Episode 243 - From All Sensations Are True to Reasoning By Similarity And Analogy
Date: 10/03/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4052-episode-247-cicero-s-otnotg-22-cotta-continues-to-attack-the-epicurean-view-that/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 243 opens by revisiting the previous week’s discussion of “all sensations are true,” clarifying that the eyes transmit data to the mind without injecting their own interpretation — the distinction between round and square belongs to the mind, not the sense organ. Cassius draws extensively on David Sedley’s article “Epicurean Theories of Knowledge,” covering: Arcesilaus’s takeover of the Academy and the rise of Academic skepticism; Colotes’s treatise The Impossibility of Life According to the Other Philosophers, attacking Democritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Socrates, Nausiphanes, Plato, Stilpo, the Cyrenaics, and Arcesilaus not for their ethics but for the epistemological support their views lent to skepticism; the Rhodian Epicurean Timagoras’s defense against the New Academy’s “squeezed eye” optical illusion challenge; and Philodemus’s treatise On Signs, which records a debate between the Epicurean similarity method (direct induction and analogy from macroscopic to microscopic) and the Stoic deductive elimination method. Joshua adds Lorenzo Valla’s analogy between human and animal experience as an example of similarity reasoning, then connects this to Cicero’s Section 26 where Cotta attacks Epicurus’s quasi-body and quasi-blood language for the gods. DeWitt traces this language to Homer’s ichor, while Tim O’Keefe argues it reflects an idealist interpretation of the gods. Cassius declines to choose definitively between idealist and realist readings. Zeno’s Achilles-and-tortoise paradox illustrates the futility of paradox-based philosophy divorced from sensation. A third participant, Callini, reflects on the broader struggle between materialist and supernatural worldviews. Joshua closes by noting that Epicurus was fighting a seven-or-eight-front war — not only against Academic skepticism but against divine providence, fear of punishment, and priestly exploitation.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 243 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 at EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread to discuss this and each of our podcast episodes.
Today we’re continuing in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. We’re in Book One, and to summarize where we are at this point: last week our episode was devoted to the relationship between the word “truth” and the Epicurean system, and we spent a lot of time talking about the classic formulation that all sensations are true and how difficult that can be to understand, to accept, to talk about.
In our discussions after the episode, it was pointed out that it was very easy to fall into being inaccurate even when attempting to emphasize that the eyes do not tell us what it is we’re looking at — that the eyes don’t have concepts of their own, that the identification of something does not occur in the eye but in the brain. It’s still very easy to fall into the habit of saying that what the eyes provide to us is light or color or shading or shapes or something like that. And it’s worth mentioning as we go forward that even when you use words like that, you’re talking about conceptual issues that the eyes don’t know anything whatsoever about.
The bottom line is that when we say there’s no truth or falsity in the eyes, we’re always talking about a special meaning of the word “true.” Because when Epicurus says all sensations are true, he certainly means something. The best explanation is that he means all sensations are true in the sense of honestly reported — that they do not inject their own memory or own opinion, that they don’t process the information they receive and transmit to the mind. They just transmit it without comment of their own. So all sensations are true in that sense, even though the sensations themselves are never in fact true or false in the sense of being true to the conceptual understanding or explanation of what they’re seeing. That’s the realm of opinion. Opinions are true or false, but the raw processing of the senses — whether it’s the eyes, the ears, or any other sense — are not concepts that are true or false. They’re just input that goes into the mind where opinions are formed that are eventually true or false. But the input is always accepted as it is. And even though you think, when you’re looking at a tower up close, that it is square, but when you look at a tower from a distance it is round — that understanding of “round” and “square” is not in the eyes; it is in the mind. The eyes are simply relaying data as they receive it to the mind.
So that was what we talked a lot about last week, and the upshot of that analysis is that all thought processes are based on the senses, because the thought processes are not a direct connection to reality themselves. It is the senses that are our connection with reality.
This leads in a number of different directions, several of which were covered in an article by Professor David Sedley entitled “Epicurean Theories of Knowledge.” We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this week. Dr. Sedley goes into several aspects of the background of Epicurus’s views of knowledge that are relevant to what we’re discussing. Here’s what David Sedley had to say. He said: during the 260s BC, Arcesilaus succeeded to the headship of the Academy, and under his influence the formerly doctrinal Platonist school veered away from dogma, instead adopting toward rival schools an essentially critical, dialectical stance.
It seems to have been during that early phase of the Skeptical New Academy that Colotes — who had been an intimate of Epicurus — wrote his treatise entitled The Impossibility of Life According to the Other Philosophers. According to the text, none of Colotes’s chosen targets — Democritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Socrates, Nausiphanes, Plato, Stilpo, the Cyrenaics, and Arcesilaus — were criticized for their ethical positions, as one might have predicted, but entirely for the support that their epistemology and metaphysics allegedly lent to skepticism, and specifically to skepticism about human cognitive access to physical reality. The last target attacked by Colotes, though anonymous, is unerringly recognized by Plutarch as the New Academy of Arcesilaus, presented as advocating universal suspension of judgment.
Dr. Sedley raises several points in his article. The first of which we’ve talked about several times concerns ontological arguments. Dr. Sedley says — and I’ll quote — he resourcefully points out that the mere existence of an ontological difference between two categories does not entail that one or the other of them will fall short of reality. Dr. Sedley was pointing out there that the Epicureans were attacking this idea that you could simply rely on word constructions to have contact with reality without the senses being involved.
Another aspect that Dr. Sedley mentions is that there was a Rhodian Epicurean by the name of Timagoras who responded to an argument about whether seeing double — for example, when you put your fingers up to the edges of your eyes and press to one side or the other and alter your vision — is that an example of something that shows a fallacy of the senses? Dr. Sedley gives the argument this way. He says — and I’ll quote — to judge from the way Cicero expressed it, the debate ran more or less as follows. Point number one: Epicurus insists on the truth of all sense perceptions. If a single case of a false sense perception were found, trust in the senses would collapse. But in fact, the eye simply registers with unfailing accuracy the visual data reaching it. In all alleged cases of optical illusion, the error lies in the mind’s misinterpretation or overinterpretation of that visual data.
Now what I’ve just read there as Dr. Sedley’s point number one is a very good statement of the essential point that we’ve been making: the eye simply registers with unfailing accuracy the visual data reaching it. Then point number two from Dr. Sedley: critics from the New Academy responded with the counter-example of an eye squeezed out of shape and as a result falsely seeing a single flame in a lamp as two flames. Here what appears to the eye is visual data, but not in the form in which it first reached the eye. How can the Epicurean say that this appearance is true when it is not even true to the visual data that arrived at the eyes?
And then Dr. Sedley said this was the Epicurean response from Timagoras: Timagoras replied on behalf of the Epicureans that never, when he has squeezed his eye while looking at a lamp, have there appeared to him to be two flames. This supports the Epicurean thesis that falsehood is always located in the added opinion, not in the eyes themselves.
Dr. Sedley says: does Timagoras mean that the situation described — the bare visual appearance — has never even momentarily looked to him like two flames? Or does he mean that he has never been misled into thinking that there were actually two flames? Cicero seems to understand the latter point — that what Timagoras is arguing is that you’ve never been misled into thinking there was actually two flames. But Dr. Sedley says that on either understanding, Timagoras’s reply would disqualify the Academic example from counting as a genuine optical illusion at all, and it therefore blocks it from being used as a single counter-example that would destroy the Epicurean reliance on senses as always true.
So we won’t go further into that, but that’s an example of how Epicurus is going to firmly hold the position that your opinion about what you’re seeing is always in the mind, and it is not an error of the eyes for you to reach a false conclusion. And that becomes essential to this argument, because that’s where Plato goes — these guys want to argue that the senses cannot be relied upon, so we have to look to logic, or geometry, or divine revelation for some other contact with reality.
Probably even more relevant to our discussion today, Dr. Sedley talks about Philodemus’s discussion of sign inferences in the book called On Signs — or On Methods of Inference, depending on how you want to translate the title assigned to it. Dr. Sedley says that arguably the most important contribution to the history of philosophy to emerge from the wreckage of Philodemus’s library is to be found in his own treatise on sign inferences, seemingly intended for school use rather than for publication. It was his record of an otherwise unknown debate about scientific method that is likely to have taken place around the beginning of the first century BC in Athens.
In it, Philodemus summarizes how their teacher Zeno of Sidon, and likewise the eminent contemporary Demetrius of Laconia, had defended their theory of scientific inference. The favored Epicurean method is the similarity method, while the opponents advocate instead the deductive elimination method — these opponents were almost certainly the Stoics.
The similarity method is subdivided into two parts. The first is based on direct similarity, as is well exemplified by inductive inference. The standard example is inference from the exceptional mortality of human beings in our experience to the universal mortality of all human beings, including those outside our experience. The second type of similarity method is based on analogy rather than direct similarity, the analogy normally taking the form of an inference from the macroscopic to the microscopic. For instance, since macroscopic motion depends on empty space, motion at the microscopic level of atoms also does. So both species of the method constitute Epicurean procedures for the use of signs — that is, for the scientific discovery of unobserved truths by inference from the directly observable evidence.
And that’s worth emphasizing before we go forward in our text, because this is the type of argument the Epicureans are pursuing. They’re saying: look at what we can observe, and we can take the position soundly that the things we’ve not yet observed are directly similar — in other words, directly operating in the same way as those things we can observe for ourselves — or by analogy, they may not be operating in exactly the same way as the things we see, but they are operating in a way analogous to the things we do see. The classic example is atoms: we’ve never seen or touched or had any direct observation of an atom. We are inferring our knowledge of the atoms from those things we do see. And the example Dr. Sedley gives is just as we see that in our own experience bodies cannot move unless they have space to move through — if they’re tightly packed, they can’t move at all — we can infer by analogy that at the atomic level there must also be space that allows the atoms to move within.
So that’s the type of reasoning the Epicureans are using, to be distinguished from what the Stoics are alleging: that the signs you should be talking about are symbolic — A plus B equals C — and the use of other types of symbolism to conclude that by logical necessity certain things must happen. Again, as we talked about last week, Epicurus is not willing to admit logical necessity — that Metrodorus must either be alive or dead tomorrow. He is going to base his conclusions not on logical necessity but on the experience we have through our senses, and he’s always going to go back to those experiences and not reach the conclusion that there is some syllogistic means of arriving at correct conclusions without ultimate reference back to the senses.
This is all going to be directly applicable when we start talking again in a few minutes about quasi blood and quasi bodies.
And here’s a particularly important statement. Dr. Sedley says: remarkably, the Epicurean side in the debate seems fully prepared to accept the a priori elimination criterion of Stoicism as correct and to retain it alongside the similarity criterion rejected by the Stoics. The Epicurean strategy is not to reject the Stoic inferential criterion but to minimize its role in sign inference. The Stoic quest for a purely deductive scientific method is doomed to failure, the Epicureans alleged, since even the a priori elimination method cannot avoid relying on premises established by the empirical similarity method.
True, the Epicureans say, the sign inference “since there is motion, there is void” goes through trivially by the elimination method, because according to them, if void is eliminated, motion is thereby eliminated. But the Epicurean position is that the natural and universal generalization about motion is one we have learned in the first place by empirical generalization over a vast range of experiences, where without exception motion is observed to take place only where there is room for it to do so.
This Epicurean strategy exhibits the empiricism that had always been the school’s epistemological hallmark and which is here taken to underwrite all necessary truths. Even apparently a priori truths are in reality generalizations from experience. Thus the same inductive methodology is pushed even into the realm of mathematics: from the fact that every four-by-four square in our world has an area numerically equal to its perimeter, we may correctly infer that the same is true of four-by-four squares in all other worlds too.
Okay, I’m going to stop there and bring us back up for air. But the point being made there is pretty clear, and can be stated in a way that is more generally hospitable to syllogistic logic than Epicurus is generally given credit for. Because what is being pressed here is that syllogistic logic, when it is correct, does not work because of the assignment of symbols detached from reality, but works only because your starting points — in the first place, even before you assign symbols to them — have been gathered through generalizations from experience.
The ultimate point is really very simple: you’re always starting back at the senses before you can reason about anything. Just exactly as Lucretius says, reason itself would fall to the ground unless the senses are true. Nothing makes sense unless it can be established through the senses.
Joshua: I think the main takeaway from everything that you’ve been saying, Cassius, is that it’s the aim of both the Platonists but also of the Stoics to undermine our understanding of things in nature — of things that are true, things that exist. In the first point you raised, they’re trying to pit relativities against objects that exist in nature. Colotes asked the question: do you think, on the basis of the foregoing argument, that someone would not suffer the troubles which I mentioned, but rather would make it convincing that fair, foul, and all other matters of belief are falsely believed in — just because, unlike gold and similar things, they are not the same everywhere?
So what we have here from the Academy side is establishing a dichotomy between something like gold, which is the same no matter where it is in nature, in the cosmos — and then you have things like fair and foul that are subject to human preference and human opinion. And the argument he’s trying to make there is that one of these things has a real existence and one of them does not — or that the belief that something is fair or beautiful is a false belief because it varies from person to person.
And what I see with most of what you’ve mentioned here is we’re dealing with an approach that sees the object of philosophy as being to unsettle our understanding of nature rather than to create a better foundation for that understanding.
Then the last point you mentioned — the issue of analogy — I want to quote from Lorenzo Valla, and this will connect it back to what we’re going to be talking about in the text today. Lorenzo Valla starts out this way. He says: according to my Epicurus, however, nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being — and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this, I agree. They eat, we eat. They drink, we drink. They sleep and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory — some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything. Finally, they die and we die — both of us completely. But we shall have no knowledge of this when we have departed from this life. Therefore, for as long as possible — would that it were longer — let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life. As much as we can — and we can do much — let us most generously gratify our eyes, ears, palates, nostrils, hands, feet, and other parts, which I hope you will do even without my encouragement.
What we see in this particular text is that he’s using some of the methods you were just describing, Cassius — the method of similarity and analogy — connecting the experience of humans with the experience of other living beings. And what we’re going to find as we get into the text for today is that this approach has its own difficulties when it comes to the nature of the gods.
Epicurus in the Letter to Menoikeus says that the gods are zoe — living beings — much in the same way that Lorenzo Valla in his book on pleasure says that Epicurus included in the term “living being” mankind just as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. And the challenge that Cotta is going to make as we go forward is: why, Epicurus, do you suggest — and what do you mean when you suggest — that the gods are living beings who have not body but something like body, and not blood but something like blood? This is going to be a major focus of his attack going forward. And one of the problems with this attack and our response to it is that this appears to me to be the only source for this particular view in Epicurean philosophy. We don’t have what Epicurus wrote on the subject. Lucretius doesn’t mention it. And so we’re relying on Cicero both as a transmitter and as a critic.
Cassius: Joshua, thank you for what you’ve just said, because I think you’ve done a better job of explaining something really important than I did in the initial discussion. Before we move on, I’d like to stay with that for just a moment, because if we can bring greater clarity to this, I think we’ve accomplished a lot.
When you went through the first argument that Dr. Sedley brought up — the difference between relative qualities versus bodies that exist in nature — this goes to the heart of a lot of these arguments. The skeptics are arguing that because we perceive differences in our sense perceptions — seeing the tower round versus square, as an example — and because these differences are perceived by the senses, we really cannot consider any one perception of a tower to be real. They’re arguing that what we should consider to be real is the idea that we can only get to with words and with logical analysis of what a tower really is.
DeWitt says that one of the main problems Epicurus had with Plato was that he considered Plato to be a skeptic. Well, Plato himself was not nearly so skeptical as some of his later followers became, including Arcesilaus. Sedley says Plato had indeed never intended by this contrast between minerals and values to impugn the reality of the latter, any more than he meant to infer from the relativity of large and small to their unreality. On the contrary, he had presented an exhaustive division of beings into absolute and relative — a scheme which became formal Academic doctrine under Speusippus.
The point being — as Sedley talks about in the article we referenced last week — that there are truths at multiple levels, and that the truth of the macroscopic level does not mean that there are no truths at the microscopic level, and vice versa. Both aspects of reality should be considered to be real, and we can acknowledge that the tower appears round versus square as an aspect of reality. At the same time we can acknowledge that our idea of a tower is also a real aspect of reality — the one aspect of reality does not invalidate the other.
Which I think is going to lead us to the conclusion that saying a god has a quasi body or quasi blood is not inconsistent with the idea that a god has reality. The argument from similarity that is being used by Philodemus’s On Signs and by Valla as to the nature of the gods is not rendered invalid by Valla’s or Epicurus’s inability to state with exact specificity what the nature of the body or the blood really is. As Lucretius said, and we referenced last week: we may not understand why the tower appears round at a distance but square up close, but even failing our understanding of the mechanism, we do not as a result consider the senses less real. We consider what the eyes tell us as just as real as our knowledge developed from experimentation and observation about whether the tower is in fact round or square.
Joshua: I think this gets us into something we were discussing during the week, which is the difference between objective and subjective truth. So going by Sedley and Colotes here, what the later philosophers of the Academy were saying was: if you think a diamond is beautiful, either your opinion that the diamond is beautiful is false, or the diamond doesn’t exist in reality — one of those things has to be true. But we could put a different lens on this by saying no, the diamond does exist in reality, and the opinion that the diamond is beautiful is just that — it’s an opinion.
But it gets even more ludicrous when they say things like: if you think that a diamond is more transparent than a ruby, either that is false or the diamond doesn’t exist. That seems to be the contrast here, and to me it just shows the level to which these other thinkers in the ancient world are going — in the words of Lucretius — to muddle your understanding. They’re just sowing confusion on these subjects.
There’s no reason to say that both of these things can’t be true. A diamond can be more transparent than another stone and it can also exist in reality. Both of those things can be true. Now, it’s not an opinion to say that a diamond is more transparent than granite — it is an opinion to say that a diamond is more beautiful than granite. But in either case, neither of these statements about the relative quality of two different objects invalidates the existence of one or both of the objects. The granite is real. The diamond is real. The relative transparency between the two is a fact of nature and can be measured. And the opinion that one is more beautiful than the other is subjectively true because beauty rests on opinion.
Cassius: The statement that something is beautiful would certainly be an opinion. I can see somebody saying that their reaction to something as being beautiful is a feeling of pleasure, perhaps. And I do think that ultimately the Epicurean position is sound here. Like the last thing you said, Joshua: ultimately, even if we are not yet at the point where we’re totally comfortable with the way we’re articulating something, we can get a grasp of the bigger picture — that something’s going on here with these radical skeptics. They’re attempting to muddle the water. And it’s not necessarily because they’ve just reached some objectively rational conclusion that “we are wise and know that the senses are not reliable, and so therefore we are able to tell you through divine revelation and through geometry that there is something you should look to instead of the senses.” It’s not that they have some objective wisdom that we don’t have.
I would submit that it’s very clear — as implied with the word “muddle” — that there is an intention here to obscure and enhance the difficulty, with the goal of attempting to dissuade you from having confidence in the senses. Lucretius says this in a number of ways in his poem. And that’s probably one of the ultimate takeaways from this whole discussion: the background of what Cotta is arguing here is that he’s attempting to slash and burn the position that the gods have something similar to body and something similar to blood. He’s trying to say that argument is ridiculous. But in the end, what truth does Cotta have to substitute for that? He has none. He’s not taking a position on anything himself. He’s just saying you can’t take a position.
And when you see through to the result there, you realize — as Lucretius is saying — that these guys are spinning these arguments, keeping people mesmerized in confusion rather than leading them to a clear result. If they had a clear result to offer and proof to go behind it, then I would submit the Epicureans would have been the first to go along with their proof and their reasoning. But they have reasoning without the proof of sensations to ground it on. And that’s where Epicurus and the Epicureans are continuously insisting that you have to have the proof through the senses to start with.
I think that’s a position that ultimately makes a lot of sense and is the most persuasive here. And every time we think about it, I can tell that you, Joshua, are improving your ability to articulate this. I’m not sure I’m getting much better over time, but there is a really, really important point here — and it’s really not that complicated a point. It’s difficult for us who are wrapped in all of the skepticism to see out of, but in the end it comes down to: if you don’t have sensations to ground your logic on, you’ve got nothing.
Joshua: Exactly. And I think if you look at other schools in the ancient world like the Eleatic School of Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, they aren’t necessarily reaching for a skeptical approach, but by ignoring the evidence of the senses, they are at least entertaining ideas that are as ridiculous as what we’re reading here. For example: if Achilles and a tortoise are in a foot race and the tortoise is given any amount of a head start, the tortoise will ultimately win the foot race — because before Achilles gets halfway to the tortoise, the tortoise will have moved a little bit, and then Achilles will have to go halfway again to the tortoise. But by the time he has done that, the tortoise will have moved a little bit more.
If you had measured the pace of a tortoise and measured the pace of a swift runner using sensation, you would know obviously that the runner would overtake the tortoise. So I think there’s a real approach here in Greek philosophy to take things to these extremes — and maybe there’s value in that in some instances, and Zeno’s paradoxes are certainly still discussed today. But you can’t build a philosophy that helps you to live better, more happily, and more wisely by founding it on these paradoxes — on the idea that a tortoise is going to outrun swift-footed Achilles, as Homer puts it, if the tortoise is given any head start. It’s like they’re trying to push things to the absolute limit so they can find the breaking point. And again, maybe that has value. But it does nothing for the health of the soul. And the whole Epicurean approach is: what good is a philosophy that does nothing for the health of the soul?
Cassius: That’s right. You’re reminding me of the example we’ve also discussed recently of Alexander the Oracle Monger. Do we really believe that Alexander — or people like him — are committed to their positions because they’re really sincere about the accuracy of their conclusions? When Lucian points out in his Alexander the Oracle Monger essay that what was needed was an Epicurus or a Metrodorus — somebody who was absolutely sure that even though, for a moment, they might not know the exact mechanism by which that snake was operating and seeming to speak, they would be absolutely confident that there was some explanation for this that was not supernatural. The snake was not a god. The snake was not able to predict the future.
And that’s really where we come down here: to have the type of confidence that even though you can’t explain at this moment exactly what type of blood a god would have, you can state absolutely and totally and with the greatest of conviction that whatever mechanism might be going on within a god to keep it alive forever — it is natural, and it is not supernatural. And it does not justify Alexander requiring you to pay a toll in order to get a prediction about the future, or some religion requiring you to go through all of their required procedures to get into heaven.
All the different things that supernatural religion and these esoteric philosophers advocate — as though they have some key to the universe that’s not available to everybody else — the upshot of all this discussion of analyzing inference through the senses and the inadequacies of logical syllogisms on their own comes down to that kind of real-world confidence that an Epicurus or a Metrodorus would have in the face of a poseur like Alexander the Oracle Monger: that an explanation does exist. And if you have enough time and enough ability and enough evidence over the years, you’ll eventually understand it. It’s not going to be found to be supernatural. It does not invalidate your ability to live a happy life in the here and now. And it’s not a cause of panic or concern or anxiety that your ability to live happily is ultimately outside of your control — which is where all these other guys end up.
Joshua: Right. And Cotta starts off sort of where you just were with Alexander the Oracle Monger. Cotta in Section 26 starts out this way. He says: it seems an unaccountable thing how one soothsayer can refrain from laughing when he sees another. It is yet a greater wonder that you Epicureans can refrain from laughing among yourselves. It is no body, but something like body. I could understand this if it were applied to statues made of wax or clay. But in regard to the deity, I am not able to discover what is meant by a quasi body or quasi blood. Nor indeed are you, Velleius, though you will not confess so much. For those precepts are delivered to you as dictates which Epicurus carelessly blundered out. He boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had no instructor — which I could easily believe without his public declaration of it, for the same reason that I could believe the master of a very bad edifice if he were to boast that he had no architect but himself.
Cotta is laying on the insults richly and thickly here. But let’s take for a moment this issue, because he’s going to go on and on about this. You mentioned, Cassius, this problem of “not blood, but something like blood” and “not body, but something like body.” He’s going to continue this even into Section 27, and there’s more to go here in Section 26.
So the first thing I want to say about this is that — to my knowledge, and I’ll have to confer with Brian because he’s doing good work on the Herculaneum material and the fragments of Epicurus — this is really the only source for the transmission of this idea, and it comes from a very hostile critic of Epicureanism in Cicero. And so it’s possible we’re not going to be able to make head or tail of what he’s saying here.
I do want to mention a few approaches, and I’ll start with Norman DeWitt from his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. He writes on page 261: it is not on record whether Epicurus adduced logical grounds for denying flesh and blood to the bodies of the gods. We are informed that he wrote of them as having a sort of blood and a sort of body lacking solidity such as characterizes ordinary bodies. It is quite possible that he was rationalizing a tradition represented by Homer, who also denied blood to the bodies of the gods. Instead of blood, there was in their veins a liquid called ichor, which in later Greek signified the straw-colored residue of blood called serum. As for the unsubstantial nature of the divine body, this was only what the general belief of the Greeks assumed to be true. As already mentioned, Epicurus preferred to follow tradition where permissible and was not bent upon introducing new gods — which was an indictable offense — but aimed rather to rationalize existing beliefs and recall his countrymen to true piety.
So DeWitt is holding the position here that when Epicurus talks about the gods having something like body but not body, something like blood but not blood, that he is tapping into a literary and cultural tradition dating back to Homer, who describes gods as subsisting on nectar and ambrosia — and that it is ichor and not blood that flows through their veins.
Another approach is the approach that Tim O’Keefe takes in a paper called “Epicurus: Garden Physics and Epistemology,” published in the Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy in 2013. This is the approach that Tim O’Keefe takes to the question of quasi blood and quasi body. He says — and I’ll quote: as noted above, Cicero is deeply hostile to Epicureanism, so he can often be uncharitable in his interpretation and criticisms. Nonetheless in this case his report can be trusted. Cicero wrote his philosophical dialogues in order to bequeath to his countrymen in Latin the arguments of prominent philosophical schools — the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptical Academy — on topics such as fate, ethics, and the gods. And he customarily used the handbooks of the various schools themselves in presenting their views. It is evident that Cicero was doing that here: he faithfully reports that the gods have only quasi body and quasi blood, but has his Epicurean spokesman Velleius admit that he isn’t expounding the doctrine clearly, reflecting Cicero’s own incomprehension. Later in the dialogue he has the Academic spokesman Cotta attack the doctrine as not merely obscure but as nonsensical flimflam.
And then Tim O’Keefe presents his argument for this issue of quasi blood and quasi body. He says: but if the gods are just idealizations of the most blessed life for us, the obscure doctrine makes sense as an answer to the question of whether the gods have bodies. To say that they do in the same way as we do would be mistaken — as Velleius later says, the gods don’t have the same sort of solidity or numerical distinction as concrete bodies like you. And I think, Cassius, as we encountered the word stereōsis earlier in this text, which had something to do with this issue of solidity — O’Keefe continues: but to say that they are bodiless would be misleading, suggesting that the gods are incorporeal, disembodied intelligences such as Plato’s craftsman in the Timaeus. As idealizations of the best human life, our idea of the gods is an idea of a being with body, blood, and human appearance. And if the gods are ideas, this would also make sense of the reports that the gods’ substance is tenuous — since according to the Epicureans, our minds and our ideas are both atomic, but neither is solid. The mind is a fine-structured and flimsy body diffused throughout the rest of the body, and both images and ideas are delicate.
So Tim O’Keefe here is taking the view that the blood and body of the gods is actually evidence that Epicurus was taking an idealist view of the gods — as opposed to the realist view — that they don’t exist in nature, they exist in our minds as idealizations of the best possible life: the life that we as humans and as Epicureans should strive for.
Do you have thoughts on that, Cassius, before I go forward?
Cassius: Nothing that’s going to advance it further than what we’ve previously discussed. There are many theories about that, and I’ve never found any of them to be exclusively persuasive to me. In fact, I don’t know that I think there’s necessarily a conflict between saying that gods can be both ideals and can exist in real particulars as well. So we’ve discussed that many times. I’m not sure I have anything new to add at the moment. But clearly that’s one of the issues we’re discussing here — the relationship between ideas and real things.
And perhaps one of the conclusions we ought to be coming to is that both of them can have reality, and that because something is an idea does not mean there are not real particular examples of it; and because there are real particular examples does not mean that on a different level we don’t perceive ideas as real. So it’s a very complicated subject.
But among the choices we’re being presented here — and that we are presented with in real life — we come back to the Epicureans arguing that there is some kind of existence to the gods, and that they have quasi bodies and quasi blood that give them some reality. We may not find that particularly satisfactory, but the opposite — the position being advocated by Cotta, the Platonist — is that god is a disembodied mind, purely non-physical, without physical reality. And if you have to choose between which of those two is most persuasive, I’ll go with quasi blood and quasi body any day of the week.
Joshua: And Norman DeWitt connects this to Greek culture, and I’m wondering if there’s something more there as well. The Greeks had some interesting ideas, principally before — I think it was Galen, one of the great doctors of antiquity, who had the luxury to live in Alexandria in Egypt at a time when the vivisection of live condemned prisoners was allowed. This was a horrific practice, but it did allow him a glimpse into the human body while it was still functioning. And so they had a much better understanding of the circulatory system in Galen’s time and in his circle than they did elsewhere in Greek culture, where it was sometimes thought that it wasn’t blood that flowed through the veins — that the blood was in the flesh — and it was air: you breathe in the air, it goes through the lungs and into the veins and arteries, and the air is conducted throughout the system.
And then there’s this other idea, which may have something to do with it as well: the idea that the seat of the mind in classical culture was in the heart rather than in the brain. The heart, obviously even to the most benign of the ancients, clearly has a connection with blood, because when it’s pumping faster the veins are expanded and so forth. So I don’t know — I think this would be an interesting field of study, but I haven’t done the work, so I don’t have much more to say on that.
Cassius: We do need to bring today’s episode to a conclusion, so let’s go ahead and do that.
Callini: During today’s podcast, it occurred to me how there’s this push and pull — almost a battle — between the material world and the spiritual world. Some of the things that you were talking about just brought that to mind: that what’s really going on here with Epicurean philosophy, when we take the focus as being the material world, we’re asserting that this is the primary thing. But it’s even more than just a primary thing. We’re asserting that there isn’t some kind of mysterious, unknowable substance that permeates everything and is kind of running the show, so to speak.
So thinking now about what exists among people’s beliefs — some people believe that God is in control of everything and that there are supernatural forces, but at the same time they have the modern scientific understanding of things. So they’re kind of holding on to two things at the same time. But with Epicurean philosophy we’re saying: wait a minute, everything is material. There’s not some mysterious power that is lurking and observing. And it’s really a big transformation. And clearly we haven’t really accomplished that in modern times — we’re still under this sense that there is a god who is involved with human beings. I’m not saying everybody believes that; there is a certain percentage that does believe in an only materialist understanding of the world. But I guess I just wanted to say that when I listen to you guys talking, it brings up certain ideas. We are in a material, physical world, and we are then able to see where we have control over that. And so that’s really an empowering thing.
Joshua: And I think it’s very important to keep a sense of the larger picture here. Even though we’re dealing heavily with the Skeptic view of things and the assertion that knowledge is impossible and we can’t really know anything for sure — Epicurus in the ancient world is not fighting a single-front war. He’s not fighting a two-front war or three-front war. It’s more like a seven-or-eight-front war. So skepticism of course is a problem, but so is the view that the gods are in control of everything in this world and that you will be judged and punished after you die — or punished in this world before you die. I think it’s very important to keep all of this in mind. And of course Cotta, as a priest in the Roman Republic, even though he claims not to have knowledge of any of this stuff, is nevertheless performing the sacrifices and taking the hard-won pay of the citizens into the coffers of the temples. So we shouldn’t lose sight of this. It’s important.
Cassius: Joshua, I think you’re exactly right. And Callini, your point was excellent — it’s really helpful here at the end of the episode as well, to bring it back to why we’re having this discussion. We’re not just here to debate skepticism or the details of what they were saying in 50 BC. It is very much the same question that we wrestle with today, and the examples you gave, Callini, are ones we wrestle with today because we have never succeeded in resolving these questions from Epicurus’s time and the time of Cicero. It’s only when you get clarity on these ultimate questions that you’re going to be able to take a position of confidence about whether the supernatural gods really exist and whether you’re doomed to heaven or hell and issues like that.
What Epicurus was striving toward was an integrated view of how perception, how sensation, relates to the opinions we form based on them — how we can use reason and indeed logic to have confidence in our opinions. And unless you get an integrated view of all these issues and how they work together, you’re just going to constantly go round and round in confusion, as we continue to do in the modern world.
Okay, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion. As always, we invite you to join us at EpicureanFriends.com. Let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any other topic relating to Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.