Episode 246 - Examining Epicurean Evidence-Based Reasoning
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 246 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we have a discussion thread for this and each of our podcast episodes we’re continuing in our series in Cicero’s on the nature of the Gods. We’re going to be talking specifically from section 31 from Book one today as we continue on basically the same theme in which kata is attacking the epicurean method of reasoning about the gods and suggesting that it makes no sense the epicurean should be laughing at each other because it’s just all so ridiculous and he’s attempting to dive down into the details of speculations about what language the gods speak, what kind of bodies they have, what kind of blood they have, and he’s saying that because we cannot prove those things with specificity, nothing that the epicureans are concluding about the gods should be given any respect whatsoever with the planted presumption that after we destroy the epicurean projections about the specific nature of the gods, we’re just going to start totally from scratch again without any evidence whatsoever and begin supporting the positions that Plato and others had taken about the nature of the gods, which was very closely related to the positions that were taken in the Roman religion of this time and of which Kaha himself was a priest making representations to the people of the Roman and Greek world about the nature of the gods, even though his personal philosophical disposition is that of skepticism in which nothing is taken to be known with certainty. Now, at the end of the material that we quoted last week, Kada had quoted from basically what was principle doctrine number one, the statement that a being which is happy and immortal is not burdened with any labor and does not impose any on anyone else. And from that point, Kada continues into his criticisms of epicurious disposition. He says in section 31, quote in his statement of the sentence, some think that he avoided speaking clearly on purpose, though it was manifestly without design, but they judge ill of a man who had not the least art. It is uncertain whether he means that there is any being happy and immortal or that if there is any being happy, he must likewise be immortal. They do not consider that he speaks here indeed ambiguously, but in many other places, both he and metro Doris explain themselves as clearly as you have done. Of course that’s addressed to Valis who’s given us the presentation that we’re talking about continuing on with the quote, but he epicurus believe there are gods, nor have I ever seen anyone who was more exceedingly afraid of what he declared ought to be, no objects of fear, namely death and the gods with the apprehensions of which the common rank of people are very little affected. But he says that the minds of all mortals are terrified by them. Many thousands of men commit robberies in the face of death, others rifle, all the temples they can get into such as these no doubt must be greatly terrified, the one by the fears of death and the others by the fear of the gods. I think that’s probably sarcasm for the sake of being clear as we go through. He’s basically complained that Epicurus is exaggerating the fear of death and of the gods and the role it plays in his philosophy, and he is saying as I read it that the common people are really not that much affected by that. Kada says many thousands of men commit robberies in the face of death and others rifle the temples, and those people, no doubt must be greatly terrified by death and by the gods. Of course, they would not be doing that if they really were terrified by death and by the gods. Do you read that the same way, Joshua, that he’s being sarcastic about epicurus his position?
Joshua: Yeah, I think it’s very clear that he’s being sarcastic. We read in Cicero’s on ends that one of Cicero’s counterarguments against the epicureans there was that there are some people who are indeed so shameless in these matters that they would eat off the sacrificial plate that was offered to the God and Horace has an ode or a satire which says something like, do you think virtue is only words and a forest only firewood? Then your main goal in life is going to be to earn money insinuating that there are people who would cut down a sacred grove in order to get the wood in the trees. So I think kata is clearly saying that there are not only some people, there are many people who have no fear of the gods or any retribution and that they are not afraid of death.
Cassius: It’s interesting to me as we go through these materials that we see echoes even today of similar arguments made about epicure and philosophy. One of the criticisms people will come up with is good grief. He thinks that everybody’s just terrified to their heart every moment of every day and constantly so concerned about fleeing from these threats of gods and death everywhere, that he’s really kind of ridiculous for being such a timid person and that that’s why his philosophy doesn’t really make sense because people really are not as terrified about Gods or as terrified about death as Epicurus makes everybody out to be. He ends up making that the centerpiece of his philosophy, the centerpiece of his motivation for all people doing all things, when really that’s not the way the world works.
Speaker 3: So as I listened to what you just said, Cassius, what comes to mind is that the world is different than it was in Epicurus time because the actual part of dying is not really right in front of our eyes. It takes place in hospitals and then we have movies that change the whole sense of what death is by showing death as like somebody’s just falling asleep somehow that it’s not such a big deal. But imagine back in Epicurus time how different things were, and especially because people probably died at a much younger age and there was a lot more death of infants and young children. So I’m just saying that we’ve changed a lot as far as civilization goes with regard to death and also when people go through their lives with this idea of, oh, I’m not afraid of death, but then when they’re really confronted with their actual death, it’s a whole nother thing. Suddenly that’s when you really have to deal with it. If you haven’t done enough thinking about it before that moment comes, it’s going to be a different experience than if you’ve really thought through it in the way that Epicureans do.
Joshua: I think you’re raising excellent points there. Kini. There is what they call the hidden death in the modern world, which is people don’t die in their beds very much anymore and they’re not left out in the living room for a wake. We do all that stuff institutionally. That’s a professional work nowadays. It’s not done in the home. The other factors of the modern world are interesting. For one, we have the internet, which gives us a possibly illusory but more private and more introspective view into people’s mindsets and into their lives than you might’ve had in the ancient world. But there’s also in the modern world, because of our ability to do mass polling and statistical analysis, some interesting research on the subject, and if you go to the Wikipedia page for death anxiety, there are a few interesting things that stand out. For example, a 2012 study involving Christian and Muslim college students from the US Turkey and Malaysia found that their religiosity correlated positively with an increased fear of death. In other words, the religion actually made them more afraid of death. But most interesting to me was a discovery in 2017. This was in the United States that you could plot the fear of death in the population as a kind of bell curve and religiosity would be on the lower axis of the curve so that the people who are least afraid of death are those who are either very religious on one end of the curve or not at all religious on the other end of the curve. And then as you get toward the middle where there’s less confidence relating to ideas about the afterlife and about the gods and about the problems that both religion and irreligion in some sense offer answers to death, anxiety increases in that population. But I have to think the phrase, there are no atheists in foxholes. You couldn’t hold that to be true as some people appear to hold that to be true, unless you thought that without your religion or without God, you would be terrified of death, and so they seem to give the whole game away when they express it in terms like that. And I also want to mention he talks about people ransacking the temples that they can get into. I believe it was the practice and some of these ancient societies where the temples were also the treasuries, right? This is the safest place to put the state’s money in the coffers of the temple because that’s the last place that people are going to rob or ransack. And if there was any validity to that at all, that means that people were generally still afraid of the gods in spite of Cicero’s protest. But it’s an interesting question.
Cassius: It is interesting. I can think of another example to add to the pot two endogen voer. The epicureans certainly understood that not everybody is living in constant fear of the gods such that they are never going to do evil fragment 20 do. Nu Anders says, quote, it’s obvious that wrongdoers given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by the laws are not afraid of the gods. This has to be conceded for if they were afraid they would not do wrong. And then he goes on and points out that people who are the most religious are often the people who do the most evil deeds in life. You can cite example after example. Reus, of course cites the sacrifice of if Vanessa to get favorable wins and so forth. So what Kata is doing here is he’s attempting to chip around the edges of Epicurus as credibility, but the epicurean certainly understood that people are not robots who are driven every moment of their lives. There’s many times in life that we are not thinking about death and that we’re not thinking about the role of the gods. You have to get into those issues in order to reach ultimate conclusions about setting your whole life course in the first place. But you’re not constantly thinking about, am I about to die two minutes from now? Is God telling me what to do right this second? There are people who think that way, but the great majority of people do not do that, and Epicure certainly understood that at this point in the argument, we’re going to come to a paragraph that I think is much more clear about where Kata is going with this argument that we can really begin to get a grip on the defects of ADA’s position and is misrepresentation of the teachings of Epicurus about the proper way to think about things that are imperceptible to the census. This is key to an awful lot of the controversy that surrounds Epicurean philosophy. So this is a particularly important paragraph. Let me go ahead and read it once, then we’ll go through it again as we take it apart. Here’s the thing that Kata says next, but since you dare not, for I am now addressing my discourse to epicurus himself, absolutely deny the existence of Gods, what hinders you from ascribing a divine nature to the sun, the world or some eternal mind. Now again, let me emphasize, I think that the tone of the argument here has shifted. He’s no longer criticizing Epicurus about you’re just overly concerned about fear of the gods and fear of death. He’s now making a logical argument himself and he’s asking Why Epicurus are you not willing to just absolutely deny the existence of God’s? Since everything that you’re saying leads up in Kato’s opinion to that conclusion, since you don’t dare to absolutely deny the existence of God’s, why don’t you just go ahead and admit that the sun, the world, or some eternal mind have a divine nature? Why don’t you just go ahead and take the next step and become one of us in believing that these things we see in the sky or in fact the world around us or some eternal mind, we can’t even see that those themselves are gods? What prevents you from taking that position? Epicurus? Okay, kata continues and gives what he represents to be Epicurus position. I never says he epicurus saw wisdom and a rational soul in anybody. Human form, which means of course that kata is alleging that Epicurus says that he will not believe in anything unless he has previously seen it himself. Now, of course, it would be ridiculous to take the position that you will not believe in anything unless you have seen it yourself. That was not Epicurus position, but kata is alleging that it was, and he goes forward and extends the argument this way. What did you ever observe? Anything like the sun or the moon or the five moving planets. The sun terminating his course in two extreme parts of one circle finishes his annual revolutions, the moon receiving her light from the sun completes the same course in the space of a month. The five planets in the same circle, some nearer others, more remote from the earth begin the same courses together and finish them in different spaces of time. He’s pointing out that the different things in the sky are moving at different rates that we can’t explain with the implication that since we have never seen anything like these phenomena here on earth and these phenomena in the sky even differ among themselves that it’s impossible to come to any generalizations or understanding about them at all. Under epicurean philosophy, he goes on and says, did you ever observe anything like this? Epicurus, according to you, there can be neither sun, moon nor stars because nothing can exist, but what we have touched or seen here, ADA’s argument becomes very clear. So let me repeat that again for emphasis. According to you, there can’t be either sun, moon or stars because nothing can exist, but what we have touched or seen, he continues on now to cash in on the argument that he has already laid. You don’t believe in anything you’ve never seen before. Epicurus, why then are you believing in God’s at all is the argument that God is going to make? So let’s go forward. He continues on quote, what Have you ever seen the deity himself? Why else do you believe that there is any if this doctrine, your doctrine, epicurious, if this doctrine prevails, we must reject all that history relates or reason discovers and the people who inhabit inland countries must not believe there is such a thing as the sea. This is so narrow a way of thinking that if you had been born in Phis and never had been from out of that island where you had frequently been in the habit of seeing little hares and foxes, you would not therefore believe that there are such beasts as lions and panthers, and if anyone should describe an elephant to you, you would think that he designed to laugh at you. Okay? Now he’s coming back to something that we can all understand. It doesn’t involve anything controversial such as talking about gods. It’s not discussing the details of whether the gods have quasi blood or quasi bodies or that level of difficulty of subject. Instead, the argument now reveals what kata is alleging about epicurus deepest reasoning processes. The argument affects all our day-to-day activities and the way we think and act in the normal world ourselves. He’s alleging that Epicurus is taking the position that you should never believe in anything unless you can see it or touch it for yourself. That is obviously not Epicurus position. If you wanted to indict Cicero on misrepresenting Epicurus positions, this has got to be one of the clearest examples of it because nobody in their right mind is going to assert that they only believe in things that they have previously seen or touched. Epicurus didn’t believe that, but it becomes the heart of this attack. He’s coming back into something that we can identify as a point of logic. Can we reasoning based on information that nature allows us to have through our senses, come to any reasonable opinion about the nature of the sun, the moon and the planets, or do we have to abandon our senses, allow our imagination to run wild and consider possibilities such as that the sun, the moon, and the planets are divine or that they are god’s themselves? That’s what’s at stake here. Epicurus is saying that we certainly can come to reasonable conclusions about the moon and the stars and the planets. We do not have to just throw everything to the wind and believe that anything is possible, but we can use our observations here on earth and also our observations of watching them in the sky and come to conclusions that are natural and not supernatural. Can we by looking at the stars, the moon and the planets say that we can understand anything about their nature by analogizing that to what we see here on earth. Kata is arguing that you’ve never seen anything like the sun, the moon, or the planets here on the earth, and so therefore your reasoning by analogy is totally useless to you. What about those people who live in inland places and who’ve never seen the sea, should they believe and contend that the ocean does not exist just because neither they nor any of their friends have ever seen in ocean? What about people who’ve lived only in lands that only rabbits and foxes, inha and they’ve never seen anything remotely like a lion or a panther or an elephant? Would those people who’ve only lived around rabbits and foxes in their life be justified in taking the position that lions and panthers do not and cannot exist, or elephants, which is an even bigger extreme here from lions and panthers under your position? You can’t say that anything is true unless you’ve seen it yourself, or maybe you’re going to let your friends tell you that they’ve seen it, but if neither you know your friends have ever seen something using your epicurean reasoning Valle, you won’t believe that anything exists unless you or your friends have seen it and that is totally ridiculous. So I think we need to come to grips with that argument by kata against the whole issue of epicurean reasoning in the first place.
Joshua: And this is a really interesting argument in part because it seems to swap the roles here, doesn’t it? It seems to swap epicurus into the place of a hard line skeptic who says that the sea is impossible because I haven’t seen it myself and kata at least on the grounds of the gods, if not on other matters, into a position of taking the view that just because I haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or it isn’t the way that it is just because I haven’t seen it to be that way. I think it’s a really interesting question. I do want to quote from Arthur Conan Doyle. This is from a study in Scarlet, one of the Sherlock Holmes stories because it’s on point relating to this issue of whether we could predict the sea without ever having seen it ourselves. Sherlock Holmes says, from a drop of water, a magician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Now, this is leaning very hard in the direction of logic as a primary tool of epistemology. This would be a view that put logic much closer to a canonical faculty in epicurean terms, where in epicurean terms, we see that the sensations and the feelings are canonical and the prolapses or the faculty of anticipation is canonical, but it’s clear from everything else in Epicurean philosophy that he does reason along these lines. You can’t see an atom or touch an atom and know it to be an atom. You can touch objects that we think are made of atoms and void, but you can’t interface directly with an atom because they’re far too small to register in your senses. Nevertheless, Epicurus is able to reason from things that he does see and does touch and does sense and is able to infer the existence of the atom, which he cannot sense directly except in compound bodies. So it’s clear to me that at least on that issue and others like it, epicurus is more than capable of reasoning beyond merely what his senses provide to him. But as Epicurus acknowledges in the letter to Les, when you’re dealing particularly with the celestial phenomenon, the phenomena of the rotation or revolution of the sun, the moon, and to the ancient world, the five moving planets, you are on the verge of an area of experience that is beyond your reach in a sense or beyond your ability to measure. And so we have to be careful. We have to be careful with our epistemology, with what we think we can know about these bodies. The fact that they mentioned five moving planets and not eight or nine moving planets is in part because they were limited in their ability, not just to sense them, but to use instruments to detect what their eyes alone could not sense. And so when you’re dealing with something at that level, at that removed from your own experience, you do have to be cautious. But that’s not to say that you have to be that cautious in everything you do. I think that seeing a small mammal might indeed allow you to believe that there are or could be at the very least large mammals elsewhere outside of your own experience. But there are cases where this has been more of a challenge even to great scientists of the age. In fact, when the duckbilled platypus was discovered in Australia, a dead specimen was sent back to the royal society in London and the biologists working on this thought that it was a forgery, thought that it was a fraudulent specimen. They were looking for the suture marks where the bill had been stitched onto the body. It wasn’t until they got a message about a live specimen that had been observed in its habitat that they actually began to believe that this really was a real animal that existed. But the failure to predict the duck build platypus is not necessarily a failure of epistemology. Part of the process of applying the senses is being willing to apply those senses to things that you encounter in the future, things that you didn’t have knowledge of but gain knowledge of as you continue to live. So I don’t think ADA’s argument is very strong here.
Cassius: Joshua, I was about to agree with everything you said and then the very last thing you said about his argument not being very strong, I’m going to agree with that as well, but at the same time I’m going to say that I think his argument takes in an awful lot of people and it’s one that we therefore have to really take apart to show why it is wrong, because we do have this drive to wish to verify everything for ourselves, and it’s very natural to think that if we haven’t seen it ourselves or if we can’t touch it ourselves, then we’re not going to have a strong confident belief one way or the other about it. We’re going to just basically stop. And of course, as we know in epicurean theory, you wait before taking a position. You would never frankly take a position that would undermine your confidence and your senses because you have already concluded through past experience and reasoning about the entire issue that there is nothing but the sense that lets you get connections to outside reality. And if the senses are not valid and can’t ultimately be relied on after repeated usage, then there’s really nothing else that you can go to. So your reasoning on everything is going to start with that kind of a realization that ultimately speculation without evidence is to be rejected. You must always have some kind of evidence on which to base your speculations and your theories, and in those situations where you don’t have all the information that you would like to have, if you have to take a position at all, you take positions that are consistent with those things that you have observed in the past which are rationally consistent with what you have observed, and you don’t allow yourself to entertain supernatural or non-natural or non-rational conclusions simply because you don’t have all the evidence you’d like to have. You’re not going to have all the evidence you would like to have, and so therefore it is reasonable in those situations to look at multiple possibilities. Consider everything that you can come up with that is consistent with the evidence that you have and then realize that you’ve got several possibilities that can explain something. You’re going to have to be comfortable with that because the only other alternative left to you is to reject your senses, reject your existing reasoning, and lay open the door to saying that anything is possible. In fact, the very next thing that Kata says is you indeed Valle have concluded your argument not after the manner of your own sect but of the logicians to which your people are utter strangers. And so what Kat is saying there clearly is that he’s accusing the epicurean of using a form of logic that the epicureans are the first to denounce in the people who are really the experts in logics like the mag or the stoics or the platonists who are willing to take logic to an extreme that they themselves are not willing to do. And so I think the point that has to be clear there is that the issue involved is not that the epicureans are antilogic, the epicureans are antilogic. That is based on no verifiable evidence that is completely let loose to any possibility and any kind of speculation regardless of whether it has any evidence from the census to support it or not. Vallejo and Epicurus are perfectly willing to use logic to reach conclusions on extremely important issues as to whether there are gods as to whether there is life after death, but all the while they are using logic pointing to the evidence of things we can see and be confident of around us for the conclusions which they reach. They’re not willing to speculate that there is life after death because never has any human being seen a living animal come back from the dead. Once they are well and truly dead, they have never seen anything created from nothing or anything go to nothing, and so therefore they’re not willing to speculate that a God or anything else could ever create something from nothing. As usual with ADA’s arguments, he’s giving us very important information here because he’s pointing out something that is true. Epicureans are willing and able to engage in very aggressive logical reasoning, but it must be logical reasoning that is grounded in the evidence of the sense that is the way that the epicureans are reasoning and based on that reasoning, the epicureans are willing to take strong positions on controversial issues. The ultimate distinction between the methods of reaching conclusions is whether you are willing to ultimately be tied back to the evidence of the senses or not. The epicurean conclusions are always held to that standard. Can you come up with some evidence which forms a basis through similarity or analogy to something that we are confident is true? Do we have that ability to connect our theory of what may be going on to an observation of something that really does go on within our own experience and these arguments really bring that out. The people who have never seen an ocean before, the people who have never seen anything but rabbits and foxes, are they limited in their thinking to those things that they have seen before? And the answer is no. They are not limited, and an epicurean is not limited just because he’s never seen a God from taking a position about certain aspects of a guy. Logic is something that is important to use when it is used properly
Joshua: And especially when it’s used inductively in the sense of reasoning from the known to the unknown. This is not a prophetic faculty, but it is a faculty that allows you to expand your field of inquiry and your access to knowledge and information. When you use deductive logic recklessly as in a famous story from Plato’s Academy, if you say that for example, all featherless bps are humans, which isn’t necessarily what Plato said, but if you take the view that all featherless bipeds are human, then you have to accept that a pluck chicken, which is a featherless biped is also a human. But when we exercise our faculty to reason from the known to the unknown in the inductive sense, it is reasonable to remain cautious and tentative about our conclusions. But as you read last week in Isaac Asimov’s essay, the Relativity of Wrong, the process of gaining new understanding about the world we live in is a process of refinement, not necessarily one of wholesale revision, and I think it’s an important distinction because it would be very easy to say. For example, they used to think as Actually Charles Darwin says that the common sense of man said that the earth stood still and the sun moved around it, but as every philosopher knows the saying, Vox Popule Vox Day cannot be trusted in science. We use our reason and our ability to expand our experience through our instruments. We use this to gain new information that allows us to refine our understanding, but the fact that there have been refinements and revisions does not invalidate the whole process or the whole procedure. I think that was the point of Isaac Asimov’s essay was that just because you’ve changed your mind or adjusted your opinion several times doesn’t mean that where you are now is as completely wrong as where you might’ve been when you started. The process of refinement is getting nearer to a correct understanding or an understanding that is more accurate to what is in nature.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s exactly what I took away from Isaac Asimov’s article, that current discoveries or theories about quantum mechanics have not overturned the practical ability to use engineering principles, mathematical principles that were well known prior to the theory of quantum mechanics, and we still use those today to great practical effect. The issue is not one of, as you say, overturning something totally, but refining and that the original theories were in many cases incomplete as opposed to being absolutely wrong. It is more correct to say that the earth is spherical than it is to say that the earth is flat, but it is not totally correct to say that the earth is spherical because it’s expanded around the equator. It’s not a perfect sphere by any means at all, but the sphere observation is a lot closer than saying flat. So it is a issue of the relationship of your position to right and wrong, and some positions are an awful lot closer to being what we in retrospect look back and say is right than what we would look back in retrospect and say is wrong. We’re much closer to the truth thinking that the world is a sphere than we are thinking that the world is flat. We can pursue these examples a little further in the next paragraph. This is paragraph 32. You indeed Valle have concluded your argument not after the manner of your own sec, but of the magicians to which your people are other strangers. You have taken it for granted that the gods are happy. I allow it, ADA says, so he’s willing to go with that one. Gods are happy. Then you say, Vallejo, that without virtue no one can be happy. Then Ada says, I willingly concur with you on this. Also, ADA says, Valle, you likewise say that virtue cannot reside where reason is not that. Again, I must necessarily allow you add however, ADA says that reason cannot exist, but in a human form, who do you think will admit that if it were true, what occasion were there to come so gradually to it and to what purpose? You might’ve answered it on your own authority. I perceive your gradations from happiness to virtue and from virtue to reason, but how do you come from reason to human form there? Indeed, you do not descend by degrees but precipitously. Now, he’s going to use another example in a moment, but let’s take that example first. He’s saying, I’ll go along with you perfectly fine Vallejo to say that Gods are happy. Well, I have to ask immediately, why would you go along with that kada? He agrees with Valle that without virtue no one can be happy. He agrees with Valle that virtue cannot reside unless you have reason, but then Kada disagrees. He says, when you say Vallejo, that reason cannot exist, but in a human form, I don’t admit that. And why do you think I should admit that? Why do you try to work up to that point using a series of steps? Why don’t you just jump straight to the position that Gods must look like humans? I think the way we have to deal with that is to question if it is the ultimate conclusion of this logical chain that you are rejecting kata, why is that ultimate step different from the earlier steps which you did agree with? You say you must necessarily allow those things, but are you able caught up as a skeptic yourself to say that no virtuous person has ever been unreasonable, that no God has ever been unhappy that no and who is without virtue has ever been happy? Why are you disagreeing Ada with the initial steps of this chain but disagreeing with the final one? So Joshua, as you’ve just been referring to in the discussion of a Featherless bi, if you try to take an abstractly logical position and say that a man is a featherless biped and you lock yourself into that position that therefore all featherless bipeds are men, you will be confronted with the absurd contention that a chicken who’s been plucked is a man. That would be an example of how your reasoning has to be tied to reality and how if you try to set up an abstract logical syllogism that is not tightly tied to reality, you’ll end up in an absurd position such as a plucked chicken as a man. I think the way that the epicureans would defend against that is, again, as we’ve discussed multiple times, Epicurus said that the main thing to think about a God is that they’re a living being and that they are blessed and imperishable, and so we start with the realization that that is the critical central point living being blessed imperishable. It is not central to our position that they speak Greek or that they have a blood that’s type A or type O positive. It’s not central to our position that they have bodies that are similar to men. We don’t know the details of any bodies of gods or blood of Gods because we’ve never seen or touched a God ourselves in close enough proximity and with the reliable enough information to take a firm position on that. We’re left in a position very similar to the letter to LEAs where we’re discussing the celestial phenomena, the movement of the stars and the planets and the moon, and we start looking for reasonable explanations that are possible and consistent with nature. We are not able to eliminate all of the different possibilities and come down only to one that is our certain choice, but by coming up with a number of reasonable possibilities, we are sufficiently able to say that there must be an explanation that is natural and nons supernatural for the way the planets and the sun work. This is very similar again, as we’ve discussed many times to Lucian’s discussion of Alexander with Oracle monger where he’s suggesting that Epicurus, even though he may not know the precise way in which Alexander was manipulating his snake, he would be certain that the snake was not supernatural. That’s the kind of position that we’re taking here in regard to the movement of the stars and the planets and that Vallejo is suggesting is a reasonable position to take regarding Gods if they have any kind of body at all, if they’re living beings, then it must be something that is like a body, but we don’t know the details. If they have blood going on within them, then it would be something like a blood system, but we don’t know the details. Again, what Kata is doing is taking a position that is a reasonable possibility given speculation that we can make with our own human understanding and saying that your speculation grounded in what you’re familiar with is totally unreasonable, but my speculation, which totally divorces us from bodies and blood and anything related to humanity at all is reasonable, and that’s an inversion of the truth. The epicurean position is the more reasonable katas position is less reasonable, so long as you understand that the position we’re taking is one of reasonable possibilities and not one of certainty. The epicureans fully understood this method of reasoning because epicures taught it in regard to the stars and the planets and the moon and the weather and all these other phenomena that we don’t have precise explanations for. Kata is taking it out of that context, failing to remind us of Epicurus, multiple possibilities, position and trying to make it look ridiculous by taking it out of that multiple possibility context, and if you want to talk about looking ridiculous, let’s compare the positions of Valle and kata in this argument. From a very high level perspective, Valle has basically said nothing more than since. There are beings who are not supernatural but who deserve the name of Gods. We can speculate that if there are living beings, then every living being that we are familiar with has some kind of a body and some kind of blood. That is really all that Valle has said, but again, if you want to talk about ridiculous kata is not standing here as some oracle of wisdom taking the position of let’s be cautious, let’s not take any position about the gods. Kada is a priest of the Roman religion. Kada is going to leave this discussion and go out into the forum and start sacrificing goats and reading their entrails and talking about what’s going to happen in the future based on the way the inside of a goat of the inside of the way some other animal looks. Kata is the one who’s taking positions that are ultimately ridiculous because he is not willing to break away from the platonic supernatural vision of Gods as being something in a mystical realm that we must worship as opposed to being a part of the natural universe, which is the way Valle is approaching the problem. So this is a continuation of the point that we’ve been discussing. Kata is trying to imply that under epicurean reasoning, someone who has lived inland would say that there’s no such thing as the sea. He’s trying to argue that an epicurean would say that someone who’s only lived around rabbits and foxes would deny the possibility of lions or panthers or elephants. I certainly don’t think an epicurean would admit that that kind of reasoning is potent against their position. An epicurean would point out that lions and panthers and elephants are indeed larger versions and foxes and rabbits, but lions and panthers and elephants are not supernaturally different. They’re not different in ultimate essence than another living being like a fox or a rabbit. No epicurean is going to get trapped into thinking that size alone or the way they hunt other animals or the way they survive in terms of being smart versus being sly like a fox. Those differences are matters of degree. They’re not matters of kind. No matter how far inland you have ever lived, you have experienced water flowing in streams or water ponding in low areas. No one who’s only ever seen a pond or a stream would be logically denying that larger bodies of water can exist than those that they’ve seen before. Those are differences in degree. They are not the kind of difference between a living being we’re familiar with versus a supernatural God who creates universes. When we talk about species and genesises and so forth, those are just words that we give to divisions that we have observed and decided ourselves are significant. There’s no list of genesises and species that nature consults when she sets up any kind of a system of living beings. The differences between an ant and a human being are ultimately differences of degree, not differences between natural and supernatural. I think it’s one of the fundamental points of the epicurean perspective that these differences between living beings are matters of degree and not of kind. What does it mean when I say kind versus degree? What I would suggest is that what we’re talking about is something that is so different is to be inconceivable. It is very conceivable to us that there should be rabbits, foxes, lions, panthers, elephants, animals of all sorts of different types. That is or should be conceivable even if you’ve only experienced in your own life a small subset of that wide spectrum of living beings. But to go from the suggestion that everything that we see in nature that unites these living beings and add to that the ability to create a universe from nothing that is a jump and a leap that is inconceivable, totally unrealistic, totally against the other conclusions of nature that we draw from our physics and therefore it’s something that is just illegitimate to suggest. So I think the defense of Vallejo and the response to what Kata is saying here is, yes, indeed it is appropriate to make observations, draw logical connections between the observations and be willing and flexible to extend those observations in ways that are consistent with the realization that in the end, the question comes down to where do you stop? Is it legitimate to stop ever in any kind of a consideration of the unknown by saying, I’ve never seen it before, therefore it cannot exist. ADA’s argument is persuasive because he is making that point that it is not legitimate to stop and say, I’ve never seen it before. My friends have never seen it before. Therefore, it does not exist. That is not sound reasoning, but the fact that that is not sound reasoning to require that it be seen beforehand is not grounds for asserting that therefore anything in the universe is possible. That’s a total non-sequitur because throwing out the rule that you must have seen it before in order for it to exist does not create a new rule that says anything can exist. We still have all of the rules of nature that we have deduced from our prior observations, and those rules don’t go away just because we have opened our eyes to the possibility that things could be different in other locations. We know that to be true. Kata himself is raising an obvious example. People who live only inland have no experience with the sea. People who live on the sea and on islands have very little experience with mountains and they need to be cautious, one, making suppositions about the other situation, but does that caution that those people have to exercise mean that anything is possible? That in fact everything we’re discussing has been set in motion by supernatural being? Of course it doesn’t. That kind of conclusion that anything is possible would be far more wrong, would be the equivalent of saying the Earth is flat. Cautious reasoning based on observation is the more productive way to deal with the unknown.
Joshua: Well, I certainly agree with what you’re saying, the ability to project beyond our experience and infer the possibility of things we haven’t seen. We certainly do have that faculty. I’ve never seen a brontosaurus or a tyrannosaurus Rex for example, but I can imagine there being one and we in fact do have evidence that these animals have existed where I will defend the epicureans on this other idea, which is that reason can only exist in a human form. First of all, I’ll make the observation that we don’t have this in epic’s own writings. We have statements like this in Phil Edemas fragments or so I’m led to believe, I haven’t read many of them myself, but a lot of what we’re getting here is we’re getting this through and from Cicero. Now, Cicero did have access to texts that we don’t have because he was much closer to Epicurus his own time, and because there wasn’t a massive loss of the literature of the ancient world that would happen after Cicero’s time, but I would defend this very precisely and where I would defend it is to say it’s irrelevant to me whether any gods that existed or whether any beings on other worlds that had the capacity to reason had a human form. In fact, I fully expect that when and if life is discovered on other worlds, it will have an amazing variety of forms that we haven’t encountered on earth and couldn’t encounter on earth because of the specific conditions of our planet or because of the specific evolutionary heritage of the animals and plants and so forth that do exist on our planet. But there is another side to this, and the other side to it is for Epicurus, the gods are not just an answer to a set of epistemological questions. They’re also the objects of a particular practice within the epicurean system that they represent the best possible life for an epicurean and that you should hold them up as an example of the life of pleasure. And so in that sense, I would defend this view in the sense that it’s easier, I think to emulate other humans than it is to emulate trees or something like that. You can take a quality that a tree has and maybe try to emulate that in your own life, but when you picture the optimal life of pleasure, it’s much easier for me to picture that in a human rather than in another kind of being, and again, this is disconnected in my mind from whether other reasoning beings actually have human forms because what kata is going to go on to say is that actually Valle, you have the cart before the horse. The gods would not be said to have human forms. It is humans who would be said to have the form of the gods because the gods are immortal and have always existed in the epicurean system. But again, that argument I’m putting to one side and I’m just saying that as a practice in the philosophy, if it’s useful to you, it might not be useful to you to try to emulate the ideal life of pleasure. There are other ways you can go about this, but as a practice that is offered by Epicurus as part of his system, it may be easier to imagine the life of pleasure as lived by something similar to yourself.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think that’s the direction that all of this goes in. It is not sound to be resting. One’s position on whether they wish to be considered an epicurean or not based on whether they think there are gods who look like human beings that they’re familiar with. That is an example, just as we find in the latter books of Lucretius, just as we find in the letter to Epithelia, the epicurean thought it was helpful to discuss possibilities of things, and presumably that’s because they wanted people to have something that they could grasp, something that they could understand, something they could hold onto in the face of adversity, in the face of challenges from all of these religious radicals who are out there who were suggesting that these gods in heaven are trying to control their lives and are trying to send them to heaven or hell and so forth. The example we’re seeing over and over is that Epicurus and Valle and these other Epicurus are trying to live in a real world situation, dealing with real world people and the happiness of those people around them who they’re talking to, who their friends, and they’re trying to make things understandable in a way that gives people the confidence to stand up to these priests like Kata, who’s oh so nice in the way he’s discussing these things and oh, so reasonable, but when you look behind where they’re coming from, they are attempting to undermine your confidence in your senses and your reasoning, not so that they can all just be friends and happy and go have dinner with each other, but because they’re going to take that license that you have given them and transfer it into the commandment that their view of the gods, their view of supernatural beings who run the universe is more logical and more consistent and more persuasive than Epicurus views because Epic and his friends dared to suggest at some point in history that maybe they speak a language like Greek. They’re trying to say that that kind of an assertion totally undermines everything else in epicure and philosophy, and that’s the kind of a failure to understand the epicure and reasoning that I think is so important to keep at the front of your mind. The issue is not what language do the God speak or what do the gods look like. The issue is whether there are supernatural gods that created this universe that dictate to you how you have to live, or is there only a natural universe in which people live according to the rules of nature and have to come to grips with the rules of nature in order to live happily, but that those rules of nature are ultimately something that is understandable in human terms just as the elephants, the lions, the panthers, the rabbits and the foxes come to terms with their own existence. Human beings can come to terms with our own existence using the faculties that nature has given to us, and we aren’t required to throw all those faculties out the door to hate ourselves and our ability to reason and our ability to see and simply throw those in the trash can and substitute for that, that there’s a supernatural realm that dictates how we should live. Joshua, any closing thoughts?
Joshua: Zooming out and ticking in the big picture as you’ve done there at the end is very much central to my own view of this topic. If we lose sight of the confidence that we should have that there is no life after death that we’re not going to be tortured for all time after we die, if we lose sight of our confidence that there is no creating deity that exists outside of time or outside of nature, then we are really doing ourselves a disservice here because the stuff that we’re talking about in this text, these are really quite minor issues in relation to those other aspects of Epicurus thought that are far more important and far more impactful on the way we live. You’ve said it many times, Cassius, if it turned out to be the case that for example Christianity was true, then it would of course radically change the way. If you had certain knowledge of that, it would radically change the way you lived your life, and so losing sight of our confidence in those areas because of the way these other aspects of epicurean theology have been transmitted from the ancient world to us and the way they’ve been received by us and the problems with that transmission and with that reception, losing sight of the areas of confidence would be a real problem, and so we should continue to do what you just did and to zoom out, take a bigger view, a wider view, and not constantly get stuck in the weeds. It’s important to go through this stuff, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it, and it’s interesting to go through this stuff, but this is not central to Epicurus project in the same way that his views on death are central to his project.
Cassius: Yes, indeed. What’s central to his project is the way you analyze these things and the way you come to confidence in positions that allow you to live happily. It’s not essential to the project to tell us exactly what type of pleasure to pursue at every particular moment or exactly what type of language the Gods may speak. All of those details are things that can be helpful to discuss, but the main reason they’re helpful to discuss is that when you yourself confront the need to understand the argument well enough to take it apart and put it back together again, only then do you really get confidence that your position is the right one. You can of course arrive at the same conclusion through many different paths, but the steps that you as an individual have taken in getting to the end of that path will make all the difference between whether you’re confident that you could retrace it or not confident that you know where you came from, confident that you know where you’re going versus floating at the whim of the circumstances that you find yourself in. Okay, let’s leave it there for today. There’s a lot more to discuss. We did not get a chance, for example, to discuss why Ada was willing to agree with Philas on several important issues about whether the gods would be happy, whether they would be virtuous, whether they would have reason or so forth. Why did he agree with Valle on those, but refuse to agree with Valle on the nature of the gods? That’s an interesting question itself and it relates to what we need to eventually get to in terms of what is discussed in Phil Edemas on signs or on methods of inference because this question of how you reason from the known to the unknown is extremely important and there is more textual information primarily from Phil EMAs, but also from other places like sexist empiricus that we can use to reconstruct that epicurean method of reasoning. We’ll do that to the extent that we can over the next several weeks and as we continue with book one of own ends. Okay, let’s leave it there for today. We’ll come back next week. In the meantime, please drop by the form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our episodes. Thanks for your time. See you next week. Bye.