Episode 229 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 04 - Velleius Continues His Assault On Intelligent Design
Date: 05/22/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3849-episode-229-cicero-s-otnotg-04-velleius-continues-his-attack-on-intelligent-desi/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 229 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most 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.
For our new listeners, let me remind you of several ground rules for both our podcast and our forum. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it. Second, we won’t be talking about modern political issues in this podcast. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is of course entirely up to you. We call this approach not Neo-Epicurean, but Epicurean. Modern philosophy is a philosophy of its own. It’s not the same as Stoicism, Humanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Atheism, Libertarianism, or Marxism. It’s unique and must be understood on its own, not in terms of any conventional modern morality.
Third, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that the Epicureans often used words very differently than we do today. To the Epicureans, God was not omnipotent or omniscient. So Epicurean references to gods do not mean at all the same thing as in major religions today. In Epicurean ethics, pleasure refers not only to sensory stimulation but also to every experience of life which is not felt to be painful. The classical texts show that Epicurus was not focused on luxury, like some people say, but neither did he teach minimalism, as other people say. Epicurus taught that all experiences of life fall under one of two feelings — pleasure or pain — and those feelings, and not God’s idealism or virtue, are the guides that nature gave us by which to live. More than anything else, Epicurus taught that the universe is not supernatural in any way, and that means there is no life after death, and any happiness we’ll ever have comes in this life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion.
Today we’re continuing to review the Epicurean sections of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, as presented by the Epicurean spokesman Velleius. Our intention in going through this material is especially to deal with issues that people find confusing in relation to Epicurus’ discussions about the gods. As we go through this text, we’re also incorporating comments that people bring to us on the forum, and before we get started with today’s text, we had a discussion last week about an article taking the position that modern science had invalidated one of the major arguments against intelligent design.
This article was focused on Epicurus and was saying that the Epicurean theory that life and the universe are natural has been superseded by discovery — according to this article — that the universe is neither infinitely old nor boundless in space. The premise of this article was that Epicurus’ attack on intelligent design and on the creation of the universe by a supernatural God was based on the idea that in an infinite and boundless universe, basically anything can happen because the atoms are randomly combining in unlimited ways, and in a universe where anything can happen, life will happen as well. The writer’s position was that modern science was making this argument obsolete in finding, arguably, that the universe had a beginning and is not boundless.
The point of raising this today is that it’s not accurate to say that Epicurus said that the universe came into existence because anything can happen in an infinitely old and infinitely boundless universe. If you read the Letter to Herodotus and compare it to what Lucretius says in his poem, you’ll find that suitable seeds are necessary for things to come together. In other words, Epicurus’ philosophy is based on limits and boundaries — the borderline, the benchmark set forever, as Humphreys translates the opening of Book One — with the implication that the atoms by their own nature are going to combine in certain ways because of the nature of the atoms, and that those certain ways are in fact limited. Lucretius makes the point that centaurs, for example, are not possible. And there are numbers of references in the text to things which are not possible.
When you review those, I would suggest that it becomes clear that the Epicurean theory of the origin of the universe is not properly interpreted to be based on simple randomness occurring over infinite periods of time. As with most of the issues we discuss here, there’s no way that we can suggest a final right and wrong answer in how best to interpret Epicurus. But what we do hope to do is bring food for thought that people in their own studies can follow up on over time. The Epicurean response to intelligent design is based on the atoms and the void and the eternal characteristics that derive from them. In fact, Lucretius makes argument after argument that things do not happen randomly. You do not see birds pop into existence from the sky. You don’t see trees growing out of water. You don’t see fish walking around on the land. You do see things occurring in a repetitive pattern that has some basis for it, and that basis is not supernatural but is, in fact, that the things we see around us arise because of the nature of the atoms — and this continuity recurs despite the fact that there is also at the same time a swerve of the atom that gives rise to the ability of intelligent beings to have free will.
Joshua: As you pointed out, Cassius, I think that the answer to part of this question comes from Lucretius’ poem — specifically the beginning of Book One — and I’ll cite two examples there that you’ve already alluded to. The first image is this very famous and somewhat Promethean image of Epicurus probing the universe in thought and coming back with knowledge of what those limits and boundaries are. I’ll read again from the Ralph Humphreys translation that you quoted earlier. Lucretius says:
“When human life, all too conspicuous, lay foully groveling on earth, weighed down by grim religion looming from the skies, horribly threatening mortal men — a man, a Greek, first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this menace. No report of gods, no lightning flash, no thunder peal, made this man cower, but drove him all the more with passionate manliness of mind and will, to be the first to spring the tight-barred gates of nature’s hold asunder. So his force, his vital force of mind, a conqueror, beyond the flaming ramparts of the world, explored the vast immensities of space with wit and wisdom and came back to us triumphant, bringing news of what can be and what cannot — limits and boundaries, the border line, the benchmark, set forever.”
And then we have the very famous line: “Religion so is trampled under foot, and by his victory we reach the stars.”
So it’s clear from that passage alone that part of Epicurus’ project in his physics is to establish the limits of what is possible and what is not possible in his atomistic universe. I said that Epicurus in this passage was Promethean, and when Henry David Thoreau read the first hundred or so lines of this poem, he said that he was struck most of all by the image of Prometheus breaking the gates of nature open and basically stealing fire from the gods. And of course it’s not Prometheus — it’s Epicurus. But the image is there, and I think maybe it’s an intentional one, because Lucretius doesn’t name Epicurus in this passage — he just says a Greek first raised his mortal eyes bravely against this menace.
Prometheus was a Titan; his name means foresight. His great crime, after he had helped to create mankind in the myth by molding the early humans out of clay, was to steal fire from Mount Olympus — from the forge of Hephaestus himself, actually — and give it to mankind as a boon to help them. And it was this crime for which he was punished severely by Zeus. He was chained to a mountain, and a vulture was sent to eat his innards every day, and every night they would grow back again. I point that out merely to say that Prometheus, in spite of this myth, doesn’t demand worship, doesn’t demand sacrifice, doesn’t demand really anything of us — this was a gift made out of his pure love for us. I contrast that with some other theories of salvation and religion.
But that’s not the main point. The main point is Epicurus, as a Promethean figure, coming back down to earth with knowledge that he has rooted out of what is possible. And Lucretius goes on a little later in Book One, around line 160. He says:
“Now, if things come from nothing, all things could produce all kinds of things. Nothing would need seed of its own. Men would burst out of the sea and fish and birds from earth, and wild or tame all kinds of beasts of dubious origin inhabit deserts and the greener fields, nor would the same trees bear in constancy the same fruit always, but as like as not, oranges would appear on apple boughs.”
He talks about humans growing large enough that they could wade the deepest oceans or split mountains with their hands — but these things are not possible in the universe that Lucretius describes, because everything has its limit, everything has its boundary, and the boundary is not established by God or by Zeus as it is in the case of Prometheus. The boundary is in the laws that operate nature itself.
So I think that answers most of the objection — which is, well, if the universe is infinite, then everything is possible. Well, it seems like there’s a whole list of things that aren’t possible. For example, many will have heard that the nature of the early earth was that the oxygen in the atmosphere was so rich that insects like dragonflies were growing to be as large as birds. An oxygen-rich atmosphere helps animals that don’t have complex cardiovascular systems to move oxygen around in their bodies and who get it mostly through absorption. But it wouldn’t be possible for there to be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to have a dragonfly the size of a planet, for example. So there are limits to what is possible in the Epicurean universe, and that’s actually a main feature — a huge point that Lucretius is trying to make.
One of the creationist claims I’ve seen is that every time you open a jar of peanut butter, you are disproving the theory of evolution. Because the thought goes: if life can generate spontaneously, then peanut butter — which is nutrient-rich and has everything you might need to get life going — this should happen automatically. Every time you put peanut butter into a jar and seal it, you should be able to wait long enough and get life. Why not? But again, this is built on a wrong way of thinking about these things.
Cassius: That’s a great example with the peanut butter, Joshua. These questions continue to be discussed not only in terms of peanut butter and how long does it take different things to occur. But to relate this back to the article that I mentioned, let me quote specifically what we’re talking about. This article says, quote: “But new discoveries seem to have finished what the big bang theory started. It is becoming increasingly undeniable that the building blocks of life are far too unlikely to emerge by chance, even in a universe as large and old as ours” — which is sort of a variation of your peanut butter argument. They’re saying that you should be able to get anything out of a jar of peanut butter, and that’s not what Epicurus argued.
To continue the quote, this writer says: “For a long time Epicurus’ version of the universe seemed probable to many. After natural philosophers realized how vast the universe really was, and again after the existence of atoms was confirmed, Epicurus seemed to have been vindicated. But now we have discovered that however vast the universe may be, it is finite, and its size does not hold a candle to the vast improbability of the miracle that is life. After more than 2,000 years, the original foundation of materialist naturalism in Western thought seems to be crumbling.”
Of course, he’s talking about the Epicurean worldview that the universe arose without the existence of supernatural gods. What I would suggest to anybody who’s considering questions like that would be that before you start concluding that the Epicurean worldview is about to crumble, you should first make an effort to understand the Epicurean worldview in the first place. That’s something that applies to the ethics with pleasure, it applies to the gods that we’re discussing now, it applies to the epistemology — the canonics of Epicurus. You first have to understand what it is Epicurus was saying before you can legitimately conclude that Epicurus was wrong. This article, in attacking Epicurean theory based on pure randomness and infinity of time and boundlessness of space, is attacking a straw man, because that is not what Epicurus was saying. Issues of chance certainly play a part, but Epicurean physics is based on the regularity and predictability of events that derives from the nature of the eternal atoms moving through the void.
Now to turn us back to the text for today. Near the end of Section 10, Velleius, the Epicurean spokesman, had just gone through the basic ideas of what the Stoics and Plato had said about the nature of a god. Velleius, focusing mostly on the Stoic argument that the entire universe is a god, says, quote:
“For the earth itself, as it is part of the world, is part also of the deity. We see vast tracts of land, barren and uninhabitable, some because they are scorched by the too near approach of the sun, others because they are bound up with frost and snow through the great distance which the sun is from them. Therefore, if the world is a deity, as these are parts of the world, some of the deity’s limbs must be said to be scorched and some are frozen.”
This is essentially ridiculing the Stoic idea that you should consider the universe itself to be the supernatural god, because if this world is part of the supernatural god, then parts of the god are frozen or scorched — which makes no sense if we associate the supernatural with something perfect and blessed. Always remembering that Epicurus has stressed in the Letter to Menoikeus, and referred to in a number of places, that you should believe nothing about a god that is inconsistent with blessedness and incorruptibility. Well, Velleius’ ultimate point here is that it’s very hard for a person of common sense to think that a scorched desert or a frozen wasteland at the Arctic regions is consistent with a state of blessedness.
Velleius says: “These are your doctrines, Lucilius. But what those of others are I’ll endeavor to ascertain by tracing them back from the earliest of ancient philosophers. Thales the Milesian, who first inquired after such objects, asserted water to be the origin of things and that God was that mind which formed all things from water. If the gods can exist without corporeal sense and if there’s to be a mind without a body, why did he annex a mind to water?”
This is a hint of the dualism we see in a lot of philosophical positions about the nature of the universe — that they’re going to come up with some material that is acted on, and then a separate entity that acts on that material. With Thales asserting that that material was water and God is whatever it was — the organizing force which formed all things from water. And as Velleius is pointing out, if God exists without being attached to a body and if God is perfect and self-sufficient and self-contained, why would a God choose to annex his mind to water or any other substance?
Joshua: As you say, Cassius, we’re getting into a list now of major — and usually pre-Socratic — philosophers. The first one is Thales of Miletus, which is in Ionia. And Thales was one of the seven sages, founding figures of ancient Greece. The seven sages were philosophers, statesmen, and lawgivers of the 7th and 6th centuries BC who were renowned for their wisdom, and they formed cultural touchstones all throughout the Greek world as the firsts in their field. Thales is considered in that tradition to be the first true philosopher in Greek philosophy. It says on Wikipedia: “Many regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, breaking from the prior use of mythology to explain the world and instead using natural philosophy.”
If you’ve heard me talk about him in the past on this podcast, it’s in that context — that Thales, even though he talks about the divine mind and so forth, is still making a very early effort to get away from the old way of thinking: it’s all in the lap of the gods, I don’t know how any of this stuff works, just the gods do it and we pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But Thales is making really the first effort in the Greek tradition to describe how nature operates. And yes, he still invokes God in order to arrive at that conclusion — but it is a stark difference from other modes of purely religious thinking. We’re now getting into natural philosophy, and I think that’s important. I do want to give Thales some credit for that.
The charge laid against him here by Velleius is that he asserts water to be the origin of things and that God was the mind which formed all things from water. And even more importantly, the next question: if the gods can exist without corporeal sense, and if there can be a mind without a body, why did he annex a mind to water?
Cassius: Yeah, that seems to me an argument that Lucretius pursues at length — that there’s really no reason why, if an intelligent being exists and it doesn’t have a body of any kind, why would the eternally happy being decide to create itself a body or annex itself to water or fire or air or earth or anything? What sense does it make? It’s sort of like the argument about why did the gods wake up one morning and decide to create themselves a universe, if they already pre-existed from eternity in a perfectly happy state — why would they change that state in any way?
I do get the impression you’re right that Velleius says Thales was the one who first inquired after these subjects. It seems to be pretty universally respected that Thales is a great figure for being among the first to have any kind of systematic thought process that involved not just attributing everything that happens to inexplicable gods, but thinking about what kind of mechanics and methodology might be behind what’s going on. So he certainly deserves a lot of credit. I don’t see Velleius here as necessarily ridiculing Thales as much as pointing out that there’s an inconsistency in Thales’ reasoning — that whether it’s water or anything else, if a god exists without connection to physical things, there’s no reason for the god to change that status.
Joshua: Yeah, I think that’s well said, and we should also bear in mind that most of what we think we know about the life of Thales comes from Diogenes Laertius, who wrote eight centuries after the fact. So we’re getting into a period of early Greek history here where we should begin to take a lot of things with a heavy helping of salt.
Cassius: Yeah, after we go through these different philosophers we don’t have nearly as much information about them as we would like to have, but I think what we’re going to see is that Velleius is making some very intelligent observations that, if we think about what he’s saying, are very perceptive. And this, like the rest, is an argument that can be applied to people today who assert the existence of some supernatural force as the creator of the universe. Why would that supernatural force change its status to annex itself to any kind of physical existence?
Velleius goes next to Anaximander. He says, quote:
“It was Anaximander’s opinion that the gods were born, that after a great length of time they died, and that there are innumerable worlds. But what conception can we possibly have of a deity who is not eternal?”
Now this is a subject we’ve been discussing very recently on the forum. We generally talk about Epicurus saying don’t believe anything about the gods other than their incorruptibility and their blessedness. Well, what does incorruptibility really mean? Does it mean that there is simply no possibility of the god changing its status and that it is inherent in the nature of the god that he cannot be corrupted? Or does it mean that there is some force that sustains the incorruptibility of the god?
As DeWitt points out in his book, in a Christian or theistic worldview you can take the position that if there’s a supernatural god, then the supernatural god acts to maintain whatever it uses to maintain itself — that this force above everything else is the ultimate explanation for why something is eternal. But if you don’t presume the existence of a supernatural god, there’s a series of questions. Do the Epicurean gods live forever? Have the Epicurean gods existed from eternity, or did the Epicurean gods have a beginning? Is Epicurus answering the question about whether his gods exist from everlasting to everlasting by saying that we should not think anything about them that is inconsistent with blessedness and incorruptibility?
It seems to me that, just like a lot of questions in Epicurean philosophy, you really have to take a step back and examine what your premises really are and whether you’re reading something into what Epicurus is saying that he has not specifically said. We’re going to see Velleius say a lot of different things as time goes on. But with Epicurus himself, we don’t have record of him making very many specific statements about the nature of the gods. He seems to be saying much more about what not to believe than what to believe. He gives us these two ground rules of what to believe — blessedness and incorruptibility — but beyond that, we don’t have a lot of information to go on.
What Velleius is raising here is that Anaximander said that the gods had a beginning, that they were born. And he’s also saying that the gods, after a great length of time, die. But Anaximander himself had said, like Epicurus, that there are innumerable worlds. So there’s a point of commonality between Anaximander and Epicurus in terms of innumerable worlds. But the final question that Velleius asks is: what conception can we possibly have of a deity who is not eternal? Incorruptibility apparently being the word that Epicurus focuses on. This is an echo of what Velleius has already raised earlier when he argued that what kind of natural physicist would take the position that something that had a beginning has no end.
Joshua: I agree. It’s a very interesting one. And Anaximander is an interesting person in part because he seems to prefigure Epicurus in some important ways. One of them is listed here — that there are innumerable worlds. But the other thing that Anaximander thought is that there are innumerable gods for each of the innumerable worlds, that there are gods associated with each of the infinite number of worlds. And this issue of how many gods there are and how many worlds there are is going to be very important later on in this series of episodes, because it’s this text that is the source of the Epicurean principle called isonomia.
I’ll quote from Norman DeWitt’s book from page 271 on the question of isonomia — this is going to come up later in the text and we’re going to talk about it at length there. DeWitt writes:
“In spite of a supercilious opinion to the contrary, Epicurus was not a muddled thinker but a very systematic one. He enunciated his twelve elementary principles and adhered to them closely. Two of these, the fifth and the sixth, asserted the infinity of the universe in respect of matter and space. To this idea of infinity, he ascribed fundamental importance. He exhorted the young Pythocles to study it as one of those master principles which would render easy the recognition of causation in details. Cicero must have been recalling some similar exhortation when he wrote — quoting Epicurus — ‘But of the very greatest importance is the significance of infinity, and in the highest degree deserving of intense and diligent contemplation.’”
DeWitt continues: “It was from this principle that Epicurus deduced his chief theoretical confirmation of belief in the existence of gods. It was from this that he arrived at knowledge of their number and by secondary deduction at knowledge of their abode. He so interpreted the significance of infinity as to extend it from matter and space into the sphere of values — that is, to perfection and imperfection. In brief, if the universe were thought to be imperfect throughout its infinite extent, it could no longer be called infinite. The necessity of thought impelled him to promulgate a subsidiary principle which he called isonomia — a sort of cosmic justice, according to which the imperfection in particular parts of the universe is offset by the perfection of the whole.”
DeWitt makes a point elsewhere in his book about the difference between a cosmos and other kinds of universes. A cosmos is a universe considered as a well-ordered whole. And going on again: “Cicero rendered isonomia as ‘equabilis tributio’ — equitable apportionment. The mistake of rendering it as equilibrium must be avoided.”
So again, this is looking ahead, because we’re going to get into all of this later in the text. But the question of how many gods there are and where they live and whether they were born and whether they die is all related to that fundamental question of the infinity of the universe and the equitable apportionment of things in the universe.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, this is a good time for me to say again that anybody who’s come to this podcast looking for a definitive interpretation for the ages has come to the wrong place. Here, just like everybody else, we’re doing the best we can to read this material and look for a rational interpretation of what Epicurus was actually saying. And then after we come to such an interpretation, we can decide for ourselves whether we agree with it or disagree with it. But there’s a lot of mining of information that has to be done here before we can even put together a coherent understanding of what Epicurus’ position really was.
At this point in our analysis, the important thing is to bring up that these positions are out there, to focus people’s attention on the fact that this information is there. And if you’re going to come to a coherent overall understanding of the philosophy, you need to be able to consistently take all of this information and bring it into a whole that makes sense. We can’t answer for you what isonomia really means in every respect at this moment. But what we can point out with definiteness is — as we look at Velleius early in this argument — that what Velleius is pointing out is that you have a very important question as to whether gods are born and whether gods die. In other words, this question of origin and endpoint is extremely important. What does incorruptibility mean? What does blessed mean? If you’re considering the existence of a god or some particular god, what is your position as to whether that god has always existed?
I think most of us who study Epicurean philosophy are fairly comfortable with the idea that life, humanity, the things we see around us, is something that naturally arises given the properties and combinations and motions of the atoms in the void. We’re pretty comfortable with this idea that humanity has arisen here on earth as a result of these natural processes. Many of us, if not most of us, are probably also comfortable with the idea that whatever process has resulted in life here on earth is a process that can and probably has existed throughout the universe at other locations as well. We’ve not found it yet, but it’s not much of a leap to conclude that whatever happened here has happened to other places in the past and will happen to other places in the future.
Carrying that one step further, it would seem logical — at least to me — that Epicurus would have asked those very same questions about any beings that he considered to be gods in the intermundia or any other location. You would have to suspect that Epicurus would have asked whether those gods had a beginning or whether they themselves are a natural process that, just like life arising on earth, involves a process where gods arise from some process of nature. So it would be logical to ask from an Epicurean point of view whether a god had a beginning, whether a god can have an end, and what if anything sustains a god during its lifespan — if indeed it has a lifespan rather than having simply existed from everlasting to everlasting, which seems to me is probably the least likely of his positions. Because, as DeWitt points out, gods appear to be part of the same spectrum of living beings that humans and everything else is a part of, and what we are familiar with from life on earth is that individual entities have a beginning and eventually dissolve.
It appears that Epicurus is saying that gods have some ability to maintain themselves and therefore do not necessarily ever dissolve and can continue to live, but that itself does not answer the question of where they came from and whether they had a beginning, whether new gods are generating over time. We talk about the intermundia as if it is a single place, but if there’s an infinite number of worlds, there’s an infinite number of spaces between those infinite worlds. In tracing down the way Epicurus is thinking, you’d have to ask those questions.
Moving on, Velleius next addresses Anaximenes and says this, quote:
“Anaximenes, after Anaximander, taught that the air is God, and that he was generated, and that he is immense, infinite, and always in motion — as if air, which has no form, could possibly be God. For the deity must necessarily be not only of some form or other, but of the most beautiful form. Besides, is not everything that had a beginning subject to mortality?”
So we’ve got a combination of arguments here in regard to Anaximenes. The same thing that applied originally to Thales: Velleius is asking, if God can exist without a body of any kind, why would he annex his mind to water? Why would a God annex his mind to air? But then you see Velleius bring in the argument that a deity must necessarily be not only of some form or another, but of the most beautiful form. And then he repeats his position that everything that had a beginning is subject to mortality. So in what may be a foreshadowing of the isonomia argument you’ve already mentioned, Joshua, Velleius says that a deity must be of the most beautiful form — as if there is a spectrum of forms from least beautiful to most beautiful, with the presumption being that the God is at the upper limit of that spectrum.
Joshua: Right. So we’ve been talking on the forum a little bit about Saint Anselm’s cosmological argument. The cosmological argument relies for its effect on the assumption that there’s one God, and that this one God is the greatest thing that exists. And there can’t be two greatest things that exist — there has to be just one. That’s why it’s called the greatest. So if there’s one God, is it the most beautiful thing that exists? I don’t really know how to get around all of this.
I do want to give a little bit more background on these three. So we’ve had Thales, we’ve had Anaximander, and we’ve had Anaximenes. And together they formed the Milesian school. We typically think of, when we think of Greek philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the succession of the most important part of Greek philosophy. But before those people, we had the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers, among which were Thales — the founder of Western philosophy — Anaximander, and Anaximenes, working not in Athens, not on the Greek mainland, but on this island chain in the eastern Aegean. So before Athens rose to prominence as the main center of learning in Greece, it was Miletus that was the main center. It was cities like Lampsacus on the Hellespont, which is where Epicurus spent some time.
There are two important things to consider about all three of these thinkers. The first is, as I’ve already mentioned, this very early effort to engage with nature on its own terms — to say that nature can be understood. Maybe not in all of its particulars, but the general structure of how things are can be understood by humans, and it’s worthwhile to do so. We don’t have to hand wave every one of these considerations away. And they were right, because we’re still talking about these things today.
They were also monists. When we talk about Thales who thought that everything began in water, and Anaximenes who thought that it was air — what they are referring to there is what Wikipedia describes as follows: “According to their writings, each philosopher of the Milesian school was a material monist who sought to discover the archê — literally, the beginning or origin or the one underlying basis of all things.”
The reason I’m bringing all of this up is that if you go back to the very beginning of our series on Norman DeWitt, I gave an overview of Epicurean philosophy. And even though we associate Epicurus with the Garden, which was located in the Ceramicus outside the walls of Athens on the Dromos, the main road that goes to the Academy, Epicurus actually got his start in the same place these philosophers did — in the eastern Aegean on this chain of islands just off the coast of Asia Minor, in an area called Ionia. And this is where Epicurus spent approximately his first thirty years of life. Then he went with his friends to Athens, which was by that point the center of culture and philosophy in the Mediterranean.
So even though we have these criticisms here coming from Velleius, we should consider that Epicurus is to some extent a part of this early tradition. He stems out of it, in contrast to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle who were working with very different assumptions about nature. Each one of these three was a material monist, and while Epicurus didn’t think that there was just one element that underlay all of nature — he thought there were many different kinds of atoms, and that the atoms have always existed — the atoms and the void themselves give rise to everything that we see in nature. So it’s one more order of separation here from what these three were doing. They were saying that the archê — water, acted on by the divine mind, or air as the divine mind — creates the things we see. Epicurus is just one more order of separation away from the totally religious position which is: God just created everything out of his mind. Epicurus is saying the atoms and void have always existed, and while there are gods, they do not create.
So I think in many ways that may not help us immediately in what Velleius is saying, because he’s bringing up some very big questions, but I think it helps to set the tone for the conversation. While he spends a sentence or two on each of these three, when we get to the Stoics he goes on for pages about where they go wrong. Even though we’re drawing the boundary between Thales and Epicurus and where they stand on these issues, we should understand Epicurus as coming out of this eastern Aegean, Ionian tradition of natural philosophy — looking to nature for answers about how nature operates, not resorting to pure logic or pure reason to try to understand how nature works, but looking to nature itself and analyzing nature in order to understand it. It’s really this Milesian school that gets that process started, and we should see those as being connected.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a good background. And the connections you’re talking about — the analogy I was going to use before you used that word was that there are a lot of threads of analysis here and we’re not going to be able to pull them together today into any final conclusions, but by bringing to light these different trains of thought, things will begin to congeal as we go further.
We started off today discussing briefly this issue that randomness and infinity alone are not sufficient to explain the origin of the universe or the origin of life — that Epicurus held that it’s the nature of the atoms that ultimately is the source of everything that happens. And in the philosophers you just mentioned, Joshua, we’ve added several observations: why would a supernatural being annex himself to water or air? Why would a god die? The structure that I think we can begin to see coming into shape is, as you said, a combination of evidence for things we do observe, evaluated through a reasoning process to make things consistent. And that kind of process is ultimately what we today are going to want to do ourselves, following the lead of the big questions that these texts are pointing out for us — all in the context, as well, that there is a skeptical view out there, the Academic Skeptics, who say that it’s simply impossible to resolve all these questions, and that the varying opinions of all these intelligent people shows by itself that there’s no way to answer them, and that the worst thing you can do is actually take a position. They say you should just simply leave all of these questions in suspension.
Joshua: Exactly. I think that’s the contrast, Cassius. And if listeners will go and reread the Letter to Pythocles, Epicurus outlines his approach to epistemology, which is: there are times when we are dealing with competing explanations about how things work or the way things are, and we don’t have enough evidence to come to a conclusion right now. In those situations, when you can list multiple competing explanations of what caused a thing to happen but you don’t know which one is true, under those circumstances you suspend judgment pending further evidence. But to suspend judgment just for the sake of suspending judgment — just for the sake of never coming down to anything real or concrete — is an approach that Epicurus, who was a dogmatist, certainly would not have countenanced.
Cassius: Yeah, the possibility that there’s life outside of earth, the possibility that there are beings that are more successful at living happily and longer than we are — those are factual questions. They’re certainly going to be debatable and are not going to be resolvable short of space exploration to actually go out and see whether something like that exists or not. We can debate the existence of life in space till the end of time, and that’s not really going to have a direct impact on us unless those beings choose to visit us and cause us any problems.
What we’re really concerned about is whether there are supernatural beings that set everything else in motion — that there is some force of mind or other type of force that acted on something else, as these philosophers are talking about. Because if that is true, then we all have to deal with the deeper, bigger issue that our lives themselves have been programmed and set in motion by some other force that ultimately is going to determine whether we burn in hell for eternity or live in heaven for eternity. Those are very practical questions that have to be answered.
It’s not really a practical important question to answer whether the gods speak Greek or how tall they are or what they look like in terms of whether we think they’re the most beautiful or not. Those are aspects that, in discussing them, will lead us to the bigger picture — and the bigger picture is whether the universe as a whole was created and is guided and led by a supernatural being or not. We approach that ultimate question by dealing with the specific suggestions that we run into in our own lives.
You sometimes hear people allege that the Epicureans were not educated, that they didn’t care to read about other philosophies. One thing we can observe about what Velleius is doing here is that the Epicureans were familiar with the teachings of other schools. They’re not just solely reading Epicurus’ texts and not learning anything else. They are making sure that they’re familiar with the important arguments of other schools and making sure that they have a position and an understanding about whether those arguments are true or false. They’re not just living in a closed-off room talking to each other about what they think. They are engaged with the teachings of other schools so as to decide whether they agree with them or not.
So let’s begin to come to a conclusion to today’s episode. Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, given what we’ve been talking about not just today but throughout this series of episodes — I quoted, I think, in the first episode of this series from Thomas Jefferson. And given our very recent discussion of epistemology as it relates to questions about knowledge and whether it’s possible to know things, whether we should withhold judgment, whether we can only talk about things in the context of probabilities — which is what we’re going to hear a lot from Cotta as we go through this book — Jefferson had this to say in one of his letters. He said:
“I am obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne. I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself — there are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place — this gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void or nothing or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”
It is possible, in other words, to know things. We don’t have to remain in suspense about them. Epicurus would expand on Jefferson’s epistemology by adding in anticipations and feelings, and we’ve talked a lot about that in the past, particularly in the DeWitt material. But the core concept here is that Epicurus was a dogmatist. He thought that knowledge was possible, that we could attain it, and that we didn’t have to remain on the fence or in the dark about it.
I think next week we’re going to get into Anaxagoras, who thought that the sun was a ball of metal larger than the Peloponnese, rather than a god. So as we go through the list, we are making progress toward the Epicurean view, and it’s a very interesting road. And most of this stuff — we tend to focus on Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius, but if you read his other books, you do find a background on all of the philosophers that we talked about today and that we’re going to be talking about as we go forward.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s a lot of fascinating material here. For example, when Velleius criticized those who thought that the world was a god and used the example that some parts of the world are frozen, he made the remark that the reason those parts of the world are frozen was “the great distance which the sun is from them.” So you can pick up all sorts of little tidbits as you read these arguments — which would factor into, well, what is the size of the sun? And obviously the Epicureans did know that the sun was a great distance away. So there’s all sorts of things that can be picked up from these arguments as we go through them.
The main thing is, you’re right Joshua, that these are critically important issues for our happiness, and the Epicurean position is that we have, through study of the nature of things, the ability to come to conclusions that will allow us to live happily — which is ultimately the most we can hope for in life. So we’ll come back next week to Section 11 and begin with Anaxagoras. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other subjects of discussion. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll see you soon.