Episode 158 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 12 - Chapter 7 - The Canon Reason and Nature 03
Date: 01/31/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2842-episode-158-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-12-the-canon-reason-and-nature-03/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 158 continues the third installment of discussion on Chapter 7 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy (“The Canon, Reason, and Nature”). The episode opens with Cassius reframing the chapter’s central tension: Epicurus respects reason but rejects any reasoning detached from sensory evidence — the key is whether philosophy has been “inoculated” with Platonic idealism, Academic Skepticism, or supernatural religion, which then requires explicit Epicurean counter-arguments. Joshua summarizes DeWitt’s three types of reason that Epicurus recognizes (dependable deductive reason from first principles; analogical inference from visible to invisible; ordinary fallible intelligence) and the one type he decisively rejects: the divine logos or “world-mind” of the Stoics and Plato — the “incorporeal, eternal, and unerring reason” that DeWitt says Epicurus eliminates while retaining purely human mortal reason. The episode then explores DeWitt’s two main criticisms of Epicurus: first, the apparent paradox that reason is required to pass judgment on reason, illustrated by Vatican Saying 40 and the skeptical self-refutation argument; second, the risk of treating Epicurus’s twelve elementary principles of physics as though they were theorems of geometry. Cassius responds at length, arguing that calling something a paradox does not mean it is wrong, that logic has inherent limitations the senses do not share, and that Epicurus is not driving toward total skepticism but toward a new framework of confidence grounded in sensory experience — the “80% mark” between confidence and certainty that Joshua identifies as the practical Epicurean stance. DeWitt’s framing of the resulting “split universe” — terrestrial and anthropocentric versus extraterrestrial and impersonal — is discussed, with Protagoras (“man is the measure of all things”) contrasted against Plato (“God is the measure of all things”). The episode then covers DeWitt’s account of ancient ridicule of the Epicurean canon; the Darwin parallel (how stripping humanity of cosmic specialness provokes emotional backlash); Plato’s self-pity for the soul imprisoned in the body, contrasted with Epicurus’s invitation to make the most of one’s actual life; and Joshua’s recommendation of John Tyndall’s 1874 Belfast Address as a nineteenth-century parallel case in which scientific materialism rooted in Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius provoked near-riots. Joshua reads Robert Frost’s poem “Lucretius versus the Lake Poets,” which turns on competing definitions of “nature” (Epicurean versus Romantic). DeWitt’s analysis of nature’s multiple meanings in Epicurean texts — human nature, civilizational experience, and nature as benevolent provider of necessities — is discussed, with Cassius noting the contrast between the Stoic theological reading of “living according to nature” and the Epicurean sensory-grounded reading. Callistheni closes by observing that modern immersion in fantasy media, cell phones, and digital constructed worlds represents exactly the disconnection from sensory reality that Epicurean canonics warns against, connecting the epistemological discussion to contemporary life. The episode ends without completing the chapter; the final section, “Priority of Nature Over Reason,” is deferred to Episode 159.
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 158 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing to go through Chapter 7 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, and Chapter 7 is entitled “The Canon, Reason, and Nature.” We’ve spent several weeks going through the first part of it, and we may be able to conclude it today. We’ll have to see as we go forward, but we’re still on the general topic of the relationship between Epicurus’s view of nature as providing the standard against which we look into questions and make decisions about what’s right and wrong, as opposed to a more abstract approach where you can ultimately decide something to be true or not true only by placing the statement or the proposition in the form of a syllogism or a formula subject to rules of logic.
The point is you have to reconcile the respect that Epicurus has for reason with the disrespect and dislike he had for certain types of reasoning that arguably are based on things other than the evidence of the senses. There’s a lot of subtlety in some of these positions, but I do think that it ultimately boils down to an extremely important point. And I’m thinking back to something that Emily Austin said in our recent podcast interview — that ultimately Epicurus doesn’t really think that it’s necessary to be so abstract in reasoning through things in a very complicated way. Ultimately Epicurus took the position that “pleasure is to be desired and pain is to be avoided” is like the idea of snow being white and sugar being sweet. Those things are just so obvious that they don’t need, and in fact can be confused by, overly complicated logical reasoning.
But Epicurus was a philosopher in ancient Athens, and just like today there are many people who are interested in the details of very complicated logical reasoning. The way you reconcile this is that there’s a basic truth — that sugar is sweet, snow is white, pleasure is desirable, and pain is undesirable. Those things are so basic that someone who doesn’t have confusing influences in their life largely needs to know just that, and they don’t have to know the details of what we’re talking about right now. But if that person has been educated in an environment where there is a lot of argument about philosophical questions — skepticism, Platonic idealism, and so forth — and they’ve learned that it’s impossible to have knowledge of anything and that there’s no way to live your life without becoming extremely familiar with geometry and other abstruse subjects, and if you’ve been brought up being told that God gives direct revelations to some people and not to others, then you have to know the arguments that can help you understand why those arguments are not correct.
So there’s a basic truth in Epicurean philosophy that’s really very simple and direct, but there are also parts of Epicurean philosophy where he addresses these very complicated questions that have been introduced by Plato and Pyrrho and others, and provides answers to those people who are interested in those questions. That’s the section that we’re working through right now. In the next chapter we’re going to be going even further, but right now we’re still at the big picture: Epicurus is emphasizing that nature through the senses gives us all the information we need to run our lives in an intelligent way and to live happily. And there are certain ways that you can understand that this is the case if you are confronted with arguments against you. Joshua.
Joshua: Okay. What I’m going to do here is try to summarize just about everything on page 125 by taking the middle paragraph on that page where DeWitt says: “Three kinds of reason are thus recognized: first, a dependable kind that proceeds by deduction from first principles; second, an inferior kind that proceeds by analogy from the visible to the invisible and is subject to correction by the former — that is, the dependable deduction from first principles; third, ordinary human intelligence, which is normally automatic and hence fallible, and is subject to correction by the volitional intelligence” — which is those other two kinds.
There’s a fourth kind of reason here that doesn’t exist in Epicurean philosophy but is present in nearly every other philosophy of the ancient world. And it’s because of that difference — that unique choice that Epicurus made to leave that kind of reason out of the equation — that so many people thought he was just fit for ridicule. The kind of reason that he leaves out of the equation is the kind of reason that people like Plato, or maybe the Stoics with their logos, talk about: the reason that does not exist in the human mind, but exists in nature. Reason that is the motivating principle of nature. Reason that is sort of a world-mind — that’s a word he uses — like an “over-soul,” to borrow an expression from Emerson. The idea that there’s this logos out there, this reason out there in nature, and if you want to be happy as an individual, you need to live your life in accordance with capital-R Reason in nature.
It’s that kind of reason that Epicurus decisively rejects. He does not see a guiding reason in nature as being something that is productive for humans to learn from or look at and to try to model their lives on. He comes down with a much simpler solution, which is simply pleasure as being the good.
Cassius: Joshua, you’re echoing what DeWitt had said previously where he said it will be observed that the incorporeal, eternal, and unerring reason of Plato and Aristotle is eliminated, but the purely human mortal reason remains.
Joshua: Yeah, that would have been a far better way to express it. As usual, DeWitt says the same thing in many different ways in many different places — which is something I’ve observed that Epicurus and Lucretius seem to do as well. It’s never good enough to say it once when you can say it four times, it seems like, in some of the Epicurean presentations. But yeah, I think the point you just made is exactly why we’re talking about this material. If you get the idea that Epicurus rejects all logic and all reason, then you’re wrong. If you get the impression that Epicurus says that logic and reason are never useful, that’s just not what he’s saying, because he spends a lot of time making elaborate logical arguments in response to these other philosophers who are saying bad things about the Epicurean approach. So if those ideas don’t really interest you, Epicurus is saying it’s okay that you not pursue these issues — but the reason they don’t interest you better be that they’re not already incorporated in your mind. Because if the presumptions about divine beings, the impossibility of knowledge, and the deceptiveness of the senses have been taught into you at an early age, you really do need to take the time to examine them and understand that there are problems with those positions.
There’s a group of people who think this epistemology discussion is not relevant, something they don’t really need because these issues don’t bother them. Like a person who’s raised in a non-religious setting and doesn’t constantly worry about going to hell, that person doesn’t need to spend a tremendous amount of time on the history of religion. But if they’ve been raised in a religious environment and have just incorporated that line of thinking without even questioning it, then they need this material as much as anybody else does, even though they may not at the beginning understand that they have a problem. So this is something we come up against a lot — the objection that “all I really need to know is how to pursue pleasure, just shut up about something with a stupid name like epistemology.” But it definitely has its place, and there are many people who are vitally interested in it.
Cassius: Yeah. I totally agree with that. Now it’s worth mentioning at this point — I’m at the bottom of page 125 — that DeWitt himself has a number of criticisms which he’s going to level at Epicurus, particularly on this question of why reason isn’t in the canon of epistemology, why reason isn’t a criterion of truth. Two main criticisms present themselves. One: DeWitt thinks that Epicurus, by taking reason out of the canon, has placed himself in a paradox. It requires reason to pass judgment on reason. We talked about this in previous episodes. The senses don’t pass judgment on reason — there’s a thinking process that has to take place here. And so DeWitt thinks this is a frankly paradoxical approach, and he outlines it by drawing attention to Vatican Saying 40, where Epicurus says: “The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity, for he admits that this too happens by necessity.” So Epicurus is picking up on paradoxes he finds in other schools — schools that are determinist like Democritus, for example. I think there’s a similar claim made about skepticism: the person who says knowledge is impossible has no basis for saying that, if knowledge truly is impossible.
Those are the two main criticisms that DeWitt has, and he says what it results in is an attempt to treat the twelve elementary principles of physics as if they were theorems of geometry — which is a point I haven’t fully internalized yet, because I know what Epicurus says about geometry and he’s apparently quite hostile to it. And of course we need to address that.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Joshua, but calling something a paradox does not mean that it’s wrong, does it? My understanding of a paradox has always been that it’s superficially inconsistent — seemingly contradictory, with an emphasis on the word seemingly or apparently. It’s not necessarily a statement that something is contradictory. Paradoxical has a different flavor, doesn’t it? Tell me what you think about that.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah. A paradox involves a kind of logical loop, where you’ve got these logical currents going into the paradox, and then they can’t get back out again — they just keep going around in a circle. The fundamental problem with skepticism is: if you’re going to say that all knowledge is impossible, well, you’re saying that as if you know that that’s true. So there’s a fundamental logical problem here that’s frankly inescapable. You can’t get around that kind of thing. If knowledge is impossible, you wouldn’t know it, because it would be impossible for you to know it. This is Epicurus’s criticism of Pyrrho. So these paradoxes do present, I think, real problems.
Cassius: Here’s what I would suggest as at least part of the way forward through that. Epicurus talks a lot about limits and limitations. I see this as a limit of logic that Epicurus is pointing out. Logic ultimately, on its own, is not a direct connection with the outside world, with reality. Logic is a tool that does wonderful things when you apply it using its capabilities. But it does have limits in what it can achieve, because it cannot ever make that direct contact with reality.
The apparent paradox that reason is required to dethrone reason should not leave you feeling like a deer in the headlights, thinking that therefore knowledge is impossible. I think what Epicurus is pointing to is that logic has limitations that the senses do not have. The senses are your direct connection with reality, and those two things used together produce tremendously beneficial results and can allow you to live a happy life. But if you allow logic to detach itself from the evidence of the senses and place itself into a position of authority — assuming capabilities it does not have in terms of contact with reality — then you’re putting the cart before the horse. You’re letting logic run like a loose cannon without any kind of direction, without any real living person behind it to decide which way it should point.
So you’re not left with total skepticism; you’re left with the knowledge that logic is a wonderful tool when used properly. It seems to me that that’s where Epicurus keeps talking about using reason and logic properly to process the information from the senses, and constantly making sure that the results of your logical deductions can be traced back to conclusions validated through the senses. You don’t end up with this immobilized fear that knowledge is impossible; you end up with a new framework of what knowledge is possible and what is not. And if there’s still a paradox at the end of it, it’s that we just have to understand that we’re never going to have all the information we would like to have and we’re going to have to live with that. If we don’t want to live with that, there’s only one way out — to stop living. But you’re never going to be able through logic or any other mental manipulation to make direct contact with some kind of absolute reality — Plato’s idealistic world, Aristotle’s essences. Those things just don’t exist. Once you liberate your mind from thinking that they do exist, you can be perfectly happy understanding and dealing with the reality given to you by nature.
I better stop that rant for just a minute. But to repeat on that point: the issue is not just Epicurus’s. It’s the issue that reason — however we might approach it — will never be able to reach what we would like in terms of an absolutely clear conclusion. No god is ever going to validate our conclusion. We’re never going to break through to some ideal world that Plato was talking about. There’s no outside of the cave — unless it’s a cave constructed by Plato and his friends. And there is no outside world that Plato has the key to, that he can open our chains and let us out through geometry into some “real” world. That is a fantasy, just as fantastic and non-existent as those in religion who say that heaven and hell are the true reality and God is just waiting to show it to us if we would read the Bible more closely. Telling someone that geometry is the key to a world of ideal forms is very similar, to me, to that religious framing.
And what DeWitt says at the end of this section is exactly on point with what you’re talking about there. He says he gives Epicurus credit for at least ruling out the divine reason as any kind of worthwhile approach, and then he uses this framing device where he says the universe is “split in two” — the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial regions. The terrestrial, meaning Earth and its environs, becomes anthropocentric since the human sensations, anticipations, and feelings are the norm. The latter is left impersonal and non-purposive, being governed by natural laws. He says: “Plato’s universe, on the contrary, is undivided, being completely theocentric and ruled by the divine and incorporeal reason.” He goes on to say: “In the terrestrial sphere, Epicurus approximates the position of Protagoras, who said, ‘Man is the measure of all things — of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not’ — while Plato holds the position that it is God that is the measure of all things.”
Joshua: It seems to me that what we come down to very often when we have conversations like this, Cassius, is finding that 80% mark, right — between confidence and certainty. This, for me, is the way to get around all these paradoxes: I don’t have to be 100% certain all the time. That’s a lot of what you were just describing. But if I can reach a position of confidence — I think in the Letter to Menoikeus, Epicurus has a Greek phrase which he uses to describe this, which is like, I’m trying to remember how Don said it now, something like “confidence of our knowledge.” That seems to me, if you can get a working confidence that most of what you think you know is true and that you can work on the stuff that you don’t know and hopefully get that into the “know” column without having to have any certainty on the basis of divine reason — that seems to me to be good enough.
Cassius: You ended on the point I was about to make my comment on, Joshua. You said earlier that you don’t have to be 100% certain all of the time. Maybe part of what Epicurus is saying to us is that we should really question whether it even makes sense to talk about being 100% certain any of the time. Maybe that formulation — 100% certain — maybe that itself is part of the problem, almost in a religious sense. The people who take the position that “God tells us what truth is; the Bible says it, I believe it, that’s all I need to know” — that approach essentially demands that knowledge requires validation by a God, or a stamp of 100% certainty, almost like a UL seal of approval on an electrical cord. But the idea that it is possible to be 100% certain has to be examined.
There is no God going to guarantee that water cooled down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit is going to freeze. We know that it freezes at 32 degrees because of our experience and our understanding of the nature of water and temperature. We’re confident that when the conditions are the same, those results will be repeated. We’re not certain because God requires it to freeze. We’re not certain because there’s some ideal world we’re in touch with when we freeze water. We’re confident because of our experience and observation. And it seems to me that’s all that anybody could ever do, and that’s what Epicurus is pointing out — and why the senses are so important, and why logic has its limitations.
The whole area of thought has been so corrupted by the religious perspective and the abstract logic perspective that Plato and these other guys have promoted that you have to step back and even think about your own terminology — the way you’re thinking about the whole subject of knowledge and certainty and confidence. Epicurus is trying to strip away that corrupt form of false reasoning about what certainty or knowledge means and show you that you can have confidence in an alternate construct of those same terms. Almost like the God situation: Epicurus obviously doesn’t believe in supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient gods like religion suggests, but he does use the word gods on a regular basis, taking a term and using it in a way that makes perfect sense when you understand what he’s saying — but which seems paradoxical to us because we come at things from such a different perspective because of how we’ve been brought up.
Joshua: Okay, so under the section “Ridicule” — we have the rather ambitious project of finishing this chapter today, so I’m trying to be brief and summarize. The purpose of this section is for DeWitt to explain what the response was to the canon that Epicurus sets up. He actually says in the first sentence that “it is a tribute to the merit of the canon that the chief weapon employed against it by critics was ridicule.” He says that “to have set up a criterion of truth in place of reason, if not impious or sacrilegious, was at least heretical and outrageous.” And he goes on to say: “Few concepts are so flattering to the vanity of mankind as the hypothesis that the possession of reason exalts it above the brutes and offers it an affinity with the divine.”
You know, when you read about the reception of Darwin and his Origin of Species in 1859, people were so thoroughly offended by that book because it seems to strip away everything that they think makes them important. That’s kind of the uptake here: nature doesn’t see you as important, nature doesn’t see you as anything — you’re just another animal on another planet. The universe is infinite, endless, eternal, and so it’s quite possible to describe ourselves in a way that would be very minimizing. I don’t know that it’s necessarily healthy to do that, but it would be true to the facts. And of course, for centuries after Epicurus you have people like Plutarch and Cicero who are very put off by some of what he’s saying here.
And then DeWitt says of Plato’s mysticism: “Part of its charm consisted in a vague self-pity for the soul imprisoned in the body.” Epicurus is not inviting you to self-pity — that’s not the purpose of his philosophy. He’s inviting you to a life of happiness, and he thinks that it’s available to everyone, which is another contrast between Epicurus and Plato.
Cassius: A couple of things on what you just said, Joshua. You reminded me of something else that Emily Austin discussed in her interview about the issue of whether we’re animals or not. That seems to be a major point of criticism — I believe Cicero is recorded as trying to ridicule Epicurus and saying that we’re just cows in the field. And so that’s a very loaded type of argument. But in the end, we are natural creatures just like those animals are. The dividing line seems to be this mystical notion — as DeWitt is talking about here — that we, of all living creatures, have an immortal soul that is specially divinely created to share the universe with a divine creator; that we are the masters of the world and everything is created for us; that we have this mystical element that puts us above the rest of nature. And that’s obviously not Epicurus’s position — his view even includes whatever gods exist as being part of nature.
So it’s clearly a point of argument, and it’s emotional and polarizing, but you do ultimately come down to the position that we are no more mystical than any other living being — a dolphin, dog, cat, whatever. We’re a lot smarter and have the ability to do a lot more things than any other type of animal we currently know about, but that doesn’t mean that we are different in type from the rest of living nature.
Joshua: Yeah, this is probably a good point to do something I probably don’t do enough on this podcast, which is direct people’s attention to John Tyndall’s Belfast Address of 1874. This is the speech that just about caused riots in the street because of precisely the things that we’re talking about today — the idea that there’s nothing particularly special about humans. In his speech, and this is the reason I think everyone should read it, he starts the conversation with Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, and an atomic system that sort of eliminated gods and demons out of the conversation on this question. Then he goes on to talk about the Middle Ages and how Aristotelianism actually held back any kind of development on the scientific front because people were so involved in bad ideas that the good ideas couldn’t really take root. So that’s out there, that’s on the internet, and I really would encourage anybody to go read it — it’s fascinating to see this speech delivered in 1874.
Cassius: And Joshua, before we leave that point, you mentioned again how there’s nothing special about us and the way we should view ourselves in the universe. I think there’s almost a parallel to Vatican Saying 63, which I quote a lot, about how it’s possible to be too frugal just like it’s possible to be too exorbitant in the way you live your life. I do think it’s possible to be too minimalist, too negative about our lack of being special. Just because we’re not different in kind than other animals doesn’t demean us or tell us to go jump off a cliff and just accept whatever we have. It’s just a statement that we’re not controlled by divine creators and that we don’t have any special dispensation from outside this world to make everybody else our slave or to treat everybody else as simply a tool.
Just because we’re not special in terms of having a divine soul doesn’t mean that we should not consider ourselves to be extremely valuable to ourselves and take all the steps we can to live a full life, to seize the day — or pluck the day, as people translate that phrase from Horace. It’s possible to let the pendulum swing too far in the direction of “you’re not special, you’re not special, you’re not special,” and a lot of people are going to hear that and say, “Well, I better just go ahead and end it all today.” But again, that’s the wrong framework — that’s this religiously or academically created framework that’s false. You’re not special and you’re not different in kind, but you are still highly important to yourself. Diogenes Laertius says Epicurus says the wise man is going to feel emotion more than somebody who’s not. You’ve got one life to live, and it’s important for you to live it to the best ability that you can, whether you’re special or not. It’s a different framework that Epicurus is coming from.
And let me also comment on the second thing you said a moment ago when you were reading from DeWitt — you talked about how Plato’s charm “consisted in a vague self-pity for the soul imprisoned in the body, pondering wistfully on the theme of a previous existence and future incarnations.” I think that’s a big point, because I see a lot of that myself when I read these anti-Epicurean philosophies. There’s a self-pity and a self-despair: “Oh my gosh, I can’t have all the things I would like to have. I can’t live forever, I can’t know everything, I can’t go everywhere — and therefore woe is me, let me construct a dream-like reality to replace the one that we have.” He’s not teaching you to have pity for yourself. He’s teaching you to see reality as it is and then make the most of it using the abilities that nature gave you. The fact that you may not have existed for an eternity before you were born and won’t exist for an eternity after you die doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make the very best you can of the time you have between those two points.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s self-pity, but it’s self-pity that’s coupled with self-aggrandizement. That’s how I read Socrates in his noble lie, which is that some people are golden people and they’re the ones who should be in charge of everything, and then some people are whatever base metals come after that. To hold both of those views at the same time seems to me just a recipe for deep unhappiness. That is not Epicurus’s position at all. But if you’re not confident that those positions are wrong, if you’ve been convinced that well, there’s no way to know, maybe they are the golden people, maybe they do have some special knowledge — that’s the situation that Epicurus is saying you need to understand canonics and epistemology to address. You have to be able to decode what they’re saying and deconstruct it and understand that it’s wrong. And if you don’t confront it, if you just say “well, these guys are full of bull, but I don’t know why,” then you’re not going to have as much confidence to reject their positions as you would if you understood what Epicurus is telling you.
Cassius: I don’t know. This one seems weird. You’re looking at the “Fallen from Heaven” section, right?
Joshua: Yeah, it seems so out of place — but then again, “fallen from heaven” should be out of place. So I’m going to read it anyway. DeWitt says here: “The language of Epicurus sometimes swerves toward poetical diction. And in one of his more enthusiastic moments, he seems to have been moved by gratitude to blessed nature to characterize the canon as fallen from heaven as if it were a holy palladium.” The palladium was a wooden statue of Pallas — who was the Trojan equivalent of Athena — that was said to have fallen from heaven after the founder of Troy prayed to the gods, and was venerated thereafter. I think there are stories about how it was carried out of the city during the Trojan War, though I can’t remember that very well. So the idea that the canon was “fallen from heaven” is an interesting way to look at this, and something the people of the ancient world probably thought was ripe for mockery and ridicule. He says: “Plutarch, who employed part of his leisure in digging up old slurs out of the archives, wrote scornfully: ‘It was not because Coletes had read the heaven-descended canons that bread was perceived by him to be bread and fodder fodder.’” In other words, he would have figured that out without Epicurus’s help, seems to be what Plutarch is writing there.
Cassius: And Joshua, when you were talking about the “fallen from heaven” passage, it seems to me that’s not entirely different from the Vatican Saying about giving thanks to blessed nature because she’s made what’s good easy to get and what’s bad and unnecessary. As usual, I’m butchering the exact language. But there is this idea in Epicurean philosophy of gratitude and of an emotional response to people who are your benefactors. In fact, we have a thread going on the forum this morning about another Vatican Saying that I think is relevant to that — the issue that reverence for the wise man is of great benefit to the person who does the reverencing, something to that effect.
There is this theme in Epicurus that not only should you just intellectually assent to — “okay, this makes sense, it’s correct, like a mathematical proposition” — but you should also have an emotional response to it. If in fact your situation is much more unhappy than it could be, and if in fact you come into contact with someone like Epicurus and he shows you the error of many of your ways and allows you to live a much better life, there’s a lot of justification for having some emotional appreciation for that relief. It’s almost like Plato’s cave analogy in reverse: if Epicurus is essentially the true deliverer of the people who are chained inside the cave — from the construct that Plato has created — it’s almost like someone liberating prisoners. The people who have been freed are extremely emotionally appreciative. And I think it’s appropriate to do that. It’s not cultish behavior to be appreciative of somebody who gives you a way of understanding that ultimately lets you improve your life tremendously.
To say it was “fallen from heaven” — he’s not outright saying that; that’s poetic diction and metaphor. Maybe it was even said with a smile, as Cicero talks about Velleius talking with a smile in connection with talking about the Epicureans — talking as if he had just come down from the Intermundia with the confidence that’s typical of Epicureans, which Cicero was criticizing. I have a feeling that some of my ranting this morning is going to sound like “one of his more enthusiastic moments,” according to DeWitt’s terminology.
Joshua: The next section is titled “Nature as the Norm.” This is an idea that I particularly associate with Norman DeWitt. He often says things like “nature furnishes the norm for Epicurus.” He starts out by talking about this tradition of Ionian science — the tradition of philosophy that started with Thales more or less on the island of Miletus. This is well before Plato and Aristotle. Miletus is in sort of the eastern Aegean, like a lot of the cities we’ve talked about — Samos, Lesbos, some of these islands right up next to the coast of Asia Minor, or what we would now call Turkey. So this is really where philosophy as a science of nature started in the Greek world.
All of the presocratic philosophers — Democritus, Leucippus, Anaxagoras — most of these guys are trying to come up with explanations of why things work in nature. What is nature made of? Questions like that. Then Plato comes onto the scene and sort of completely shifts the focus of philosophy. But then Aristotle starts to bring it back because Aristotle is interested in things like biology, which is important when you’re talking about nature.
The upshot of all of this — DeWitt says: “The immediate net effect of this was to create a competition between nature and reason for the command of philosophic attention. When Aristotle arrived at the conclusion that nature does nothing at random, he was speaking of plant and animal life and was bringing to the fore a new teleology.” Teleology is a branch of philosophy that deals with purpose inherent in nature, that’s my understanding. And then he says: “It is this concept of creative nature that Epicurus took over.” He calls the study of nature by the name Physiology, which is that Rerum Natura of Lucretius — On the Nature of Things — which includes nature in all manifestations, with the exception of astronomy, which in the ancient world had a lot of bleed-through between astronomy and astrology and mathematics, for reasons we’ve talked about extensively in previous episodes.
So this whole part here seems to center on what we mean when we use the word nature. Cassius, I almost can’t help myself at this point. This is a poem written by Robert Frost. It’s called “Lucretius versus the Lake Poets.”
Cassius: The Lake Poets?
Joshua: The Lake Poets. Okay, so that’s going to be Wordsworth, Shelley — Walter Savage Landor is the person he’s actually addressing here. “Lucretius versus the Lake Poets” by Robert Frost. And he starts off with a quote from Walter Savage Landor: “Nature I loved, and next to nature art.” And then Robert Frost says this:
“Dean, adult education may seem silly. What of it though? I got some willy-nilly the other evening at your college deanery. And grateful for it, let’s not be facetious. For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius by nature meant the whole goddamn machinery. But you say that in college nomenclature, the only meaning possible for nature in Landor’s quatrain would be pretty scenery, which makes opposing it to art absurd. I grant you, if you’re sure about the word, God bless the Dean and make his deanship plenary.”
So it seems to focus on issues of what we mean when we talk about nature. And all of these people have a different understanding of what we mean. Nature for Plato is something completely different from what it means for Epicurus, right?
Cassius: Yes, that seems to be what this section entitled “Nature as the Norm” is all about. He’s raised the question in these paragraphs, and I think as we get to the next two paragraphs that end the section, he begins to make the point more clear.
You know, I remember saying something to the opposite effect, either in the last podcast or the one before — that we all really know what we mean when we say nature, but we don’t know what we mean when we talk about reason or logic. And now we’re back to the first point, which is where we’re really not so sure what we mean by nature either — we need to be clear about that term. And I think that’s what DeWitt is doing a very good job of pointing out. You’re going to conclude the process for us in the next couple of paragraphs. But in general, it’s the issue of: does “mother nature” really exist? Does Epicurus say there’s some force or separate existence called nature that’s outside our universe and runs our universe for it? Or exactly what is nature when we’re talking about it?
I always think of Rolfe Humphries’s title of his translation of Lucretius — The Way Things Are — as opposed to On the Nature of Things, which most people usually translate it as. It’s a very interesting question about what we’re really talking about when we say nature, and whether there’s a separate entity called nature or whether that’s just a word we apply to the — I believe you called it “the whole goddamn machinery” in your quote.
Joshua: Yes, the whole goddamn machinery. And what DeWitt actually does here is he talks about Epicurus’s view of nature in a few different contexts, so it’s kind of difficult to bring it all into a neat little package. He talks about how different quotes from Epicurus don’t necessarily use nature to mean the same thing.
He says, for example, that in one particular quote “the meaning was narrowed by Epicurus to signify human nature. This is the meaning undeniably when he wrote, ‘Nature is not to be coerced.’” In other words, it’s human nature that is not to be coerced. You have to be more gentle with yourself than that seems to be the uptake.
And he says slightly different is the force of the word when Epicurus wrote of the beginnings of civilization: “Furthermore, it must also be assumed that nature was taught many and diverse lessons by sheer force of circumstances and compelled to put them into practice.” And Lucretius has quite a lot about this — like how humans learned from nature when they discovered fire, for example, by seeing the way lightning striking trees can cause it.
And he concludes the paragraph by saying: “In this instance, nature signifies the composite and accumulative experience of the human race.”
So just after those two quotes, we’re already beginning to see that there’s quite a lot more to this word nature than I’m accustomed to using it in Epicurean context. He goes on to give a third one. He says: “In the saying — this is the one, by the way, Cassius, I think you just quoted — ‘Gratitude is due to pleasant nature because she has made the necessities of life easy to procure and what is hard to procure unnecessary.’ The gratitude here signified exhibits an advance over the pagan gratitude to mother earth as the giver of bread. The word nature has taken on an ethical connotation. Nature is not merely the creatrix; she seems to be also benevolent and provident. The concept of her is close to that of Aristotle when saying that nature does nothing at random.”
One thing that’s throughout all of this conversation is something that you mentioned a little bit ago, Cassius, which is metaphor. When you start using metaphor as heavily as Lucretius does as a poet, it becomes more and more difficult to be concrete about what you’re saying and clear about what you’re saying.
Cassius: Yeah, I guess that’s the whole concern about poetry that Epicurus was concerned about — that if you live in a world of constant metaphor and you never make yourself absolutely clear, then it’s very easy to go off in a direction that’s not accurate, not intended.
Maybe we can give sort of an overarching summary of this whole chapter, because it will have been a few weeks by the time people actually listen to this from when we started it. The chapter is called “The Canon, Reason, and Nature.” He begins by outlining the canon, and then he goes on to discuss the position of reason — not in the canon, because Epicurus consciously left it out of the canon, but in a secondary position. It’s not on a level with the senses in terms of taking in new information, but it’s sort of the background process for how we deal with some of this information. And then the relationship between both of those two functions and nature in all of its different contexts — that’s sort of been the overarching project of this chapter: to explain all of those things. And when we get to the last section, which is called “Priority of Nature Over Reason,” he’s going to have much more to say about this. So I certainly think you’re right, we should put this off until next week.
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t think we’d do it justice today.
Cassius: I have to confess I’m probably more confused than I normally am after a recording with some of this material. Usually I leave a recording more well-informed than when I started, but now I feel like I’ve opened a can of worms.
Joshua: Well, as we were discussing earlier, this is a subject that not a lot of time is spent on in our normal Epicurean discussions. It’s not the type of thing that people on Facebook who are just slightly knowledgeable about Epicurus will want to talk about. But I do think that it is extremely important, and maybe the reaction that you’re having — finding the material unfamiliar, not something that any of us are comfortable talking about through long experience — I think Epicurus thought this is critically important material.
I remember that Diogenes Laertius says that Epicurus tended to combine this with the physics, which is why there are sections of Lucretius that do specifically address these issues — but it’s all kind of mixed together, because you’re talking about the universe, but you also have to have an understanding of how it is you know anything about the universe. And before you can reach conclusions about how to live, you have to bring together the picture of just what are the basic facts of reality that you’re dealing with. What is the nature of things? Once you understand and take a position confidently about the nature of things, then you’re in a position to decide how to live. Because if indeed there is a divine creator, if there’s divine fire like the Stoics say, if there’s some reason that virtue is a goal in and of itself, then you’re going to take that path and go in a totally different direction than Epicurus is suggesting. So you have to start off with an understanding of nature and an understanding of logic and reason and what is possible and what is not in terms of human knowledge, before you can make these ethical decisions.
Cassius: One thing I’m reminded of — I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently that Lucian of Samosata’s dialogues are extremely interesting to read, and there’s the one called Hermotimus which I recommend a lot and think is useful for anybody to read, because it is a discussion between Lucian as one character and then this Stoic student he’s talking to about the issue of: how do you know which path you should follow? You’ve got all these philosophies and philosophers who are standing on the different street corners and telling you to follow their path. How do you know which one is the one to choose when you don’t have any experience with any of them? How can you really know anything about them without testing them or learning something about each one? How much time should you spend on any particular one before you move to another?
And in the end, I think Lucian has some very good suggestions about the way to look at that problem — how you should end up being practical and prudent based on just ordinary common sense, and not getting too caught up in the logical constructions. Because one of the points I specifically remember about Hermotimus that I think is so important is that once you start down a particular path and you accept the assumptions given to you by the leader of that path, then it’s just like any other type of abstract logic. You can build a system that is entirely self-consistent within itself, and once you get started down a particular path on a particular set of presumptions, you can just go on forever — and because you’ve accepted these initial presumptions, you’ll never find any inconsistencies. You can weave all these elaborate dreams.
I have a lot of respect for things like Lord of the Rings and the different types of fantasy novels that people construct, but what they do is they create these worlds of their own that have a set of presumptions and axioms and rules, and you can just go on forever living in this alternate reality that is consistent within the rules of that reality. But the question you have to face is: should you accept those rules of reality in the first place? Because once you accept them, you’re not going to be able to necessarily reason your way out of the problem. And that’s one of the lessons that Lucian gives in Hermotimus — you’ve got to question the presumptions and the system at the very beginning before you get yourself trapped in the logical circles we were talking about earlier. The only way to escape from those problems is to question the assumptions in the first place.
And that’s something else we’ve been talking about on the forum recently — the issue of whether Epicurus is setting up a cult, whether Epicurus is saying that you should reverence him in a way that makes him into a godlike figure. That’s something we today are very uncomfortable approaching, and we should be. But Epicurus is clearly saying that you question authority and you question the presumptions and you always use your senses to test the reality of what somebody’s suggesting to you before you get caught up in some system that you’ll never logically reason yourself out of.
Boy, I’m so sorry today for my rants. So, why don’t we go ahead — Callistheni?
Callistheni: Yes. Okay, because as I was listening to you talk, and you were bringing up Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons — I played that game in college with a group of friends — but it seems life just goes on with more and more entertainment that is full of fantasy, and it’s engaging and people enjoy it, and there’s so much that kind of pulls away from the real world. So in some sense the Epicurean philosophy can point us back to the real world. I mean, we’re now on our cell phones, on the internet all the time, so we’re in this sort of artificial constructed world right there, and we’re not fully tuned into what’s in our environment, what’s surrounding us, what’s available to our actual senses — our eyes and ears and our bodies. So it would be interesting to see in what way Epicureanism can point us back to the real world. Because I think it really is a problem with people being absorbed in fantasy so much. As people are absorbed in fantasy, they’re losing touch with the real world, they’re losing touch with how to make sense of life, and then we end up with things like fake news and — how do we determine what is true? Nobody knows what to make of it. It’s almost like the end of civilization because we’re just so out of touch with reality.
Cassius: Callistheni, why is it a problem to be out of touch with reality? Are we after wisdom for the sake of wisdom? Are we after reality for the sake of reality? What’s wrong with being out of touch with reality? You can at least for a while get a lot of pleasure playing these games and reading these fantasy stories and so forth. What’s wrong with being out of touch with reality? I think that’s part of what we’re doing with this section — we’re talking about the canon, reason, and nature, and we’re trying to decide ultimately what you look to as a way of making decisions. So I think Epicurus would ask, well, what’s wrong with being out of touch with reality?
Callistheni: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that would be — you make bad choices if you’re just totally unaware of what’s going on, or if you’re viewing the world around you incorrectly. Your choices that you make are going to turn out badly because you’re not seeing the big picture and you don’t have all the information that you need to make good choices. And on top of that, other people who are in touch with reality can take advantage of the people who are not. So it’s in your best interest to be in touch with reality. There’s an advantage in being in touch with it, and if people who are not in touch with reality are not careful, they will become dominated.
Cassius: Well, Callistheni, we just had the advantage of interviewing Dr. Emily Austin on her new book Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, and one of the things she said kind of goes along with what you’re talking about — which is that if you don’t make time for things in your life, they tend to pass you by. If an opportunity comes up to spend time with your friends, it’s real easy to stay in your pajamas on the couch. So I think one of the things she mentioned was having a rule to the effect that when those things come up, unless there’s a really good reason not to go, do it — because you miss out on opportunities without really knowing that they’re just passing you by.
Callistheni: Yeah, I think that’s really important, especially since having gone through the whole COVID time where a lot of people have withdrawn from life, and then it’s a matter of: well, are people getting back involved again, or are they just staying holed up because that’s how their whole patterns have shifted?
Another thing that I remember you were talking about was the definition of the word nature, and that really perked up my ears because I think that’s a really interesting investigation — to think about what it finally comes down to: is there a sort of respect for “mother nature,” or how was the final conclusion on that with regard to Epicurean philosophy, especially in Lucretius?
Joshua: Well, we’re kind of skipping that for today. That’s going to be — I think the focus of some of what’s coming up next, which will be the very end of this chapter. The last three and a half pages of this chapter deal predominantly with nature as it relates to reason in the rest of the canon. But basically what DeWitt has laid out so far is that there’s a lot more context needed for each individual quote than we might think. You know, sometimes he’s not talking about “mother nature” — sometimes he’s talking about human nature. Sometimes he’s not talking about human nature — he’s talking about mother nature. Sometimes he’s not talking about the individual whose human nature it is — he’s talking about human nature as a whole throughout a civilization. That’s why I kind of ended the way I did by saying I’m almost more confused now than I was when we started, because DeWitt has not yet brought this all together.
And hopefully next week we can get some more closure on this. The last time I felt this confused was when we started reading Cicero and the Torquatus material — I remember the first couple of episodes of that I was just at my wit’s end. But there’s a long book that we’re dealing with here, and we are making progress.
Cassius: Yeah, I would echo what Joshua just said. I think next week, Callistheni, the section is entitled “Priority of Nature Over Reason,” and hopefully we’ll be able to address many of the aspects of the question that you just raised.
We know that Epicurus said that the wise man is fond of the country, and so many of us, when we say nature, are thinking about birds and bees and trees and grass and that kind of thing — which is definitely a part of what he’s talking about. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier: there’s many perspectives and levels of these discussions. There’s sort of a basic level in which it’s easy to understand — as Emily Austin was saying, pleasure is desirable, pain is undesirable, snow is white, sugar is sweet, things that don’t need elaborate explanation. You can just point to them and people understand them. There’s that aspect of the emphasis on nature.
But then there’s also a deeper level. If you’re into the philosophical debates, you’ve got the Stoics — they were super nature lovers, they said nature is so important to them, and “living according to nature” is all throughout Stoicism. But it’s a very different meaning, because their interpretation of nature is all sorts of divine fire and theologically motivated and oriented things. The Epicurean view of nature is very different.
And in this case, what we’re talking about in this canonic section is yet another level of discussing nature — this issue of: in your thought processes, do you ultimately look to what some people would say are artificial rules and formulas and geometry and these constructions of the mind that appeal to us as being very organized and logical? Do we have the ability to look to those methods for the ultimate answers to our questions about life? Or do we take a more basic approach and listen to our feelings and the natural faculties that nature has given us, and do we try to put it all into one coherent package that leads us to those answers?
So there’s a basic level, there’s an advanced level, there are many different perspectives. But until you begin to grapple with some of these questions, I think Epicurus is saying you’re not going to be able to withstand the arguments — again, as Lucretius warns near the beginning of Book 1 — about how many dreams the priests will weave to try to distort your knowledge and make you lose confidence in your senses. I think it’s also in Book 4 when Lucretius is talking about those people who say that knowledge is impossible and Lucretius says that that person is basically standing on their head — you can’t even talk to them, because they refuse to connect with reality in a way that fair-minded people can agree makes sense.
So there are many different levels of this discussion. They’re all important, and we’ll try to bring them together next week when we hopefully finish Chapter 7 with the section “Priority of Nature Over Reason.”
I didn’t ask for closing comments — let me do that now. Martin, do you have any closing comments for today?
Martin: No, no, no.
Cassius: Okay, thank you, Martin. Callistheni, any closing comments?
Callistheni: Oh, nothing else, thank you.
Cassius: Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, I don’t have anything either.
Cassius: All right, we’ll come back next week and go to the final section. Thanks for everybody’s time today. See you next week. Bye.