Episode 234 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 09 - Dealing With Marcus Aurelius And The Epicurean Canonical Basis for Divinity
Date: 06/24/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3915-episode-234-cicero-s-otnotg-09-dealing-with-marcus-aurelius-and-the-canonical-ba/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua continue the series on Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. Before entering Section 16 of the text, they address the ongoing relevance of their discussion to modern Stoicism — particularly Marcus Aurelius’s own acknowledgment that one must choose between “Providence or atoms.” They contrast the Stoic providential universe with the Epicurean view using quotes from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.3.5 and 4.23), Pierre Hadot, David Sedley, and Chris Fisher. They also examine John Mason Good’s confused introduction to his Lucretius translation, which incorrectly tries to reconcile Epicurus with belief in a first cause. Velleius then opens Section 16 with a final dismissal of all previous theories of the gods, setting the stage for the Epicurean positive argument grounded in prolepsis. The episode is largely devoted to laying the canonical epistemological foundation for that argument: passages from Diogenes Laertius on the Epicurean view of truth, Lucretius on sensation (Books 1 and 4), and Sextus Empiricus are discussed at length. Principal Doctrines 22, 23, and 24 are quoted to show how Epicurean canonics apply directly to the question of the gods.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 234 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 our basic ground rules. First of all, our goal is to provide you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it. Second, we won’t be talking about modern political issues. How you apply Epicurus in your own life is up to you. Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy of its own and it needs to be understood on its own and not confused with Stoicism or other competing philosophies. And third, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that the Epicureans often used words differently than we do today. To the Epicureans, gods were not omnipotent or omniscient. So when we talk about gods in this podcast, especially in the sections we’re going through right now, we don’t mean the same type of thing as a god in the major religions of the world today.
Today we’re going to be beginning in Section 16. Before we get into that today, though, we did want to make a few more comments about what we discussed last week, because last week we finished our discussion of Velleius’ attack on the Stoic views of the gods. Of course, since Velleius was talking — Cicero was writing in 50 BC — he was dealing primarily with the leaders of the Stoic school such as Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus, but it’s worth pointing out for those people who are familiar with modern Stoicism and who seem to focus mostly on Marcus Aurelius that the same criticisms that Velleius was leveling against the founders of Stoicism also apply to the Stoics in general.
The Stoics of today most frequently talk about Epictetus, and there should be no controversy over saying that Epictetus, like the other Stoics, was firmly in the camp of saying that God governs the universe and controls what happens. For example, in the Enchiridion 31, Epictetus says: “Be assured that the essential property of piety towards the gods is to form right opinions concerning them as existing and as governing the universe with goodness and justice. And fix yourself in this resolution to obey them and yield to them and willingly follow them in all events as produced by the most perfect understanding.” And the same attitude carries over to Marcus Aurelius himself.
Over on the forum in the thread for today’s episode, I have some material that we’ve collected from different sources on Stoicism describing Marcus Aurelius’ position. Those include the very well-established position of Marcus Aurelius that as a Stoic he recognized the essential divide between the proposition that the universe is governed by providence versus the universe operating through the movement of the atoms. In Meditations 4.3.5, Marcus Aurelius says: “But perhaps you are discontented with what is allotted to you from the whole. Then call to mind the alternative — either providence or atoms — and all the proofs that the universe should be regarded as a kind of constitutional state.” Marcus Aurelius declares: “The gods exist and have concerns for human affairs” and “the whole divine economy is pervaded by providence.” And Marcus Aurelius considered that life is not worth living unless there exist providential gods.
There is a well-known writer by the name of Pierre Hadot who wrote: “Whatever modern historians may claim, the dilemma — ‘either providence or chance’ — when used by Seneca or by Marcus Aurelius does not signify either renunciation of Stoic physical theories or an eclectic attitude which refuses to decide between Epicureanism and Stoicism.” In fact, we can see that Marcus had already made his choice between Epicureanism and Stoicism by the very way in which he describes the Epicurean model with a variety of pejorative terms.
David Sedley, who we quote frequently here on this podcast, has written: “Marcus Aurelius’ unexpected openness to Epicurean physics as an alternative to the Stoic model reads as if it were an extension of the same policy. Despite the obvious difference that he is palpably committed to the truth of Stoicism and hints to the falsity of Epicureanism.” Sedley continues to clarify something that modern Stoics really need to understand. Sedley says: “Marcus’ cosmos or world is recognizably and indeed technically Stoic. It is a single, finite, cohesive organism surrounded by void. As a consequence, it is entirely self-contained and cohesive in its functioning, internally governed by the inexorable sequence of causes known as fate. So far as its underlying constitution is concerned, it is composed out of two ultimate items, one of which is a pliable material substrate and the other acting upon this a single intelligent, divine, causal power.”
And then there is an article by Chris Fisher which says that many moderns question the necessity of providence for the practice of Stoicism. To do so, they must modify Stoicism in ways that remove one of its most potent psychological tools — a trust that all events in nature, even those we would typically judge as bad, have a purpose and serve the good of the whole. This trust and the attitude of gratitude that springs from it are expressed beautifully by Marcus in one of Chris Fisher’s favorite passages: “Everything suits me that suits your designs, O my universe. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is in your own good time. All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O nature. All proceeds from you, all subsists in you, and to you all things return.” That’s Meditations 4.23. And Chris Fisher says it’s simply not possible to make sense of passages like this apart from Marcus Aurelius’ absolute and unequivocal trust in the providential nature of the cosmos.
And that is the heart of what needs to be stressed as the difference between the Epicurean view of the gods and the universe versus the Stoic. The Stoic is inextricably linked to a providential model in which there is an intelligent creator that is creating and directing everything that happens. And from that point of view, if that were true, if that were establishable and you were persuaded of it, it would be logically compelled to take everything that happens as the action of that divine creator and find some way to reconcile yourself to it. But that is absolutely the opposite of the approach that Epicurus takes, because Epicurus does not have nature as an intelligent being that is directing the universe as a whole or your life in particular. As Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoikeus, some things do happen by accident, some things are determined, but other things are within your control. And under the Epicurean scheme of things, it’s up to you to get engaged with your life and use it and manage it and run it in the way that you think is best for you to do, which is where Epicurus identifies happiness through pleasure as the best way to live. It could hardly be more different than the Stoic model. And modern Stoics who just simply look at the techniques that are discussed for maintaining your calmness are simply scratching the surface of what Stoicism is all about. And if they’ll go deeper and see what kind of providential cosmos arrangement is necessary to support that, I think many of them would recoil at what they’ve really gotten themselves into.
Joshua: I think Marcus Aurelius states it very clearly himself, Cassius, when he says, “Providence or atoms.” It’s one or the other. While you were talking, Cassius, I was Googling stuff. And it looks like Chris Fisher wrote an article called “Providence or Atoms? Providence.” And Donald Robertson wrote an article, which looks like a response to it, that says, “Providence or Atoms? Atoms.” Clear evidence of the confused state of modern Stoicism. I think Marcus Aurelius is very clear on the distinction between the two schools when he says it’s providence or it’s atoms. And you have to choose. You have to choose between those two propositions.
Cassius: Very early on in this series of podcasts, I quoted from the introduction to John Mason Good’s translation of Lucretius in a passage that I thought was very confused on this issue — far more confused than Marcus Aurelius himself appears to be. And John Mason Good says this — I’ll quote it again. He says: “But the Epicureans, it may be said, were atheists. They denied the existence of a God and of a future state. And some parts of the poem of Lucretius are expressly written to establish such denial. Let us examine these assertions separately. If, in the first place, it be atheism to deny the existence of those absurd and vicious deities who were the sole objects of adoration with the multitude, the Epicureans were certainly guilty of atheism, for such they did deny.”
I think as far as that quote goes from John Mason Good, I would agree with it. The Epicureans certainly did deny the gods of the multitude as being vicious and absurd and contrary to their nature. But unfortunately John Mason Good decided to keep writing, and he says this: “But it is so far from being provable that they uniformly disbelieved the existence of an eternal first cause of all things that it is perhaps impossible to produce an Epicurean philosopher of any age against whom such a charge can be legitimately substantiated. The philosophers of this school on the contrary have at all times as openly avowed the existence of such a deity, and in many instances as strenuously contended for the truth of such an avowal, as the disciples of any system whatsoever.”
And unfortunately this is where John Mason Good goes totally off the rails. It’s certainly not the case that the Epicureans believed in an eternal first cause of all things. The atoms and the void have always existed. They are themselves uncaused, and so to speak of a first cause is totally wrong. John Mason Good continues: “Epicurus admitted moreover the existence of orders of intelligences possessed of superior powers to the human race, whom, like the angels and archangels of the Christian system, he conceived to be immortal from their nature, to have been created anterior to the formation of the world, to be endowed with far ampler faculties of enjoyment than mankind, to be formed of far purer materials and to exist in far happier abodes.” Again, I would quibble with his words, but I would say on the whole he’s not that wrong — this is exactly the kind of stuff we’re going to be getting into starting on this episode and going forward. But he continues: “The chief difference which I have been able to discern between the immortal spirits of the Epicurean system and of the Christian theologian is that while the latter are supposed to take an active part in the divine government of the world, the former are represented as having no kind of connection with it, since it was conceived by Epicurus that such an interference is absolutely beyond their power and would be totally subversive of their beatitude.”
And then he continues by saying that one undivided supreme being is the first cause, the creator, and so forth. Unfortunately, all of that is wrong to the Epicurean school. Epicurus thought that nature existed without a first cause, that nature exists and operates according to herself and with no intervening or overriding providence, that we are not bound by fate, that we are only somewhat bound by necessity, but that we also have choice and free will to determine our own path in life, that virtue does not consist in aligning oneself with the logos or the divine fire.
Joshua: Cassius, last week you mentioned Cleanthes and his thought experiment. He said, “Think of a painting in which pleasure sits on the throne and the virtues kneel at her feet as her slaves.” And Cleanthes wants you to imagine this as something horrifying, but in reality in Epicurean philosophy the virtues are subservient to pleasure, to the telos, to the good, to the summum bonum, which is pleasure. And so the distinctions between this approach and the Stoic approach are as clear as they can possibly be. And making things as clear as we possibly can is probably the theme of our episode today. What we’re trying to do as we go through this material is not to attack Marcus Aurelius personally. The point is not to dredge up historical trivia. The point is to make sure that people understand the big picture. And I give Marcus Aurelius credit for seeing that there is an irreconcilable opposition between providence and atoms. Marcus Aurelius is at least being honest that you have to make a choice between the two. John Mason Good, by confusing these things together and trying to say that Epicurus was consistent with providence — having his cake and eating it too, so to speak, with a providential God over the lesser gods — is just confusing the issue and making it harder to get to the bottom of what people are really saying.
Cassius: Before we move on to the real heart of the positive presentation that Velleius is going to make, let’s take the first section of Section 16, which says this: “Thus far have I been rather exposing the dreams of dotards than giving the opinions of philosophers. Not much more absurd than these are the fables of the poets who owe all their power of doing harm to the sweetness of their language, who have represented the gods as enraged with anger and inflamed with lust, who have brought before our eyes their wars, battles, combats, wounds, their hatreds, dissensions, discords, births, deaths, complaints, and lamentations, their indulgences in all kinds of intemperance, their adulteries, their chains, their love affairs with mortals, and mortals begotten by immortals. To these idle and ridiculous flights of the poets, we may add the prodigious stories invented by the Magi and by the Egyptians also, which were of the same nature, together with the extravagant notions of the multitude at all times, who from total ignorance of the truth are always fluctuating in uncertainty.”
So there he is, once again summarizing his attacks on the standard interpretations of the gods. Some of those apply to the Stoics and Platonists as well, but others he’s just focusing on the fluctuating uncertainties and speculations of the multitude of all times who are ignorant of the truth. And he’s saying that those are dead ends that create problems for everyone involved and that need to be considered absurd — the dreams of dotards — and not anything to do with credible opinions of philosophers.
Epicurus is attempting to bring to the subject of the gods a philosophical approach that makes sense based on his observation of the universe as a whole, based on the canonics and the physics that he has developed to apply to the understanding of the things that are directly in front of us. And so before we get into the next section, which lays out Epicurus’ opinion, let’s drop back one more time and make a very important point about what Epicurus considers to be the foundation of how you go forward in deciding what is false and what is true, what is right and what is wrong, how you separate the certain from the uncertain, and how you get at the very basis of knowledge in the first place.
Epicurus has a very specific approach to issues of truth and falsity, of what’s real and what’s not real. And there are aspects of this that have to be clarified before we can really understand what Velleius is about to say in terms of the nature of the gods. Let’s take a quick look at what Diogenes Laertius records about the Epicurean view of truth. In section 31 of his biography of Epicurus, Diogenes Laertius says this about the Epicureans:
“Logic they reject as misleading, for they say it is sufficient for physicists to be guided by what things say of themselves. Thus in the canon, Epicurus says that the test of truth are the sensations and preconceptions and feelings. The Epicureans add to these the intuitive apprehensions of the mind, and this he says himself too in the summary addressed to Herodotus and in the Principal Doctrines. For he says, all sensation is irrational and does not admit of memory, for it is not set in motion by itself, nor when it is set in motion by something else can it add to or take from it, nor is there anything which can refute the sensations… Again, the fact of aperception or repetition confirms the truth of the sensations, and seeing and hearing are as much facts as feeling pain. From this it follows that as regards the imperceptible we must draw inferences from phenomena or from what is perceptible, for all thoughts have their origin in sensation, by means of coincidence and analogy and similarity and combination, reasoning too contributing something. And the visions of the insane and those in dreams are true, for they cause movement, and that which does not exist cannot cause movement.”
Now this is said in a number of different places and in a number of different ways, but the essential point to be drawing attention to right here at the very beginning is that Epicurus considers as true and real everything that these canonical faculties are producing to us. Now that does not mean that when we see a lake with palm trees in the middle of a desert — when we see the illusion of such a thing — that when we walk up to it, it really exists. But what Epicurus is stressing is that as a canonical faculty, as a connection of reality, when the senses, when the feelings of pleasure and pain, when the anticipations are placed in action by the movement of atoms, when they are active, we have to treat what they are telling us as real observations. We cannot just say that sometimes the eyes function truthfully and sometimes they lie to us. The eyes do not lie. The ears do not lie. The feelings of pleasure and pain do not lie, and the preconceptions do not lie.
We’re going to take multiple observations from these faculties. We’re going to compare our own observations with those of other people. We’re going to compare today’s observations with tomorrow’s observations. We’re going to compare our observations with telescopes versus those with microscopes versus those with radio telescopes. We’re going to bring all of our observations in our mind into a calculation of what we eventually form as an opinion, and opinions can be true or false. But what these senses are providing to us is considered to be — and is described in Epicurean terminology as being provided truly — and the things that are causing these sensations are real in the sense that they are really causing these sensations.
If you walk up to a patient dying in excruciating pain from cancer in a hospital and you try to tell that patient, “Sir, your pain is not real,” that is as incorrect as saying that the illusion of the oasis in the desert is not real. The eyes are reporting to you these things are there because of the physics of the phenomena that is in play at the time of your observation. But that does not mean that in the end you should form the opinion that that oasis is really there and that if you walk over to it you’ll be able to drink from it.
And so when Diogenes Laertius records that dreams and hallucinations are real, he means what he says — that there is a sense of the word “real” and “true” in which those things do actually exist. Now, as we know from Book Four of Lucretius, the Epicureans were well aware of how illusions operate, that you can place an oar in water and it appears to be bent, that you can look at things far away and believe that they are round instead of square or vice versa, depending on the circumstances of your observation. A specific example of that in Lucretius comes at section 732 of Book Four, where he discusses the operation of images. In section 732, Lucretius says:
“And so we see centaurs, and the limbs of Scyllas, and the dog-faces of Cerberus, and the idols of those who have met death, and whose bones are held in the embrace of earth. Since idols of every kind are born everywhere, some of which are created of their own accord, even in the air, some of which depart in each case from diverse things, and those again which are made and put together from the shapes of these. For in truth, the image of the centaur comes not from a living thing, since there never was the nature of such a living creature, but when by chance the images of man and horse have met, they cling together… And other things of this kind are fashioned in the same way.”
And we know that this whole topic is not just a hallucination of Epicurus himself, because we have other sources that tell us that this issue of the images traveling to the mind and truly causing these reactions was held similarly by Democritus and others. Sextus Empiricus records: “Epicurus said that all sensibles are true and real, for there is no difference between saying that something is true and that it is real.” And that is why in giving a formalization of the true and the false, he says: “That which is such as it is said to be is true, and that which is not as it is said to be is false.”
In the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus says: “For the similarity between things that exist, which we call real, and the images received as a likeness of things and produced either in sleep or through some other acts of apprehension on the part of the mind or other instruments of judgment could never be unless there were some effluences of this nature actually brought into contact with our senses.”
So to bring this back down to earth — the point being made here is that in Epicurean terminology, if the senses perceive something, it can be considered to be in a specialized sense of the words “true” and “real,” and it should be considered that way because you have to maintain your confidence in what your senses are reporting in order to base any conclusions on anything. In order to reason at all, you must have data on which to reason, and if you cannot have confidence in your faculties which produce data to you, then there’s no grounds for maintaining that any reasoning of any kind could ever be true.
So the Epicurean approach is to take as true and real what the faculties present to us, and as we are about to read in the next section, Epicurus held that what the faculty of prolepsis presents to us also should be considered to be true and real. Here’s the way Velleius states it in the second paragraph of Section 16:
“Now, whoever reflects on the rashness and absurdity of these tenets of these other schools we’ve just been discussing, must inevitably entertain the highest respect and veneration for Epicurus and perhaps even rank him in the number of those beings who were the subject of this dispute.” — Now that’s another reference to how Lucretius says that if there’s anybody who deserves to be called a god, it’s Epicurus because of the accomplishments and benefits he brought to us, but that’s a tangent for another time. —
“For Epicurus alone first founded the idea of the existence of the gods on the impression which nature herself hath made on the minds of all men. For what nation, what people are there who have not, without any learning, a natural idea or pre-notion of a deity? Epicurus calls this prolepsis, that is, an antecedent conception of the fact and the mind without which nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on, the force and advantage of which reasoning we receive from that celestial volume of Epicurus concerning the rule and judgment of all things.”
And of course, here we confront one of the great frustrations of Epicurean studies — that we don’t have a copy of the celestial volume concerning the rule and judgment of all things where Epicurus explains the canon and these rules of epistemology in detail. But already we have emphasis from Velleius that it is in the canonical faculties that Epicurus is grounding his ideas of the existence of gods and the nature of gods — not in the speculations of logic, not in a claim that Moses went up on the mountain and got the Ten Commandments. He’s saying that where we’re going to ground our understanding of the gods is not in particular people and particular assertions of evidence, but in the faculties that we all have. The faculty itself is not giving us the conclusion; the faculty itself is not producing the opinion, but it is providing data which we then take into our minds with all the rest of the data that we have and which Velleius is going to use to make some conclusions about the gods. The starting point of this analysis, as cited by Velleius here, is that it is in the canonical faculty of preconceptions that Epicurus is going to ground his positions on the nature of the gods.
And Joshua, before I turn it over to you, I’ll just repeat something I said just a moment ago — that we have an example in Lucretius of how we can receive images of centaurs, a centaur being a half-man, half-horse. And just like the dreams of men who are hallucinating or simply sleeping, the image of the centaur can strike us. And from that point of view, it is real — sort of like the distinction between going back to the cancer patient dying in the hospital: we may not be able to physically put our finger on the point of pain that the person may be experiencing, but the person is feeling pain nevertheless, even though it may not be localized in a particular point of his body. And that pain to that person is real, even if it cannot be physically localized either within or outside the person’s body. When you feel something, when the senses report something to you, you must account for that feeling and consider it to be important. If it turns out to be an illusion, if it turns out to be like a centaur after examination over time and through comparison with other senses, then we will certainly declare it to be something that cannot exist, just like we declare centaurs not to exist. But there’s a multiple-step process going on here that has to be taken at face value before it is then evaluated and opinions formed.
Joshua: So let me take up this issue, Cassius, of sensation. You’ve already gone over it, but I just want to review. There are a couple of passages in Lucretius that are very short — sometimes not more than a sentence — but also very clear on a couple of the key points. And one of them is in Book One around line 422. He writes: “For sensation common to men declares that body has its separate existence from void, and unless our belief in sensation is first firmly established, there will be no principle of appeal in hidden matters, according to which we may establish anything by reason.”
So Lucretius doesn’t usually go into other elements of the canon as much as we find in other sources because he’s writing a book on the nature of things, on the cosmos and nature itself. And so for him, sensation is more important. We shouldn’t conclude from this necessarily that other Epicurean figures took the same approach. But for Lucretius here, what he’s saying is that without sensation, nothing can be firmly established and there will be no principle of appeal. The reason there’s no principle of appeal is given here in the next part: reason does not interface directly with nature, with our environment. And so reason is limited — limited by its inputs. And the inputs are the canon: the sensations, the feelings, and the prolepsis.
Further in Book One around line 690, Lucretius says this — I’m reading from the Martin Ferguson Smith translation, the Loeb edition — in a passage in which Lucretius is discussing the work of other philosophers: “Further to say that all things are fire, and that there exists no true thing in the number of things except fire, as the same man does, appears to be raving madness. For on the basis of the senses he himself fights against the senses, and shakes the credit of that upon which all belief depends, by which this very fire as he names it is known to himself.”
So you cannot reason without the epistemological sources, but you also cannot form beliefs without these epistemological sources. This is the second major premise on canonics coming from Lucretius. And he takes up the issue again in Book Four around line 462 when he says: “…we see in marvellous fashion many things besides of this kind which all try as it were to break the credit of our senses but all in vain since the most part of them deceives because of opinions of the mind which we bring to them ourselves so that things are held to be seen which have not been seen by our senses for nothing is more difficult than to distinguish plain things from doubtful things which the mind of itself adds at once.”
So what we’ve gotten so far is that the senses and the other canonical processes are how we take information in as input — it’s how we know things about the world that we live in — and without these things we cannot form arguments based on reason because reason requires inputs. But as he says here in Book Four, there is a problem because the beliefs and the reason is precisely where the error comes in when we’re talking about issues relating to epistemology. It’s not the senses that are wrong, it’s not the feelings that are wrong, it’s not the prolepsis that is wrong — while the sensory input is streaming into our senses, the mind is adding its own layer to that, and this layer of opinion is where the error comes in in all of these cases.
Cassius: Many of the things that Velleius is about to say as he goes on further have to be considered within that framework — that what he’s suggesting are reasonable possibilities but not necessarily the only possibilities except in regard to some very basic points that we’ll also discuss. So as we said, there’s the multiple possibility doctrine. There’s the withholding doctrine — that when you don’t have enough information to make a firm conclusion on a particular point, you don’t take any position at all on it. So we need to take all of our knowledge about Epicurean canonics and keep it in mind and have it ready to evaluate everything that is going to be discussed about the gods. Even those things that the prolepsis presents to us — and I think that’s where you’re going to pick up again.
Joshua: I think all of those points are well taken, Cassius, and especially what we can learn from the Letter to Pythocles is of such interest. The direction I’m going to go in now is back into Lucretius, but not directly into the issue of prolepsis quite yet. I’m going to go to Book Three around line 425, where Lucretius is describing the nature of the soul or the nature of the human mind or psyche or spirit or whatever you want to call it. Lucretius says:
“First of all, since I have shown the soul to be delicate and composed of minute particles and elements much smaller than the flowing liquid of water or cloud or smoke — for it surpasses these far in quickness and moves if touched by a more delicate cause, in as much as it is moved by images of smoke and mist — as for example when sunken in sleep we perceive altars exhale their steam on high and send up smoke, for without doubt these are images born to us — now therefore since when vessels are shattered you perceive the water flowing out on all sides and the liquid dispersing, and since mist and smoke disperse abroad into the air, believe that the spirit also is spread abroad and passes away far more quickly and is more speedily dissolved into its first bodies as soon as it has departed, withdrawn from the limbs of a man.”
One of the ongoing conversations we’ve been having on the forum recently is as to whether the prolepsis is an organ for sensation on its own account, separate from the others, or whether it takes in information from the other senses as well in order to form the impressions that are the basis of the prolepsis. And I think if we take the time to go back to what the Epicureans had to say about the nature of the soul — about the atoms that compose the soul, that they are far finer than other atoms, that they move far quicker indeed — and that they are dispersed throughout the body, it’s these soul atoms dispersed throughout the body that allow sensation in the first place. I think in Epicurean philosophy, in part because it’s these atoms of the soul extended out to the senses that allow the sense of sight, for example, or that allow the sense of touch, the distinction which seems very clear to us between the senses and the mind may not have been made to the same degree among the Epicureans in the ancient world. And I think if we take this view, then we would see that the mind of course uses the informational inputs from the senses in forming its impressions that make up the prolepsis, and is itself a sensing capacity. I think that solves that problem.
Cassius: That sounds like a very fruitful path to explore to me. It’s in adjusting our own expectations that I think we’re going to find the answers that are much more satisfying here. We cannot expect that Epicurus looked at these issues in the same way that we do today. Epicurus had a foundation of physics and canonical approach that is very different from ours. We don’t normally like to think of centaurs as being real or the hallucinations of madmen as real or true, and yet Epicurus is coming at these from the perspective that they really are happening to that person — he’s not lying about it happening to him, it is happening. And Epicurus’s pursuit is to determine what could be causing those things and to come up with an explanation that is not supernatural in origin. And whether we agree with every aspect of it or not, this contention — apparently shared with Democritus and potentially Leucippus and other atomists as well — is that our thoughts are influenced by this concept of images, the flows of atoms. Everything is involved with the flows of atoms, and it would be unexpected and inconsistent if Epicurus did not think that thought was involved with the flows of atoms.
So we have a long way to go in articulating these issues. I really want to commend people listening to the podcast and commend the people who are participating in the forum for the discussions that we’re having, because clearly there’s a lot of difference of opinion about what Epicurus was really saying. This is an issue that has been put aside and deprecated because people say, “Well, in all practical terms Epicurus just denies the existence of supernatural gods,” and people jump to the conclusion that fits him within the box we consider to have the label “atheist” put on it. And by stopping at that level we’re missing, I think, a lot of subtlety that clearly is still there in the text.
Now we’re going to begin to run out of time for today before we get much further into Section 16, and so when we start back next week we’re going to need to emphasize to people that this episode today will be a very good one to listen to in conjunction with the next episode — because we’re setting the stage today before we really dive into the meat of what Velleius is saying. But one more thing that we have to add to this picture under the category of “let’s look at all the texts and look at all the positions that Epicurus was taking”: we need to remember that Epicurus devoted several of his Principal Doctrines to this question of how canonics operates, and these positions are very relevant to our discussion of the gods as well.
Principal Doctrine 22 says: “We must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise all will be full of doubt and confusion.” Now we often talk about that one in terms of the real purpose of nature — the real purpose of nature is pleasure — so we’re talking about we want to keep our actions consistent with pleasure. But it also applies to “all evidence of direct perception,” which includes prolepsis, which includes the five senses, and which tells us not to ignore this proleptic perception that people are experiencing about the category of things called gods.
Then Principal Doctrine 23: “If you fight against all sensations, you’ll have no standard by which to judge even of those which you say are false.” That’s saying the same thing — if you’ve got this proleptic sensation that there’s something going on in this category of relationships called gods, then you cannot ignore that. You have to take it into account and deal with it and make opinions that you can be firm about, separated from those which you think are false or which you simply don’t know about.
And then Principal Doctrine 24, which is the most lengthy but also the most directly applicable: “If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion so you reject every standard of judgment.” So if you’ve reached the conclusion that gods are arbitrary and capricious and that they choose certain people and reject certain others because they like them or don’t like them, if you let that kind of groundless opinion pervade all of your considerations of the topics of gods, then you’re never going to be able to make any progress in the subject.
Doctrine 24 continues: “If among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation and that which does not, you will not escape error since you will preserve the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.” So Epicurus is hammering home this point that when you’ve got a canonical faculty reporting something to you, you must take it into account and integrate it into your opinions and conclusions if you expect those opinions and conclusions to be valid. You can’t simply throw them out and act as if they’ve never happened.
Joshua: Because they did actually happen to you, in the sense that a sleeping person experiences a dream. You can study this phenomenon. You can come to an understanding of dreams in which you realize that they’re not prophetic and they’re not messages from God telling you what to do — or you can go down the Stoic road, you can go down the road of these Platonists and others who say that dreams are sent by the gods to tell you what to do, to tell you what’s right and wrong, to cause you upset like Brutus tried to construe that the shade of Julius Caesar was warning him of something terrible. You can take that Neoplatonist-Stoic position about the images that you think you’re perceiving and go off in a totally wrong direction — or you can take the trouble to understand and come up with a rational, natural explanation for what’s happening and not let them destroy your life, as Cassius was attempting to tell Brutus to do before the Battle of Philippi.
Cassius: So now we are coming to the end unfortunately of today’s episode. Joshua, any closing thoughts for today?
Joshua: What I would encourage people to do at this point in time — since we didn’t really get into the prolepsis today — is if anyone wants to revisit Episode 166 of the podcast, that was our interview with Dr. David Glidden, who’s written a series of articles and compiled lecture notes specifically on the subject of prolepsis, and it’s a source I’ll be looking at throughout the week. Other than that I would just echo what you said there, Cassius — if we want to understand what the Epicureans meant by this stuff, we have to be willing to reconsider our own opinions on the matter of soul or mind or spirit and so forth.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Joshua. And as we begin to close, I want to repeat how much we appreciate the input from members of the EpicureanFriends.com Forum on this discussion. We’re having some really good exchanges about these subjects, and at the hazard of forgetting to commend somebody, I particularly appreciate all the input from our participants Tau Phi, from Brian, from Don, from Little Rocker, and from other people who are participating in these discussions in a constructive and open-minded way that I think is going to lead us to a much deeper understanding and better application of what we’re reading here.
This is fascinating material. It’s tempting to get so deep in the weeds that we lose touch with the big picture, and we constantly need to remind ourselves that we’re mortal and we have a limited time to live and we need to really continue to focus on the things that make a day-to-day difference. As Epicurus said, we don’t always need the details of the philosophy but we always need the ability to consult and apply the major conclusions of the philosophy. And as we’ve discussed and as we’re going to see, the major conclusions are that there are no supernatural gods who create universes and who guide them and who send us to hell or award us with heaven. Those are the big conclusions. The detailed conclusions are things we can spend time on if we’re interested but should not get to the point where we forget to live our lives day-to-day under the influence of the big picture.
That’s all we have time for today. Let me again thank everyone on the forum who’s participating in these discussions and encourage it to continue. For those who are listening to the podcast for the first time, we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions about this or any other subjects that relate to our mutual interest in Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.