Episode 241 - A Common Thread Between The Epicurean View Of The Gods and The Good
Date: 09/19/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4052-episode-247-cicero-s-otnotg-22-cotta-continues-to-attack-the-epicurean-view-that/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 241 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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 discussion thread for this and each of our podcast episodes today we’re continuing in Cicero’s on the nature of the Gods. We are going to be moving into section 23, but before we do that, we spent almost the entire episode last week focused on the implications of one sentence from section 23 where Kata said that Valle had argued that the general ascent of men of all nations in all degrees is the argument that Epicurus was advancing to induce us to acknowledge the being of the gods. And we talked about that at length because it’s a really important subject involving prolapses and canons in general. But even as we talked about it and then moved into several of our Zoom episodes last week, I think we found that there’s more to be said about that, especially as to one part of it that Joshua brought up in analogizing or pointing out the similarity in the style of the argument between something that Quata has said about the nature of the good in Cicero’s on ends and comparing that to what Valle is saying about the nature of the Gods herein on the nature of the gods. I think Joshua was making a very, very interesting point about the way that Epicurus was approaching these things and then how that approach has come down to us in a way that sometimes can be a little bit confusing to us when we take something in isolation and we don’t follow exactly why the conversation got started off in a particular direction in the first place, both in relation to the good and where that word comes from and what’s really being discussed, and then the nature of a God or divinity and where that concept came from and why that’s being discussed. It can be very confusing to consider, well is epicure saying something about Zeus and Athena and Minerva and Aphrodite, or is he saying something much more general that precedes the discussion of an individual God? Just like Torta is saying something much more general about good. Before you start talking about pleasure and which ones to pursue and which ones not to pursue and how to evaluate all those choices, there’s a groundwork or foundation that has to be laid before you get to this particular analysis. And you could analogize this to the issue of confusing the forest for the trees. You can look at individual trees without appreciating the concept of a forest. And we have some things to review further about whether we’re having the forest versus the trees problem with both the issue of the gods and the issue of the good. But lemme turn that back over to Joshua to continue.
Joshua: I think we’ve always said Cassius, that we probably get more out of recording these episodes than people do from listening to them just because we learn so much from trying to think through the arguments and especially when dealing with works like Cicero’s works, we have to come up with responses to what he’s saying. And this is hugely helpful for us and this is nowhere more clear to me than when we’re recording an episode. And at the end of the episode, I have a thought that explains the topic better than I’ve explained it through the entire episode, and this happened to me last Sunday when we were recording episode two 40 and in the thread for episode two 40 after we were finished recording, I made a post which I think explains two problems. In the letter to Manus also explains the problem we were dealing with in the passage that we discussed last week. So let me start and we’re going to try to get through this quickly. Let me start with the letter to Manus where he says, first believe that a God is a living, being blessed and incorruptible according to the notion of a God indicated by the common sense of mankind. And it’s always struck me, and we’ve had conversations about this in the past, why in the first instance here in the letter to Manas, does Epicurus use the singular for God rather than the plural? And he normally uses the plural. In fact, for the rest of the letter he uses the plural Lucretius talks about the gods as plural. And I think I can explain that as part of my broader explanation here. So I think that what Epicurus is doing here in the letter to Manus is actually very similar to what Torti does in the beginning of his monologue in Cicero’s on ends. And let me quote that. He says this quote, the problem before us then is what is the climax and standard of things good. And this in the opinion of all philosophers must needs be such that we are bound to test all things by it. But the standard itself by nothing, he then goes on to say, Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good while pain is the supreme evil. But before we can talk about what any given philosopher thinks is the good, we have to have an understanding of what the good is. In other words, we have to define our terms. If you think virtue is the good, that doesn’t help us unless we know what we should think the good to be. And Towada says that the good in the opinion of all philosophers is such that we are bound to test all things by it, but the good itself by nothing. So if pleasure is the good, we are bound to test all things by pleasure, but we test pleasure itself by nothing. If virtue is the good, we test all things by virtue, but virtue itself by nothing and so forth. And I think there’s a real parallel here to what Epicurus says in the letter to Manus when he says, first believe that a God is a being blessed and incorruptible, before we can talk about the gods, we have to have a working definition for what a God is. And I think what Epicurus is saying here is according to the common notion of mankind, a God is a being blessed and incorruptible. That’s not an argument for the existence of the gods. Epicurus thinks the gods exist because he bases that conclusion on the prolapses, which is a canonical faculty like sensation, like the feelings, and B, he bases it on his principle of isno, which he derives from his physics. He does not think that the gods exist because that is the common notion or common sense of mankind, that the gods exist. He’s relying on the common sense of mankind to provide a definition of a God, a God for it is anything else is a living being blessed and incorruptible just like the good before we even know what any given philosopher says, the good is. The good is such that we are bound to test all things by it, but we test the good itself by nothing.
Cassius: Yeah. Joshua, it seems to me a lot of the confusion can come in when the word the is inserted here and that’s what you’re saying, it’s almost like the question is the general versus the particular or the universal versus the particular. The statement by epicurus about God or a discussion about good has to be distinguished between whether you’re talking about a particular God or a particular good.
Joshua: I spent all last episode listening to you talk about this. I don’t get what your point is, is my problem. I’m talking about the definition and you’re talking about the general versus the specific and whether Zeus and Minerva exist.
Cassius: So Joshua, what I’m hearing you say, whenever you or anybody uses the term the gods, there is an ambiguity about which Gods you’re talking about. That is a different issue in my mind between the concept of God because that’s where I’m hearing you say we have to have a definition. You’re saying that Epicurus is giving a definition of what a God would be. That doesn’t tell me whether he thinks that a particular God exists or not. So my point would be that the direction you’re going in is correct for QAs is pointing out that we’re going to have a discussion about the word good and we’re going to define the word good, but we’re going to define it conceptually without reference to any particular good. We’re going to decide whether a particular thing is good after we come up with our definition because unless we have the definition, we don’t know that we can apply it in a particular instance. And I see that you’re saying the same thing in regard to the gods that before you can have a discussion about something, you’ve got to have some kind of an agreement as to what the definition is. And Epicurus is asserting that the definition is that a God is a living being who is blessed and imperishable. Now once you have that definition, you can then start talking about whether Zeus or Minerva or Yahweh or anybody else exists, but you can’t even start talking about whether those things exist as particular beings unless you first come to an understanding of what it is you’re talking about. Am I with you on what you’re saying there or are you saying something different?
Joshua: Yeah, I think you’re taking it just one step further, and I think it does proceed from what I’m saying, we can’t decide whether my coffee table is a table unless we know what a table is. And this is not the same thing as asking what is the ideal form of a table. I’m just asking for a definition of a table because
Cassius: You can’t even begin to communicate unless you agree on what it is you’re communicating about.
Joshua: Right? Yep, I’m with you on that. Yep.
Cassius: Okay. And so the first thing I’m hearing you say is that Torti in regard to the good and Valle in regard to the God in both cases of course we’re talking about Epicurus definition and we’re just using the messenger in one case in regard to the gods, the messenger is valle and regard to the good, the messenger is quata, but we’re all talking about what Epicurus is saying and we’re dealing with hearsay because we’re talking about where Quata and what Valle are telling us, but it sounds like they are thinking that Epicurus is starting point was to say, before we can start talking about this, we have to agree on what it is we’re talking about. And you’ve got this whole chicken and egg question tables, for example. Can you talk about a table before you have seen a table? Are tables only a construct of your mind after seeing a certain number of tables or are you able to have a discussion about things that you’ve never seen before? Because in the case of the Gods, you have this prolapses we’re talking about, but we don’t see right in front of us directly every day a God that we can say this new thing that we’re talking about is consistent with these old things that we saw previously because we really haven’t seen them directly in front of us previously. So in the case of both the gods and in the case of the good, we’re talking about this issue of where does this concept come from and can we talk about a concept without identifying particular instances of that concept?
Joshua: I think that this is really helpful because you’re right, Epicurus talks about God’s exist for knowledge of them as manifests. This is also from the letter to eu, but what’s also true is you have a lot of disagreement as to which Gods exist, but you also have a lot of disagreement as to whether the gods exist in the first place. I think your question is a very good one. Does it make sense to have a definition of the God or of the gods without having seen or heard or tasted a God? I think it’s an interesting question.
Cassius: To me it’s similar to Centar. I mean we know what we’re talking about when we start discussing centaurs. I think we know what we’re talking about if I’m correct, it’s a body of a horse and a head or upper torso of a man sort of combined together. We have defined a centar in that or similar way. And so we can talk about centaurs because we have constructed an agreement between ourselves about this concept. But as we all know in epicurean philosophy, centaurs do not exist. In other words, there are no particular instances of centaurs other than in pictures or some constructs such as that there are no cent in reality that we can point to say that this issue of centaurs arose in human life because somebody saw a horseman combination at some point in the past, the issue of centaurs has been developed not independently because we have seen horses and we have seen men, but the idea of combining them together is something that we’ve never seen before and yet we talk about all the time. I would think that epicurus in the case of both gods and the case of the good is able to look at it again in both terms. You’ve got the practical instance of particulars that you’ve seen and had direct experience with, but because we talk about particular gods and particular things that are good, that doesn’t mean we cannot also talk about this overall concept of goodness or godness. And gosh, I’m almost thinking it relates to a discussion we’re having currently on the forum. We’re talking about analyzing desires this morning as we record this episode and looking at the definition of the word desire in the dictionary, desire can be defined as a passionate longing for a particular object such as romantic love and so forth. But there are also other definitions of desire in which desire is just something that you wish for or you want, and the level of intensity that’s involved in the wish or the wantingness makes all the difference in the world in terms of what you’re talking about when you talk about the word desire. If when Martha Nesbaum writes about the therapy of desire, she’s talking about the therapy of intoxicating romance and fixing that problem, then that’s one thing. But if you’re saying desire is anything in life that you wish to accomplish, that’s something totally different and you have to separate out those things that are intoxicating from those things that are not intoxicating but that you wish to do. So that’s a little bit of a tangent, but I think the same thing is going on here in regard to Gods and in regard to the good. We have to constantly be on guard to be clear as to whether we’re talking about the idea of a God in which that is a living being which is blessed and imperishable, or whether we’re talking about Zeus or Athena or miner or anybody else. And I hope that hasn’t been too confusing in the way I’ve said it in the past, but to me I think you’re constantly going back and forth between the forest and the trees. You’re talking about individual trees, but if individual trees don’t exist in a group, then you don’t ever have a forest. A forest is defined in terms of not only the individual groupings of trees, but you’ve elevated the concept of forest to a verbalized conception that has many different ways it can be applied, but it’s still something that you can talk about even though everybody may have a different conception of the particular reference at a particular moment. And one more thing that I’m not going to have time to expand on today, but I want to at least mention is that I would contend that when Epicurus is defining pleasure as the absence of pain and he’s talking about the limit of quantity in pleasures as the removal of all that is painful, those are extremely important examples of the same thing we’re talking about today. The issue of how words can be used to refer both to a concept to the thing and to particular instances of that thing, individual pleasures exist because our faculty of feeling tells us that pleasures and pains exist. But pleasure is also something that exists as a concept for us to think about as any experience in life which is not painful. In the same way Epicurus is defining the limit of quantity and pleasures as the removal of all that is painful, and that’s a conceptual starting point that exists as a standard which we can then use to evaluate particulars. This is where Dewitt says that the major innovation in Epicurean philosophy was to expand the meaning of pleasure to cover not only sensual stimulation but also all experiences which are not explicitly painful. When Epicurus was talking about pleasure as the absence of pain or the limit of quantity of pleasure as the removal of all pain, he was not referring to some kind of new or unusual type of pleasure. He was simply expanding his explanation, his definition of what pleasure is all about, to be clear about what it includes and what it does not include. Those people who are taking absence of pain as if it is some kind of fancy pleasure, which is the real goal of life, have totally missed what Epicurus is really doing here in terms of expanding the definition and not talking about some new or unusual or exotic kind of pleasure that comes from asceticism. So again, we’ll come back to that another time, but in addition to defining the gods as blessed and imperishable living beings, and in addition to defining the good as that which all other things are aiming towards, we can also apply the same analysis to pleasure both in terms of pleasure as a description of the good and in terms of the limit of quantity of pleasure being the example of how to understand the removal of all pain, not that the removal of all pain is in some particular way the goal of life, but that the removal of all pain stands as the definition of the limit of quantity in pleasures that can possibly ever occur. So again, we’ll come back to those examples at another time. This whole universal versus particular question is very complicated and not something we can easily resolve, but it’s clearly going on when you have words that can mean different things in different circumstances. So Joshua, after having continued to think about this problem since last week, what does it lead you to conclude about? What does this parallel mean in how we should understand
Joshua: For a long time and.deals with this problem? Epicurus has long been considered a muddled or unorganized thinker. He talks about things, but in fact, I can point to Cicero, I can point to plu tar. There are many voices in the ancient world, but also in more recent centuries who look at some of the things that Epicurus has said and written and they’re asking questions like, why doesn’t he speak more clearly? Why doesn’t he use when he’s talking about natural and necessary? Why doesn’t he discuss this at the level of the genus in the species? Why doesn’t Epicurus use Sistic logic to lay out his propositions? And to me, part of my answer is when you look at these two passages, I think Epicurus is trying to lay out in an orderly fashion what he’s doing. The question of where the concept of the good comes from is an interesting one, and maybe Epicurus would say just as tota says, well, the opinion of all philosophers, people are talking about this. Whether anyone has seen the good is a separate question. People are talking about the good and in order to talk about it, there has to be a definition. And likewise with the Gods, people don’t just talk about the gods people worship the gods, people go to the temple of Poseidon and make a sacrifice before they get on a ship and cross the sea. This is a really important issue and there are pitfalls with this discussion perhaps more than any other discussion because we’re dealing with something so remote, but we have to be able to talk about it because whether or not you think that Gods are real, the impact of this concept on people in the real world is huge
Cassius: And you refer to talking about it, I’m not even sure you can think about these things without being able to put ‘em into some kind of a verbal form in your own mind. It’s hard enough to communicate with other people when you have different points of reference, but even to continue a thought process within your own mind for very long, it seems like you’ve got to organize your thoughts into some kind of organized structure that you can then refer back to or else as epicure says in the letter to S, you go on spinning around using different words to infinity and you never understand anything unless you can somehow at some point bring something back to a clear reference point. And this clear reference point is what I think you’re pointing out is going on in relation to both the gods and the good epicurus is attempting to be extremely clear and he’s not willing to just jump over the issue of whether a particular thing is right or wrong without first being sure that he’s being clear about what’s being discussed in the first place.
Joshua: Right now, everyone views these things through their own lenses is part of the problem. So even defining a table for example, doesn’t get around that problem. I don’t think Aristotle had his system of teleology, which he would use to explain a table. Even if you define a table, you’re still going to encounter Aristotle trying to give you his four causes of what makes up the table, what’s the material? Cause for example, Aristotle would say the material cause is wood because the table is made of wood. What’s the formal cause? The formal cause is the shape that the table takes. You have the efficient cause, how was the table made? And then you have the final cause. What is the purpose of the table? And that’s all in the background. That’s all in the mind of Aristotle. Even if you define a table to him, you’re not going to get around this other problem, which is Aristotle’s got this whole system built up around his understanding of a table. So defining something gives you a bridge to connect with the minds of other people, but it doesn’t mean you’re all standing on the same ground. There’s connection, but there’s also differences that you just can’t get around.
Cassius: And because you can define things that don’t exist in reality, you can assign a word definition to a centar even though a centar does not exist in reality, you can assign omnipotence and omniscience and all of these other words that people associate with Yahweh or Allah or whoever. But just because you can say it, just because you can define it does not mean that it exists in reality. It’s a constant back and forth of comparing what is being said or thought with what does exist in reality and how do you get back to what’s existing in reality, the only way to do that reliably, Epicurus is pointing out to us is through these canonical faculties of repeated observations through the five senses, the feelings of pain and pleasure and the prolapses faculty. So to me, Joshua, it seems like this is so important because it’s an aspect of almost every discussion in that there are different perspectives on particular words and in order to make progress, it’s very much what epicure has said in that letter to HERIs about first being clear about what it is you’re talking about before you start using additional words to define something. Because unless you can bring it all back in the end to something that’s clearly relevant to you and real in your experience, then all of it becomes just empty words and on and on and on without any kind of a resolution to any kind of question. I would say that that’s one of the important takeaways of how all this fits together in both the gods and the discussion of the good. I think Epicurus is always insisting that even though it’s possible to talk about things and have a concept of a thing, what really matters in life are the particular instances that really exist in our own experience. And if these particulars do not affect us, then to some extent our abstractions become totally useless and even harmful, especially if they distract us away from the reality of our day-to-day lives. There is a concept of God that does have a particular application to us that’s extremely beneficial, but there are also concepts of Gods which are extremely damaging and extremely unrelated to the reality that we live in. And the same thing goes with the good as well. You can become a platonist and a stoic and get all wrapped up into the idea that there is a good, that virtue is the good, that the good and virtue are their own reward, and that there’s this overriding conceptual, categorical imperative that you must achieve the good, you must achieve virtue, you must achieve God, and you can become obsessed or intoxicated with this conceptual level of things which has no connection with reality. And if you do allow yourself to go down that road, it’s just extremely damaging for the limited time that you have to live. And that what’s much more important and the remedy to that is to always come back to those things that nature herself allows you to have contact with through the faculties that nature gave you.
Joshua: I think it’s conversations like these that drive Thomas Jefferson to say what he says in his letter to John Adams, which is, I recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne. I feel therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not my own. There are other existences. I feel them trading or changing place. This gives me motion. And I think you’re right that returning to what we have direct evidence of, I mentioned earlier, everyone approaches all of these issues through their own lens. You have to constantly dial in your lens a little bit by returning to what you know by returning to sensation and contact. Divine touch I think is what Lucious calls it by bringing it back down to earth because when we talk about defining a God and whether or not that’s helpful, is it helpful to define how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? One of the contemporary problems for Epicurus was you had philosophers in his world who were taking geometry to expansive interesting places, but it had no real connection to the world that we live in, was his view. It’s all very good to define that only one line can be drawn through a point parallel to another given line. How does that make people happy? How does that alleviate suffering? How does that expand the level of human connection that is possible? And if you spend your entire life in this rarefied world of pure geometry, pure reason, contemplating absolute truth as duet summarized Plato’s purpose, if you spend your entire life there and you never bring it back down to earth, it becomes really difficult to actually apply and use this stuff.
Cassius: Exactly. I think of the school of Athens mural with Plato pointing up to the skies and Aristotle pointing ahead of him as if he’s pointing to this world and so forth. I think of the illusions that you often see Nietzsche making about the competition between those who are concerned about this world versus those who are pointing to some other world as if that other world supersedes this one. And that conflict seems to be behind an awful lot of what’s going on here. I think the people who failed to appreciate Epicurus are failing to appreciate that Epicurus is going further even than Aristotle was. Because when you drill down to what Aristotle is identified with, at least in popular understanding of his philosophy, is that Aristotle himself was still bound up in these categories and in the logical reasoning that he is so associated with and that Epicurus was going further even than that by saying that it’s not by the reduction of things to logical syllogisms either from the form of the heavens or from just some essences that we think we can identify nature around us as Aristotle was apparently attempting to do. Life is not a matter of reducing things to logic or logical forms. It’s a matter of following the canonical faculties that nature gave us the five senses, the feelings of pleasure and pain and these anticipations are lysis and that it’s there and not in logical categories or logical analysis that we eventually find what’s real and true and that we need to live our lives by Aristotle is given all this credit for bringing things back down to earth. And he deserves credit for breaking away from Plato and this totally abstract idea of having lived before we were born and there being a divine creator who has everything going in motion, but Aristotle was not able to break away from that divine creation, that intentional universe, that teleological orientation, that still results largely in the same kind of conclusions that Plato himself had. He just grounds them and says they exist here around us instead of in some other dimension maybe. But I think Epicurus is saying you’ve got to go beyond all that, beyond these ideas that the concepts and the logical categories are what matter and decide what it is that really matters to you in life and what matters nature has given to us. Nature has given us only pleasure and pain by which to decide what to choose and what to avoid. Those lines that toti has given to us. And it’s all through the PE letter to menaces as well. That’s the basis that you have to come back to and not any amount of logical manipulation of words, the words are useful. The words have to be used in order for us to communicate in order for us to even think. But in parallel with virtue, virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is a tool for happy living, for pleasure, and these words that we’re talking about, the conceptual definitions that are being given to the good or to gods is not in itself and the end, it is only a tool for understanding the reality of nature that we live in.
Joshua: I think it’s partially this conflict if we don’t talk about very much, it’s this difference between a priori reasoning and a posteriority reasoning. When St. Danson sits down and develops his ontological argument, he’s reasoning a priori that is in advance of the facts. This is all theoretical. Whereas when Epicurus, and we’re going to get here into the Adams and ADA’s skepticism over the Adams here in a moment, Epicurus is not dreaming this up out of his own head. He is arguing for the existence of the atoms after the facts. He is deriving this argument from sensation. You can’t see an atom, they’re too small, but you have this whole framework of experience built up throughout your life and he’s using this framework as the basis of an argument that leads him to the universe is made of atoms and void even though it’s a conclusion derived from reason from logic. It’s very different from a conclusion that is only derived from reason and logic. That’s not based on any evidence, that’s not based on any sensation. And I think that’s a big part of the problem with all of this stuff.
Cassius: I agree that it is, and I think you’ve used exactly the right term when you said a priori reasoning and that conveys exactly what needs to be conveyed. But unfortunately, those discussions with words like that are not in the common vocabulary of ordinary people. And it really is a challenge to explain these things in ways that are understandable because that question that you’ve just identified is really behind everything like you said. So if it is behind everything, then basically everybody needs to have some kind of a working ability to use that understanding. And again, we don’t talk about it ourselves here, very much different Latin designations. Those issues need to be explainable and understandable and ordinary terms by ordinary people. And I think people do understand to some extent, people will understand the words common sense, even though the cliche is the common sense is not very common and people will make quips about common sense all the time. I do think people instinctually grasp that there is a highly abstract and technical and egghead type of reasoning and type of way of living your life versus a very practical way. And the people who live very practically are really focusing on those things that are real and immediate in their lives. But the people who do focus on those things that are real and immediate to them also have to be concerned about things that are not immediately going on around them in the sense that life doesn’t allow us to live in our own caves apart from the rest of the world. We have to have a method of synthesizing and being aware of things that are going on further out around us to be sure that the Persians don’t march in and destroy Athens or whatever. There is a necessity of life that involves communication and words and concepts and the evaluation of things that are more than three feet away from us. So it’s necessary to do all these things and I guess that’s what philosophy’s all about, to help us to understand these issues and come up with practical ways of living based on them. So let’s go a little further into the end of 23 and the beginning of 24 here today before we stop, because what Kata turns to next, and we did hint at this last week. He says, okay, we’re going to put all of that aside about the communist sin of man. We’ll go ahead and presume that there are gods. Let’s get into the discussion of the details of those gods and how they live and so forth. Lemme quote just a little bit that we need to start analyzing because he says at the beginning of 24, according to young, I advanced these principles of the naturalist without knowing whether they’re true or false, yet they’re more like truth in those statements of yours, for they are the absurdities in which ISTs before him lucita used to indulge saying that there are certain light corus, some smooth, some rough, some round, some square, some crooked and bent as bows, which by fortuitous concourse made heaven and earth without the influence of any natural power. This opinion Valle, you’ve brought down to these our times and you would sooner be deprived of the greatest advantage of life than of that authority for before you were acquainted with those tenets, you thought you ought to profess yourself an epicurean so that it was necessary that you should either embrace these absurdities or lose the philosophical character which you would taken upon you and what could bribe you to renounce the epicurean opinion. Nothing you say can prevail on you to forsake the truth and the sure means of a happy life. But is that the truth for I shall not contest your happy life, which you think the de himself will not enjoy unless he languages an idleness. But where is truth? Is it in your innumerable worlds, some of which are rising, some falling at every moment of time, or is it in your atomic core puzzles which form such excellent works without the direction of any natural power or reason? But I was forgetting my liberality, which I had promised to exert in your case and exceeding the bounds which I first proposed to myself. Okay, so before we go forward, let’s analyze that because there’s more going on here than just saying, Valle Adams don’t exist and you’re wrong. There’s an accusation that kata is bringing against Val that we need to pull out of this and decide how to respond. And it’s something important that we ourselves see and have to deal with even today.
Joshua: So we were chatting about this passage a little bit before the recording and the point you made is the point you just made there. This is more than a question about whether the cosmos is made of atoms and void. This is a question about adherence to a particular philosophical sect. Whether the epicureans are as religious about Epicurus opinions as, for example, your average Catholic is about what a Pope said in the 14th century. And the answer I think is no. We can follow Epicurus train of thought and see where it leads and see why he places the foundation of his physics on Adams and void so that when Kada says You Valle would sooner be deprived of the greatest advantages of life than of Epicurus authority for before you were acquainted with his tenets, you thought that you ought to profess yourself in epicurean. Do we imagine that Valle just walked through the agora one day or the forum one day and was like, ah, the epicurean, I’m going to join that school without knowing anything about it. I have to assume that he was convinced of the claims that Epicurus was making before he aligned himself to that particular school.
Cassius: In hearing you say this and looking at this text, Joss, this is now reminding me of the theme of a few days in Athens, Francis Wright picked out and set up the story of Theon, and I think this argument actually appears in there. She might have placed it in the mouth of Epicurus suggesting to Theon that he became a stoic because of their reputation or perhaps also metro Dous in a few days in Athens suggests to Theon that he should not have presumed that Epicurus believed in the Gods until he found out exactly what Epicurus taught, that he’d been impressed by certain superficial aspects of Epicurus before he came to really understand what Epicurus was teaching. So I think some of that’s going on here too.
Joshua: That is such a good point because Theon in that book doesn’t necessarily join Epicurus the school, but he starts hanging out with the epicurean just because he likes them as people more than anything. And you’re right to say that it’s superficial aspects. He sees Epicurus as a happy person and says, well, I want to be happy, so I’m going to listen to what this guy says. But he hasn’t actually read a single text by any of these philosophers it seems. And then I think that’s a really interesting point. I’m assuming that maybe Valle has put more work in than this because we know of Cicero’s own youth that he studied in Athens as many elite Roman men of his generation did. They were sent to Athens to study philosophy and he did study with the Epicureans, but he eventually sided with a different school. He didn’t just, well, my father sent me to the stoic, so I’m going to become a stoic. And that’s just the way it is. Cicero gives us the impression that he considered multiple possibilities before siding with this academic skeptic approach that starts with Plato.
Cassius: Yeah, it’s an interesting argument to me. I’m joining it now in my mind with what Kata has said previously about, well, Epicurus came up with this idea about the gods. And I’m not saying he was lying, but it was awfully convenient that Epicurus did therefore not get prosecuted for blasphemy and have to drink the hemlock like Socrates did. So you might want to question whether Epicurus was really being truthful and honest or not, and now he’s saying Valis you yourself. You just kind of think that you ought to be an epicurean because you like the epicurean lifestyle, but do you really believe the truth of these atoms or are you an epicurean just because you like the lifestyle? And in a sense those are very legitimate questions to ask, but they’re kind of snide ways of undercutting somebody’s confidence, which to some extent I’ll admit has some usefulness because you don’t want people to just adopt things on superficial grounds, on superficial appearances. It’s not desirable to say that I’m an epicurean because if I was a Socratic, I’d be thrown out of Athens or forced to drink the hemlock. Neither of those are very attractive possibilities. So you can see where the argument is grounded and why the argument carries some force if it is true. So that would to me emphasize the necessity of making sure that that argument is not true and does not apply to you. It’s very important to be an epicurean, not because you like the lifestyle and like the superficial appearance, but because you’ve come to a belief after reading the argument of epicurus and examining the world yourself that these conclusions are correct. It’s important to take epic’s views of the gods or not based on his argument and not based on whether it’s going to prevent you from being accused of blasphemy or not. Those are considerations for sure, but they should not be the foundation of the reasons you make these decisions. And this kind of thing comes up all the time. We see it even in our own discussions among people who in good faith are studying epicurus and they’ll repeat the same thing. Well, Epicurus sure gained a lot by taking his position about the gods and Epicurus sure gained a lot of pleasure and wine women and song by taking his position about pleasure and happiness. So you really ought to think that he’s motivated by those results and not by the truth. And those are arguments that are important to realize that are there, and they’re important to come to a conclusion yourself on whether they’re true or not, because if you think those arguments are true, then you are in the wrong place because those who say they’re committed to philosophy, they love wisdom and they love truth, they’re not interested in these superficial results that have no relationship to what is true and real. If you’re into philosophy, then you need to be listening to and reading and studying those people who are concerned about the truth. And if you’ve got some concern that Epicurus is doing what he’s doing because of the advantages that it brings to him regardless of the truth, then that is a recipe for disaster because you’re buying into a premise that goes totally against everything that Epicurus Foundation calls you to do. Epicurus calls you to be honest with reality and honest with the truth and based all of your arguments and all of your decisions on your honest assessment of the way things really are. And if you’re going to use some consideration that I wish this were true because it would bring me all these advantages and I’m going to do it even though I know it’s not true, that is the most foreign thing, the epicurean analysis that you could possibly come up with.
Joshua: Yeah, I referenced this passage earlier in the episode. This comes from DeWitt’s book Epicurus and his philosophy, and it’s in the chapter under the true piety and in the subsection called isinia and the gods Dewitt says this in spite of a super silliest opinion. To the contrary, Epicurus was not a muddled thinker, but a very systematic one to the idea of infinity. He ascribed fundamental importance. He exhorted the young les to study it as one of those master principles which would render easy the recognition of causation in details. Cicero must have been recalling some similar exhortation when he wrote, but of the very greatest importance is the significance of infinity. And in the highest degree deserving of intense and diligent contemplation, he was quoting Epicurus and Dewitt continues. It was from this principle that Epicurus deduced his chief theoretical confirmation of belief in the existence of Gods. All throughout the epicurean works, you have these exhortations, as Dewitt puts it from Epicurus, telling his students to don’t just take this stuff on board without thinking about it. You have to study this stuff. You have to study nature, you have to study infinity. You have to examine this stuff for yourself. You can’t just take it as read just because I said it. And the Greek word relating to this exhortation is proleptic. And the letter to EU is a proleptic work in that it exhorts the reader to look into this stuff. Don’t just accept it because I said it. You really have to study this on your own. Kini, I think it was you several years ago now on the podcast pointing out that the letter to MEUs has those protic elements, that this is a way of not just attracting new students like the young Theon in a few days in Athens, but of exhorting his readers to actually apply their own attention to what he’s saying and weigh it in the balance and see if it comes out true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. I’m thinking through something right now, which is probably exposing my lack of advancement in the philosophy, but in my mind, I realize how strange it is that we have something here with Epicurean philosophy in which there is this belief in the material world and that a person when they die, there’s no soul that goes on after death, and yet there’s a belief in God, in God’s. So it’s a strange kind of thing because from first appearances, epic epicurean philosophy at first glance, when you don’t really know too much, it almost seems like, oh, this is going to be close to atheism, but you can’t even fit it into that box because once you say that there are gods, that throws it into a whole nother kind of category. And so as I was saying, this points out that I kind of still need to go processing what is this, that on the one hand, there’s no immortal soul, there’s no heaven, no hell, but yet on the other hand, there’s the idea of Gods and that they somehow exist. So it’s still an ongoing process for me right now in that regard.
Joshua: Yeah, and certainly for me, I would’ve found Epicureanism a lot faster if Epicurus had said for Gods there are not, because that was much more in accord with my own opinion. It was the way he lays this out makes it interesting to talk about, and it’s not just accept this or you Rod at the club, you have to think through this stuff. Cassius, we might be taking this in a direction that you weren’t intending here.
Cassius: No, that’s a great example of this issue of clarity and the meaning of words that are involved because I think Epicurus was expecting people to get to the point where they would understand that there is no conflict whatsoever between the existence of Gods and your own pursuit of your own happiness in your own life, even though you’re mortal, those very issues that you brought up just a few minutes ago. If you consider the word gods and the concept of Gods and the way that Epicurus seems clearly to be going, then they are a feature of the universe just like there’s billions of other features of the universe, some of which are relevant to us and some of which are not. But there’s no conflict between the existence of Gods of the type that Epicurus is talking about and the rest of the analysis of the ethical system that Epicurus has also put forward. It’s only these errors about the nature of Gods that other people are bringing in that creates the conflicts that you’re talking about. But if you purge the definition, purge the understanding of these incorrect concepts, then the concept of a God is not only perfectly consistent with but actually beneficial to the rest of the ethics and the way that you live your life.
Joshua: Yeah, I think this is really important stuff to work through and it’s going to get even more important next week because the question that Kata is going to start with next week is Pontius pilot’s question what is truth? And this is his foundation as a thoroughgoing skeptic that knowledge of the truth is fundamentally impossible. We can only talk in terms of probabilities. And so having this stuff straight in our minds I think is going to be very important next week. And everything we’ve discussed, this whole episode relating to both this issue of the ascent of mankind in its relation to epicurus his opinion on the gods, but also reasoning in advance of the facts or after the facts, all of this stuff is going to come into play in a really important way next week, not just how do you know that Adams exist or how do you know that the Gods exist? What is truth? And this is a challenge that Cicero sets forth for us here.
Cassius: And what you’re talking about, Joshua includes that question of can you legitimately take a position on what is incorrect? If you cannot take a position on what is correct, do you have to have your own view of what is true in order to be confident that something else is false? And there’s a lot of complexity involved in that, and in a lot of situations it does seem very legitimate to say, well, I don’t know what the facts are, but I know that that is not what’s going on. And that’s certainly a legitimate position to take. It’s certainly a position we’re all familiar with taking, and it rings true to us. But when you look behind that a little bit, you have to have an understanding of this issue of truth in order to be consistent even within your own mind about what it is you’re really saying. When you’re saying, I know something is not true, it’s because you are able to look at that thing and say certain things about what you’re looking at and saying that those things don’t match the truth. So it’s such a deep issue, but it has to be dealt with because again, on this issue of the truth of the gods, if haha is correct, if those who assert supernatural religion are correct, that there is a God who rewards his friends and punishes his enemies, and if they’re correct about that, then I don’t want to be on the wrong side of that equation. I want to be a friend of that particular God so that he will reward me with eternal life and happiness in heaven. And so he won’t send me to hell. And so in order to decide which of those roads to take, you have to take a position on whether that argument about a intervening intelligence supernatural God is correct or not. You can’t avoid taking a position on it if you want to be logically consistent in trying to live happily because everything turns on the truth or falsity of those assertions.
Joshua: Yeah, I think what you mentioned there, Cassius, which is a belief in supernatural gods, that punish and reward does present a really interesting problem, not just to the belief in that God, but to all people who would be affected by the claim if it was true. And this is where philosophy, it’s really interesting and in part really difficult, and I just want to go back again to that letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams written in 1820 when he says, rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my sense is I rid myself of the purism with which an indulgence in speculations, hyperphysical and anti physical. So uselessly, occupy and disquiet the mind, a single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely and never. All our senses together with their faculty of reasoning, they evidence realities. And there are enough of these for all the purposes of life without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and fantasm, I’m satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. I’m sure that I really know many, many things and none more surely than that. I love you with all my heart and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself. On the one hand, the claim that there is a supernatural God who will punish you after you die. That claim is being made without any evidence put forward to support it. And that might be enough for us to be able to set it aside and not be tormented or troubled as Thomas Jefferson says about it. But there’s another position which says, we should look into this stuff and see what the foundation is, and that will give us a much better position, not only to respond to it and to refute it if we are able, but also to ensure that it will not affect us because it’s very easy to say that, oh, I’m not going to be tormented or troubled by that. But just saying that we won’t be tormented or troubled doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true that we won’t be tormented or troubled. The best way to ensure that we will not be tormented or troubled is to learn as much as we can about it and about the shaky foundation on which the claim rests. And for that, we’re going to need to know a little bit about what’s true and what’s not true. And that’s why ADA’s question next week is going to be so important. What is truth? We’re going to have to be able to offer an answer to that question because if we don’t accept that certain things are knowable, then we’re accepting the possibility that these claims, which hold so much horror and terror for us. If they’re true, we won’t know if they’re true or not. And I think it’s really corrosive not just to philosophy, but to human happiness, to sit on this volcano, we need to have answers, especially because the questions that are being asked are so important.
Cassius: Yeah, I agree, Joshua, that we don’t see a God bringing things into existence out of nothing. We don’t see a God destroying things to nothing. We don’t see Gods intervening to appear before us and make decisions and tell us what to do. We don’t see those things happening, and that’s the basis for why we don’t believe them. If we did see those things happening, we would believe them. And so the ultimate odine that Thomas Jefferson is talking about at such a basic level is where you get to application of the entire epicurean philosophy of taking the information from the census and the anticipations and feelings and making your decisions based on those observations. And that’s where truth comes from. If the truth cannot be validated by the anticipation’s feelings and the five senses, then whatever the logical consistency of the abstraction might be, whatever the possibilities might be, then that thing is not really true to us or relevant to our lives, and we have to base our lives and make our decisions and live from day to day based on the things that are relevant to us that come to us through these faculties. It makes no sense to do anything else. So this question of what is truth with something we’ll deal with further on next week. So let’s end the discussion today. At that point, as always, we invite you to drop by the form and let us know your thoughts about this episode or anything else you’d like to talk about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.