Episode 153 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 09 - The New Education 02
Date: 12/23/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2789-episode-153-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-09-the-new-education-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 153 concludes Chapter 6 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, titled “The New Education,” focusing on the sections “The New Textbooks” and “Refutative Writings.” DeWitt identifies three categories of Epicurean written works: dogmatic textbooks (including the 37 books on physics that set out the firm framework of the philosophy), refutative writings designed to counter rival schools (such as Epicurus’s Against the Philosophers in Mytilene), and memorial writings — eulogies celebrating deceased members that served simultaneously as examples of lived Epicurean philosophy and as a form of immortality for those commemorated. The group examines the role of epitomes as condensed summaries, noting Philodemus’s warning that students of his era were settling for outlines rather than studying the underlying works — a danger still present today. A key DeWitt insight is that Epicurean reasoning proceeds deductively from first principles (axioms such as “nothing comes from nothing”) downward to particular applications, not inductively from observations upward to conclusions as often assumed; this is why DeWitt argues that Epicurus is mischaracterized as a pure empiricist. A lengthy exchange follows on balancing intellectual confidence in settled conclusions — especially regarding the absence of divine interference and life after death — with openness to ongoing inquiry, with Martin contributing that the “inoculation” against rival philosophies is a pedagogical device for beginning students, not a restriction at higher levels of debate. Callistheni’s earlier observation — made during the Letter to Menoikeus series — that the letter functions as a protreptic (an exhortation to begin studying philosophy) is revisited and affirmed by DeWitt’s own recognition of the protreptic as a standard form of ancient philosophical writing. The episode closes with discussion of the Roman Epicurean tombstone inscription non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (“I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care”), and previews Chapter 7, “The Canon, Reason, and Nature,” covering Epicurean epistemology.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
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 153 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing to discuss the background and overall thrust of Epicurean philosophy using Norman DeWitt’s book Epicurus and His Philosophy as our guide, and we’re currently about to finish Chapter 6, which is entitled “The New Education.” From the beginning of this series, we’ve been talking about how the school came about, and where we are now in Chapter 6 is discussing the issue of: once you’ve set up the school, what are you going to do to actually systematize and then transmit the philosophy? So what we’ve been talking about already included the tour of the universe and other methodologies and analogies that Epicurus was using. And today we’re looking at sections entitled “The New Textbooks” and then a section entitled “Refutative Writings.” And it seems to me that the important point that DeWitt is bringing up is that once you’ve decided to set up a school of philosophy and you want to explain it to other people, you’re going to have to find a method of doing that that makes sense — sort of like what we face today in discussing Epicurean philosophy with other people. Where do you begin the process of explaining it to other people, writing it down, and then conveying it to others? Do you begin with a very high-level overview? Do you pick out a couple of important principles that are the most important for you to convey? Or is there some other method that makes sense? We constantly talk about applying the philosophy, but unless you understand what the philosophy is in the first place, you have to question the logic of somebody who wants to apply something without ever understanding it in the first place. We have the 40 Principal Doctrines that most of the time people will look at as sort of an overall view of the philosophy. But there were also apparently 12 fundamentals of physics, and in addition to that, the letters of Epicurus — the Herodotus, Menoikeus, and Pythocles — and of course the larger 37 volumes on nature and so forth that were eventually produced. But you have a mix of sources and materials that the Epicurean school was working on, and there are some issues about that which DeWitt highlights for us. And in relation to that, there’s also an interesting argument that survives from the ancient world about how the Epicureans had criticized Socrates for the method that he had pursued — what has come down to us as the Socratic method of question and answer. The Epicureans were very direct in criticizing Socrates on a variety of grounds. Probably the most prominent was that he was never very clear about what it was he was teaching. Rather than just come right out and make his point at the very beginning — or make his point sometimes even by the end — he would just ask questions that he would sometimes seem to agree with the answers to, and sometimes not. He would try to lead people through the analysis without being very clear about what his own analysis was. So with that as background, the first section is moving from the use of the epitome — which is a summary of the principles of the philosophy — and moving into a discussion of the textbook method that the Epicureans were presenting, which DeWitt classifies as dogmatic textbooks, refutative textbooks, and memorial textbooks.
Joshua:
Yeah, the epitomes represent basically just a small fraction of everything that was written by the Epicurean school in the ancient world, most of which simply does not survive. So what we have left is probably — maybe we talked about this last week, I can’t remember — is probably slightly biased in the way that we’ve managed to receive it. It might give a false impression of the makeup of most of their writings. And I think DeWitt goes in here and explains several different methods they used in the books that they were writing, each of which was designed to accomplish a certain goal or to instill a certain style of education, and that no one book would answer to the purpose of all three. I think in the Letter to Pythocles, he starts out by relaying something that Pythocles himself had said — which is: I have all your books; I’ve got your 37 books on nature; I’ve got your other writings on the phenomena of the sky; but what I really need from you is to compress it down into something that I can read and easily remember, because I can’t always remember the 37 books on nature, just like I can’t always remember everything that Lucretius has to say. Cassius, you managed to surprise me with our conversation on wonder and what Lucretius has to say about looking up at the stars. There’s so much there that it’s easy to forget what all is there if you don’t spend a whole lot of time reading it. And so the purpose of the epitome is to condense this broad group, this massive pile of things that you need to study, down into a size that is more convenient. The danger in that is the one that Philodemus outlines in — I think — his surviving fragment, where he says that the problem with the Epicureans of his day is that they just settle for the outlines and they don’t go on and read the books. They think that the outlines themselves are sufficient. So one thing we have to consider, because we don’t have those other books, is: how can we take the outlines that do survive and fill in the blanks in a way that allows us to maybe alleviate the concerns of Philodemus there? Lucretius is one way to do that. The writings of Philodemus himself are another way to do that. The inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda is a way to do that. But it’s a question, Cassius, of how do we make the best possible use of what little survives, frankly?
Cassius:
I think that’s a very important direction to go in there, Joshua, because obviously it’s great that we have the epitomes and they’re irreplaceable for what they’re intended to be. But the implication of what we’re saying here is obviously the epitomes themselves don’t stand alone and they have limitations on how they’re usable, and you can easily get the wrong impression. For example, how many people end up — they find there’s a book called The Epicurus Reader that basically presents in pretty easily accessible form the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings and so forth — but when you read the 40 doctrines on their own, almost all of them are very difficult to put in context if you’re not familiar with the philosophy. And I think a lot of people will end up going to those 40 doctrines and reading them expecting something that’s extremely profound and clear to them, and it is profound, but it’s probably not very clear to them if they don’t have the overall understanding of the direction that it’s going. They serve as a reminder of the important points — much like even more distilled versions of things that are in the Principal Doctrines — but if you don’t at the same time have additional material to refer to, or people to talk to, which might actually even be more important, you can very easily come away with the wrong impression of the subtleties of the philosophy. They tell you the important topics that you need to be sure to understand and study, but they don’t give you by any means all the depth of detail that you need to put them in your own personal context and make use of them.
Joshua:
Like DeWitt says in the next paragraph, he says: “Nevertheless, the epitomes are in no true sense to be regarded as primers to be mastered and laid aside. They are rather syllabuses to be kept at hand and used in conjunction with the big epitome.” Of course, we don’t have the 37 books. You mentioned other things people could look to. Really, Lucretius’ poem — I guess that’s what I say at the beginning of almost every episode — the only surviving full-length presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. The real benefit of Lucretius is that even though it seems to us to be heavily weighted with physics, it does contain ethics and epistemology as well. And by looking to that original presentation, you can see how they fit things together and bounce back and forth from one topic to another. So that is one reason I think Lucretius is uniquely valuable to us — that it does knit together the principles that sort of stand alone and disjointedly in the 40 doctrines.
Cassius:
Yeah, Lucretius is certainly a huge advantage, because it would be difficult to overstate the degree to which we would probably have a very skewed sense of Epicurean philosophy if we didn’t have Lucretius. I don’t mean to say that Lucretius isn’t consistent, but there are so many things that are in Lucretius that are not in surviving texts because the texts they were in simply have not survived. So there’s a huge advantage there. One of the things I’m not sure that DeWitt will go into here is the peculiar problems that you have when you’re dealing with papyrus scrolls, which were the books of the ancient world. In the computer age, we’ve become familiar with ideas like serial access memory and random access memory. With random access memory, you can go anywhere in — whatever it is, hard drive or whatever — and pull out exactly what you want. With serial access memory, you’re just going in order. Well, the ancient scrolls were much more like that. It’s not like a book that you can flip through. It would be considerably less convenient, particularly when you’ve got very long scrolls and you’re trying to remember a particular thing. So we do have certain advantages now that they did not have then in terms of accessing the information, compiling the information, sharing the information. This has all gotten quite a lot easier.
Joshua:
And maybe one more thing to bring up here — you’ve touched on it with Socrates — is the way that the different philosophical schools in the ancient world presented their literary face. If you’re trying to convey a philosophy, what kind of books are you going to write in order to put it forward? I think you can very easily make the case that the dialogues of Plato are very different from the epitomes of Epicurus, which are very different from the handbooks of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Stylistically very different, serving very different ethical, philosophical, and epistemological purposes. So that’s another angle on all of this.
Cassius:
And Joshua, going further with part of what you just said there — you’re talking about random access versus serial memory and so forth. One interest I have outside of the philosophical world is personal knowledge managers and how to organize things on a computer. There’s a lot of development lately on the internet about different programs you can use to organize your research and find things more directly. Several of the programs that I’ve been playing with have a dashboard where you have sort of a tree or some other type of organized method. Again, it’s an outline of places you can click on. You have a series of headings and topics and you can click on them and hyperlink into various levels of detail. And I think to a large degree, that’s what these 40 doctrines and the other lists were. They served that purpose as an intermediate index to the general topics of the philosophy. And just like the surviving versions of the 40 doctrines, there were annotations to that. Those who had the ability to write back then probably had their own annotations to their own list of the 40 doctrines to help them find places in the larger text that would have extended and expanded on the particular discussion that’s summarized only in the doctrine itself.
But moving on to what I think is an even deeper issue: DeWitt on page 112 is saying that the supreme requirement on the part of the student is to be able to handle smartly the synoptic view, and the supreme objective is perfected precision — precision of detail. And this moves us into something we’re probably going to discuss more next week. DeWitt says the method of procedure is not from the particulars to the first principles, but from the first principles to the particulars. And he says that this reasoning is deductive. Once you’ve validated your conclusions by observation — such as that nothing is created from nothing, and nothing goes to nothing — you end up treating these conclusions as axioms, and they themselves become the foundation of your application. You have these higher-level conclusions, these axioms, from which you can reason to conclusions that are important for application. You’re not constantly expecting your observations to change what you observed yesterday. An observation that the sun generally rises in the east and sets in the west is something that doesn’t change over time, and you end up reaching higher-level conclusions such as “nothing comes from nothing,” and from those you wield them like building blocks to produce the applications of the philosophy. So to a significant degree you don’t have to remember every observation that led you to conclude that nothing comes from nothing. You’ve reached that conclusion, you’ve got an axiom, and it can be applied. And from that DeWitt concludes that, quote: “It is customary to classify Epicurus as an empiricist because of his reliance on the sensations, but to do so is to misunderstand the function of the canon and to ignore the manifest procedures of his reasoning.” And one of his epitomes was devoted to those 12 elementary principles of physics. Since the procedure was to begin with these and to commit them to memory, it follows that the method was deductive. These principles became the major premises, and the ideas arrived at by deduction from these were called epinoia, which by etymology means inferential or accessory notions. What we’ve got then in the 40 doctrines — these epitomes — are largely these conclusions rather than the details that led to those conclusions.
Joshua:
Yeah, and I think the one thing that sets Epicurus apart in this regard is he gives you the conclusions that he’s arrived at, but he doesn’t give you particular applications that you’re supposed to make in your own life — like whether or not you should eat white bread or brown bread today. He doesn’t get down into that kind of level. He’s giving you the conclusions, which if you take the time to try and understand, hopefully you can begin to work out for yourself how these things are going to apply to your own life. But he’s not writing the kind of books or letters, generally speaking, where he’s going to tell you what to do when you wake up in the morning, what you should eat for breakfast. There are other philosophers from the ancient world who do go into that kind of detail. But Epicurus isn’t doing that. He’s giving you the axioms; he’s giving you the conclusions that he’s drawing; he’s giving you some of the chain of reasoning that gets from certain axioms to certain conclusions. But it seems to me that a large amount of the work is left for the reader — left for the student who’s taking in this information, trying to handle it smartly as DeWitt praises it here, and finding out how to apply it. He’s telling you that health of the mind and health of the body are in fact the natural goals of life, rather than following the will of the gods or following ideal forms. He’s telling you that health of the mind and health of the body are the goals, which is the really important thing, because if you don’t have the goal down, you’re never going to reach the right objective. But the actual application of the science in a particular time — the things that are available to you in your particular environment — those are going to be constantly changing. And so the foundation and the goal are the critical thing, because you simply can’t predict every circumstance that every person is going to be in. The heavy lifting is done in identifying the goal, not in telling you what to eat for breakfast.
Joshua:
Now this also is, again, a kind of artifact of what survived. There’s a whole quantity of instruction that was lost simply because it was never written down. Pythocles is not the only person who ever consulted Epicurus with a question. We can be reasonably sure of that. There were people asking him things all the time that just never made it into writing to be circulated and then to survive for us to read. So a big part of the project here is to assimilate as much of this information as possible and then be able to extrapolate beyond what we have in a way that is consistent with what we have, but that can tell us relevant things — that’s my sense of it anyway.
Cassius:
When you say the things that we need to learn — I think I’ve mentioned this before — we had a professor joining us in our discussion of the A Few Days in Athens book several months ago, and one point he raised that I remember was that it was always his impression that the Epicureans thought they had things figured out. They had that attitude that they weren’t just necessarily waking up every morning expecting to totally revise everything they thought previously. They thought that they had a pretty firm grip on things that were important. And that would be the point: they didn’t have a firm grip on things in terms of what the goal was, but they weren’t trying to tell you in your situation how best to get to that goal yourself. There are certainly some guidelines that were available and that they did use, but the real work in applying the philosophy is for the individual who, once he’s identified the goal, can assess his own circumstances and decide how best to get there.
That would lead us into the next section of DeWitt’s discussion about the new textbooks. Once you’ve got this framework of having developed a general philosophy of life and you think that you’ve got the major points down, you’ve got this question of exactly what type of writings you’re going to use to communicate that to other people. DeWitt says he can classify those into three different types: the dogmatic, the refutative, and the memorial. He describes that the dogmatic writings were a series of textbooks on the canon, the physics, and the ethics — that was the 37 books on physics that Epicurus himself was writing to sort of set out the firm outlines of the philosophy. There was another set of writings though that had a different goal: the refutative writings, which were composed for the purpose of refuting the teachings of all rival schools, especially the Platonists. An example of that was Epicurus’s work entitled Against the Philosophers in Mytilene. And then there was also a third category: the memorial writings, which consisted of eulogies of deceased members of the school. That served another purpose of helping integrate the people who were involved in the philosophy as part of a team, integrating them into a community of people who not only were reading ideas and playing with words but who had a direct affectionate tie to the other individuals who were part of the school.
Joshua:
Yeah. In fact, later on in this chapter, DeWitt makes the intriguing claim that this was a form of immortality that the Epicurean school was offering to its members — memorializing them and celebrating their memory on occasions like the 20th.
Joshua:
There’s this issue of the pleasure that would come from knowing that obviously you’re not going to be around to experience pleasure from what happens after you’re dead, but there are several instances where it’s mentioned that you gain pleasure yourself from knowing that the benefits of your work will assist those who are your friends. That’s not something that’s mystical or something you would experience after you die. It’s something you would feel now, if you know that your work is going to continue on after you’re gone.
Joshua:
There’s going to be a certain kind of person — and I would almost include myself in that number — who’s going to find the language of “inoculating yourself against the writings of other philosophers” to be, if not just intellectually constricting, then almost censorious to a degree that is slightly chilling. Do you see the point — particularly in an age where we pride ourselves on freedom of speech and free inquiry, and I want to chase down this line of inquiry to the final conclusion, wherever it leads me? There’s a certain draw to that kind of thinking, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong. So how do you balance that idea with what DeWitt is describing here as being the Epicurean position?
Cassius:
I think this is a fascinating subject and one of the most important ones out there. We talked about it in several contexts. Frances Wright seems to have a position that I would say is a little bit different from Epicurus’s on this. The question is: does observation ever lead you to justifiably conclude in your mind that you’ve answered a question? Or does every question always remain open? How do you balance this issue?
Maybe it’s best to jettison the word “dogmatism” because it’s got such negative connotations. But outside of the censorious aspect of it — whether you’re going to enforce your position on other people, silence freedom of speech, expel people if they don’t agree — as emotional as those issues are and as important as they are, I think you sort of have to put that aside for the moment and not let the emotional aspect of those questions override the real ultimate question for you yourself. Because the question is not so much whether other people are going to force you to believe what they believe — that’s hugely important, but I want to know whether I myself can ever reach a conclusion and have confidence in it, regardless of what other people think. And that’s really, to me, the issue that’s being addressed here: can you ever come to a conclusion that you can rest on and believe that you’ve answered with finality the question of the nature of the gods, the question of whether there is life after death? Must you always keep those questions open in your mind as something that you could decide tomorrow could be overturned?
What Epicurus, I think, is trying to say is this: is knowledge possible at all? Is it possible to have knowledge on whether there’s life after death or not? How do you describe your position on that? Are you certain of it? Are you taking the position that it’s more likely than not? And what we found in the Frances Wright material, I think, is that Frances Wright was reaching the conclusion that you should never reach your conclusion about much of anything — that it’s always a matter of continued observation, especially on issues of the formation of the universe, the size of the universe, the age of the universe. Those are just not important enough for you to take a position on, so you just don’t take a position. Do you ever take a position on anything, though, is the ultimate question. And under what circumstances would you do that?
Joshua:
I think I see what you’re saying here, and it’s actually become something fairly common for people who have made a name for themselves as being non-standard in their beliefs about religion, about God, about death, about the afterlife — because you have so many stories, so many claims about deathbed conversions that are shamelessly confected after the fact. The “Lady Hope” story in the case of Charles Darwin: she started claiming about 20 years after the fact that she was with Darwin when he died and he converted on his deathbed, and she went on public speaking tours describing this kind of thing — shamelessly lying about it. We know that in her case because Darwin’s family was with him when he died, and she wasn’t. The story did not even begin to be in circulation until well afterward. But it has gotten to the point where people who are in this space will have to say, as they get close to dying: any account of a deathbed conversion — I’m telling you now that that story is false.
So I see what you’re saying from that point of view. There’s a quote by C.S. Lewis — I don’t have it perfectly — but he says something like: a person who wants to maintain a position of unbelief, particularly in Christianity, can never be too careful about their reading. The point he’s trying to make is that any reasonably wide or deep reading will obviously only ever lead you in the direction of Christianity. And if you want to remain an unbeliever, you have to also remain ignorant — that’s the implication. Is there a chance of playing right into his hands when he says that? Of giving the appearance of someone who’s just burying their head in the sand — I don’t want to hear about this God issue, I’ve already made up my mind? That would be, to me, the danger. Because I can get to the point of tentatively concluding that there’s no interfering gods, that there’s no life after death. I am as settled in my belief that there is no life after death as I think it’s really possible for a human being to be, given our limited knowledge. But I can imagine a circumstance or something that might change my mind — I think the chance of that is approximately zero, for the record, but I could see it happening. In fact, in people like Karl Popper, it did happen toward the end of their life. So I guess it’s that question: how do you balance reaching conclusions and being reasonably sure about them with not becoming rigid and willfully ignorant?
I still haven’t managed to articulate the question very well, but it’s pretty clear, I think, at this point. Martin, what do you think about that?
Martin:
I think this inoculation is for the purpose of efficient teaching. So I don’t think at the higher levels, when they were debating things, they were that close and that rigid. The rigidness is really at the level of teaching — so that you present it in a way that students can understand it. And once they understand it, they are then more ready to also look at other views and be exposed to them. Because if you do this too early, people will just get confused.
Cassius:
Martin, is there a way that you think, in your own mind — how do you describe those things that you are sure about versus those things you’re not sure about? How do you describe to yourself when you’ve reached the point that it’s really not necessary to expose yourself to additional views? When do you reach the point that you’re comfortable thinking that you’ve resolved a particular question?
Martin:
Actually, I don’t mind to keep getting exposed from time to time. I mean, I do that — I attend a series from a somewhat different group, which is explicitly not Epicurean, even though the leader there calls himself an Epicurean. And I get exposed to all kinds of other ideas there, and it helps in some way to get clearer. I mean, once you have reached your own position with sufficient certainty, then exposure to other ideas helps you to understand it better.
Cassius:
I think that last point is very important, and that’s what DeWitt’s talking about and what Epicurus was doing as well. You understand your own views better by testing them with arguments from opposing positions.
Joshua:
Is it the one conclusion that’s safe to reach that no conclusions are possible? That seems to be sort of the modern consensus — the skeptical view of what we’re talking about — is that there’s one thing we can all be certain about, and that is that we can’t be certain of anything.
Martin:
Well, we can be certain about death — that death will happen. But as far as whether there’s a kind of life after death, that is a very different question compared to day-to-day things that come up in your life.
Cassius:
Joshua, going back to the way I described it a moment ago: isn’t it sort of the modern consensus that the one thing we’re certain about is that certainty is impossible?
Joshua:
Yeah, that would be a frequent way of putting it.
Martin:
I think it’s correct, but that view is essentially missing the point, because we don’t need certainty. Something like being of high confidence or high probability is enough. In most cases, we can’t even expect more. And when we go to fundamental questions, this is even more so.
Cassius:
You’ve used the word there, Martin: confidence. What is confidence? I can tell you what Cicero has to say about it. He says: “Hereupon Velleius began, in the confident manner I need not say that is customary with Epicureans, afraid of nothing so much as lest he should appear to have doubts about anything.” He goes on to say: “One would have supposed he had just come down from the assembly of the gods in the intermundane spaces of Epicurus.”
But I was not always an Epicurean — I wasn’t born an Epicurean. I was actually born Catholic, and I could have stopped at that point and said: okay, I’m as sure as I need to be that the claims of Catholicism are true — just wiped my hands of the matter and called it done. I didn’t do that. I kept going and went through a few other intellectual phases. I mentioned probably American transcendentalism before, Buddhism and other Eastern interests. Epicureanism for me has the right kind of basis in a material world — something that’s very important to me — because I think it does accord with all of what I think are the known facts. But I always have to realize that I could be wrong. And to me, it varies tremendously based on the topic you’re talking about. If you’re talking about some very difficult issue of physics or astronomy, you really know the possibility of error is strong. In areas that are not so important to you, where it’s not going to necessarily affect your happiness if you end up being wrong about the composition of the atmosphere on Mars when you get more information — fine. But on those issues of sort of life or death that affect you immediately and that you have to make decisions on day to day, you’d need to be as confident as you can possibly be.
The whole test of there not being a supernatural realm and a supernatural god is the observation issue of nothing coming from nothing — at least, that’s a major part of the Epicurean test of how you arrive at atomism and all of your other conclusions. Certainly if you start seeing magically appearing and disappearing objects in your own immediate life, then you’re going to have to evaluate what’s exactly going on. But you have no reason to expect that’s going to happen, and you have a level of confidence that it’s not going to happen based on all of your experiences in the past. One thing I would point to in that case would be trying to demonstrate that there is an afterlife on the basis of what are called near-death experiences — “I was clinically dead for seven minutes and went to heaven and saw the angels.” There are books like that published fairly frequently by sellers because this is the kind of thing that people find compelling. But when you really look into this line of what they call evidence, what you find is that the definition of death they’re using is spongy. Death — what we know of death — is brain death: when your brain dies, you’re dead; you don’t come back. “Clinical death,” meaning when your heart stops and they can’t get it restarted in a certain amount of time, is not death, because your brain is still oxygenated. So when you’re relying on bad evidence that relies for its effect on spongy definitions about words that are otherwise very clear, you can evaluate a system to the extent that it relies on bad information like that. And the Epicurean system, I think, comes out very well on that kind of analysis.
Cassius:
One more thing, if we’re ready to leave that issue aside for a moment — I’m actually going back a little bit. When we were doing the first episode in our series on the Letter to Menoikeus, Callistheni made an interesting suggestion. She said that we could analyze that letter through the lens of being a protreptic, which I thought was very interesting at the time — something that hadn’t occurred to me before. On page 115, a few lines down in the third paragraph, he’s describing all of the different kinds of writings they’re using, and he says: “There was, as fashion had begun to require, a protreptic, or exhortation to the study of philosophy.” There’s that element in the Letter to Menoikeus — “you shouldn’t put off studying philosophy when you’re young, and you should continue to study it as you grow old; this should be something you study throughout your life.” Trying to convince people that philosophy is a worthwhile project to begin with is another element in this series of books that we’re describing that we haven’t really talked about today. And that was the point that Callistheni had made. I thought that was a good one. And so when you say protreptic — go ahead and define that again. He defines it here as an exhortation to the study of philosophy. The point that Callistheni had made — and I should let her speak in her own words — but in that episode on the Letter to Menoikeus, we were trying to figure out what was the context in which this letter was written. Does he know Menoikeus? How familiar is he with Menoikeus? Because he greets Menoikeus in a very different way from the way in which he greets Pythocles. It’s clear from the text that Pythocles is very familiar to him. It’s not clear the extent to which Menoikeus is familiar to Epicurus. Callistheni had made the suggestion in that episode that the Letter to Menoikeus operated as a protreptic — an exhortation to the study of philosophy — in other words, trying to find people who maybe don’t think that philosophy in itself is a worthwhile pursuit and getting them to start thinking along those lines. Because if you’re Epicurus and you’re convinced — confidence is the word we’ve been using — that you’ve come up with an explanation of nature, an ethical system, a regime of epistemology that you think works, you think that it fits, and you want to get it into circulation, specifically because you think that if people really do embrace this it will actually help them.
Martin:
Motivation. Also, I want to add that this was something that was used by the schools of philosophy to bring students to them. It was just a common way of generating interest.
Joshua:
Because you’re competing in a saturated market for interested people who are going to engage. You’re trying to generate engagement — there’s a social media phrase.
Cassius:
Yeah, you’re motivating people to find the energy or find the enthusiasm to do something that they don’t necessarily already understand that they need to do.
Joshua:
Yeah, because it’s people like that — people who have not spent much time thinking about ideas. And that to me is what philosophy is at its core: spending time thinking about competing ideas. And if you don’t have skin in that game, you are prone to fall prey to any person and any claim that comes along.
Cassius:
Okay, let’s just say a few things about memorial writing, then we’ll close up for the day and we’ll have the chapter completed. Joshua’s already brought up the issue that to some extent you get a semblance of immortality by having yourself memorialized after you’re gone, and that that was one effect of the memorial writings. And the whole issue of the 20th celebration is wrapped up in this. I believe there’s the Vatican Saying about reverence for the wise man being of great benefit to those who do the revering. The point being that there are multiple aspects of the issue of memorializing people. You not only provide certainly satisfaction or enjoyment to the person who thinks he’s going to be memorialized, but you provide an example of proper living, an example of good ideas. It’s just another method of showing the reality of what it is you’re talking about. If you can memorialize a person — such as, for example, the life of Atticus that we have from Cornelius Nepos — you’ve got in his life story an example of someone who is applying his philosophy and you’re seeing the benefit of it. And that’s a practical way of, again, bringing down to reality the benefit that you get from philosophy — that it’s not just something that’s abstract. Plus, it’s a good opportunity to have a party if you celebrate somebody’s birthday or memorialize them like that.
Joshua:
There does seem to be a contrast here between these memorial writings — this tendency, the celebration of birthdays and all of that — with what we know about later Roman-era Epicurean funeral arrangements, things that you read on headstones from that period, where you can identify the Epicureans by all having the same phrase or abbreviation of the same phrase written on their headstone. And you’re going to go ahead and tell us what that was, right?
Cassius:
Yeah, in Latin it’s non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, which means “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.” There’s a certain kind of anonymity in having the same thing as everyone else on your headstone or your memorial monument. So there does seem to be a contrast between that kind of anonymity and the specific reference in these memorial writings — writings that we’re presuming people would continue to read and maybe even read sections of aloud at the 20th meeting as a way of keeping the memory alive.
Joshua:
I think this might be the quote you were referencing a moment ago: “Gaius Stahlius Haranus watches over this abode, one of the joyful Epicurean chorus.” That was inscribed on a funeral monument.
Cassius:
The bottom line being that maybe there are two major benefits at least of these memorial writings: that you get pleasure knowing that perhaps you will yourself be remembered in the future — that gives you present pleasure — and it also serves as pleasure to those who come after you, to realize that here are examples of a successfully lived life according to Epicurean principles. It, again, gives benefit to you in terms of allowing you to live your life in a more successful way.
Okay, as we come to the end of discussion of Chapter 6, let’s go ahead and bring today’s episode to a conclusion. Any final thoughts from Martin?
Martin:
No, I have nothing to add to today.
Cassius:
Callistheni, anything?
Callistheni:
Oh, no, nothing. Thank you.
Cassius:
All right. Joshua, what are your concluding thoughts for the day?
Joshua:
My concluding thoughts are that we have no more excuses. Next episode is Chapter 7: “The Canon, Reason, and Nature.”
Cassius:
That’s exactly right. We’ll get into the details of that aspect of the philosophy first, and that’s going to occupy us probably for several weeks. We’ll go ahead and bring today’s episode to a conclusion, then we’ll come back next week and start discussing Chapter 7, “The Canon, Reason, and Nature” — basically the epistemology section of Epicurean philosophy. And we will talk to you then. In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions about this or other episodes, please visit us at EpicureanFriends.com. Thanks, and we’ll see you next week.