Episode 169 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 22 - Chapter 10 - The New Freedom 02
Date: 04/12/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2994-episode-169-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-22-chapter-10-the-new-freedom-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 169 continues Chapter 10, “The New Freedom,” moving through the subsections on “Necessity and Fortune,” “Freedom and Fortune,” and “Freedom and the Gods.” Martin opens by objecting to DeWitt’s language that man is “miraculously exempt” from the laws of nature — the laws of nature do apply to us — and Cassius defends DeWitt as using a poetic mode: not fully exempt, but able to add our own influence to outcomes. Don brings in two outside readings: Jeffrey Purinton’s paper “Epicurus on ‘Free Volition’ and the Atomic Swerve” (Epicurus analogizes between macroscopic free will and the atomic swerve, which Purinton argues occurs frequently rather than rarely) and a chapter from the Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism on voluntary action from On Nature, Book 25, which shows Epicurus positing that our foundational atomic structure sets a starting point but our ability to train our minds and change what we pay attention to over time is the basis for genuine moral responsibility. Joshua adds the Lucretius racehorse example: between the crack of the whip and the horse’s forward motion there is a brief pause — the moment of the horse’s own volition. Joshua then makes a Thomas More digression: Amerigo Vespucci described Native Americans as living in an “Epicurean” mode of life, which inspired More’s Utopia, where More notably writes that anyone who believes “the world was the mere sport of chance, without a wise overruling providence” is “scarce fit to be counted men” — but as the discussion shows, Epicurus explicitly rejected the universe as “mere sport of chance” just as much as fate. The “Necessity and Fortune” section establishes that eliminating determinism in favor of pure chance does not solve anything: Joshua’s hurricane example makes the point that blind chance (like fate) causes passivity, while recognizing lawful natural causes motivates practical preparation. Cassius notes that DeWitt describes Epicurus’s attitude toward fortune as “defiance.” Principal Doctrine 16 is read: “chance steals only a bit into the life of a wise person… the greatest and most important matters have been, are, and will be directed by the power of reason.” The Greek word for chance is identified as tychē (the name of the goddess of fortune but also the ordinary word). Cassius reads Metrodorus’s Vatican Saying: “Fortune, I have forestalled all thee and barricaded thine every entrance.” Joshua brings in Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod — Franklin ironically invokes God’s goodness in finally giving mankind the means to stop lightning strikes, but of course it is Franklin himself figuring out the predictable natural laws involved. Don reads his translation of Letter to Menoikeus section 131 on simple living and facing the vicissitudes of fortune, followed by the key passage on necessity, chance, and par’ hemas, with the conclusion that “it is better to be unfortunate rationally than fortunate irrationally.” Joshua tells the story of Lord Timothy Dexter, the eccentric colonial merchant who stumbled into fortunes by what looked like chance. Cassius reads Usener fragment 489 from Porphyry and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: “wisdom and knowledge have nothing in common with fortune.” Don tells the Chinese farmer story (“We shall see”) illustrating that fortune’s swings should not be the basis of happiness. The brazen bull of Phalaris passage follows: DeWitt notes that Cicero and Seneca ridiculed Epicurus’s claim that the wise man is happy even on the rack, but DeWitt corrects them — “Cicero chose to ignore the difference between pleasant and happy; the martyr at the stake may still claim to be a happy man but he cannot claim to be experiencing pleasure.” Don clarifies that the word is eudaimonia — a sense of fulfillment — not giddy happiness. Joshua reads Shakespeare’s Richard II on how thinking about relief makes pain worse. The brazen bull itself is described (hollow bronze sculpture, fire underneath, mouth engineered to convert screams into grunts; the craftsman who built it was the first victim). The section on “Freedom and the Gods” covers Epicurus’s equal concern for the freedom of the gods from servitude to man and the freedom of man from servitude to the gods, and DeWitt’s observation that “a difficulty inherent in theocentric structures of thought” is the problem of reconciling an all-good God with genuine human freedom and the existence of evil. Joshua recounts Giordano Bruno’s execution at the Campo de’ Fiori — seven years’ imprisonment by Cardinal Bellarmine, refusal to recant, two nails through his lips in a cross before burning alive, and the statue of Bruno now glowering toward the Vatican — and the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which the Pope commemorated with a medal, prompting Cassius to quote tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. The episode closes with Vatican Saying 31 from Metrodorus (“all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls”) and DeWitt’s conclusion that this invests the present with urgent practical importance — the past is unalterable, the future undependable, the present alone within our power. Cassius shares a newly discovered phrase: “worth the candle” — if you’re going to spend your limited time on something, it ought to be worth doing.
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 169. This week we are continuing our discussion of Chapter 10 of DeWitt’s book, entitled “The New Freedom.” We are currently in the middle of the subsection entitled “Freedom and Necessity,” and we are about to go to a subsection entitled “Necessity and Fortune.” Before we go into today’s discussion, let me say this: certainly over the last week, as we have discussed on the forum and looked further into all the different arguments involving determinism, it is such a deep and complicated subject that virtually nobody agrees with anybody else on it — we can’t really hope to cover in this podcast everything that’s out there on every argument, there’s no doubt about that. One thing we can do is be clear that where Epicurus stood on the subject is that he did believe that humans have a certain amount of agency and the ability to influence their future, and he considered that to be an important part of his philosophy. Having said that, there are many aspects of it that DeWitt has covered in separate sections here, and as we continue, we’ll just go back into his sequence and try to make sure that we hit the major points he is bringing up. That continues to be in my mind one of the real benefits of DeWitt’s book — that even where you disagree with some of his details, he does provide a sweeping overview of the entire subject so that if you follow his organization, you’re going to get a much wider and broader overview of the philosophy than if you would just focus on ethics or physics or epistemology separately. So having said that, before we just go back into continuing on page 175 and the section on “Freedom and Necessity,” I thought I’d throw it open to see if anybody had come up with anything from last week they wanted to talk about further.
Martin: Yes. So if you look on page 175, the last paragraph — the first sentence is all fine. And then really, DeWitt uses formulations which I think are outright wrong. So: “in an infinite universe dominated by these physical laws, man is miraculously exempt.” Already, using the word “miraculously” is wrong. The next sentence is okay. But then: “the laws of nature are in the main restricted to the world of inorganic things.” So try to make the volition that you hop off the cliff and fly — you will hit the ground very hard and fatally. So that means the laws of nature do apply to us, to us organic beings.
Cassius: Martin, my response to that would be that you’re reading it exactly as written. I would say DeWitt is being in his poetic mode. Anybody reading Epicurus knows that there are no miracles in Epicurus, and so “miraculously,” like you say, is the wrong word. As well as “exempt” — you are taking a literal reading of the word “exempt,” and we certainly are not exempt in full from all of the laws of nature. If you do attempt to jump off the wall of the canyon, you are going to fall. What I would say DeWitt was attempting to do there poetically is to say that we are not exempt, but we are able in certain instances to add our own influence to the result. We can choose whether to walk to the left or the right, or choose whether to jump off the cliff or not. And so the basic point of all we’re discussing here is that we are not totally bound by the laws of determinism, but certainly we are not fully exempt from them either.
Don: I would just give that and follow up to what you’re saying, because you’re right — we’re not exempt, and the laws of nature do apply to us. One of the laws of nature seems to be, though, that we have some free will. And that does seem to be the point. I was reading a paper by Jeffrey Purinton, and the title is “Epicurus on Free Volition and the Atomic Swerve.” His point was that Epicurus was a materialist — there was no supernatural mechanism, the gods were not controlling our fates, all that kind of stuff. His position was that Epicurus would have looked to the Swerve and made an analogy between the things that we see at the macroscopic level and the things that happen at the atomic level. We fall down because of our weight; the atoms fall because of their weight. And we obviously have free volition, and there has to be some sort of atomic analogy to that. So he’s saying that Epicurus came up with the Swerve to give the quote-unquote randomness of our actions — because sometimes we’re not sure what we’re going to do and we end up making a decision — and he was trying to say that somehow the Swerve, which he posits is not an uncommon occurrence but is happening all the time, is that sort of analogy: there is still an atomic cause for our actions, but it’s not something you can predict. We’re not bound to any particular one path. That seems to be his position. I found that kind of interesting just from a purely materialistic viewpoint. But I was also reading from the Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism — the 800-some pages of it — and there’s a chapter in there on voluntary action and responsibility, which has a bunch of sections from On Nature, Book 25, which is evidently the book where Epicurus was talking about the whole idea of moral responsibility. And I know we’ve talked a little bit about the idea of downward causation and emergent properties. The sections from Book 25 that I was able to read before we went online today suggest that Epicurus wanted to posit the idea that our original atoms that come together to form our mind are the original foundation we have to work with — but we can change what we pay attention to, we can change our ideas and beliefs as we develop. So there’s this idea of a foundational structure to our mind, but then as we develop and get new information, we decide what we’re going to pay attention to. They draw the analogy: if you see a piece of cake and you have trained your mind — if you’re on a diet or whatever — to a course of action where you don’t eat the cake, then that’s one direction you can take. But if you have not trained your mind and decided you’re going to stick to your diet, you’re just going to eat the cake right away without even thinking about it. So it’s that idea of the development of your responsibility getting to a point where you are actually responsible for your actions, even though there is a basic underlying atomic structure. You have the ability to make those changes. That’s a little rambling, I realize, but I’ll throw that out there for some discussion.
Joshua: Yeah, now there’s one more point to be made here on this question of whether the laws of nature are in the main restricted to the world of inorganic things. Lucretius, on this question of determinism, uses the example of the racehorse. When you see racehorses and the starting gate opens and the whip cracks, there’s a brief moment between when those things happen and between when the horse moves forward — and that’s the moment where nothing seems to be going on — that is the moment where the will or the volition of the horse takes over. In other words, it’s not the crack of the whip, it’s not the physical striking of the whip against the horse’s body that pushes the horse forward — it’s the volition of the horse to engage its own muscles and push forward of its own free will.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a good point. Let me add another caveat for just a second. Speaking for myself, I have not been preparing for the last four weeks — or four years — all of my thoughts on determinism, summarizing them here in this episode. So I reserve for myself the ability to revise and extend and correct or totally change my comments even as the episode goes forward. It seems like when I read an article, I come up with an impression every time. I think that’s another caveat. I would presume, unless Don or Joshua or Callistheni or Martin would like to say differently, that we’re all still in the process of studying and thinking about these issues, and so people listening to the episode should not presume that any particular statement is the final one.
Don: That’s a good way to put it. And I think the fact that there is such an abundance of opinion even in academia and the various Epicurean philosopher scholarship out there means that we certainly don’t have to come up with any sort of fundamental truth in this particular episode. I would put a plug in for the forum — this will be a good topic for the forum, starting a thread on determinism and the Swerve and everything. That’s one of the great uses of the EpicureanFriends.com forum.
Cassius: Okay, why don’t we go back into where DeWitt is and just use that as a prompt as we go forward. I will say in response to what Don said earlier — we do already have threads for Episodes 168 and this one 169. Don especially has found some really good articles already, one from Scientific American that I thought was particularly good about whether quantum mechanics rules out free will. We’ll put the ones that come to our attention as of greatest use on those threads. And I do take some comfort in the various opinions that are out there — OK, nobody has this really figured out yet, so it doesn’t make me feel too bad.
Joshua: I have a brief detour here. This is going to take a minute. In the age of exploration, this Italian cartographer and explorer named Amerigo Vespucci traveled to the New World, and in his journal of his adventures he records that he encountered Native Americans and says that their mode of life is what he would describe as “Epicurean.” And of course, Thomas More back in England reads this travelogue and decides to use this as a concept for a book, which he calls Utopia — “no place,” nowhere is this ever going to happen in his view. But one of the things he articulates in his Utopia is a level of religious freedom which they didn’t have in Europe or in England of More’s time. And what he writes in Utopia is this: “He, Utopus, the king of Utopia, therefore left men holy to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause, only he made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that their souls died with their bodies, or that the world was the mere sport of chance, without a wise overruling providence. For they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life. And they now look on those that think otherwise, as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than the beasts. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth, since a man of such principles must needs, as often as he dares do it, despise all the laws and customs. For there is no doubt to be made, that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.” This idea that the universe is “the mere sport of chance” and that souls die with the body is More sort of criticizing what he thinks of as being Epicurean positions, I think. And what we’re going to talk about today is whether that’s actually what Epicurus thought — that the universe was the mere sport of chance.
Cassius: I do find it interesting. I think that is a great thing to bring up, Joshua, because that is one of the things that you often hear arguments against atheism or agnosticism: “there’d be no morals,” “that sort of thing.” That’s certainly understandable as a viewpoint because it’s still current today. But it does bear repeating that evidently Epicurus didn’t totally dismiss chance as a force in our lives, but it wasn’t the only one. So it’s important to keep that sort of perspective in mind: there are things that happen by necessity, things that happen by chance, and then things that are up to us. And chance and necessity, I think, are the ones where we are subject to the laws of nature — in addition to inorganic things.
Don: Right, and getting rid of determinism and just putting chance in its place doesn’t, in Epicurus’s view, really solve the problem.
Cassius: Right. And the problem being how to deal with chance when it does impact us in undesirable ways. For example, at the beginning of the third paragraph, he uses the example that we as individuals have no control over whether our city is attacked by an approaching army or not — there are certain things like that that are just out of our control. And so DeWitt is talking here in terms of necessity and fortune that for all such exigencies, according to Epicurus, the wise man will keep himself prepared through addiction to the simple life and the cultivation of self-sufficiency. And he says “the wise man, when confronted by lack of necessities, stands by to share with others rather than have them share with him, so great a reserve of self-sufficiency he discovers.” So maybe in this section, DeWitt is talking about the issue of what do you do in response to the fact that some things are out of our control. And it seems to be a theme that Epicurus isn’t going to simply stand by and say, “Okay, some things are in our control, some things are not.” He’s going to say, “Well, what do we do about this analysis? Do we just simply stand by and do nothing, or do we attempt to minimize the possibility of particular accidents or particular events coming our way and causing us trouble?” For example, there’s no way to deal with the fact that we’re all going to die, but we can prepare ourselves for it. His example about the simple life and cultivation of self-sufficiency is one of those ethical, practical conclusions that seems to flow from his observations about the way nature is set up. You’re not going to just do nothing and just take every blow as it comes — to the extent you can, you should prepare yourself to take the blows of things that are outside of your control, which you can do by accustoming yourself to a simple lifestyle, not indulging in luxuries that can easily be taken away from you. People will sometimes talk about self-sufficiency almost as if they’re encouraging you to be aloof and detached. But the point is that if you organize your life properly, you can minimize the possibility of terrible things happening to you.
Don: Yeah, I’m glad you brought both of those up. I think the simple living there is one of those things where people will take it to be “oh, you know, I should live like an ascetic and not have anything” — that kind of simple living. So I think it’s always important to drive the point home that it’s not simple living in that sense. It’s to be satisfied with what you have and then to take the extravagances as they come or as they become available to you, and to enjoy them. And the self-sufficiency — I remember we had a discussion on the forum about the different connotations of that word in Greek, that it’s both from a financial standpoint that you should be self-sufficient as much as you can, and also to have a more internal self-sufficiency in yourself, that you have control over your demeanor and that sort of thing.
Cassius: Yeah, Don — to try to drive home the point and say it better than I said it the first time — the point is not to be living simply for the sake of living simply. There’s a method behind the madness. You’re attempting to organize your life so as to live as pleasurably as you can, knowing that some things are out of your control. You don’t have the ability to assure yourself that you’re going to have a banquet in front of you every time you sit down to a meal. Things can and do happen to you that you should be prepared for. And being self-sufficient in general is going to certainly smooth out some of the worst pains that can come your way when bad things happen, while still allowing you to enjoy those pleasures that are available to you.
Don: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, well put.
Cassius: You know, it’s in this section that DeWitt includes one of the sayings that we just need to be sure we’ve covered when we’re talking about determinism in general. On page 177 he talks about — I think it’s one of the Vatican Sayings — “the man who declares that everything happens of necessity can have no fault to find with the man who denies that anything happens of necessity, for he is saying that this very denial is made of necessity.”
Don: Vatican Saying 40 — I just pulled it up.
Cassius: Yep. So you’ve got it in the Vatican Sayings, you’ve got it in the letter to Menoikeus, you’ve got it in Lucretius, you’ve got it all over Epicurean texts. This issue is of practical importance to people. As Callistheni mentioned last week, people who get too far into the rabbit hole of determinism can end up demoralizing themselves into a sort of passivity that can be very damaging to their happiness. This is sort of an echo of what’s argued in the Sedley article that we mentioned last week as well — the sort of self-refutation argument. The man who argues that necessity is controlling everything is really being illogical by even arguing the point, because why are you even trying to change something if everything happens of necessity? This is an argument that points out the illogic of the foundation of the person who’s arguing for total necessity. But it doesn’t give you a technical explanation of whether necessity exists or not. DeWitt even refers to it here: “dialectic is a game and it has to be kept in that perspective.”
Cassius: I was going to say — just before we get off this issue of the simple life and related issues — there’s a story about Diogenes the Cynic, and of course he was like the prophet in the ancient world of absolute simplicity, taken to a maximal extreme. He was supposedly bathing one day in the public baths, and some of the people he was arguing with took his clothes — this seems to be the oldest prank in human history, stealing people’s clothes while they’re bathing — and they replaced them with the finest clothes which money could buy. And when he got out of the bath and saw this, he refused to wear them. He demanded his old rough cloak back. And obviously the point of the story is: if you make a religion out of simplicity to the point where you won’t even wear fine clothes if they’re available to you at no charge and for no expense or problem — you don’t have to go through anything to get them, they’re just there — then you’ve completely missed the point. And I think Epicurus would be more than happy to take the fine robes if they were there and available to him. It’s not like he’s making a fetish out of wearing terrible clothes. It becomes a sort of virtue signaling.
Joshua: Yeah, and whenever you mention the word virtue, it always goes back to that question of what is it you’re trying to accomplish, what’s the benefit of virtue. “Is virtue its own reward?” — that’s a phrase I remember from elementary school, that seems to be such a recurring question. The idea that looking for a reward is demeaning and causes you trouble — that you should not look for a reward, you should simply be content with virtue and being good, as if that’s an explanation or goal of itself.
Don: Oh yeah, there’s another rabbit hole with the virtue — where do they come from, where do you know… all that kind of stuff.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. Okay, there, Don — you’ve given me a link to the next section. In scanning over this next section, “Freedom and Fortune,” it appears that where does it come from — this seems to be pointing out that we talk about fortune as if it’s a synonym for the word “chance.” But as DeWitt is pointing out here too, among the Greeks and the Romans, Fortune was a deified abstraction that was very popular. “Luck be a lady” — that’s the song.
Joshua: “Luck be a lady” — Frank Sinatra, I guess.
Cassius: But there are many other cultural references to fortune as if there is some force of fortune out there, almost as — as DeWitt says — a “deified abstraction.” That seems to be something that was of significant interest to Epicurus, that we should not consider that there’s a force of fortune that’s going to cause us trouble or not cause us trouble. And there’s all sorts of clichés about luck and how to get lucky. I remember a phrase: “I’d rather be lucky than smart” — as if there is some force that endows you with beneficial results in your life, as opposed to the dark cloud that hangs over some people. Luck and fortune as forces — which of course is something that Epicurus is rejecting.
Cassius: It just literally hit me: so the headings and the paragraphs are “Necessity and Fortune” and then “Freedom and Fortune.” So we have two. We looked at the necessity ones, and now we’re moving on to what it means to be free and yet have fortune.
Don: Yes — meaning that certain things are made necessary by the universe as if there’s some force that makes it necessary, and then certain things are caused by the universe to be random as if there’s a force of necessity and a force of randomness. And this “force” perspective seems to be a problem.
Martin: And Cassius, I would argue that even emphasizing this idea of the force of randomness is going too far. If you believe that everything in nature happens at the roll of a dice, it completely removes any ability that humans could or would have to predict what happens in nature. And he uses a little bit above where we’re reading now the example of the hurricane. There are two potholes you can fall into here: if you think that a hurricane happens because of necessity or fate or because of the will of the gods, you’re going to immediately fall on your knees and start praying, because you think you’ve done something horribly wrong. But if you think that it happens because of blind chance, then you’re never going to look for the underlying causes, and you’re never going to ask yourself, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have built my house here — maybe if I go just a little bit more inland or uphill I wouldn’t be underwater right now.” So the idea that the universe has some aspects of it that are not fated but that are predictable, and that we can rely on to produce certain results consistently, is another reason why we try to avoid the pitfall of fortune or blind chance, because not everything works that way.
Joshua: And contrasting those two things there, Cassius — I see in the last sentence of DeWitt’s first paragraph here, he’s saying that the attitude recommended towards fortune by Epicurus was “defiance.” And I don’t see an equivalent sentence at the beginning of his discussion of necessity. But I don’t think that Epicurus would recommend defiance to necessity, if it truly is necessity. Like death, for example — you don’t necessarily defy death, you postpone it to the extent that you can, you understand it, you make sure that you don’t let it get you down too much. But you don’t necessarily defy death. But in terms of an allegation that there’s a fortune out there — a force that is rolling the dice for you — you would actually defy that attitude, because that’s just simply not the case. There’s no goddess of fortune deciding whether there’s going to be a war next week or not.
Cassius: And I happen to have the page open to the thread from last week, and I see one of the YouTube videos that Don posted is titled “Does Free Will Violate the Laws of Physics?” The background picture is a bunch of dice. Dice is probably an interesting symbol to think about when we’re discussing this issue, because even when we talk about whether everything is necessary or not, we’re not postulating that there is a goddess of fortune throwing dice. We’re not in a casino where the table is being set — there’s not dice being thrown on the table constantly. You’re not pulling the arms of the one-armed bandit and having allegedly random results calculated for you.
Callistheni: Principal Doctrine 16 — I have the Saint-Andre translation, which says: “Chance steals only a bit into the life of a wise person, for throughout the complete span of his life the greatest and most important matters have been, are, and will be directed by the power of reason.”
Cassius: So which is — we always think of that as the idea of chance, of course. This is one of the most important doctrines. This probably should have been the one we highlighted as much as anything else, because this again is where the practical result comes in. That even if you acknowledge that there are certain things in life that are pure chance, you’re not going to just accept it and blindly go walking down the road as if paying no attention to this fact. If there’s a possibility of some kind of accidental intrusion into your life, you are going to take steps through reason to attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. If there’s any firm takeaway from the whole discussion, it’s that everything does not happen to you by necessity, and it’s not necessary that some tornado bear down on you and kill you in every instance. You have the ability to get into the basement or to avoid the tornado in many instances, just through location.
Don: And it is tychē — T-Y-K-E — that is the word for chance there, which tells you what — that is the name of the goddess of Fortune, but it’s also the word that would have been used just for chance or fortune. So it’s tychē, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
Cassius: Yes. And Callistheni — in addition to the one you mentioned, there is the Vatican Saying from Metrodorus where he says, quote: “Fortune, I have forestalled all thee and barricaded thine every entrance, and neither to thee nor to any other surprise of life will we give ourselves in surrender.” A very strongly worded statement of the same thing as the Principal Doctrine you just read — that you are going to take action, to the extent that you can, to minimize the harm that can be done to you by accidental injuries.
Joshua: And Benjamin Franklin — with a touch of irony, he says this. He says: “It has pleased God, in his goodness to mankind, at length to discover to them the means of securing their habitations and other buildings from mischief by thunder and lightning.” He’s describing his invention of the lightning rod. And in a touch of irony, as I said, invoking “it has pleased God” — but of course it is Benjamin Franklin himself figuring this problem out, how to forestall the apparently random strikes of lightning that burn down this building but not the building next to it. We can solve this problem because we can predict how it works and how we might forestall it.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s also — I’m not sure whether did we bring up the section in the letter to Menoikeus where he talks about facing the vicissitudes of fortune? I don’t think we did. Don, let’s talk about that because you know it better than I do. Is this the part where the future is not entirely within your control and not entirely outside of your control?
Don: There is that one, but there’s also in section 131 — I’ll completely toot my own horn and read my translation: “A simple meal of hearty wholesome bread and spring water delivers the most extreme pleasure, whenever food and drink have been brought to bear against hunger and thirst. And when extravagant experiences do come up every once in a while, they are experienced more intensely by us and we are better able to fearlessly face the vicissitudes of fortune.” So that sort of gives you an idea that goes back to that whole simple living: when you add that passage together with the long passage on determinism, and with the passage about your future not being entirely in or outside of your control, you could almost assemble an argument that this issue of free will and taking charge of your life is one of the central themes of the letter. Certainly happiness is possibly the number one theme of the letter. But maybe the unifying practical result of everything he’s saying is to take this information and take charge of your life, to do the best you can to work towards that happy result that is the goal.
Cassius: Exactly. And the section you were talking about — about things happening by chance?
Don: Yes, because of this — even though some things happen by necessity, some things by chance, and some by our own powers — for although necessity is beyond our control, they see that chance is unstable, and there is no other master beyond themselves. So that praise and its opposite are inseparably connected to themselves. And it continues on — I’ll go ahead — “because of this, it is better to follow the stories of the gods than to be enslaved by the deterministic decrees of the old natural philosophers, because necessity is not moved by prayer, and such a one accepts that fortune is not a god as the hoi polloi understand, for a god does nothing in a disorderly or haphazardly manner, and it is not the uncertain cause of everything. For one cannot think it can grant good or evil for a person’s blessed life. However, it does furnish for oneself the starting point of great goods and great evils. Believing that it is better to be unfortunate rationally than fortunate irrationally, because it is better to have been deciding the noble way and accomplishing one’s actions and to have been foiled than having decided the bad way and to succeed by means of chance.”
Cassius: My take on that is that he’s saying that it’s better to plan for things and not have them work out than to just blithely go throughout your life and say, “Que será, será, whatever will be, will be.”
Joshua: There was a wealthy merchant in pre-revolutionary America, in the American colonies, named Lord Timothy Dexter. He was renowned as a kind of buffoon, but he wrote an autobiography in which he describes how he made his wealth, basically. It’s stuff like: he took a bunch of gloves and warm coats to the Caribbean and tried to sell them, and you think, well, what kind of moron would take winter clothes to the Caribbean to make money? Well, of course, there happens to be a Russian trading vessel that comes through and they’re heading to Siberia, and there’s nothing on earth they need more than warm clothes. It’s silly stuff like that that’s how he makes his fortune over time. He was roundly considered to have been a great fool but a very, very rich fool.
Cassius: That sounds not altogether different than — I’m looking at page 178 and the last full paragraph of 178, and DeWitt quotes a saying that is not familiar to me. He’s got footnote 22. He says, quote: “Nature teaches us to appraise as of minor value the gifts of fortune, and to recognize that when fortunate we are unfortunate, and when faring ill not to set great store by faring well, and to accept without emotion the blessings of fortune and to remain on guard against the seeming evils from her hand; for everything that to the multitude seems good or bad is but ephemeral, and under no circumstances does wisdom enter into partnership with fortune.” That’s Usener 489. I have 489. I’m using the Attalus site, and the version quoted here says: “Nature also teaches us to regard the outcomes of fortune of little account, and to know how to face misfortune when we are favored by fortune, but not to consider the favors of fortune important when we experience misfortune. And nature teaches us to accept unperturbed the good outcomes of fortune while standing prepared in the face of the seeming evils which come from fate. For all that the masses regard as good is a fleeting fancy, but wisdom and knowledge have nothing in common with fortune.” I’m assuming it’s ascribed to Epicurus — that whole text from Porphyry seems to be considered to be Epicurean in nature. And then Cicero’s quote from the Tusculan Disputations, Book 2, is: “Shall we allow this man to be forgetful of himself and be disdainful of fortune at the moment when all that he holds good and evil is at fortune’s disposal?”
Don: Has anyone heard the story about the Chinese farmer who lost his horse? Because I’m going to tell that one. So there was this farmer, and one day his horse ran away. His neighbor came over and said, “Oh, I’m really sorry, I’m terribly sorry that happened — this would have been a huge source of your wealth.” And the farmer said, “We shall see.” And the next day, the horse comes back and brings a whole herd of wild horses with it. Immediately the farmer becomes wealthy overnight, and his neighbor comes over and congratulates him, and the farmer says, “We shall see.” And then the next day, while the farmer’s son is out trying to break one of the wild horses, he falls and breaks his leg. And the neighbor comes over and says, “Wow, I’m terribly sorry that this happened to you.” And the farmer says, “We shall see.” And the next day, the representative of the emperor of China comes around pulling volunteers to go to the army, and the farmer’s son, because he has broken his leg, is exempt from having to go to the front line. And the neighbor comes over and says, “Well, congratulations, that your son doesn’t have to go.” And the farmer says, “We shall see.” And it just goes on and on like that — the moods and swings of fortune are not what we should base our happiness on, because just as one day they can seem to be very good for you, tomorrow they might turn out to be very bad for you.
Cassius: So basically you take it as it comes, but don’t necessarily get attached to the idea of working out all your problems through fortune. Roll with the punches.
Don: Roll with the punches, exactly. And try to plan, and plan to avoid the punches, but if you can’t, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
Cassius: This is certainly a wide-ranging conversation today — it just goes to show all the implications of these particular topics that DeWitt brings up in this chapter. You know, “rolling with the punches” — I think that’s the last point he makes in this subsection, because he goes now into the discussions of the person who is tortured alive inside the brazen bull of Phalaris. And DeWitt’s point is that Cicero and even Seneca ridicule Epicurus for saying that the wise man is happy even while he’s being inside the brazen bull. The point he’s talking about in this context is that Epicurus is saying you need to be in control of your experience and not put too much emphasis on the benefits of good fortune or the detriments of bad fortune. Even if you have the extreme bad fortune of being inside the bull of Phalaris, being tortured, being in some terrible circumstance — whether you come through the circumstance or not, as a human being who has the ability to think about his overall circumstances, you can think about the fact that although this is very bad fortune, you’ve had a lot of good things happen to you in the past, and you can look at things from a higher perspective than just the pain of the moment. Anyone have a different take? I think this is one of the more controversial passages in any aspect of Epicurean philosophy.
Don: It’s this one and it’s the claim that pain is short if intense — those are the two that most people seem to have a problem with.
Joshua: And William Shakespeare in his play Richard II expresses it this way. He says: “Who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow by thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? Oh no, the apprehension of the good gives but the greater feeling to the worse. Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more than when he bites but lanceth not the sore.” The idea that thinking about things you don’t have, or if you’re experiencing one kind of pain and you’re thinking about what would soothe that pain, it actually makes the pain worse — that’s the claim here. Although research does show that if you swear whenever you have pain, then you feel less of the pain, so you can take it longer. I’ve been administering that medicine for a very long time.
Cassius: I should read more of what DeWitt says in that last paragraph, because he does explain his ultimate point: “Cicero chose to ignore the difference between pleasant and happy. The martyr at the stake may still claim to be a happy man, but he cannot claim to be experiencing pleasure.” The point is a good one — there’s a difference between “pleasant” and “happy,” and the words are significantly different in meaning. You are not experiencing pleasure when you’re being tortured. But the wise man can claim that he has been living a happy life.
Don: And that’s another one of my hobby horses too. The word that’s used there is eudaimonia — it’s not “happy,” it’s not happiness as in “la dee da, skipping through the roses.” It’s eudaimonia. I translated that particular one in my characteristics of the sage as: “The wise one will have a sense of fulfillment even on the rack, even though they will moan and wail when tortured.” So it’s like — you can still sense that you’ve lived the right way, you have a sense of well-being. You are not going to be experiencing any sort of pleasure. That’s probably the most ultimate pain — inside the bull of Phalaris — but you can still say, “Well, you know, I ended up here, I lived well.” It’s not “happy” as tra la la, it’s that eudaimonia sense.
Cassius: And for anyone who isn’t clear about the bull of Phalaris — my understanding is that it was a hollow bronze sculpture of a bull that had a door in the side of it, and they would put you inside of it, lock the door, and then light a fire under the bull, and you would slowly roast to death. So that gives you an idea of the torture that’s being talked about there.
Don: And oddly enough, the word that’s used in the characteristics of the sage in Diogenes has to do with being stretched on the rack — so that’s the word actually used there.
Joshua: And the claim about the bull is that its mouth was made in such a way that it would convert human screams into grunts — so that it looked like a real bull snorting and bellowing, even though there was somebody being roasted alive inside of it.
Cassius: Yeah, it’s horrible. In fact, the other story about the bull is that the person who made it and presented it to the king was put inside of it as the first example, because it was such a horrible thing.
Joshua: Boy, the ingenuity of humanity.
Cassius: There is a story — I don’t want to dwell too long on issues like martyrdom and all that, because I don’t think it’s really possible to know what you would do if you were put to torture, and it’s not a reflection of who you are if you fail that test, because it’s beyond the pale of anything that any human being should ever have to experience. But Giordano Bruno — who was not an Epicurean but took a lot of Lucretius’s ideas about nature to their logical conclusions — was imprisoned for something like seven years by Cardinal Bellarmine in Rome for beliefs relating to materialism, and that there are other worlds besides this one, and ideas like that — everything is made of atoms and void. He was imprisoned for seven years. Unlike so many others, he refused to recant his position. And when he was finally led to the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, he was given one final chance to recant — even at that point refused to do it. And the last thing they did before they burned him alive was drove two nails through his lips in the shape of a cross, just to shut him up. But to the very end he was still in essence accusing his accusers.
Joshua: Not unlike Socrates in that way, yeah. A century or two afterwards, a group of merchants and educated people commissioned a statue, which now faces the Vatican — he’s sort of glowering under his hood in the direction of the Vatican. So there’s another site to visit on the bucket list.
Cassius: Yeah. Well, let’s visit the next section, “Freedom and the Gods.” Here DeWitt is talking about the issue we’ve tested earlier about whether the gods themselves are subject to fate. DeWitt is talking about how the Greek view of the gods was so different from our current omnipotent, omniscient type of perspective that you have to be careful about how you think they relate to the issues of freedom. “Epicurus was at no less pains to assert the freedom of the gods than the freedom of man, and it was just as necessary for the gods to be free from servitude to man as for man to be free from servitude to the gods.” I think that’s a reference to the argument he makes several times — that the gods are not going to be enslaving themselves to micromanaging every minute thing that happens in existence from moment to moment. The gods don’t spend their time numbering the feathers on the birds and counting the hairs on your head to make sure they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Joshua: Exactly, yeah. I would agree. And that seems like such a simple assertion too — that if the gods are micromanaging the universe, that does not lead to happiness, eudaimonia, well-being, satisfaction, any of those kinds of words, which appear to be things that he applies to the gods.
Cassius: Yeah. And then I see down a little bit farther he talks about all the slights against the gods and everything, just to show that the idea of the Greek gods is not in keeping with an Epicurean perspective. And of course Lucretius takes that to its most forceful conclusion. Maybe the theme here is that DeWitt is pointing out that the Epicurean gods — or the idea of a single God that we have today, “God is love,” meaning that God is some force in the universe of omnipotent love, and he’s got everything working together for good — was just not the Greek attitude, and although that kind of viewpoint would be totally inconsistent with what Epicurus taught, it’s not even something that he necessarily would have fully addressed because they just didn’t see things that way. He’s talking about Plato and the ordering of the universe that Plato and Aristotle suggest as something that Epicurus rejected.
Joshua: I see what you’re saying, Cassius, that the gods of the Greeks were very different from — well, I shouldn’t say very different — they were different in some ways from maybe current conceptions of religion. And what you’ll see in commentators on Lucretius and Epicurus is that “if only they had lived a century longer, they would have learned the truth about the true religion.” I don’t think that’s true. I think Lucretius, as we see certainly in the case of Lucian of Samosata, would have been just as critical about the claims that are made today about religion as he was about the claims made by the priests and prophets and oracles of the ancient Greek religion.
Cassius: Yeah, I fully agree with that.
Joshua: And in all cases in this chapter, the main focus is that true human freedom — the freedom that’s promised by philosophy — is freedom from fate, freedom from determinism, freedom from pure chance, and freedom from providence.
Don: Yeah, it always comes back to that whole idea of the personal responsibility that Epicurus seems to hit on, for me at least. Some things do happen by chance, some things are necessary just through the laws of the universe and laws of physical existence, and then some things are, in his words, “up to us.”
Cassius: I see DeWitt as saying that “even the goodness of Plato’s supreme god, the Demiurge, by no means consisted in benevolence towards mankind.” He also says that it’s difficult for Plato to come to grips with the problem of freedom in a practical way. “A difficulty inherent in theocentric structures of thought.” Freedom poses a particular problem to theocentric structures of thought. You know, we don’t talk about it very much. I think we’ve basically decided that the Riddle of Epicurus is probably not necessarily straight from Epicurus in the first place. But you see a lot of discussion about that on the internet that I think comes through Lactantius and perhaps David Hume. And that points out some of these issues as well — that it’s very difficult to reconcile an omnipotent, purely good being with all of the very ungood things that we see around us.
Joshua: Yeah, and it also takes away human freedom as he says here. You know, there are a number of images everyone’s seen — that picture of the surgeon at the operating table working on the patient, and Jesus is standing behind him and holding his hand, guiding the scalpel. Or the president in the Oval Office, and Jesus is standing behind the president as he signs a bill into law. Well, if Jesus is holding your hand making you do all this stuff, are you really doing any of it? That’s the question. Do you even have the freedom to make a decision here if the decision is being made by the person standing behind you, holding your hand? And in the case of the surgeon, if the surgery goes wrong, whose fault is it?
Cassius: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah.
Don: So all of these things are — you know, people do these things because they want to feel like someone is in control of their lives, someone cares about them, and is working all things toward a good goal. But Epicurus, I think, thinks in reality it’s just not like that. And to actually have someone standing over your shoulder directing every move wouldn’t be good — it would be a bad thing, because it would totally remove any power you have as an individual to make choices and to live with the consequences, which is part of freedom.
Joshua: There’s a particularly horrifying passage in Tertullian, when he says: “You philosophers, you scoffers, you laugh now. But when Judgment Day comes and I’m waiting to go into the pearly gates of heaven, I’ll be looking down at you as you’re hurled into hell, and I’ll be the one laughing that day. That’s going to be one of the keenest pleasures of paradise — laughing at the people who are burning in hell who laughed at us while we were alive.”
Cassius: Wow, that’s a pleasant little sentiment there.
Don: You know, you bringing that up reminds me of the passage in Lucretius about him standing on the hillside seeing the shipwreck and the battles — feeling, I hesitate to use the word “fortunate,” but feeling fortunate that it’s not happening to him. And those two passages sort of illustrate to me — Lucretius is not necessarily taking pleasure in the suffering of others, but he’s taking pleasure in the fact that, “thank heavens it’s not happening to me,” whereas the other guy is like, “party time, look at all you sinners, woohoo.”
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, there’s a definite contrast between those two passages. I’m glad you brought that up, Don — that’s a very interesting comparison. Because as I’ve said before, Lucretius wants everyone to be — he doesn’t want anybody to be in that shipwreck. That’s his ideal, you know.
Don: Exactly, exactly.
Joshua: But crowing over the misery of the people who are in hell is part and parcel of Tertullian’s understanding of heaven. And Tertullian is, you know, one of the church fathers, so it’s not like anyone’s gone to great lengths to repudiate what he had to say from inside the church.
Cassius: Right, exactly. And same way with Cyril of Alexandria being made a father of the church — the sort of thing that was responsible for Hypatia’s death. And as late as recent French history — well, when you talk about ancient Greece, it is recent.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah — the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, where the Huguenots in France were basically all massacred all across the countryside in one particularly horrific month, and the response by the Pope was to strike a medal in honor of the King for doing this.
Cassius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Yes. Okay, well, we’ve ended up spending today’s episode probably much better than we might have by going in circles on some of the details of the arguments about necessity that modern philosophers spend a lot of their time on. But unfortunately we have the necessity of bringing the show to a close today. We can either close it on where we are or go into the necessity of death very briefly. I think what I would do here is just make the point because it fits with the little analogy I’m drawing. We have a necessity to end our podcast today — no way around that. We have a necessity of death that is unavoidable as well. He cites Metrodorus’s Vatican Saying 31: “Against all other hazards it is possible for us to gain security for ourselves, but so far as death is concerned, all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls.” And DeWitt draws this conclusion: “The immediate effect of this is to invest the present with a pressing urgency and to demand the control of experience with respect to the past, the present, and the future. This amounts to control of our thoughts. A choice of attitude is involved. The past is to be regarded as unalterable, the future as undependable, and the present alone as within our power.” To me, I’ve always thought one of the takeaways of Epicurean philosophy is: if you know that you’re going to die and you know that death is the end, you know that life is short. To me that is as much motivation as anybody ought to need to want to spend your time wisely, because you’re not going to get it back again and it’s not going to last very long.
Callistheni: Yeah, I think that is one of the things that I’ve heard people say — if you want to either purchase something or go somewhere, do something, think of it in terms of: if you have a job, think about the hours that you would be working to pay for that thing. Is it worth it? Time as currency — because like you said, once you spend it you can’t get it back.
Cassius: I recently came across a phrase I’d never heard before — maybe you have — but I was reading a review on Amazon of a book, and the person said it was “worth the candle.” I’d never heard that before, but I kind of like it. It makes clear that if you’re going to spend time doing this — and of course reading by candlelight was the history of the human species for most of our history — if you’re going to spend the time to do it, it ought to be worth doing. It ought to be worth the candle.
Callistheni: Oh, I like that. Yeah, very good analogy.
Cassius: Okay, well, why don’t we go to closing comments and we’ll bring today’s episode to a close. Martin, any closing thoughts for today?
Martin: I’ve nothing to add. Thanks.
Cassius: Okay. Thank you. Callistheni, any closing thoughts today?
Callistheni: Oh yes, it was a very enjoyable podcast. And Joshua, I really enjoyed all your stories and all your comments, and especially this very last one about being “worth the candle” — that’s something I’m going to have to think about, because so much of my time I feel a little bit pulled and distracted, and in some sense I’m really not getting as much pleasure as I could if I were more aware of my priorities in life. Something for me to consider and contemplate to get more clear on. So thank you.
Don: I agree with the candle analogy — that is a really interesting way to do that. For anybody listening, hopefully this podcast is worth their candle. It does give me some sort of solace to see how convoluted and of multiple opinions these whole topics are out there, so it makes me feel better that I don’t have everything cleared up in my mind myself. It is very interesting, and I’m looking forward to continuing these sorts of conversations on the forum as well.
Joshua: I’m glad, Don, that we got the hard stuff out of the way, because next week is “Freedom, Government, and Law” — and that should be like, good, what — five, ten minutes? Yeah, yeah. Followed by “Freedom and Public Careers” and “Control of Environment.” So we’re coming into sort of a practical freedom and the simple life. And on that last topic about freedom and public careers — we’ve been finding some interesting articles on the whole idea of Epicureans and politics and things like that, so that should give you some source material for that as well. The upshot of this whole topic of freedom — and I don’t want to jump the gun here, because clearly we’ve got a lot to talk about yet on this point — but the whole point seems to be that if we don’t have free will, then there’s absolutely no point really in even talking about philosophy, because there’s no point in figuring out what the good life is if we’re just going to do whatever we were destined to do to begin with.
Cassius: Exactly. It couldn’t be, in my view, a more important question. And I know that Don, as you said, modern thinkers have clearly gone one way on this discussion — but that shouldn’t put us off from discussing some of the other implications here. That seems to me to be where Epicurus starts and ends the topic. He realizes with all of his physics and epistemology and everything else he’s thought about that life is short, but that being happy is the best way to spend your time. Maybe there are a few people who think the best way to spend their time is to debate determinism endlessly and go back and forth and never reach any conclusion about it. But for Epicurus as a practical person: if you want to be happy and you don’t find your happiness in debating determinism, then you should spend your time on those things that do make you happy, and take control of your experience to the extent that you can to pursue happiness. So okay, let’s leave it at that for this week. Thanks everybody — please join us at the forum and make comments on this podcast and any other topics you’d like to talk about. Thank you again for your time, and we’ll see you next week. Bye.
Don: Bye-bye.