Episode 203 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 11 - Do The Senses Have Jurisdiction To Judge The Supreme Good?
Date: 12/02/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3552-episode-203-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-11-do-the-senses-have-jurisdiction-to/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 12–13. Cicero introduces a Roman legal analogy: courts only have jurisdiction over matters within their competence — and the senses, he argues, lack the jurisdiction to judge the supreme good. Reason, armed with virtue and knowledge of human and divine things, is the proper judge. The episode works through the implications of this claim.
Key threads: DeWitt’s observation that Epicurus excludes reason from the canon (reason cannot make direct contact with reality — only the sensations can); Thomas Jefferson’s enlightenment faith in reason (“fix reason firmly in her seat”); Aristotle’s claim that man is a “god subject to death” created for thought and action, and the Epicurean/Lucretian counter-argument that the eyes were not made for seeing — they developed through natural processes and then found their use; Darwin’s passage on the eye from On the Origin of Species (recorded on or near the anniversary of its publication, Nov. 24, 1859); the “is-ought” problem (Hume’s guillotine) and whether Epicurus is vulnerable to it; DeWitt on whether Epicurus involuntarily ascribes purposiveness to nature (“she has brought into being a purposive creature, man”); the difference between psychological hedonism as a descriptive claim versus a normative one; and Cicero’s final hand-wave in section 13, where he simply “assumes” that any scheme without virtue is to be banished from philosophy — which Cassius finds infuriating.
Martin’s closing: the key is the choice to take pleasure and pain as guides — that is what bridges the is-ought gap for the Epicurean. Callistheni’s closing: Cicero doesn’t seem to trust that humans can develop wisdom through experience and anticipation — he doesn’t acknowledge that using memory and foresight is itself rational activity, not mere animal impulse.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 203 of 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 walk you through the Epicurean texts and we 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.
This week we’re continuing our discussion of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends. We’re beginning today in section 12. We’re continuing in the Reid edition — we’re on page 45 at the bottom — in the middle of Cicero’s complaint that Epicurus has expanded the definition of pleasure inappropriately.
Last week we went through a section where he was criticizing Epicurus’s reliance on looking at animals for the conclusion as to what the highest good might be, and he has concluded section 11 by repeating his allegation that Epicurus is being inconsistent. He says it makes no sense to say that the sensual stimulating pleasures are where you look, but in the end you wind up with absence of pain — which is supposedly something different in Cicero’s eyes than pleasure itself.
So after criticizing that inconsistency, Cicero goes on to say this.
“Now, as to Epicurus’s statement that pleasure is decided by the senses themselves to be good and pain to be evil, Epicurus allows more authority to the senses than our laws grant to us when we act as judges in private suits. For we are unable to decide anything except that which falls within our jurisdiction. In this matter, judges often uselessly add in giving their decision the words ‘if a thing falls within my jurisdiction.’ And if the affair was not within their jurisdiction, the decision is none the more valid.”
Before we go further — he’s raising this issue that even in courts of law, there are certain courts that have jurisdiction over certain matters and not others. This would have been a concept very familiar to the Romans of his time: if you bring a matter before a judge that is not within the judge’s jurisdiction, then the judge has no authority to pronounce judgment on it. We have very similar situations today in our divisions of courts with jurisdiction over different types of things. So Cicero has launched off here by pointing out that before we agree to the finding of a judge in a particular matter, we must find that the judge has jurisdiction to issue an order on that topic.
So Cicero continues: “On what do the senses decide? On sweet and bitter, smooth and rough, nearness and distance, rest and motion, the rectangular form and the circular? Reason then will declare an unbiased opinion, aided first by the knowledge of all things human and divine, which may justly be called wisdom, then by the association of the virtues, which reason has appointed to be rulers over all things. And here’s an aside — just as reason has appointed the virtues to be the ruler of all things, but you have appointed virtue to be the attendants and the handmaidens of the pleasures. Truly then, the opinion of all these will in the first place declare concerning pleasure that there is no chance for her — I won’t say to occupy alone the throne of the supreme good, but none even for her to occupy it with morality in the way described.”
Around this section, he’s stating that if you follow reason and virtue, you will never be able to allow pleasure — not only to sit on the throne by herself — you’ll certainly never allow pleasure to sit on the throne of judgment at all, even with virtue sitting next to her.
Joshua:
Okay. So he makes a series of claims about who — or more properly what — is the arbiter in this dispute. And he says it cannot be the senses. He said the same thing in section 11: he said animals have no power of judging because they don’t have reason; they are restricted to the senses. He doesn’t say it directly, but I think that’s clearly part of his claim there. The animals are corrupted, he was saying as well. That’s another reason why they can’t give a judgment — you wouldn’t allow a corrupt person to be your judge.
Now, one of the claims Cicero makes is that reason will pronounce an unbiased opinion on what is the good, the telos, the end. And I don’t even think that it’s true — whose reason? That’s my first question. The fact that people are disagreeing about this tells me that reason is not the standard, because we have so many divergent conclusions reached by different people who presumably all possess reason.
Cassius:
Yeah. This is really a fascinating sentence you’re talking about right now. Because where he says “reason then will declare an unbiased opinion,” he states the two things he thinks are the input into reason — the two things reason will use. He says reason will declare an unbiased opinion aided first by the knowledge of all things human and divine, which may justly be called wisdom, and then second by the association of the virtues, which reason has appointed to be the ruler over all things. So he’s saying reason is going to be unbiased because it’s going to bring to the judgment seat knowledge and virtue as the two things which will allow it to rule properly in these decisions.
Joshua:
Right. Now there’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson that we’ve discussed many times. He says: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion, question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” So Jefferson here — this is kind of a key aspect of the Enlightenment, that whole period really, that we have been endowed with reason and that it allows us to probe the secrets of everything in nature. And again, I’m not even sure I’m convinced that reason can be unbiased even though it has knowledge on the one hand and virtue on the other.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua. But of course, as we know, Epicurus endorses the use of reason and says the wise man is going to be guiding his life by reason. So it really is interesting to think about what is the different take here. With Cicero looking to reason, but says reason is using knowledge of things human and divine plus virtue — while Epicurus seems to be endorsing reason as well, but says that it has at its left and right sides something very different.
Perhaps one way of looking at it is: the senses on one side and then the young of all species on the other side. You’ve got the question of what is the standard of proof and where does your evidence come from? Do we really have true unbiased opinion of divine knowledge? And then where is this basis for virtue that Cicero alleges reason has appointed to be the ruler over all things? Perhaps that’s the big issue right there. Why should we accept that reason has appointed virtue to be the ruler over all things?
And that’s where Cicero throws in his slam at Epicureans — because he says that you set virtue to be the attendant and the handmaiden of pleasure instead of pleasure to be the attendant of virtue. And to repeat again what Cicero says, he says that truly the opinion of all these will declare that pleasure has no place at the throne of the supreme good at all. It’s certainly not in the central place of making the ultimate decision, and it’s not even at the side of virtue or reason. It’s not even something reason will even consider in making the final determination as to what the supreme good is.
Joshua:
Right. Now DeWitt dealt with this extensively in his chapter 7, “The Canon, Reason, and Nature,” in which he says on page 122: “It will have been noted that the canon makes no mention of reason. This means that reason is denied rank as a criterion of truth.” And then in the next paragraph DeWitt says that the position of Epicurus becomes seemingly paradoxical because there is no instrumentality by which reason can be dethroned except reason itself. And we dealt with this extensively in our series on DeWitt.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua. That takes us back into that question of what is really meant by the canon of truth and whether reason is a contact with nature as a source of evidence or whether reason is sort of the weighing and analysis process. Is it the weighing process itself that is in question, or is it the evidence and the source of the evidence that is really in question?
At least at the moment, as I’m looking at these, it seems to me that the big issue is not necessarily so much that we’re using reason and a process of analysis — that process of reasoning can be viewed neutrally and can be viewed agreeably by both Epicurus and by Cicero and the people who are against Epicurus. The real question comes down to: where is your evidence coming from? Is it from your observation of nature in the case of Epicurus, or is it — in the case of Cicero and the Platonists and so forth — from some kind of divine and human knowledge and some kind of virtue that you can somehow make direct contact with and consider as your evidence?
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s a very good place to draw the line. I have a passage here from DeWitt in that chapter. He says: “It will be observed that the incorporeal, eternal, and unerring reason of Plato and Aristotle is eliminated by the Epicureans. The purely human mortal reason remains. But even this is subordinated to the sensations, because ‘not even reason can refute the sensations, for reason depends wholly upon them.’ This does not mean, as Gassendi imagined, that the whole content of thought is derived from the sensations — which was not the teaching of Epicurus — but rather that the deprivation of sensation is virtually death. The basic idea is the conviction that reason is incapable of making direct contact with reality. Reason is active only when the sensations are active. Without the sensations, reason possesses no criteria, since they, along with the prolepseis and feelings, function as contacts with reality. Reason cannot interface directly with the stuff of nature.”
You know, the word “reality” has that word res as its root — the same word that occurs in the title of Lucretius’s poem, De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things.” So reality is sort of “thingishness.” Things that exist in nature. And reason has no capacity to directly interface with that.
Cassius:
Joshua, I’m really glad you cited what you just did. Because as we move on to the remainder of section 12 here, the very last thing in this section is that Cicero is going to point out that there’s a major issue in the difference between things versus names. And I think that’s going to take us back to a statement in Diogenes Laertius about two kinds of investigation that Epicurus said one should engage in: one into things versus one into words.
But as we continue into section 12, the next thing Cicero says right after talking about pleasure being unable to occupy the throne, is: “As to freedom from pain, the opinion of reason will be the same, it too will be turned away. Nor will any system concerning the supreme good be accepted which has any connection either with pleasure or absence of pain or is disassociated from morality.”
I’m going to repeat that sentence. Cicero is again stating this central point: the system of reason that he’s referring to here will turn away from the supreme good and will not accept anything which has any connection with either pleasure or absence of pain or which is dissociated from morality. So reason will reserve two schemes for her repeated deliberations:
“For she will either on the one hand decide there is nothing good which is not moral and nothing bad which is not immoral — that all other things are either entirely without importance or have just so much that they are neither objects for our desire nor for our avoidance but merely for our choice or our rejection” — this is an echo of Stoicism in terms of “indifferences” and “preferred indifferences.”
“Or she will prefer on the other hand that scheme which she sees not only furnished to the fullest extent with morality but also enriched by those very primary endowments with nature and by the perfection of life on all its sides. And she will be clearer in her judgment if she understands whether the difference between these schemes is one of things or of names.”
Let’s stop and talk about that. Let’s take up this issue of morality first. I think Cicero is on weak ground here, because just because the truth ends up being immoral or amoral does not any less make it the truth. I think that has to be said. He’s using morality as part of his standard to determine what is true. But there’s no universal law written into the fabric of nature that says that the outcome that turns out to be true will also be the outcome that is the most moral.
Joshua:
I think that’s the point of contention though, because apparently the Platonists or the Stoics would think exactly that. They think that the divine fire and the prime mover and the divinity of the universe means that the moral is the true.
And Christianity, Catholicism in particular, also holds to this idea of natural law — that the world we live in is another revelation of God and that it points us to moral truth that is absent either from the Bible or from the life of Jesus.
I’m going to quote Charles Darwin here when we get to the subject in section 13. But one of the things that drove Charles Darwin to question the existence of God was that he observed wasp mothers laying their eggs in the living flesh of other insects — burying them underground, paralyzed but still alive — so the eggs hatch and the larval wasp eats its way through the living flesh of this other insect to give it the nutrition it needs to grow. And when you really look at nature, you don’t find morality as we would understand it. A God who created this would have seen a different way to do that. But that’s Charles Darwin’s opinion. And he actually ends up with the conclusion that is the directly opposite of Cicero’s. By looking to nature and seeing what is in nature, he emerges with the conclusion using vera ratio — true reason — that this could not have been ordered by a moral or just God.
Cassius:
And I think that argument is very persuasive. Yeah.
So Joshua, the linkage between nature and the good is where a lot of this discussion turns again. Cicero is repeating what I think can be identified with the Stoic position: there is nothing good which is not moral, nothing bad which is not immoral, and everything else besides what’s moral and immoral is a matter either entirely without importance or just so much that they are neither objects for desire nor for avoidance.
And then he’s got the second option which is perhaps Aristotelian: she will prefer that scheme which sees not only furnished to the full extent with morality, so he’s saying this scheme has virtue in it, but also enriched by those primary endowments of nature and by the perfection of life on all its sides. My understanding is that Aristotle sees virtue as key but not sufficient — that you also need these other primary endowments of nature, such as health and sound mind and sufficient resources to be able to live happily.
Neither of which are at all the same view that Epicurus has been describing.
Joshua:
And then again Cicero closes this section by saying: “She will be clearer in her judgment if she understands whether the difference between these schemes is one of things or one of names.” And again I’d like to go back to some statements from Epicurus that may relate to that distinction between things versus names.
What I was thinking of earlier: in the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus says “first of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection — so that we may neither leave everything uncertain nor go on explaining to infinity, or use words devoid of meaning.” So Epicurus has definitely been concerned in the Letter to Herodotus about how we’re using words.
And then over in the biography of Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius, around line 34 — where Diogenes Laertius is explaining aspects of the Epicurean canon — he says: “The internal sensations they say are to pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature; the one is akin to nature and the other alien; by means of these two, choice and avoidance are determined. And then here’s this interesting sentence: “Of investigations, some concern actual things, others mere words.” That sentence seems to me to be very close to — and probably talking about the same issue that — Cicero is addressing when he says we need to understand the difference between these views as being one of things or of names.
Martin:
Things are almost like beyond language — you’re experiencing things before you really start thinking about them, but yet they have an existence. Objects in the world. And then as soon as you name something, you’re taking something into the world of language, which adds a whole other layer onto the whole experience of things.
Cassius:
Yeah, Callistheni, I think you’re talking in the right area here. This is a reference to the logos or logic issue — this process of assigning meaning to words and the issues that arise when you attempt to do that, and you as you always will fail to encapsulate every aspect of the particular things you’re describing. You introduce the possibility of error through incorrect definitions, imprecise definitions, ambiguous definitions, over-broad definitions. And that presumably is what we’re talking about here — the issues and errors that arise from the manipulation of words versus the manipulation of actual things, which of course Epicurus would say comes through the senses.
I would present: things are what you can touch, see, taste, feel, smell, hear. Those are actual things, as opposed to the words that our minds have assigned to the actual things. I don’t know that Cicero is resolving here in this sentence at the end of 12 which of the two he’s saying is better. Maybe he’ll come back to that as we go forward into 13. But he’s closing by saying that reason will be clearer in her judgment if she understands whether the difference between these schemes arises from things versus names — saying that confusion over different names for the same thing is one thing he’s criticized Epicurus for repeatedly, and that reason will give us a better answer if we give the right name to the right thing rather than multiple different names to the same thing.
Joshua:
Cassius, our next section is section 13 here. And I want to say something about what Cicero does at the very beginning, because it’s so important.
Cicero says: “Attaching myself to her opinion” — that is, to reason’s opinion — “I shall now take the same course, so far as I can. I shall narrow the field of dispute and shall assume that all the uncomplex schemes of the philosophers in which virtue is not added are to be entirely banished from philosophy.”
Now this is somewhat difficult to parse. But one of the claims he makes is that reason will pronounce an unbiased opinion — whose reason? — and he says reason is using knowledge of things, human and divine, plus virtue, to make its judgment. And then here he just hand-waves the whole issue away by saying “well, I agree with reason” and “unless virtue is part of the ultimate good, you’re out of court.” As if that settles the question — which it certainly does not.
What he should be saying is: “well, when I use my reason, this is the conclusion I get to — but you might well get to a different conclusion.” This is the way people use reason, and should use reason.
Cassius:
This is why I kind of have an issue with Thomas Jefferson in that quote — he’s making reason out to be like a god unto itself, that reason makes the decisions. But reason is just one faculty among many, and it has pride of place in our view of ourselves because it’s kind of the thing that separates us from other species of animals. But it does not follow that just because other animals don’t have reason, reason is therefore this divine spark that guides the way and sits alone on the throne to arbitrate a dispute between what is good and what is not. I don’t think that’s a valid claim.
And I totally agree with what DeWitt has said — that the Epicureans, because of their conviction that reason is incapable of making direct contact with reality, have excluded reason from the canon, from any ability really to make the kind of direct assessment of nature that is necessary to understand what is the good.
Cicero is focusing his attack first here on those who don’t even include virtue at all — which is Aristippus, Epicurus, and potentially Hieronymus of Rhodes as well. You’ve got to at least say, apparently, as Carneades said, that virtue is part of the ultimate good. So he’s just decided to wave his hand like a wand and say that we’re going to follow reason, and unless virtue is part of the ultimate good you’re out of court — as if that settles the question.
Joshua:
Yeah, now this is the passage I’ve been excited to get to here, because it has so many deep implications. This is kind of the fault line that runs through all human thought and divides us into two camps: were we put here by an intelligence for a purpose, or were we not?
Now, Cicero says: “First, the scheme of Aristippus and all the Cyrenaics, who are not afraid to make their supreme good lie in that form of pleasure which excites the sense with greatest possible sweetness while they made light of your freedom from pain. These men did not see that, just as the horse is created for speed, the ox for plowing, the dog for hunting, so man is created for two purposes, as Aristotle says — thought and action — being so to speak a god subject to death. And in opposition to these views, they have made up their minds that this god-like creature — like some sluggish and lazy beast — came into being to feed and take pleasure in propagating its kind. Though I can imagine no view sillier than this.”
This is the passage I’ve been excited to get to. Let me read what Lucretius says in response — this is the 1743 edition published by Daniel Brown. And this is Lucretius transmitting the Epicurean position:
“In subjects of this nature, guard yourself to the utmost of your power against that error, that gross mistake, and never believe that those bright orbs the eyes were made that we might see, or that our legs were made upright and things fixed upon them and were supported by feet that we might walk and take large strides, or that our arms were made to assist us in those offices that are necessary to the support of life. And whatever constructions they put upon the other parts of the body, they are all absurd and against reason. For no member of the body was made for any particular use; but after it was made, each member found out a use proper to itself. For there was no such thing as to see before the eyes were made, nor to speak before the tongue was formed; but the tongue was rather in being before there was speech, and the ears were made long before any sound was heard. In short, all the members in my opinion were in being before their particular uses were set out.”
Cassius:
This stuff goes so far back in our heritage as beings that developed out of nature — out of natural processes — that it cannot be said that we were put here like a geranium in a flower pot, or that we were put here with a purpose, or that we were put here like a god subject to death with two modes: thought and action. Lucretius says: “All things therefore that were in being before the use of them was determined applied themselves afterwards to the office that was most suitable and serviceable to them. Of this kind principally are the senses and members of our bodies and therefore you are to avoid upon all accounts so much as to think that they were at first formed for any particular design or use.”
Joshua:
Now I’m going to read a quote by Charles Darwin from The Origin of Species. By the way, we’re recording this on or around November 26th, which is very close to November 24th — the anniversary of the first publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, I think in 1859. He says:
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You’ll still hear this argument — “What use is half an eye?” This is Darwin’s answer to that question before the question was even asked, really.
He says: “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned around, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false. But the old saying of vox populi, vox dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God — as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. A reason tells me that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor — as is certainly the case — if further the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited — as is likewise certainly the case — and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection should not be considered as subversive to our theory.”
So Lucretius — we have to assume he’s transmitting the Epicurean position on this — and it totally tallies in my view with what Darwin would go on to discover in the middle of the 19th century: that things were not designed ahead of time and then built that way, that they developed out of nature and were put to use gradually and through iterations and variations.
Cassius:
Yeah. So it’s not true — as Cicero is saying here — that the horse is created for speed or the ox for plowing or the dog for hunting; it’s not true as Aristotle says that man is created for two purposes, thought and action, as a god subject to death. So when the Epicureans come on the scene and in opposition to Aristotle say — and this is Cicero putting his own spin on it — that man and other animals came into being to feed and to take pleasure in propagating their kind — that is actually a much truer description of how things actually develop. The drive to procreate has been there since the beginning. We were not just put here for these higher purposes of morality and virtue and reason. Nothing started with that in view. And to me that’s a fatal flaw in this whole kind of thinking. It’s a fatal flaw for Aristotle and it’s a fatal flaw for Cicero. It’s totally against everything we know about nature.
Joshua, let me ask you something about the very famous passage from Lucretius about the eyes not being born in order to see. I can see potentially two separate points being made here. One of them is absolutely clear — Epicurus rejected the idea that a supernatural being above nature created the eye with a purpose in mind that humans use it to see. But what I’d like to discuss is: to what extent would it be fair to say that Epicurus is doing a little bit of the same thing by looking at what nature has created and concluding from that that that is a legitimate analysis to use to determine what we should do? When he looks at the young of all things and sees that they pursue pleasure and avoid pain — is Epicurus using a similar method of analysis as to what we’ve just been criticizing?
Joshua:
Cassius, I’m so glad you asked that because I’m looking at Norman DeWitt’s book here, on page 221. He says: “As for nature herself, she speaks through the newly born, undefiled, and uncontaminated. Her word is true philosophy, the vera ratio so often invoked by Lucretius.”
And then in the next paragraph DeWitt says this: “Out of this teaching arises a perplexing question. Was Epicurus, in making of nature a judge and, incidentally, a teacher, involuntarily ascribing to her a certain purposiveness and by so doing admitting himself as a believer in teleology?”
Let me stop there, Cassius. Is that kind of the question you’re asking?
Cassius:
It is. The word “purpose” is key to the discussion. Did nature have a purpose? And I think you’re going to answer that nature itself has no purpose but rather evolved a purposive creature in man — that an unpurposive nature evolved over time a purposive creature. But the question also involves the propriety of looking at what is and deriving from what is the question of what ought to be.
Joshua:
Okay, so you’re making the point of David Hume — whether looking at what is, a mere description of how things are, can ever give you insight into how they should be. That’s an excellent question. I’m not sure that Epicurus is falling into that trap, but it’s certainly something we need to think about.
Let me put it in these terms. One of the things we’ve discussed — and if you go back to our interview with Emily Austin, she says it repeatedly — was the description of Epicurus as a psychological hedonist. And actually, we see that if you go back to Book One in this very text, we see Torquatus making the same point: “Cicero, you say that my ancestor did such and such, took the necklace off the enemy, to preserve virtue or to keep the troops in order or to save Rome from some calamity. But actually, Torquatus is saying, my ancestors did all of these things ultimately for the pursuit of pleasure.” And this is kind of the claim of psychological hedonism — that everything we do, if you could see it clearly, is geared toward either the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain.
Cassius:
Yes. I think this is a key issue. Remember last week we were quoting Cicero as saying that whether pleasure is a primary endowment of nature is a very difficult problem. He’s considering pleasure to be corruption as opposed to something that nature has given us that is natural and should be accepted. So you’ve got this issue of how to view pleasure.
I think we all agree there’s no way to interpret Epicurus as anything but saying there’s no supernatural force that had a purpose or a design that created things the way they are and we should follow the design because we want to honor that creator — that’s one method of analysis that religion adopts. But I can see somebody saying Epicurus is doing the same thing in a different way: he’s saying this is the way people are, they are created by nature and they are following pleasure and pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, and therefore it’s just a function of nature that they’re doing that. Should we accept that, and in so doing, are we falling into the is-ought problem?
Joshua:
The is-ought problem is so paralyzing in that way. But let me read this DeWitt quote from page 222: “Thus, so far as touches teleology, the net situation may be described as follows: there is no purposiveness in nature, but in the processes of non-purposive creation she has brought into being a purposive creature, man. For him, being capable of reason, a telos is conceivable.”
And you’re saying that even that sentence violates Hume’s is-ought rule — I’m not even entirely sure you’re wrong about that, Cassius. But it seems to me ultimately that is your only basis for decision-making. If you don’t look at nature and follow nature, then you are simply imagining things that don’t exist. Because we consider nature to be all that exists. So that would be my problem with invoking Hume: I’m not sure that I even understand what Hume’s problem is. I don’t see that I have an alternative to following nature. Do you understand him to be suggesting some alternative?
Cassius:
No. Hume is saying that we can’t bridge that gap at all — you couldn’t point to God, you couldn’t point to morality, you couldn’t point to nature, you couldn’t point to the law, you couldn’t point to anything to bridge that gap. But it’s been clear to me for a long time that the Epicureans kind of sensed this problem. In part because Epicurus says, when he looks to the young of all species, when he looks to newborn children, that the claim that they pursue pleasure and avoid pain is not something that has to be supported by elaborate argument. He seems to understand that once you invoke elaborate argument into this problem, you are caught on the horns of the is-ought problem. Epicurus is saying that he points to the animals, to the young of all species and to newborn children, and it’s not elaborate argument that bridges that gap for him.
Joshua:
I very much agree with what you said there — I think that gives you the answer as to Epicurus’s position. It seems like Epicurus was anticipating this problem, because I think that gives you the answer: he’s looking at the way things are and concluding that at least certain aspects of it are the way things ought to be. Snow is white, honey is sweet — that is the way nature has provided.
Now one thing about Hume’s guillotine is that he does allow for what we call instrumental oughts. So an instrumental ought is a sentence structure where you say: “If you want X, then you ought to do Y.” It’s not that any ought is impossible — it’s that these transcendental moral oughts are impossible. So “if you want to quench your thirst, you ought to get a drink” — that kind of thing is fine. It’s the absolute categorical moral “thou shalt” that Hume is attacking.
Cassius:
I could see a big difference between just looking at pleasure and pain and saying that animals are created by nature to pursue pleasure and avoid pain — that’s one thing — but then when you start trying to get very specific about something that an animal should do or should not do, that becomes much more complicated. You can observe pleasure and pain through feeling. But that’s the trick: how do you actually act in order to produce pleasure and avoid pain? That’s the issue that is so difficult. But at the same time, both things are true. It is difficult to determine exactly how to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. But the feelings that are there, implanted by nature, are the starting point and the end point of the blessed life, as Epicurus says — that just is the way it is.
Let’s begin to wrap up today. Cicero here at the bottom of page 46 at the very beginning of section 13 says: “Reason has decided that pleasure cannot sit on the throne with any semblance of morality — it has to be virtue, it has to be reason and virtue. And then Cicero says: ‘Attaching myself to her unbiased opinion, I shall now take the same course. I shall narrow the field of the dispute and I shall assume — I shall assume — that all the uncomplex schemes of the philosophers in which virtue is not added are to be entirely banished from philosophy.’”
Well, I’m sorry Cicero, but just because you want that to be true doesn’t mean that it is. I don’t know why I find this so infuriating, but it absolutely gets me worked up because it starts from assumptions that are so perilously wrong and it deserves to be called out wherever it crops up.
Yes, Joshua. Let’s go back to the original question that Cicero raised near the beginning of section 12. I think we can summarize the question we’ve been discussing today this way: what is the court of ultimate jurisdiction that has the ability to tell us what the supreme good is? What would Epicurus’s answer to that question be? To what tribunal, to what court, to what judge do we look to decide what is the supreme good?
Joshua:
My immediate answer is: to the canon of truth — to the sensations, to the feelings, and to the prolepseis, and to the vera ratio of Epicurean philosophy. And where does nature fit in that question?
Well, looking at this — DeWitt here says that Epicurus “makes of nature a judge and, incidentally, a teacher.” I would think that’s exactly what that sentence means. Epicurus is making nature the judge and the teacher. And I think he’s right. Epicurus is saying: that’s where you find the jurisdiction for deciding how to live. Not in religion or ideal forms or in some kind of essences that you make contact with through logic. But in what you can observe, what you can feel, what you can hear and see and touch.
When Cicero says: “Well, what did the census have jurisdiction over? They decide whether it’s sweet or bitter, smooth or rough, near or distant, at rest or in motion, rectangular or circular” — yes. And everything else that we need to decide about how to live is derived from these.
Cassius:
I should clarify that when we say that “nature is a judge” we don’t mean that nature has that ability to do things intelligently. I’ve told the story before about the official measuring sticks of the British Empire, which were housed in a building that burned down — and when they rebuilt it they put them up as bronze plaques in different parts of the city, so that anyone could go up to this plaque and say, “okay, this is a centimeter right” — and if I hold this thing up to it I will know for certain whether this thing I’m holding is a centimeter or not, because I have the standard right here. And to me that’s what we mean when we say that nature is a judge. We hold things up to her to determine whether they bear that true stamp or not. Nature certainly does not have an intelligent design goal or purpose for our lives. On the other hand, we do see the Epicureans allegorically personifying nature — Lucretius does it with Venus, he does it with nature speaking to the man facing death. It’s definitely within the Epicurean viewpoint to allegorically personify nature as if she is leading us. But Epicurus does not think that nature is an intelligent being which created you for a particular purpose and your goal should be to study holy books to find out what god wants you to do every moment of your life.
And here is DeWitt on page 222: “When such phrases are employed as ‘the justice of nature’ or ‘the limits of nature,’ this means only that the intelligent agent, the human, looks to the phenomena of nature in order to observe there the signs by which he shall know the true nature of justice and the true limits of pleasure. In the same way he looks to the behavior of the newly born for the signs that shall inform him of the identity of the telos of living. It’s not that nature is a personified judge sitting in an actual chair telling you what’s true or not. She is the standard, the gold standard.”
Okay, well, let’s come to the end of our episode today. On the jurisdiction to determine what the supreme good is — let’s go around and see if anybody has additional thoughts. Martin?
Martin:
Yes. I would like to comment on this Hume’s is-ought thing. So he is right in the sense that we cannot have logical reasoning where we come from an is to what we should do. We need to add something. And the one thing we add is a choice. So it’s our choice — we see that nature gives us pleasure and pain as our guides on how to take action, and so we positively make this choice. Okay, then we take this seriously and use our reason to make this as efficient a choice as possible. And other people — for example those who think that mankind was created by a god who wants mankind to be virtuous in some sense — those people will have a different choice.
Cassius:
Yeah, Martin. Thank you for adding that in. I think that’s a good explanation of the issue.
Callistheni:
This was in response to Joshua — what he said earlier. I could sense a bit of passion in his voice. And then also at that very moment I was thinking: why is it that Cicero is just so obsessed with virtue? It’s as if Cicero does not trust human beings to be able to develop wisdom. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that with regard to pleasure and pain that we can learn, that we can gain knowledge, that we can use our memory and that we can anticipate future outcomes. Because when we do all that, we’re not just some kind of corrupt animal doing the first impulse that comes to mind — we’re using reason, we’re using thought and intelligence to live the best life possible.
Cassius:
Yes, great point, Callistheni. You know, when you started off by focusing on why Cicero is obsessed, I think your statements are exactly correct. It’s sobering to realize that I don’t think it is just Cicero, though. As we’ve gone through Book Two and discussed our episodes on the forum, we’re joking about how we dislike Cicero. But the sobering thing is that Cicero’s views that he’s relaying here are not those only of himself. Cicero is presenting to us the distilled summary of these other anti-Epicurean philosophical schools that were in existence not only in his time but have continued to be the prevailing orthodoxy for the last 2,000 years.
Joshua:
Well, I’m glad you said that, Cassius, because that sets me up for what I was going to say. This is a quote from Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, one of the most famous quotes in all of Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”
You’re right to say that the ideas that Cicero is channeling have become established orthodoxy. We see it everywhere — we see it here in Hamlet, we see it in our laws and our governments. People want to believe that morality is intrinsic in the nature of things, that it has been put there by a designer, and that the only way to know what we should do is by looking back to what that designer has to say directly to us. It’s so foreign — it’s so foreign to the way the Epicureans thought. To me, that’s part of the draw of Epicurean philosophy: that there was this sophisticated system, extant and well-developed in the ancient world, that could answer so many of the questions that this other way of looking at things leaves unanswered.
Cassius:
Yeah. People know, whether it’s instinctively or whatever word you want to use, they know that pleasure and pain are of central importance in life. No matter how Cicero or these other philosophers work up their logic to try to exclude pleasure and pain from the determination of what is the supreme good — people know that doesn’t make sense. They know there’s something wrong with it. And that’s where Epicurus was giving the key to understanding how to place these things in their proper perspectives.
We will come back next week to continue on in section 13 and go further into Cicero’s arguments. Thanks for your time today. Please be sure to drop by the forum and participate in our discussion about this episode or other aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Again, thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.