Episode 160 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 14 - Chapter 8 - Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings 01
Date: 02/07/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2868-episode-160-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-14-chapter-8-sensations-anticipatio/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 160 begins Chapter 8 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy (“Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings”), introducing the three criteria of truth in the Epicurean canon and tackling head-on the widespread but misleading label of Epicurus as an “empiricist.” Cassius opens by framing the chapter’s central issue: having established in Chapter 7 that knowledge is possible, Chapter 8 examines how we obtain it through the three natural faculties. He and Joshua immediately address the Wikipedia-level mischaracterization that “Epicurus was an empiricist meaning he believed that only the senses are a reliable source of knowledge” — pointing out that Epicurus firmly believed in atoms he never directly saw or touched, and that he used deductive reasoning to reach conclusions about the unseen from the observed. The name “empiricism” itself is traced to Sextus Empiricus, who was actually a Pyrrhonist skeptic belonging to an empirical school of medicine. Martin contributes a physicist’s perspective: empiricism alone — merely collecting sensory facts — is “basically useless to people” without modeling, the interplay of data and theoretical framework that constitutes actual scientific methodology. Joshua raises the creationist “no one has seen a frog evolve into a human” objection as an example of misunderstanding this distinction. The discussion turns to the three-part sequence DeWitt describes: sensation (irrational, merely registers a quality — e.g., sweetness); anticipation/intelligence (says “this is honey”); and feelings (reports “I like it or I don’t”). DeWitt’s point that Epicurus takes a “biological or more precisely genetic” approach — starting from the behavior of newborn animals and humans reaching for pleasure and shrinking from pain — leads into an extended treatment of the blank slate (tabula rasa) debate. Cassius distinguishes between being born with ideas (which Epicurus does not claim) and being born with operational principles — faculties like pleasure and pain, pattern recognition, and an innate sense of justice — using the analogy of a computer’s operating system that enables processing but doesn’t pre-load content. He returns to Jackson Barwis’s Dialogues on Innate Principles (cited at the end of Episode 159) as a resource against Locke’s blank slate theory, noting the crucial distinction: “ideas simply considered are very different things from principles.” The cookie-fairness example in children, chimpanzees sharing food with caged companions, goats anticipating rain, migratory birds, and ant navigation are all discussed as evidence for innate biological faculties that fall outside strict empiricism. The Stoic contrast is drawn explicitly: the blank slate and pure willpower approach of Stoicism, which sees suffering as a failure of psychological discipline, is opposed to the Epicurean view that pleasure, pain, and anticipation are biological givens that shape the person before conscious thought begins. Joshua closes the episode by summarizing the epistemological landscape: Epicurus has now been ruled out as a rationalist (Chapter 7), an empiricist (Chapter 8 so far), and a skeptic — leaving the question of what Epicurean epistemology actually is as the project for the coming chapters. He uses the Matrix “there is no spoon” scene and Lucretius’s “life is one long struggle in the dark” to illustrate the stakes. Martin offers no closing additions.
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 160 of Lucretius Today. Today we’re going to be discussing Chapter 8 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, which is entitled “Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings.” To try again to put us in context of where we are: we have been going through Chapter 7, which we just completed — “Canon, Reason, and Nature.” We dealt with some very deep issues of whether knowledge is possible and the relationship of reason versus nature in determining whether we have confidence that something is true or not. This week we’re going to be going further into the details. Having established that knowledge is possible, we’re going further into how you obtain knowledge — with the sensations, anticipations, and feelings being the three categories of faculties that Epicurus identified as having been given to us by nature for this purpose.
One of the major themes that we’re going to continuously come back to is the issue of empiricism, because many people, when they think about Epicurus, identify him as an empiricist. Our podcasts are not aimed at professional philosophers, and there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t even have a strong impression of what empiricism really means, so before we get too far into the discussion today we’re going to talk about what empiricism is and what the implications of it are.
In general, I would say that the big issue involved here is that some people say that Epicurus, in being an empiricist, only believed those things that his senses could directly reveal to him — that if he didn’t see it or taste it or touch it, he didn’t believe it was true. And as DeWitt points out throughout this section, that’s not true at all. Epicurus believed in atoms, for example — he thought that his conclusions pointed directly to the existence of atoms, and you don’t see or touch or hear or smell atoms directly. You infer their existence from other evidence that you do see directly, but you never see or touch an atom directly. So there’s an important distinction here: Epicurus was using not only these natural faculties of the sensations but taking the evidence from the sensations and reaching conclusions through deductive and other types of reasoning. He was taking the circumstances of things that he could see and moving into conclusions about things he could not see, based on what he does see and feel and taste and touch.
So there are a lot of implications of that, including potentially the biggest issue of all in our lives today — facing religion, which is based on faith, and issues of people who take the position that faith can give you conclusions about things without any evidence whatsoever, or contrary to all the evidence. That obviously is not a position that Epicurus took, but the distinctions between the religious faith traditions versus Epicurus are very important and are really not fully explained by simply saying that Epicurus was an empiricist.
So that takes us to the beginning of Chapter 8, page 133 of Norman DeWitt’s book, and the first point he makes is how there are indeed three criteria of truth in the Epicurean canon — sensations, anticipations, and feelings — but there’s a lot of difference in the amount of information that we have about Epicurus’s positions on them, and a lot of misunderstanding takes place especially in regard to anticipations.
Joshua: Cassius, that’s probably a good point just to remind people of the overarching structure of this book. He tells you in the beginning of the book that he’s taking the synoptic approach, and he also takes the synoptic approach within each chapter. So the first page and a half here is kind of the overview of the whole chapter that’s coming. The main point I want to make here is that we’re getting into some pretty deep stuff, so if we get to the end of the episode today and people are just more confused than they were when they came into it, the hope is that by the time we get to the end of the chapter — which won’t happen today — we’ll be much better situated to understand some of this, because it is quite intricate the way this chapter is structured.
So let’s start out with putting Epicurus in this big picture of the category of “empiricist” and empiricism before we go too much further. The name comes from an ancient philosopher by the name of Sextus Empiricus. Sextus is called Empiricus because he belonged to the Empirical School of Medicine. There were three main schools of medicine: the Rationalists, the Empiricists, and the Methodists. But he was a skeptic, and as a skeptic he was deeply involved in issues relating to epistemology. What in the end does it really mean to be an empiricist?
Empiricism — this is from Wikipedia — is an epistemological theory, and that’s what we’re talking about today: epistemology, this whole chapter. It holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. I see that there is a Wikipedia article on Sextus Empiricus himself which talks about some of the same material: he doubted the validity of induction long before David Hume did, and he raised a regress argument against all forms of reasoning. So even though we talk about him as being associated with empiricism, he was really grounded in skepticism. He was a Pyrrhonist more basically, but again, Pyrrhonism and skepticism generally are schools of philosophy whose primary focus is on epistemology. So it’s no wonder they would be exploring different kinds, and David Hume, I think, was probably considering himself to be a skeptic as well — he wrote an essay on miracles that is worth reading.
Cassius: Yeah, trying to keep everything relevant. We’ve talked a lot in this podcast in the past about skepticism and the idea that Pyrrho had that really nothing was knowable at all. But what Sextus Empiricus’s name evokes, and what empiricism evokes today, it seems to me, is a more general attitude that basically everything you believe comes through the senses — and if the lack of sensation is essentially death, then if you’re alive, you’re experiencing sensations. But there’s a related issue of how strictly you apply that and basically what you do with the evidence of the senses.
One of the points of this chapter that we’re going to be talking about is how Epicurus obviously does not say that seeing is believing in a strict sense. You don’t have to see something in order to believe it to be true. There are all sorts of examples of that. You can talk about air, which you know exists because you see what happens when the wind is blowing, or the issue of atoms themselves — you never see or touch an individual atom and yet Epicurus is firmly convinced that they do exist based on evidence that he does observe through the senses.
So the point is: how do you take the information from the senses and rely on them, but also reach conclusions at least at times about things that are unseen and unverifiable directly through the senses? Epicurus certainly does that. And people will throw around the phrase “all sensations are true” as if Epicurus was so focused on taking what the senses say and nothing else that he rejects all kinds of reasoning and logic completely. Again, that gets back into the discussion from last chapter. Epicurus does not reject all forms of reasoning by any stretch of the imagination — even to the extent of logic, you’ve got Epicurus using all sorts of logical arguments in support of his positions.
Joshua: Isn’t John Locke also considered to be an empiricist?
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. Empiricism today is probably most talked about in the philosophy of science, where physical evidence is given precedence over most other sources of knowledge. Epicurus is going to go on to talk about the anticipations and how we may have a kind of innate sense of justice. That’s not the kind of thing that you can really measure, and if you can’t measure it, if you can’t reproduce the results, then it’s simply not useful for science. Epicurus was not really a scientist — he was a philosopher in a much more general spirit of that word, not just a philosopher of science. So empiricism does not answer to his total purpose in philosophy, though it is one of the main approaches of science.
Now Martin talks about how we expand on that with things like modeling, which I don’t have a very good grasp on, but maybe Martin can explain that a little bit better.
Martin: Yeah, because if you just go by the senses, you don’t really gain knowledge — you just have a collection of facts, and from a collection of facts, you cannot derive much. And so to organize these facts into something from which you can derive something, you establish a model. So if we simplify it, the first step would be to make one quantitative model out of the empirical facts you have, and then to test it with experiments — which means you gather more empirical facts. And it’s this interplay that is the scientific methodology. Empiricism will just emphasize this collection of facts and neglect the modeling, and that one is basically useless to people.
Joshua: It occurs to me that this ambiguity between senses and modeling is a source of an argument that I see made by creationists or proponents of intelligent design, where they’ll say things like, “No one has ever seen a frog evolve into a human” or “No one has ever seen a crocodile evolve into a duck,” and furnish that as if it’s evidence that the theory of evolution is false. What they’ve simply not done is understood what’s going on in the theory of evolution — that it happens over a long range of time, and it wouldn’t be expected that you would see an evolution in one individual from one species to another. In fact, if that did happen, it would prove evolution wrong, not right. Anyway, one of my hobby horses.
Cassius: Josh, yes. And a moment ago, you talked about not being able to measure anticipations. And I think you also have the issue that if there are three legs of the Epicurean canon in terms of feelings, it’s very difficult or even impossible to measure feelings either. So we need to struggle through it, I think, because what Epicurus was attempting to do — and what we would like to have for our own lives — is a practical, prudent, common sense, accessible understanding of the issues involved here. Because a lot of people, when confronted with religious arguments about faith and believing things that you have no evidence whatsoever for, instinctively can tell that’s not a very smart way of approaching things. But as often happens, you don’t want to swing the pendulum too far back to saying you’re not going to believe anything unless you can see it and touch it for yourself. That would not be a logical, reasonable approach to life, because you simply have to make decisions and reach at least tentative conclusions about things you cannot see or touch directly.
I don’t know how far we can or should get into it, but I think we’ve talked about in the past how the Benthamite utilitarians were really attempting to come up with a science of pleasures and pains and somehow objectively quantify things and extend that into a more objective science of politics or social interaction. But we all come to the conclusion that it’s basically impossible to mathematically quantify feelings. So when Epicurus is referred to as an empiricist, we have to keep this balance and understanding: yes, the sensations, anticipations, and feelings are the raw data that we go back to as frequently as we can, but we don’t limit ourselves only to the data that they produce. We produce models, as Martin was saying, or we recognize patterns in the data and act based on those even though we don’t see every piece of data we might like to see.
Martin: And we react if things change, right?
Cassius: Absolutely. If I get pleasure out of eating ice cream — well, now my mission, if I think pleasure is the good, is to eat as much ice cream as it’s humanly possible to do. The pleasure involved quickly changes into something not unlike suffering in that case. And I think that’s one of the real huge errors that people end up running into as they try to apply Epicurus in a social or even political way, in that everybody has different feelings of pleasure and pain and they end up ranking their activities of life on a very individual basis. You used the example of ice cream — we could say people generally like ice cream, but there are people who don’t like ice cream. There are people who like one flavor versus another. The very same thing that gives someone pleasure at one moment might be very painful another moment.
The idea that you can take logic and reason and extrapolate from a current set of facts to a universal conclusion that’s going to apply to everybody all the time and everywhere — it’s just not going to happen. It’s impossible to do, and when you attempt to do it, you end up causing all sorts of damage to yourself and to other people, because you’ve fundamentally failed to understand the way the universe works and the way that individuals work — that these sensations, anticipations, and feelings are very individual from person to person.
In a common definition of empiricism, you can to some extent come up with methods of measuring sight and sound, you can rank things in terms of color and volume and various other specifications. But you can’t measure to any real degree the other two legs of the canon — pleasure and pain, and the anticipations. And so two of the three legs of the Epicurean canon are outside of what we would call empiricism. It’s as much an error to think of Epicurus as an empiricist as it is to think of Epicurus as strictly a hedonist. In each case, Epicurus had his own very well-developed and very subtle set of views on these topics. If you end up just putting them in boxes of empiricism or hedonism, you miss tremendous amounts of detail of the philosophy.
Joshua: Cassius, I think the next point is whether these three — sensations, anticipations, and feelings — are basically three aspects of a single faculty or whether they are totally discrete and function separately from each other, and to what extent they act together or in sequence. He ends up coming to the conclusion that they are neither three aspects of a single capacity nor totally discrete, totally functioning separately. The conclusion is that they do act together and in sequence.
Are sensations, anticipations, and feelings the three sides of a single triangle — or are they totally discrete things acting totally independently of each other? What DeWitt says here is that all three may be components of a given reaction, but they occur in a sequence. So sensation comes first, or at least it’s the most proximate to the kind of stimulus that we as humans deal with all the time — things we see, things we touch, taste, hear, smell. He says that sensation is irrational and merely registers a quality. Now that word is a whole barrel of snakes right there, isn’t it? The qualities versus properties thing will come later in the book and we’ll deal with that at length. But he says sensation registers a quality — for example, sweetness. It is then the intelligence that says, “This is honey.” Is that the anticipation? And then he goes on to say, and it is the feelings that report, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” So the stimulus is the same. The three actions occur in a sequence, but pretty close to simultaneously.
Cassius: Yeah Joshua, I picked out that sentence myself as particularly important and we probably ought to talk about that for a few minutes, because that really gets to the bottom of it. I agree with you — when he says it’s the intelligence that says “this is honey,” he’s certainly analogizing intelligence to anticipations as the function he’s talking about. Anticipation, as Epicurus uses the word, surely is wrapped up in the intelligence here. But that way of looking at things as three aspects of a single process is really important to think about the implications of.
When he says the sensation “is irrational and registers a quality,” he’s going to develop that into a discussion of how the sensations don’t have their own opinions about things — they just simply report things automatically. And then when he says that the intelligence says “this is honey,” that’s this whole process of analysis that clearly is not inborn. As a baby, you don’t know what honey is. But there is a part of you which gives you the ability to put together things — again I used the word earlier: pattern recognition. You begin to see things over time as connections. So it’s some kind of connectedness faculty that is not inborn with you as a complete idea when you’re born — all the different connections you’re going to make throughout your life — but you are apparently born with this ability to make these connections, which you have to have or else you’re not going to be able to make the connections in the first place.
And then the feelings, which are what we talk about as pain or pleasure — whether you find something desirable or undesirable — we will defer for the moment the question of whether you can do one of these things without the other. But I think we’re probably going to need to return at some point to: Can you anticipate things that you have never felt or sensed? Can you sense things that don’t involve anticipations and feelings? And I guess the third one would be: Can you anticipate things that you can neither feel nor sense? That’s going to lead to some interesting discussions beyond the scope of where we are today, but we will come back to that now that we’ve raised it.
Joshua: Yeah. We have enough to talk about. Like when DeWitt offers this sentence: “It is positively known that Epicurus postulated the existence of an innate sense of justice and called this anticipation.” Yes — I think that’s the Principal Doctrines on justice. And if I remember correctly there are other examples, I think in terms of time and perhaps the issues of divinity.
And of course there’s a big issue when DeWitt says “innate” — since we’ve been talking a lot about empiricism, one of the ideas traditionally associated with empiricism was the idea of the blank slate or tabula rasa — that the human mind at birth is just a blank canvas waiting to be filled. Epicurus, according to DeWitt here, seems to not take that direct approach. He seems to think that due to the way our species came about, due to the development of our minds, due to our particular orientation to the physical world, we come with certain faculties, certain kinds of — can we call it knowledge? When he talks about justice, that’s not really about knowledge, that’s more about judgment. But the idea that some of this stuff is instinctive. And you can look to animals to see that as well. In fact, his main argument — that pleasure is the proper goal of life — is an argument that he partially derives from observing newborn animals.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, thank you very much for bringing that up, because that really is one of the big themes of all this. We’ve made the point that Epicurus should not really be considered to be an empiricist, but that point may not have fully sunk in. People may be still thinking, “Who cares whether he’s an empiricist or not?” But there’s this related and even equally or more important issue of: are you born with any kind of ideas in your mind or not?
Plato was talking about how you potentially have been reincarnated and your whole life is a process of attempting to remember and identify things that you knew in a prior life or prior dimension. That’s a hugely important aspect of Platonic philosophy. It continued to be debated, and John Locke, I think, is associated with the blank slate as well. Aristotle is associated with rejecting Plato’s recollection theories and coming back with the idea that you’re basically not born with anything previously — everything that you end up thinking is a result of things that happen to you directly through your sensation experiences in your life. That ends up being translated by John Locke later into a whole theory of government and has tremendous implications for education, dealing with people, whether people can change, and all sorts of important social issues.
But before you get to those applications, you have to deal with this initial question of whether you are born with any ideas or knowledge at all. And frankly, I’ll go ahead and state one criticism I have of DeWitt’s presentation here: I do think that he sometimes ends up talking about innate ideas just like an eye is born without ever having seen anything — as if this sense of anticipations can be born without ever having anticipated anything. But to allege that you’re born with a particular bit of information, a particular opinion, an idea, or particular knowledge — I think that’s a dangerous direction to go in, and I would not say that Epicurus suggests that, and I don’t really think that DeWitt goes too far in that direction. But sometimes some of the language he uses would imply you’re born with an idea, and ideas as fully formed knowledge — I think you can rule that out.
Joshua: Yeah. Well, let me say first of all that the reason this issue of empiricism is so important is because I’m on the Wikipedia page for Epicurus right now and it says exactly this: “Epicurus was an empiricist, meaning he believed that only the senses are a reliable source of knowledge about the world.” So it’s important because there is a lot of confusion on this point.
As to the issue of justice — something that you can notice with children, apparently: if you have a cookie and you break it into one really small part and one big part, if the children are young enough you can give them each one part and even if they’re completely different in size they’ll still think that’s fair, because there are two pieces and each got one. As they get a little bit older that trick doesn’t work anymore. So maybe what you’re born with is sort of a seed of a faculty that grows over time, and presumably grows regardless of culture or education.
Cassius: And Joshua, at the end of the last episode I quoted a statement from a man named Jackson Barwis from a book called Dialogues on Innate Principles, and this issue that we’re talking about now is exactly what that book was directed to — he wrote it entirely against John Locke’s blank slate theory. I do recommend this book for anybody who wants to pursue this. The point that he makes relevant to this current conversation: his book is entitled Dialogues on Innate Principles, with emphasis of course on the word principles. One sentence that’s in front of me right now: “Ideas simply considered are very different things from principles.” He goes into this in a lot of detail.
You can be born with principles of operation — like an eye has. We can look at an eye or an ear or the different parts of the body and study them and realize that they operate using set processes. Obviously at some level we are born with a faculty of pleasure and pain, which is not decided by us consciously as we grow. We are born with a feeling of pleasure and pain that has come from somewhere — some things are pleasing to us and some things are painful from the moment we’re born and even beforehand. So you’re born not with any ideas of anything or knowledge of anything, but you’re born in a way — genetically — such that everything that constitutes you operates in a particular way that is not chosen by you after you’ve been born.
I like to use the analogy of a computer. The computer has an operating system that allows it to interact with its disk drives, receive information through cameras, and so forth. But it doesn’t do anything with that at the very beginning — it doesn’t process it into ideas until you’ve got other types of programs laid on top of the operating system itself. So it’s very important to drill down and use the right words: to say that you’re born with a particular idea in your mind is probably going too far, but to say that you’re born with a brain that operates in a particular way, with senses that operate in a particular way — from my point of view, obviously correct. Distinguishing the two of those is important to do.
Joshua: Yeah, and the way DeWitt puts that here is he says that “injustice hurts, and it is the feelings that register this fact.” So it’s not like you’re born with an elaborate sense of right and wrong — that’s not the way it works. It’s the feeling reaction that you have in the face of these things that sort of defines how you respond to them. And this is probably noticeable even in animals. Chimpanzees, for example: if you give all chimpanzees celery, they’ll all be happy. But if you give two of them celery and one of them grapes — well, the grapes are better than the celery, they prefer the grapes — so the two that got celery instead of grapes are going to be unhappy because they didn’t get the grapes.
Another example also with chimpanzees: if one of their group is in a cage but the others are free, and you give the free ones food, they will sometimes actually share their food with the one in the cage. Part of our heritage as a species and as apes is that we are in many ways tribal and have been selected genetically with that in view — or rather, that’s the consequence: our adaptation to our environment is improved with other people. That’s true today. If you’re going hiking in dangerous country, you immediately improve your chances of survival if something goes wrong by just having another person there. Someone who can go for help if you fall unconscious, someone who can protect you, who can light a fire. All of these things are selected for because they improve the survivability of the group and the individual.
Cassius: Joshua, that reminds me of a comment made by Emily Austin in her interview with us about a distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans on this point of friendship — in that the Stoics contended that you don’t even need friends; you don’t need anything. All you basically need to do is pursue virtue, control your mind, and friends are potentially just one of those “indifferent” things out there that you may or may not need. Everything is just a tool to virtue from the Stoic point of view.
And expanding that analogy a little bit further, that’s one of the implications of this chapter as well. If you’re born a blank slate totally, and everything that you end up thinking as your life goes on is totally determined by your own thoughts from zero without any influence from your genetics and from the way the brain is structured or the way that pleasure and pain operate, then I think you can be impelled towards the conclusion that everything in life is just a matter of willpower — that you can do basically anything, overcome anything, deal with anything, simply by willpower and thinking about it. That’s sort of an attitude associated with Stoicism: if you’re suffering, if you’re in a bad situation, you’re there because you’ve let it bother you, you’ve let it get to you, when you really should just be aloof and above everything that goes on around you. The Stoics are so interested in psychology because they really attempt to manipulate everything around them almost purely in psychological terms.
But that’s I think very different from Epicurus’s approach, because he’s built in here early in the process of analyzing how we think about things — he’s built into the canon two issues: anticipations and feelings that are not determined by what you think about after you’re born. He’s built into the canon two aspects of life that are influenced by what happens to you and what you think about things, but you’re born with these faculties that are disposing you in particular directions as to what you feel to be pleasurable, what you feel to be painful, how you recognize things in terms of pattern recognitions or intuitions. And so I think that leads to significant implications for distinguishing Epicurus from the Stoics, or from people who believe in the blank slate. You can also distinguish him from the strict Platonist position of an ideal-form world that you’re trying to recall after birth — you’re not looking to another dimension or a divine creator for this influence in your life; you’re looking to your heritage as a human being, your genetics, your evolution, the things that have evolved over tremendous periods of time, some of which are in your control and some of which are not.
We’re not going very fast through this chapter so far, but this is I think very important material for us to bring out the implications. You can skim through somebody’s book and see here’s a chapter on epistemology and think, “Oh my god, there’s no way in the world I’m going to spend any time reading anything about epistemology” — but these things have tremendous implications when you think about them.
Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so where we are now — we’re still in the very introductory section of Chapter 8, and I don’t think we’re going to get much further than that today. Maybe we should begin to bring today’s session to a landing by emphasizing this point that DeWitt makes at the bottom of page 133. He says:
“When once the criteria have been recognized as three distinct reactions occurring in close sequence, the next point is to recognize the general approach of Epicurus to the problem of the canon as being biological, or more precisely genetic. This attitude reflects the contemporary increase in the interest of the study of biology, which included animal behavior. The starting point is the behavior of the newly born, whether a brute or human, which reach out for pleasure and shrink from pain.”
Of course, we’ve talked about that many times. That is mostly recorded for us in the Torquatus narrative about how Epicurus held that it’s not necessary or appropriate to try to prove that pleasure is desirable using abstract logic — that the ultimate proof of pleasure being desirable comes from observing how young animals operate, that they all pursue pleasure and avoid pain naturally, instinctively so to speak, intuitively. These words like that are part of why we’re having this discussion. People throw around words like “instinct” all the time. Do beavers build dams totally by instinct? If you take a baby beaver just born and separate it from its parents, is that beaver going to build dams later, or is it simply observing what its parents have done?
Migratory birds: same thing in terms of migratory patterns. There are questions about how birds do that — do they have a built-in ability to determine magnetic fields and know where north is? Related to that — people often talk about when we mentioned the five senses that there are other senses beyond five that science has identified over the years. I think people will talk about the sense of balance being one of them, and there are others as well.
Where I’m going with it in this context is that Epicurus is attempting to determine what nature has given us as guidance systems, as contacts with reality. Ultimately, the only guidance system or choice-and-avoidance system is pleasure and pain. But whether there’s a sense of balance, whether there’s a sense of magnetism in certain animals by which they navigate through connections with reality that we currently don’t understand — Epicurus is studying those in studying nature. This gets back to this issue of nature being the criterion rather than just logic and reason. He’s ultimately always looking to see what nature has provided to us before he starts to pull together a philosophy of how we should live our lives.
Cassius: Yeah, DeWitt mentions here the contemporary interest in biology. The early philosophers seem not to have considered the lives of animals very closely until about the time of Aristotle and Plato to some degree. But in many ways they were probably more interested in categorizing and defining. You’ve got that famous moment where Diogenes the Cynic hears Plato’s definition of a man as a featherless biped, and then plucks a chicken and takes it in and presents it as “Plato’s man.” Epicurus is primarily interested in animals and their lives because of what he thinks that can tell us about humans and our lives.
Joshua: That’s right. I think you’ve got the analogy there. As you talk about animals, I’m thinking of horses for some reason. Isn’t the classic question from Plato that you can never really know that this animal standing in front of you is a horse, but there is a horse that exists in another dimension and you can define that horse through logic and through your application of the mind? That’s apparently what Aristotle was reacting against, and Aristotle spent a lot of time coming up with categories and talking about how to observe the differences between types of animals and somehow divide them down into species and genera. Those categorization processes are frequently associated with Aristotle and are much more related to the Epicurean approach — looking at the details of what’s in front of you to come to conclusions about them. But the difference between Aristotle and Epicurus, to my understanding, is that Aristotle ended up concluding that there are essences within the horse, for example, that define him as being a horse — which is not the approach that Epicurus ends up taking. He doesn’t think that there are either ideal forms in another dimension or essences within things, but that what you have to do is make your observations and process the emergent properties of the bodies that form from the atoms, analyzing it from an atomistic scientific perspective — realizing that everything is just dependent upon the particular atoms that are combining at a particular time and place in a particular way.
Cassius: I probably won’t dig the hole much deeper today on illustrations like the beaver and the birds. But I have to ask — do you have any comments on any of those that we should include today?
Joshua: It all ends up relating to this issue of the blank slate. Yeah, I’ve read about certain species of ants and what they’ll do: they’ll start at the hive and go out looking for food, walking a certain distance in one direction and then turning an angle and walking a certain distance in another direction, and then when they’re done they know what bearing and distance to take to get back to their hive. Things like that seem to suggest certain faculties that humans don’t have, or that we’ve lost from being removed from nature in many ways.
I think I’ve told this story before, but my aunt and uncle have a goat farm in Florida — kind of a hobby farm. My grandfather was there one day tending to the goats, and all of a sudden all the goats just got up and started running and ran up under the eaves of the shed. He’s watching them go, thinking, “What are they doing?” — and ten seconds later the sky opens up and it starts raining. So that’s another issue that Epicurus talks about, and Lucretius talks about — whether animals sort of know the advance of the seasons.
Cassius: How have we talked about that in the past? I think it’s in the Letter to Pythocles where Epicurus says that gods don’t sit around watching for owls or birds to move and then follow their inclinations to make things happen — he says something like “nobody of any intelligence would do anything like that, much less a god.” I believe that’s in the Letter to Pythocles.
And completely unrelated to anything we’re talking about today —
Joshua: Well, but see, I don’t think it is. I think the way we can relate this to reality and practicality is: are we going to do what Plato suggested and just study geometry as the path to truth, or go for pure reason contemplating absolute truth — is that the direction to happiness, the direction to a proper life? Or is the proper life, the best life, the happy life, more involved in studying nature? Which includes studying our own faculties — our own senses, to understand how our senses work; our anticipations, to understand how our anticipations work; our feelings, to understand how our feelings work — and to recognize that our happiness depends on understanding ourselves so that we can then use that information to live the best life possible in a practical way. Is your time best spent contemplating music and geometry for the sake of learning the harmony of the spheres? I think where we’re going here stems from those questions, and it’s extremely practical and extremely important.
Cassius: Yeah, and that’s because it’s Epicurus who was right. Pure reason contemplating absolute nature is a dead end. A lot of abstract philosophy — if you enjoy it, then it’s fine because you’re getting pleasure out of it. But it’s not practical, it’s not prudent for most people to pursue the details of abstract philosophy, and it’s a dead end for them. But they still need an understanding of how the world works — or else they’re going to think they’re going to hell and that the rain is caused because God’s mad at them. They have to have an understanding of all these things, and the way to get at that understanding is not through abstract logic but through studying nature. And the important aspect of our nature is the way we operate — sensations, anticipations, and feelings. If you don’t think about these things and work to understand them, you can never put the information to use and reach any conclusions. You can never be confident of anything. You can never even know if knowledge is possible.
It’s incredibly practical. It’s just that it’s sometimes very difficult to get past the initial reluctance to talk about these things. As I was talking to Martin earlier this morning, anybody who gets introduced to philosophy nowadays gets introduced to people like Hegel and Heidegger and 20th-century analytical approaches to asking questions. There’s a movie out there called Waking Life that I saw recently which is just a sequence of conversations with modern philosophers who talk what appears to most ordinary people to be just nonsense after nonsense chained together. Again, if you enjoy it then you get pleasure out of it and you should do it. But most people do not get pleasure out of what appears to them to be nonsense. But every individual has sensations, every individual has feelings of pleasure and pain, and every individual is born with some type of pattern recognition or intuitive faculty that leads them in particular directions — and understanding those is going to be the key to living your life in a more productive way. How’s that for a rant to begin to end today?
Joshua: Not bad so far as it goes. The only thing I could really add to that would be to say that my attempt to summarize where we are in our discussion of epistemology over the last, I don’t know, six episodes or something like that, is that we’ve now ruled out the idea that Epicurus was a rationalist — that he put reason in a primary position when it comes to how we know things. We’ve ruled out the idea that he was an empiricist — that he believed it was only the senses that gave us reliable information. And the other one we’ve talked about, though maybe not a whole lot in this DeWitt discussion so far, is the issue of skepticism — Pyrrhonism is the other main branch of epistemology that Epicurus decisively rejects. So our project going forward, having ruled out rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism, is to figure out exactly what Epicurean epistemology looks like. And for more detail on that we’re going to have to spend a lot of time on the coming chapters.
Cassius: And those categories of approaches that you’ve just listed there — rationalism, empiricism, skepticism — people might not necessarily use those particular terms in everyday life to describe what they themselves think. But absolutely, those are useful terms, because people, whether consciously or not, are in fact applying ideas that come from those schools. And so if all you think about Epicurus is that he liked pleasure and didn’t like pain, you haven’t scratched the surface of what Epicurean philosophy is all about and why he’s important. You’ll never understand the significance of why people in the ancient world loved him so much or why other people hated him so much — because he was producing his own approach to these issues that was very different from most of the dominant schools of his time, and that have remained dominant for 2,000 years. Unwinding these details begins to unwind for you the significance of Epicurus in the history of philosophy, and why he’s such a polarizing and important figure.
Martin, any closing thoughts for the day?
Martin: I have nothing to add.
Joshua: The only other thing I had to talk about — I was recently on YouTube just wasting time watching random clips, and somehow I ended up on this scene from The Matrix. And The Matrix is rife with all the stuff that we’ve just been talking about, and where it goes wrong. It’s the scene where he goes to the oracle and meets this little kid dressed in monk’s robes who’s bending the spoon, and the little kid says: “Don’t try to bend the spoon — that’s impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.” And then I made the mistake of looking at the comment section, and you know, people will say any old nonsense about anything as if it has any bearing on our lives or can do anything to make us live better.
And that’s the whole problem with epistemology: if you don’t have a good understanding of where your knowledge comes from and how you know the things you think you know, you’re just liable to fall for any old nonsense. We’ve all been there. But if you have no method, no ability to sift ideas and figure out which ones work and which ones don’t, you’re just totally in the dark. That’s what Lucretius said — “life is one long struggle in the dark.” It’s probably not true for everybody, because some people have ways of dealing with these problems, and it has to do with being more precise than most people are comfortable with about language, about sources of knowledge, and about how to evaluate them. And most people just don’t want to do that work. But it’s something I need to get better at. One of the things I said to myself before this chapter was: my goal is to understand the anticipations, because I really am not very good at that. So hopefully by the end of this chapter I’ll really get a good grasp on them.
Cassius: Joshua, that was a great way to close the episode today. I couldn’t say most of that any better than what you just said, so I’m not going to try. I’ll just repeat that we are going to go next week into more detail on the sensations, and then more detail on this discussion of whether Epicurus was an empiricist or not — in much more detail than we’ve gone today — all of which has the goal of helping people have a common sense understanding of these issues, the ability to apply general principles of Epicurus’s approach to their own lives, and live more happily as a result. We are not here to go into philosophy for the sake of philosophy, detail for the sake of detail, argument for the sake of argument, abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Believe it or not, we’re here to have a life of pleasure and have fun doing it. Hopefully our attempts to go through this material will be of use to our listeners as we go forward.
So with that we’ll come back in a week. These are very interesting topics that are very difficult to discuss, but we have the forum at EpicureanFriends.com. Anybody who has questions, comments, or examples they’d like to throw out is welcome to drop by every week. We’ll have a thread set up for this episode and look forward to seeing your comments. We’ll be back in a week. Thank you for your time today.