Episode 150 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 06 - Development of the School in Mytilene and Lampsacus
Date: 12/03/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2755-episode-150-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-06-development-of-the-school-in-myt/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 150 covers Chapters 4 through 6 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, focusing primarily on Epicurus’s periods in Mytilene and Lampsacus. Chapter 4, “Mytilene and Lampsacus,” describes how Epicurus — after a decade refining his philosophy in Colophon — chose Mytilene on the island of Lesbos as his first venue for public teaching. Lesbos had deep cultural roots (the lyric poet Sappho was from there), and Aristotle himself had taught in Mytilene for two years before going to Macedonia as tutor to Alexander the Great. But Mytilene was a hotbed of Platonist thought, and Epicurus’s combative methods of argumentation — including the Sorites syllogism against the Platonist conception of “the good,” and appeals to Homer and Sophocles as authorities — quickly generated hostility and he was effectively driven out of town.
The bulk of the episode discusses the Sorites paradox and its use by Epicurus. Joshua opens with analogous puzzles — the Gordian knot, the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise — before arriving at the central Sorites formulation: if you remove grains from a heap of sand one by one, at what point does it cease to be a heap? This is connected to the problem of universals — does “heapness” exist in some ideal dimension, or only in the minds of humans who apply the word? DeWitt interprets Epicurus’s repeated Cicero citation — “I am at a loss to know what meaning I shall attach to the good, subtracting the pleasures of taste, subtracting the pleasures of love, subtracting the pleasures of the ears, subtracting also the pleasures of the eyes in beauty of form and beauty of movement” — as Epicurus deploying the Sorites syllogism in dialogue form against Platonic conceptions of the good. The implication: Plato denies pleasure after pleasure after pleasure the name of “good,” and at the end of the chain there is nothing left that deserves the name. Cassius also discusses the color gradient analogy — a spectrum running from green to red illustrates how adjacent points are indistinguishable but the extremes are clearly different, applicable both to the Sorites and to the micro-versus-macroevolution debate.
DeWitt’s evidence that Epicurus cited Homer in Mytilene as a “hedonist authority” is discussed at length: Odysseus’s speech to the Phaeacian king celebrates pleasure in fully embodied form — bread, meat, wine, and the voice of the bard — using the word euphrosyne (which Plato and Aristotle reserved for pure intellectual contemplation) to describe a banquet scene. DeWitt considers this akin to quoting the Bible in support of evolution. Epicurus also cited Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (the agonized cries of Heracles on his deathbed) to demonstrate that pain is manifestly evil, doubly provocative since Heracles was a model figure in Stoic and Cynic ethics. These polemical tactics, DeWitt says, were “difficult to think of tricks of controversy better calculated to exasperate adversaries.”
Hermarchus, who would become the second head of the school, was met by Epicurus in Mytilene. After leaving Mytilene, Epicurus went to Lampsacus — a city that, like Anaxagoras a century earlier, served as a refuge from philosophical persecution. There Epicurus assembled the core circle of what would become the Garden in Athens: Metrodorus and his brother, Polyaenus, Idomeneus (to whom Epicurus’s will is addressed), Leonteus and his wife Themista, and Leontium. The episode closes with a broader reflection: Epicurus eventually chose to teach in private — in a garden on his own land — rather than in the Agora, having learned in Mytilene what public controversy could cost, just as Anaxagoras and Socrates had discovered before him. Cassius and Joshua reflect on how studying Epicurus is itself a long developmental process requiring independent thinking, willingness to revise prior convictions, and active community engagement — as Philodemus warned, even Epicureans of Philodemus’s own day were failing to read the primary texts. Next week: Chapter 5.
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 texts 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 150 of the Lucretius Today Podcast. This week we’re going to chapters 4 through 6 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, and we’ll be covering it fairly broadly and not going through nearly all the detail that Norman DeWitt does. But we’re going to pick out some sections in these chapters that seem of particular interest. Chapter 4 is the first of the sections, and it’s entitled “Mytilene and Lampsacus.” We start out by talking about Epicurus’s time in Mytilene, and the period there that was ended when he was basically required to leave — for reasons that are not entirely clear.
Cassius:
So just a little bit more on the background here. Epicurus is born on Samos — we talked about that. He goes to Athens for his mandatory two-year military training — we talked a little bit about that in the last episode. Then he spends ten years, I think, in Colophon. And this is where he really begins to refine the philosophy. And once he’s done that, he’s looking for a place somewhere in the Aegean where he can sort of set up as the philosopher and begin to really teach people about what he thinks he knows about nature, about how we know what we think is true, about epistemology and physics and ethics and all of that. And the place he chooses is Mytilene. Mytilene is a city on the island of Lesbos — again another one of those islands right off the coast of Asia Minor, a little bit north I think of Samos, so we’re getting actually closer to the Hellespont, which is a point of important cultural exchange basically all throughout history. So he chooses the city of Mytilene as the place to first begin to teach his philosophy.
Cassius:
And essentially what we learn from Norman DeWitt is that Mytilene was a hotbed of Platonist philosophical thinking. He says that Aristotle actually taught there for two years himself before going to Macedonia to tutor Alexander the Great. And this is really the first lesson that Epicurus gets in holding forth as a philosopher publicly — holding positions in philosophy that are so contrary to the prevailing interests of the philosophical milieu — and essentially what ends up happening is he gets basically run out of town, as the portrayal goes in Norman DeWitt.
Cassius:
Just a little bit historically: Lesbos is, as I said, an island, and it’s probably most famous as being the home of the great lyric poet Sappho, of about the 7th and 6th centuries BC. So this is a very early Greek poet, and a woman — which is always interesting in itself in these very early times, to see someone like this publishing their work. She became actually very famous, and most of her work does not survive. I think one of the few intact poems of Sappho that does survive is a work called the Ode to Aphrodite, which is, I think, intensely personal. But it might be because of this atmosphere — Mytilene is a city with philosophical roots, with deep cultural interests and persuasions — that Epicurus chooses to start in a place like this. He’s not going to leave his education and then go immediately to Athens and try to set up a philosophy. For one thing, at this point he doesn’t really have a whole lot of friends devoted to him in the way that people would later become devoted to him.
Cassius:
Now, the first of the subsections that DeWitt goes into in this chapter is called — and I pronounce it — the Sorites. I have no clue if that’s right. Joshua, did you say you looked that up in Wikipedia to explain what the Sorites syllogism issue is?
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s actually a lot of interesting problems like this from ancient philosophy. I could give a couple of examples. Maybe the earliest legend that has something to do with this is the legend of the Gordian knot — this king in Lycia in Turkey dies, and there’s a prophecy that says that the next man to come into town on an ox cart will be proclaimed king and he’ll be very good at it. So that happens — this basically a merchant comes into town on an ox cart, becomes the king, and to honor the oracle he takes his ox cart and ties a fiendishly difficult knot around it. And I guess the second prophecy was that the next person to solve this knot is going to be the king of all Asia. Well, what ends up happening is Alexander the Great comes through, and the knot has been described by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus — this is from Wikipedia — as comprising several knots also tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened. Alexander the Great hears this story, pulls out his sword, slices the knot in half, and actually does go on to conquer quite a lot of what was thought of as Asia at the time.
Joshua:
The Sorites paradox is more intellectual maybe than that, and there are a couple of other paradoxes of the same style. We actually have talked about one of them before on the podcast — do you remember? I think it might have been during the Torquatus material. I really can’t remember, but it was the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, I think it was. So if you give the tortoise a head start on Achilles, then no matter how fast Achilles runs, he’ll never catch up — because by the time Achilles gets halfway to the tortoise, the tortoise will have already moved forward. And by the time Achilles gets halfway to where the tortoise now moved to, the tortoise will have moved forward again. These sorts of riddles and puzzles and paradoxes were useful in ancient Greece for philosophers who were trying to prove a point about the way nature works. And unfortunately, if you have a bad understanding of nature, your paradox or puzzle is going to also be quite bad. So for example, if you think that motion is impossible, you’re going to produce a paradox that is unsolvable.
Joshua:
So anyway, to get down to what we’re talking about — what I have been calling it this morning is “my grandfather’s shovel.” I don’t know if that’s what it normally goes under, but the idea is: suppose that you were given a shovel by your grandfather, which you cherished — but you also wanted to use it, because that was a way to honor the memory of your grandfather. But as you use it, things start to break. Maybe you’ve now chipped the scoop part of the shovel, so you have to take that off and replace it. And then you keep using your grandfather’s shovel and maybe the handle part becomes loose, so you have to replace that. And then as you keep using it, the wood starts to warp, so you have to replace that. And you get to a certain point in the paradox where you have now replaced every original component of the shovel. And the question remains: to what extent is it still the same shovel? Because partly it’s an issue of how many times do we have to subtract something before it becomes something completely different. Part of it also has to do with people and with — I can’t think of the word, maybe something like nostalgia — this was my grandfather’s shovel, I don’t want to get rid of it. But as you change it over time, you completely alter what the shovel actually is or was.
Joshua:
Another example would be the human body, in which every cell becomes replaced every seven years or whatever it is — we’ve all heard that. And I’ve heard it used in describing cars as well. At what point does a car stop being a car instead of just a bunch of parts? So that’s maybe the current example that people might be familiar with that begins to get to this question. But perhaps the oldest example of this was a heap of something.
Cassius:
Yes. So I’m on the Wikipedia page for the Sorites paradox, and it says: “A typical formulation involves a heap of sand from which grains are removed individually. With the assumption that removing a single grain does not cause a heap to become a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times that only one grain remains. Is it still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?” That’s a basic way to formulate the problem.
Cassius:
Before we turn to what Epicurus might have said that’s relevant to that, it’s pretty obvious what the problem is: at some point what appeared to you to be a heap or pile of sand has ceased to become a pile or heap and come down to only a few grains or one grain. And the question becomes at what point did you remove the quality of “heapness” or “pileness” from those sands? Was there a particular grain that you removed at a particular time that contained the essence of heapness from that heap of sand? It would be the question being asked in this illustration, because — again, since we’re talking about this in the context of Mytilene and the Platonists — the Platonists are always alleging from the point of view of their ideal forms that everything, including a heap or pile, is a reflection of an ideal heap or an ideal pile. There’s a definition or an ideal example of that in this other dimension that we can identify through words and logic and dialectic to determine what the true reality of heapness really is. But Epicurus is saying: well, here’s this heap in front of you, this pile of sand, and you’re removing the grains from it. At what point have you picked up the grain that contains the concept of pile or the concept of a heap? — with the implication being that there’s no such thing as a concept of a pile or a heap that exists in reality, that there’s no ideal form of it floating in another dimension that you can grasp by removing a particular grain or number of grains, that the concept of a pile or a heap is something that is an intellectual function of the human mind and not something generated by the gods or existing in another dimension. Would anybody take anything different from that question or illustration other than what I just said?
Joshua:
On the Wikipedia page, Cassius, there’s a list of proposed resolutions, and the first resolution to this problem is the one you’ve proposed, which I think is adequate enough to reject the underlying Platonist argument here. The first resolution is “denying the existence of heaps.” And if you go down this list, there are probably ten or twelve resolutions to this problem. Just as a side note, they’re phrased very interestingly — for example, “unknowable boundaries” or “epistemicism” — Timothy Williamson and Roy Sorensen claim that there are fixed boundaries, but they are necessarily unknowable. So it’s like the agnostic position on the heap.
Cassius:
Another resolution is supervaluationism. These are terms we really don’t find much value in, do we? And we try to avoid them because we’re not talking to professional philosophers. It’s sufficient to notice that the heap in question does not have any real existence apart from the group of sand grains that it is used to describe. And to claim that there is any necessary “heapness” that exists in the universe and of which this is a kind is simply a false way of looking at it. This is simply a word we use to describe a collection of sand grains, and our philosophy does not stand or fall on whether we pull one grain out and whether that makes it into a non-heap.
Joshua:
I could give one more example. This comes from a professor of philosophy I had in college. He made the illustration of: if you start removing body parts, at what point do you start causing irreparable damage to your soul? If your soul is inside your body — if I cut off my left arm, have I cut off a part of my soul? Same kind of problem. And in most cases these paradoxes seem to rely on a false assumption about what the soul is, or where it is, or whether heapness has any necessary or real existence apart from the grains that make it up. So all of these paradoxes are maybe intellectually stimulating, kind of interesting to talk about a little bit, but not really useful in epistemology. That would be my answer to the problem.
Cassius:
You know, I think I’ll put a slightly different twist on that, when you say “useful in terms of epistemology.” Everybody is at a different stage in what they think is important and what they’re really looking for in terms of guidance and philosophy. And certainly everybody is not equally interested in, for example, what we’ve been doing recently on the forum — spending a lot of time looking at the exact date of Epicurus’s birthday under the ancient Greek calendar — which is extremely interesting to some of us and maybe not so interesting to others. But without attempting to resolve anything today, I would suggest the possibility that the Sorites is perhaps more important than some people might give it credit for. Not you, Joshua — but it reminds me of the exercise in Lucretius where he attempts to get to the issue of whether there’s a boundary to the universe by visualizing throwing a javelin in that direction and what would happen as the javelin continues to travel. It’s a way of illustrating to people that there’s a question here that needs to be examined. And I think Epicurus decides in many cases that these thought experiments are not only mind-expanding but also do point to conclusions in particular directions. And in this case — when the issue is how removing grains one by one from a heap of sand eventually makes it cease to be a heap — I do think there’s a certain number of people, maybe a significant number of people, who are going to understand that that is a method of understanding for yourself that you’ve got to come to terms with this question: do these concepts exist apart from the items that are right in front of you?
Cassius:
Does the concept of capitalism, communism, socialism — any type of complicated conceptual relationship — does that really have a definition somewhere that everybody can be certain of and can aspire towards? Or in fact, do we have nothing but individual realities and we’re just using words to describe as best we can what those realities are? Because I don’t know whether “the heap does not exist” is exactly the right way to say it — certainly a heap of sand is something that means something to us and we can picture a heap of sand or wheat or anything. It’s just that we have to understand that what we’re describing as the heap of sand is not ordained by God, is not set up by the universe itself in another dimension as Plato would have it, and that there’s no essence of heaps as Aristotle might say. We’ve got to understand both points: yes, it’s useful to conceptually describe things with words, but on the other hand these words don’t have any objective meaning established by God or by Plato’s ideal forms or essences. So I think that’s the direction this example is intended to take us.
Cassius:
And so I’m on pages 72 and 73 of the DeWitt book where he’s talking about the Sorites syllogism, and what DeWitt is doing here is he’s pulling out the fragments. First of all, he talks about what Cicero records in the De Finibus and says that Epicurus is reported to have said, quote: “Time and again I demanded to know of those who were called wise, what they had to leave in the list of goods. If they subtracted those pleasures of taste, vision, and other senses, unless they chose to pour forth a stream of meaningless words, I could get no information from them.” Now I would take that to mean that what Epicurus is saying is: when Platonist philosophers or others talk about the good as a conceptual abstraction, let’s talk about subtracting various goods from “the good” and see at what point we no longer have what you’re calling good — because if we subtract our sensations of taste, vision, and other senses from our experience, what’s left other than a stream of meaningless words for the term “the good”? So again, I don’t mean to be implying that we can resolve anything, but I think that’s the issue to be thought about here. Any thoughts on that?
Joshua:
Well, on the point that we won’t resolve it anytime soon — when I look at the Wikipedia page for the Sorites paradox, Cassius, I notice this color gradient on the right side of the page in which on the top of the gradient you have broad samples of the gradual change that you can tell are distinguishable. Like on the left side it’s green, on the right side it’s red. It’s easy to tell that these are very different. But if you take tiny little samples — this little green that’s right next to this green, are they distinguishable? This little greenish-red that’s right next to this little greenish-red, are they distinguishable? The answer is no. What it reminds me of more than anything is the people who will say that microevolution is true, but macroevolution is not true. Because essentially it’s the same problem: if you accept change over time, it’s not sufficient to say that small changes are observable and therefore true, but large changes have never been observed and therefore they’re not true. Well, the large changes we see in this gradient are just a series of small changes over time.
Cassius:
Yes, I’m looking at that chart too. I think that is a good example of what we’re talking about and a good way to illustrate the question. Virtually everybody is going to be able to look — of course I may be colorblind, I may be about to quote the wrong color — but the right-hand side as you said is clearly some shade of red, the left-hand side is clearly some shade of green, but as they merge towards each other, the actual shades that started out as very clear on either end become indistinguishable to us. No doubt we could assign a name for any one of those locations on that spectrum of colors. But those points on the spectrum are not designated by God as being a particular color of chartreuse or something like that, and they don’t exist in the universe apart from us assigning a name to them.
Cassius:
Maybe the point that’s important to stress is that it’s not a matter of saying that colors don’t exist — we do use colors extremely precisely and we find them very useful and they’re reproducible between different people and there’s definitely something here that you can work with and it’s important to work with. The issue is not that colors don’t exist. The issue is just making sure you don’t make the mistake of thinking that colors are generated in some other dimension of ideal forms, or that there’s an essence of the color green, or that God spoke and the color green came into existence.
Cassius:
I think if I had to stress a particular point out of this argument, that’s the point to go back to. What Epicurus is quoted by DeWitt as saying — citing Cicero again — is: “These men, if they will only get rid of their fancy notions of virtue and wisdom, will mean nothing else than the means by which those pleasures which I have listed above are obtained.” I would say that the analogy there is: looking at the bar chart of the green and the red, you could consider “virtue” to be like a color on such a chart, and you have to realize that there is no objective definition of the individual virtues on a chart like this. You cannot separate virtue from actions which we decide to be virtuous.
Cassius:
And there’s another related quote from Epicurus that DeWitt cites on page 73: “For my own part, I am at a loss to know what meaning I shall attach to the good, subtracting the pleasures of taste, subtracting the pleasures of love, subtracting the pleasures of the ears, subtracting also the pleasures of the eyes in beauty of form and beauty of movement.” That is a particularly important quotation, because it really gets to the heart of what Epicurus meant when he talks about pleasure. We talk about that a lot as if we’re contrasting Plato’s view of the good versus Epicurus’s view of the good and saying that this means Epicurus is saying the good is pleasure. I think that’s probably a legitimate conclusion, but it also has a very epistemological, logical aspect to it. It shows you the way in which he’s getting at the question — not only does it tell you what the answer is, but it tells you how he’s getting to the answer. In fact, would it not be fair to say that this is applicable to the word “pleasure” itself? There is no ideal form of pleasure in another universe. There is no definition of pleasure given by God or no essence of pleasure other than the individual pleasures that we feel and experience for ourselves. Is that a fair conclusion?
Joshua:
Yeah, I certainly think that’s a fair conclusion.
Cassius:
So in the concluding paragraph here, DeWitt says: “The true import of this passage has escaped detection. It is the Sorites syllogism in narrative form. The key word is ‘subtract’ for a correct understanding.” The argument, DeWitt thinks, must be restored to dialogue form. He says it consists of a chain of questions: “Do you deny the name of good to the pleasures of taste? Yes. Do you deny the name of good to the pleasures of love? Yes.” And so on with the rest. At the end of the chain, the interlocutor has denied the name of good to everything that the man in the street calls pleasure. And there is left only the pleasures of the mind — and that the argument did arrive at this termination is made plain by Cicero, and he goes on to quote him: “Neither can this be said that the pleasure of the mind alone is to be ranked among goods. It was thus that the imprudent Epicurus chose to exasperate his competitors.”
Cassius:
We have talked a little bit about the Philebus material — is that where we got Plato, in the person of Socrates, talking about what is the good? Socrates is trying to put forward the idea that the mind itself is the good, or reason itself is the good. And so when Epicurus says it’s not just the pleasures of the mind that should be ranked among the goods but also the pleasures of the body, this is a fairly interesting take.
Joshua:
Yeah, I’m thinking that it’s basically like Epicurus is asking Plato: “Do you deny that the pleasures of taste are good?” And Plato will say yes, because that’s not where the good is. And Epicurus would say: “Do you deny the name of good to the pleasures of love?” And Plato would say yes. And an Epicurean could go on down the list of asking that question as to everything that we in normal life believe to be good — whether it’s food, or dance, or music, or literature, or art, or anything. Epicurus would ask: “Do you deny that those items are good, Plato?” And Plato will say yes, because the good exists in ideal form. And so I guess the point of this is that by the end of this chain of questions, the Epicurean has shown that Plato is denying the name of good to every common experience of pleasure, every common experience that common people find to be good in everyday life. And he’s said those aren’t the good. And so what’s left, Plato? And there’s really not a good answer to that from Plato, according to the Epicurean perspective.
Cassius:
And then DeWitt does something interesting here. He sort of caps off this section by moving on to Epicurus’s citation of Homer. There is Homer’s understanding of pleasure as the good. And it comes from this passage — let me see if I can get the quote here. It says: the Phaeacian king is addressed and the speaker is Odysseus — “Verily this is a beautiful thing: to be listening to a bard such as this man is, with a voice like the gods. For to my mind I say no consummation is nearer perfection than when rejoicing prevails among the whole people, and the banqueters, seated in order in the halls, are listening to a bard, when the tables abound in bread and meats and the wine-bearer draws the sweet drink from the mixing bowl and pours it into the cups.”
Cassius:
I mean, it’s pretty clear what DeWitt is trying to do here. He’s trying to take what the philosophers in Mytilene want pleasure to look like — as being exclusively a mental or intellectual process — and comparing it directly with what we read in Homer, in which pleasure includes but is not limited to listening to the voice of the bard, rejoicing in company at a banquet where there’s bread and meat and wine. It’s a much more complete picture of what pleasure is, and we can see for that reason why Epicurus might have used it.
Joshua:
Yeah, and I think one of the points too that DeWitt is making here is that Homer and these stories were the foundation of Greek mythology and Greek understanding of the gods — it was like almost the Bible, I presume, in the sense that when Homer said something, the Greeks held it in extremely high regard. And so the fact that Epicurus could appeal to Homer and find something in Homer where Homer is praising pleasure in a standard, understandable sense — “no consummation is nearer perfection than when these things are going on” — that would be something the Platonists would have found particularly distasteful, because he’s citing one of their own authorities and saying: here’s Homer agreeing with me, that pleasure and friendship — the things that we can understand from our human lives — is something identifiable with the ultimate good.
Cassius:
DeWitt calls that an almost sacrilegious equivalent to quoting the Bible in support of evolution. Yeah, and he indicates that in the Greek, in that passage from Homer, two words are important. One of them is telos — this very prominent word in Greek philosophy meaning “the end” or “the goal,” meaning the proper goal of human life — and of course for Epicurus that end is pleasure, and Homer seems to be portraying something similar in this passage. And the other word of importance is euphrosyne — which I guess was a word commonly used by Plato and Aristotle to signify a pleasure superior to hedone, merely the pleasures of the body or the pleasures of the moment — and denoted the enjoyment of pure reason contemplating absolute truth. That’s the telos articulated by the Philebus dialogue. But to see that word used in this context to describe the atmosphere of a banquet — you can see why that would be a challenge to Plato and Aristotle. But the fact that it comes from Homer makes it even worse.
Cassius:
And I see that before DeWitt leaves the section on citing Homer as a hedonist, he uses one more illustration that he cites from the Iliad. There’s a section that says: “This is the lot the gods have apportioned to miserable mortals — to live in sorrow — but no care have they themselves.” And there’s apparently a scholium somewhere in the text that says: “From this, Epicurus infers that the incorruptible and blissful being has neither care nor worries, nor occasions them to others, and for this reason is susceptible of neither anger nor gratitude.” And of course this is Principal Doctrine 1. So you’ve got at least two key doctrines of Epicurus that he can cite back to Homer for authority: that the gods don’t have any cares themselves — which easily translates into Principal Doctrine 1 — and then this statement we’ve just been discussing, that there’s no greater telos than the rejoicing which prevails among banqueters among friends. So those are two examples where he’s citing the authority of the opposing schools against their own positions.
Cassius:
And there’s a third example: he quotes Sophocles of the Oedipus cycle — this is just above the heading of “Rhetoric” on page 75. So he uses Homer to establish that pleasure was good, and not just the pleasure of pure reason contemplating absolute truth. And then he cites Sophocles — one of the great tragic playwrights — for his argument for why pain is considered to be an evil. And I think it’s doubly penetrating here because the figure experiencing the pain is Heracles, or Hercules, who goes on to become an important figure in Stoicism and I think also in Cynicism. The quote from Sophocles goes like this: “Biting, screaming in pain, and all around his moans were echoed by the Lemnian rocks and headlands.” And he may also have cited a humorous passage from Homer where the wounded god of War is described as bellowing like nine or ten thousand men when they raise the battle cry. And the conclusion is: if Ares himself, like Heracles, bellowed with pain when wounded, why should not the wise man moan and wail aloud when on the rack? Pain was manifestly evil, just as pleasure was manifestly good.
Cassius:
And the next sentence is that DeWitt says it’s difficult to think of tricks of controversy better calculated than these to exasperate adversaries and to afford them grounds for arousing the populace against Epicurus. Implicitly here, the Stoics, the Platonists — everybody in the traditional Greek line of thinking — were taking the position that the gods would not have regarded pain as an evil, that the point would be that if Hercules was indeed divine and experiencing pain, he would have bitten his tongue and not expressed any feeling of pain or cried out. But here we’ve got in these classical Greek stories the gods celebrating pleasure and the gods bemoaning pain when they have it. With Heracles — I think like you said — his trials and examples were often used as models of the ideal way to live. This must sound quite a lot like that phrase you often see in Christianity: even the devil may cite scripture to his purpose.
Joshua:
One thing he does point out here is that Hermarchus was actually one of the people that Epicurus met in Mytilene, and who later became the second head of the school in Athens — only because Metrodorus had previously died.
Cassius:
Well, this is slightly off-topic, but maybe we can talk about this for a little bit productively — because we’ve got a thread on the forum ongoing that compares this passage in Thucydides on the plague with the end of Lucretius, and because we’re talking about quoting ancient sources here, it seems slightly relevant. Of course I have not read Emily Austin’s book yet, but this has apparently become all the rage on the forum recently — I really ought to get a copy of it. One thing we should probably mention here is that the flight from Mytilene to Lampsacus is echoed by a moment earlier in history. Anaxagoras — who lived maybe 100 or 150 years before Epicurus — when he was going to be put on trial in Athens for charges of impiety (for positions like, for example, that the Sun is not a god but a ball of hot metal larger than the Peloponnese), he actually escaped so as not to be put to death and lived his exile out in Lampsacus.
Cassius:
So that gives us this understanding that Lampsacus is the kind of city where you can go and not experience the same pressure from the authorities that you might elsewhere. The Platonist inquisition has not reached that far. So when Epicurus eventually leaves Mytilene — after causing all the problems we’ve been describing by use of quoting Homer, the Sorites syllogism, quoting Sophocles, all these methods he uses to poke and prod the Platonist philosophers in Mytilene — he eventually leaves town and goes to Lampsacus. And this is where, under the heading of the Lampsacene circle, he goes on to meet some of the most important figures in what would become the Garden in Athens. I think Metrodorus and his brother, and Polyaenus, and Idomeneus — who is the person to whom his will is addressed — and Leonteus and his wife Themista, and Leontium. So this is really where he begins to build the circle of friends that would completely color the rest of his life and go on to become his companions, and ultimately in a few cases his heirs, once the Garden school in Athens is established.
Joshua:
Yeah, what he’s doing in the rest of this chapter here is talking a lot about the different people that he came into contact with before getting to Athens, and there’s a lot of good material here of interest. This is something that DeWitt does a really good job with — he’s read all of these detailed references in the materials and he knows how they fit together after spending a lifetime of classical study in a way that most of us who don’t have a lifetime of classical study are really unable to do.
Cassius:
Yeah, there’s a quote on about the middle of page 80. It says: “If all the foregoing items of information be now assembled, it becomes very probable that Epicurus was already practicing his known precept: under no circumstance pass up an opportunity to disseminate the doctrines of the true philosophy.” And there’s a lot in here about the change that was wrought in Epicurus during his early efforts to spread the philosophy. When we finally do get to the point where he’s in Athens, he’s no longer engaging philosophers in the public square directly. He’s seen what that will get him — you see it in Anaxagoras, as I mentioned; you see it in Socrates. So what he goes on to do is to establish a garden on his own private land in which he will teach his students and anyone who basically comes and wants to listen to him. But he’s not going to go to the Agora or the gymnasium — he’s not going to go out there and teach in public. What they will do is put a bust or statue of Epicurus in public to sort of direct attention to the school, but the school was taught in private.
Cassius:
And we might talk a little bit about how that was a way that he could disseminate the doctrines of the true philosophy, as it says on page 80, without reliving what he had experienced in Mytilene. Because Athens — in spite of its reputation as the cradle of democracy, a word often used — probably had quite a lot of the same problems that Mytilene had. It was probably an environment in which his views, if expressed publicly, would have been hugely controversial to the established authorities in the city. He probably would have been charged as Socrates was charged — with corrupting the youth — and probably in Epicurus’s case with more reason. He seems to think that teaching in private is simply a better practice than teaching in public. Probably something he learned in Mytilene.
Cassius:
I think what I’m seeing here as a sort of lesson to take home from this particular chapter, and everything we’ve read so far about Epicurus’s background, is that again Epicurus is not just a particularly brilliant writer who all of a sudden emerges like a god from the head of Zeus, full-blown writing these brilliant articles and everybody just lays down at his feet proclaiming how wonderful he is. Epicurus went through a long period of development — growing up, coming into contact with other schools, being taught himself, experimenting, and getting negative reactions at times from some of the things he was saying. And of course what we’re doing by talking about this is to try to find things that are relevant to our own lives and what we can do ourselves. Probably that’s something extremely relevant to how to apply Epicurean philosophy in the modern world: you cannot expect just to talk about Epicurus as a philosopher of happiness and have the world beat a path to his door, thinking that just by saying Epicurus values pleasure and dislikes pain, he’s so embraceable that everyone will say “hey great, let’s talk more about pleasure and how to avoid pain.”
Cassius:
Epicurus was a campaigner and in the process of setting up a school. Having a school means that it’s separate from other schools — and that there are ideas he’s involved with and friendships and relationships with people who are his closer friends, which means there are other people who are not in that circle and who are probably going to be organizing against him, as apparently was taking place in these earlier locations where he was beginning to teach. The role of a philosopher, a teacher, and sort of a prophet is not always welcomed by everyone. When you start overturning existing ideas and saying that things need to be rethought and that the common consensus is something that needs to be challenged and questioned, you create a lot of resistance — which somebody today pursuing Epicurean philosophy would have to expect to encounter the same kind of situation.
Cassius:
In fact, though we haven’t gone through Emily Austin’s book in detail yet, I think there’s a sense in which you can see some of that in the way she presents her book. She’s a philosophy teacher in North Carolina, and it’s clear from the way she writes that she understands that in promoting Epicurean philosophy, she is not promoting a position that everyone agrees with — and that it’s going to be met with resistance even to suggest that Epicurus has things to say that people should listen to today. It’s going to encounter much the same resistance that Epicurus himself encountered in ancient Greece. There’s such a lot of explosive material in Epicurean philosophy that there are controversies that cannot be avoided that are key to understanding and really appreciating the pieces that people find so attractive.
Cassius:
I know, Joshua, I think you’ve talked about this at times before. There are certain church fathers — is it Augustine, or someone — who quotes a church father who said he would have given the palm to Epicurus as the most persuasive philosophy, except he couldn’t give up eternal life. Something like that. Was it St. Augustine?
Joshua:
Yes, I should know — when I quote a Catholic father, I should always turn to you, Cassius, for verification.
Joshua:
I was going to follow up on some things you said there with kind of a question. Because what you’ve referred to in Epicurus is a period of development, and you’re talking about ways we can sort of understand these things through the perspective of our own lives. Cassius, you’ve been active in online Epicurean spaces now for over a decade, I have to imagine. To what extent do you think your perspective and opinions on a lot of these issues have changed over time? Because I occasionally see you reassess an opinion you’ve long held on a finer point of Epicurean philosophy, or maybe the interpretation of a certain work. Recently I remember you talking about reinterpreting your approach to the Philebus material that I was quoting a little bit earlier. So to what extent is this kind of a process that changes over time as you continue to approach the texts and the secondary information about the philosophy?
Cassius:
I think the most important thing I would say in response to that — that I’ve observed in myself — is that it’s just inevitable, I think, for anybody who’s grown up in the twentieth or twenty-first century. You have grown up in a totally different perspective about religion, the nature of the world, the nature of the universe, the nature of good, humanism, secularism, all these different things. And it just takes time, I think, to begin to realize what a different orientation Epicurus is. Of course if you’re a professional philosophy student — you go to college, you study philosophy, you immerse yourself into it — then you’re going to pretty quickly realize that there’s just so much out there that it’s very hard to reach any conclusions at all. But I believe that philosophy is important for everybody, not just professional philosophers, and I think Epicurus is taking a practical common-sense approach that almost anybody can understand who’s of average intelligence.
Cassius:
Even when you start talking about something as relatively complicated as the Sorites syllogism or paradox, it becomes understandable to most people if you’ll just confront the question. So what I’ve experienced is: there are issues like “anticipations,” for example — I’m still trying to decide what I really think is going on with that aspect of the canonics section. But to me the key fundamental pieces are pretty understandable once you begin to realize that you’ve got to let go of what I would say is sort of the traditional Western consensus about virtue and honor — virtue in particular. The Stoicism, the whole issue that there is an absolute virtue, an absolute right and wrong, is very difficult to let go of. That’s probably what I see most. And issues of determinism and so forth — all of those things are very difficult, and it just takes time to absorb them.
Cassius:
So I guess if your question was directed to how this applies to most people today, I would say people have to understand — just what Norman DeWitt says at the very beginning of this book — that Epicurus is one of the most revered and also the most reviled philosophers of all time. And the practical advice I would give somebody studying Epicurus is: you need to understand that early on, and be careful in terms of how you use the information, who you discuss things with, who you’re working with on these things. Because it’s going to take a great deal of independent thinking for almost everybody. There are very few people who are going to fall into a community of people who are sympathetic to Epicurus in the first place. It’s going to take a lot of willingness to challenge your preconceived notions and willingness to follow the logic presented in the original Epicurean texts — especially the letters of Epicurus — and then Lucretius. In reading through Lucretius you’ve got a very good explanation of the thought processes involved in Epicurean philosophy, and you can learn those on your own. And you’re not going to get a lot of assistance from other people.
Cassius:
There are still many areas that have to be explored and articulated in a better way. That’s why I’ve been so pleased to read the Emily Austin book — I think there’s a lot of good material there and a good way to take a new look, for people who don’t have a lot of philosophy background, at what Epicurus was saying. But now that I’ve rambled an answer to your question, the conclusion I come to — if everything we’re doing on this podcast is trying to relate to people who are non-professional philosophers and trying to give them something helpful in their own lives — is to read this material for yourself, be willing to think independently, be willing to question basically everything you’ve thought previously. It’s almost a Nietzschean type of approach when he talks about smashing the existing tables and transvaluing things and overcoming man and so forth. Regardless of what you think of Nietzsche, there’s that kind of aggressive attitude toward this philosophy that I really think is the key to it. As much as I enjoy pleasure myself, and as much as I dislike pain myself, it’s this aggressive approach to wanting to use your life as best you can that I think is really important in Epicurean philosophy. It’s all the difference in the world between “turn on, tune in, drop out” — which some people came up with in the sixties as the way to deal with the modern world — as opposed to digging into the reality and, instead of dropping out, engaging with it as aggressively as you can. I think that’s what Epicurus was suggesting.
Joshua:
Yeah, part of what motivated the question for me was: I’ve been active on the forum since, I don’t know, 2016 or something like that. I will occasionally read something I wrote maybe four years ago and as I read it I’m thinking — who wrote this? This is so contrary to my own opinions and what I’m thinking today about certain aspects of Epicurean philosophy, it’s almost as if a completely different person wrote it. So for most of us it’s not going to be like flicking the first domino and everything just falls into place seamlessly. There’s going to be an ongoing process of reading and integrating and assimilating and revising and reading some more. This is I think part of what Philodemus was talking about when he talked about the prevailing problem that he saw with Epicureans during his own time — this is about the first century BC in the Roman Republic. He says that the thing that put him off most about his contemporary Epicureans was their inexcusable ignorance of the texts. They’re not going back and reading the texts. There are people who are just happy reading summaries or epitomes of the main points. But you know, it’s not like you’re going to just flip a switch and understand it directly. It’s a process that has to be carried out over time, and you have to continually go back to the source material — which we don’t have a whole lot of, which is why books like Emily Austin’s book and Norman DeWitt’s book become so important.
Joshua:
And I can’t think of a better way to come to a conclusion on that than by citing what is it — the end of the Letter to Menoikeus? — where he advises people to study these issues with like-minded friends. And if there’s anything that’s advanced my understanding over the years, it has been the interaction with people such as you guys here on this podcast, and the other people on the EpicureanFriends forum, and over at Facebook, and the different other places that we’ve interacted over the years. It’s really the discussion of these issues and the exploration of them that leads you to a deeper understanding. It’s not something you can just read superficially, decide “pleasure is good and pain is bad,” and consider yourself a top-flight Epicurean. It’s almost laughable to me at this point in my life to suggest something like that — though it seems to be the case in some circles — as if the identification of pleasure as the good and pain as the evil is some sort of ultimate contribution of Epicurus to the world. And while there’s certainly an aspect of that that’s true, I don’t think that’s what he would want to be remembered for. He would want to be remembered for the process of escaping these erroneous ideas and showing people how they can come to that understanding themselves — not just take his word for it, or anybody else’s word for anything. If there’s anything I would summarize about Epicurean philosophy, it’s that “question authority” attitude: deciding what is your authority? Are you going to listen to other people and what they tell you, or are you going to use the faculties that nature gave you and employ those to seek out the truth for yourself? And I feel sure that Epicurus would have a whole lot more respect for somebody who took that path and came to a different conclusion than he would for somebody who just decided “I agree with Epicurus and I’m just going to do what he said.” That’s not the point of Epicurean philosophy at all.
Cassius:
Okay, well, why don’t we begin to come to a conclusion for today. Maybe we’ve already come to the conclusion. But any final thoughts? And next week we’ll devote the next episode to Chapter 5 and the beginnings of the organizational structure of the Epicurean movement. I realized I was writing something this weekend and sometimes I was using the term “Epicurean philosophy” and sometimes “Epicurean movement” — and I do kind of think that Epicurus was setting up a movement. Maybe “school” is the right word, but it’s more than just a philosophy. It was a group of people organizing together to live happily in the way that they saw as best for them to do. So Joshua, any final thoughts for today?
Joshua:
Well, it’s funny you say what you said at the end there about it being a movement, because when I was looking at that quote by Cicero earlier — all I could think of was it’s almost like Epicureanism is like Beatlemania in Italy, the way Cicero uses this — “it took Italy by storm.” So “movement” is probably not entirely the wrong word to describe it. But whatever you call it, it’s something that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about, researching, and probably above all doing this podcast on. And that’ll about do it for me.
Cassius:
Okay, very good. All right, well, we’ll come back next week and do it again. So thanks for your time today, and we’ll see you next week.