Episode 152 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 08 - The New Education 01
Date: 12/14/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2769-episode-152-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-08-the-new-education-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 152 covers the first half of Chapter 6 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, “The New Education.” All four panelists — Cassius, Joshua, Martin, and Callistheni — are present. The Platonic educational program consisted of music and gymnastics (inherited from Athenian tradition), rhetoric (introduced by the Sophists), and dialectic and mathematics especially geometry (Plato’s own additions). Epicurus’s “new education” is a reaction against this program and must be understood in context, not taken superficially.
Joshua opens by connecting the Greek embrace of music and gymnastics to Xenophon’s Anabasis (the “march of the ten thousand”): when the Greek mercenary army, hired by the Persian prince Cyrus to help him seize the throne from his brother Artaxerxes, finally escaped danger and reached the Black Sea coast, they celebrated their survival by holding gymnastic games — an outpouring of Greek cultural instinct. DeWitt’s main point is that Epicurus endorsed music and gymnastics, but rejected the deeper Platonic claims built upon them. Cassius connects this to Vatican Saying 47 — “we will leave life singing a glorious triumph song on how well we lived” — as the proper Epicurean spirit: not escapism but active celebration of living. DeWitt’s summary of the shift: the objective of Platonic education was to produce a good citizen; Epicurus’s objective was to produce a happy man. DeWitt cites Juvenal’s phrase mens sana in corpore sano (“a sound mind in a sound body”) as genuine Epicureanism — though the full Juvenal passage also contains Stoic notes (Hercules’s labors better than Sardanapalus’s banquets). Horace’s own twist is that length of days is the only fitting subject for prayer, since a healthy mind is something you give yourself.
On rhetoric: Cassius notes that Epicurus is not simply against persuasive speaking but against rhetoric as a tool tied to demagogy and the manipulation of the multitude, referencing Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger and the De Finibus citation — Plutarch records that “Epicurus and the Circle write about oratory to deter us from becoming orators.” The key point is that rhetoric in the ancient world carried epistemological and political connotations far beyond mere public speaking.
On mathematics and geometry: Joshua explains that Pythagorean numerology carried these to absurd heights — claiming 10 was the perfect number because 1+2+3+4=10, and therefore 10 must also be the number of heavenly spheres. The problem is not mathematics itself but the claim, most visible in Plato, that geometry can prove absolute truth about ideal forms and the nature of reality. Epicurus explicitly rejects this misapplication.
The episode’s second half focuses on the subheadings “The Heavenly Apocalypse” and “Tour of the Universe.” DeWitt notes that the conceit of ascending above the earth to view things from a higher perspective was common in ancient philosophy: Plato’s Phaedrus has the soul ascending in a chariot, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio has Scipio look down at earth from above, and Lucretius’s great opening passage in Book 1 has Epicurus traveling through the universe and returning to share what he has seen. Cassius reads the Rolfe Humphries translation: “The Greek it was who first opposing dared / raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand… And thus his will and hearty wisdom won / and forward thus he fared afar beyond / the flaming ramparts of the world.” The panel emphasizes that this is a journey in thought, not in body. The Prometheus myth — fire stolen from the gods and given to humanity — is invoked as a cultural analogy, though Lucretius specifically replaces it with his own naturalistic account of how fire was discovered (lightning striking forest). Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is quoted: “to follow knowledge like a sinking star / beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
Horace’s relationship to Epicureanism is discussed in depth: his early work contains a clear Epicurean note (“fat and sleek, a hog from Epicurus’s herd”), but after the defeat at Philippi and the establishment of Augustan imperial rule, he explicitly repudiates it. Joshua quotes A.S. Kline’s translation: “Once I wandered an expert in crazy wisdom / a scant and infrequent adorer of the gods / now I’m forced to set sail and return… for Jupiter, father of all the gods, / who generally splits the clouds with his lightning, / drove thundering horses and swift chariot through the clear sky” — a direct repudiation of Lucretius’s argument about lightning on clear days. Cassius links this to Cicero’s late-life admission: “I don’t know where, if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, then I err gladly — and I would not have this belief stripped from me while I’m still alive.” Both men’s late-life retreats from Epicurean conclusions under stress are treated as a warning about the necessity of genuine philosophical preparation, not just intellectual familiarity.
The guide/map analogy is developed: DeWitt notes that the Greek word periodos, like the Latin itinerarium, means not only a tour or journey but also a map or guidebook. Cassius elaborates: Epicurus is a guide who has traveled the path himself and shares what he has seen, not a dictator demanding assent. “The map is not the territory.” The episode closes with Callistheni’s question about wonder in Epicureanism, prompting Cassius and Joshua to discuss the Lucretius passage about jaded human beings who no longer look up at the stars — translated by Rolfe Humphries — and Joshua’s citation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s parallel: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore…” The James Webb Space Telescope images are mentioned as a contemporary example of wonder at the scale of nature. A brief note on suicide ends the episode: the panel affirms that Epicurean fearlessness about death is not an invitation to end life, but the opposite — to hold onto life as long as it makes sense because only the living can experience pleasure. Next week: second half of Chapter 6, the Epicurean approach to books and publishing.
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 152 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing the discussion of the background of the Epicurean school using Norman DeWitt as an organizational method, and this week we’re talking about Chapter 6, “The New Education.” We’re beginning with the discussion about Epicurean education. The Epicurean approach towards teaching people was a reaction to, and to some extent in response to, the method that was in place at the time the school was started — which primarily was the Platonic method, which consisted of music and gymnastic inherited from the Athenian past, of rhetoric which had been introduced by the Sophists, and of dialectic and mathematics, especially geometry, which was the addition of Plato himself.
Cassius:
In this chapter today, as we’re discussing the new education, from here on out we’re hitting major issues in each chapter that are going to be significant in Epicurean philosophy. With the new education we’re dealing with, for example, the issue that Epicurus is perceived as an enemy of culture — as we’ve discussed numbers of times in the past. So what we need to do is look at what was existing as culture at the time that Epicurus started teaching. When we go through these elements that DeWitt has just mentioned — especially music and gymnastics, with music being related to poetry — that’s an area of expertise that Joshua has, and so whenever that subject comes up I like to hear what Joshua has to say about Epicurus’s attitude towards music and poetry and the way we should take that.
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s a line in here, Cassius, that really stands out to me — it’s the second paragraph where he says the Platonic program consisted of music and gymnastic inherited from the Athenian past. And those two in particular I want to talk about, because there’s a book that was written right about the time that Epicurus lived — actually by a Greek general and acquaintance of Socrates, this guy named Xenophon — and the book is called Anabasis, which in Greek means “upcountry march.”
Joshua:
So very briefly I’ll give you the story and then I’ll try to get to the point. The general story is that you’ve got the Persian king — Darius II — who was on his deathbed. So he called his two sons, of which the eldest was Artaxerxes and the youngest was Cyrus. He tells them: “I’m pretty sure I’m about to die. This is how I want to dispose of the kingdom when I’m dead. Artaxerxes, you’ll be the high king in Babylon. Cyrus, you’re going to have this other area here that you’ll be in charge of — much smaller area.” Okay, so then he dies and Artaxerxes takes the throne. Artaxerxes is convinced by one of his courtiers that Cyrus is plotting against him. So he has him imprisoned — which is quite possibly the worst thing he ever did, because even though Cyrus was innocent of the charge laid against him, when he was finally freed by his brother, he vowed personally to himself never again to be under his control. So for the next several years, he began slowly consolidating his position with the eventual goal of marching on Babylon and deposing his brother and taking the throne for himself. To that end, one of the things he did was hire a Greek mercenary army of somewhere between twelve and fourteen thousand Greek soldiers. And Xenophon, the guy who wrote the book, was in the army.
Joshua:
This is an absolutely true story and a very fascinating one. The Greek army goes to Persia under the pretext that they will be used to put down some insurrection on the border — some minor dispute is what they believe they’ve been called there to do. It’s only as they begin to march, and they’re marching in the wrong direction, that they begin to realize they’ve been lied to. And Cyrus convinces them — “I’ll double your pay, I’ll triple your pay” — he convinces them to stay and fight. And in any case they can’t really turn back now because the whole might of the Persian cavalry is behind them. So what they do is they actually march on Babylon. There is a great battle in the field outside the city walls. The Greek army is victorious — they beat the Persian garrison at Babylon — but unfortunately Cyrus is killed in the battle. So the man who had hired them is now dead, and the Persian cavalry is coming up behind them very quickly.
Joshua:
So in an effort to decide what to do — some of their generals had actually been killed under the flag of truce during a parley after the battle — they elect new generals. One of these new generals that they elected was Xenophon, the man who wrote the book. And what they quickly determined to do is: you can’t turn around and go back the way you came, because that’s the way the Persian cavalry are coming up the road. So what we need to do is get north as quickly as possible to the Greek colonies on the coast of the Black Sea. And so the whole rest of the book — the bulk of the book — is this long, arduous, difficult march across the whole length and breadth of Persia to get the Greek army to safety. It’s a fascinating read. I’d recommend it to literally anybody. It’s one of my favorite books from the Greek world. But what was so interesting to me as I read it is what happened when the Greek army finally crested the hill and reached the sea. They’ve reached safety — because once you’ve reached the sea, you can find a Greek city, you can get a boat and go back home. So this is for the first time in months they’ve realized, “okay, we’re probably actually going to survive this.” So what they do — very strangely from my point of view when I first read it — was in celebration they decided to hold a series of games: gymnastic contests, running contests. It’s this outpouring of Greek culture, Greek talent, Greek interest. And it’s absolutely fascinating. What you feel when you read this book in that particular moment is the sheer relief of these soldiers who by all rights probably ought to have died, but managed to survive, and in the moment of survival decided to celebrate their survival in a uniquely Greek way.
Joshua:
So when DeWitt says here in the second paragraph of this chapter that the Platonic program consisted of music and gymnastics inherited from the Athenian past, and that Epicurus himself will go on to endorse both of those aspects of the Platonic curriculum — I think he’s absolutely right, and it’s one of the most interesting parts of Greek culture. The whole dating system of Greek culture is the Olympiad, the Olympic games. It’s a very different way of looking at things, but a very interesting one.
Cassius:
Joshua, that’s a fascinating story, and it reminds me of a couple of things. Basically you’re focusing on the gymnastic aspect — a little bit on the music as well — but to me the emphasis there is the Greek attitude toward life. When they get to the end of this long struggle, it’s not like they just immediately rush off to go sleep for a week or whatever. They decide to celebrate instead, which presumably would have included at least singing along with the gymnastics. And one of the sayings this reminds me of is Vatican Saying 47: “I have anticipated Fortune and closed off every one of your devious entrances, and I won’t give myself as captive to you, or to any circumstance, but when it’s time for us to go, spitting contempt on life and those who cling to it vainly, we will leave life singing aloud a glorious triumph song on how well we lived.” And to me that is indicative of the Epicurean approach here. We’re not just looking to escape from problems so that we can then go to sleep or rest as if that’s the only thing that’s important in life. We’re looking to celebrate and achieve the enjoyment that comes from when we do successfully live life.
Cassius:
DeWitt continues in the section you’ve been talking about by joining it with a discussion that the objective of Platonic education had perhaps been the production of a good citizen, but that Epicurus’s objective was to produce a happy and contented man. And DeWitt says that for practical purposes this happiness was defined as health of mind and health of body, with the famous phrase of Juvenal — mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind and a sound body — recommended by Juvenal as genuine Epicureanism. And while Juvenal may be a Roman writing long after Epicurus lived, it’s always seemed to me that DeWitt is getting the spirit here correct — that Epicurus was transferring the goal of life from being virtuous, or being a good citizen, or being a good subject of some supernatural god, to what he identified as the proper goal: what nature had intended, using pleasure and pain as the guides that nature has given us. Living a happy life based on our experiences in life — not worrying about some life after death which doesn’t exist, or worrying about some supernatural commandments, or worrying about some ideal forms or essences that don’t exist — but following nature and the guidance of pleasure and pain. And that’s what is contained in those words: health of mind and health of body. When your body is healthy it feels good, and when your mind is healthy you’re feeling good — and when I say good, of course that’s a generic word for saying you’re experiencing pleasure of a type.
Cassius:
So to me the example of Xenophon and the Greeks escaping from peril in Persia again brings to mind the quote from Plutarch about how Epicurus said that we should look to the escape from some terrible danger, and the feeling that arises in us after that, as a way of identifying what the good is — rather than walking around ceaselessly debating the meaning of the word “good.” So you look to real human experiences as the definition of what you’re trying to do with your education and with your life.
Joshua:
Let me just say something about this quote by Juvenal, just for context. The fuller quote goes like this: “You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a stout heart that hath no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of nature’s gifts, that can endure any kind of toil, that knows neither wrath nor desire, and thinks the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus. What I commend to you, you can give to yourself. For assuredly the only road to a life of peace is virtue.” There’s a quote from Horace which I’ve been looking for, in which he to my mind kind of takes Juvenal to task here. He says that it’s not a healthy mind in a healthy body that I should pray for — those are things I can give myself — but that length of days is the only gift that it’s proper to ask for. So an interesting twist on a similar idea: you don’t need to pray for a healthy mind because part of the work is to establish it for yourself. Just an interesting dichotomy in the way you can look at it there. I need to find the Horace quote and put it in the show notes.
Cassius:
I seem to remember that Thomas Jefferson adopted this issue of what you should pray for and what you should not pray for too, but I can’t remember the detail. But when you read the full Juvenal quote, that clearly is not pure Epicureanism in total at all — it sounds like he’s definitely got a Stoic vibe going on at least in part of what he’s saying.
Joshua:
Yeah, well, it’s funny because I can’t think of anybody who wouldn’t want a healthy mind and a healthy body.
Cassius:
Well, but Joshua — when you say that, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t want it either. But if virtue is your goal, and virtue is the only thing that is important in life, and everything else is only instrumental at best, and you could be indifferent to everything other than virtue — then maybe the Stoics are going to be willing to dispute us on that. But I can’t think of any sane person who would not want a healthy mind and a healthy body.
Cassius:
So what DeWitt does in this first chapter — before we go into his subheadings — is that we’ve just been talking about music and gymnastics. DeWitt has also pointed out that the Platonic education included rhetoric and then dialectic and mathematics, especially geometry. Rhetoric has always been something I’ve been a little bit unclear about — exactly what they’re talking about. I know there’s a Philodemus work on rhetoric, and I gather it’s just sort of the art of using words for persuasion without any major concern about what it is you’re persuading people to do. Joshua, or anybody, how do you interpret rhetoric?
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. I guess to master rhetoric, what you really want to master is the ability to speak persuasively, contemporaneously, about any particular issue. And I think I remember reading that in British education, this was given quite important stature, with the idea that if you’re going to raise a group of people who are going to later serve in Parliament, they need to be able to actually stand up and speak and express what they’re trying to convince other people of. And so what they would do — based on my reading of British education at some indeterminate period I’m describing — is they would take cases from the ancient world, for example: “Here’s a sticky position that Demosthenes once found himself in. Now you have to stand up there and give me a speech in character as Demosthenes, counseling on what we should do in this terrible circumstance.” A very difficult method of training, but the goal absolutely is to produce people who can speak persuasively off the cuff about anything. I think it would be fair to say this is how Cicero probably made a name for himself in the Roman world — his ability to do this, as evidenced in his court cases. For example, when he busted open the Catiline conspiracy.
Joshua:
Yes, yes. But what it depends on is the ability to stand in front of a group and make your case in a way that will persuade the people with the power to make the decisions. In that book I mentioned earlier — the Anabasis by Xenophon — one of the things constantly happening is somebody is always standing up to give a speech.
Cassius:
Of course, being able to write or speak persuasively is probably at worst a neutral kind of talent to have. On page 108 of DeWitt’s book, he cites Plutarch as saying: “These men — Epicurus and the Circle — write about oratory to deter us from becoming orators.” And DeWitt’s commentary is that you don’t want to devote your life to leading the multitude because you’re then tying yourself to the multitude. So it’s not necessarily just that Epicurus is not interested in being persuasive in written or spoken word — it’s what he’s using that for. Maybe the term “rhetoric” implies public speaking for purposes of the state or something like that. It says the tricks of the demagogue lose value, and no quality of style is required except clarity, when your purpose is an individual method of communication as opposed to politics.
Joshua:
Yeah. When you read Lucian in his Alexander the Oracle Monger, he makes it very clear that Alexander in that story was a very charming, very charismatic, very powerful public speaker — someone who could stand up and get a crowd on his side. But it wasn’t a good thing that he could do that. All it meant in his case was that he was able to trick people more easily. Like a televangelist, I guess. The televangelist comparison comes up frequently in my mind as we discuss all these things. The opening of Lucretius about the threats of the priests, about death and torment everlasting intended to confuse us and prevent us from understanding the truth of nature — you’ve got lots of easy comparisons with evangelical preachers of all sorts of different religions. I can see why people might tend to agree with Epicurus that rhetoric should not be the focus of a school of philosophy.
Cassius:
And where I expect to get pushback is particularly on these last two issues of dialectic and mathematics. I think that mathematics in our time period, in our culture, has attained to a state where it cannot be gainsaid. So it might be difficult for people to quite get a handle on what was going on with mathematics — and particularly with geometry — in the ancient world. Because if you don’t have that context, then Epicurus just frankly sounds like a moron, doesn’t he? Somebody who doesn’t believe in math. What do you think about a person like that?
Joshua:
Well, it’s not that he didn’t accept the conclusions that you could draw using mathematical formula. It’s that there were epistemological, ethical claims being made about nature, about human life, and the basis for these claims was a kind of misapplication of mathematics and in particular geometry. It was the idea that if Euclid can prove, for example, that a cone is one-third the volume of a cylinder — if he can do that using geometry — then maybe we can prove something about absolute truth using geometry. Maybe we can demonstrate something to be true about ideal forms using geometry. An example comes down to us from the Pythagorean school. Cassius, you have repeatedly used the word “numerology” to express this kind of sentiment, but it reaches very interesting heights in the Pythagorean school. They had the belief that 10 was the perfect number. If 10 is the perfect number, then 10 must also be the number of the heavenly spheres. How do we know that 10 is the perfect number? Well, if you have 1, that makes a point. If you have 2, that makes the segment of a line. If you have 3, that makes a triangle or a surface. And if you have 4, that makes a cube — so it gives you volume. So if you add up 4 plus 3 plus 2 plus 1, that gives you 10.
Joshua:
Now, it is true that 1 is a point, 2 is a line segment, 3 gives you a surface, and 4 gives you volume. But the extra claim that they made — that somehow because you could add those things up and that would give you the number 10, therefore the number 10 is the perfect number — is a claim that modern mathematics is never going to make. It’s particularly this sort of bizarre misapplication of mathematics in an attempt to find what we talked about in the last episode: pure reason contemplating absolute truth. That’s the goal of geometry in Plato’s school. It’s not just to find out interesting stuff. He’s not trying to engineer a skyscraper — that’s not a problem he’s ever considered. He’s trying to find out absolute truth, ethical truth, truth about nature, truth about what happens to us when we die. He’s trying to derive absolute truth from a system that, as I feel absolutely okay in saying, is simply incapable of giving that kind of proof or furnishing that kind of evidence. It’s a misapplication — so that’s the version of mathematics that Epicurus in particular is trying to get away from.
Cassius:
Joshua, I think what you just said is a great summary for most of what we’re talking about today — and especially just going back to the topic of Epicurus’s attitude towards culture. Each of these words we’re talking about, whether it be culture or mathematics or geometry or rhetoric, we may have a superficial understanding or definition of that word today that makes us think: how can anybody disagree with any of those things? But at the time that Epicurus was working and writing and teaching, these words had much deeper connotations, and the claims being made on their behalf were much more extensive than what we’re familiar with today. So rather than think that when Epicurus is rejecting something like mathematics he’s just an idiot and we can’t possibly accept anything else he says — the better course, and the direction where the truth lies, is going to be in exploring exactly what it is these terms meant and how Epicurus was reacting to them.
Cassius:
While you were talking, I see on the rhetoric page at Wikipedia: rhetoric is the art of persuasive speaking. But one of the lines says: “Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle’s three persuasive audience appeals: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.” And if you hover over Logos, you see a definition of logos as a term used in Western philosophy, psychology, and rhetoric, referring to the appeal to reason that relies on logic. So in order to understand what Epicurus might have been referring to with rhetoric, you’re going to have to get back into the details of what were the three components of rhetoric in the ancient world and what was he possibly talking about — which is far beyond our ability to deal with fully in this episode. What we’re doing today is just introducing the issue so that we can sort of set the stage for deeper discussion later on.
Cassius:
We’ve talked about these issues of geometry, mathematics, rhetoric, music, and poetry many times. Hopefully we’ve hammered in the point that we cannot take these issues superficially and we have to understand what’s going on, and not let them worry us that this is some problem where Epicurus was not sufficiently as smart as we are today. He was dealing with these things on a much deeper level than we generally deal with today. And the issues that he’s discussing, the issues that he’s getting at — that’s part of the benefit we get from Epicurean philosophy. By glossing over these things and taking them for granted, we’ve been led down this primrose path of the rhetoricians who have produced in us an attitude towards life that has probably regressed significantly from where Epicurus was 2,000 years ago.
Cassius:
The first subsection of this chapter is entitled “The Heavenly Apocalypse,” and so let’s talk about why DeWitt would segment that out. Part of this section is directed towards the method that’s used in Lucretius of talking about casting the mind in a particular direction — this issue of a conceit, a methodology of approaching something, getting a higher view — maybe the cliché we use today: “the 30,000 foot view of things.” Obviously most of us can’t ascend to 30,000 feet and see the world below us, but it’s an issue of — for example, Plato had described apparently in the Phaedrus that the soul is described as ascending to the heavens in a chariot drawn by two steeds, and from a supernatural point of vantage looking down upon the nature of things as they truly are. It’s a method that’s used. Cicero used it in the Dream of Scipio, where he has Scipio ascending over the earth and looking down at the earth below. And it is brought to us in Lucretius in the very opening of Book 1 by the example of Epicurus traveling through the universe and coming back to us as a conqueror to explain the things he had seen.
Cassius:
So under the “Tour of the Universe” section, DeWitt explains how this conceit integrates itself with the Epicurean system of knowledge. He says it’s necessary to make a brief detour into the terminology of Greek geography and of Aristotle, and so he brings in words like periodos and the Latin term itinerarium for journey. But it certainly is a tool they seem to have used. What DeWitt points out here is that this is not at all uncommon — even Epicurus’s predecessors in Greek philosophy used the same kind of thing. But Lucretius takes it to interesting heights in a passage that was actually misunderstood by Thoreau when he read it as being applied to Prometheus. The idea is that there is something heroic about going up and getting new information and bringing it back and giving it as a gift to other people. In the story of Prometheus, he went up to Mount Olympus and stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. Now, the Epicureans don’t have any time for that particular mythology — in fact, Lucretius, I think in Book 5, gives his own account as to how human beings first mastered fire, having to do with lightning striking the forest. Lucretius is very clear that humankind begins not in a paradise or golden age, but in very primitive, very bleak conditions, and only by very slow degrees comes up to something like the civilization that he was living in. So the Prometheus myth is not hugely helpful to them in that way, but as a metaphor for what they’re trying to do in philosophy, it did seem to be useful.
Cassius:
And in the famous opening to Book 1 after the Hymn to Venus, Lucretius says this — in the Rolfe Humphries translation:
“The Greek it was who first opposing dared raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand, whom neither fame of gods nor lightning stroke nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky abashed, but rather chafed to angry zest his dauntless head to be the first to rend the crossbars at the gates of nature old. And thus his will and hearty wisdom won, and forward thus he fared afar beyond the flaming ramparts of the world until he wandered the immeasurable all.”
And he goes on to say that Epicurus brought back news of what can be and what cannot. Of course, he’s not physically going up into space — I don’t think that needs to be said. There is a very interesting story by Lucian, considered to be the first science fiction story, where they do actually take a ship to space. But this is a journey in thought — touring the universe in thought seems to be the general idea.
Cassius:
Alfred Tennyson put it this way in his poem “Ulysses,” written from the point of view of Odysseus at the end of his life. He says:
“Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains. But every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself, and this gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
So that gives you an idea of the practice, which has continued to inspire poets all throughout history.
Joshua:
Horace actually sees this as representing a kind of ambition that doesn’t serve you well in the end — knowing that you’re going to die. He says in one of his odes:
“You who measured the sea, the earth, and the numberless sands, you, Archytas, are now confined in a small mound of dirt near the Matine shore. And what good does it do you that you attempted the mansions of the skies and that you traversed the round celestial vault — you, with a soul born to die?”
That’s the poet focusing on the end of the journey and the inevitability of death as the thing to say, as opposed to the pleasure that was no doubt experienced during the course of the journey.
Cassius:
Yeah, this is Horace writing at a particularly interesting time in his life. In the early work of Horace we see a distinct Epicurean note — in fact he says in one of his letters: “When you look for me you shall find me fat and sleek, a hog out of Epicurus’s herd.” So it’s maybe unclear to what extent he’s genuinely adopting the name for himself, but there are points of interest in his early work that do suggest an interest in Epicureanism. But that all changed with the fallout from the Roman civil war, because the other side won and established an empire in which they ruled by divine right. And so this creates a problem for Horace — if you want to continue to live, you need to pay lip service to Augustus Caesar, which includes the Roman state religion, which is part of how the empire concentrated power. The exact moment when he abandoned Epicureanism is actually preserved as well, in one of the odes written around the same period. He says — this is A.S. Kline’s translation — “Once I wandered, an expert in crazy wisdom” — “crazy wisdom” is how he describes Epicurean philosophy — “a scant and infrequent adorer of the gods. Now I’m forced to set sail and return, to go back to the paths I abandoned. For Jupiter, father of all the gods, who generally splits the clouds with his lightning flashing away, drove thundering horses and swift chariot through the clear sky.”
Joshua:
This is a direct repudiation of Lucretius. Lucretius said: if lightning and thunder were the armaments of Zeus, then why do we only see them when the sky is in storm? In other words, you don’t see lightning, you don’t hear thunder, on a clear day. Why do lightning bolts strike the temples of Olympian Zeus himself? Why does he waste his bolts with such fecundity in places where the humans don’t even live — in deserts and over the sea? It seems to be a huge waste and a huge amount of trouble and labor, apart from anything else. But Horace — who perhaps actually did see lightning and hear thunder on a clear day, or more probably is using this to repudiate Epicurean philosophy in a time in his life when it has become inconvenient to be an Epicurean.
Cassius:
Gosh, Josh, there’s a lot of great detail in what you just said, a significant part of which is new to me. I was generally aware of the situation that as Horace got older he was less Epicurean. I don’t think I was aware of that particular quote that you mentioned. So there’s a lot of good research that could be done in Horace’s Epicureanism. It certainly strikes me as parallel to what Cicero was going through towards the end of his life: as his daughter died and circumstances were getting negative, he became apparently much more anti-Epicurean than he had been earlier. So it’s a subject for many years of discussion — how adversity brings out the sincerity of your belief. There are many people, and I think Lucretius talks about it, how as you face adversity or face death, people who have not been able to properly prepare for it — that’s when the truth comes to the surface and you see people revert to superstitious ways as what they see, perhaps sadly, as their only escape from whatever problem they’re facing.
Cassius:
And of course I do understand that Horace had been allied with the senatorial forces — maybe even with Pompey and certainly with Cassius and Brutus — and after they were defeated at Philippi, things would have been bleak for him afterwards. But I wish I had more information about those details.
Joshua:
Just while we’re on the subject, the one quote that I can think of from Cicero that kind of describes what you were just talking about is: “I don’t know where, if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, then I err gladly — and I would not have this belief stripped from me while I’m still alive.” In other words, it’s so important to him to believe that there is a life beyond the grave that even if he’s wrong, he doesn’t want to know it. You mentioned the grief over the death of his daughter, and that certainly has an impact. It’s also suggested, when you consider that in the Torquatus material he specifically says that his desire is to find truth and not to confound an opponent — but you have to consider that everyone has their biases, and Cicero is no different.
Cassius:
I think we should try to bring this back to the issue of education, and maybe I can link those two things together by saying: the things that you go through in life when you face traumatic events and death as time goes by — you’re just not going to be prepared for that unless you have thought about death and thought about these things for significant periods of time. If you lived your whole life believing in some supernatural religion — and there are numbers of references it seems like in the Epicurean material that you should learn these things early in life and then continuously talk about them and think about them — because when the bad times come you need to be prepared. And if you’re not prepared, it’s very easy to just have your reason confounded by people who want to manipulate you into supernatural beliefs as a way out.
Cassius:
And another way to bring this even further back: it seems to me that if you unite those subheadings here that DeWitt’s talking about — the heavenly apocalypse and the tour of the universe — I would see this as him suggesting that in studying philosophy it’s not a matter of going from flower to flower and discrete issue to discrete issue and never joining the observations that you make into a more systematized view. The analogy of a more systematized view of everything is to fly up into space, fly up above the earth and see everything from a much higher vantage point — such as you can do from a mountaintop, for example. The issue is that you have to be able to integrate the things that you’ve seen into a worldview, so that when new things occur to you, you can fit them into this paradigm.
Cassius:
So the heavenly viewpoint, and then the tour of the universe — I recently took a trip to a place I’d been before, and I was with somebody who had not been to that location before, and I continuously see this issue of a guide as being a good analogy for what he’s talking about. Epicurean philosophy is not saying that there’s a god who’s speaking to you through divine revelation. You’re not going to learn the truth of the universe through geometry or mathematics. But what you do need is some type of method of grasping where you are and where you’re going. An analogy is a map. An analogy is having a guide. Epicurus is not a channel of divine revelation from God. He’s not delivering to you a supernatural method of understanding things. He’s being a guide of things that he’s explored already and seen before and processed in his own mind, and he’s acclimating you along a path, guiding you. And people have the ability to stop; they have the ability to go in a different direction. He’s not enlisting people or followers as a dictator. He’s a guide imparting information that hopefully you find useful in your own path through these same issues. The guide analogy is more than a superficial analogy — it’s really a way of organizing the educational process where the teacher is not somebody to be accepted solely on their authority, to be accepted without challenge. He’s a guide who’s been there all the way through, though you can make your own observations and decide whether you embrace them or not.
Joshua:
He says on the bottom of page 110: “The Greek word periodos, like the Latin term itinerarium, means not only a tour or a journey from place to place but also a map or a guidebook.” So very much central to what you’re talking about.
Cassius:
And also central to the other point I often make, which is that the map is not the territory. You don’t worship the map. You don’t worship Epicurus. You don’t take any of it as an absolute authority. But you sure as heck do find it useful and helpful. And any step along the way where you find that some territory you’re in doesn’t agree with the map, then you’re going to acknowledge that maybe the map needs to be updated and you’re going to go with what the reality is in front of you. But the person who would say that maps are useless or that no mapping is possible — no knowledge of anything is possible — that’s just as big an error, if not worse. That’s the absolute skepticism that people can fall into, the nihilism they can fall into, after they realize that their supernatural views really have no foundation. There’s this pendulum that seems to swing back and forth — from supernatural beliefs and belief in absolutes from another world, and then when you realize in a difficult situation like maybe Horace was facing or like maybe Cicero was facing that those ideas may not prove to be true, you either swing back into total despair and nihilism, or you grab onto those dreams even harder. And neither one of those approaches is the correct one, I think, from Epicurus’s perspective.
Cassius:
There’s one more thing involved in this whole tour-of-the-universe issue, which is probably implied by what I read from Lucretius, but it has to do with having a sense of wonder in the face of the amazing things that you’re being presented with. You know, atomism you can understand as something sterile, something lifeless, something that takes all of the mystery out of nature — in much the same way as John Keats accused Isaac Newton of unweaving the rainbow. But there is a sense of wonder in the way things actually do work. When the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, came back down, he remarked — I think rather snidely — “I didn’t see any God up there.” That for me does not set anything like the right kind of tone for the first man in space. What I want to see from you is a sense of wonder, a sense of human achievement that has taken place here, and a sense of the incomprehensible majesty of the nature that surrounds us — which is far more satisfying to my mind than what we actually got from him. But that’s just by the by. Is there anything about wonder that comes up in Lucretius? Any other places in Epicureanism that talk about having a sense of wonder? Joshua, think about what the full answer is.
Joshua:
Certainly the main example that always comes to my mind is the section in Lucretius where he talks about looking up at the sky and realizing how grand and amazing it is, and realizing that people get jaded and cynical and they don’t look up at the sky anymore — they get used to everything and want something new all the time, even though what’s there before them is grand and amazing as it is. There’s definitely that section. I don’t know if there are others or not.
Cassius:
Yeah, I mean, I think I would make the argument that Lucretius has this kind of wonder all over. The project of writing 7,000 lines of hexameter — you don’t do that if you don’t find something almost intrinsic about it. Certainly there’s one of the proems — is that the one in Book 4? — where he describes his experience as a poet writing the poem, and that he’s doing something that had never been done before, and that it has been the most pleasurable thing he’s ever experienced.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s the Pierian Springs passage — he’s the first to quaff the waters of the springs — and how significant and emotional an experience this is for him.
Cassius:
Yeah. So that wonder issue is definitely there. It seems like in Epicurus’s own words it’d be hard to come up with the direct example of that. Possibly something in Diogenes Laertius in his comments about what the wise man is able to do might go in the same direction, but I’m not thinking of a good example right now. But it’s so clear in Lucretius, and that’s got to be a reflection of Epicurus’s views. I’m not sure about Philodemus, but it goes right along with the whole issue of pleasure being the central aspect of life, pleasure being a feeling. Certainly there’s the quote in Diogenes Laertius about the wise man experiencing emotion more deeply than other men. This whole issue of engaging emotionally with existence as it is — as opposed to how you would prefer it to be, or how you would like to dream it to be — I would think is absolutely central to the whole philosophy. Because that’s what life is about: the experience of sensation. Once you have no more sensation, once you get no reaction to anything anymore, that’s the equivalent of — or the definition of — death.
Cassius:
And of course join with that the comment in Lucretius about the wonder of looking up at the sky — I’m pretty sure that’s where it continues on and says this is a new philosophy, but it’s calling out to you to examine it, and to think about it, and to embrace it if it’s true, and if you find it’s not true to fight against it. But you should not reject something just because it’s new, nor should you think that newness is the only thing in life. That’s the issue about being jaded: we do get jaded when we think the sky becomes ordinary. But if we just look up at it and think about it and really truly experience it, we lose that cynicism — well, we should lose that cynicism. Not everybody does. And maybe that’s one of the problems and issues that we’re dealing with: how you get cynical and how you lose your enjoyment of life.
Cassius:
Josh, you’re saying that quote about the stars is in Lucretius?
Joshua:
Yes, absolutely. If I was quick enough to find it now it’d be good to talk about it and read it. I think of the Humphries edition mainly. Because let me read something to you by Ralph Waldo Emerson — this is the quote that sticks in my head. He says: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” That is almost directly a take on what I’m remembering from Lucretius — almost enough to joke about plagiarism, except I feel so sure it’s so clear that he intended to copy it, that he would expect people to understand his allusion. This is the way Rolfe Humphries translates the Lucretius passage:
“Direct your mind to a true system. Here is something new for ear and eye — nothing is ever so easy but what at first is difficult to trust, nothing so great and marvelous but what all men, a little at a time, begin to mitigate their sense of awe. Look up, look up at the pure bright color of the sky, the wheeling stars, the moon, the shining sun. If all these, all of a sudden, should arise for the first time before our mortal sight, what could be called more wonderful, more beyond the heights to which a sparring mind might dare? — Nothing, I think. And yet a sight like this, marvelous as it is, now draws no man to lift his gaze to heaven’s bright areas. We are a jaded lot. But even so, don’t be too shocked by something new, too scared to use your reasoning sense to weigh and balance, so that if in the end things seem true, you welcome it with open arms; if false, you do your very best to strike it down.”
Cassius:
We’re talking about the issue of wonder, and when you told me about that Lucretius quote, what I immediately thought of was the Emerson quote. Probably my first major literary interest in my adolescent and adult life was American transcendentalism, so if nothing else I have a store of quotations locked away. And what Emerson says is: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” I don’t know if Emerson did read Lucretius — it’s possible that there is a connection between these two passages.
Joshua:
Well, it’s pretty easy to think multiple people totally independently would come up with it. But it is a very good illustration of the point that we don’t even think about the stars as we go through our daily lives. And the way we live today, we hardly even look up at them at all. And of course lately there’s been a whole series of new incredibly brilliant pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope — even better than the Hubble pictures — that are just dramatically amazing to look at.
Cassius:
Yeah, the pictures are incredibly sharp. When you compare a Hubble picture of one area and the James Webb picture of the same area — the difference in resolution is astonishing.
Cassius:
Well, we’re probably at a position where we need to come to the close for this episode. But I think Callistheni’s question about the wonder aspect is a really good place to end it — from the perspective that this is not just something that should be dry and unemotional and calculating in an abstract logical sense. That ultimately in Epicurean philosophy it’s the feeling and the emotions of life that define what life really is, and that we should approach these issues, we should try to get the big picture in our minds — whether you use the example of a tour guide, or just going up into the air or on a mountaintop and looking at the scenery below you — and begin to realize how everything fits together, and how the proper reaction to this is not just to despair or to close your mind to it or go to sleep, but to embrace the majesty, the amazing aspects of being alive for the time that you are alive.
Joshua:
It’s particularly important, Cassius, because most of us are well past what is being described in this chapter, which is kind of the period of formal schooling. There needs to be compelling reasons to take time out of your very busy life to devote to something like the study of a system of philosophy from the ancient world. It has to be compelling. And that reminds me of what we’ve been talking about today: if you don’t take the time to understand this and work on it, you’re going to end up like a Cicero. Hopefully not with your tongue cut out and your head cut off, but you’re going to be despairing at the end of your life. You’re going to end up like apparently, to some extent, Horace was — tempted to backslide into areas of superstition that are borderline aspects of despairing of your situation. Of course, the example throughout Lucretius is people who end up taking their own lives, totally unjustifiably, out of fear of death and fear of things they’ve never come to terms with. I think Epicurus is pointing the way here: it’s not any amount of words, it’s not any amount of logical construct that can give you the emotional intensity to stand up to these issues and to embrace your life and avoid falling into despair. You’ve got to apply your mind and apply your understanding of what it is you’re observing and engage with it. It’s not a dry mental construct.
Cassius:
I’m talking as if I’m about to say goodbye, but Joshua, you haven’t had closing thoughts — and of course if anyone else has any closing thoughts for today, let’s say them too. Joshua?
Joshua:
Yeah, we were trying to keep it light until you slipped in “suicide” there. I always seem to come back to that as an interesting issue. But no, I don’t have anything else.
Cassius:
So briefly, we should tell everyone what we’ve just realized: we have one more episode on this issue of education — particularly specifically on the issue of the books — and then we’re getting into epistemology, I think it is. So we have lots more detail coming in future episodes. And of course, I never miss the opportunity — we’ve had this discussion on the forum this very week in an interesting thread — never miss the opportunity to say that any discussion of suicide is just absolutely the last thing that anybody wants to pursue and should consider. It’s out there as the fact that we’re not afraid of death, and that life can hold no terror for people who understand that death holds no terror. So you’ve got this constant understanding that’s out there. But unless you’re in some extremely unusual circumstance — like maybe Cassius Longinus, having just lost a big battle at Philippi and thinking he’s about to be tortured by the oncoming enemy — you’re just generally not going to consider ending your own life as a reasonable option to pursue. Those are going to be very unusual circumstances. But death is a part of life — to an extent it’s something we all have to come to terms with, and we have to come to terms with at some point in the future, and we need to think about how we’re going to face it. But everything is tied up in life itself. Only the living can experience pleasure, and so you hold on to life as long as it makes sense to you to hold on to it, so that you can experience it all.
Cassius:
All right. So with that as the first half of the chapter on “The New Education,” we’ll come to a close today, and we’ll come back next week to continue on in Epicurus and His Philosophy. Thank you very much, and if you have any comments or questions in the meantime, please always drop by the forum and let us know what they are. We’ll see you soon. Goodbye.