in the modern sense of the word. DeWitt said that Epicurus did not declare sensation to be the only source of knowledge, and DeWitt goes into a long discussion later in the book about how you have to be very careful about the statement that Epicurus allegedly made — that all sensations are true — especially the different meanings that the word “true” can have. Now last week we talked about that just a little bit. Today let’s combine it with the next bullet point that DeWitt gives us, which is a commentary on the method by which Epicurus determined what he thought was true versus what he thought was false. And that brings us to this issue of types of reasoning, especially deductive versus inductive reasoning.
Cassius:
DeWitt says that Epicurus taught reasoning chiefly by deduction, and in this he was adopting the procedures of Euclid and parting company with both Plato and the Ionian scientists who had come before them. DeWitt says that the false opinion is that Epicurus was a strict empiricist who taught reasoning mainly by induction, while the truth is that Epicurus is generally presenting his reasoning and his conclusions through deductive rather than inductive reasoning. Now to make any sense of that we have to talk about what induction and deduction are. Martin, you want to start with that? What’s induction versus deduction?
Martin:
Yeah, induction is if we come from observation — so from particular cases, from specific knowledge — to come to a general statement. So this one is not based on strict logic, but it’s just with some confidence: if all the cases we have observed are like this, then we can expect that all other cases where we do not have significant differences are also like that. The other way around is if we have an established theory and then deduce by logic — it’s not directly obvious, but what follows from that theory.
Cassius:
Okay, so you’ve started out by defining induction and then you’ve just defined deduction. In the show notes we have a link to the Merriam-Webster definitions of induction and deduction. Merriam-Webster defines induction as “inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances.” Martin, can you give an example of what inductive reasoning would look like?
Martin:
Simple one. So we see that the dogs we know have four legs, so then we conclude from that that all dogs have four legs.
Cassius:
Which means that you’ve looked at particular instances of these animals in front of you, and since every one of these animals has four legs, you’ve concluded that all of those types of animals have four legs.
Martin:
Yes, but of course what happens is eventually you get some sort of Siamese-twin type of dogs bound together, or where there starts to develop another genetic defect, so then you have a dog with five or six legs — so that means the generalization has already been refuted, and you need to express it in a more complicated way to be accurate.
Cassius:
Or a dog loses a leg — it only has three. In Thailand that’s a very common sight. Okay, so there are obvious limits and issues with inductive reasoning, especially if you look at it from the point of view of wanting to be certain about something. Just because you’ve seen a thousand dogs with four legs doesn’t mean that every dog in the world has four legs, and if we overgeneralize to take the position that all dogs must have four legs, then we’ve got a problem when we come across one with three or five or more. Martin, if somebody were to ask — “you’ve told me that inductive reasoning has limits and I’d better be careful about the conclusions I draw; if you’re going to be negative about inductive reasoning, what should I do instead? Is there some other source of knowledge other than looking at particular instances?” — what would you say to that person?
Martin:
Yeah, I mean it depends on what type of knowledge we’re after. Ultimately, for most types of knowledge we’re interested in, we have no way to avoid induction, and we have to live with unknown probabilities attached to what we derive by our induction.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think you’re right. We have to live with the knowledge that we have not observed every instance of dogs in the world. We have to live with the knowledge that we may observe things here on earth but cannot observe things on every planet or solar system or other rock anywhere in the universe, and so we’re left with questions as to how far we can take our generalizations that arise from induction. And ultimately, if your standard of proof is to say that I don’t believe it unless I’ve seen it, then you’ve got a real problem. I think most people would agree in real life — whether they agree philosophically or not — that there’s a practical aspect in which you have to eventually take the position that once you’ve seen so many instances of a kind, there’s a probability that other instances will be consistent with the ones you’ve already seen. And I think we’ve talked about this before — there is a common viewpoint in what scientists generally do. What is often done is hypothesis testing. You look at a particular narrowly defined aspect, collect the cases, apply the statistics, and see how probable it is to have obtained that result. Martin, I think you’ve previously mentioned a percentage that seems to be something of a consensus in the scientific community. What is that?
Martin:
Yes. So that means if we can be 95% sure that it’s correct, then we accept this for this instance. And then those who review all these papers where these types of statements have been made come along and say: almost all these cases show a significant result; there are a few cases where it doesn’t fit. So then they examine further or determine that a study was done wrong, and they can dismiss those which don’t fit. And eventually, by this process, some broader consensus gets reached about what is considered to be the correct model — the correct statement on how to make sense out of the data.
Cassius:
And that percentage of confidence is something where — I don’t think anybody really suggests there’s a magic level — we seem to have a consensus that a 98% confidence level is a whole lot better than a 51% confidence level. But as far as where you draw the line in terms of percentages, there’s no divine authority that tells us that.
Martin:
Yeah, actually different fields sometimes apply different limits. Environmental regulations, for example, sometimes use different standards.
Cassius:
Okay, let’s move to the second category. But to me it’s clear that Epicurus was using inductive reasoning by looking at particular instances and drawing conclusions from them. But he definitely talked about multiple-causation situations where you cannot, from particular instances, conclude that there’s only one cause. He talked about withholding judgment when you don’t have enough information. So I think it would be very clear that Epicurus would have acknowledged the limitations of the inductive method of reasoning. And I would say it that way because the limitations of these issues are probably very important for us to be clear about as we move to deduction. Deduction, per Merriam-Webster, is “the deriving of a conclusion by reasoning in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily from general or universal premises.”
Martin:
Yes, and that is now different from induction. So that one is now sure in the conclusion at the end — except it depends on the truth of the premises. That means in the end it’s actually not really more powerful than induction, because it stands or falls with the premises. And from a total perspective, these premises eventually have been generated by induction. So in the development of something more complex than just a very special ad hoc theory, you will have an interplay of successive deduction and induction to get at something that works.
Cassius:
And I think it’s probably very important for us to point out that this seems to have been an incredibly important distinction between Epicurus and Plato — in that Plato was beginning his reasoning from these ideal forms that he considered to exist somewhere in the universe as absolutes, and his position was that you could somehow get knowledge of these absolutes through types of logic and reasoning, and that unless you could reason based on those absolutes you could never really be sure about anything. So Plato was tying confidence and certainty to starting with these universal premises, or ideal forms as he apparently called them.
Martin:
Plato arrived at this — and there will definitely have been some inductive aspect in there — but he arrived at it because he did not accept that the real world as we perceive it was real, and that we can use it to find out things. He effectively arrived at it through his geometry and his almost numerology of things, it seems to me.
Cassius:
And the point I would emphasize about what you just said is that this is where they differed so much: Epicurus emphasized the reliability — the ultimate need — to rely on the senses, and Plato was rejecting the contention that the senses could ever lead you to anything that was true. He was using these other formulaic methods tied up in issues of different types of logic. So I’ve always interpreted this as the point where it really comes home: Epicurus believed that nature gave us the senses, the feelings, and the anticipations as the methods for determining truth, whereas Plato rejected the senses as ever being sufficiently reliable for us to come to any confident conclusions — that we had to go beyond the senses, and in fact to some extent even reject what the senses are telling us, in order to determine what’s true.
Cassius:
And it seems to me, Martin, that leads us to another point we’ve raised in the show notes for this week, which is the issue of the so-called “problem of universals.” There’s a Wikipedia article that introduces this topic. It defines universals as qualities or relations found in two or more entities — as an example, if all cup holders are circular in some way, circularity may be considered a universal property of cup holders. And it comes to this conclusion: philosophers agree that human beings can talk and think about universals, but they disagree on whether universals exist in reality beyond mere thought and speech. So to some extent what we’re talking about here is the issue of universals. I don’t know how far we really want to go into it today, but certainly people who are interested in Epicurus need to file this question away as something to keep in mind and to understand the differences between Epicurus and the other Greek philosophies. Martin, do you have a comment on how Epicurus might differ from Plato and Aristotle on the problem of universals?
Martin:
There’s a chapter in A Few Days in Athens where Frances Wright talks about color as an example of this, and there are other types of examples that get very complicated. But when you start categorizing things that are common between separate objects, that process of categorization is going on in your mind — and in human minds — and there was not a universal mind, there was not a god or any other force that itself generated these categories universally. We’re seeing them and identifying them. For example, the color yellow. One way this question gets discussed is: does the color yellow exist on its own, separate from things that are yellow? Does yellow exist in the abstract, apart from things that are yellow?
Cassius:
No — I think that’s the right answer from an Epicurean perspective. But we’re going to wait and let Joshua explain this to us now. Joshua, you’re ready to jump in on that question — does yellow exist separate from things that are yellow?
Joshua:
Well, we might have to come back to it. The reason I say that is because I started this Google search way back in the conversation and it’s probably no longer relevant, but I’ll get into it anyway. The idea is this: even when you have established something that you think is true, and you’ve got all your ducks in a row and everything makes sense and you’ve accounted for all the available information and it’s logically sound, it’s still possible that you have made a mistake or that you’ve simply left something out. And the example that I can use here is of the duck-billed platypus.
Joshua:
What you had in Europe at the time, among these scientific communities of biologists, was an idea about what a mammal was — I guess it’s kind of an inductive type argument. You look at all different kinds of mammals, and of course they didn’t have Watson and Crick’s knowledge of the double helix; they hadn’t synthesized a breakdown of the genome. In other words, they couldn’t compare the genetic information of a rat to a monkey to a dog, so they didn’t have the genetic basis for classification. But what they did was try to classify animals according to other things. And what the platypus represented in about the year 1884 was a challenge — and in fact it was such a challenge to the prevailing system that many biologists in Europe and North America simply thought it was a hoax, that it wasn’t real.
Joshua:
Until the year 1884 — in August, I think it was August 29th — there was a twenty-five-year-old biologist, a relatively young scientist working in Australia, who had made an important discovery. He had been studying the issue, trying to actually find a live specimen in nature — not just a dead specimen, as Europe had already seen — to really try and capture a living one. And so on that day, August 29th, 1884, this William Hay Caldwell sent a telegram to the British Society for the Advancement of Science in Montreal. The telegram was just four words long. It said: “Monotremes oviparous ovum meroblastic.” That probably doesn’t mean anything to any of us except maybe Martin here, but it absolutely caused a sensation. You could imagine this telegram being read out to the society and the room suddenly going quiet — because what it represented was this: while they knew that if the platypus was real it was a mammal — it had mammary glands, it had fur, it seemed to satisfy all the necessary criteria for inclusion as a mammal — the claim that it was an egg-laying creature was a huge problem. Frankly many scientists in Europe simply didn’t believe it. But William Hay Caldwell was able to demonstrate that this was true.
Joshua:
So what kind of challenge does that present to this body of information that we already have? One of the words that gets thrown around in science is the word “theory,” and we all know that theory has a very different meaning in a strict scientific context than it does used more casually. A theory is an explanation for phenomena that has taken account of all the known facts and not only that, but can also account for hitherto unknown facts. So the issue of the platypus would be a hitherto unknown fact that biologists would have to account for — but it doesn’t necessarily bring the whole system crashing to its knees. You simply have to analyze where you went wrong, where you made logical mistakes, where you made sins of omission or commission when you were analyzing the data. You simply have to adjust your conclusions based on the new evidence that has presented itself.
Joshua:
In the meantime, there’s an example from the ancient world in which one of the big two — Plato or Aristotle, I can’t remember which — had defined a human being as a featherless biped. And so Diogenes the Cynic plucks a chicken and walks in and presents “Plato’s man” — or Aristotle’s — because it was a biped and it didn’t have feathers. It’s always possible to make mistakes when you’re talking about these things, but the ability to account for new information and assimilate it into your system really just makes the system stronger. A lot of people tend to think that if your system didn’t predict this, or if it didn’t account for this, then it’s a failure and we shouldn’t believe you. But really the ability to account for new information is so much of what the scientific endeavor is and what it represents. And I have no idea what that has to do with the color yellow.
Cassius:
Oh, it absolutely has lots to do with the color yellow. That was very good, because that’s really the takeaway point. I don’t want to imply that we’re finished discussing this, because I think we could spend most of today’s episode talking about these issues. But in the end, what I heard you talking about is: what happens when you find new information that does not fit into your pre-existing paradigm? Obviously, from an Epicurean perspective, you are going to adjust your paradigm. You’re going to adjust your theory to now come into consistency with all of the evidence — not just the evidence you had previously. And so what is the proper attitude toward knowing that you’re going to have to adjust your paradigm? I think most scientifically minded people have a practical perspective that the fact that the duck-billed platypus could be discovered and make them revise their theory of what a mammal is does not shake their worldview so much as to cause them to question existence and become total nihilists and jump off a cliff.
Cassius:
If you go into these issues understanding that there are limits to your reasoning, and that you have to be aware of the possibility that your reasoning could be wrong, then you’re going to be able to adjust to these new discoveries. Probably another good example that comes to mind — although I haven’t quite reached it yet — is what happens to the world of religion when finally, as we expect it to be, life is discovered somewhere else in the universe besides the earth. There’s been a lot of discussion over the centuries that such a thing would be revolutionary in human affairs, and no doubt it would be revolutionary for certain people. But from the Epicurean perspective, he’s been expecting that for 2,000 years or more — that there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Nevertheless, even though he’s taken this position to expect something that we have not yet seen proof of, he doesn’t fall into absolute skepticism, into saying that nothing can ever be known with confidence.
Cassius:
And that’s the thing we come constantly back to in these discussions: just because you realize that certain decisions have to be made on probability, based on the evidence that you do have, does that lead you to become a total skeptic who thinks the salt and the pepper on the table in front of him may magically disappear at any moment? That’s why this is all so related to skepticism. We all know what skepticism means in an extreme sense, and we can understand the difficulties with it. But finding another word that correctly describes Epicurus’s position is maybe a little bit harder. If Epicurus was not a skeptic, is there a good word in your view that summarizes Epicurus’s perspective in relation to skepticism?
Joshua:
I don’t know about a single word that would express this, but there’s a phrase that he repeats again and again, particularly in the Letter to Pythocles. He says, “Nothing in phenomena is against it.” He uses this when — if you’re going to give an account of magnetism, for example — Epicurus probably didn’t have an accurate understanding of magnetism because he lived in the third or fourth century BC and it probably simply was not possible at that time. But when he would try to explain something like lightning or a tornado or an eclipse, he would account for it given what he thought was good evidence at the time. And then he would cap it off by saying, “Nothing in phenomena is against it.” The implicit assumption you’re making when you say that is that when something in phenomena does come up — something you didn’t know about before — you can’t go on saying that nothing in phenomena is against it. You either have to examine this new thing and determine whether it’s really real — which in the case of the duck-billed platypus the scientists of Europe were initially prepared to do by simply discarding it — but in the end, with better evidence, they came to accept it was true and adjusted their system accordingly. And Epicurus, in the face of new evidence, would have had to do the same. It’s implied in the phrase he keeps using in the Letter to Pythocles: “Nothing in phenomena is against it.”
Martin:
Yes, and the opposite of skepticism is dogmatism. So that’s what he touched on previously already.
Cassius:
Which is a word we have to be very careful with, given its very negative and overbroad connotations.
Martin:
We just said that these dogmas we establish — they are open to revision if new data don’t fit them anymore. Then we revise them, and then we have a new dogma — with which we then avoid becoming skeptics.
Cassius:
And if somebody heard you say that, Martin, without having heard our discussion last week about dogma, how would you define “dogma” in that context?
Martin:
We can rather use the adjective — it’s easier to say. Instead of characterizing our perspective as “dogmatic,” we can call it “axiomatic.”
Cassius:
Yes, you discussed that last week, yeah. Another word that I think people might be tempted to use would be “realist” as opposed to “skeptical.” But I have a feeling that “realist” doesn’t really answer the questions because it doesn’t really tell you what is real. I’m not sure there’s a better word simply than to describe it as “Epicurean” — to describe the way Epicurus was thinking. But I think it’s very helpful to talk about it in more simple terms: Epicurus was not being a skeptic about everything, and he was being realistic. But if you were to try to use that word, you still have to take positions on what is real and how you determine what is real — which constantly leads us back to the direction of looking at the faculties that nature gave us as what Epicurus is pointing to as the standard for what is real.
Martin:
Yeah, I mean, probably in some ways “realist” may be applicable, but the problem is it’s in conflict with what is the most adequate description of modern science — because modern science is not really about truth. Truth occurs there in a trivial sense, like the measurement protocols, the data in there have been truly recorded. But the question of whether a scientific theory is true or false does usually not matter, because the question is: is the theory adequate for what we want to find out with it? Whether it is also true — that just doesn’t matter. And this is different from the way the ancient philosophers thought. They really thought they were after the truth. Most scientists nowadays are not after the truth in that sense.
Cassius:
That’s an interesting way to look at it, and I’m not sure that says good things about modern science, but it’s a very good way to look at the question: are we after truth, or are we after something else? First of all, what was Epicurus after? Was Epicurus after the truth, or something else?
Martin:
The way it’s written, he really thought this is true. So he’s doing pre-scientific modeling, and he thought that this was true. Whereas scientists who think like me don’t think that we are dealing with truth in science. I mean, there are others who think like that — and so “realism” is the wrong opposite for those who don’t. These two different camps you can call “realist” and “anti-realist.” So in that sense, I would be an anti-realist — but if you say this casually, it wouldn’t make sense.
Cassius:
There’s a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies in which he’s describing what archaeology is to his students, because he’s a professor at a college or university. And what he says basically is that archaeology is the attempt to discover facts. And then he goes on to say that if it’s truth that you’re looking for, you need to go down to room whatever, which is Dr. Whoever’s philosophy classroom. The truth is the province of philosophy, and science is more appropriately attempting to deal with facts. I don’t know if that clarifies things. I think it clarifies things as to modern science. I don’t know that it necessarily clarifies things as to what we are after in the study of Epicurus and in the application of Epicurean philosophy, because I have a hard time believing that at any point Epicurus would abandon the word truth and say that we were not after truth. It sounds like, as Martin said a moment ago, that he thought his position was both true and consistent with everything that nature tells us. And I don’t think he would admit the possibility that nature would point us in some direction other than truth. But the word truth itself is so complicated and so subtle. Again, we referenced last week Pontius Pilate’s question about what is truth. And unless you’ve really thought about that, you’re never going to really get a firm understanding of where Epicurus was going.
Joshua:
Yeah, it’s interesting, because in scientific endeavor the stakes are, I guess, lower than in philosophy. And in philosophy, what you’re dealing with is — as you always point out, Cassius — if the claims made by Christians, if the claims made by Muslims, if these claims were true, it would fundamentally alter any approach we have to questions about death, questions about how we should live our lives, questions about the afterlife, questions about our relationship with God. The stakes could not possibly be higher than when what you’re dealing with is an afterlife of eternal torment and punishment. So it’s in that context that we have to have philosophical conversations — and science doesn’t get us there. So Epicurus needs to find other ways to approach these fundamental issues which science, because of its natural limitations, simply can’t answer. Issues like: is there a life beyond the grave? Does a supernatural God exist? Questions that are particularly the province of philosophy and religion, and where the stakes are very high indeed.
Martin:
Yeah, but again, I mean, they talk about truth, but they have no way to find it out.
Cassius:
Right, because the word a scientist might use would be “unfalsifiable” — if you’re going to make a claim about life beyond the grave, the claim is unfalsifiable; it cannot be tested. And if you hold yourself to the standard that the only thing you are totally confident in is something that you can observe for yourself, you’ve reached the end of your ability to reason at that point. We don’t accept, most of us, that there is any evidence from anyone who has come back from being dead. And almost by definition, we all understand that once we’re dead, we don’t come back from it. So in terms of being certain about what happens after you die, if we take the position that we haven’t experienced it for ourselves, so therefore we’re not sure, we’ve reached a dilemma in our reasoning.
Cassius:
I think Epicurus was taking the position that if you stop at that point and say “I don’t know,” you’re always going to have doubt in your mind that will cause you to live less pleasurably than you otherwise would. And you have to then confront these questions. Is it legitimate to speculate about possibilities without any existing evidence of your own? Is it legitimate to think that there could be pink elephants on the other side of the moon simply because you’ve never been there? Is it legitimate to think that you could spend an eternity in heaven in bliss because you can’t rule it out since you’ve never been there? Is that whole line of thought legitimate? It seems to me Epicurus is saying it’s not.
Cassius:
So the question is: how do you sort which claims can be evaluated reasonably and which can’t? And I think it was Christopher Hitchens who formulated this particular way of expressing things: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And those claims which are extraordinary but have not furnished extraordinary evidence should simply be dismissed — it’s not worth our time. You could take Thomas Jefferson’s approach: he says about Catholicism and its doctrine of the Trinity, the triune God, that an idea has to be comprehensible before logic or reason or the faculties of our minds can act upon it. And no one has ever had a comprehensible or sensible idea about the Trinity. So the only response we have left in cases like that is simply to dismiss it — to laugh it off. Because if you’re going to make a claim like the claim about the Trinity, you’d better have some good evidence to support your position.
Cassius:
And when you say good evidence, that means you have to examine the nature of your evidence. Epicurus is always pointing back to evidence coming from the five senses, from the anticipations, and the feelings as being the sources of evidence given to us by nature — as opposed to evidence that might come from circumstantial reasoning in terms of creating hypotheticals that don’t have observable evidence to support them. But those hypotheticals lead you to all these arguments in favor of God, and in that direction.
Cassius:
This is probably a good time to remember that we’re in the introductory section of our discussion of Epicurus in Chapter 1 here. Probably we’ve gone as deeply into this issue of truth as we have the time to do at this point in our discussions. But before we leave it, let’s just bring it home. It seems to me that the key point DeWitt is bringing up here is that we have to be very careful to understand the way Epicurus is approaching the whole issue of truth — what truth is, how you determine what truth is — and that this is a major area of significance in Epicurean philosophy. Ultimately, truth in the Epicurean viewpoint is derived from and validated against the evidence of the senses, but at the same time, in processing the evidence of the senses, it’s important to think about the types of reasoning — including deductive and inductive reasoning — and to be clear about the way you’re coming up with what truth is and how you’ve arrived at it.
Cassius:
And that summary is a way to lead into the next section that DeWitt brings up, because in fact Epicurus was not just a thinker spending all his time deliberating and chasing down rabbits along various trails of logic. DeWitt’s next point is that Epicurus was a man of action and not just thought. DeWitt says that it’s false to say that Epicurus was a moral invalid, a pacifist who taught retirement from and non-engagement with the world. The truth is that Epicurus was actually producing a philosophy that had very serious missionary aspects, and that Epicurus was combative — he had natural gifts of being a leader, an organizer, and a campaigner. So let’s talk about that for a few minutes.
Cassius:
One of DeWitt’s earliest essays on Epicurus was entitled “Philosophy for the Millions,” which basically explains this point: that Epicurus was not just an isolated thinker sitting in a monastery somewhere churning out words for his own benefit. He actually knew and was engaged in a project of enlightenment of other people. One thing I want to point out is this view that the ancient Greeks seemed to have of their philosophers. They would tell stories about Thales of Miletus being so deeply involved in his study of the stars that, as he’s walking along, he falls into a well because he’s looking up. It was said about Empedocles that he jumped into a volcano to prove that he was a god. Another story is of Archimedes from Syracuse — when his town was sacked by the Romans, the Roman soldiers were instructed not to kill him, but he was so intractably focused on his work, studying his diagrams, that when the Roman soldiers encountered him he didn’t even seem to notice them until the moment when they ran a sword through him.
Cassius:
It’s this idea that because philosophers are interested in the workings of nature and things that are going on in the sky, things that are behind the scenes, their full attention and focus is on that — and so when it comes to the real world and the things that people have to do to survive or simply get by in complex societies, philosophers are not adequate to the task. There are many, many stories from the ancient world to make this point. And in drama — was it The Clouds or The Frogs? — some of these plays from the Greek world where philosophers are lambasted. In fact, Lucian of Samosata, a satirist, had many of the same takes on the prevailing attitude of philosophers in the world, because they didn’t seem to focus on things that mattered to most people. They lived in an ivory tower.
Joshua:
Yes. One thing that DeWitt points out in elaborating some of this — and maybe I’m remembering from what you said last week, where you went down the list of the names of the books that Epicurus and his people were writing — so many of them are entitled “Against” a particular person or idea. That’s the point that DeWitt is raising here: that Epicurus was by disposition combative and a natural leader, organizer, and campaigner. It does seem like to me at least that the school was set up from the very beginning to be a school. It wasn’t just him writing his own books. It was intended to be an organized presentation of a reform movement, at least in philosophy if not in the wider society itself.
Cassius:
And maybe we should blend this in with the next item that DeWitt raises, because next in his list of true and false opinions is the discussion of Epicurus’s view of self-interest. DeWitt says that it’s false to say that Epicurus was a totally egoistic hedonist ruled solely by a narrow view of his own self-interest — which is sort of the caricature that you do see about Epicurus and Epicureanism even today, that they’re just totally focused on the pleasure of the moment. What DeWitt says is in fact true is that Epicureanism was the first world philosophy acceptable to both Greeks and non-Greeks, and that Epicurus taught that we should make friends whenever possible, and that it’s not an inward-facing or an exclusively outward-facing philosophy — but that it was focused on the result of living a pleasurable life, which cannot be obtained successfully in most cases unless you are to some extent engaged with the world around you. The emphasis that Epicurus places on friendship, and living among people who are your friends, and how you don’t necessarily need the actual assistance of your friends so much as the confidence that they’re available if needed — there’s a tremendous amount of material in Epicurean philosophy about the interactions that the individual has with the wider group of people around him. So Epicurus was not an isolated thinker who just wanted to write his own theories and not care about how to apply them in the real world.
Joshua:
Cassius, it strikes me that describing him as an isolated thinker is not just wrong, but actually a very charitable view of the wrong view. What they actually said about Epicurus was that he was like a pig — so focused on looking down and worried about his own pleasure that he had no time or ability to assess or deal with things that were above or beyond himself; that his followers are pigs in his herd, which is how Horace sort of ironically describes himself. And there was that other instance — you might have to fill me in on the details here because I can’t remember it specifically — but someone was asked why it is that many men are seen to leave other schools of philosophy and join the Epicurean school, but that apart from Timocrates no one was seen to leave the Epicurean school and join the other schools. And the answer is: for the same reason that a man can be made a eunuch, but a eunuch cannot be made into a man. So there is this rather scathing portrayal of Epicureans as effeminate, as lacking all self-awareness in their heedless pursuit of pleasure. There’s a view of them as stupid, as poor citizens, as not fit to have any participation in public life in Greece. Simply describing him as an isolated thinker would actually be putting quite a good face on it, even though that doesn’t accurately answer to what he was either.
Cassius:
Yeah, when you say “charitable,” that’s a good word. It’s overly charitable to describe him by simply saying he’s a hedonist or whatever. It seems to me that there’s this general impression that Epicurus is telling people to turn inward. DeWitt is using the words here that he has a narrower view of his own self-interest. And I think that’s really very false. An analogy that regularly comes to my mind in comparing Epicurus with other philosophies is to compare this with the modern viewpoint associated with Ayn Rand or objectivism. She wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness and said that it’s correct to be selfish as opposed to altruistic. She’s setting up what I think is a false choice between saying that the goal should be your own interest as opposed to other people’s interest. She’s probably correct in saying that it’s wrong to say that your goal in life should be other people’s interest above yourself — you’ve got that cliché about “God first, others second, myself last” that you’ll find thrown out commonly in the world today. She’s probably right in rejecting altruism as the ultimate goal of life.
Cassius:
But then to flip back and say that your own selfishness is a correct description of the ultimate goal of life — I think Epicurus would equally condemn that, if not more so. Because if you keep your focus on the ultimate goal — which for Epicurus is pleasure, very widely defined — you cannot achieve the most pleasant life by putting your own self-interest always and only as the first focus of your decision-making. Sometimes, Epicurus says, you must choose pain in order to get a greater pleasure. Sometimes you’re going to put the interest of other people above your own. Epicurus said sometimes you’re going to die for a friend. So the idea that Epicurus was a narrow egoist in the Ayn Rand sense would be as wrong as suggesting that he was a communist — saying that you should put other people’s interests always above your own. Logically applying his philosophy, you’re going to realize that there’s a time for everything under heaven — a time to put your interests first, a time to put other people’s interests first — all in the service of keeping the goal of nature, which is living pleasurably, as your definition of the goal.
Joshua:
Just because you mentioned communism — what Epicurus actually says in his own terms, or rather what Diogenes Laertius describes Epicurus saying, is that for a school of philosophy to hold property in common betrayed a lack of trust among its members. That was the reason he did not, in his school, hold property in common, as they may have done among the Pythagoreans.
Cassius:
Yes, I think that’s one of the best examples that people should always keep in mind when thinking about what Epicurus might say about current affairs, modern politics, and so forth. There’s just not an absolutely correct system that applies at all times, all places, to all people. I believe there’s an example about him sharing beans at some point when Athens was under attack. He does say about wealth, though, that accruing great wealth can actually make you a target.
Joshua:
Exactly. By sharing it with your friends and with your neighbors, you actually increase your — I guess you could think of it as a web, almost like a safety net. By getting more people on your side, by establishing more friendship and connection on proper terms — he’s very careful about the way we should pursue friendship — by doing that, you actually give yourself a broader foundation for support and for friendship, which is so important for his method of pursuing pleasure.
Cassius:
Isn’t there also a Vatican Saying about love of money? I seem to never remember the phrasing on this one. Something about money justly gained or unjustly gained.
Joshua:
Yes. In both cases, the love of money is the problem — whether justly gained or unjustly gained. If it’s unjustly gained, there are all those ancillary ethical issues that impend. But even when it’s justly gained, the love of money for its own sake is something not to be cultivated in yourself.
Cassius:
Right. Money is such an easy example when you start talking about altruism versus egoism or whatever. Vatican Saying 43: “The love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious; and if justly gained, it is shameful, for it is unseemly to be parsimonious, even with justice on one side.” So that is another example of keeping your focus on the ultimate goal, which is living pleasurably. And sometimes that’s going to mean that you’re going to put the interest of other people — especially your friends — ahead of your own. And it’s not a contradiction within Epicurus to take that position.
Cassius:
As we begin to wind down for today, let’s go ahead and deal with the last of his examples of true and false opinions — the issue of Epicurus’s relevance to the development of Christianity. DeWitt points out that it’s false to say that Epicurus was an enemy of all religion. And what is in fact true is that Epicurus had his own views of what proper religion is, and that he was changing the emphasis from political virtues for the state to more social virtues in terms of how best to relate with other people, and that he was developing a wider viewpoint applicable not only in Athens and Greece but everywhere.
Cassius:
This whole issue of Epicurus’s relationship to Christianity — we’ll see throughout DeWitt’s book that he’ll bring up this issue in ways that probably most of us agree would be a little bit on the stretched side, and that he sees commonalities sometimes where maybe most of us would not. But maybe we can generalize it even a little further and say that the false opinion is that Epicurus was just an absolute atheist in the way that we categorize that subject today — that he just dismissed ideas of talking about divinity whatsoever. There is mention of the Epicureans in the New Testament, and the issue of what relationship, if any, existed between the early development of the Christian church and the development of Epicurean philosophy is of some interest to some of us at times. Let me ask a question this way: to what extent do we see a relationship between the development of Christianity and the development of Epicurean philosophy?
Joshua:
Maybe the ultimate point that DeWitt is actually raising here is that Epicurus was changing the focus from being a good citizen to being a good person, and that there’s a personal aspect of Christianity that is similar. Rather than raising citizen soldiers in service of the state, you’re attempting to do something maybe more personal and more social — something that doesn’t have reference directly to politics or who’s in charge, although of course in Christianity they talk a lot about the kingdom of God. But it is your personal relationship with Jesus Christ that is so totally talked about too.
Joshua:
Right, and smaller things like the way that the early Epicureans would have pictures of Epicurus in their house, or on rings, or just having his picture around — which was something slightly novel for a philosopher to do. And in Christianity there’s this tendency to outright reject one of the commandments in the Decalogue — which is not to make graven images — because the making of graven images of Jesus is something that is very common and widespread. Whereas in Islam this commandment is actually heeded to the letter and they do not make images of Muhammad or of God. And when you go to a mosque — which I’ve never been to — what I see in pictures is this stylized arabesque, using the Arabic script decoratively inside the mosque, rather than having stained glass windows or the stations of the cross.
Cassius:
You know, maybe the best way to do justice to this section — and help us bring it to a close — would be just for me to read this paragraph from page 8 of Epicurus and His Philosophy. DeWitt says: “Epicureanism served in the ancient world as a preparation for Christianity, helping to bridge the gap between Greek intellectualism and a religious way of life. It shunted the emphasis from the political to the social virtues and offered what may be called a religion of humanity. The mistake is to overlook the terminology and ideology of Epicureanism in the New Testament and to think of its founder as an enemy of religion.”
Cassius:
Somebody interested in pursuing that further would want to read DeWitt’s second book, entitled St. Paul and Epicurus, where he goes through the New Testament and looks at different passages and speculates as to what relationship they could have to Epicurean ideas. In my own personal view, I’ve always seen this aspect of DeWitt’s book as something that is going to appeal to a certain type of person — especially someone coming from Christianity and looking to study Epicurus for the first time. They’re going to find it interesting in many cases to look at the different statements made by Paul in his letters and think about how they do seem to refer to arguments that Epicurus was making. In fact, DeWitt makes several analogies about how the early Christians would have considered Epicurus as a form of Antichrist, and that some of the phrases used in discussing that wrap into aspects of Epicurean philosophy — such as the phrase about “the weak and beggarly elements” that Paul was accusing certain Christians of still being slaves to. It’s hard for me at least to look at something like that and not think that it’s applying to an Epicurean point of view.
Cassius:
So there’s a certain type of person who will find the points that DeWitt raises about early Christianity and statements in the Bible to be of particular interest, and a certain type who will not — and they can simply skip those sections of DeWitt if they wish to. But DeWitt was writing in a time and a place where this was a subject of interest, and so that’s just part of his book.
Joshua:
Yeah, and one point maybe in support of DeWitt’s interpretation would be to point to this famous essay that I reference again and again — Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger — in which Lucian describes that there were basically two camps who were opposed to the rise of this oracle: the Christians and the Epicureans. For very different reasons they were both opposed to it, and both were condemned by the oracle. So they are both outliers, in a sense, in the Greco-Roman world — outliers for very different reasons, but on a similar footing in that regard.
Cassius:
Okay, well, we’ve now basically come to the end of DeWitt’s list of true opinions and false opinions. We’re going to go forward in our general overview next week, turning attention back to ancient Athens and the period in which Epicurus developed his philosophy, and doing a little bit of biographical work. As for today — Martin, any concluding thoughts?
Martin:
No, I have nothing yet.
Cassius:
Okay. And Joshua?
Joshua:
Yeah, I don’t have much to add except to say that it’s unfortunate that Callistheni isn’t here with us to give her insights. But basically, I just want to echo what you’ve already said, Cassius: this is very, very introductory matter that we’re going over here, basically a list that covers about two pages in just the first chapter. And so there’s quite a lot more to come in Norman DeWitt, and it’ll be very interesting to go through it as we do — but there’ll be a lot more detail to flesh out some of the things we’ve been talking about, and a lot of things that we have not yet talked about.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua — taking the higher-level view about what DeWitt is doing here in this opening section: he’s talking to people who have not yet read his book, who are starting out in the process of studying Epicurus, and he’s pointing out issues to be aware of that normally many people today are not going to be aware of until much further down the road in their reading, if they don’t start with something like what DeWitt is providing here. We’ve said over and over there’s a tendency to jump into Epicurus on the ethical side, talk about pleasure and happiness, and basically stop at that point. What DeWitt is warning us about here is that there’s an awful lot more under the surface that we need to understand, and that we’re really not even going to understand the part we think we understand about happiness and pleasure unless we have this background overview of where Epicurus was coming from and what he was talking about.
Cassius:
Be aware that these things are out there. Don’t take everything on a superficial level, and wait until you have more information before you’re really confident that you have understood where Epicurus is coming from. Don’t just go to the Wikipedia article and presume that it tells you everything you need to know — it doesn’t. Epicurus was producing a worldview and approaching it from a very unique direction that most of us are not familiar with at all today. It really helps to get that overall context in so that you can understand the details and apply them as Epicurus was intending.
Cassius:
Okay, well, that’s a good place for us to stop today. We’ll close the episode and come back next week. In the meantime, we invite everybody to come to the forum and discuss these issues with us. EpicureanFriends.com is the place. Thanks for listening today and we’ll come back in a week.