Episode 246 - Examining Epicurean Evidence-Based Reasoning
Date: 10/24/24
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 246 works through Sections 31–32 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods and defends Epicurean evidence-based reasoning against Cotta’s attacks. Cotta opens Section 31 by mocking Epicurus’s emphasis on fear of death and the gods, sarcastically noting that thieves and temple robbers obviously aren’t terrified — to which Cassius responds by citing Diogenes of Oinoanda Fragment 20 (wrongdoers who sin do not actually fear the gods) and Lucretius’s account of Iphigenia’s sacrifice (religion drives even greater horrors). A brief contribution from Callini (a recurring third participant) notes the “hidden death” of modern institutional medicine and its impact on how people confront mortality. Joshua adds research from a 2017 Wikipedia article on death anxiety showing that religiosity and irreligiosity both correlate with lower death anxiety, while the most anxious population sits in the middle. Cotta then argues in Section 31 that the Epicurean method requires having seen something before believing in it — meaning Epicurus could not believe in the sun, moon, or planets, nor in anything like a lion or elephant if he’d only seen foxes. This is exposed as a misrepresentation: Epicurus reasons by analogy and similarity, not by requiring direct personal observation. Joshua quotes Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet: “from a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of a Niagara”) and discusses the duck-billed platypus as a case study in how unexpected empirical discoveries work. Section 32 presents Cotta’s logical chain — gods are happy → happiness requires virtue → virtue requires reason → reason requires human form — and agrees with the first three steps while refusing the final one. Cassius notes that Cotta is a priest who will leave this discussion to sacrifice goats and read entrails, making his position far more ridiculous than Velleius’s. The episode closes by connecting back to Asimov’s “Relativity of Wrong”: Epicurean conclusions may be incomplete, but they are far less wrong than those of their opponents on the questions that matter most.
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 at 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, going to be talking specifically from Section 31 of Book One today, continuing on basically the same theme in which Cotta is attacking the Epicurean method of reasoning about the gods and suggesting that it makes no sense — that the Epicureans should be laughing at each other because it’s just all so ridiculous. 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 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 taken in the Roman religion of this time, and of which Cotta 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 we quoted last week, Cotta had quoted from basically what was Principal 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, Cotta continues into his criticisms of Epicurus’s position. He says in Section 31:
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 Metrodorus explain themselves as clearly as you have done.
Of course that’s addressed to Velleius, who has given us the presentation we’re talking about. Continuing on with the quote:
But he — Epicurus — believed 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. Cotta 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’s 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 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 Cotta is clearly saying that there are not only some people, but 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 Epicurean 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 threats of gods and death everywhere — that he’s really kind of ridiculous for being such a timid person, and 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.
Callini: 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’s time, because the actual process 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’s 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” — when they’re really confronted with their actual death, it’s a whole other 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 the way that Epicureans do.
Joshua: I think you’re raising excellent points there, Callini. There is what they call the “hidden death” in the modern world — 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 now. It’s professional work, 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 have 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. 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, in the United States, that you could plot the fear of death in the population as a kind of bell curve with religiosity 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, 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 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 it 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: Cotta talks about people ransacking the temples they can get into. I believe it was the practice in some of these ancient societies that the temples were also the treasuries — the safest place to put the state’s money was in the coffers of the temple, because that’s the last place 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: Diogenes of Oinoanda certainly understood that not everybody is living in constant fear of the gods such that they are never going to do evil. Fragment 20 — Diogenes of Oinoanda says: 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 to point 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. Lucretius, of course, cites the sacrifice of Iphigenia to get favorable winds, and so forth.
So what Cotta is doing here is attempting to chip around the edges of Epicurus’s credibility, but the Epicureans certainly understood that people are not robots who are driven every moment of their lives. There are 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: 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.
And at this point in the argument, we’re going to come to a paragraph that I think is much more clear about where Cotta is going — one where we can really begin to get a grip on the defects of Cotta’s position and his misrepresentation of the teachings of Epicurus about the proper way to think about things that are imperceptible to the senses. 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 what Cotta 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 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 gods? Since everything that you’re saying leads up — in Cotta’s opinion — to that conclusion, since you don’t dare to absolutely deny the existence of gods, 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 the world around us, or some eternal mind — that those themselves are gods?
What prevents you from taking that position, Epicurus? Okay, Cotta continues and gives what he represents to be Epicurus’s position:
I never, says he — Epicurus — saw wisdom and a rational soul in anybody but human form.
Which means Cotta 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’s position, but Cotta 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 — 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.
Cotta’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 gods at all? That’s the argument Cotta is going to make.
So let’s go forward. He continues:
What have you ever seen the deity himself? Why else do you believe that there is any? If this doctrine — your doctrine, Epicurus — 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 Pharos and never 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 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. Instead, the argument now reveals what Cotta is alleging about Epicurus’s deepest reasoning processes. The argument affects all our day-to-day activities and the way we think and act in the normal world.
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’s position. If you wanted to indict Cicero on misrepresenting Epicurus’s 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 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 are gods 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?
Cotta is arguing that you’ve never seen anything like the sun, the moon, or the planets here on 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 an ocean? What about people who’ve lived only in lands that only rabbits and foxes inhabit 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 from lions and panthers? Under your position: you can’t say that anything is true unless you’ve seen it yourself. Maybe you’re going to let your friends tell you that they’ve seen it, but if neither you nor your friends have ever seen something, using your Epicurean reasoning, Velleius, 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 Cotta against the whole issue of Epicurean reasoning.
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 hardline skeptic who says that the sea is impossible because I haven’t seen it myself, and Cotta — 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 isn’t the way that it is.
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 logician 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 — a view that puts logic much closer to a canonical faculty. In Epicurean terms, the sensations and the feelings are canonical, and the prolepsis or 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 Pythocles, when you’re dealing particularly with the celestial phenomena — 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, beyond your ability to measure. And so 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, that removed from your own experience, you do have to be cautious. But that’s not to say 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 duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia, a dead specimen was sent back to the Royal Society in London, and the biologists working on it thought that it was a forgery. 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. But the failure to predict the duck-billed 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 Cotta’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 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. It’s very natural to think that if we haven’t seen it ourselves or if we can’t touch it ourselves, we’re not going to have a strong confident belief one way or the other about it.
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 in your senses, because you have already concluded through past experience and reasoning about the entire issue that there is nothing but the senses 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 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 you would like to have, if you have to take a position at all, you take positions that are consistent with those things 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 you can come up with that is consistent with the evidence 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 Cotta says is: you indeed, Velleius, have concluded your argument not after the manner of your own sect, but of the Megarians, to which your people are utter strangers. And so what Cotta 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 logic — like the Megarians, or the Stoics, or the Platonists, who are willing to take logic to an extreme the Epicureans 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 anti-logic. The Epicureans are anti-logic 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 senses to support it or not. Velleius 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 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 Cotta’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 senses. That is the way 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 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 god. 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 all featherless bipeds 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 plucked 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 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 Populi Vox Dei 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: 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 have 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 and mathematical principles that were well known prior to the theory of quantum mechanics. We still use those today to great practical effect. The issue is not one of overturning something totally, but refining it. And 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 the earth is flat. But it is not totally correct to say 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 an 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 and say is wrong.
We can pursue these examples a little further in the next paragraph. This is Section 32:
You indeed, Velleius, have concluded your argument not after the manner of your own sect, but of the Megarians, to which your people are utter strangers. You have taken it for granted that the gods are happy. I allow it, Cotta says — so he’s willing to go with that one: gods are happy. Then you say, Velleius, that without virtue no one can be happy. Then Cotta says: I willingly concur with you on this also. Cotta says: you likewise say that virtue cannot reside where reason is not. That again I must necessarily allow you. Add however, Cotta 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 have asserted 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, Velleius, to say that gods are happy. Well — I have to ask immediately, why would you go along with that, Cotta? He agrees with Velleius that without virtue no one can be happy. He agrees with Velleius that virtue cannot reside unless you have reason. But then Cotta disagrees. He says: when you say, Velleius, 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, Cotta, 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 one who is without virtue has ever been happy? Why are you disagreeing 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 the featherless biped: 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 — therefore all featherless bipeds are men — you will be confronted with the absurd contention that a plucked chicken 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 being a man.
I think the way 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. 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 blood that’s type A or type O positive. It’s not central to our position that they have bodies 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 reliable enough information to take a firm position on that.
We’re left in a position very similar to the Letter to Pythocles, 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 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 a natural, non-supernatural explanation 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 the Oracle Monger — where he’s suggesting that Epicurus, even though he may not know the precise way in which Alexander was manipulating his snake, would be certain that the snake was not supernatural. That’s the kind of position we’re taking here in regard to the movement of the stars and the planets, and that Velleius 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 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 Cotta is doing is taking a position that is a reasonable possibility given speculation that we can make with our own human understanding and saying: 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 one. Cotta’s 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 Epicurus 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. Cotta is taking it out of that context, failing to remind us of Epicurus’s 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 Velleius and Cotta in this argument. From a very high level perspective, Velleius has basically said nothing more than: there are beings who are not supernatural but who deserve the name of gods, and we can speculate that if there are living beings, then every living being we are familiar with has some kind of a body and some kind of blood. That is really all that Velleius has said.
But again, if you want to talk about ridiculous: Cotta 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.” Cotta is a priest of the Roman religion. Cotta 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 looks. Cotta 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 Velleius is approaching the problem.
So this is a continuation of the point we’ve been discussing. Cotta is trying to imply that under Epicurean reasoning, someone who has lived inland would say 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 kind of reasoning is potent against their position. An Epicurean would point out that lions and panthers and elephants are indeed larger versions of what you already know — lions and panthers and elephants are not supernaturally different. They’re not different in ultimate essence from 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, 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 has only ever seen a pond or a stream would be logically denying that larger bodies of water can exist than those 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 genera and so forth, those are just words that we give to divisions we have observed and decided ourselves are significant. There’s no list of genera and species that nature consults when she sets up any kind of 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 as 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 we see in nature 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 Velleius and the response to what Cotta 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 consideration of the unknown by saying, “I’ve never seen it before, therefore it cannot exist”? Cotta’s argument is persuasive because he is making the 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 it’s 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. 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. Cotta 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 in making suppositions about the other situation. But does that caution mean that anything is possible — that in fact everything we’re discussing has been set in motion by a supernatural being? Of course it doesn’t. That kind of conclusion that “anything is possible” would be far more wrong — 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 do in fact have evidence that these animals have existed.
Where I will defend the Epicureans on this other idea — that reason can only exist in human form — first of all, I’ll make the observation that we don’t have this in Epicurus’s own writings. We have statements like this in Philodemus’s fragments, or so I’m led to believe. A lot of what we’re getting here comes through and from Cicero. Now, Cicero did have access to texts we don’t have, because he was much closer to Epicurus’s own time and because there wasn’t yet the massive loss of the literature of the ancient world that would happen after Cicero’s time. But I would defend this very precisely. Where I would defend it is to say: it’s irrelevant to me whether any gods that existed, or 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 we haven’t encountered on earth and couldn’t encounter on earth, because of the specific conditions of our planet or the specific evolutionary heritage of the animals and plants that do exist on our planet.
But there is another side to this. The other side 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. They represent the best possible life for an Epicurean, and 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 Cotta is going to go on to say is that actually, Velleius, 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. I’m just saying that as a practice in the philosophy, it may be useful to imagine the life of pleasure as lived by something similar to yourself.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I think that’s the direction 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 Pythocles — the Epicurean thought it was helpful to discuss possibilities of things. And presumably that’s because they wanted people to have something they could grasp, something 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 were out there 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 Velleius and these other Epicureans are trying to live in a real-world situation, dealing with real-world people and the happiness of those people around them — 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 Cotta, who is 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’s views.
Because Epicurus and his friends dared to suggest at some point in history that maybe the gods speak a language like Greek — they’re trying to say that that kind of assertion totally undermines everything else in Epicurean philosophy. And that’s the kind of failure to understand Epicurean reasoning that I think is so important to keep at the front of your mind. The issue is not what language do the gods speak or what do the gods look like. The issue is whether there are supernatural gods that created this universe and 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 those rules in order to live happily. But 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 the idea that there’s a supernatural realm that dictates how we should live.
Joshua, any closing thoughts?
Joshua: Zooming out and taking 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, 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 we’re talking about in this text — these are really quite minor issues in relation to those other aspects of Epicurus’s 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, 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: 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’s 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 Cotta was willing to agree with Velleius on several important issues about whether the gods would be happy, whether they would be virtuous, whether they would have reason and so forth — why he agreed with Velleius on those but refused to agree with Velleius 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 Philodemus’s 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 Philodemus, but also from other places like Sextus 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 as we continue with Book One of On the Nature of the Gods.
Okay, let’s leave it there for today. We’ll come back next week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum 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.