Episode 161 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 15 - Chapter 8 - Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings 02
Date: 02/15/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2884-episode-161-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-15-chapter-8-sensations-anticipatio/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 161 continues Chapter 8 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, covering the subsections “Sensations” and “Epicurus Not an Empiricist” in depth. Cassius opens by summarizing DeWitt’s definition of the canon’s first criterion: the five senses — vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — which qualify as criteria of truth precisely because they are direct physical contacts with external reality, and because they are irrational, incapable of memory, and pronounce no judgments. The sensations merely register stimuli and transmit them to the mind without comment or recognition — that processing function belongs to the mind. Joshua notes that this irrationality of sensation is crucial: if sensations were rational and capable of opinion, reason would have crept back into the canon through the back door. The episode then turns to the central topic: Epicurean physics rests on twelve elementary principles (such as “nothing comes from nothing”) from which Epicurus deduces further conclusions — like the eternity and infinity of the universe — by reasoning like theorems of geometry, without any direct sensory observation. This alone, Cassius and Joshua argue, is sufficient to show Epicurus was not a pure empiricist. DeWitt is followed carefully as he unpacks the phrase “all sensations are true” — the most widely misread formula in Epicurean scholarship. The word “true” here means honestly reported and without opinion: the oar that appears bent in water is reporting truly what the eyes actually see; it is the mind that must account for the distortion. Error lies in the mind — specifically the “automatic mind” acting hastily — not in the senses themselves. The witness-in-court analogy is developed at length: sensations are like courtroom witnesses delivering honest raw testimony; the volitional mind is the judge who must weigh the evidence, compare one sensation against others, and reach the best conclusion possible. The tower that looks round at a distance but is square up close; the oar in water; the blue heron’s practiced compensation for water refraction; the stormtrooper marksmanship joke — all illustrate the same point. DeWitt page 141 is quoted directly on the witness analogy, and his page 142 finding is highlighted: Epicurus himself never actually says “all sensations are true” in the Letter to Herodotus or the Principal Doctrines; he says sensations should be given attention and that the student should check observations against others — statements incompatible with belief in infallibility. Principal Doctrines 23 and 24 are read, showing that Epicurus himself explicitly warns against rejecting any single sensation or confusing the raw sensation with the opinion formed from it. Joshua argues that the oversimplification danger is general: just as “pleasure is the absence of pain” misrepresents Epicurus, and just as the “Epicurus only ate bread and water” legend distorts his practice, the reduction of “all sensations are true” to a claim of infallibility is the product of reading isolated phrases out of their full technical context — a technique Cicero the lawyer used and which is illustrated by the blind men and the elephant parable. Cassius closes by correcting his error from Episode 160 about the origin of the word “empiricism”: it comes not from Sextus Empiricus but from the Greek empeiria (cognate with Latin experientia and English “experience” and “experiment”), and he frames the British empiricists’ focus on personal experience as another reason Epicurus cannot be confined to that category — Epicurus goes beyond personal experience to logically consistent deductions about death, the size of the universe, and the nature of the gods. The episode ends with a preview of the anticipations discussion scheduled for next week.
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 161 of Lucretius Today. We’re in the middle of Chapter 8 with the sections “Sensations” and “Epicurus Not an Empiricist.” Both of those are related to each other, so we’re covering them together, and we’ve already been talking to some degree about the general overview of the sensation subsection. What DeWitt talks about here is that in the canon, “the sensations” denotes the five senses — vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And DeWitt says nothing else.
Frequently it seems to me that when you talk about the brain receiving images from outside, you ought to be at least considering that to be another direct contact with the outside world. And of course today we talk about senses of balance and other potential senses that the body may have that are not as significant as these first five, but may exist.
The issue being, as DeWitt talks about, that these senses qualify as criteria because they are direct physical contacts between the living being and the external physical reality. DeWitt says that they also qualify as criteria because they are irrational, they are incapable of memory, and they pronounce no judgments. The sensations just register what they’re receiving and then transmit that to the mind without comment on what it is and without any sense of recognition of what it is — that recognition function is something that’s performed in the mind and is a separate process from the operation of the senses themselves. And I think that’s a very important point: this information that we’re receiving through the five senses is not being commented on by the organs that receive them.
Joshua: Yeah. And part of what that does, Cassius, is that it prevents kind of an end run for reason to get back into the canon. We spent a long time talking about how reason is not part of Epicurus’s canon of epistemology — it takes place later in the process. But if we were to speak of senses as being rational, capable of memory, and able to pronounce judgment, that would suggest that reason had crept back in.
Cassius: Yeah, reason or opinion of any kind. And that’s a topic that we’re going to tackle in much more detail when we get to anticipations. Unfortunately, because of the few texts we have on it, it’s controversial and poorly understood.
Whatever anticipations are, it seems to be that what makes something a part of the canon of truth is that it receives information without commenting on it, without forming an opinion about it, without processing it in your mind using reason or any other method you might like to think about. It’s a pre-processing part of consciousness, might be one way to say it — it’s part of the raw material that consciousness has to operate on.
Joshua: Yeah. Since the criterion of truth is supposed to be something like a ruler or a yardstick that we’re comparing things to, it’s always seemed to me like it would be a feedback loop that would distort everything if you could create something in your mind in terms of an opinion and then inject that back into the yardstick as if you’ve formed the yardstick as a result of thinking about something. I don’t think that’s the way these things are supposed to work. Surely the sensations are not supposed to work that way. But when we get to the anticipation discussion it will be a lot more complex, because the existing texts seemed to talk about a processing function that is hard to distinguish from opinion-forming.
But for today the big issue that we’re going to be discussing is this whole issue of whether Epicurus was an empiricist or not. A lot of people today, in loose discussion, will consider empiricism to mean that there’s simply nothing in your mind that does not come through the senses. The question of empiricism in the modern world focuses on taking the sensations as absolutely true and that basically all information comes to us that way.
DeWitt begins the discussion of this by pointing out that Epicurean physics rests on twelve elementary principles — which we don’t have a complete list of anymore, but which if we go to the Letter to Herodotus and compare it to Lucretius we can see as a very parallel structure of observation about atoms and the nature of the universe. So DeWitt’s first point about empiricism is that Epicurus takes those elementary principles — like “nothing comes from nothing,” “nothing goes to nothing” — and then uses them like theorems of geometry, deducing from those principles other conclusions such as his conclusion about the size of the universe or the fact that the universe is eternal in time. He obviously has not taken a position on those issues based on direct observation of the creation of the universe or direct observation of the size of the universe by flying out through space. He’s taking these positions based on deducing from his first theorems the implications of what they must require if they are in fact true.
So DeWitt’s point here is that this is a crucially important part of Epicurean philosophy, and it is not based on direct observation through the senses. That alone is sufficient to show that Epicurus is not simply taking the position that all sensations are true, all sensations are all I know, and therefore that’s the end of our thought process.
Joshua: Yeah, and it kind of works on two levels. You can take the elementary principles and build from them, but you can also build toward them. So for example, in the case of whether anything can return to nothing, Lucretius, in Rolfe Humphries’s translation, says that an indiscriminate common violence would eventually bring an end to everything and there would be nothing left. So it’s that kind of approach that’s built into it, which he’s describing here as like theorems of geometry.
DeWitt will point out that the style that Epicurus uses is drawn from Euclid and his book on geometry because it was very simple and very easy to understand. Epicurus’s letters are not written, generally speaking, in a high style that would typify the work of Cicero or Plato — he wants it to be understandable.
Cassius: Right. And when you refer to Plato, as with much of what we’re doing — going back to compare Epicurus to Plato is very helpful. Because, as DeWitt points out, the reason that Lucretius and Epicurus himself are stressing the evidence of the senses, the reliability of the senses, the fact that one’s sensation cannot contradict another, the fact that reason cannot operate without the senses — the reason is because Plato and these other people, even Aristotle to an extent, had alleged that there was no way to reach conclusions about what’s true and what’s not true based on the senses, because they’re inherently deceptive — the cave analogy. What Epicurus needed to do first was to set up a theory of how the sensations are in fact reliable. So Lucretius in particular spends a lot of time talking about illusions and how images work and how it is understandable, if you examine the process, that the sensations are reliable. They’re the only thing we have to make our decisions based on, and reason cannot contradict the senses without some other basis, because it has no basis other than the sensations on which to work.
So the first aspect of understanding why we’re even talking about this is that we’re combating skepticism — the idea that nothing can be known at all. We first established that the sensations are reliable and how to work with them. But that doesn’t mean that we stop there. That’s the point we’re hitting on today. You don’t stop at just observing what something looks like. Your mind is then going to process it after you receive that data, and the processing of it is going to be through deductive reasoning — which means importantly that there’s no reason to put Epicurus on the shelf and say “Epicurus says all sensations are true, that’s what we go by.” Epicurus is a very deep thinker in telling you that you take the information from the sensations and then derive from them, using deductive reasoning, conclusions about things that are “hidden” — a word that Epicurus uses a lot — such as what happens when you’re dead, such as whether there’s a supernatural God, such as big issues regarding faith and religion and all sorts of things that you don’t have direct evidence on. Epicurus doesn’t leave you blind and say that if you don’t see it, then you don’t believe it. That’s not the way Epicurean thinking works.
Joshua: Yeah. And DeWitt also points out here that Epicurus, by taking a position between skepticism and empiricism, appeared when criticizing one of them to be aligning himself with the other. And DeWitt is suggesting that a lot of the confusion on these issues has come in because of things like that.
Cassius: Yeah, and I could see the possibility that somebody’s thinking to themselves, “Why are we even talking about this? Who cares whether he’s an empiricist or not? Empiricism is great, isn’t it?” The reason we’re talking about it is the implications that flow from these things. If you are the type of person who is very scientifically minded and demands evidence and facts and then reasons based on those facts, then that’s exactly what Epicurus is doing. But there is in philosophy the school of thought on empiricism that takes a much flatter and less in-depth position about how thought processes go. And so this is an important thing that’s worth covering, because you need to have a full understanding of how proper thought processes should go or else you’re subject to being confused by other schools who think that you should just do what God tells you to do, or that you just don’t know so you might as well exist for the moment and make the best of it, or other conclusions like that which are very damaging.
Joshua: Yeah, and it’s also very hard to start from a position of empiricism and emerge with conclusions like “pleasure is the goal of life.”
Cassius: Right, right. Or “there are no supernatural gods,” “the universe is infinite in space,” “the universe is eternal in time.” Whether we agree with those things or not, those are conclusions based on deductive reasoning that neither Epicurus nor us nor any other human being is ever going to be able to determine directly from their own sensations.
So on the first paragraph of page 137, he says that “other plausible reasons for ascribing empiricism and belief in the infallibility of sensation to Epicurus will disappear if the ambiguities be cleared up that inhere in the statement ‘all sensations are true.’” This is something that gets repeated quite a lot among the commentators on the ancient texts, that Epicurus said that all sensations were true. And it’s the kind of phrase that’s very prone to being misread in some very stark ways.
Joshua: So Cassius, I know in the past you’ve talked about how “all sensations are true” does not mean that what they report is absolutely factual. They are maybe trustworthy in the sense like witnesses in a courtroom — they don’t have all the information, and maybe some of the information they are reporting is wrong, but they are reporting it to the best of their ability.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, in my reading of DeWitt over the years this has seemed to me to be one of his favorite topics to talk about, and this subsection is lengthy. DeWitt even wrote a separate article devoted entirely to this question. We’re probably not going to hit all the detail that he goes into about it, but let’s try to hit some of the high points.
Right now, the section that you’re looking at when you call that to my attention — what DeWitt is talking about is that to a significant extent, that position was not all that different from what Aristotle himself had taken in terms of the perception of particulars being always true. DeWitt gives a footnote for that, and I think if we were to take a tangent into Aristotle we would be able to see that looking at perceptions as something you can’t get behind is not all that unique to Epicurus.
Where you go when you look at the general question is again to people who want to dismiss Epicurus: “He said all sensations are true. Haha, that’s obviously not true. What about illusions? What about all sorts of mistakes that we make?” Just because I look out into the horizon and see what appears to me to be a body of water underneath some trees does not mean that it’s really true that there’s an oasis with real water there.
So a significant part of this issue is that each sensation, because it’s reported without opinion, is simply reporting raw data that is being processed in your mind. It is true in the sense of honest. It is true in the sense of without telling you its own opinion. It is true in the sense of being an appearance that your eyes are presenting to your mind to process. If you look at the desert and you see an oasis out there, the conclusion that it is in fact a body of water is in your mind — separate from the sensations itself. The vision of that is reported truly to you.
The analogy that DeWitt uses frequently is to a witness in court who will get on the witness stand and say what they saw about a particular incident. But that person may not have seen the full incident. They may not have been paying attention. They may have been looking at it from another direction or seeing it out of the side of their eye. And as we know, people describe differently what they see or what they hear or what they touch. It’s not that those witnesses are trying to deceive you. It is not that they are presenting a conclusion to you that you have to accept. They’re simply producing raw data that in the case of a courtroom the jury has to decide what the final facts are and what it adds up to in terms of the big picture.
And so the statement that “all sensations are true” is nothing more than that they are produced by your organs of sensation just as they are. If you’re nearsighted, if you’re hard of hearing, if your sense of smell is distorted by COVID-19 or something else, then you will not be able to use those sensations to form a full picture of a particular situation. All you can do is take the information they give you and process it. If you know that you’re nearsighted, if you know that it’s foggy, if you know that it’s dark, then you realize that the data being presented to you is distorted by these intervening events.
Lucretius goes into great detail in Book 4 about illusions — about standing in a boat and going down the river and having an illusion that it’s the river bank that’s moving rather than you; putting the oar in the water and thinking that it’s bent. Epicurus was well aware that every sensation is not true to all the facts.
The important point to stress there is: how do you correct, how do you know what is the truth, when one sensation indicates to you that the oar in the water is bent, but when you pull the oar out of the water it’s not bent? It’s the repeatability, the repeated comparison of one sensation against another, that gives the mind the ability to assemble a true picture of the facts. The oar does appear to be bent when it’s in water; the oar does not appear to be bent when it’s out of water. It’s up to your mind to understand the difference in context and pull together the big picture from the different and separate observations. So “all sensations are true” is correct and totally defensible when understood from the point of view of the word “true” meaning reported honestly and without its own opinion.
Joshua: Yeah, and certainly you could find examples in arenas where certain animals are better at this than others. Hawks have better eyes than humans. Does that mean that their sight is more “true” than humans’? That’s the kind of question that we’re interested in.
What he goes on to say here is that both Aristotle and Epicurus recognized the possibility of error in sensation, but that Epicurus — because of the time he lived in — was more keenly interested in this factor because by his time the vogue of skepticism had made the creation of a criterion of knowledge a vital necessity. He was consequently at pains to locate the source of error, and he found it in the hasty action of the automatic mind.
Cassius: Right. Error is in the mind and not in the senses. One of the statements I’m looking at right now is on page 138: “The fallacies of those who impute to him belief in the infallibility of sensation lie partly in their failure to observe the ambiguity of the word ‘true’ and in their confusion of truth with value.” And that’s basically another way of saying the observation that the oar in the water appears bent is true — it appears to be what it is — but it’s not of value in completely determining the true shape of the oar. You have to take the oar out of the water, compare it with other observations when it’s not in the water, and then you have the ability to have a more accurate conclusion.
Joshua: The other thing probably to mention here is that it would be possible to train your mind in certain areas to account for the error that it makes. So for example, in the case of the oar that looks bent under water, blue herons are actually very good at standing above water and looking into it because that’s how they get their food. So if you were a human, for example, who spent most of their life spearfishing from the surface, that would give you better intellectual equipment when approaching these problems. It’s kind of like if you’re manning an anti-aircraft gun and shooting at airplanes near the sky — you’re going to have to shoot ahead of the airplane in order to hit it.
Cassius: Yeah, the old joke from Star Wars is the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy — because they always manage to shoot right behind the target.
So we probably shouldn’t omit the example they give the most frequently: the issue of the tower that at a distance looks round, but when you get close to it appears to be square. It’s obvious when you walk up to it closely that it is square, but from a distance you can’t tell that it’s got sharp edges — the turret edges may look round. Again, that’s an example of how it can look differently at a distance from when you’re close up, and the way you determine how it is in fact shaped is: you don’t just speculate about it, you don’t pull out your calculator and try to calculate something — you walk up toward it, and the closer you get to it the more accurate your vision is.
This probably brings up a point that Joshua and I were discussing before we started: one thing that Epicurus observed is that you don’t have clear vision at a distance. That’s the problem with looking up at the sky — you’re not close enough to it to be sure what’s really going on; you have to make your deductions based on the best reasoning that you can. The further something is away, the less clear a vision you have of it.
Those kinds of rules of the way things are — knowing that there are illusions out there in the world; knowing that there are things so far away that you don’t have the ability to see them up close; knowing that people report things differently; knowing that when you put the oar in the water you have a bending effect — mean that you have to keep those things in mind and make your conclusions based on taking those things into account. The reason we’re talking about this is because you do have sensations to process, but you can’t process them accurately unless you think about how they work — which means thinking about the possibility of illusions and distortions — and that’s exactly what Lucretius does at length in Book 4, and almost certainly Epicurus would have done in the full version of On Nature.
Joshua: And Cassius, almost the whole Letter to Pythocles is on issues like this one, where he talks about how to explain phenomena, particularly atmospheric phenomena or phenomena in the sky. We spent almost the whole third episode in that series just on the question of the size of the sun. And sometimes the answer is just to withhold judgment: when there are multiple competing explanations that could each do a satisfactory job of explaining the phenomena, you simply withhold judgment. That’s another way to get around the error that the mind is constantly involved in — you don’t just latch on to the first idea that you come across; you think about it, come up with other explanations, and if you can’t rule all of them out except for one and know that that one’s right, you simply withhold judgment as to which one you think is true.
Cassius: Yeah. The reason we’re talking about this is not because we’re trying to be astronomers, not because we’re trying to become better scientists. It’s because if we’re going to reach any conclusions of importance about the way to live at all, we have to know how the universe operates and how we operate. We have to start off with knowing that the sensations are reliable — that we’re not living in a cave like Plato asserted — but then once we understand that the sensations are reliable, we have to determine how to use them in order to think properly.
This is an important part of daily life — to be able to think clearly on something and to know that illusions and other distortions are possible, but that you don’t just throw up your hands and say, “Oh my gosh, there’s no way to know anything, let’s just go to the temple and be told what to do.” You have the ability, if you take the time to think about these things and understand how the senses operate and the mind processes them, to have confidence in your reasoning process. If you don’t understand why you can have confidence in your senses, you can’t have confidence in anything.
Joshua: Yeah. And Lucretius in the first book uses a particularly dark example in the case of Agamemnon and his daughter Iphigenia — but the ultimate point is that when people are acting on bad information and they’re not thinking clearly, they make bad decisions. That’s kind of what it comes down to.
Cassius: It’s important to at least be aware that Epicurus spent significant time in his Principal Doctrines on these topics, starting for example at Principal Doctrine 23: “If you fight against all sensations you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.” And then 24: “If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion so that you will reject every standard of judgment.”
If you’re saying that a particular sensation is false, then you give up the ability to check it, because you’re then questioning the reliability of sensations. You need to accept that a sensation is what it is and realize that what you’re talking about in terms of true and false is the conclusion of opinion, and not the sensation itself.
The second sentence of PD 24 is: “And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.” He’s discussing the mental images created by your opinion, and if you don’t recognize — as Joshua was talking about a minute ago — that some of those opinions need additional confirmation and some of them don’t, then you won’t be able to again distinguish between what you say is true and what you say is not true.
One thing that occurs to me: imagine if you’re looking at a steak but you smell apple pie. Does the scent of apple pie prove that your eyes are lying about the steak? Does the sight of the steak prove that your sense of smell is lying about the existence of the pie? It simply doesn’t make sense to think like that, and that’s stated explicitly in Lucretius — how the nose is not going to give you any information about sight, and sight is not going to give you any information about smell. Your mind is going to assemble the different sensations that are coming in at the same time and produce a picture in your mind. But that picture is something created in your mind by your mind operating on the data — it’s not the operation of the senses themselves. So any error in the conclusion that you reach by assembling these sensations is not the fault of the sensations.
On page 141 of DeWitt, he talks about the witnesses-in-court analogy: “The sensations are consistently regarded as witnesses in court. Their evidence may be false, as in the case of the oar half immersed in the water which appears to be bent. False evidence is to be corrected by that of other sensations. The evidence of all witnesses must receive attention. The volitional mind, as opposed to the automatic mind which errs, functions as a judge.” And as everybody knows, juries and judges are not always right — they do the best they can with the information that they’re given. But it’s important to keep in mind that Epicurean philosophy doesn’t give us a supernatural God feeding information into our minds. It’s totally possible that we will go through a lot of time and not understand the big picture and have our opinions be wrong. That’s a fact of life that we can either throw up our hands and crawl in a hole about, or we can dig into the evidence and dig into the way the mind works and do the very best we can.
Joshua: Yeah. And that point he makes about the rational as opposed to the automatic mind — it’s important to know that it is the volitional mind that judges the error, and not the competing sense perception. When you’re taking in information from multiple witnesses, it’s not one witness — i.e., one sense — that judges the other sense. It’s the judge. The volitional mind is doing that work because the senses cannot judge each other. They don’t have that capacity. The judge is separate from the witness — they’re not the same thing. They’re two separate entities in a courtroom, and they’re separate parts of the big picture.
The eyes are not sending down the optic nerve a statement “I see a dog,” “I see a cat.” That conclusion process of what you see is in the brain. Here’s how he states that — when he’s talking about the senses as criteria, he says: “Sensation is incapable of memory. It can no more recall a given stimulus than a house can recall the impact of a ball thrown against its wall. The sensation merely registers a stimulus. A melody, for example — it is the memory that says ‘I have heard this before.’ It is the intelligence that says ‘home sweet home.’” That’s where the recognition is happening — not in the senses.
As we begin to reach the end of this section, at the top of page 142 is a particularly important paragraph I think we should treat in detail. DeWitt says that “nowhere in the Letter to Herodotus or in the authorized doctrines do we find the statement that ‘all sensations are true.’ On the contrary, the epitome begins by urging the student to give heed to the sensations under all circumstances and especially the immediate perceptions, whether of the intelligence or of any criteria whatsoever, which manifestly allows some value to all sensations and special value to immediate sensations. At the end of the epitome the student is warned to check his own observations against those of others. These authentic statements are incompatible with the belief in the infallibility of sensation. They presume belief in gradations of value among sensations and also the need of perpetual caution against error.”
Which again just takes us back to the big point: while the sensations are the basis of all our knowledge, we have to process the sensations into conclusions and opinions. Those are not just handed to us automatically by the operation of the eyes or the ears or any other sense organ. A knowledge and understanding of how it all fits together and how they work together is crucial to being able to accurately work with that information.
Cassius: What this demonstrates partially, Cassius — the danger of oversimplification — wait, Joshua, I need you to say it.
Joshua: What this demonstrates is the danger of oversimplification. You can see how someone would read Epicurus’s texts and come away with ideas like “all sensations are true.” But that would be a gross oversimplification of what he actually said, to the point where it’s actually misleading. Because Epicurus’s language is always very technical, very precise — he’s always very precise when he’s speaking. So for example, when people say “oh, Epicurus thought that pleasure was the absence of pain,” when you go to what Epicurus actually says in his Principal Doctrines, it’s much more technical and precise — and complete would be the word — than simply saying “pleasure is the absence of pain, and therefore it’s the absence of pain that is the good.” When he says things like “the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain,” there’s just a lot more going on in that sentence than simply saying that pleasure is the absence of pain. It’s the same in the case of “all sensations are true” — that takes everything that he had to say about sensations and tries to boil it down into five words, and just by the process of doing that it comes across as being completely misleading.
Cassius: Yeah, and that’s the big picture observation that I hope we bring some value through these podcasts in stressing. Because it’s very easy to dive into a detail and get obsessed with a subtlety that is important perhaps but does not affect the big picture. We talk constantly on the forum about issue after issue in which it is possible to take something alone and out of context and think, “My gosh, this is totally contradictory with what I understood Epicurus to be talking about in general. This lacks compassion. This lacks practicality. This doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do today. Why wasn’t Epicurus like the Stoics and giving me all these precise techniques of how to spend my time?” As you said, Joshua, it is very easy to oversimplify, and in oversimplifying come away with a totally wrong understanding of the big picture. You have to constantly be able to flip back and forth between the details and the upper-level viewpoint. You don’t constantly need all these details, but you do constantly need a general understanding of the way things are.
Just another example would be this issue of “oh, Epicurus only ever ate bread and water” — these gross oversimplifications, when we know for certain that in another instance he asked for food that was not bread or water. You can kind of see the seed of where it starts, but then it just gets taken to these absurd conclusions. If you really looked into the text and made an honest effort to study it in depth, in the light of everything that he wrote, you would come away with a completely different and far more accurate conclusion.
When you live in your day-to-day life in the real world, there are lots of controversies out there, there are lots of people who have different agendas, religion being the number one example. And one of the best ways of arguing against something is to take something in isolation and out of context. Cicero being a lawyer — and our discussion today of courtroom analogies — is a useful thing to remember. What are lawyers generally going to do to muddy the water, to sow confusion, to create doubt in any kind of legal case, more so than to isolate some small fact which when taken out of context appears to be huge, but when seen in the big picture is totally reconcilable? People say you can prove anything you want from the Bible by reading a particular passage, and that’s what we’re talking about to some degree here. The isolated details have meaning only in the full context.
What’s the other example — the blind men with the elephant? You touch the elephant’s trunk or you touch the elephant’s leg and you come away with a totally insufficient picture of what an elephant really is. Doesn’t mean that the examination of the trunk is wrong or the examination of the leg is wrong. It’s just that it’s not sufficient to provide the full picture unless you put it into context with many other observations as well.
Joshua: You kind of mentioned this at the beginning of this episode, Cassius, when you said that empiricism sounds great — it doesn’t sound like there would be anything wrong with it. And for certain disciplines that’s true. Empiricism works for disciplines where you are looking for a narrowly defined set of answers to specific problems. But in the case of a total philosophy, like Epicurus is trying to build, empiricism does not answer anything like his total purpose. It doesn’t tell you anything about ethics, for one thing. There’s no description of what we sense that can tell us anything really logically about what we ought to do. This is David Hume’s guillotine, right? This is his “ought problem”: there’s no description of how things are that can tell us how they ought to be. And so empiricism — like Martin was saying last week, empiricism coupled with things like theory and modeling — gives us an approach that works in science, the kind of questions we’re trying to answer with scientific inquiry. But it has nothing to say about things like: what is the goal of life? How should we live? What does the good life look like? All of these other questions, which are sort of the principal questions that Greek philosophers were trying to answer. Empiricism simply does not answer to that purpose.
Cassius: And that helps us bring this episode to a conclusion today, Joshua — hitting that big point about why we’re talking about empiricism. If Epicurus was simply an empiricist, he would not be able to give us the answers that we’re looking for.
This also gives me the opportunity to correct a statement I made, I think, in the last episode, where I was labeling the whole field of empiricism as something that had been named after Sextus Empiricus — but that’s not correct. This is what Wikipedia says about this. Under “Empiricism”: “Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.” Now, here’s the part that I missed last week: “The English term empirical derives from the ancient Greek word empeiria, which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which the words experience and experiment are derived.”
I think that helps put into perspective why we’re concerned about empiricism. The British empiricists — people who became like John Locke, more identified with empiricism in more recent times — are focusing on everything coming from experience. And we’ve been talking about everything based on sensation. But if you think about the term empiricism being a reference to experience, what these empiricists are saying is: if you don’t experience it yourself, you’re not going to be able to come up with any conclusions about it. You can only confirm that which you’ve experienced yourself.
And again, as we said earlier in this episode: you have no experience as to what happens after death. You have no experience as to how the universe was formed. You have no experience as to how big the universe is. And yet those are questions that people want to think about and have some comfort about — lest they get obsessed and confused and afraid that there’s some supernatural explanation that promises to harm them unless they do certain things that priests or somebody else wants them to do.
Epicurus is willing to go further than just his own personal experience. He is willing to take his personal experience through the senses and based on that derive conclusions that are logically consistent with that experience. If you simply stop at experience, you’re just going to say, “I don’t know about all these other questions.” Obviously, it’s very difficult and subject to error to talk about things that you’ve not experienced for yourself. And yet we do that all the time. We think that even though we may not have been to South Africa, that nature works in South Africa largely the way it works in Berlin or Washington or New York or Los Angeles. We don’t have personal experience of life in places we’ve never been to before, but we have confidence that nature works consistently. And that’s why it’s important not to limit yourself to an empirical view of philosophy in which if you haven’t experienced it yourself, there’s no way to have any knowledge about it.
Related to that is going to be the question that we discuss next week, which is that of anticipations. Anticipations is going to be a complicated subject, but we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know your comments and thoughts on that topic or any other topics you’d like to talk about. Thanks for your time this week, and we’ll see you again next time.