Episode 184 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 36 - Chapter 14 - The New Virtues 07
Date: 07/28/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3210-episode-184-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-36-chapter-14-the-new-virtues-07/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 184 continues Chapter 14, “The New Virtues,” covering faith, love of mankind, friendship, suavity, considerateness, and hope. The episode opens with an extended treatment of faith as Epicurean confidence — not blind faith but evidence-based conviction that truth is accessible. Cassius and Joshua contrast Pyrrho’s skepticism (formed after encountering Indian gymnosophists on Alexander’s campaign) and Democritus’s “truth at the bottom of the well” with Epicurus’s conviction that truth is near the surface of things. This leads to discussion of atomism as the paradigm case of faith: just as Epicurus inferred atoms from indirect evidence — cave stalactites, worn bronze statues, polished stone steps — confidence in one’s conclusions is the Epicurean analog of faith. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is examined as a counter-example where Aristotelian substance/accident language is used to sustain claims the evidence cannot support. The “love of mankind” (philanthropia) section introduces VS 52 (“love goes whirling in dance around the whole earth”) and connects Epicurus’s healing conception of philosophy — “vain is the word of that philosopher by which no malady of mankind is healed” — to his break with Leucippus and Democritus for imposing a paralyzing law of physical necessity. The friendship section revisits familiar ground through DeWitt’s lens: Cicero’s utilitarian critique, VS 46 on banishing evil associations, the dictum that it is more necessary to have someone to eat with than something to eat, and VS 28 on not judging people who make friends quickly versus slowly. The suavity section contrasts Epicurean agreeableness with Cynic and Stoic asperity, traces Latin candor and suavitas through Atticus, Cassius Longinus, Papirius Paetus, and Horace, and concludes that suavity was practically Epicureanism’s salesmanship. Considerateness (epieikeia) is examined through Lucian’s description of Celsus, Horace on the golden rule, and Polyaenus. The hope section closes the episode: hope as “confident expectation” grounded in preparedness; Theophrastus’s fortune-over-reason thesis as the target Epicurus was reacting against; VS 33 and VS 39 on stable bodily expectations; and Horace’s advice to Tibullus on living in the present. Callistheni offers a practical closing observation — mentally listing possible future outcomes as a way to dispel anxiety rather than jumping to worst-case conclusions. Next week: attitude toward the present.
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 184. We are continuing in chapter 14, “The New Virtues.” Last week we talked about honesty and today we’re going to continue on through faith, love of mankind, friendship, suavity, and a series of other virtues that DeWitt has identified as being significant in Epicurean philosophy. We’re going to start today with faith, which as we mentioned last week is kind of a controversial thing to talk about because if faith is taken to mean blind faith — blind obedience to something without evidence — that would not be appropriate. But what Epicurus does talk about a lot is confidence based on evidence that has been determined through the canonical faculties. The classic example being that Epicurus believes strongly in the existence of atoms based on circumstantial evidence — he didn’t directly see or touch atoms, and yet he had a strong confidence that the atomic theory was correct based on the evidence that he did have. So there’s a distinction between blind faith versus confidence that you can have in something even though you cannot see or directly touch it through the senses.
Joshua: DeWitt says a brief chain argument will show how the doctrine of faith fits into the matrix of meanings. As a dogmatist, Epicurus believed that truth was discoverable and also that he had discovered it. He called his teachings true philosophy. So he talks a lot here about the skeptics — Pyrrho, Nausiphanes, and so forth. Pyrrho had traveled with Alexander the Great’s army as far as at least Bactria, but perhaps as far as India. And he met there the gymnosophists — these yogis, the “gymno” of course referring to their physical disciplines and so forth — the philosophers who spend a lot of time with physical discipline and meditation. What Pyrrho discovered was that they had very, very different ideas about nature, about the world, about human life than he was familiar with back in Greece. And it led him to the conclusion that every different place in the world probably has their own idea about how these things work, and they’re all equally certain of them. And so how do you know which ones are true? And so Pyrrho came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really possible to know the truth. And to some extent, even Democritus, before Epicurus, was following the same line of thinking — because he’s got this famous quote. He says: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the well.” And he’s got this whole metaphor about how the water at the bottom of the well gives us a reflection of truth, but not truth itself. So Epicurus — I remember reading a scholar in the introduction of one of his works saying, Epicurus did not think that truth lay at the bottom of the well. He thought that it was very near the surface of things. So this really does set Epicurus apart — certainly from the skeptics clearly, but also from the Platonists, and even from Democritus, one of his forebears in philosophy. So this question of, is it possible to really know the truth? Now I always struggle with this word “truth” as it relates to whether it’s a capital T or a lowercase t, because there is no abstract truth out there in the universe that Epicurus is trying to grasp, like Plato trying to get out of his cave. But the question is whether it was possible to know it. We’ve talked before in this podcast about Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, who said that motion was impossible — because in the words of Aristotle, nature abhors a vacuum. And if there’s no vacuum, if there’s no space, then everything is full. And if everything is full, then motion is impossible. What we perceive as motion is merely an illusion. So all these kinds of ideas — ranging from quite deep ideas to really fringe and absurd ideas — were swirling around in Greece prior to Epicurus. But he comes on the scene here and thinks he’s really grasped something. He famously says that the flux is real, but it’s not happening so fast that we can’t perceive what’s going on while it’s happening — by reference possibly to Heraclitus: you can never step into the same river twice. So that’s kind of the question — that’s where this issue of faith makes its appearance in Epicurean philosophy. It’s not blind faith. It’s certainly not faith in the supernatural. It’s not even this sort of vulgar faith in charms or oracles. It’s, as you say, Cassius — it’s confidence that things in nature can be grasped, that we can know, we really can know about what we’re looking into, that it’s not a totally fruitless exercise.
Cassius: Joshua, that was a great introduction there. You’re going in exactly the direction that I think this section should be taken. DeWitt sort of takes it into a comparison of Christianity and the faith issues there. But what you’ve just been talking about, I think, is the real key. The issue of whether there is some true world that we don’t have access to is probably one of the most basic issues in Epicurean philosophy — all the way back into the Letter to Herodotus and the discussion in Lucretius about accidents and events and properties and qualities of the atoms and so forth. It’s necessary to have a framework. As you said, there’s a problem with the word truth in the first place. But the issue is: what should you consider in your life to be of importance and of significance to you? And in that sense of the word “true” — is there anything that is ultimately true in that sense? Because whether it’s significant to you ultimately is the final question. If it’s not significant to you — such as what happens after you’re dead — then nothing to us in the sense of Principal Doctrine 2. But this question of this flux: if you’ve got these atoms, is it really true that Democritus was going in the direction of saying, well, there’s really nothing ultimately real but atoms and void? And while there is nothing that has an eternal existence to it, the qualification that there’s nothing real but atoms and void is the problem that Epicurus was reacting against. And when you go back again into the Letter to Herodotus and the discussion in Lucretius where he’s talking about the Trojan War and so forth, you come up with this question of: can you really consider the things that are the result of combinations of atoms and void to be real? I’ve been referencing David Sedley’s article in recent weeks, and he talks about that Epicurus was not a radical reductionist in that sense. Epicurus did not consider only the atoms and void to be real. He considers the things that you perceive through your senses to be real as well. That’s the canonical faculties — the five senses, the anticipations, and the feelings. He considers the things that those reveal to you to be real as well. Even mentioning that the things that happen to you in dreams have a reality to them because you are perceiving them to be happening to you. And you don’t get caught up in these ideas that this world that we’re perceiving and this world we’re living in is not real — because that ends up being an extremely debilitating and demoralizing and deconstructing attitude to take about the world. If you conclude that everything that you’re seeing and touching and living in isn’t real, it’s very easy to fall down this slippery slope into nihilism if you don’t keep a framework of analysis in front of you to analyze these things. And that’s where we’re going with this confidence. Because of the framework that Epicurus has provided, while atomism is very important, it’s not only the fact that the atoms and void exist that’s important — it’s the rest of the framework that allows you to relate the events that occur to you as being real in addition to the atoms themselves. There’s a terminology issue in Lucretius where the translators will talk about “accidents.” The Brown edition uses the word “events,” and in Lucretius the Latin is eventum. It’s useful to think about colors and other things being events that occur and not just accidents, because the colors and other things that are qualities of these atoms are naturally occurring phenomena and they’re not just random, they’re not just chaotic.
Joshua: I’m not quite ready to leave this events issue, because we’ve talked a lot about how skepticism relates to some of the problems that existed prior to Epicurus in Greek philosophy and this claim that knowledge is impossible. There’s another issue on the other side, and that is I think typified, for example, by the Catholic doctrine of the transubstantiation — which bases itself on Aristotle’s physics, this idea of substance and accident or event. The thinking is that when the priest performs the sacrament of the Eucharist, the bread and wine are literally substantively changed or transubstantiated from bread and wine into body and blood. And you might say, well, couldn’t we just test this scientifically and come to a real conclusion about this? But what they say based on Aristotle’s views is that the event or accident of bread, the event or accident of wine, doesn’t change. What changes is the underlying substance — that the substance of bread literally changes into the body of Christ, and the substance of wine literally changes into his blood. So it’s issues on both sides: where you go too far in the direction of skepticism and knowledge becomes impossible, but you go too far the other way and you end up with claims that are really, really difficult to sustain in the face of the facts.
Cassius: So, yes, you’re always basing your confidence on evidence and you’re not ever detaching yourself from that. The point with the transubstantiation of the wine is that because you can test the wine and you know it’s not true, you would hopefully never make that error that the Catholic Church is making.
Joshua: Yeah, I think that’s the point, because Epicureanism uses these same terms — substance, accident, or event — but the difference is that in Epicureanism it’s atomism that underlies this, and that atomism is not some ethereal substance that is impenetrable to our understanding. We can understand it. The substance of Aristotle is sort of impenetrable to understanding — and maybe intentionally so, maybe being a little bit uncharitable there — but that’s what allows the Catholic Church to latch onto this and say that Jesus says in the Bible, in the Gospels, “Do this in memory of me,” so we’re literally going to do this in memory of him, and he will be here as well in the real presence of the Eucharist because the substance is actually him — he’s actually here. Atomism would never allow you really to make that claim. And in fact, I don’t know if this is worth going into, but there was a book or an article or something published recently of somebody who went looking into the records of the Galileo trial — actually it might have been Giordano Bruno — and atomism allegedly crops up there as well, because of exactly what we’re talking about. It completely undercuts the claim that is made about the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood.
Cassius: What DeWitt says here — as I think you’ve already quoted — he said: this belief, Epicurus’ position about atomism, “if this belief had consisted merely in an intellectual assent to the doctrine that the universe consists of atoms and void or the like, it would have been on a par with Plato’s theory of ideas.” If we’re just going to assert stuff out of thin air, you can say anything and pretend that it’s true. What Epicurus does in the case of atomism is look for evidence. And we’ve gone over all that before — the water that percolates through the walls of a cave and leaves the stalactites and stalagmites, the bronze hand of a statue at the entrance of a city gate that has been rubbed and polished smooth by many passing visitors, steps that have been worn smooth by the feet of many passers. So there’s evidence of atomism in the ancient world all around them, and that is what allows them to have confidence. This is what we mean by faith here.
Joshua: Confidence that their conclusions have merit. And the place where you join the looking for evidence with confidence is that you can’t just simply stop at the evidence. You take the evidence and you then form a conclusion based on it. The priest at the transubstantiation ceremony can tell you — here is this bread, and here is this wine, and it is the body and the blood of Jesus. If you take his word for it, you’re going to reach a conclusion that’s different than if you apply the evidence that you have also seen in the past and calculate this out through your mind and realize that these things are in conflict. At that point, you are in a state of uncertainty as to competing claims of the evidence that you’ve seen in the past versus the evidence that this man is pointing to.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, it seems to me that the transubstantiation question is a good example of what you have to do when you have conflicting evidence. There are different types of evidence in the world — not only what you see and touch and feel for yourself but what other people tell you is going on. You have to have a framework for analyzing evidence so that you can put everything in perspective and decide what to believe and what not to believe, and not just simply list out the evidence without coming to a conclusion about it. We’ve talked about this a number of times in regard to Frances Wright. At some point, you do have to come to a conclusion about what the evidence shows and not just leave it unresolved. If it’s possible to resolve it — we’ve also discussed in the past the issue of waiting when the evidence is not sufficient — but on the very important questions of life, such as whether you’re going to exist after you die, whether there’s a supreme being and so forth, those are questions that it’s important to have a conclusion about. And DeWitt continues at the bottom of page 304 by saying that it’s uncertainty rather than outright disbelief that seem to Epicurus to be the opposite of faith. And DeWitt quotes PD 12 and 13: “It’s impossible for men to dispel the fear concerning things of supreme importance not understanding the nature of the whole universe but suspecting that there may be some truth in the stories related in the myths,” and then “nothing is gained by building up the feeling of security in our relations with men if the things above our heads and those beneath the earth and in general those in the unseen are matters of suspicion.” These are issues that are touched on also in VS 49 and VS 72. So part of what we’re discussing here then in terms of belief, faith, confidence — it’s not simply a matter of belief or confidence in a particular observation at a particular moment, but also a belief or confidence in the framework that you’ve reached through the evidence that’s been presented to you.
Cassius: Okay, and so in the section entitled “Love of Mankind,” DeWitt starts talking about the different words that are involved — the Greek philia, the Latin amor, the agape — and the ambiguities that come as a result of that word.
Joshua: Yeah, I get a little annoyed constantly hearing about how Greek has different words for love, but I realize that’s probably just me. But it does say here that Epicureanism concerned itself with the love of mankind, philanthropia, and the love of friends, both denoted by philia. And you see that particularly I think in the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda where he talks about — actually I think he uses those exact words — he says love of mankind prompts us to help also the foreigner who comes here, for we all share the same world.
Cassius: Right, it’s also displayed in Lucretius with the desire to spread the insights that Epicurus gave.
Joshua: Right, yes, when he says that life is one long struggle in the dark, it’s not like he wants it to be that way — he wants to shed some light. And Epicurus’s view of the healing power of philosophy: “Vain is the word of that philosopher by which no malady of mankind is healed. For just as there is no benefit in the art of medicine unless it expels the diseases of men’s bodies, so there is none in philosophy either unless it expels the malady of the soul.”
Cassius: And here’s the interesting comment that you don’t see very often. DeWitt says, quote: “It’s on this principle that he denied to Leucippus the right to the name of philosopher, and chiefly on the same ground that he broke with Democritus, who seemed in the opinion of his great disciple to impose upon men a paralyzing law of physical necessity.” So DeWitt’s linking here this emphasis on the love of mankind and the healing that should come from philosophy with his criticisms of prior philosophers who were not focused on that, or who seemed to be disregarding the negative impact of their views. And this connection between philosophy and medicine is one that you see all throughout ancient Epicureanism — and perhaps most notably in Lucretius, of course. We’ve got this metaphor of when you have to give a boy the nauseous wormwood which you think will be good for his health but it’s too bitter, he doesn’t want to drink it — that’s when you add the honey to the rim of the cup to help make the medicine go down. And Lucretius is doing that with his verse, but of course the philosophy it contains is this bitter medicine. It’s not bitter to everybody, but it’s bitter to people who are new to it and sometimes don’t want to hear what Epicurus has to say. With the understanding that if you take the medicine you will actually be healed and be better off than beforehand.
Cassius: In Epicurus’s day there was in vogue a weird rite for the cure — as it would seem — of depressive melancholy. The participants were called the Corybantes. The patient was seated upon a throne while the celebrant circled round and round with song and dance and a tumult of tambourines and horns. In the normal course of the cure the patient was first overcome with bewilderment, then fell into a coma, and finally awoke in an ecstasy — a cured man to join in the tumult. DeWitt says in the light of this custom we must interpret VS 52: “Love goes whirling in dance around the whole earth, veritably shouting to us all to awake to the blessedness of the happy life.” This tacit allusion — according to DeWitt — to the well-known rites should remind us that Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, was not distrustful of emotion. That, to me, is an important point. He asserted that the wise man would feel more strongly than the rest of men.
Joshua: I think the conclusion that DeWitt makes here is quite good — that ataraxia, in spite of the dictionaries, cannot be equated with Stoic apathy. The conclusion that DeWitt makes is quite good: that ataraxia is not apathy because it is concerned not with indifference but with the health of the soul. Yes, and that’s a theme that goes along with everything we’re talking about here — we’re not just seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge or wisdom for the sake of wisdom. We’re looking for practical results in the lives of the people who are participating in the philosophy, not just abstractions. Right, and so we should ask ourselves, Cassius — if Epicurus is interested in the health of the soul, if he’s interested in alleviating the suffering of the people through philosophy, why, as you said last week, is there no great commission to go out into all the lands and preach the gospel to every creature? As he says here, Epicurus doesn’t go down that road. And DeWitt’s answer is: “It is true that Epicurus anticipated the apostles in the writing of pastoral epistles, but he did not undertake missionary journeys.” We spoke last week about how the ancient Epicureans were pamphleteers, and how sometimes writing can penetrate into intimate social circles in a way that just shouting things from the rooftop doesn’t do. But it’s an excellent point that he makes here — Epicurus is not undertaking a journey to preach the gospel to all the world. He’s not interested in that approach.
Cassius: Yeah, it seems to me that part of the answer to that is contained at the last of the Principal Doctrines, for example, where he talks about how you’re going to make friends of the people you can. The ones you can’t make friends of, you’re not going to treat as strangers if that will work. But then those that you just simply can’t get along with at all, or who choose to not get along with you — you’re going to just separate yourself from. So when you analogize it to the Great Commission, you have this idea that anybody you don’t save in Christianity is going to burn in hell for eternity, or it’s going to blaspheme the name of God, and so you really need to take steps with everybody to get them right with God for their own sake or for the sake of everybody who’s left. But the Epicurean attitude seems to be a much more realistic one — that there are people in the world who are just not going to see things the way you do. And it’s a lot more of a live-and-let-live kind of philosophy where, unless you’re being directly affected in a negative way, there’s really no call for you to get involved with some other person. Obviously you want to help these other people and you want to help everybody you can just from this general disposition. Again, going back all the way to the fact that life in the absence of pain is pleasure — you are here on this earth for a very short period of time after an eternity of nothingness before you were born and an eternity of nothingness after you’re dead. The brief time that you’re here is a time when you do wish to take advantage of all the pleasures that are available to you. And so you’re naturally going to have this benevolent disposition toward other people and alleviate suffering where you find it — but it’s a much more realistically based analysis. Again, like with friendship, the realism is that the basis of friendship comes from the advantage that you have in having friends in the first place. Eventually you may reach the point where you will die for a friend, but you don’t ever lose the understanding that the basis for things in the first place comes from the nature of things and not from an idealized view that you should simply go out and attempt to convert the whole world when nature is not telling you to do that.
Cassius: So yes, those comments there would lead us into the next section on friendship, which we’ve discussed many times. Let’s see if there’s anything new in this section that we haven’t already discussed before. DeWitt is here identifying friendship within the context of a series of Epicurean virtues that are important to cultivate in order to live a happy life. Cicero with the discerning eye of the trial lawyer pounced upon the utilitarian aspect of Epicurean friendship as a suitable pretext for throwing discredit upon the whole creed. Cicero chose to exalt virtue as the sole basis of friendship, as if Epicurus had ignored it. Remember — this entire chapter is called “The New Virtues.” So virtue has an important component in all of this, but virtue and friendship — all of these things are subservient to pleasure as the good. And DeWitt says that Epicurus would tolerate no compromise with evil. VS 46 says: “Evil associations, like wicked men who have long done us great injury, let us banish utterly.” You know, much of what DeWitt’s covering here is fairly standard for our many discussions of friendship. I see two things maybe worth commenting on that have not been included in our normal discussion. DeWitt says Epicurus himself declared that it was more necessary to have someone to eat with than something to eat. And that’s the reference to eating alone being like a wolf or something like that. Do you remember that one, Joshua?
Joshua: Right. I couldn’t quote it for you. There is an American sort of food journalist called Michael Pollan or something, and he’s got these four rules for food — eat real food, not too much, et cetera. But the last one is “never eat alone.” So that’s kind of exactly what Epicurus is saying here — that it’s more important to have friends to share the moment with than it is to have something to eat. Of course, you wouldn’t want to take that too literally. But there definitely is a fragment we can put in the show notes here.
Cassius: Another thing that I see here that we don’t talk about very often — VS 28, which DeWitt puts in the context of how Epicurus recommended against hasty judgments with friends. VS 28 says: “We must not be critical either of those who are quick to make friends or those who are slow, but be willing to risk the offer of friendship for the sake of winning friendship.” So in other words, there’s something there that Epicurus is commenting on to the effect that in the end, whether you go fast or slow, there’s a risk and a reward in friendship. The reward is what makes the risk of friendship worth taking. And so as we discuss how quick to pursue friendship, that takes us to the next subsection, which is entitled “Suavity.”
Joshua: Yep. So he starts this section with a reference to St. Augustine. He says, who possessed a good understanding of Epicureanism and but for its denial of immortality would have awarded it the palm — in one passage selecting as its watchwords: Pleasure, Suavity, and Peace. As usual, this whole issue of watchwords is a little bit convoluted, but he says it seems to have been the friendly ethic of Epicurus that won for this virtue of suavity a manifest vogue among the Romans, and for the words suavis and suavitas a certain currency in a definite context of meaning. They occur repeatedly in the letters of Cicero and in the writings of the Augustan poets, so as to seem characteristic of the Latin vocabulary. Like the words candid and candor, they took on a fresh color from the Epicurean context. It was the sweet friendship of the disdainful Memmius that Lucretius hoped to win for himself by the charm of his verses. That’s where this issue of suavity seems to come in. And what do we take the word suavity to mean? Perhaps we should not presume that that word is understandable in 2023 English. Does it mean smoothness? Does it mean sort of genteelness? How would you say it, Joshua?
Cassius: Yep, I associate it with charm, but I guess it means pleasant, elegant, polite, and agreeable.
Joshua: Yeah, I see that DeWitt quotes a description of the issue as “a certain agreeableness of speech and manners,” and that Atticus is stated by his biographer, Cornelius Nepos, to have had this quality.
Cassius: Right, because what we’ve been talking about is starting with the issue of faith and how that relates to determining what is true and what is not, and having confidence in your conclusions — talking about love of mankind and how that persuades us of the need to bring the fruits of philosophy to as many as we can, not necessarily through missionary zeal but through writings and inscriptions and Lucretius’s wonderful poem — that what this all relates to is a desire to persuade people. And that’s where this issue of suavity comes in as well. We’re trying to persuade people that you really can get something out of this.
Joshua: You know, as I’m looking at the paragraph that we’re talking about here, this is classic DeWittian material. He’s got these details of other people in this time period who are being referenced as being sweet or suave. Even to the “lean and hungry” Cassius Longinus — hardly sweet of disposition though known to have followed Epicurus — is ascribed “an unlimited fund of sweetness.” And then DeWitt talks about someone named Papirius Paetus whose letters overflowed with sweetness, and that Cicero claimed this quality for himself, and there was another one called “my sweetest Volumnius.” And then DeWitt says, “so singular is the usage of the word that it almost ranks as a test for identifying Epicurean correspondence” — which, to bring it back home for just a minute, is an interesting aspect of our discussions on the EpicureanFriends forum, perhaps. I think most of us look for a quality of friendliness in the way we discuss things — that even when we disagree on something we can do it in a manner that is agreeable and not disagreeable in the harsh sense of the word. And it’s interesting he says it’s a test of Epicureanism — right — because this seems to be a critical component of what we talked about last week, which is honesty or parrhesia, frank speech. If you don’t have the knowledge or certainty or confidence that your candor, your frank speech, is going to not drive the person hearing you into a murderous rage, you’re not going to offer that. So it requires friendliness, it requires a kind of openness to the conversation — otherwise you don’t have the conversation.
Cassius: Yeah, if you don’t have confidence in what you’re talking about, it’s easy to get shaken and then lose control of your emotions as you’re talking to somebody. It seems like there are several instances in ancient texts where the Epicurean speaker is described as saying something with a smile. There are definitely ways in life to be like Lucretius and rim the cup with honey rather than just being so harsh about things that you put off the listener just by your manner of presentation.
Joshua: Dovetailing with what you said — in the Rolfe Humphries translation, Lucretius in his appeal to Venus is asking for — he says, give to my verses a radiance, a light, brightness, and candor. So that’s grace mixed with truth, with frank speech, as part of the whole issue here of suavity.
Cassius: Yes. This next paragraph is interesting enough to talk about in detail. It says there’s also a historical reason for cultivating the virtue of suavity. Epicurus was not born too late to be nearly a contemporary of the earlier Cynics, all of whom practiced a shock treatment in greeting the public and prospective students in particular. Antisthenes, when he was asked why he was so harsh with his pupils, retorted: “Physicians are so with the sick.” Diogenes, who died when Epicurus was 18, interpreted freedom of speech as freedom to insult. Crates, known as “the gatecrasher,” a contemporary, was the teacher of Zeno — who adopted and bequeathed to the Stoic school this practice of asperity. Thus Stoicism by heredity became a scalding, censorious creed. Epicurus, reacting adversely to the example of the Cynics, cultivated the opposite virtue. He’s on record as having dealt with this question in the second book of his work Own Lives, where he wrote: “The wise man will not adopt the Cynics’ way of life.” This comparison between the Epicurean approach of suavity and the Stoic approach of sour insult is certainly one worth talking about. And at the very end there, where he says that this also serves to separate Epicurus from the Platonists: “Platonism was the creed of highbrows. The aristocrat may be courteous to all, but he will be suave only to those whom he admits to equality. Suavity as the Epicurean’s practice was a kind of salesmanship. It was their weapon for making friends and influencing people, and it was partly by means of it that they became as numerous as they were.” So basically the lesson there is that there’s just no reason to be a jerk in the presentation of a philosophy or presentation of anything else. In fact, maybe we should ask — is there any reason ever to be a jerk? I’m not sure that there is a good reason ever to be a jerk. Epicurus was identifying this agreeableness of approach as a desirable characteristic.
Cassius: So after this he goes into the virtue of consideration, or considerateness, for the feelings of others. I guess the Greek word for that is epieikeia. Epieikeia emerged to prominence in Epicureanism. This increase of emphasis was part of a general drift from the study of political to the more purely social virtues. Do you have any comment on that, Cassius — I know we’ve talked before about this claim that there’s a sea change in philosophy after Alexander the Great, and that seems to be what he’s alluding to there.
Cassius: Well, it certainly blends in with what we were just discussing — that maybe the best way to be suave is to be considerate of the person you’re talking to. You can adjust your manner of speech and the things that you’re saying to the circumstances of the person who is hearing you, and that would be an important part of coming across as being agreeable. DeWitt then quotes Epicurus saying that the Epicurean holds in high regard as many people as possible, and he relates that to a statement made by Menander: “If there is any man who is eager to give pleasure to as many good men as possible and to cause pain to as few as possible — in that number this poet declares his name.” And even Cicero betrays the influence of Epicurus by defining the good man as “one who will do a good turn to whom he can and who will injure no one unless attacked.” We can point on the next page to Lucian. He says the nature of this virtue, considerateness, is further defined by the virtues with which it is associated. Lucian ascribes it to his Epicurean friend Celsus — although there’s some confusion as to whether that is the same Celsus who wrote a book against Christianity or not, and most people think it’s not — along with companionability, friendliness, evenness of temper, serenity, and tact. “A veritable garland of Epicurean virtues” — not a sentence that you hear every day. And he goes on to say that the poet Horace devotes a whole satire to the topic and anticipates more nearly than the others the formulation of the golden rule, when he claims: “Alas, how rashly we enacted a harsh law against our very selves” — that is, by censoriousness toward the minor faults of others. And then DeWitt continues that Polyaenus was apparently especially noted for his considerateness, and that Diogenes Laertius calls him “a considerate and friendly man.” It’s interesting because some translations actually put in place of “considerate” there just “a just and friendly man.” So as usual when you’re dealing with translations, this is an example where consulting multiple translations becomes especially important. Yes, and what DeWitt’s doing here is just citing reference after reference to other texts and people — providing a lot of good information here for somebody who wants to track it down. But in the end what he’s simply doing is giving us examples of where considerateness or consideration of others is referenced within the Epicurean texts.
Cassius: Okay, so the next subsection is entitled “Hope.” What DeWitt’s basically doing in this section is talking about the attitude that while we don’t have total control over our futures by any means, we do have some influence over it. And as discussed in the Letter to Menoikeus, that point is made. And so it’s important to have a proper attitude toward both the past, the present, and the future: toward the past man should be grateful, in the present patient and cautious, and toward the future he should be hopeful.
Joshua: Right, you know, we started today with this virtue of faith and how it relates to confidence — but hope also, as it relates to the future, requires a certain amount of confidence. What Epicurus says elsewhere is that “the future is not wholly ours nor wholly not ours,” and there’s an element of hope there — that even though we could drop dead tomorrow, we hope to have more time, more time to live.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a very important part of all of this — the whole free will aspect of Epicurean philosophy. To the extent we call it natural law, the whole issue of atomism is: you gain an understanding of the way that nature works that allows you to predict the future with some degree of confidence. You can’t do it with certainty because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen because there is no necessity — but while there’s no necessity, the world does operate according to natural principles. And you can predict what direction the sun’s going to come up in tomorrow, what time it’s going to rise, what time it’s going to set. All sorts of things in life you have the ability to predict if you use your mind rationally, look at the evidence that’s out there, and put it all together into a coherent whole. That’s the way you have confidence in things — applying this whole process from evidence to conclusion. And you don’t just stop with skepticism by saying, well, nothing’s knowable, it’s impossible to predict anything, so therefore I’ll just go hide in a hole. That’s not the Epicurean approach. You take a reasonable approach to these things that you’re learning through the study of nature to guide the rest of your life in as happy a way as possible. DeWitt says that Epicurus wrote, quote: “No art of prophecy exists, and even if it did, external events are to be considered as meaning nothing to the inner life.” DeWitt says this does not mean that Epicurus utterly denied the play of chance or fortune. He believed that this play could be practically nullified, however, by rational planning. And neither did he utterly deny necessity — but “there’s no necessity of living with necessity.” By building up a reserve of self-sufficiency, the wise man can forestall the compulsions of poverty, war, or servitude.
Joshua: You know, I’ve quoted Lucian here several times — he has this story in his essay on Alexander the Oracle Monger. One of the stories is about a young man who was traveling with his servants, but his servants were waiting for him at a certain place and he didn’t turn up. So they went back home and reported his absence, and the people went to Alexander and presented him with the information. And Alexander said the servant had killed this young man. So the family executed the servant — and then a few weeks later the young man comes back and says, no, I took a detour. While I was in the area I wanted to travel over here. So on the basis of no evidence whatsoever they executed the servant based simply on the claim of a prophet. So it’s not just wrong — it’s dangerously wrong. And so this uncertainty when it comes to the future is not necessarily a bad thing, and far worse is to stick in its place a sense of false certainty that leads us to behave monstrously.
Cassius: That point leads DeWitt to include a very interesting quote that you don’t see very often. He quotes Cicero writing to the Epicurean Papirius Paetus: “You, however, as your philosophy teaches, will feel bound to hope for the best, contemplate the worst, and endure whatever shall come.” Hope for the best, contemplate the worst, and endure whatever shall come. And the good news is: after we finish this book, we’re going to move on to Cicero next, so we’ll have occasion to look that up. He then quotes Horace here in his Odes: “The man whose mind is well prepared hopes for a change of fortune in adversity, fears it in prosperity.” The allusion — DeWitt talking — “the allusion to the planned life and controlled experience is made plain by the words ‘well prepared.’” So another aspect of this question of hope is that we don’t know that we’re going to live another day, but we have this hope, this confidence, that perhaps we will — and we’re not just going to blunder through it either. We’re going to plan for not just our current happiness but for our future happiness, not just for our current pleasure but for our future pleasure.
Cassius: DeWitt says that “the hope that chiefly makes for happiness is confident expectation. Only the fool indulges in vain hopes and lives in the future. The wise man will live in the present, facing the future with confident expectation because of preparedness.” Now that’s DeWitt talking there. You were just saying, Joshua — it’s the preparedness that gives you the confident expectation that you can deal with things in the future. If you’re not prepared, you not only don’t have it — you should not be confident that you’re going to be able to deal with what fortune brings.
Joshua: Right. One of the things that Lucian says in that essay I’ve been quoting is: “Human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles — fear and hope — and anyone who can make these serve his ends may be sure of a rapid fortune.” So you have this uncertainty about the future, which you’re approaching with confidence, but crowding in from all sides are these oracles and charlatans from the ancient world trying to make claims about the future that they cannot possibly have access to. So your answer is not going to be to go to the oracle and ask what you should do next — your answer is going to be to prepare for multiple eventualities, including the eventuality that you could die tomorrow.
Cassius: DeWitt says that this topic was a live one in the time of Epicurus because Theophrastus had chosen to exalt the importance of external influences in human life. Fortune, he said, not reason, rules the lives of men. And Epicurus was to some extent reacting against this. And to Metrodorus he assigned the task of developing the theme at greater length. And Clement of Alexandria witnesses the fact — Clement mentions a writing of Metrodorus which aims to demonstrate: “Viewed as a cause, the inner life is a good of more effect for happiness than our external goods.” “What else falls more within the province of the soul than the stable well-being of the flesh and the confident expectation concerning the same?” And with both Metrodorus and Epicurus talking about this, this means that both of them were hammering home the same teaching.
Joshua: The opposing Platonists and others retorted that the continuance of health was precisely one of those things which humanity cannot count on. And it’s kind of surprising that DeWitt doesn’t relate this back to that quote from Juvenal that he quoted earlier in the book, where he says: “I would ask for a sound mind and a sound body, and a stout heart that hath no fear of death and deems length of days the least of nature’s gifts.”
Cassius: Instead we have VS 33: “The cry of the flesh is: not to hunger, not to thirst, not to suffer cold. Because possessing these and expecting to possess them, a man may vie with Zeus himself in respect of happiness.” I think this word “expecting” is related to the Latin word for hope, though I’m not sure — I’ll have to look that up. Yes, and DeWitt links to that the fragment: “The stable condition of well-being in the flesh and the confident hope concerning this means the height of enjoyment and the greatest certainty of it for those who are capable of figuring the problem out.” Being capable of figuring these problems out is a major theme of what Epicurean philosophy is all about. It’s not a matter of just ascending to some formulation of faith, but understanding how these things fit together to give you the confidence to reach the right conclusions. VS 39 says in part: “The man who never associates help with friendship cuts off good expectations concerning the future.” Right — and friendship, this net of friendship that we enjoy in good times supports us in bad times, and so forth, is an element of how we prepare for the future and therefore how we experience this virtue of hope.
Cassius: And DeWitt sort of finishes here by saying it was the Epicurean doctrine also that Horace was disseminating when he gave the advice to shun knowledge of the future and to set down to treasure trove the gift of the morrow. In the soul passage in which he mentions Epicurus by name, he advises Tibullus to believe that every day that dawns will be your last. “Welcome will be the surprise of the unexpected hour.” This living in the present — it may be added — besides the merit of condensing pleasure through surprise, possessed the advantage of forestalling fear and apprehension, a chief enemy of serenity. The true opposite of hope is not despair but uncertainty. Once again we’re coming up on this issue of uncertainty — we started the chapter with a discussion of Pyrrho and skepticism and this question of uncertainty, and now we’re coming to the end here once again with a question of uncertainty.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s a really good place to begin to close our episode for this week. When DeWitt says “the true opposite of hope is not despair but uncertainty,” I think there’s more to it than meets the eye there. He is calling us back to this point that uncertainty goes hand in hand with skepticism and the idea of gaining a framework that allows you to have confidence in those things that you can know — that this is of critical importance in Epicurean philosophy in terms of being happy. If you’re totally stuck in skepticism, if you’re uncertain of everything, there’s no way to be happy. You’ve got to have a framework that allows you to have confidence — or, in the word that we’ve been discussing today, hope for the future.
Cassius: Okay, let’s begin to bring this episode to a conclusion for today. Callistheni?
Callistheni: I had a comment regarding — when one is uncertain about future events, I think there’s sort of a practical thing that could be applied, which is making a list mentally about what possibly might happen based on the situation. In other words, let’s say you’re waiting for someone to return and they’re late coming back home and you’re not sure what’s going on. So then you make a list — well, let’s see, maybe the car broke down, or maybe they had to run back to go get something else they had an additional errand on their list of things to do, and so then they’re late because of that — or something terrible happened like there was a car accident. But if you list all the possibilities, it’s not like you’re gonna jump to some wild conclusion — oh no, something really terrible must have happened, they’re late and they’re never late. But as far as hope — and this could be done in any kind of situation — I think listing the possibilities given the situation of what could occur in the future based on the circumstances kind of dispels the sense of uncertainty. It can help to deal with feelings of anxiety by just bringing it back to the present circumstances, and also recognizing that you really can’t know, but there are certain possibilities. And I think it’s just kind of a practical exercise with regard to dealing with the future. Hopefully that makes sense.
Cassius: Yes, those are excellent points, Callistheni. Very good.
Joshua: Yeah, I think that was very good. The key takeaway from all of this is that we’re not blundering through life convinced that knowledge is impossible, totally paralyzed by fear of the future, mistrustful of friends. All of this stuff actually makes the pleasant life impossible. Dwelling on the worst could really take the whole joy and pleasure out of the whole project of philosophy. And so this is why we talk about attitudes like hope — and even to an extent faith, which is what we started with — this issue of confidence. This stuff is really, really important. Because next week we’re going to talk about this section — “attitude toward the present.” He’s called this chapter “the virtues,” but to me a lot of this stems from more of your attitude toward the world. What is your approach to life? Are you going to have hope that you’re going to experience something good in the future, pleasant expectations? Or are you constantly looking for the worst? So it’s questions like these that I think are worthwhile to consider as we attempt to study the philosophy.
Cassius: And DeWitt can seem very droning at times, and we’ve skipped a lot of it here, but it’s worth considering — at least worth talking about. We’re going to come back next week and pick up on “attitude toward the present,” and then after that we’re going to close the chapter with a series of subsections on gratitude — which again is part of these attitudes that allow an Epicurean to hope for a better result and a happy life. We’ll come back next week and continue on in chapter 14. In the meantime, drop by the forum and let us know your comments and questions. Talk to you next week.