Episode 155 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 11 - Chapter 7 - The Canon Reason and Nature 02
Date: 01/10/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2811-episode-155-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-11-the-canon-reason-and-nature-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 155 continues Chapter 7 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, focusing on the section “The Dethronement of Reason.” The central question is why Epicurus excluded reason from his three-part Canon (senses, anticipations, feelings) and placed it in a subordinate, secondary role — even though he never denied that reason and logic are essential tools. Cassius opens with Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Peter Carr (“Fix reason firmly in her seat…”) as a seeming counter-argument, then contrasts it with Jefferson’s letter to John Adams (August 15, 1820): “I feel, therefore I exist” — which directly inverts Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” by grounding epistemology in sensation rather than thought. The group works through DeWitt’s key paradox: that reason can only be dethroned by reason itself; Martin and Joshua conclude that reason and logic are part of the prolepsis/anticipations — they operate at a later stage, on data already gathered through the canonical faculties. A major topic is DeWitt’s point that the universe has always been a cosmos (a well-ordered whole, not chaos), which eliminates the need for an ordering mind (nous in Anaxagoras, the divine demiurge in Plato). Martin draws an analogy between Epicurean pre-cosmic chaos and the hot, dense early state of the universe, while affirming that constant factors remain throughout. DeWitt’s statement that “sensation is entirely irrational” is explained as a merit, not a defect — the canonical faculties are reliable precisely because they report data automatically, without opinion or inference; it is human intelligence, not sensation, where error arises. The “white ox” example illustrates the distinction: the sensation of seeing an ox is a criterion; the judgment that it is “a white ox” is a mental operation that can err. The migraine aura problem is raised by Martin (and confirmed by Joshua, who also experiences them) as an edge case where sensation is partly altered at the brain level before conscious processing — a genuine counterexample to the strict formula that sensation “cannot add anything or take anything away.” The episode closes with discussion of forum user Todd’s question about hallucinogenics (sensation is honestly reported; the error is in the conclusion drawn from it), Callistheni’s observation about the practical importance of understanding how we come to know the gods are not supernatural and that death is the cessation of sensation, and Cassius’s Sherlock Holmes analogy: “Data, data, data — I cannot make bricks without clay.”
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 155 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing to discuss Chapter 7 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. This chapter is entitled “The Canon, Reason, and Nature.” We got started with it last week on the big topic of the chapter: the relationship between the canon, reason, and nature in terms of setting up an ultimate standard for deciding what’s true, what’s false, how to begin the analysis of just about any question. And the first subsection is entitled “The Dethronement of Reason.”
Throughout this chapter, DeWitt’s main point is that Epicurus, in contrast to Plato, Aristotle, and many of the other Greek philosophers, decided that ultimately an abstract perspective or abstract version of reason or logic cannot ultimately be the guide or the standard of truth. As stated in the Principal Doctrines, Epicurus says that the wise man is going to live his life by reason. So while Epicurus is never anti-reason — or at least anti a particular form of reason — he does come down against the idea that reason alone in the abstract, the phrase that we’ve been using in recent weeks, “pure reason contemplating absolute truth” — a kind of deification of a disembodied reason or logic — has something almost magical about it that can allow us to reach another dimension, reach a realm of forms as Plato might have put it, or determine what essences are as Aristotle might have said, or just put us in contact with some other but truer world than the one in which we live. And Epicurus is throughout his philosophy looking at that contention and going in a different direction, saying that nature through the faculties that nature has given to us is ultimately the standard, and not just our own human reasoning.
So one thing I picked up on last week, and we talked a little bit about this on the forum, is this issue of whether canonics can be associated with very specific words like “a test of truth” or “a standard against which you measure other things to see if they are true.” And I bring that up by way of preface because when we get into the issue of reason here, I want to read something Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Peter Carr. He says: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” So if we accept that a canon of epistemology is something that you measure other things against to see if they are true, then Jefferson here is making a strong case to put reason in that position. Hopefully we can, by the end of maybe this episode, come up with some good reasons why Epicurus is taking a different course on that — or if he’s taking a different course on that.
What is reason? I think most of us, when we talk about nature, although we can come up with all sorts of rabbit holes to trace down, probably largely have a consensus on what nature means — there’s something out there separately and totally apart from us, the universe itself. But reason — what exactly is reason, and should we consider the word reason to be the equivalent of the word logic? Is it the equivalent of the term dialectical logic? Diogenes Laertius says that Epicurus rejected dialectic. What’s the best way to get at the meaning of these terms? So when we’re talking today about the relationship between nature versus reason, what are we really talking about as “reason”?
Looking at definitions here: the first definition is “a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.” The second definition — probably the one we’re more interested in — is “the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.” That would be, I would say, the classical definition of reason as ancient philosophers would have applied it to epistemology. Does that mean the working definition there would be that reason is that thought process which is based on logic?
Joshua:
I don’t know if I would say that there’s a one-to-one correlation here. I’m a bit fuzzy around the edges on this one, but I do feel like there’s a difference between these two words. But you’re right, it is difficult to get at the heart of the issue. When you talk about that first definition, that takes me back to Frances Wright in A Few Days in Athens — the tracing of causes back and back and back, and that that is an important part of the process. But causation often doesn’t mean a whole lot more than following in time. One event seems to lead to another in a way that we call it the cause. But probably it is that second one you’re talking about that we need to focus on. So if it’s not a one-to-one correspondence, but if logic is tightly tied up into reason, would it be accurate or fair to say that Epicurus dethroned logic as his ultimate test of truth? I think all of us kind of resist that conclusion. But to what extent is it true, and to what extent is it false?
Cassius:
Well, “ultimate test of truth” is an interesting concept, because I think Epicurus would maybe present it slightly differently — that the standard of truth is almost something outward-facing; it’s taking in new information, testing it against known information with the senses you’re constantly streaming in through every sense. To talk about an ultimate standard of truth — I guess I just don’t know how that fits in exactly.
Well, if what we’re talking about is how we as individuals decide whether something is true or false — like you say, it’s outward-facing — what we’re presuming in this conversation is that truth is our understanding of something accurately in a way that we consider to be true. So it’s something that’s really going on in our heads as opposed to floating out there in the air. Is there any truth out there in the air, Joshua or Martin or Callistheni? Or is truth something that’s just within our minds?
Martin:
That’s only in our minds, because it’s a word which we created to designate something, and there is no absolute existence of this outside of our minds.
Cassius:
I think that’s correct from the direction that Epicurus is coming from anyway. And again, keeping the big picture in perspective, we’re contrasting this to the way that Plato or Aristotle might have suggested it, which is that the senses are deceptive, the senses are insufficient, and that we can go beyond our senses to discover something to be true against the senses or beyond what they can ever establish. This is all very, very complicated material. But what does it come down to in the end? If he’s talking about “dethroning,” that would imply that he’s talking about a king and deciding who ultimately makes the decision as to whether you consider something to be true or false. Is it something you can get independent of the senses and independent of nature?
Joshua:
For the record, I would say the Canon is how we know — how we interface directly with, call it what you want; I would probably prefer “facts” to capital-T truth. That’s certainly a way that I would describe the senses. You could describe the feelings in that way, and once again the prolepsis is something I’m always a bit confused about. Where I think reason and logic come into the equation is at a later point. This is why I latched onto the word “ultimate” earlier — because I feel like it’s almost the reverse: the most proximate to us are precisely the Canon’s faculties, and reason is down the chain somewhere else. Reason needs information that has been passed through or verified by the Canon in order to have something to work on. That’s my sense.
Cassius:
Why don’t we just go ahead and deal with page 123, where DeWitt says, quote: “It will have been noted that the canon makes no mention of reason. This means that reason is denied rank as a criterion of truth. It will be worthwhile to observe by what procedure this exclusion may be justified and what the consequence will be for the concept of reason itself. The position of Epicurus becomes seemingly paradoxical because there is no instrumentality by which reason can be dethroned except reason itself. Consideration of this paradox may be postponed until it has been shown how the Platonic concept of reason may be rendered absurd. The conclusions will be absolutely logical if the premises are accepted.” What do you take that to mean?
Joshua:
I think that DeWitt is right here to touch on a fundamental difficulty when we approach this issue, because in order to pass judgment on reason, it requires the thinking faculty to do that. The senses can’t pass judgment on reason. In other words, it’s not sufficient for them to do that. It takes that part of your mind which weighs things against other things, considers them — and it’s that part of the mind that he’s touching on here, which is also the part of the mind that determines that itself is not directly epistemic, not directly canonical, not a criterion.
Cassius:
Probably in my mind, it’s another question of the use of the word “reason,” because loosely speaking I think we consider all of our thinking processes to be our reasoning processes. None of us would like to say that our thoughts are just random or unguided or totally chaotic. We tend to think of whatever it is we conclude as our reasoning.
Martin:
Yeah, but if you’ve opened it like this, as you and Joshua said, then it’s quite obvious that logic and reason are part of the prolepsis. We are not really dethroning them — they become part of the prolepsis/anticipations, something like that.
Cassius:
There’s certainly part of the process of being conscious and weighing and balancing and coming to any kind of conclusion at all. I tend to think that the issue is dividing that process up into the data-gathering part versus the weighing part. And it’s the weighing part where errors occur.
Martin:
Yes, yes. I completely agree. I think that reason and logic, these things all have their place. The reason they are, quote unquote, “dethroned” in the sense that DeWitt is describing here is because they are not part of the way that we directly interface with — call it what you want. They’re not unimportant, reason and logic, just because they’ve been taken out of the Canon. That does not necessarily render them completely irrelevant and unimportant.
Joshua:
One way we could maybe talk about this productively — and I’m probably going to need your help here, Cassius, because you will remember this letter — kind of ironically, there’s another letter from Thomas Jefferson. It starts out: “I return always to my perpetual anodyne,” or something like that.
Cassius:
Yes, it’s Jefferson’s letter to John Adams of August the 15th, 1820. He says: “But enough of criticism. Let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the 12th, on matter, spirit, motion, etc. Its crowd of skepticism has kept me from sleep. I read it and laid it down, read it and laid it down again and again, and to give rest to my mind” — here’s the important part — “I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne. ‘I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself. There are other existences, then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.’” That type of orientation to reality — again, it’s that distinction with Descartes. “I think, therefore I am” places thought at the center, as opposed to Jefferson saying “I feel, therefore I exist,” talking about feelings or the senses as the ultimate starting point.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah, you picked up on directly where I was going with that. We kind of, in a separate conversation, got really deep into the weeds with Descartes and those issues, so I’m happy to see you’ve been able to rather succinctly express that, because now I don’t have to. But I think you’re very much on the right track there — that in the one case, in Descartes’ case, “I think, therefore I am,” it’s taking a mental process and putting that first in what will become a chain of reasoning; whereas in Thomas Jefferson’s case, he’s taking not a mental process, but a data-gathering aspect of human nature and putting that first. That seems to me to be the crucial difference.
Cassius:
Yes. And Joshua, another illustration I think fits right in here is the one everybody knows about — again, Plato’s cave analogy. Are you chained in a cave and are your senses part of this terrible situation where your mind is just unable through the senses to gain any sense of truth whatsoever, and it has to be freed from this cave implicitly through this appeal to an abstract logic and abstract reason that is not chained to your senses — that can lead you out of the cave to a higher reality? That picture that Plato has drawn with that cave I think is really critical and is a good place for us to contrast what Epicurus is doing. Because I think he’s rejecting that analogy. He’s rejecting that illustration and saying that your senses and these canonical faculties — the senses, anticipations, and feelings — they’re not chains that are constantly lying to you. They are, in fact, what you ultimately have to look to to come up with what is true to you. There is no world outside the cave that you can ascend to through absolute logic and syllogisms and the mind working upon itself. You are an integrated creature of senses and thought, and thought is not chained and restrained by the senses — it is, in fact, the senses and the way you interface with the world that is your whole life. Which takes you back to Principal Doctrine 2: death is the absence of sensation, and anything that’s without sensation is nothing to us. I think ultimately Epicurus would say that “pure reason contemplating absolute truth” — that’s nothing to us unless we have connections through the senses.
On page 124, I see this line from DeWitt that I think is probably fairly consistent with what we’re thinking. He says, quote: “While by this line of argument — the Epicurean line of argument — you will observe that the incorporeal, eternal, and unerring reason of Plato and Aristotle is eliminated, the purely human, mortal reason remains. But even this is subordinated to the sensations.” Quote: “The basic idea is the conviction that reason is incapable of making direct contact with reality. Reason is active only when the sensations are active. How the sensations reason possesses no criteria, since they, along with the anticipations and feelings, function as contacts with reality.”
Joshua:
Yeah. What you just read there would summarize my entire thinking on this whole section and this chapter. That was a good way to express it.
Cassius:
At the bottom of page 123, just to get this in the record — this is just more on the same point. We’re talking about how the 12 principles relate to the Platonic conception of reason. One of them that he quotes is: “The atoms are always in motion.” If we seek the implied negative of this positive statement — and Epicurus does reason after this fashion — it will be this: that nothing else in the universe is in motion, because the void is incapable of motion, and outside of atoms and void there is nothing. And he concludes by saying it will be nonsensical, therefore, to think of divine reason as the cause of motion. DeWitt often refers to sequences of propositions like that as “chain reasoning,” and that is absolutely reasoning. So it’s nonsensical to say that Epicurus is against reasoning or against logic. It’s just a question of where you start, where the data from logic comes from, and whether logic can go off on its own apart from data.
Then at the top of page 124 — this is something I don’t know if I’m just supremely ignorant on this point or if other people are going to be as surprised as I am — there’s an interestingly phrased sentence at the very top of page 124. DeWitt says: “To Epicurus, it meant that the idea of primeval chaos was absurd. The universe has always been a cosmos.” Before I looked this up, I thought “universe” and “cosmos” were the same thing. But when I looked up the definition of the word cosmos, a cosmos is “a universe seen as a well-ordered whole.” And for me, I had no idea that extra layer was added on there. So when DeWitt says “the universe has always been a cosmos,” cosmos in this definition is basically the opposite of chaos. If you’re talking about a cosmos as a well-ordered whole, there’s no place for chaos in that. And then he goes on: “To him, the universe was a cosmos solely because of the various weights, shapes, and magnitudes of the atoms and their motions, all of which were constant factors.” Of course this is ancient Greece — they don’t have a theory of gravity or all of the physical conclusions we’ve developed, particularly in the last 200 or 300 years. Nevertheless it’s very interesting. And he concludes all of that by saying: “Consequently, there was no need of the ordering mind, or nous, according to Anaxagoras, or of the divine demiurge of Plato. Both of these become absurdities.” And DeWitt goes on to note that in the extant remains of Epicurus, the word nous — which is a Greek word — does not occur. It seems to have been deliberately avoided. There’s no mind outside the universe which is putting things in order and making sure they run correctly. It would be a mistake to think along those lines.
Joshua:
You know, a lot of what Epicurus is doing all the way through is looking at what people allege to be an ordered system as if it had a person who ordered it behind it, and he’s looking at these regularities and attempting to explain where they came from. And so the Epicurean response to the assertion that it came from a divine creator is that it did not need a divine creator, because the nature of the atoms and the void will give rise to the things that we see without a superintending creative force behind it. And in the Letter to Herodotus, he talks about how the regular motions of the stars — the different things that we see are regular — have really been set in motion from the foundation of the world.
Cosmos is not the same as the world, and you’ve got to get into the definition of what Epicurus refers to as a world and relate that to the universe, because the universe contains limitless numbers of worlds in the Epicurean viewpoint. The way the worlds form sets in motion a determined series of events in most things from the time a world was first formed.
Cassius:
Cassius, have I taken the wrong direction with that? Is that even an intelligent comment on what you said?
Joshua:
I was confused when you were talking — I was thinking the word “world” instead of “cosmos.” Yeah, yeah, that’s certainly an interesting point that has to be brought up any time you talk about the Epicurean understanding of nature. You’ve got worlds. I don’t really have a good way to conceptualize this. There are people on our forum who conceptualize this by talking about star systems or galaxies — that’s a world. And it’s clear that I can’t see Epicurus being that knowledgeable about the precise configuration of the way things were in the universe. And the idea that the physical gods, who are made of atoms and void, are living in what we would call outer space, in the space between the worlds, the intermundia — so that to me is interesting.
What’s more interesting to me is this: but you mentioned one very good thing, which is this idea of how do you systematically remove the argument for the supernatural from this world? So that’s one problem. The other thing is this issue of chaos. And we’ll remember from previous episodes in this series that chaos was the first philosophical issue on record that Epicurus responds to. He responds to this when he’s a young boy in school. He’s exasperated that his teachers cannot explain to him what chaos is.
Here’s the problem. Epicurus believes that the universe, in all its particulars, at some point, at some level of knowledge, is thoroughly explicable and understandable. I think that’s quite important. Do you agree with that sentence, Cassius?
Cassius:
I guess the part that concerns me is whether “explicable” means that humans at some point have the ability to comprehend all of it. If the universe is infinite in size and eternal in time, by definition a human being is never going to be able to encompass all knowledge of it. If you’re saying it’s potentially explicable as we gather more data, I would agree with that. What are you thinking is the potential controversy about it?
Joshua:
Well, now that you reply that, I’m actually starting to think a little bit differently about this. Maybe I should phrase the question like this: “Everything in the universe can be explained eventually, if we have enough knowledge.” Would you agree with that?
Cassius:
Yes. Yes. And it can be explained in natural terms. It’s almost as if the bright line here is that there is no reason to expect, at any point, no matter how long we live or how far we fly through the universe, that we’re going to run into anything that’s not a part of the universe itself and therefore not natural. And you can say that’s a word game if you want to, but if it exists in the sense of being able to touch it or see it or come into contact with it, then that’s going to make it natural. Maybe you are going to come into contact at some point with some space alien who says that he came to Earth 10 million years ago and planted the seeds of human life. Maybe that’s the case, because we’re going to go to Mars and other places soon and other systems at some point. But if we were to come into contact with that Star Trek-like figure who says “I planted life on Earth 10 million years ago,” he’d be natural — it would not be anything supernatural if we came into contact with that. So that seems to me to be the critical distinction: we don’t have all the data we want, we’re never going to have all the data we want, but we’re making this logical conclusion that the data we don’t have is not going to be supernatural.
Right. So that seems to me to be the critical difference between a generic universe and a cosmos. A cosmos is something that is well-ordered and can be explained eventually if you have all the information. The problem he’s really getting into is this issue in Greek cosmology of chaos. Chaos is something that cannot be explained, that has no explanatory power. No inferences can be drawn from it. So for people to put that at the start of their system, it’s in my mind equivalent to throwing their hands in the air and saying, “I have no idea what’s going on here.” Because a universe that originates in primordial chaos — what does that require to make the transition from chaos to cosmos? Most theologically-minded Greeks would say: an ordering mind. That’s the distinction.
Joshua:
Okay. So when you say “order,” you are inseparably including an orderer in that terminology — you’re saying that implies necessarily that it was ordered by some outside force beyond itself?
Cassius:
No, no, no. I wouldn’t say that exactly. Because Epicurus’s cosmos is ordered. He makes the claim that it has always been that way — always been the same eternal atoms and void, and these eternal atoms and void have always had the same properties and capacities to combine in particular ways. There’s never been any new atoms from outside the universe, or any change in the nature of the atoms that has given them any new capacities to combine in ways that they could not have combined in an infinite number of times in the past. The source of what we’re calling “order” is not an external force; it’s just the nature of the atoms that they have this capacity to naturally come into combinations that we consider to be ordered.
Joshua:
Yeah, I mentioned earlier that referring to a particular cosmos, we can in principle know everything. And this is actually already too optimistic.
Martin:
So even if we just restrict ourselves to a single cosmos, we can never have sufficient information to completely predict or explain it. But of course what we agree on is there is no supernatural thing which comes out. It’s just that we are limited in how we can figure out the laws of nature to give complete explanation in every case. The limitation is that there are too many particles. You cannot track every particle independently. So that prevents you from really explaining it from first principles. And if you go to emergent properties — especially those of higher orders — there are a lot of uncertainties in there. Their behavior is established empirically and not fully explained back to first principles.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think it’s clear from the Letter to Pythocles that Epicurus doesn’t know everything — he can’t explain everything; he knows that. I think that he would say that if he had enough information on a particular thing, then he could explain it. That’s my sense of it. I’m mainly bringing this up to draw a distinction between the idea of a well-ordered universe and a universe that starts in chaos. Because to me, chaos — whatever else it is — is not explicable. It cannot be explained.
That’s what DeWitt is saying here: the whole idea of chaos is absurd. We can call flotsam floating on the ocean after a shipwreck “chaotic” if we like. But ultimately it’s not chaotic — what’s going on derives from the properties of the atoms and the void in that part of the ocean where that flotsam is floating.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. You’re definitely on the right track. In Greek cosmology, everything begins in chaos. To get from a universe of chaos to a universe that exists as an ordered cosmos — it seems to me that chaos would be self-sustaining in the same way that an ordered universe would be self-sustaining. And therefore, if you’re going to make a change from chaos to cosmos, what that requires is something outside. Whereas something that has always been a cosmos doesn’t require anything from outside. If you start with chaos, you need that ordering mind — that nous, or the divine demiurge, or whatever. There’s got to be something to make that change. And that’s the essential point here that Epicurus is making: that this idea of chaos is absurd.
This also attaches to the question of chance and natural law in Epicureanism. There’s this term “chaos” which the Greeks were focusing on. It’s like the Bible in the beginning — “I created the heaven and the earth” with the implication that everything before was “without form and void.” Formless matter. You’re postulating through your mind a condition for which we have absolutely no evidence has ever existed. Everything we see is a result of atoms and void moving together, which when we study we can make sense of naturally through science. But for some reason people think they can, through their logical mind, suggest to you that you should accept that there was a time before this happened, before nature was the way nature is. Why would you ever accept that? You can speculate all day long that maybe there was a time before the universe was the way it is now and maybe there was a time of absolute chaos. But that’s just idle speculation unless you’ve got some evidence to support it or some reasoning based on evidence.
Martin:
I have quite a few remarks here. One is it does actually look quite pretty. If you look at those pictures of a star explosion — a supernova — it does look extremely aesthetic from the pictures we can generate. And the other thing, regarding characterizing this chaos: there is an actual analogy between the very early phase of the universe, where we did not have individual atoms but everything was essentially a mix of particles — plus of course the electrons must have existed inside there already as well. But it would have been very difficult to distinguish individual things like what we call now an atom. All these elementary particles were condensed into an extreme ball into one thing — something like a giant nucleus but very small. Very dense state.
Cassius:
But you’re postulating that, Martin, based on a scientific extrapolation of what we know about the way matter and energy and atoms work. You’re postulating it based on data from the senses that we’ve collected over time, and in a rational extrapolation would lead to a condition such as you’re describing. You’re not at any point in that process inserting a supernatural God to say that yes, all these things took place exactly as we would have predicted them, but exactly 10 gazillion years ago some supernatural force came from nowhere and all of a sudden put everything into motion. There’s never any reason, no matter how far back you go or how far you trace your causation analysis, to just explode the whole analysis by suggesting a supernatural outside force.
I should point out here that one thing DeWitt isolates as being a feature of a cosmos and not of a chaotic universe is that in a cosmos there are “constant factors” — that’s a word he uses on page 124. In this hot, dense state that you’re describing, Martin, would you say that there are still constant factors in play? Because if chaos is complete disorder, then any amount of order at all would suddenly render it not chaos.
Martin:
Yeah, well, of course. So I mentioned it only as an analogy. Actually, the way “chaos” was used in the ancient world is not specific enough that you can really get much out of it, and that’s why it’s essentially useless. But just the way it was formulated, there is an interesting analogy between that view of chaos and this very early stage of the universe.
Cassius:
Very good. I’m happy with that issue for now. I think we’ve hit that hard enough, probably. And the conclusion of it all is in the next paragraph — he says, “It will be observed that the incorporeal, eternal, and unerring reason of Plato and Aristotle is eliminated, and the purely human and mortal reason remains.” Now further down in that same paragraph, there’s something I’ve highlighted: “Reason is active only when the sensations are active.” What do we think about that? Maybe just the major point is that reason doesn’t operate unless it has data from the sensations to operate on. Does reason itself operate on itself?
One thing I’ve mentioned in separate conversations is that I can’t even get my head around this idea of a mind with no sense organ feeding information into it. I just can’t wrap my brain around that. So of course I’m going to say, well, of course reason is active only when the sensations are active, because when the sensations aren’t active, you’re dead. But I do think, as a general observation, there are people who seem to talk about consciousness and the mind just simply being conscious of itself — consciousness conscious only of itself, the mind thinking only of itself. And I think that is a very problematic suggestion. Martin, do you have anything to say about that — the issue of what it would mean for consciousness to be conscious? Can a mind be conscious only of itself? Is that just such a logical abstraction that it’s meaningless and should be rejected?
Martin:
It would not be possible to verify this experimentally. What we would need — even if that hypothetical brain doesn’t have any sense input, at least it must have some output so that we can detect what it does. And then it may actually produce something that could be generated by algorithm. But then we don’t know whether this was just some chance nonsense or whether it actually produced it through some consciousness process. So that means it would practically not be possible to verify that this hypothetical brain has consciousness.
Joshua:
There was a man who actually majored in philosophy, came back from World War II, went to the University of New Mexico, I think, majored in philosophy, became a park ranger in Utah, and wrote a very famous book among a certain group of people called Desert Solitaire. I actually really like this book. There’s an interesting paragraph in which he says that if you’re dealing with a metaphysical idealist — or someone of that stripe, the kind of person Cassius was describing in a philosophy class — Edward Abbey suggests that the remedy for that is to take them outside and throw a rock at their head. And if he ducks, he’s a liar. We’re trying to deal with concrete reality here. I realize that philosophy has this whole other dimension; I also realize, frankly, I’m not very well versed in it, so I probably can’t even talk intelligently about it if I tried. But it’s also the case that I’m just not that interested in this debate.
Cassius:
Yes, maybe there’s a good reason you’re not well versed in it. Maybe it’s because you’re smarter than that, or because you just instinctively feel the lack of productivity of entertaining ideas without evidence. That’s how I would summarize all those different arguments — “consciousness contemplating only itself.” Why do you ever spend time going there without some kind of evidentiary basis for the speculation? If you enjoy just that kind of thing, then sure, do it. But it’s just like we were talking about earlier — why would you ever postulate the existence of a supernatural creator, or a time before the universe operates as it does now, without any evidence? There’s something just instinctively unsound about that approach.
Martin:
The reason this occurred in humans is because there were things that were unexplainable, and then it was just too uncomfortable to not be able to explain things. So for example, with weather phenomena — in ancient Greece, the gods are causing weather; Zeus is causing the lightning. So much of life was attributed to these various Greek gods. It’s this explanation in order to deal with something that’s ultimately not knowable at that point, because the science did not exist, but people felt uncomfortable not knowing, so they created ideas to make sense of things. So there’s this sort of need for the human being to make sense of things, but unfortunately that leads to errors at times.
Cassius:
Yeah, that is certainly the case in the ancient world, and to an extent in the modern world as well. In the ancient world, it seemed to me to be more transactional in this life. I’m getting on a boat, so I need to make an offering to Poseidon — that kind of thing.
Joshua:
And it may surprise people to learn that one of my favorite authors is Henry David Thoreau. People read Henry David Thoreau and they emerge with the conclusion that he is the kind of person Cassius was describing elsewhere. I don’t think that’s a completely unfair presentation, but what Thoreau is for me is not so much the metaphysical speculation that interests me, as it is the use of metaphor that sort of bridges the gap between these two worlds in a more aesthetic way. But just for the record, he does say in his journal: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” I was quite gratified to find that in his journal, because it tracks so clearly with something I’ve long felt.
Cassius:
No, I think that is the topic. You use the word “metaphor,” and I think Lucretius talks about a scheme of contemplation — at least some of the translators use that kind of terminology. That’s what we’re talking about in everything we do here. We’re looking for a picture, an outline, a method of putting everything into a context that’s understandable. Because if it’s not understandable, ultimately we can’t even deal with it at all. And we have to deal with this issue that we don’t have all the information we would like to have and will never have all the information we’d like to have. Do we allow ourselves to just indulge in flights of fancy that come to our minds as possibilities but which we have no evidence to support? Or do we construct probabilities in our minds based on evidence that we do have?
So at the beginning of this conversation today I kind of started with a challenge by reading this quote from Thomas Jefferson. I’ll read it again and we’ll see if we have any new thoughts since we’ve been talking about reason for most of the day: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
One thing that occurs to me as I read this the second time is he says “call to her tribunal every fact.” What is a fact, though, Joshua? Is a fact an opinion about the fact? Is a fact a truth which your mind has concluded to be true? Or is it the data itself?
Joshua:
It’s a difficult question — the difference between fact and truth. I’m much less comfortable talking about truth generally. We’ve been having some very interesting conversations about whether the senses always tell us the truth, and you had some very interesting takes on that. But maybe have we discussed that recently on the podcast?
Cassius:
I don’t know that we have, and it’s certainly part of what we’re talking about right now. Talking about the senses versus truth, it’s almost like apples and oranges — truth is a product in our mind of working with the data the senses have given us. But the data is not necessarily even true or false unless you’ve evaluated it. Wouldn’t that be right? “All sensations are true” is this phrase that certainly has come up a lot and that we have to have an understanding of. And that’s where DeWitt goes into the long discussions of the various meanings of the word “true” and how the senses are witnesses who are reporting honestly. You know the word “honest” versus “true” — you can honestly say that you saw something but have very poor eyesight, and what you’re reporting that you saw when you’re on the witness stand is not what actually happened. So you’ve got this difference between the word “true” and what we’re talking about with the senses. Every one of these canonical faculties — even the anticipations and the sense of pleasure and pain — they’re producing sensations to you that you have to accept as the starting point of your analysis. But as far as pronouncing them to be true or false — that’s something different, I think Epicurus is saying.
I’m sorry, Joshua, I’ve led you off your train of thought.
Joshua:
I don’t have a train of thought. I think it’s an interesting question because if we say that the whole topic today was “the dethronement of reason” — reason taken out of the Canon and put in a secondary place — but if it’s true that we can’t establish anything as a fact without the application of reason, doesn’t that just slide reason right back into place in the Canon? That’s the difficult question.
Cassius:
Yeah, what I’m reading DeWitt to be saying in his analysis of Epicurus here — and I think this goes back to Lucretius; I can’t call the examples to mind right this second, but I think Lucretius is fairly regularly using the word “true reason” — I don’t think that Epicurus would for a minute admit that he is abandoning reason in a sense. What Epicurus seems to me to be saying here is that there is a true method of reasoning, a method that gets you to the truth, which is the kind of thought process that we are familiar with and that we endorse in science. But he’s saying that it has to always be tied to the data of the senses — that when you try to reason without the data of the senses or against the data of the senses, you are committing a logical fallacy of its own. We’re saying that this method of reasoning based on the senses is reason and it is logic, and that it’s actually illogical or unreasonable to try to reason without this data. It seems to me that that’s the ultimate point: does reason and logic have to operate on data from the senses? And can you end up concluding that anything is true using reason or logic without data from the senses ultimately being the foundation and starting point of your analysis?
I think Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing can be defended: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact” — as long as you understand reason in the sense of a methodology that operates on the data of the senses, you’re fine. It’s only when you take this other approach of saying that reason and logic can ultimately be divided from the data of the senses that you’re into a world of speculation and nonsense.
Joshua:
Yeah, to some extent it’s a question of how the sausage is made, isn’t it? You’ve got your sausage-making machine, but it’s no good to have the machine if you don’t have the pig to put into it, essentially. So from that point of view, the process is interesting and it’s worth studying and it has its place in the whole architecture of what we’re talking about. But it doesn’t have that prime position that the senses have, and it doesn’t have the prime position that Plato and the others would certainly give it — by far.
Cassius:
So just as we’re going to begin to run long for today’s episode, if we can at least start looking at this final paragraph on page 124, I think this is part of answering the question you’re raising here. What I’m seeing is that DeWitt says: “Moreover, it is not in sensation but in human intelligence that error arises. Of the sensations he wrote: sensation is entirely irrational.” And DeWitt says this is not cited as a demerit but as a merit — and it is the justification for regarding sensation as a criterion. It cannot stimulate itself, and unlike reason, when stimulated by something external, cannot add anything or take anything away. And then DeWitt gives a number of examples about seeing oxen and the color white and so forth. But I think the point of a lot of this leads us back to this: the distinguishing attribute of the canonical faculties is that they are irrational — that they operate automatically. It’s the process of evaluation where reason and logic take place. But ultimately the reason the canonical faculties are reliable is that they’re just simply giving us raw data that has not been filtered through opinion.
This is where differences of opinion occurred even within the Epicurean school — Diogenes Laertius records this. This is the question of whether there are three legs of the Canon of truth or whether there are four. DeWitt says it is not sensation that tells the observer that he is seeing a white ox — this conclusion is a function of the intelligence — and this recognition is “an immediate perception of the intelligence.” And here’s the point that I think is interesting to follow: even to such a perception as this, the recognition that you’re seeing a white ox, Epicurus denied the rank of a criterion — though his successors did not. And the ground of his rejection is manifest: if the observer says “it is a white ox,” this is a judgment, and as such it is secondary to the sensation itself, and it can err. Thus it does not qualify as a criterion. The sensation, however, does not err. This is that whole issue of whether it is ever justifiable for you to form a concept like “an ox” and decide that that concept itself is a criterion of truth. What DeWitt is saying is that Epicurus said no: you reason in your mind that you’re seeing a white ox, but you always have to keep in mind that you could be mistaken. The conclusion that something is a white ox is a conclusion of your mind that could be wrong. But the sensations — the things you’re seeing and touching and feeling and smelling — are not wrong. They are just what you’re experiencing.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. So when you asked me a moment ago what I thought about whether senses fundamentally report truth or fact, and whether they err — I hesitated, because it’s actually a question on which there’s some diversity of opinion among academic commentators living today. And this issue comes up — like the square tower that looks round from far away — there are all kinds of ways of interpreting that in a way that defends the sensations as being worthy of being criteria. But there are actually counterexamples to the formula as it’s put here by DeWitt — that sensation “cannot stimulate itself, and when stimulated with something external cannot add anything or take anything away.” One counterexample I’m very familiar with myself, unfortunately, is migraine auras. They are generated after the picture has been produced on the retina, on the way into the brain, at an early stage of brain processing. So they’re woven into the sensation, and if you don’t know about auras, you cannot distinguish them. They’re part of an altered sensation if you have the migraine aura overlaid on what comes in from the retina. There are certainly more counterexamples. So there are exceptions to this statement as put here by DeWitt.
Cassius:
So Martin, are you saying you also suffer from migraine with visual aura?
Martin:
Yeah, only I have — I don’t have the pain normally, only the migraine auras, typically once a month. And they definitely are there directly interwoven with the sensation, and it’s added to what comes in. Because I know the background, I know this one has been added. But it’s in such a way that in principle I cannot distinguish it — only my later processing, the mind, can dismiss it as an artifact from this migraine.
Joshua:
Yeah, I actually suffered the same thing — probably not as frequently as once a month, but I do get it. It’s caused by spreading cortical depression in the brain, which is an electrical phenomenon as far as we think we know. And this visual aura — there are Wikipedia pages about this; people who don’t experience it can go and see what it looks like — the weird thing about it is it’s not dependent on your eyes and which way they’re moving or whether they’re open or not. If I were to close my eyes and move them left or right, the visual aura seems to stay in the same place, because it exists in the brain.
Martin:
But it’s at such an early stage that it cannot be separated — so it’s part of the sensation as you get it.
Cassius:
Now what I’m hearing both of you referring to there is going to lead back to another major part of the big picture: that nature doesn’t guarantee us success either in thinking or necessarily in our perceptions. Some people are born blind, some people go blind. The senses are not necessarily functioning all the time as we would like them to. But the question would then be: how do we know that they’re not functioning correctly? It’s not because we’ve just contemplated pure reason and come up with that conclusion. We know it’s a problem because there are times when it’s not a problem, and we compare the functioning when they’re malfunctioning to other times when they are functioning without those distortions.
The eyes do not contradict the ears, nor does one vision of the eye contradict another vision of the eye — they’re both primary data that you have to accept as the starting point of your analysis. But as Epicurus and Lucretius say, you never really dismiss the sensation. What your mind is doing is comparing multiple observations of those sensations, and over time you begin to see that when your eyes are functioning without distortion you’re producing a picture that you conclude to be true, and then you can compare that to those times when your eyes are not functioning properly. But you’re never really dismissing the data from that sensation — you have to accept what you’re given, because you have no way to get behind it. The times when you have the aura are just as real to you and just as primary data as the times when you’re not. It’s just that you don’t make judgments about what color the ox is when you’ve got dark glasses on. You take off the dark glasses and you realize that the color changes — it’s a different color without them — and it’s only comparing the sensations to each other that leads you to be able to say something is true or false. You just can’t reason your way to that conclusion.
Okay, tell me why I’m wrong there.
Joshua:
No, actually what I want to do is present another case — that came to us from a forum user, Todd. He mentioned the issue of hallucinogenics, and I was hoping to get your opinion on that since you’re on the subject; you’re on quite a roll here.
Cassius:
Yeah, what did he say? I’d have to refresh myself. Joshua, do you remember the point he brought up?
Joshua:
Well, your response to it, vaguely, at the time was that it’s false to say that everything that is reported by our sensations is true. Right — if I’m hallucinating and I see a dragon flying at me, my senses told me there’s a dragon flying at me, therefore there’s actually a dragon flying at me. That would be a misrepresentation.
Cassius:
It would be a false conclusion. Okay, yes. You know, I am as bad about loose talk as anybody, and my ability to articulate things consistently and clearly is woefully insufficient. “All sensations are true” is a defensible position, but “all conclusions based on sensation are true” is absolutely not defensible. And so that’s the direction you have to drill down.
If you’re hallucinating — in fact, I think it’s specifically stated in Lucretius — that hallucinations and dreams are true in the sense that you are perceiving them in your mind, and you can’t just simply say that they didn’t happen; they weren’t just put there supernaturally or whatever. They happened to you. But the conclusion that you draw from it has to be that it did not happen in the real world — it was just a dream or it was just a hallucination. You should not conclude that a dragon actually flew at you. It’s these conclusions — these true or false opinions, conclusions, deductions — that are true or false. But the sensations are simply whatever they are. I think that would be a sympathetic way of explaining Epicurus’s position — at least that’s what I read, and it seems to be a plausible version.
Joshua:
I do remember being specifically on the subject of psychedelics, but I think you’ve probably answered it fairly.
Cassius:
Yeah, and maybe given the time we just need to wrap up the episode. But let me say this before we can do closing comments: what it comes back down to is that we have to have an understanding of “all sensations are true” that is reasonable and not absurd. It is absurd to say that the things that we dream, the things that we hallucinate, that we think we see — it is absurd to say that every one of those things is true in the sense that “that’s what actually happened to you in the big picture.” But on the other hand, the things that your eyes report, your ears report — no matter how distorted — the things that you experience in a dream: if Lucretius and Epicurus are correct, they are raw data that has come into your mind from some source, and that raw data has to be accepted as it is, as raw data, because there’s no way to get behind it. Those are the faculties that nature has given you to interface with reality. And then you evaluate the data, and there you make mistakes. You can be right or wrong in determining what’s accurate and what’s not. But “all sensations are true” means that all sensations are honestly reported to you without evaluation and without any opinion from those faculties that nature gave you. All the operation and process of evaluating them is what takes place in your mind. You may be sick; it may be beyond your control; you may have dark glasses on — you may have all sorts of obstacles to having all the information that you need. But in the end, you have to evaluate it, and that’s in your mind where true or false occurs.
I’m sorry for ranting like that. Let’s talk about closing comments so we can bring the episode to a reasonable time-length conclusion. Martin, any closing thoughts for the day?
Martin:
Nothing to add.
Cassius:
Okay. Callistheni?
Callistheni:
So my closing comments are that this is important, even if there’s a certain level of complexity that I find a little bit unpleasant. But it’s important — everything that we’re talking about here — because it has to do with how we come to think that the gods are not supernatural, that the gods are not involved with human life, and how we think through all of that. So how we use observation, how we use reasoning to come to conclusions around that — so that’s why this is important. And also regarding death, that after death sensations cease, and how do we come to that conclusion. So it’s very important to understand the process of thinking and the reasoning behind that.
Cassius:
Good points. And Joshua, Callistheni has been talking a little bit about the Greek gods and their influence on how people think about these things. What I realized as I hear you talking, Callistheni, is that I can now justify the reference I seemingly made out of nowhere to American transcendentalism and the use of metaphor in the place of some of these other things like “pure reason contemplating absolute truth.” Because Lucretius justifies the use of metaphor particularly on the subject of the gods — “the grain is Ceres and the wine is Bacchus” and so forth.
One thing that I can probably say to sort of tie up the episode here is this: if you picture the fictional character most associated with logic, most associated with reason and those processes, I would nominate Sherlock Holmes for that position. But when Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have enough information for reason or logic to act upon, what’s his response?
Joshua:
Well, in the books he says: “Data, data, data — I cannot make bricks without clay.”
Cassius:
There you go — we could have skipped a whole hour and a half. That’s exactly right. Or as Diogenes Laertius says about Epicurus — and it’s in one of the Principal Doctrines as well, those long ones that seem so convoluted about how to think — you do not select a single opinion as true if you don’t have sufficient evidence to justify it. If the evidence supports several conclusions, you have to keep open the possibility that one or all of those simultaneously possible conclusions are also true. And as Frances Wright says in her book: if you observe that the sun rises every morning immediately after a horse-drawn chariot ascends into the sky, then you’re going to conclude that the horse-drawn chariot ascending into the sky was somehow related to the sun rising. You have to follow the evidence that’s before you. But you don’t create evidence in your mind without data from the senses.
Okay, so we’ll wait until next week for further discussion. We haven’t finished this chapter yet — hopefully we’ll finish it next week as long as we continue to have interesting discussions about it. So thanks for your time today. We’ll come back next week. See you then, and join us on EpicureanFriends.com in the meantime. Bye.