Episode 167 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 20 - Chapter 9 - The New Physics 02
Date: 03/29/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2973-episode-167-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-20-chapter-9-the-new-physics-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode continues Chapter 9 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, focusing on motion, the swerve, and the problem of first cause. Cassius opens by framing the philosophical stakes: the question of whether motion has a cause is where the Epicurean view that atoms have always been in eternal motion confronts the Aristotelian prime mover argument and ultimately separates materialist from supernatural cosmologies. Joshua quotes Virgil — “happy is he who is able to know the causes of things and who trampled beneath his feet all fears, inexorable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld” — as a gloss on the practical importance of these seemingly dry physics questions. The DeWitt subheading “Linear and Vibratory Motion” is covered: even when an atom is locked in a compound body that is stationary or moving slowly, the atom itself continues vibrating at the constant uniform speed proper to free atoms; the objection that a slowly-thrown baseball contradicts “constant atomic motion” is answered by the two distinct types of motion. The episode then turns to Deism and its difference from Epicureanism: Deism shares with Epicurus the view that the gods are uninvolved in human affairs, but differs fundamentally in requiring a prime mover to have wound up the clockwork universe at the beginning — which is precisely the argument Epicurus was designed to refute. Thomas Paine’s article at the Society of Theophylanthropists is discussed as an example of someone very close to Epicurus in temperament who nevertheless fell back on motion as an argument for a supreme being. Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker is recommended as addressing the same question. Two key scholarly articles on the swerve are cited: David Sedley’s “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism,” which argues that the swerve was a deductive conclusion Epicurus reached from observing free will in higher animals rather than a feature of his atomic physics from the start; and A.A. Long’s “Chance and Natural Law in Epicureanism,” which argues that the swerve is so infinitesimally small that it barely breaks through at the level of observable events except in the motion of intelligent animals, while the universe at large operates mechanistically. Cassius notes that the swerve does not appear in the Letter to Herodotus — our only direct record of Epicurean physics — and is known only from Lucretius Book 2. The cosmological question of “up and down” in an infinite universe with no center is discussed: those who thought Earth was the center could define “down” as toward the center, but in the Epicurean infinite universe with no center, these terms require a different treatment. Cassius notes that Diogenes Laertius reports Plato wanted to burn all the writings of Democritus he could collect. DeWitt’s three causes of atomic motion are read: weight (downward motion), collisions (oblique and opposite motion), and the swerve — which both makes the initial formation of compound bodies possible and, crucially, “emancipates man from an infinite chain of physical causation.” The episode closes with the “Prometheus moment” of Epicurean physics: DeWitt’s observation that for Epicurus, human intelligence including volition was “an accident of organic life” — a purposive being arising from a non-purposive nature, anticipating Darwin’s Descent of Man. Cassius contrasts this directly with Stoicism’s dependence on a divine fire as the origin of everything. Next week: Chapter 10, “The New Freedom.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 167 of Lucretius Today. This week we’re continuing in chapter 9 on the new physics. This week we’re going into motion and some aspects of motion that are involved with the atom. Once again, as we start the episode, it’s a good idea to repeat that we are not attempting to become particle physicists. We’re not just curious for the sake of curiosity as to how atoms work. The Epicurean viewpoint was that you’re always looking for knowledge not for the sake of knowledge itself, but for the pleasure or avoidance of pain that comes from understanding the way things are. And it’s with that attitude that we continue into some of the details of how atoms work, which may appear on the surface kind of dry to some people. But once again, in a world in which there’s much conflict of opinion on whether the universe operates supernaturally, whether it’s even possible for us to affect our future because of determinism, whether there’s a possibility of life after death — the answers to those questions derive from your viewpoint about the nature of things and how things are constructed, whether they’re constructed naturally or whether there is a supernatural component behind it.
One aspect I should mention at the very beginning: part of what is important when Epicurus goes into the details of the nature of atoms and how they move is this question of motion — something that we observe that atoms do — but where does it come from? There’s a lot of discussion in Epicurus about weight and falling of atoms, but again there’s this question of what set the atoms in motion. Or is it even appropriate to ask “what set the atoms in motion in the first place?” Because it’s a perspective of Epicurus that there is no “first place” — that the atoms moving through the void are eternal and do not themselves have a cause behind them. Any comment on that, Joshua or Martin? What are the philosophical implications of whether motion itself has a cause?
Joshua:
The implications as to whether motion has a cause just radiate throughout the whole system. Epicurus has claimed that atoms are constantly in motion. Lucretius says elsewhere that if the seeds of things could be destroyed, pretty soon we’d have nothing at all. It’s kind of like that with motion — if atoms didn’t have a constant rate of motion, pretty soon they would all just come to a stop and nothing would ever happen again. So what drives motion, and whether it constantly needs a cause to keep moving, is an interesting question.
My understanding is that Aristotle had this idea based on what he observed on Earth, because on Earth we have frictional forces. If you throw a ball, it’ll go at a certain rate of speed but then it’ll slow down and hit the ground and come to a stop eventually. And there seems to have been this idea in the ancient world — Aristotle thought nature abhorred a vacuum — that everything was like that. Everything would just go for a bit and then stop, unless there was a constantly sustained force to drive it on. And Epicurus is saying that we don’t need a constant force. You don’t need the intervention of some God to sustain the clockwork of the universe. You just need constant motion. It seems to get around this problem.
Cassius:
In terms of “constant” — I have gotten ahead of myself here by opening the podcast discussing the problem of cause, which is the last thing in this chapter instead of the first. But the reason I did that is because we always want to relate what we’re doing back to the practical ramifications of it. And when you talk about Aristotle, he came back with his “prime mover” as his explanation of a first cause — and this prime mover contention ends up being very close to what you would identify as a divine being, a supernatural force.
One of the key issues is: is there a requirement that there had to be something supernatural at a beginning to set everything in motion or not? If you think that it’s necessary that whatever we see today was initiated by some higher force, then you’re going to constantly be impelled back to this supernatural viewpoint. That’s one of the reasons why Epicurus was so concerned about this. There’s the story that when he was very young, he asked his teachers about the nature of chaos — they were alleging that chaos existed before the things that we see today — and Epicurus challenged that approach as not making any sense.
So much of what we’re going back to here is this question: was there a first moment of all things, in which a divine being all of a sudden decided to create everything, and we’re here today because of that? Or, in Epicurus’s perspective, have the atoms moving through the void always existed, such that what we see today is an absolutely natural result of the changes over time — with no requirement of a supernatural being to initiate it in the first place?
Like you said, Joshua — if atoms are going to stop at some point unless they are continuously impelled by a supernatural force, then you’ve got a problem stating that the universe is natural. That just invites a supernatural force and compels that force to control not only the universe but your life, since you’re part of the universe.
Joshua:
Right. And Virgil picked up on some of the implications of the physics here when he said, in reference to Epicurus and particularly Lucretius: “Happy is he who is able to know the causes of things and who trampled beneath his feet all fears, inexorable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld.” So these issues relating to cause — you rightly said at the beginning — can put people off as being kind of boring or irrelevant. But the implications that extend from them radiate into your understanding of how everything around you works. And that seems to me to be a question of principal importance.
So Epicurus thought two things: that nothing could be created from nothing, meaning that everything that exists has always existed; and that the atoms were in constant motion. The implication of those two claims together is that the atoms have always existed in constant motion. There was no need for a first cause or a prime mover to get things started. And Democritus seemed to hold that view too — that nothing could be created and that atoms were in constant motion. That works. But for Epicurus, he needs to take it one step further, and he relates it back to ethics. We’ll get to that in a bit.
Cassius:
Yes. There’s a section before that entitled “Linear and Vibratory Motion.” Let’s see what’s there before we move on to the swerve.
This involves what is, to me, the seminal question in Epicurean cosmology. And it has to do with what we constantly hear about: “the original motion of atoms.” This has been a thorn in my side for a long time, because it strikes me that there ought to be no “original motion” of atoms, because there is no “original” — that doesn’t exist in Epicurean cosmology. There is no origin point that everything comes from. Everything has always existed.
Joshua:
And when you say everything has always existed — we’re not saying that Joshua has always existed. We’re saying that the atoms that make up Joshua have always existed. The bodies that we see around us certainly have not always existed and will not always exist, but the atoms that make them up have — that’s the Epicurean point.
Cassius:
Yes. The atoms and their attributes — weight, shape, and size. What DeWitt does in this book is connect weight to motion: they’re inextricable. If you have weight, you have motion. So the motion, like the weight, has always been there. The Epicurean universe and the atoms that make it up don’t start out like balls on a billiard table, just waiting for that first something to strike something else and start it all in motion.
Now the speed of atomic motion is constant. If things completely stop, you’ve reached complete entropy, and then nothing else ever happens again. So atoms, even when they’re bound up in compounds and can’t move at a constant speed in one direction — because that would require them to leave the compound body — instead vibrate at that same speed within the compound.
Now there is a tendency in all of this, since we are talking about a mechanistic or physicalist understanding of nature, to use the analogy of the watch. You’ve got the mainspring that drives the gears, and this gear drives this gear, and it’s all planned. And so the argument often made is: you can’t have a watch without a watchmaker. It’s that exact question of the prime mover. And it’s a distinction between what Epicurus thought about nature and what was called Deism — a popular mode of thinking, particularly around the 18th century. Some people in loose speech will say Epicurus was a deist because the gods are removed from human affairs. But one of the central components of Deism — really the only reason the god exists in Deism — is that something has to be there in the beginning to wind up the watch. After that it’ll run, but something has to start it, and that something then just goes away and does something else while we live in the clockwork universe it created. So there is really no connection between Epicurus’s view of nature and the gods on one hand, and Deism and its view of nature and the God that created nature on the other.
Joshua:
Right. And I was reading a lot of Deist material long before I got more interested in Epicurus — Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason was tremendously influential on my thinking. And I noticed that there is an article Thomas Paine wrote, a discourse at the Society of Theophylanthropists in Paris. Looking back on these things, it’s frustrating to me that Thomas Paine did not go down the Epicurean route and instead was stuck, in my view, on Deism. But that article talked a lot about the question of motion. One of the parts of it says: “The universe is composed of matter, and as a system is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist.” And it goes on to argue that motion itself is an argument you can use to infer the existence of a supreme being — a prime mover. So the issue of whether motion is a property of matter itself — Thomas Paine concluded it was not, whereas Epicurus concluded the opposite.
Cassius:
It’s very good to bring Thomas Paine into the equation here. And that’s essentially what DeWitt is saying Epicurus thought — that weight is a property of the atoms and motion is inextricably linked to weight. Thomas Paine and those Deist ideas not only were they trying to protect themselves from charges of heresy — this issue of motion is something they ran into a problem with and apparently concluded, somewhat in an Aristotelian sense, that this motion is an indication of a first cause and therefore something supernatural. But Epicurus is saying that motion is always something that has existed eternally with the atoms. The atoms have always been in motion. There was never a time when atoms were motionless.
I just want to reference this book because it’s relevant to this question of whether the universe is a watch made by a watchmaker. Richard Dawkins wrote a book specifically about evolution but about other things as well called The Blind Watchmaker. And it addresses the idea that natural selection coupled with genetic mutation is enough to explain speciation — and that gravity, absent a god, is enough to explain motion. So there are all these ways that we have today that Epicurus probably didn’t fully grasp or didn’t live in a time that gave him access to these ideas, but that explain this stuff so much better than the idea that something started it all and then walked away. So that book, The Blind Watchmaker, is good on this point.
Joshua:
Yes, this whole clockmaker argument is something that people who are interested in these issues are really going to want to wrestle with. It’s very close to some of the ultimate questions that we’re dealing with.
Cassius:
Now, we turn to the next section of DeWitt, which is the swerve of the atom. There is an article that I highly recommend from David Sedley entitled “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism.” I’m not going to be able to summarize much of the thrust of that article, but if you read it you’ll find a very interesting argument. Sedley — one of the real authorities on Epicurus living today — takes the position that Epicurus probably did not develop his theory of the swerve as part of his original physics. He started out with a Democritean viewpoint of physics, but then confronts this question of where does our apparent free will come from. From Sedley’s point of view, the argument for the existence of a swerve is a deductive conclusion based on the observation that higher animals have a certain degree of free will. If there were not a mechanism of some kind that would explain that, then you would not have free will. So you deduce the existence of the swerve from observation about the way bodies of a certain type — higher animals — operate. Because of course you can’t see an atom swerve; you can’t see an atom do anything, you can’t see an atom. But from what we observe at the level that we can see things, we conclude that the swerve must exist.
Another article that’s very important on this would be an article by A.A. Long entitled “Chance and Natural Law in Epicureanism.” It also goes into the question of the swerve and another very important aspect: if atoms are swerving, why is everything not totally unpredictable all the time? Long constructs the argument that what Lucretius says about the swerve — our only record of it, in Book 2 of the poem — is that the swerve happens at no fixed time and no fixed place, but it’s also an incredibly slight deviation. And Long argues that while the swerve may be going on all the time in all atoms, because of its minute nature it doesn’t break through into something observable at our level of existence except in a certain number of cases — such as, again, the movement of intelligent animals. Generally the universe does operate in a totally mechanistic way of billiard balls bouncing off each other in the deepest physics sense, but this swerve exists at a very minute level that allows in certain instances a breakthrough of the ability of certain bodies not to be totally mechanistic. So those are two particular articles I would really recommend for anybody who’s interested in pursuing the swerve. And of course there’s Steven Greenblatt’s book as well.
DeWitt says that he’s going to talk about the swerve more in a later chapter called “The New Freedom.” So all of these issues relating to determinism are going to be brought up at a later point.
Joshua:
Cassius, you’ve also read the articles — which I have not — and I know that you have some opinions on this point of how important this swerve really is.
Cassius:
Yeah. In fact, Sedley’s commentary is very similar to DeWitt’s challenge here in this section on the perpendicular universe, because as DeWitt says, “so far as the atoms in their motions are concerned, the principle is indifferent” — that’s the principle of falling straight down — because owing to the constant collisions and subsequent rebounds, the atoms are thought of as moving in every conceivable direction throughout the void. So that’s something reflected in Sedley — that how many swerves are really necessary for things to come into being? All you really had to have, according to Sedley if I remember correctly, is just one single swerve at any moment, and then everything would have started bouncing around. So it seems like both DeWitt and Sedley are challenging this idea that Epicurus needed the swerve in order to bring our universe into being. That could have come into being without the necessity of an atom swerving, and certainly without the necessity of atoms constantly swerving through eternity.
Martin:
If they are not swerving constantly, it’s not enough to really get collisions, because they will not reach the other atoms. At the same speed, once one swerves, it doesn’t then reach another one. And the collision effects eventually fade away.
Cassius:
And there’s another problem: if there was one swerve that started it all, that would seem to indicate something very special and unique about that one swerve. That would be the fingerprints of God, as it were. Of course, I don’t know that we’ve mentioned yet today the observation that the swerve does not appear in the Letter to Herodotus. The swerve does not appear in any direct writing of Epicurus that we have record of. If we did not have Lucretius’s Book 2, we would not have a straightforward statement from an authoritative Epicurean text about even the existence of the swerve. So that’s a factor in all of this analysis — the Letter to Herodotus explains the formation of universes without any reference to the swerve. There are all sorts of interesting questions that arise from the details of the text.
What I wanted to talk about was the broader point of what we’re talking about today — motion, flux, where it started, and all that. Once again, Epicurus, as he so often does in the ancient world, seems to be caught between two extremes. There was a philosopher named Zeno of Elea — a disciple of Parmenides — who thought that motion as we know it is impossible. And then you have people like Heraclitus who said that everything is in a state of flux and you cannot step into the same river twice, that things are changing so fast it’s impossible to grab hold of any one thing and really know much about it. Both of those positions lead to conclusions and implications that are, I think, anathema to everything Epicurus thought was true about the universe. And so once again, he’s caught between a rock and a hard place and manages to chart his own course in a way that he thinks preserves what is important about humanity and ethics, and what’s true about the gods, while at the same time being true to the physics.
Joshua:
And again, there are different levels of detail that certain people are going to want to get into. But if you don’t at least have a high-level understanding of where these issues go, it’s easy to get tripped up by other people’s arguments or attempts to place doubt in your mind. For example, Diogenes of Oinoanda has a section about the flux — and how Epicureans believe that the flux does exist, but that it’s not so fast that we can’t comprehend the things that are moving within it.
Cassius:
So it seems to me we’re now on to this issue of acceleration and retardation. One thing about what DeWitt is saying in this section goes back almost into the epistemology discussion. What Epicurus has to say on the issue of acceleration and deceleration, at this point, is this idea of whether motion is inherent in the atom itself as a consequence of its weight. Motion and weight are inextricable. Because weight is one of the permanent attributes, then motion goes right along with that. And so the question that comes up is what happens to projectiles on Earth. If you have an object and you throw it — let’s say you throw a baseball — we know that the speed of atomic motion is supposed to be uniform, and it must be pretty fast, quicker than thought, I think is what Epicurus says. But if you throw a baseball and you throw it relatively slowly, doesn’t that imply that all of the atoms that are in the baseball are moving as slow as the baseball? This is the objection that was brought to Epicurus and later Epicureans. And the response was this issue of the two different types of motion — linear and vibratory — that even when an atom is contained within a compound body and that compound body is either moving slower than the uniform rate of speed of the atom, or is completely still, the atoms are still in constant vibratory motion.
Joshua:
Yes, that makes sense. It’s an obvious objection: when you hear that atoms are in motion, you look at a mountain or a tree. That tree’s not moving, that mountain’s not moving. But the atoms that compose the mountain or the tree are what we’re talking about. Just because we can see the configuration at a particular moment does not mean that the atoms which create the configuration are not themselves in motion.
Cassius:
I had a conversation at one point with someone who thought that the world was flat, and they don’t think that gravity exists as a force in nature. They think it’s just made up. What they substitute in place of gravity to explain some of its effects — there are two different things, one of which works and one doesn’t. One is positing that the Earth, which is flat, is accelerating upwards at a constant rate of speed — that would simulate gravity. The other is buoyancy, which is totally muddled thinking, because buoyancy relies on gravity. You can’t have heavier objects falling without gravity. And what it caused me to ask this person was: why do heavier objects fall down? What is so special about that direction in particular? What makes “down” the direction heavier objects go, in the absence of gravity? And they of course had no answer, because it doesn’t make sense in those terms.
And that’s really the whole point of this subsection of the chapter: trying to get a hold of ideas like up and down in an infinite universe. What DeWitt says here is that Epicurus, in much of what he’s doing, is trying to immunize the minds of his disciples against certain views propounded by Plato and Aristotle in criticism of Democritus. So he’s defending certain aspects of the Democritean universe.
This traces back to Carl Sagan’s discussion in that episode of Cosmos — Democritus, and perhaps even Leucippus before him, had been the exponents of atomism and were moving things forward, and Plato and Aristotle represented a regression. Apparently Diogenes Laertius suggested that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect. That comes from Diogenes Laertius and we’ve talked with Dr. Glidden about issues with relying too heavily on him, but in the ancient world there was thought to be some basis for it.
Joshua:
Okay. And so if that comes from Diogenes Laertius — even though we have to be careful — it seems pretty clear that both Plato and Aristotle had been criticizing Democritus, and what Epicurus was then faced with the need to do would be to rehabilitate the Democritean perspective. Or certain aspects of it — except for the hard determinism, perhaps.
Cassius:
So this stuff is so weird to talk about. What seems to be at the center of this conversation is: if you assume the universe is infinite, as Epicurus does, and if you assume the universe has no center, as Epicurus does — some of these other philosophers thought the Earth was the center of the universe, so “downward” is anything that points toward the center of the universe, and “upward” is anything that points away from it. That makes it consistent within their claim, even if the claim doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So Epicurus is now in the position of having to explain up and down, and the motion of atoms in relation to up and down, in a universe that is infinite, that has no center, no beginning, and no end. And it’s a really odd and difficult thing to talk about.
And Lucretius has a passage — I mentioned the idea that the Earth is flat. Some people read Lucretius and come away with the conclusion that Lucretius thought the Earth was flat. DeWitt seems to say that there is no opinion about the shape of the Earth in Lucretius, but that there needs to be some surface for human beings to stand on. It’s unclear from the text whether that means all of them are standing on top of each world or how that all works. We discussed this before: there’s the implication in Lucretius that if people lived on the other side of the world, they might fall off — because Epicurus and Lucretius were committed to the idea that there was no center to the universe and the center of the universe was not the center of the Earth. Which is one of those issues we talk about in terms of “okay, that’s not what we think today and that would be laughably wrong.” But which is the greater error — to think you could fall off the other side of the Earth, or to think that everything in the universe is focused on the core of the Earth itself? If I thought that everything in the universe revolved around the Earth, I would have a hard time believing that there’s not something special in a religious sense about the Earth. That would lead to the conclusion that the Earth was created by someone with special intent toward humanity — which is of course not what we believe through science today or through Epicurean theory.
Joshua:
You said something a little bit ago, like it’s laughable today to think you could fall off the face of the Earth. There’s a thought experiment in which it’s not all that laughable. When you’re an astronaut on a spaceship, it becomes really important to be tethered to that spaceship, because if you’re not tied down you really will, at the slightest provocation, just float off into space. The spaceship doesn’t have a strong enough gravitational pull to pull your body back to it. So the seminal idea that separates modern physics from physics of the ancient world is the understanding that there is a force inherent in all matter which draws other matter toward it, and that force is gravity. In the absence of gravity, it would be very possible to float off the face of the Earth, so that’s the issue.
Martin:
Without gravity, we wouldn’t really fall off, as much as we would slowly drift away. There was a recent film — I didn’t see it, but it created quite a stir. It was set in space, and there was an astronaut who started floating away from the ship, and in a split-second decision she cut her oxygen hose and used the propulsion of the oxygen flowing out to push herself back to the ship. The whole idea is you’re floating away, and once you float to a certain point, you might as well have fallen off because there’s no going back absent some contravening force. If you have something in your hand, you can throw it in the opposite direction —
Cassius:
— and it’s the same idea as releasing the oxygen. It’s the same thing.
Joshua:
It seems like this idea of floating away on an endless plane of nothingness is probably a nightmare that’s very old — considering how long we’ve been a seafaring species. Like floating away from a ship.
Cassius:
Well, there is this problem. A surface reading of the Epicurean text seems to suggest that the “original motion” of atoms was straight downward owing to their weight in perpendicular lines, and that the swerve was needed to get the billiard-ball motion knocking off each other. DeWitt seems to take a critical view of that understanding. It’s almost as if this “original motion” of the atoms is more of a thought experiment than anything. There is no original motion of the atoms because there’s no origin point in space or time. But he seems to suggest that this was a useful conceit to help explain why the swerve was necessary.
Okay — the problem of cause, as the last section of Chapter 9. He starts here with a reference to Aristotle — this issue of the prime mover, the uncaused cause that causes everything else. And so DeWitt has a point here: if you’re living and writing in a context where people are obsessively looking for the causes that explain all things — and I read that quote from Virgil, “happy is he who knows the causes of things” — it would seem odd not to give some explanation of that.
The point seems to be, in a way, an analogy with what you have today with apologetic Christian writers who attempt to reconcile reason and religion and come up with so-called reasonable arguments for God. This is what Aristotle was doing ultimately — if you deduce from your physics that there had to be a prime mover, an uncaused cause, then it’s easy and simple to designate that phenomenon as God. And so in a philosophy that attempts to say that everything is natural and does not arise from some intelligent original source, you have to come up with an alternate explanation — and that’s what we’re doing through atomism and the formation of universes totally naturally through the operation of eternal atoms.
And this paragraph of DeWitt’s is worth reading: “The first cause is manifestly weight, which causes the downward motion of the atoms. It is equally manifest that the second cause is the blows arising from the clash of atoms, which are the cause of all opposite and oblique motions. The third cause is the swerve of the atoms from the perpendicular in their downward motion. This serves two ends. First, it makes possible the collision of atoms, which otherwise would fall in parallel lines and never meet to form compound bodies. Second, it emancipates man from an infinite chain of physical causation, the pet abomination of Epicurus, and makes possible the freedom of the will.”
Particularly that last sentence I thought was very well done. Because there is a connection: some people find the physics rather dull, but it’s constantly interacting and intersecting with the ethics, which is what people want to talk about so much. There’s a lot of bleed-through in every area here.
To be prepared — for some reason this analogy comes to my mind. Death is not the kind of thing that we want to constantly be thinking about, because we want to enjoy our life. But if we don’t spend some time preparing for it, thinking about what it means, and understanding how it fits into the scheme of things, then we can be just totally knocked off of our rocker by an unexpected and unprepared-for event that is something we know is going to happen. And again, these questions of the existence of the universe, how everything comes together, whether it’s supernatural, whether we have the ability to control our future or not — whenever the bad things in life come to affect us, all of these issues can flash to our minds and further debilitate us in our efforts to stand up against that. And the best way — probably the only way — to deal with those issues is to be prepared for them, and to know where to go to look for answers.
Emily Austin talks a lot about this in her recent articles. I get drawn to this particular passage where she talks about how when bad things happen, an Epicurean doesn’t think that these things have a good reason behind them. In other words, there’s that quote from the Bible about all things happening together for good for those who love the Lord. Well, that is not the way things are. All things don’t happen for good. Bad things that happen aren’t the expression of the will of God. They are simply bad, and we wish to avoid them if we possibly can. But we don’t have this mental construct by which we just reconcile a bad event as something ultimately meant for good — because it’s not meant for good. It is simply a bad thing which causes us to want to avoid it if at all possible and to take steps to protect ourselves from it to the extent that we can.
Knowledge in itself can actually be harmful to you if you don’t pursue it to a conclusion that leads you to an understanding of the way things truly work. If you’re an astronomer and you just immerse yourself in all these incredibly awesome pictures of the universe but then don’t move forward to the understanding that these things are natural and not a manifestation of some supernatural being, then you can back yourself into the corner of being more superstitious than any tribal witch doctor. You have to go to the next step of having a philosophy — as Lucretius calls it, a scheme of systematic contemplation. He says over and over that otherwise you’re like children in the dark imagining bad things to be happening. And this philosophy, even though certain aspects of it can appear bitter, is ultimately helpful because it gives you the power to get past many of the tribulations of life.
Joshua:
What DeWitt gets into here I find so interesting. Henry David Thoreau in his journal records that he read about the first hundred lines of Lucretius, but didn’t read any further — which is a shame. The thing that he pulls out as being the best part, in his opinion, was what he called the description of Prometheus climbing the ramparts of the world and stealing fire from the gods. Now of course Prometheus is nowhere mentioned in Lucretius — Lucretius is, in fact, talking about Epicurus. But in this paragraph very near the end of the chapter, I think we do get a glimpse of Epicurus stealing fire from the gods here, because what DeWitt says is: “as for Plato’s idea that the cause of motion in the universe was the divine mind and that the human being was endowed with a share of this mind, this is inconceivable to Epicurus. In his thinking, the human intelligence, including volition, was an accident of organic life. For him, it was quite thinkable that a purposive being should be the product of a non-purposive nature” — the soul creatrix, as Lucretius calls nature.
So it’s that idea. He goes further than Darwin in his first book, because Darwin wrote The Origin of Species — I think published in 1859 — in which he describes speciation, but he holds back the most important claim. It would have completely shocked and appalled his readers, as the book already did. The idea that it wasn’t just the animals that evolved from lower life forms — that it’s the story of every single one of us — didn’t come until one of his later books, The Descent of Man, after the main furor over The Origin of Species had already come out. And for Epicurus and for Lucretius, the answer is here: that nature, even though it is not intelligent and has no purpose — Lucretius says the eyes don’t develop to let you see, that’s not the way it happens — from a nature that is non-intelligent and non-purposive, an intelligent and purposive being like mankind or the other animals can arise.
Cassius:
Yes. And I’m looking at this section now — DeWitt is making a similar point on page 170: “thus to Epicurus, motion was inherent in matter and no external cause of motion existed. While to Plato, matter was inert and the cause of motion was external to it.” I think essentially that’s what Thomas Paine is doing in that article I cited — he’s looking at matter and separating it from motion and saying there’s an external, basically supernatural cause. This is the level at which these issues are joined: if you don’t have a natural explanation for both matter and motion, then you’ve got the camel’s nose under the tent of saying that somehow motion has been created by an external force that is essentially God.
And that’s one of the places I want to end up in this episode. This is why there is such an important distinction between Epicurus versus Stoicism or versus other philosophies or psychologies that sort of start and end with the proposition that “well, we all want to be happy, let’s just talk about being happy.” The Stoics were absolutely dependent on a viewpoint similar to Plato and Aristotle — that there is what is essentially a divine fire, a supernatural origin to everything. If you go down that road, you’re going to want to follow that road and decide: well, if there’s a supernatural origin, tell me what that supernatural force wants me to do, and that’s how I’ll live my life. Whether it’s religious piety or virtue or whatever you consider that supernatural force to be, you’re going to want to study that and get behind it and use it as the foundation for your ethics. And Epicurus saw that as a total dead end that’s going to lead you to all sorts of damaging conclusions. You have to start at the very beginning to understand that the universe is not supernatural, that it is all natural, that it does not have any plan for your life, and that it’s up to you to develop your own plan — to understand based on the feelings of pleasure and pain how you should spend your time and how you should act to bring a better life for yourself and your friends.
And that’s going to lead us next week when we start into chapter 10. As DeWitt has said in this chapter, one of Epicurus’s major irritations was that people have the idea that we are at the mercy of fate or the mercy of supernatural gods. And so DeWitt devotes an entire chapter — chapter 10 — to the topic of “The New Freedom,” in which we’re going to discuss those things which we do have control over, those things we don’t have control over, and how we evaluate what we can do with the discretion that we do have, and how we should work to implement the choices and avoidances which will lead us to a better life.
Thanks to our listeners for being with us today. Always feel free to come by the forum, look up this episode and our other threads to discuss whatever might be on your mind in regard to Epicurus. We’ll be back next week to start a new chapter — chapter 10, the new freedom. Thanks, and we’ll see you then.