Episode 159 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 13 - Chapter 7 - The Canon Reason and Nature 04
Date: 02/03/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2867-episode-159-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-13-chapter-7-the-canon-reason-and-n/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 159 is the final installment on Chapter 7 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy (“The Canon, Reason, and Nature”), completing the subsection “Priority of Nature Over Reason.” Cassius opens by reading Diogenes of Oinoanda Fragment 4, in which Diogenes notes that Academic Skeptics effectively say natural science is unnecessary, and that Aristotle and the Peripatetics say nothing is scientifically knowable because things are in constant flux — while Epicureans acknowledge flux but deny it is so rapid as to prevent sense perception from apprehending the nature of things. He then reads an extended passage from Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius satirizing abstract dialectical logic: the famous mouse/syllable/cheese paradox — “a mouse is a syllable; a syllable does not eat cheese; therefore a mouse does not eat cheese” — which Seneca and Cassius both invoke as a perfect illustration of what Epicurus criticized as empty definition-chasing detached from nature. DeWitt’s central argument on page 128 is that possession of sensation is antecedent to rational activity, and that actions invariably precede thought — illustrated by Joshua’s Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle quote (“from a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara”) which, while favoring reason, notably still starts from sensory observation rather than pure abstraction. The discussion covers Lucretius Book 5’s description of humanity developing from animal skins to woven garments, caves to huts, clubs to weapons — the Lucretian basis for 19th-century anthropological three-age theory, contrasting directly with the Homeric/biblical Golden Age of divine instruction. The origin of language is explored through the contrast between Genesis 2 (Adam naming the animals at God’s direction) and the Epicurean view that language developed gradually through common human experience, without any single authority naming things. The section on “Taking Words at Their Face Value” is discussed: Epicurus’s dictum that nature is neither a poet nor a rhetorician nor a dialectician; words must be taken at face value; the quest for Platonic definitions leads to empty abstractions like “the Other,” “the Same,” and “Essence” in Plato’s Timaeus that mean nothing without the theory of eternal ideas which Epicurus rejected. Diogenes Laertius is quoted: “Dialectic they reject as superfluous.” The section on poetry examines DeWitt’s claim that “the wise man will not compose poems” — a challenge given that Lucretius is one of Rome’s greatest poets; the resolution is that Epicurus objects not to poetry as such but to the mystical obscurantism of poets like Homer (whose gods intervene in battles) and Heraclitus (who hid his poem in a temple to make it appear divine), while Lucretius justifies his verse as honey rimmed around the cup of philosophical medicine. Joshua’s Lucian parallel is noted: Lucian’s A True Story, sometimes called the first science fiction novel, opens by honestly declaring every word is a lie — the honest opposite of Heraclitus’s deception. Cassius reads more Seneca on dialectic: “I should deem your games of logic to be of some avail in relieving men’s burdens if you could first show me what part of these burdens they will relieve.” Cassius and Joshua discuss why Epicureanism was so popular in the ancient world — not because people wanted to be shameless pleasure seekers, but because it was founded on nature and sensory observation rather than abstract hierarchies. The chapter concludes with DeWitt’s parting observation that “it remained for the Stoics to identify nature with reason and to make a fetish of living according to nature.” Joshua explores at length how Stoic natural law — identifying divine reason with the order of nature — is completely antithetical to Epicurean philosophy, noting that Epicurean rejection of the great chain of being is precisely why the Garden admitted women and slaves as co-equal philosophical partners, including Leontium, who wrote a book against Theophrastus (Aristotle’s successor), praised even by the hostile Cicero for writing “in good Attic Greek.” Cassius closes the chapter with a passage from the late eighteenth-century English writer Jackson Barwis arguing against Lockean rationalism: “When we are told that benevolence is pleasing, that malevolence is painful, we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning… but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls.” He closes with Principal Doctrine 25 (“If on each occasion instead of referring your actions to the end of nature you turn to some other nearer standard…”) and previews Chapter 8: “The Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings.”
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 159 of Lucretius Today. The question of how you can be sure of anything is always a threshold issue when you discuss something controversial in philosophy. When we know things — and if we can — how do we go about it? The question may seem too obvious to worry about, but it was consuming to the ancient philosophers and something that we need to spend time on ourselves. It’s even included in Diogenes of Oinoanda’s inscription on his wall. In Fragment 4 of that inscription, Diogenes says about the Socratics:
“They say that pursuing natural science and busying oneself with investigation is superfluous and unprofitable, and they do not even deign to concern themselves with such matters. Others don’t explicitly stigmatize natural science as unnecessary, being ashamed to acknowledge this, but use another means of discarding it. For when they assert that things are inapprehensible, what else are they saying than that there is no need for us to pursue natural science? After all, who will choose to seek what he can never find? Now Aristotle and those who hold the same Peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable because things are continuously in flux and on account of the rapidity of the flux evade our apprehension. We, on the other hand” — and he’s talking about the Epicureans — “We on the other hand acknowledge their flux but not its being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense perception. But indeed, in no way would the upholders of the view in the discussion have been able to say — and this is what they do maintain — that at one time this is white and this is black while at another time neither this is white nor that black, if they had not had knowledge of the nature of both white and black.”
What Epicurus did, it seems, in response to those problems was what we’re talking about now in terms of the canon, reason, and nature. Before we get back to this chapter, there’s a section of the Letters of Seneca to Lucilius that contains a passage I think is extremely relevant to what we’re talking about. Because when Aristotle and the Socratics and the Skeptics say that nothing is possible to know, they have an answer to that and they talk about abstract logic as the method by which they determine things. Epicurus criticizes that in the form of calling it dialectic, and here’s something that Seneca said that I think is very Epicurean. Seneca said:
“And on this point, my excellent Lucilius, I should like to have those subtle dialecticians of yours advise me how I ought to help a friend rather than tell me in how many ways the word friend is used and in how many meanings the word man possesses. Lo, wisdom and folly are taking opposite sides. Which shall I join? Which party would you have me follow? On one side, man is the equivalent of friend. On the other side, friend is not the equivalent of man. The one wants a friend for his own advantage. The other wants to make himself an advantage to his friend. What you have to offer me is nothing but distortion of words and splitting of syllables. It is clear that unless I can devise some very tricky premises and by false deductions tack onto them a fallacy which springs from the truth, I shall not be able to distinguish between what is desirable and what is to be avoided. I am ashamed. Old men as we are, dealing with a problem so serious, we make play of it. Mouse is a syllable. Now a mouse eats its cheese. Therefore a syllable eats cheese. Suppose now that I cannot solve this problem. See what peril hangs over my head as a result of such ignorance. What a scrape I shall be in. Without doubt I must beware, or some day I shall be catching syllables in a mousetrap, or if I grow careless, a book may devour my cheese. Unless perhaps the following syllogism is more shrewd still. Mouse is a syllable. Now a syllable does not eat cheese. Therefore a mouse does not eat cheese. What childish nonsense! Do we knit our brows over this sort of problem? Do we let our beards grow long for this reason? Is this the matter which we teach with sour and pale faces?”
And then Seneca goes on continuing along criticizing the dialectical approach to getting to truth. But that dialectical approach — that resort to logic in an abstract sense — is I think what Epicurus is criticizing in all the material that we’ve been talking about. It’s not through definitions that we get to the truth. Just because we define a dog as man’s best friend does not mean that any particular dog is going to be friendly to you rather than bite you. We have to think about the use of words and think about the use of logic and apply it in a way that’s consistent with observation of nature. And that’s where we get back to the title of this chapter: the canon, reason, and nature. We find that Epicurus is pointing to nature always as the ultimate tool by which we determine what’s true or not — not definitions, not abstract logic, but observation of the facts through the senses.
Now with that as background, we’re on page 128 of Chapter 7. Again the subsection title is “The Priority of Nature Over Reason.” That little opening I just gave, I hope, helps set off that point. Epicurus is never criticizing common sense, practical, prudent reason. But there is a type of abstract logic — this dialectical trickery as Seneca is criticizing — that does deserve criticism, and Epicurus goes to the attack against it.
Joshua: That’s very good. I’ve never read that passage from Seneca. The rest of it is excellent, but we’re not going to turn this into a Seneca discussion today.
Cassius: I did want to use the syllable example.
Joshua: Yeah, a syllable cannot eat cheese. That’s great. So yeah, we’re certainly continuing what we were talking about last week, which is the canon, reason, and nature. But the section we’re starting today is a subsection called “The Priority of Nature Over Reason.” So that’s the focus now. We are going to try to finish this today. Hopefully we can pick out some interesting stuff to talk about here.
Cassius: Hopefully will be more interesting than my example of the priority of observing mice over reasoning about the definitions of the word syllable. But the first sentence that you were looking at there, Joshua — this description of benevolence to nature and the narrowing of the concept to denote human nature or the composite experience of the race — all reflects the pronounced ethical bias of Epicurus. Along with this bias goes a deliberate plan to exalt nature over reason. In point of time and succession, nature is made to possess precedence. You observe the mouse rather than talk about the definition of mice.
Joshua: Yeah, and one thing we’re going to go into here is something we were talking about briefly before we started — the many, many examples that Lucretius gives us of how nature in the development of humans and society furnished a lot of things that we have since expanded upon a great deal. Things like clothing: they didn’t start out with the loom and start weaving things, they didn’t have polyester — they started with animal skins, throwing animal skins over their shoulders and that kind of thing. The reason and other human faculties of the mind have their place, but they take over where nature starts. So that seems to be the critical point of this whole subsection.
He says: “The most telling argument of Epicurus has been preserved by Cicero. Let it be assumed that a human being has been deprived of all his five senses. This is tantamount to death and the subject has ceased to be a rational creature.” He’s making that point not to be crude or unkind at the expense of people who are impaired of certain senses. He’s making that point to suggest that a rational mind on its own, separated from all input from the outside and with reason alone as its tool, cannot really get you anywhere. That seems to be the main problem.
He goes on: “In the present context, this notion seems to have opposite application. The possession of sensation seems to be construed as antecedent to rational activity.” And a little bit later he says that actions invariably precede thought. And that’s something I wanted to talk about a little bit. I wanted to talk about it for two reasons, one of which has to do with logic. And this is a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. He says: “From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.” This is sort of the most pro-reason, pro-logic kind of argument you can have — except he doesn’t make the seminally problematic point which is made by other schools of philosophy, which is that logic or reason, even in the absence of exposure to that one drop of water, can still tell you important moral, ethical, philosophical truth. It’s that idea more than any other that Epicurus is pushing back against here, and that DeWitt is explaining to us.
Cassius: Just so I’m with you there on the Conan Doyle quote — he is starting with observation of a drop of water, is what I heard you read. So I guess you could probably reconcile that with the Epicurean position by just simply observing that he’s not just starting from logic itself, from some concept to concept to concept. He is expanding projections about what he thinks nature is going to be based on the original observation, which he’s holding to be correct. Am I listening to that correctly?
Joshua: Yeah, no, I think you have that right. But the difference here — and DeWitt goes on to explain it — is that while that kind of reasoning can work, and you can sit in a room with a piece of paper and starting with one observation reason out all this stuff about it, the development of human societies and technology historically has not worked that way. We needed a forest fire before we could have fire. We needed animal skins before we could start making clothing. We needed caves before we could start making shelter. So while this may well be entirely possible, it’s not the normal course of things. And the information you can derive from a drop of water is going to be relatively limited. It’s not like you’re going to be able to deduce the whole of existence from a drop of water without other observations.
Cassius: Right, right. Which is kind of the opposite of how Conan Doyle himself ends it when he says “so all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”
Joshua: Aha, and that clearly is a problem.
Cassius: Yeah, exactly. And Joshua, before you mentioned that, you were reading out of page 129 and what DeWitt said. I think one other thing I would clarify — I would read that whole sentence that DeWitt stated in the last paragraph on 129: “Since the whole cause of growth and change in the universe is the ceaseless motion of the atoms and this activity is non-purposive, it follows that actions invariably precede thought.” I could hear somebody who heard just the last part about “actions invariably preceding thought” thinking that he’s criticizing somebody like me who would act first and think later. I don’t think he’s saying that actions precede thought in that sense. He’s not suggesting that’s a good way to act or a good way to think, but he’s talking about that the universe sets up the chess board and we act based on the chess board that we’re given. Josh, are you reading it that way?
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, that’s fair enough. And again, he’s talking more in a broad sense here. But in a particular sense, there’s another way to be confused about this — and that is on the issue of free will. When you say that actions invariably precede thought, that would lead some people to conclude that actions and thought have this chain reaction that can’t be broken. So when something happens, you react to it involuntarily. And that would seem to be, writ large, the destruction of free will.
Lucretius actually tells us how we get out of that problem. He says: “Whence comes, I say, this willpower wrested from the fates, whereby we proceed where pleasure leads, swerving our course at no fixed time or place, but where the bidding of our heart directs? For beyond doubt, the power of the will originates these things and gives them birth, and from the will, movements flow through the limbs.” He says: “Consider racehorses — the starting gates fly open, the horses are strong and keen to go, but they can’t break out as fast as their minds would wish.” It’s actually quite an interesting image from the ancient world that had horse races and gates that flung open. The point is, though, that between the time when the gate opens and the time when the horse starts moving, there’s this brief gap — almost too quick, you could almost miss it. This gap for Lucretius demonstrates the action of the will, of the mind to move. It’s not just that the gates open and then the horse, because the gates open through no will of its own, just starts moving. That’s not what Lucretius or Epicurus are saying is happening here. It’s merely that you can’t have anything like rational thought in the absence of sensory observations that are based on nature. It’s in that sense that nature here is more important in Epicurean philosophy than reason. It’s in that sense that reason is demoted from the canon.
Cassius: Yeah, all of this is still on that major point that reason can’t operate totally on itself. It needs a basis in reality, which we get through the faculty of the senses. I think there’s another illustration of this as well in Lucretius, where I believe it is said there’s an argument for why the universe could not have been designed by gods: Lucretius says that the gods could not have designed it because they had no pattern to go by. The point he’s making regularly is that reason and logic, as useful tools, must start with and stay linked to observations of the senses. That’s the way you ground yourself in reality, and the further you get from constantly checking your thoughts and speculations against the observations of nature, the more likely you’re going to have a problem.
Joshua: A bit above where I quoted a little bit ago, he has Aristotle saying that “perhaps even in the case of the lower animals there is some natural good superior to their scale of intelligence which aims at the corresponding good” — which of course, for Epicurus, was pleasure. And it was precisely the behavior of animals and infant children that Epicurus points to to furnish his idea that pleasure is the good and that pain is bad. So some credit is given to Aristotle there for hitting on the same kind of thing.
And he goes on to say: “To this principle Epicurus adapted his procedure. By the promptings of nature alone, apart from reason, every animate thing the moment it is born reaches out for pleasure and shrinks from pain.” Consistent with this reasoning is the steady practice of referring to pleasure as the “end of nature” — which occurs five times in our scant remains — and as analogous phrases may be cited “the good of nature” and “the pleasure of nature,” all of them implying that reason played no necessary role in establishing the truth. Similar is the implication of parallel phrases such as “the wealth of nature” — signifying that nature and not reason reveals the true meaning of wealth — and also “the limits of nature,” implying that nature and not reason teaches the true limits of the desires.
Cassius: That’s a good paragraph.
Joshua: It is a pretty good paragraph.
Cassius: Now of course Aristotle doesn’t take that to Epicurean conclusions here. He thinks that animals may have their own sense of the natural good which their intelligence aims at, but he certainly thinks that that’s probably not the same thing that human intelligence or ability or reason should be applying itself at. Epicurus thinks the two are the same thing. The natural good for animals is the same as the natural good for humans, and that’s pleasure.
Okay, I think we’re caught up now to that earlier quote: “actions invariably precede thought.” And then he goes on to say — on this point the judgment of Epicurus is explicit — “Moreover, it must be assumed also that human nature by sheer force of circumstances was taught a multitude of lessons of all sorts and compelled to put them into practice; the reason subsequently contributed refinements and additions to these.”
It’s interesting because one thing that DeWitt frequently points out here is that Epicurus, when talking about nature, has different ideas about nature depending on the context of what he’s talking about. And in this case, nature means human nature. This is where we get the passage where Lucretius in his fifth book says human beings wore skins before they manufactured garments, they lived in caves before they built huts, they employed clubs before they made weapons, they lived dispersed before they organized governments and built cities.
Joshua: Lucretius is interesting because he was actually the source of what was a common paradigm in the 19th century among anthropologists: the three-age system — the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Modern anthropologists think that’s too simplistic a way to look at it, but what it represents is something in direct contrast to what a lot of Lucretius’s contemporaries thought, which is that there was an original paradisiacal golden age when people were being instructed directly by the gods, and when piety and morality and justice were all at their zenith — and that it’s been a freefall downhill ever since. Lucretius has no patience for that kind of view. He thinks that, like Thomas Hobbes much later, life in nature is nasty, brutish, and short, and that it was only by slow degrees that society reached the level it was at during the late Roman Republic in his own time — and he still didn’t think that humans had got very far.
Cassius: One of the areas that is constantly of interest in conversations like this is the origin of language, and there are competing claims for how that came about. One of them comes from the book of Genesis, Chapter 2, verses 18 through 20, where it says: “Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every beast of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.”
What Epicurus will go on to explain here — much in the same way that no God could create a universe or world who didn’t have a pattern for one already, just as you couldn’t really imagine a Pacific or a Niagara without having access to at least one drop of water to examine — is that you can’t invent a language wholesale without having an idea what language is. And beyond that, it would be useless to invent a language for one person because nobody else speaks it. So language, like everything else in this story, develops gradually as part of the common experience of mankind. No one’s coming down the mountainside and teaching everyone what this animal is called and what we should call this tree. These are things that develop over time. That seems to be very important here in the conversation of nature having precedence over reason.
As I look back, these are a series of very good paragraphs from DeWitt, and my eyes are on the next paragraph in which you’ve read, Joshua, about the specific logical ground upon which Epicurus based this view of the origin of language.
Joshua: “The specific logical ground upon which Epicurus based this view of the origin of language was the postulate that action is bound to precede thought. The involuntary act is the indispensable stimulus to the voluntary effort through which refinement and improvement are achieved. And then, since nature is assumed to be the sole creatrix and man is restricted to improving upon her suggestions, it follows that nature is the supreme teacher, and by the same reasoning, physics is the supreme science, because through the study of this, the teachings of nature come to knowledge.”
Cassius: This is the point of Epicurus — what he has to say in the opening of the Letter to Herodotus, isn’t it? Where he says: “I who urge upon others the constant occupation and the investigation of nature and find my own peace chiefly in a life so occupied have composed for you another epitome on these lines, summing up the first principles of the whole doctrine.” So nature once again is always first in the order of events for Epicurus. It’s why we do the things we do as individuals; it’s why we do the things we do as a species; and it’s why he goes to the effort that he goes to, to study and to explain philosophy to other people.
There’s a passage in Epictetus where Epictetus asks him — you know, why do you sit down for so long writing these letters? Why do you burn so many candles just to tell us things that are scandalous to normal human beings? This is Epicurus’s answer: the study of nature tells you things about yourself, tells you things about the world that we live in, that are frankly indispensable things to know. And that’s something that Epictetus was never going to understand, of course, because he comes from a completely different point of view — a point of view where it is reason, the divine fire, that animates everything and takes precedence, and not nature. For Epicurus, nature always takes precedence.
And Josh, following what you were commenting on a moment ago about physics being the supreme science, I think DeWitt is quoting Cicero from the Torquatus material by saying that “through this body of knowledge” — referring to the physics — “the force of words, the meaning of style, and the distinction between the logically consistent and the logically inconsistent can be discerned.” So there’s this strong emphasis on looking at reality, which you determine through your observations, through physics and epistemology — what we’re talking about. That is the basis of everything, not abstract logical reason that just starts with “I think therefore I am.” It’s more the Jeffersonian view: “I feel therefore I am,” “I observe therefore I am.” And we want to go further.
I know you’re not going to skip over this, Joshua — the next section is about taking words at their face value and then the discussion of poetry. Do you want to take that?
Joshua: Ironically, this is the section that I have the least highlighting going on, but what he says here is basically this: he’s going to take that quote from Cicero on “words, style, and logic and dialectic together with logic” and he’s going to analyze them — really break them down. He says: “The first two may be discussed together” — that’s words and style. “By implication, it seems to be declared that nature is neither a poet nor a rhetorician nor a dialectician. Words must be taken at their face value.” You can’t go on seeking for definitions, because eventually you’re going to get yourself to the point where a syllable is trying to eat cheese, and that doesn’t get you anywhere.
“So this means, for one thing, that the use of figures of speech is absurd. Although the wise man may become a good critic of poetry, he will not compose poems.” This may be shocking to people who haven’t heard this before, because of course most people come to Epicurean philosophy either through Lucretius, or through books that certainly talk about Lucretius — who was one of the preeminent poets not just of Latin verse but of the late Republic period specifically, in which he cites Epicurus as being his source and his inspiration for writing the poem, and takes it upon himself to put forward Epicurus’s philosophy in about 7,000 lines of dense hexameter.
So if Epicurus apparently says the wise man will not compose poems, what is Lucretius doing composing poems? It’s a problem that has vexed scholars on this issue for quite a long time. But it seems to be that the problem here is not poetry in itself but poetry as it is commonly practiced, particularly in the ancient world — and in the ancient world the pattern for this is always Homer. Homer is describing a war, and sometimes doing it very clearly and very explicitly in ways that are sometimes quite shocking to read. But he’s also talking about things like the gods on Mount Olympus watching the war from afar, and not just watching but taking sides and influencing the course of battle — things which eminently do not happen in reality. So the problem with poets is that they always lie, and that by using language that is necessarily intricate and difficult, they are not writing in the way that Epicurus thinks that people should write.
Lucretius got around that problem by saying that there are a lot of people who just don’t want to hear this — “Epicurus says, accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to you.” Most people just don’t want to think about death; they want to imagine that there’s something beyond death, some reward that will sort of get them through the day as they struggle through all of the horrible things we sometimes have to go through in our lives. So if Epicurus wants to get his teachings out, if he wants to get people serious about his particular philosophy, Lucretius thinks that what he needs is for philosophy to be like medicine — and in fact that’s kind of what Epicurus thought philosophy was: useless unless it did something for the health of the soul. Lucretius says, if you want people to take their medicine, you need to give them something sweet to help it go down, and in the case of poetry, the honey rimmed around the cup of nauseous wormwood, so that “unthinking youth will swallow down not just the honey but also the medicine that is meant to make it healthier.”
Cassius: Joshua, one small point I would add into the discussion of poetry — it seems to me that an analogy might be raised in regard to the Christian Bible, which I think Epicurus would have tremendous problems with every aspect of. I think Epicurus would have a particular problem with the Book of Revelation — not written in poetic form directly, but in a kind of dark manner that hides its meaning, from which you can get all sorts of different conclusions depending on what you want to read into it, almost like Lucretius criticizes Heraclitus for being a dark poet who appeals to fools, who are basically tickled by fancy wording. It always seems to me that the criticism of poetry is largely based on the lack of clarity and on the mystical way in which much of it is written.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s a very good point, and particularly in the case of Heraclitus. Because one of the things he did was take a poem that he wrote and hid it in a temple, so that when it was found it would be thought to be an omen coming down from the god itself. That’s precisely the kind of hijinks that Lucretius and Epicurus have no time for at all. What is to be gained from a poem that starts out with a lie? You know, that seems to be the problem here. And it’s rarely expressed so clearly as a lie as it is in the case of Heraclitus hiding a poem so that it will come across as being the voice of an oracle.
A contrary example of that would be Lucian — or Lukian, I still don’t know how to pronounce that — who wrote a story sometimes considered to be the first science fiction novel, called A True Story. And he opens it up by saying that this is a story of things “that I have neither seen nor heard at second hand nor have witnessed or gone through myself.” He goes on and on saying that on the other hand it’s the only story of its kind that is completely true — “because I’m telling you right now that every word of it is a lie.” So that’s the honest opposite of what Heraclitus was doing.
Cassius: Joshua, it occurs to me to link our discussion this way as we move to the next section. We’ve been talking for a few minutes about the difficulties with poetry and how it can be dark and hidden in meaning and manipulate people through emotion — all the things that Epicurus really dislikes because he wants clarity, he wants to be as clear as he can possibly be in explaining things that are important for people to know. In fact, Seneca makes that very same point — life is too important to waste playing games; we need to give people help, make clear to them how they can improve their lives, and not waste our time playing games. That would be essentially what Epicurus was criticizing in certain types at least of poetry.
But there’s another form of discussion, in addition to poetry, that Epicurus had a particular problem with — and that particular problem, as DeWitt starts talking about in the next section, was with dialectic. The dialectical method of discussion and teaching that Plato and Socrates are associated with. And that’s going to be the last major topic we discuss here in Chapter 7. So let’s spend a few minutes talking about that. Why don’t we begin by just reading what DeWitt says?
Joshua: “The same priority of nature over reason that predetermined the right kind of writing and rendered rhetoric superfluous eliminated dialectic. But the logic of this judgment can be given more precision. The effect of the doctrine that nothing exists except atoms and void was to deny the reality of Plato’s eternal ideas; thus dialectic, which was the avenue to comprehension of those ideas, became a superfluity. The testimony of Laertius is explicit: ‘Dialectic they reject as superfluous; for it should suffice physicists to get along with the names of things as they find them.’ While this advice seems to overlap the recommendation concerning style, the application is different: it means that the quest of definitions is useless. This quest is capable of terminating in fantastic concepts such as ‘the Other’ or ‘Same’ and ‘Essence’ in Plato’s Timaeus, possessing no meaning unless on the highest level of abstraction. Since Epicurus rejected the reality of the eternal ideas, such terms could possess no meaning at all. Hence the following dictum: ‘There are two kinds of inquiry: the one about realities; the other ending up in sound without sense.’ In the same vein as the advice to the young Herodotus to take words at their face value: ‘So as not by our endless attempts to define have all our ideas in confusion or have mere vocables that mean nothing.’”
Cassius: Yeah, a pretty scathing account of the dialectical logic. Because once again, when you start with nature as the beginning point and you follow closely on a line of thinking that comes from Epicurus’s canon of truth — observations that start with the senses, the feelings, and the prolepsis — what that gives you is a way of grounding things in reality in a way that Plato, with his ideal forms, his eternal ideas, pure reason contemplating absolute truth — it wouldn’t be possible for a logician to infer the existence of Niagara Falls or the Pacific Ocean without at least having a drop of water to work on. So it starts with nature; it has to start with nature, or you don’t get anywhere. Or if you do get somewhere, you get somewhere that doesn’t make sense — somewhere that as Seneca was saying earlier, you can’t help other people with. If you’re forever trying to define your words, it simply is not going to be a line of inquiry that’s actually going to help anyone. And Epicurus is not interested in any philosophy that doesn’t have as part of its goal improving the health of the soul.
Joshua, I think we can use a little more of Seneca since you’ve raised his name again in this context, to really hammer home this point. Canon, reason, and nature is a rejection of abstract logic of the type the Platonists and the Stoics and Aristotle to some degree were promoting. Seneca said in the same letter I was reading earlier:
“I should deem your games of logic to be of some avail in relieving men’s burdens if you could first show me what part of these burdens they will relieve. What among these games of yours banishes lust, or controls it? Would that I could say that they were merely of no profit! They are positively harmful. I can make it perfectly clear to you whenever you wish that a noble spirit, when involved in such subtleties, is impaired and weakened. I am ashamed to say what weapons they supply to men who are destined to go to war with fortune and how poorly they equip them. Is this the path to the greatest good? Is philosophy to proceed by such claptrap and by quibbles which would be a disgrace and a reproach even for the expounders of law? For what else is it that you men are doing when you deliberately ensnare a person to whom you are putting questions — then making it appear that the man has lost his case on a technical error — but just as the judge can reinstate those who have lost a suit in this way, so philosophy has reinstated these victims of quibbling to their former condition.”
That’s what I would say that Epicurus is seeing himself doing: reinstating humanity to the proper place of being able to “rise to heaven,” as the analogy in the opening of Book 1 of Lucretius, rather than being in this cave chained in by the arguments of Plato — that their senses and the world around them have conspired against them.
“Why do you men abandon your mighty promises, and after having assured me in high-sounding language that you’ll permit the glitter of gold to dazzle my eyesight no more than the gleam of the sword, and that I shall with mighty steadfastness spurn both that which all men crave and that which all men fear — why do you descend to the ABCs of scholastic penance? What is your answer? Is this the path to heaven? For that’s exactly what philosophy promises to me, that I should be made equal to God. For this I have been summoned. For this purpose have I come.”
More Seneca there. I’m sorry, I have to go a little further.
“Philosophy, keep your promise therefore. My dear Lucilius, withdraw yourself as far as possible from these exceptions and objections of so-called philosophers. Straightness and simplicity beseem true goodness.”
Anyway, that’s good enough for that.
Joshua: Yeah, well of course this is the same Seneca who cannot help himself in quoting Epicurus.
Cassius: Absolutely.
Joshua: More than his listeners would seem seemly. This is a direct criticism of Stoicism itself. All this syllogistic logic that Seneca is attacking is at the heart of Platonic and Stoic philosophy.
Cassius: Yeah, absolutely. You know one thing I keep thinking of is Cicero’s complaint or criticism at the expense of Epicurus and Epicureans when he says that Epicureans are taking Italy by storm, picking up men at the crossroads. Well, if you want to know why Epicureanism, in comparison to some of these other schools of philosophy in the ancient world, did so well, it’s precisely because of what you’re talking about, Cassius. It’s not just that people wanted to become shameless pleasure seekers — that’s not why they turned to Epicureanism. They turned to Epicureanism because it founded itself on nature and proceeded by sense perception, observation, and built up reasonable conclusions based on that. It doesn’t start with these pure abstractions of these other philosophers. And for that reason, it was able to draw people who simply didn’t have time for all of that. Socrates and his noble lie that there was a golden class of human beings and that they alone were fit to rule is precisely the kind of thing that people don’t want to hear. People want a philosophy that is going to be relevant to them — and not just to them, but at least in theory, relevant to everyone they know. Epicureanism is not too highbrow for anyone. It’s not so highbrow that there are people who just can’t understand it. Fairly easy to understand, really. But you can’t say that for these dialecticians of the ancient world, who are living in a world of pure abstractions.
Cassius: Joshua, I think we’re coming to a point where we’re leaving this chapter at about exactly where we ought to leave it — at a high-level understanding of where DeWitt has been coming from, and where Epicurus is coming from over this entire discussion. Okay, we’re not ready to close quite yet, but any other thoughts on this chapter, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, actually the way the chapter ends turns out to be more important than you might think, because it gets at the heart of one of my hobby horses, which is natural law. People who have listened for a long time will know that I was raised Catholic, and natural law is sort of the fourth revelation in a sense — after the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the person of Jesus. If you want to know how to act, and it’s not mentioned in the Old or New Testament or talked about by Jesus or represented in his life, they turn to nature for examples.
So anyway, what DeWitt says here is this: “As a parting comment, it may be stated that when once nature has been established as the norm, it follows logically that man should live according to nature. But the Epicureans seem never to have followed this inference through. It remained for the Stoics to identify nature with reason and to make a fetish of living according to nature. They believed her supreme teaching was to be found in the divine order of the celestial realm, where nature and reason were at one.”
Okay, so with that in mind, let me read the opening part of the Wikipedia page on natural law. It says: “Natural law is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law” — which is the express enacted laws of a state or society. Just the way that’s framed, you can get the sense that it’s possible to have positive laws that are in contravention of natural law.
Natural law is not without its issues, because for one thing it proposes, generally speaking, at least in the Christian tradition, a creator. The idea that because God created nature, nature is a source of information that can tell us about moral truths, about ethical truths — things that reinforce what you read in the Bible or what you hear in church. This approach to nature and to natural law is totally in contravention, in my view, to everything that Epicurus is teaching. He does not imagine that there is a set of moral rules, a list of commandments that can be deduced from nature. He basically just picks out one, and that is that the good, which is pleasure, is tied to nature, and we learn it from nature.
So as the Wikipedia page goes on to say: “According to natural law theory, all people have inherent rights conferred not by act of legislation, but by God, nature, or reason.” As you can see, this natural law is actually hugely formative, particularly in American founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It goes on to say natural law theory can also refer to theories of ethics, politics, civil law, and religious morality.
What you might hear people say, particularly on some controversial issues, is “well, that shouldn’t be legal because it’s not natural.” This is the kind of thing that I don’t think you would hear Epicurus say. This natural law, which is totally at home in Stoicism because of their logos and their divine fire, is not something that you see in Epicureanism. Nature does not come from God. It’s not created. It’s made of atoms and void that have just always existed and always will exist. Humans have no special place in nature. The world we live in is not the center of nature. There’s not even anything particularly special about it in Epicureanism — there are an infinity of other planets, systems like ours, plenty of them probably inhabited. There’s nothing special about humanity in the grand scheme of things.
That’s not to say that we should drive toward a nihilist position that nothing matters — that’s not the conclusion either. But whatever it is that matters, you can’t take it from the view that human beings are inherently special, because eventually, science is going to find out that there is life elsewhere in the universe. And when it finds that out, it will demonstrate once and for all that human beings do not occupy a central role in creation. And so the idea that you could look to nature to give moral rules about human beings, because nature was created with that in mind, is completely antithetical, in my view, to everything that Epicurus is teaching. Because for Epicurus, in contrast to the Stoics, nature and reason are not one. Nature and reason are two different things. And nature always has primacy over reason. That’s the conclusion more or less of this whole chapter.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, I agree with what you were just saying completely. And to highlight it again — you just read it, but DeWitt’s statement that it was the Stoics who identified nature with reason and made a fetish of living according to nature, because they believed her supreme teaching was to be found in the divine order of the celestial realm where nature and reason were at one — such a deep subject. But I think the gloss I would place on what you stated would be that it’s not nature itself that’s the problem. It is man’s intent to enforce some supervening, controlling reason or logic onto nature that creates these issues.
Nature is what it is. It doesn’t have benevolence towards us. It doesn’t have good feelings for us. It doesn’t reward its friends. It doesn’t punish its enemies. It just is what it is. But the Stoics and Platonists, through this appeal to reason as being the core of what the universe is all about, are doing something very similar and very analogous to just the whole issue of it being divine, of it being God. In either case, people are finding their own idea of the good and projecting it onto nature through this system — either of religion or through a system of what they consider to be abstract logic. And when you project these things onto nature that are not there, you end up with conclusions that are just not justified.
The Stoics might want to say that that creates natural law by which we can reason our way to form the laws that our legislatures are going to enact. But I don’t think Epicurus would approach it that way at all. He would always just look to the feelings, to the conditions of the people involved in a particular situation, and tell them to evaluate their own circumstances according to the leadings of nature — which is not some kind of abstract natural law, but is in fact simply pleasure and pain. Those feelings that are given are the key.
Joshua: Yeah, and one more point I just want to make on this is that because Epicurus does not fetishize living according to nature, he also doesn’t fetishize any hierarchies that people tend to infer from nature. During the medieval period, there was this idea of what they call the great chain of being — that every person had their place in it. At the very bottom you have just above mineral and vegetable the lowliest of the low kinds of animals, and then you have higher-order animals, and then at some point you have human beings with men just above women, and then you have angels and archangels, and then you have God himself at the very top. Epicurus doesn’t have any time for that either.
People who often praise Epicurus — usually when people are giving a brief couple-paragraph overview of Epicureanism — will say to tip the scales in his advantage that the school of Epicurus was the only school in the ancient world to allow slaves and women as sort of co-equal partners in this project. That’s no accident. It’s not just that he was particularly open-minded for his time. It’s that he didn’t start with the same basic assumptions that everyone else was starting with. He didn’t start with the assumption that women were meant to be in the home or were meant not to go out in public or were there just to raise children. He took it for granted that women were just as capable of exploring philosophical issues.
He had Leontium write a letter or write a paper or a book against Theophrastus. Theophrastus was the successor of the Peripatetic school — the school founded by Aristotle — one of the most preeminent philosophers working in Athens at the time. And she’s writing against him. And Cicero, who talks about this later on, says that he abhors the idea that a woman could be teaching — but he goes as far as to say that she writes elegantly and in good Attic Greek. So there’s a sort of backhanded compliment in there.
It’s precisely this problem of looking to nature not for the foundation of knowledge, but for nature co-existent with reason as being the way we should live — virtue being living according to nature, living according to reason — that, when you throw all that out and start fresh like Epicurus was doing, you reach conclusions that many other people are going to find absurd. And it was absurd in the ancient world for women to be teaching and studying philosophy. But it wasn’t absurd for Epicurus, and that was no accident. It’s because of issues like this one.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you for that. We’re now at the end of Chapter 7. There are only a few more things I can think of that I’d like to say before we close it. There’s one other quote I’d like to throw in from a source that I found some years ago that has always meant a lot to me personally when I try to think about how persuasive this argument is — the argument that it is nature, as opposed to reason or logic, that’s the ultimate authority we look to. The source comes from a writer from the late 1700s in England by the name of Jackson Barwis. He’s talking in his book against John Locke and this idea that nature doesn’t really provide us a lot of basis for morality. This is what Jackson Barwis says:
“When we are told that benevolence is pleasing, that malevolence is painful, we are not convinced of these truths by reasoning nor by forming them into propositions, but by an appeal to the innate internal affections of our souls. And if on such an appeal we could not feel within the sentiment of benevolence and the peculiar pleasure attending it, and that of malevolence and its concomitant pain, then not all the reasoning in the world could ever make us sensible of them or enable us to understand their nature.”
To me that has always been an example — and I think something that again speaks to me personally — that that is where, in the end, certainty and confidence of things come from. You have to look within yourself and within a feeling that is real to you, as opposed to all the books, all the logic, all the reasoning in the world, which is not going to convince you of the truth of something the way seeing it is. Seeing is believing is the old cliché, and so Epicurus seems to be just constantly pointing back to nature and the feelings and the sensations that nature gave us as the way forward in determining what to choose and what to avoid.
Principal Doctrine 25 says the same thing: “If on each occasion instead of referring your actions to the end of nature you turn to some other nearer standard when you’re making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.”
So that’s probably a good way to end Chapter 7 — but don’t be concerned that we’re finished talking about this topic entirely, because our next chapter, Chapter 8, is entitled “The Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings.” We’ve been talking about the necessity of understanding whether knowledge itself is possible; next week we’ll turn to the details. Thanks for your time today. We’ll come back in a week. See you then.