Episode 168 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 21 - Chapter 10 - The New Freedom 01
Date: 04/05/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2992-episode-168-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-21-chapter-10-the-new-freedom-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 168 opens Chapter 10, “The New Freedom,” which DeWitt frames as Epicurus’s response to both supernatural fatalism and hard determinism — arguably the most emotionally contested issue in the study of Epicurus. Cassius opens with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act 1, Scene 2), where the historical Cassius Longinus — whom David Sedley has identified as an Epicurean — tells Brutus: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” expressing the Epicurean conviction that free will is possible and that inaction is itself a choice. The discussion moves to Greek tragic fatalism — the “Appointment in Samara” story and the Oedipus cycle — as paradigms of the pre-Epicurean belief that fate cannot be outrun no matter what actions one takes. Don identifies the three causes in the Letter to Menoikeus: necessity, chance, and “the things that are up to us” (par’ hemas), with the last being the locus of Epicurean freedom and the ground for praise and blame. The episode surveys Epicurus’s statement in the Letter to Menoikeus that it is better to believe in the myths of the gods (who can at least be appeased) than in the inexorable necessity of the physicists, and revisits the Virgil quote about trampling underfoot “inexorable fate.” Don offers an extended analysis of the Greek vocabulary in Epicurus’s book On Choosing and Avoiding (Peri Haireseōn kai Phugōn): hairesis (choosing/pursuing; source of the word “heresy”) and pheugō (not merely “avoid” like stepping around a puddle, but to flee or take flight — he argues “rejecting” or “fleeing” better captures the active force than the flat English “avoid”). DeWitt’s concept of “the double choice” is examined — Epicurus taught not just specific choices but general attitudes toward whole fields of life (gods, fortune, politics), which then guide individual decisions; the example from Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger shows how an Epicurean’s general attitude toward the gods leads immediately to recognizing fraud without needing to identify the mechanism. Joshua raises John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration on belief as “inward and full persuasion of the mind,” provoking discussion of whether beliefs can be consciously changed. The “Freedom and Necessity” section covers DeWitt on Greek tragic fatalism and the distinction between fatalism (often religious, not necessarily causal) and determinism (secular, causal). Martin observes that hard determinism is empirically unfalsifiable — the computer required to calculate all atomic positions would need more atoms than exist in the universe. Callistheni reports having read Sam Harris’s free will book and concludes that regardless of the theoretical question, holding the belief in free will leads to better practical outcomes. Martin critiques the famous neuroscience experiments (brains firing before conscious awareness of a decision) as applicable only to reflexive reactions, not to deliberative choices. Cassius reads the key passage from David Sedley’s “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism,” which argues Epicurus uniquely arrived at a non-reductionist position: truths at the atomic level and truths at the phenomenal level are both real; neither has a monopoly on truth, and the sweetness of sugar is not straightforwardly reducible to its molecular structure. Don adds from his Sedley notes that Epicurus acknowledged “matter in certain complex states can take on non-physical properties which in turn bring genuinely new behavioral laws into operation” — anticipating the modern concept of emergent properties, illustrated by the rock-versus-leaf example. The episode closes with DeWitt’s framing of the laws of nature (foedera naturae) versus the laws of fate (foedera fati) — “the new freedom had been wrestled from the fates” — Don reading Epicurus’s own words from the Herculaneum papyri (via Sedley) on how “developments” bear most of the responsibility for behavior rather than the constituent atoms, and Joshua closing with Steven Greenblatt’s The Swerve (Chapter 10), quoting Giordano Bruno’s On the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast: “there is no artifice or God standing outside the universe barking commands… nature is not an abstract capacity but a generative mother.” Next week: continuation from DeWitt p. 175, including Sedley’s arguments that radical determinism and radical skepticism are self-refuting.
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 168 of Lucretius Today. We’re starting a new chapter, Chapter 10, entitled “The New Freedom,” and it’s a very big and important topic that’s not necessarily evident from the title. Essentially what we’ll be dealing with in this section is a subject of great importance to Epicurus, which we generally today talk about in terms of determinism — the issue of whether we have any ability at all as human beings to influence the course of our actions and our futures, or whether we are basically the playthings of the gods, or of fate, or some other forces that are totally outside our control. And as usual with Epicurus, his position ends up being one that some people might call commonsense and practical, but it’s a very detailed and emotional question for some people. Over the years in our discussions of Epicurean philosophy on the internet, this is probably one of the issues that has caused the most division and emotional angst among people who like many aspects of Epicurus but there are some aspects of him that they just cannot go along with. Epicurus addresses it in several aspects of his writings — it’s a significant part of his letter to Menoikeus, there are references in the Vatican Sayings and aspects of the Principal Doctrines, it’s in Lucretius, and it relates to one of his most famous doctrines, the Swerve, in certain ways. One of the most significant passages in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar relates to Cassius Longinus, who was about to become involved in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. There’s a discussion between Cassius and Brutus that touches on this issue. Since our resident expert in Shakespeare is Joshua, I’d ask him to pull that up and bring that to our attention.
Joshua: A resident expert — that might be stretching things. But yeah, this comes from Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2. And it goes like this: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Cassius: This is relatively early in the play and Julius Caesar has risen to power. The senatorial class — of which Cassius, Brutus, Cicero, and many others were part — were extremely unhappy about Julius Caesar’s approach to kingship. The Romans had a lot of antipathy towards kings from the very founding of the Roman Republic. So these are people looking at a problem and deciding whether they have the ability to influence it or not, whether everything is just ordained by the fates and they have to stand idly by.
Joshua: Brutus is identified as being sort of a Platonist — he’s not a Stoic as some people think — and there’s a very good article by David Sedley on this exact issue, the ethics of Brutus and Cassius. Here in this situation, Cassius as an Epicurean is looking at Brutus and saying that men are at some time masters of their fates — which is a reflection almost of what’s in the letter to Menoikeus, that some things are in our control and some things are not. And then he says specifically: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” — that we’re not willing ourselves to take action that is possible to us. So Cassius as a representative who had converted to Epicurean philosophy is expressing directly to Brutus an Epicurean theme which we’re going to be talking about today.
Cassius: The philosophical point is you do have intruding into day-to-day life the question of whether you have any control at all. I’m glad we have Don with us today. Don, I think you’ve read a lot more Greek drama than I have. But I guess the essential story of, for example, the Oedipus cycle is this idea that no matter how hard you run, you cannot outrun your fate. I’ll try to be very brief with this. It’s called “Appointment in Samara.” There’s a master who sends his servant to the marketplace to buy goods, and the servant comes running back with no goods. The master says, “What happened?” He says, “I was at the market and I felt something behind me. I turned around and I beheld the face of Death.” The master says, “I’ll go to the market and see what happened. But before I do that, you take the fastest horse we have and make for far-off Samara to escape Death.” So the master sends him on the horse, and then he goes to the market and confronts Death and says, “What is the meaning of this, playing pranks upon my servant?” And Death says, “I didn’t mean to play a prank on him. I was actually very surprised, because I have an appointment with your servant in the far-off town of Samara tomorrow.” Again, this idea which is very old in human consciousness — no matter how far you run, you cannot outrun your destiny.
Don: Yeah, Oedipus was always going to marry his mother and kill his father, no matter what he did. And it’s almost as if the actions that people took around him — far from preventing the fate — actually pushed it to its final conclusion.
Cassius: Exactly. This idea that there is a fate that overrides everything else is extremely important. And that’s what’s in the letter to Menoikeus. Epicurus has certainly identified with being against the idea of worshiping supernatural gods who will reward you or punish you. But as much as he’s against that, he says it’s preferable to believe in that than to believe in what amounts to fate or hard determinism — that nothing you can do can control what happens to you in the future. He says explicitly that it’s worse to believe you’re hopelessly subject to fate than to believe in supernatural gods who might help you. And this is again part of the Virgil quote that we talked about last week: “Happy is he who was able to know the causes of things, and who is trampled beneath his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld.” Of all the things that Virgil could think of to say about presumably Lucretius, the triumph over fate was one of the things he mentioned as most significant.
Joshua: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that seems to strike me about the Stoics — that they’re all about fate. You know, it’s like “embrace your fate” — amor fati, I believe, is the Latin. Because from the Stoic view, everything happens for a reason. We will not necessarily know those reasons, but we just have to accept our fate. And that seems to me to have a very religious sound to it. Why would you accept your fate and love it unless you thought there was some divine will behind it?
Cassius: I seem to be on the theme of mentioning this from Emily Austin recently, but I like the way she describes how in an Epicurean framework you don’t have the religious point of view that “everything works together for good for those who love the Lord.” Because if you’re a Calvinist, if you think that everything from the beginning of time was ordained by God, then no matter how horrible an event happens to you, you can just look at it and say, “This is what God intended, so therefore I’m happy that it happened.” And then you look at a book like Job, where basically God comes off as just a capricious, “I do it because I want to do it, and how dare you question me” — that’s the kind of God portrayed in the book of Job.
Don: Exactly. I’m so glad you mentioned that. That’s one thing I remember from my childhood when I was being brought up in a religious environment. The man of God who had been blessed in so many different ways — at the height of his success, the devil just walks up to God and says, “Well, he loves you because you’ve made him successful. If you took away his success he wouldn’t love you anymore.” And so this arbitrary and capricious God just decides to destroy everything that Job has, as a test, to please Satan and bring things to a head. There’s no lesson from the book of Job other than that the will of God is inscrutable to us and we just have to shut up and take it.
Joshua: And he gets very, very angry if you question it, that’s the other side. “How dare you question me? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? You’re nothing to me, mortal.” Yes — this is all-powerful God for you.
Cassius: So it isn’t just a matter of astrology. Epicurus was on record as being against divination — the point being that divination is not true, but that even if it were, you wouldn’t want to do it for this very reason.
Don: Yeah. Epicurus says explicitly that things that happen can have three causes: some things happen by necessity, some things happen by chance, and then others are “up to us” — the literal Greek there: par’ hemas, “the things that are up to us.” And that’s where the whole idea of freedom and free will comes in. It is not the case that there are not some things that are literally up to us, that we can have power over what we decide to do.
Cassius: And that’s probably the time to talk about one of the controversial aspects — right in there where you’ve just quoted from — where Epicurus talks about the issues within our control and the choices we make in regard to that being where issues of praise and blame arise. Les Misérables — the theme of that is where somebody is stealing some bread to feed his child, and this policeman is constantly pursuing the hero to persecute him because he’s broken the law. It doesn’t matter that he’s stolen in order to provide bread for his hungry child; the law is the law and you never have any exceptions to it. So you have very complicated issues of blame and praise that go along with what you’re responsible for and what you’re not. But in the end, Epicurus is saying some things are in your control and some things are not, and that those things within your control are certainly things you should be engaged in. Once you know that you have some ability to influence your experience, that’s where all these other doctrines about choice and avoidance and natural and necessary and all the different practical advice come in.
Don: Yeah, and this whole idea of “the new freedom” here in the DeWitt chapter really digs into the debates on free will and determinism and indeterminism, and then you get into the modern discussions about compatibilism and responsibility. I started reading some more into this last night, and it is just a rabbit hole down which one cannot extricate oneself. There is a hot and heavy debate even in modern philosophy going on about free will. It’s a really interesting subject, but boy is it convoluted and complex.
Cassius: One thing I want to say about the rabbit hole is you certainly cannot just pursue this rabbit to its end, because you’ll never come up for air. One other reference I would strongly urge anybody interested in this subject to find is the article by David Sedley entitled “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism.” I think his conclusions are largely consistent with what DeWitt is talking about here. But one particularly interesting thing about that article is that Sedley talks about some more recently discovered Herculaneum texts — in fact, some that he himself has been involved in reconstructing — that are not included in what DeWitt did back in the 1950s. And there’s some really fascinating material that Sedley comes up with. The one theme I’ll mention is that there’s a parallel between Epicurus’s refutation of determinism versus Epicurus’s refutation of skepticism. He considers both radical skepticism and radical determinism to be significant problems, and it’s very interesting to read Sedley’s analysis of how Epicurus combines a physics approach — but perhaps more so it’s a logical argument about the inconsistencies of both the skepticism argument and the determinism argument.
Cassius: One of the items that DeWitt brings up is a fourth kind of necessity that Epicurus was against — dialectical. For example, when the disjunctive proposition “Tomorrow Hermarchus will either be alive or dead” was put up to Epicurus, he declined to give an answer. He was too wary a dialectician himself to swallow a dialectical bait. My understanding of the Hermarchus issue is that Epicurus was observing that there is no necessity that Hermarchus either be alive or dead tomorrow, and that therefore, because there’s no necessity that would lead you to a conclusion one way or the other, the right answer was to refuse to entertain it. Does anybody have a take on that?
Don: Yeah, I think you put that pretty well.
Joshua: Okay, so the problem here — which is something I did study at college but don’t remember much of — is what’s called the “explosive fallacy” or the “principle of explosion.” The Latin phrase is ex falso sequitur quodlibet — “from falsehood, anything follows.” It is the law according to which any statement can be proven from a contradiction. Once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition, including its negation, can be inferred from it. As a demonstration: consider “All lemons are yellow” and “Not all lemons are yellow,” and suppose both are true. If that is the case, anything can be proven — for example, unicorns exist. It’s absurdity that elevates itself.
Martin: It doesn’t apply fully here, because that is an “and” statement. What you see is how much “Hermarchus will be alive or dead” — that’s an “or” statement. So it doesn’t fully apply here.
Don: Well, you could just rephrase this by saying “All lemons are yellow or all lemons are not yellow” and just follow it that way. But yeah, you’re probably right. You would have to restructure it differently. It’s problematic, I think, no matter how you look at it.
Cassius: And that was exactly the kind of wordplay that Epicurus didn’t seem to have a lot of time for — “logic chopping,” as I think Shakespeare in Hamlet refers to it. We’ve also got that good example in Seneca where he’s talking about Epicurus and then also complaining about — do you remember that one, Joshua, how that one goes? “Cheese is a word, so logically, mice eat a word” — does that make sense?
Joshua: Yes, that’s the direction it goes.
Cassius: Epicurus was pointing in the opposite direction. He was saying to be more practical about it: do your best to predict what’s going to happen if you make one choice versus what’s going to happen if you make another choice, and that’s the best you can do. Speaking of choosing and avoiding, that’s where we come to. And Don, I gathered that this was, as it were, part of the reason you’re here with us today — you have some thoughts on this.
Don: Yeah, I’ll let Cassius just give the introduction and then I’ll chime in with a couple of things myself.
Cassius: The next section is indeed on choosing and avoiding. The main point made by DeWitt is that these words — “choose,” “avoid,” and so forth — represent a different way of looking at things. In the modern world we often talk about “willpower” or “will,” but that’s not the direction that the Greeks were thinking about these things.
Don: Yeah, it’s sort of my hobby horse, I think. Because the book where Epicurus talks about what’s traditionally called “choosing and avoiding” is Peri Haireseōn kai Phugōn, and those two words — hairesis and phugē — are the ones translated as “choosing and avoiding.” But hairesis, I think, is interesting because it comes down to us as the origin of the word “heresy” — so those people who were “choosing for themselves” were seen as heretics in the early church. It also has the idea of pursuing something, so it’s not just a choice, it’s something you actively pursue. And pheugō is the one that annoys me the most, I think, because it’s often translated almost exclusively as “avoidance” or “avoiding,” and it really means more like “to flee” or “to take flight from something” or “to escape from something.” It’s a much more active word. Whenever somebody says “avoid,” I always think of stepping around a mud puddle. It’s a very mundane sort of thing, whereas it seems to me that Epicurus is really saying that you either pursue something or you flee from something. I usually translate it as “choosing and rejecting” because it gives a little more of the impact and importance of these ideas.
Cassius: Yeah, and Epicurus says elsewhere that we should flee from our bad habits as if they were angry men who had done us grievous harm.
Don: Exactly. And it would be a whole other connotation if you said you just “avoid” your habits. Those English words have such semantic baggage with them that “choose and avoid” just seems like there should be something stronger there whenever we talk about those words.
Cassius: Don, can you tell me the word for avoiding again?
Don: It would be, if we transliterate it, P-H-E-U-G-O — pheugō, or I think fevgo is the modern Greek pronunciation of it.
Cassius: Does that come down to us in any similar English word?
Don: It could very well be the exclamation “pew!” whenever you escape from something.
Joshua: I was going to suggest “pugilism,” which is boxing — parrying and evading. Oh, I’d have to look that one up.
Don: That’s a good idea.
Joshua: I think it comes from the Latin pugnus, which means “fist,” so completely unrelated.
Don: That makes sense.
Cassius: Several of the things you said, Don, play into transition into the next subheading. The heading title is “The Double Choice,” and what DeWitt is saying here is somewhat what you were saying a moment ago, Don — that in addition to basically making choices between individual specific things, Epicurus thought it was important to have a choice of attitude. DeWitt says there’s a clear distinction between choosing an attitude, ethically, toward an action in a given sphere, and choosing to do or not to do a given thing within that field. What he’s talking about is that a lot of the Principal Doctrines seem to be structured in a way as to inoculate students against other ideas — basically a position that if you understand a general observation in a field, such as the idea that the gods are not supernatural and are not going to reward and punish you, once you accept a perspective in a particular field, that’s going to serve as your attitude and lead you in your direction of evaluating the specifics within that field. In Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger, Lucian makes the comment that a person very skeptical of Alexander — who was defrauding people through his religious pretensions — that an Epicurean would be sure that even if he did not understand the precise way that the fraud was being committed, he was confident that it was fraud because he understood the general nature that there are no supernatural gods.
Don: Yeah, that’s an interesting section just because it really gives the idea that we do have freedom to believe what we want to believe, that we can change our beliefs, we can change our empty beliefs into beliefs that have more of a foundation. The way DeWitt phrases it is kind of interesting. He uses the example: “The proper attitude towards food is to prefer a simple diet, but this does not preclude, and even approves, an occasional indulgence” — which is exactly what Emily Austin said. And: “Neither is political life to be avoided under all circumstances; the evil is not in such a life itself but in the surrendering of freedom by making a career of it. Thus, in spite of the choices of attitude, the necessity of making the individual choice is perpetual.”
Cassius: I guess that point would be that you don’t generally end up revising your major attitudes once you’ve decided which ones are correct, but in the individual moment you may have to take some action. Just as we sometimes choose pain in order to pursue pleasure ultimately, we have to be aware of the context of the circumstances and live in the real world, as opposed to living in some abstraction.
Joshua: I always quote this John Locke letter on this point — his Letter Concerning Toleration. He wrote it anonymously in Latin and published it in the Netherlands because he didn’t want too many people to read it. It was quite groundbreaking for the time. He was advocating for extreme religious toleration in a time when that was quite dangerous to do. And he says that “true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind, and that faith is not faith without believing.” And for me this is an area I continue to struggle with — this idea of whether it is possible to really choose what you believe. And since we’re talking about free will, this seems like an important subject. The way I always sort of tie it in with Epicureanism is this quote in the letter to Menoikeus, right where he says, “Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to you.” People struggle with this — it’s not like they can just flip a switch in their brain and go, “Okay, now I believe that death is nothing to me.” It’s something you have to think about and wrestle with. You have to put new information before your eyes, consider things, weigh them in your mind, before you can come to what Epicurus thought was the right conclusion. I don’t think it’s easy to change what you believe. Just like I couldn’t suddenly start believing in leprechauns if I wanted to.
Martin: Well, I think in science you may more easily change what you believe, because the context of science is designed to do that. When a scientist sees evidence, that can be instantaneously convincing to change a belief. The whole point really is to attempt to prove your hypothesis wrong by testing it. But in practice, most of the research actually done and what we see in the laboratory is quite straightforward — we see directly what we want to look at, and we do not do a refutation attempt.
Cassius: Maybe it’s a question more about: do you have to have a desire to change your mind before you change your mind? And I don’t know that that’s true either. I think that some things are so overwhelmingly apparent at times that you can’t help but change your mind. But it is a difficult issue.
Joshua: Yeah, there’s a lot, when it comes to belief systems, of acculturation and education and indoctrination and all those sorts of words that have to do with why you believe a certain thing. And sometimes it’s hard to pull down those walls if you want to try to believe something different, or when the walls are pulled down, to put them back up again.
Cassius: The reference to walls takes us into the next section, “Freedom and Necessity.” DeWitt begins the discussion basically by talking about Greek tragedy and how it related to Greek religion and the fatalism in Homer. He cites the phrase many of us have heard: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive insane.” He brings up the Oedipus cycle again. I did not realize that the Oedipus complex was fundamentally a fate story — it’s a phrase people throw around, but as for what the theme of the play actually is, I didn’t realize it was a fate issue.
Joshua: Yeah, that was one of the reasons that Oedipus’s parents tried to get rid of him when he was a baby — because it was prophesied that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and they were like, “Well, we can’t have this.” So they tried to prevent it — but then somebody picks him up in the woods and raises him, and then he becomes king in another city, and then he meets his father on the road and he doesn’t know it’s his father, they get into an argument, he kills him. And then it goes from there — he doesn’t realize that his mother is there. So it’s this whole thing where his parents try to outrun fate, and Oedipus is aware of this prophecy and tries to as well, and then there’s a whole plague afflicting the city where Oedipus is king, and Oedipus says, “I’m going to find out,” and then he finds out that he has married his mother and killed his father.
Don: Oedipus’s name literally means “swollen foot” — when his father received the oracle that his son would kill his father and marry his mother, he bound the baby by his feet and left him in the woods to die. And it all ends up with his beard bedecked by eyeballs, which is one of the great lines.
Joshua: So Oedipus is a Greek story — originally a myth, and then the Greek tragedians took it and ran with the story, through various cycles. Aristophanes was writing plays about Euripides and Sophocles debating each other in Hades. It was very much in the mix in Greek culture at the time. But that’s exactly the kind of fatalism that Epicurus would have railed against.
Don: I hesitate to bring this up, but I was reading last night about the whole free will debates, and there seems to be a subtle but important distinction between “fatalism” and “determinism” in the current debates. And I think it’s interesting because “determinism” is the word always used in discussing this with Epicurus and Democritus, but it almost seems it would be more “fatalism” than “determinism” sometimes. The whole difference between fatalism and determinism seems like an interesting possibility to explore.
Martin: So the fatalism is essentially the wrong attitude you may get if you believe in hard determinism, but it’s not necessary to go that way. Fatalism is basically not something that you characterize the physics with — it’s just a person’s attitude. Determinism would be an issue of metaphysics.
Don: I’m looking at an infographic I had found last night. Some of the points: “Determinism is dependent on causality and fatalism is not dependent on causality. Determinism says the future is causally determined; fatalism says the future is fated or destined. Determinism does not lead to defeatism, as our conscious thought and action leads to future events.” And: determinism is often a secular understanding of causality, while fatalism is often a religious idea of being fated by a deity or god. So there are subtle yet distinct differences there.
Cassius: And I would say this is where we serve a role of hopefully being helpful to people — pointing out where the rabbit trails are that you go down and never come out of, versus where the practical issues really hit the road. The practical result of an improper understanding of where you fit in the universe according to Epicurus is this attitude of fatalism: there’s nothing you can do to affect your future, you’re just absolutely hopeless, and you get depressed and you crawl into your hole and do nothing. That’s the practical result that Epicurus is combating. Nobody’s really going to take the position that saying that the atoms swerve is a full and complete definitional mechanism to understand everything that flows into human activity. But it is a sort of touchstone or perspective that gives you something to hang on to when you ultimately come up with your final attitude that you do have the ability to control some of your actions.
Cassius: On page 175 there’s a paragraph where DeWitt goes into this. He says: “The physicist had been busy erecting an edifice of thought in which the end result was a kind of fatalism even more shocking to the sensibilities of Epicurus. We still possess this pronouncement upon the topic” — this is what we quoted earlier from the letter to Menoikeus — “It would be better to follow the myths concerning the gods than to be a slave to the necessity of the physicists, for the former presumes some hope of appeasement through worship of the gods, while the latter presumes an inexorable necessity. The crime of the physicists in his judgment had been their failure to deal with the problem of freedom, and their offense was that it was worst in the case of the atomists who found the sole cause of motion and change in the universe to be the motion of the atoms.” On this point, the feelings of Epicurus were so intense that he denied to Leucippus even the name of a philosopher. There’s this controversy about Leucippus, who had been a predecessor of Democritus in the discussion of atomism. Apparently Epicurus said something that some people interpreted as saying Leucippus did not even exist, that he was a fantasy. I’ve seen others — it may be DeWitt, it may be others — who take the position that what Epicurus was saying was not that Leucippus was a fictional character, but that Leucippus was so wrong in his misinterpretation of atomism that he did not even deserve the name of a philosopher.
Cassius: DeWitt goes on: it was consequently the duty of Epicurus as a moralist, a reformer, and hence a pragmatist — or in the ancient parlance, as a truly wise man, who will be more powerfully moved by his feelings than other men — to declare the significance of determinism for human conduct. His verdict was that determinism meant paralysis. His solution was to postulate a sufficient degree of freedom of the motion of the atoms to permit the freedom of the individual — and that’s where the Swerve comes from.
Don: There are, at least in modern philosophical discussions, people who will say that if we knew the position of every atom from the beginning of the universe, we would be able to predict your actions with 100% accuracy — that free will does not exist in any way, shape, or form that people think of it, and that if we had enough computing power we could predict everybody’s actions with 100% accuracy. And that is a position where a number of modern philosophers and neuroscientists have come down, including I think people like Sam Harris.
Cassius: I was going to say — Callistheni, you mentioned you wanted to add something…
Callistheni: Yeah, so actually I read Sam Harris’s book — I think the title says something about “free will,” I can’t remember the exact title — but I went down the rabbit hole regarding the idea of free will: do we have free will? And yes, it sounds like, if you read what other writers have said about free will, you can suddenly feel like, “Oh my God, maybe I don’t have free will.” But guess what — that does not help you live a good life. And if you are in any kind of challenging situation, you’re going to have a better outcome if you hold the belief that you have choices and you have the power to make choices and to take action. So I think it’s very, very important to take an attitude that you do have a certain amount of free will. You’re going to have a much better life. You’re going to have more options come to you as you’re analyzing a situation. Your mind will be able to see the world in a more open way, in a more positive way. You’ll be able to make much better choices because you have more options, and it will result in a better life.
Don: Yeah, well put. And from my understanding, that basic idea is where the compatibilists — people like Daniel Dennett — come from. Even if maybe there’s some sort of deterministic thing going on at the atomic level, free will is still a very useful way of looking at the world. It is definitely a long and winding road whenever you go down that rabbit hole.
Martin: The reasoning of the hard determinists actually cannot be upheld — it’s against empiricism. Because you would need many more atoms than there are in the universe to build that computer. That means you cannot build the computer. That claim of hard determinism can neither be verified nor be refuted. So it’s just a belief thing.
Cassius: Oh, that’s a very good way of putting it. Very interesting.
Joshua: What I was going to say, particularly about Sam Harris — because I used to listen to his podcast — is that some of the conclusions that these academics and intellectuals draw from their idea of determinism sound quite attractive. One of them is the idea that if no one has any choice in what they do, then shouldn’t we be more understanding and compassionate of people who fall on the wrong side of the law? Everything should be focused toward rehabilitation rather than just punishment. And that sounds quite good. But the paradox immediately is: how do we choose to be more compassionate if we don’t have a choice in the matter? So it’s a thorny question, but I think part of the reason some of this stuff is appealing to people is because of issues like that one.
Don: Interestingly enough, I was reading about that too. They said: not only is it that you can’t assign blame to anybody for the actions they’ve done, but conversely you also can’t praise anybody for what they’ve done, because they were determined to do that anyway. So if somebody runs into a burning building and saves children, it’s like, “Oh, that’s great — but you would have done that anyway.” So praise and blame are sort of taken out of the equation.
Martin: Again on the legal system — that means it would be perfectly okay not to do any punishment, but still to throw people in jail for life, just to protect the others who are not likely to commit serious crimes. So the reasoning becomes: no punishment at all, but rather protection of the majority.
Don: Good point. And that all sort of, at least in my mind, comes back to the whole idea of Epicurean justice — with the “to neither harm nor be harmed.” So if you’re harming people, and if you’re hard-determined — well, we can’t really blame you for that, but we’ve got to put you away to protect the other people in society.
Joshua: There was a film a number of years ago — I think I was in high school at the time — starring Tom Cruise called Minority Report, and this was like a sci-fi dystopian future in which everything was predetermined and they could predict who was going to commit a crime, and they would arrest and punish them prematurely — putting them in some sort of suspended animation or just taking them out of society.
Don: Yeah, it really is — the whole free will thing is a really interesting debate. One of the experiments they keep bringing up in the free will debate is that they’ve done experiments where your brain actually fires to provoke an action before you’re conscious of it. And I’m like, well, that’s interesting. But it’s still your own biology that’s initiating that action. At what point in the continuum does making a choice actually come in? I’m not entirely convinced that it completely negates the idea of a general idea of free will.
Martin: It looks to me that this kind of experiment is simply over-interpreted. In certain situations where people expect that a certain choice or reaction is about to happen, the reaction can already be initiated by the brain stem automatically, before we consciously decide. But in most of our actions — non-trivial actions — we ponder before acting. We spend a long time consciously thinking about this. So this experiment does not apply to those cases.
Don: That’s a very good point, because what they’re basically doing is: if a letter comes up on the screen, hit this button; if a number comes up, hit that button — and then they see that the neurons are firing before the action is consciously taken. But as you say, Martin, those aren’t necessarily the kinds of decisions where the free will argument lives. Whether you’re going to hit a button before a letter or a number shows up on the screen doesn’t necessarily equate to making decisions about which career to take or which steps to take in a given situation. The over-interpretation you mentioned is a really good point to keep in mind.
Cassius: We’ve covered a lot of fascinating material in the last few minutes, and we’re probably going to be coming to the end of the episode before long. Let me throw in this point, perhaps targeted mostly back at what Callistheni said but relevant to what several others said as well. Going back to the David Sedley article — “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism” — Sedley is talking about how Epicurus was responding to this idea that if you believe in atomism, you’re going to believe in a billiard-ball form of hard determinism. I want to read this because I think it’s particularly well-worded. Sedley says: “Epicurus’s response to this is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of his thought. It was to reject reductionist atomism. Almost uniquely among Greek philosophers, he arrived at what is nowadays the unreflective assumption of almost anyone with a smattering of science, that there are truths at the microscopic level of elementary particles and further very different truths at the phenomenal level, that the former must be capable of explaining the latter, but that neither level of description has a monopoly of truth. The truth that sugar is sweet is not straightforwardly reducible to the truth that it has such and such a molecular structure, even though the latter truth may be required in order to explain the former. By establishing that cognitive skepticism — the direct outcome of reductionist atomism — is self-refuting and untenable in practice, Epicurus justifies his non-reductionist alternative, according to which sensations are true, and therefore are bona fide truths at the phenomenal level accessible through them.” The issue is that at neither level — neither the microscopic nor the phenomenal level — neither one has a monopoly on truth. They are both true. One helps us explain the other, but there is not a war between the level at which we live and the level of our understanding of atomic movement.
Joshua: And it always goes back to that Democritus thing: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, in reality atoms and void.” Both things can be true — it’s not an either-or.
Don: I had taken some notes last night on Sedley’s article. The line I put in my notes was: “According to Sedley, in Epicurus’s view, matter in certain complex states can take on non-physical properties, which in turn bring genuinely new behavioral laws into operation.” He’s basically saying that Epicurus had the idea of emergent properties of matter.
Cassius: I’m so glad you brought that up, Don. Sedley discusses the fact that a rock versus a leaf — if you throw a rock into a pond it will sink; if you throw a leaf into a pond it will float on the surface. That is an example of the emergent body controlling the reality of the atoms that are the components within it. In other words, the atoms within the rock are going to sink; the atoms within the leaf are going to float. They are being affected by the emergent aspect in the way they have combined. And if you think about it like that, it’s obvious that at this emergent level of humanity at which we’re living, we are affecting the atoms that are within us — they are in a particular place, in a particular time, in a particular configuration, because we act in a way that brings that about. There’s something in the New Testament where Paul is complaining about those people who think that we are “slaves to the weak and beggarly elements” — that we are just totally at the mercy of what the elements would tell us to do, as if they’re gods constantly giving us commands. Well, the point that Don has just brought up is that we too, at our level of being an emergent property of the atoms, are influencing the atoms. It’s not just totally a one-way street.
Cassius: Maybe this is the point we should close on today. DeWitt at the bottom of page 175 is talking about: “For the sake of a closer analysis it’s worthwhile to observe at this point that Epicurus, having put the mythologists and the physicists in a single class as teachers of fatalism, wishes to see the new order of his own system as governed by the laws of nature (foedera naturae) as opposed to the laws of fate (foedera fati), and consequently the new freedom he was offering to mankind had been wrestled from the fates. In an infinite universe dominated by these physical laws, man is miraculously exempt.” The point of all that being that there’s an attitude of “the laws of fate have us in an iron grip from which we cannot escape” — but if we see that there are not really “laws of fate” but rather “laws of nature” that we can work within and even have influence over, we see that there is freedom within which we can work to have a happier life.
Joshua: And one of the things I loved about that Sedley article is that we get more words of Epicurus himself, because Sedley has done the hard work of looking at the Herculaneum papyri. We so rarely get to talk about Epicurus’s words other than the letters to Herodotus and Pythocles and Menoikeus. Sedley quotes Epicurus talking about people and their behavior. He says: “For the nature of their atoms has contributed nothing to some of their behavior and degrees of behavior and attitudes. But it is their developments which themselves possess all or most of the responsibility for certain things. It is as a result of that nature that some of their atoms move with disordered motions. But it is not on the atoms that all the responsibility should be placed for their behavior.” And that’s another passage talking about the whole idea of emergent properties coming from the configuration of your atoms.
Cassius: Boy, we are ending on a very deep but extremely productive area. And we have yet to even address Sedley’s arguments about how the determinism and skepticism arguments are self-refuting — really fascinating material, fairly technical, going to take some explanation. In the interest of time, let’s go around and take closing comments. Martin, closing comments for today?
Martin: We will continue at the bottom of page 175, so let’s resume there next week. Okay.
Cassius: All right. Who’s next? Callistheni?
Callistheni: Oh yeah, this has been an interesting podcast. I enjoyed it. And also Don’s comment about the word regarding avoidance — and the interpretation of saying “flee” rather than “avoid” — that was kind of interesting. I was hoping, Don, that you could post on that on the forum a bit. Maybe it’s already there, but I’d be curious to read more about that.
Don: I can definitely add it to the show notes.
Callistheni: Great, thanks.
Joshua: I have a quote that I was going to read from Steven Greenblatt’s The Swerve. This comes from Chapter 10 of that book. He’s been describing a book by Giordano Bruno in which Bruno is taking to task this idea that everything is ordained by God. This is his conclusion. He says: “Once you take seriously the claim that God’s providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit — from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions occurring in the heavens above — the whole thing does not work that way. There is no artifice or God standing outside the universe barking commands, meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. We have, in other words, entered the Lucretian universe.” That is the end of a passage in which Greenblatt is quoting Giordano Bruno — in Ingrid De Rooldin’s translation — from a book called On the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. It’s a very long passage from Bruno in which he’s describing how Mercury, at the behest of Jove, has to account for how many dung beetles are in the yard, and how many teeth fall out of this old lady’s mouth, and how many hairs fall off a young lady’s head when she is using the curling iron — and it goes on and on. The point of the passage is: there’s too much to be done, and it’s not done by any outside force or any God working all this out. It’s built into the nature of reality. It’s a great chapter from a book I really, really like.
Cassius: Didn’t Lucian write something about Zeus being overwhelmed by the number of prayers people were asking, and it was just — he couldn’t keep up with everything? There was a whole thing similar to that — just too much to do for any one God to be in charge of it all.
Cassius: That’s great. I need to go back and read The Swerve at some point — so many books, so little time. And now it’s your turn, Don — closing comments?
Don: Thank you again for having me back. This is a very intellectually stimulating conversation and has inspired me to go back and read some more things and sort of get a better grasp on this, and really know what I believe myself. This is a good impetus for that. This was very, very interesting, and I look forward to seeing the comments on the forum.
Cassius: And I’ll close by saying how much I appreciate everybody’s participation today. This is a fascinating subject, and as you get into it and discuss it at this kind of a level, you can see how important it is to us and how important it was to Epicurus. Although we don’t really discuss it that much in our day-to-day discussions of Epicurus, it’s really a critical issue to bring out, and it’s something I hope that we’re able to communicate through the podcast and bring perhaps a different perspective that people haven’t thought about in a long time in their studies of Epicurus. I think that’s largely what we’re doing in our work at the podcast and the EpicureanFriends group — to stimulate the study of Epicurus at a deeper level than most people generally are thinking about it, because there’s so much there to bring out that doesn’t deserve to be buried in the obscurity that it’s been for so long. So we invite everyone to come by the forum and discuss this and any of our other topics, and let us know your comments, questions, and suggestions for future episodes. With that, we’ll come back next week. Thanks everybody, and see you then.