Episode 237 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 12 - Isonomia And The Implications Of Infinity
Date: 07/17/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3961-episode-237-cicero-s-otnotg-12-isonomia-and-the-implications-of-infinity/?postID=31411#post31411
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 237 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 text 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@epicureanfriends.com where we have a thread for this and every one of our podcast episodes this week we’re continuing in on the nature of the gods. If you’re following along in the Yang edition, we’re on section 19 at the top of page 19. Last week we focused mostly on the discussion of images and potentially how prolapses factors into the use of images, and we discussed the textual issue about which direction the images are flowing, whether they’re flowing from the gods or to the gods. But today we’re going to get back into a subject that has a really profound implication about a lot of epicurean theory, not only in regard to the gods, but also in terms of the creation of the world, the eternality of the universe and so on, and one criticism of myself and the way we present these things. Here we are on episode 237 and very infrequently over these 237 episodes have we done what Epicurus specifically tells us in mandatory terms that we need to be doing. Of course, what I’m referring to there is the letter to epi section one 17 where Epicurus ends the discussion of the things that we see in the sky, the stars, and why the universe is not supernatural. And he says at the end of that letter all these things typically you must bear in mind for thus you will escape in most things from superstition and will be enabled to understand what is akin to them. And most of all, give yourself up to the study of the beginnings and of infinity and of the things akin to them and also of the criteria of truth and of the feelings and of the purpose for which we reason out. These things for these points when they are thoroughly studied will most easily enable you to understand the causes of the details. And so we’ve got a very explicit summary at the end of the letter to LEAs telling us that we need to pay attention to infinity. Of course, that’s what we’re about to hear. Valle tell Telus as well, but if you look at that letter toles, if you look at the letter tous where epicure says around line 45, these brief sayings, if all these points are born in mind afford a sufficient outline for our understanding of the nature of existing things, and then he goes on and says, furthermore, there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours for the Adams being infinite in number as was proved already are born on far out into space for those atoms which are of such a nature that a world could be created out of them or made by them, have not been used up either on one world or on a limited number of worlds, nor again on all the worlds which are alike or on those which are different from these. So there nowhere exists an obstacle to the infinite number of worlds, and I’ll make note as we pass through there that the very next thing he says in discussing the infinity of worlds is to turn his attention back to these images again that we’ve been talking about in relation to Prolapses because he continues on there and says, moreover, there are images like in shape to the solid bodies, far surpassing perceptible things in their subtlety of texture. For it is not impossible that such emanations should be formed in that which surrounds the objects, nor that there should be opportunities for the formation of such hollow and thin frames, nor that there should be effluence which preserve the respective position and order which they had before in the solid bodies. These images we call idols. Now that’s idol is Bailey’s translation. You see all sorts of other different words that are used when we get into the Latin, but Epicurus is clearly linking this issue of infinity to this issue of images and considering all of this to be very important for the reasoning process to get us where we need to be in terms of understanding the nature of the universe and thereby when we understand the nature of the universe to live happily. In fact, I’d even include how Epicurus ended the letter to mens around line 1 35 at the end he tells me, see us meditate therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day by yourself and with a companion like to yourself and never shall you be disturbed, waking or asleep, but you shall live like a God among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is not like unto a mortal being. And of course now that’s immortal again, we discussed that word in terms of potentially being better translated as incorruptible potentially therefore implying that it continues on without end and certainly not being of a supernatural nature that would take the being or the thing being discussed outside of the natural realm. It seems to me that one of the key issues involved in interpreting epicurean philosophy is that that you’ve always got to be consistent with the fundamental holdings of the philosophy and you’re never going to have anything that is outside or above or supernatural in nature. It’s always going to be a part of nature if it exists at all. And I think it’s a pretty clear statement of and philosophy that there is nothing that is eternally unchanging except the atoms. And so that leads into the questions we’ve been discussing. We’ll continue to discuss about how could a being attain deathlessness if it is the nature of atoms to not stay together leading into the hypothesis that a God could continue to exist indefinitely in an analogous way to that of a waterfall which continuously replaces its contents but remains a waterfall over time. That is potentially one way of explaining what Valle has been saying about the nature of the god’s consisting of a unending flow of atoms. And again, let me say this, we’re going to hopefully spur people to think about these issues and to do what epic years has suggested in terms of examine them closely because they do have a tremendous amount of implication for the philosophy as a whole, and we’re never going to make any sense out of it if we don’t start the process even though it’s hard, it’s similar to this question of the formation of the universe. It’s really hard for those of us who have been raised in a religious western society to think about something not having a beginning and that there was a point when it didn’t exist and that it came into existence because we’ve had that drummed into us through the Bible and other religious positions. But the epicurean position is that the Adams and the universe as a whole have always existed. So while it may seem hard to accept that the universe has always existed, it’s pretty hard also to accept the idea that the universe did not exist at one time and epicure position from an early age seems to have been that it makes more sense to understand the evidence around us as leading to the conclusion that the universe has always existed than it does to understand the evidence as leading to the conclusion that there’s some supernatural being that created the universe again. Lemme take us back to section 19. Valez has just made his comment that in regard to the gods, we perceive images owing to their similarity and succession because an endless train of precisely similar images arise from innumerable atoms and stream towards or from the gods. Our mind with the keenest feelings of pleasure fixes its gaze on these images and so attains an understanding of the nature of a being both blessed and eternal. That’s the part we discussed last week. Here’s the new part following on immediately after that quote. Moreover, there is the supremely potent principle of infinity which claims the closest and most careful study. We must understand that it has the following property that in the sum of things, everything has its exact match and counterpart. This property is termed by Epicurus is Sonoma or the principle of uniform distribution from this principle. It follows that if the whole number of mortals be so many, there must exist no less a number of immortals. And if the causes of destruction are beyond count, the causes of conservation are also bound to be infinite. Now, after that, vals turns back to talking about the nature of the life of the gods and how they spend their time. So he moves on to a different subject, but this series of sentences here is extremely interesting, difficult, and it’s going to take some time to sort through. I believe we did this a little bit last week, but let me again bring in the statements that Lucretius made that are relevant to this. Lucretius at book 2 10 77 says, there is this too that in the universe there is nothing single, nothing born unique and growing unique and alone, but it is always of some tribe and there are many things in the same race. First of all, turn your mind to living. Creatures you will find in this wise is begotten race of wild beasts that haunts the mountains in this wise, the stock of men in this wise again, the dumb herds of scaly fishes and all the bodies of flying fouls. Wherefore, you must confess in the same way that sky and earth and sun, moon, sea and all else that exists are not unique but rather of number numberless in as much as the deep fixed boundary stone of life awaits these as surely and they are just as much of a body that has birth as every race which is here on earth abounding in things after its kind. So again, that’s book 2 10 77 earlier in book two, and since I’ve taught this much, I will hasten to link on a truth which holds to it and wins belief from it that the first beings of things which are formed with a shape like to one another are in number infinite for since the difference of forms is limited, it must needs be that those which are alike are unlimited or else that the sum of matter is created limited, which I’ve proved not to be showing in my verses that the tiny bodies of matter from everlasting always keep up the sum of things as the team of blows is harnessed on unbroken on every side. For that you see that certain animals are more rare and perceive that nature is less fruitful in them yet in another quarter and spot in some distant lands there may be many of that kind. And so the tale is made up even as in the race of four footed beasts, we see that elephants with their snakey hands come first of all by whose many thousands. India is embattled with a bull work of ivory. So that no way can be found into its inner parts. So great as the multitude of those beasts whereof we see, but a very few samples. But still let me grant this too. Let there be if you will some one thing unique alone in the body of its birth to which there is not a fellow in the whole wide world yet unless there is an unlimited stock of nature from which it might be conceived and brought to birth, it will not be able to be created nor after that to grow on and be nourished. He’s talking about that in one place some things will be more common than others, but in another place other things will be more common and that’s a part of the infinity just as much as the idea that as a whole there’s no limit to the number of earths, no limit to the number of anything. And of course as we discussed this, we’re talking about infinity primarily in terms of infinity of space, but there’s the related issue of boundlessness or eternality of time and to throw into the pot as well. Lucretius in book three at 8 43 has said this, and even if the nature of mind and the power of soul has feeling after it has been rent asunder from our body, yet it is nothing to us who are made one by the mating and marriage of body and soul. And here’s the point about time nor if time should gather together our substance after our disease and bring it back again as it is now placed if once more the light of life should be vouched to us. Yet even were that done, it would not concern us at all when once the remembrance of our former selves were snapped in twain, he goes on and explains that the fact that we don’t remember things from the past tells us that severing the body from the mind is going to mean that we’re a different person. But that last section in 8 43 indicates that lucretius is considering possibilities of the atoms and for example, our particular bodies in mind over time coming back into the same locations after we die. It seems to me that that is something that’s easily relatable to the questions of an infinity of space. The same thing could be happening over and over again. So 8 43 helpful mainly just to indicate that the implications of extending things over time in space is certainly occurring to the ancient epicureans and to close out the list of citations. As I was looking this morning, I know there are significant others that I’m not including, but dogen of anda mentions in his letter to Antipater the issue as well, he says, so as I was saying, having had my appetite most keenly wedded by all the advantage of the voyage, I shall try to meet you as soon as the winter has ended. But since this is uncertain both on account of changeability and inconstancy of our fortunes and on account of my old age, besides I’m sending you in accord with your request, the arguments concerning an infinite number of worlds and you’ve enjoyed good fortune in the matter for before your letter arrived, Theodore of Linda, a member of our school, not unknown to you, who is still a novice in philosophy, was dealing with the same doctrine. And this doctrine came to be better articulated as a result of being turned over between the two of us face-to-face for our agreements and disagreements with one another and also our questionings rendered the inquiry into the object of our search more precise. I’m therefore sending you that dialogue antipater so that you may be in the same position as if you yourself were present like Theodorus agreeing about some matters and making further inquiries into cases where you had doubts. The dialogue began something like this. Dogen e said Theodore, that the doctrine laid down by epicurus on an infinite number of worlds is true. I am confident, okay, I’ll leave off there in the citations, but that’s an example of just like Theo Orus of Lindus, Dogen of Orlander and Auntie Potter, whoever that is, we too are engaged in the discussion of issues of infinity and the disagreements among ourselves, the agreements among ourselves are questions are hopefully going to render the inquiry into the object of our search more precise. So Joshua and I will stand in the stead of these characters from 2000 years ago and we will go right back down the same road that they were going themselves unfortunately with a lot less text to work with but down the same road because so much does hang on this issue of what are the implications of infinity.
Joshua: Okay, so the first thing I want to look at is to go back into the text for today, which is around section 19 and there is some confusion here between Rackham and young because in young we have the phrase or sentence, surely the mighty power of the infinite being is most worthy, our great and earnest contemplation. And in the KU translation we have moreover, there is the supremely potent principle of infinity which claims the closest and most careful study. And if you go to the Latin for that, that is Suma Vero in Magna. And when I plug that into Google translate, what I get out of that is, but the highest power is infinite and worthy of great and careful contemplation. I think what’s actually going on here in the Latin text, they’re missing the word Vero, which means truth. So I think what’s actually going on here in the Latin text is I’m reading this something like the highest truth of the infinite and the great deserves our close and careful study or contemplation. That’s where I’m coming in. Most of these other translations don’t do anything with that word truth. And of course the young translation goes in the direction of capitalizing the words infinite being as if we’re talking about a God, we’re not talking about a God. We’re talking about nature. Nature is infinite in epicurean philosophy. It has no limit in space, it has no limit in time. And likewise, there is no limit to the number of atoms. The limits that we find in this equation are the limits of what can be produced by the accretion of the atoms into bodies. Lucrecia elsewhere talks about how you can’t have men the size of giants weighting the deepest oceans and splitting mountains with their bare hands. That would be an example of a limit in this world, but as to the extent of the world and the duration of the world and the number of the atoms in nature, those things are all unlimited. And what we see from that throughout this text, Cassius and through all of the citations that you’ve added to it, is that there are a number of things that follow from that that may not be immediately obvious. And one of those things is this principle of is Sonoma, which in the Rackham translation he reports this way. We must understand that it has the following property that in the sum of things everything has its exact match and counterpart. This property is termed by Epicurus is Sonoma or the principle of uniform distribution from this principle. It follows that if the whole number of mortals be so many, there must exist no less a number of immortals. And if the causes of destruction are beyond count, the causes of conservation also are bound to be infinite. That last clause in particular calls to mind lucious because lucretius uses two gods to symbolize creation and destruction or to symbolize conservation and destruction. And so at the beginning of the poem we have Venus who symbolizes conservation and then you have Mars who symbolizes destruction. And while this has a erotic element in Lucius’s poem, what we see is that Venus has the ability to seduce Mars away from his war path from his total destruction of everything. And that the tension between those two powers means that while everything that exists in nature that is made of Adams tends toward dissolution over time, the atoms themselves and their capacity to reunite and to form new bodies is without limit. Now I say that everything in nature tends to dissolution that is made of Adams, the gods also tend toward dissolution. What is different about the gods I think and duet makes this point clear is that it’s not that they are by nature immortal, it is that they are by their own effort incorruptible. Do you Cassius have a comment on that? Is that how you would describe this?
Cassius: That’s exactly the way I would describe that. And I want to at this point thank the people on the forum who are talking with us about all this. And the reason I mentioned that is I do think it’s essential to resist this temptation to read into a description of this process. Anything that is supernatural, if there’s anything basic to epicurean philosophy is that the world did not come from chaos at the instigation of some supernatural influence. Everything operates according to the natural motions of the atoms and the void. And sure there are different shapes of atoms and different sizes of atoms and different weights of atoms. I believe those are the three characteristics that lucre just incurs talk about, size, weight, and shape. Those differ, but essentially they’re all the same in terms of being eternally solid and unbreakable and irreducible. There’s nothing supernatural about any of them. Some are going to be smoother and rounder and smaller and thereby able to interact with each other. As Lucretius talks about the nature of the soul, these are the type atoms that are involved in things that move quickly, but that doesn’t make them supernatural. And the temptation to think that just because the gods are able to replace their atoms means that they must replace it supernaturally does not make logical sense. It’s even somewhat debatable I would say, whether there is really a law that requires that bodies that come together eventually split apart. I would say that it’s our experience that that is the case and so therefore we conclude that that’s going to happen. But other than the force of motion itself, I don’t know that it’s absolutely clear that it is inevitable that atoms once they get into a particular configuration are going to split apart. Part of the process of what we’re examining here probably needs to include this question of whether there is a natural law that requires bodies that come together from atoms to split apart over a particular timeframe. Essentially that’s what we’re talking about in regard to an eternal being is that they are deathless because they have found a way to replace their atoms into the same structure and that the structure therefore need have no end. Certainly in general, there’s no force of fate in the universe, certainly no supernatural force of fate that requires certain things to happen. So it’s not an easy question to answer, but I think that’s something that would have to be considered. And at least in the current context of discussing a being which is able to continue its life, it seems very clear that what Epicurus is hypothesizing is that through natural means. And of course that’s where the inner mindia comes in, the fact that we are sort of between the worlds and you’re not theoretically subject to the same forces of constant collisions that we see in our corner of the universe, so to speak. But all of that leads to the conclusion I would submit that there is no reason whatsoever to consider the eternal replenishment of the bodies of these eternal beings as being supernatural. I even probably should not even use the word eternal. Eternal to me is another word that has one of these supernatural connotations to it. And I think any kind of supernatural connotation is something that has to be avoided, endless, boundless, infinite or more neutral words. And the only thing that I see in all of this material that Epicurus is insisting on is that these beings have found a way to continue the replenishment of their structural atoms so as to not lose the shape of the structure ever over time, that they have a process of maintaining that structure using purely natural means. And in the related issue, another aspect of that that’s come up is that we do have to be very careful with Cicero. Cicero is an enemy of epicurean philosophy. He cannot be expected to present the philosophy as greater a length and detail and richness as would a proponent of epicurean philosophy. He thinks the whole idea of Adams is wrong, and so he’s not going to spend any more time than he absolutely has to explaining Epicurean philosophy, but offsetting that it’s important to recognize that a lot of Cicero’s major friends were epicureans and were strong epicureans. They had been to epicurean school, so to speak. They had talked to epicurean professors so to speak. They were very familiar with the details of the philosophy and I think it would be very reasonable to consider as part of evaluating what Cicero says, that he wanted to be influential, he wanted his arguments to be accepted. And I don’t think a professional lawyer advocate philosopher statesman like Cicero would think that an absolute misstatement of fact would produce much persuasiveness to his listeners. He’s encouraging them to conclude something different. But I think we can expect that Atticus Cassius, the other significant number of epicurean who surrounded Cicero would not have found his presentation effective if he had absolutely misstated a basic fact of epicurean philosophy. And again, it’s certainly a boon to us that 2000 years later we’re still talking about what Cicero has written, but he was writing for people of his own day and his own age with the idea and hope that his viewpoints in attacking Epicurus would help maintain the Roman system that he was a fan of. And his goal was that not necessarily being the world’s greatest philosopher and it would not have been logical for him to think he could succeed in persuading his friends to move away from Epicureanism if he was not willing to grant them the accuracy of what they understood Epicurus to have been saying. So in many of these cases, I think we can take the words that Cicero places in the mouth of Valis as accurate as far as they go,
Joshua: Right? So getting back to this question of whether anything supernatural happens in this universe, the Epicurean or Lucian or Olean universe, and the answer to that has to be no for this to actually work in an epicurean way. But in this text here that we’re reading, and I’m again reading from the Rackham translation, he doesn’t refer here to the force of destruction or to the power of destruction or to the law of destruction. He refers to the causes of destruction. If the causes of destruction are beyond count, the causes of conservation also are bound to be infinite. What are the causes of destruction? In several of these texts, we hear particularly in Lucretius, we hear a lot about blows, that it is the blows from other atoms that knock our own atoms loose. And when you have another large body of atoms that knocks against us, this causes damage, this causes dissolution and it causes destruction. And you rightly mentioned Cassius, that in lucius’s intermedia that there’s just fewer blows that are happening and that’s one of the ways that the gods are able in this universe to avoid destruction or dissolution. But the fact is we talk about the gods having this ability to conserve themselves and their atoms or replenish their atoms in the face of the causes of destruction. But the reality is that all living things that we know of have this ability. It’s just that in nearly all of the living beings that we know of, the causes of destruction, overwhelm the causes of conservation.
Cassius: Joss, that’s exactly right. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily conceptually different between an endless lifespan and one that lasts for an hour or for a day or for a week or for a month. The extent of the time doesn’t change the nature of what’s going on. We know that the universe itself continues in existence because of the flows of the atoms for one place to the other. I suppose an analogy could be made that these beings which are deathless, have just managed to find a process to duplicate that flow which takes place at the universal level. They’ve been able to duplicate that on a more local level in regard to their own existences. The universe itself stays into existence without end because of the flows of the atoms, and it would be natural for epicurus to look into flows of atoms as a way for beings to maintain themselves in a particular locality as well.
Joshua: Exactly, and if you just look at other species here on earth, there are reptiles that can lose limbs and gradually regrow them. There are species that seem to be inexplicably not susceptible to aging or to radiation, for example. There’s quite a lot of interesting things here on earth and with the emerging field of gene therapy, the question is can we take some of that and splice it into our own bodies? It’s an odd universe, but the important parts are what was just listed there that it’s infinite in time, it’s infinite in extent, the number of the atoms is infinite. The extent of the void of course is infinite. The number of beings composed of atoms in the universe is infinite and that the causes of destruction are never sufficient to exceed or overwhelm the causes of conservation. Part of Lucius’s argument in favor of that idea is that if things, if the atoms in particular, if the atoms could be destroyed, then surely they would’ve been destroyed by now. And the fact that we see things, you can take the remains of a dead thing and put it into a patch of soil and plant life will grow more richly there than anywhere else. It’s things like this that they must have noticed in the ancient world, surely that lead to the conclusion that the causes of conservation are never overwhelmed by the causes of destruction. The rivers carry water away to the sea, but the rain always is there in the end to replenish the water into the rivers that goes to the sea. You quoted Cassius Lucretius in book two, and this is the Bailey translation, and this is this question of whether any truly singular and unique thing can exist in nature, and he puts it this way, this there is too that in the universe there is nothing single, nothing born unique and growing unique and alone, but it is always of some tribe and there are many things in the same race. First of all, you turn your mind to living creatures. You will find that in this wise is begotten the race of wild beasts that haunts the mountains in this wise, the stock of men in this wise again, the dumb herds of scaly fishes and all the bodies of flying fouls. Wherefore, you must confess in the same way that sky and earth and sun, moon, sea and all else that exists are not unique, but rather of numberless in as much as the deep fixed boundary stone of life awaits these as surely, and there are just as much of a body that has birthed as every race which is here on earth abounding in things after its kind lucretius in the opening to book one in the Him to Venus. There’s this line when he says Tu, and the idea is that through Venus, through the power of conservation in nature, every class of living thing like our word genus, refers to groups of beings. In here he is talking about tribes and classes and so forth, but in lucretius it seems to be this word, gay newsum, every class of living thing is born and rising up looks upon the lights of the sun. And in this process, if we ever came across something that existed totally singular and without anything to compare it to, anything that was like it, we’ve talked about many times, Cassius, if the earth, for example, was the only place in nature where life existed that would say something pretty powerful about the earth, this would be a very unique and exceptional place in nature and that this by extension might suggest that the earth was the project of some higher being. We’re confident that we will find life elsewhere in nature elsewhere in the cosmos, in part because we see the way things work here on earth. He talks about elephants. There are elephants in Africa, there are elephants in Asia. Some elephants make their way to Italy through human effort. What Lucretius couldn’t possibly have known though was that if you cross the Atlantic ocean, you’ll find more continents there and that on those continents you’ll find the fossil remains of elephant like creatures, the mastodon and the wooly mammoth. He couldn’t possibly have known that those things existed, but through this principle of is Sonoma, he was able to predict that they would. That stuff like this doesn’t just exist in front of me. If it exists here, it also exists elsewhere. This is the principle of uniform distribution or is Sonoma. And so a singular object that existed only once would be an aberration. It would be a violation of this fundamental principle of the operations of nature.
Cassius: Joshua, before you go forward, let me say something on that because I think that’s a hugely important point. You’ve got this question of thought. You’ve got this question of attitude towards the universe that you’ve got to resolve. You yourself have not been to every continent. You yourself have not been alive. But for at most 70 or 80 years, you yourself have only experienced a few things within your time and space. What do you think about those things that you have not experienced and places you have not been? Are you going to allow yourself to think that places and times and locations that you’ve not been to can be supernatural? What kind of a thought process would allow you to say that? Well, I haven’t been there, so maybe God is there, maybe God’s on the other side of the moon, maybe there’s peak elements dancing on the other side of Mars. You’ve got this fundamental question of do you take existence as you observe it and extrapolate from that a set of consistent observations that you then apply and use as the basis for thinking about what exists in other places? Or do you just allow yourself free reign to say anything’s possible? I’ve never been to Africa. There could be giants with one eye, with computer brains who live forever and on and on and on. Speculations that if you come at it from the wrong position and take the position that, well, I’ve never been there, so I don’t know. And because I don’t know anything’s possible over there. Well, I think that type of questioning has to be examined and hammered down early on in the process here because it looks to me like that’s exactly what the epicurean were concerned about and took the position that no, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all sorts of cliches that get used in that subject. But just because you don’t know anything about a particular topic, if you have a need to take a position on it, many things, you’re not going to have a need to take a position. So there’s no need to speculate about it. But if you’re being confronted with people as we are every day who tell us to organize our lives according to a divine being who has created the universe and who’s told us what to do, then we’re going to need a position on whether such a being exists or not and can exist. And so I think what you’ve just been going over is an extremely important point. If we see one thing of a kind, that means that the existence of that thing is possible and would anything justify us in concluding that a supernatural being created that thing and that single thing is a violation of all the rules of nature that we’ve observed for the rest of our own personal existence and through the rest of human existence as well that’s reliably reported to us. I think the epicureans are saying, no, you don’t take that position and from the fact that a thing exists, that means that it is natural and has been created by natural processes. And if nature has created that thing through one set of natural processes at one place and one time, there is no reason to think whatsoever that the atoms that are going infinitely out into the universe cannot do the same thing again, which is not to say that they’re going to do the same thing again in the same place very frequently, but over a boundless universe if it happened once, it can happen again. And so you’re going to run into the logical questions of does the single existence of a thing imply that things like that exist an infinite number of times in an infant universe? What do you think about that?
Joshua: Yeah, I certainly think that that’s a correct way of looking at things. We have to be, the word class is interesting, every kind of thing. Am I going to find a Maytag dryer somewhere out in the sickness constellation or something like that? I don’t know. But we can expect that given enough time and given the ability we’re limited as a species, partially because just the amount of effort it would take to get to the nearest star, which is alpha sari. It would take the fastest thing we’ve ever launched, which was a satellite which was fired at the direction of the sun. If we sent that to the nearest star, it would take something like 40,000. It would take a long damn time, let’s put it that way. And that’s just to get to the nearest star. So short of some faster than light travel, exploring the universe becomes kind of beyond our reach as a species, right appears to be right now without violating some law of nature. And so it’s possible given the sheer size and scope of the universe and the time range. One way to think about humanity’s duration as a species, I was told if you start at the center of your chest and you work out to the tip of your finger in the history of the earth, half of that distance is there’s no life at all. And then most of the remaining distances like single cellular life and all of human history is a single pass of a nail file along the fingernail. That’s it, working from the chest to the tip of your fingers and to the end of your fingernail. A single pass of the file wipes off human existence from this timeline completely. So given our very narrow window onto these things, it’s possible that we’ll never find another living thing in the universe. We shouldn’t necessarily conclude from that, that it doesn’t exist out there somewhere. We’re limited by how far we can go and how long it takes us to get there. We’re limited by the power and scope of our telescopes, and we’re limited also by our particular existence in a moment in time, right? It’s possible that some of the planets that we’ve already examined, it’s possible that a hundred billion years ago there was something there that there was life there, but it just doesn’t exist anymore and it doesn’t exist now for us to see it. I’m kind of rambling on this, but the challenges that exist for us to find this stuff out there are very limiting for our species. But it makes sense when you take in Epicurus view of the cosmos that if we see it here, we should see something very like it, not just somewhere else in the cosmos, but possibly an infinite number of times, given an infinite extent, an infinite number of atoms and an infinite duration.
Cassius: Yeah. Joshua, I agree with the direction you’re going. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot by asking the question that way because I certainly am not sure of the right answer about this myself, but I do think you go back and compare the difficulty of this question with the difficulty of suggesting that this a supernatural being, that however hard the forces of nature might be for us to understand. When we think about such vast distances and such vast lengths of time, it is still more graspable and rational, reasonable to conclude that over the vastness of space and time, things are going to happen multiple times, things are going to happen essentially in the end, an infinite number of times, that argument is still a lot more reasonable than to suggest that the forces of nature at one point were just absolutely suspended by some supernatural unique event that the priests and religions of the world want you to consider to be the source of everything. Even Aristotle wants you to consider to be the source of everything. You’ve got a competition between these two perspectives in which neither one of them are easy for us to get our minds around, but the one offered by Epicurus is a natural one that has evidence behind it, when in fact the argument that is suggested as the alternative by the religions is telling you to not look for evidence. It’s telling you to ignore the evidence that you do have. It’s telling you that the evidence that you do have is leading you astray. That once you put that aside and realize the truth of our divine revelation, you’ll see that you should never trust your senses in the first place. And the difference in those two directions is dramatic, but I think Epicurus direction is the clearly superior of the two. And again, we’re not going to be successful in this episode or in a thousand episodes and coming to certainty about this, but it really is fascinating to think about the implications of these ideas and to think about how the epicureans were pursuing these ideas 2000 years ago and the fact that really the same questions confront us in the same way today, and that this is a much more productive way of living with nature and attempting to come up with a way to live happily than is the method which suggests that you suspend the laws of nature and look for some kind of divine intervention that we have nothing to base such things on other than the representations of self-interested people who have a good reason for you to believe that they have a connection with some divine truth that you don’t have. There’s lots of reasons for accepting the evidence that nature gives us as the foundation of your philosophy and lots of reasons to reject the representations of self-interested people which conflict with the evidence of nature.
Joshua: There are so many directions, Cassius, we could take this conversation. I think this bears on the riddle of Epicurus. Lucious gives a whole number of examples, and one of those examples is this idea that our atoms, the atoms that make up our body and our soul could one day in the future and may one day in the past have come together to form a being that looks exactly identical to ourselves. It’s possible he’s tapping in here to this idea among the early philosophers in Greece called meam psychosis. In philosophy, meam psychosis is the transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. The oric religion which believed in mep psychosis first appeared in thra on the northeastern frontier Orpheus, its legendary thracian founder is said to have taught that soul and body are united by a compact unequally binding on either the soul is divine but immortal and aspires to freedom while the body holds it in. Federers as a prisoner, death dissolves that contract but only to imprison the liberated soul after a short time for the wheel of birth revolves inexorably. Thus, the soul continues its journey and alternates between a separate unrestrained existence and a fresh reincarnation around the wide circle of necessity as the companion of many bodies of men and animals. And this idea was actually, it was still current in Asia Minor in the cities on the southern coast of the Black Sea during the time of Lucian. I think he was writing in the second century ad or something. But he’s talking about Alexander the Oracle monger who not only claims that he existed in previous lives, but that he will continue to exist in future lives. And included in his oracles are predicting what you will become in your next life and what you have been in your past life. And one of the devotees of this position was thought to have been Pythagoras, who was the pupil possibly of Ric of Eros, the earliest Greek thinker with whom this idea of meta psychosis is connected. So Lucious is even picking up on this idea and saying that in an atomic universe, it’s possible that our atoms will come together in an identical pattern as they exist in us now, but from this, we should not conclude that we as distinct people, that we will continue to exist when the atoms come together again, it will look exactly like us, but it will be something new. But there are an infinite number of places we could go with this question, Cassius, and it looks like we are about at the end of the episode for today.
Cassius: That’s right. As we discussed at the beginning, the best we can do is hope to point people back in this direction remind everybody that Epicurus was really focused on this issue as being extremely important enough to tell pit leads, to really make sure that he focused on the implications of this issue. And we’ve really only begun to do that in this episode. We haven’t done nearly enough of it on the forum. And I really think in the future that this is something that we need to come back to and spend more attention on because this is the link in the chain between Aism and the world around us. We are constantly confronted with arguments about supernatural beings creating the universe, guiding the universe, rewarding their friends, punishing their enemies, and Epicurus was concerned about constructing a persuasive alternative hypothesis about the way the universe works, and there is a great deal of distance between Adam’s falling through the void and the formation of worlds and human beings and all of the things that we see in the universe, and you need to be able to have a coherent understanding of how you can get from one to the other. So you’ve got images, how the repeated exposure to images over time was thought by epicurus to lead to thoughts and other processes directly in the mind. You’ve got all sorts of observations that we’re aware of today and to some extent they were aware of then, but we have many more today that can be used to investigate these issues. I made a couple of notes in post number 27 in this thread for episode 3 27 about things that we can observe going on in nature. I’ve always found Fibonacci sequences and fractals to be particularly interesting, and that’s not to even mention the fact that Dogen EU records that the SRECs had held that pleasure was directly related with smooth motion. And I don’t know whether that goes back to Democrats or not, but it certainly seems like smoothness and roughness and flows of atoms when you read lucretius about the experience of tasting pleasant food and so forth As you digest it, it certainly seems like smoothness and roughness involved in not only the shapes of the atoms, but also in the motion of things is going to be something that the epicureans would’ve been investigating and how over time repetitive flows in a particular direction and a particular shape could give rise to more complex shapes and flows over time. So that is a much more productive way of examining the nature of the universe and thinking about the practical applications of it rather than just hypothesizing some supernatural event and then continuing series of supernatural events that totally contradicts nature. We have evidence to work with and we need to work with that evidence. That’s what Epicurus appears to have been doing, and that’s what he suggests, that as part of your philosophical time, you examine those issues yourself because it’s through this kind of examination, this kind of discussion, this kind of thought processes about the way the world works that you’re going to gain the confidence to dismiss these ridiculous supernatural claims and the impositions of all sorts of fabrications and assertions of priests and philosophers about the way you should live that have no foundation in them at all. You mentioned earlier in the episode about the unlimited number of causes, and you contrasted that Joshua with the opening of Lucretius where he is focusing the idea of unlimited causes of preservation in this personification of Venus. I think that’s what he’s doing. He’s personifying in Mars the unlimited number of causes of destruction. That’s an example of the way to unwind these things, I think, is that you realize that in the physics there’s unlimited numbers of these causes, but you have to get your mind around them somehow. Maybe that’s part of what Lucretius was doing in the opening. There was suggesting a way to get your mind around in the form of Venus as a representation of the unlimited causes of construction and preservation with Mars being the personification of the opposite. So there’s also of ways to approach this and unwind what Epicurus is saying. It’s tempting for us to step back and say, well, I am never going to get very far with that myself. I’m just going to decide what Epicurus has to say about how much ice cream I should eat today, or what Epicurus has to say about whether I should decide to engage in a life of politics versus a life of being a doctor or whatever. All of those things are important, but this is important as well, and so we’ll do our best to continue to help you examine these issues as we go forward in the study of Epicurus. Joshua, any closing thoughts as we begin to wrap up?
Joshua: Yeah. Lucretius throughout his poem uses the idea that he is placing his own feet in the footsteps of Epicurus, and what he’s really saying is, Epicurus, you made it easy. You laid a path that it was easy for me to follow. And it’s difficult, I think, to imagine Epicurus not being it in some sense proud of Lucretius, but the other side of this is that beyond Epicurus, there is another goal, and that goal is the life of the gods, this blissful and incorruptible life of the gods, and that there is a path from Lucretius to Epicurus to these gods, and that this is the project of Epicurean philosophy is to follow that path to plant your feet firmly in those footprints, as Lucious would say.
Cassius: Yeah, let me join in on that for just a moment because I think that that is a very important aspect of what we’re doing at the Epicurean Friends Forum and in discussing Epicurean philosophy in general. It is certainly tempting and legitimate for those people who want to do it, to just go off on your own, do your own thing, start everything afresh as if the world had never existed before you were born, and spend all your time insisting that you do everything you way in your own time and your own method, and that you don’t care what anybody else has ever done. But it’s a legitimate approach as well, I think, to realize that the world existed before we were born, and a lot of people have learned a lot of important things over those years, and that what we are doing today is, as you said, Joshua, exactly what Epicurus was advising. He would’ve been proud of what Lucretius did in talking to Mimus about epicure in philosophy and him writing his poem so that everybody else could have the benefit of it. He would’ve been proud of what Dogen of ER was doing and writing his letter to Anna Potter and putting up his wall. He’s doing exactly what Epicurus has suggested to take these ideas and discuss them with other people, and in doing so, all of you profit from going through it and learning it better and being able to articulate it and understand it better. That’s a huge part of Epicurean philosophy. It’s a huge part of what we’re trying to do with the Epicurean Friends forum and what we’ll continue to try to do in future weeks. So let’s bring it to a close. At that point, we’ll come back next week and start talking about the stoics and the mode of life of the Gods for a few more episodes perhaps. Then we’re going to get into some criticism as Cicero provides us some immediate criticism of what Valle has been presenting. I think we’ll get a lot out of looking at that as well. But that’s all we have time for today. We’ll be back with you next week. In the meantime, drop by the Epicurean friends form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this episode. Again, thanks for your time today. We’ll be back soon.