Episode 251 - Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods - Part 26 - How Niagara Falls Helps Us Understand The Flux, The Heap, and The Epicurean Gods.
Date: 10/18/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4091-episode-251-cicero-s-otnotg-26-how-niagara-falls-helps-us-understand-the-flux-th/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”(Add summary here)
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 251 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we have a thread to discuss this and each of our podcast episodes last week, we spent a significant amount of time talking about whether the gods are active or not, and we also discussed this issue of images, how it relates to prolapses and the epicurean theory of knowledge of the gods that comes through the mind, taking the information that the images or prolapses gives to it and then coming to conclusions about the nature of the gods. One of the most important things we mentioned last week that Joshua brought up again for us was this issue of how the letter to men when it says believe that a God is a living, being blessed and imperishable. The issue of whether that is a sort of definitional statement of what a God is or exactly how that statement should be interpreted, and I think the better explanation and interpretation of all that is that Epicurus is in fact talking about how we can interpret the images or the information given to us by prolapses to come to conclusions about the nature of the gods and separate the true conclusions that are supported by evidence and sound reasoning from the false conclusions that the many come to about God’s rewarding friends and punishing enemies and doing all sorts of other things that are inconsistent with the basic nature of a God as being happy and imperishable. That discussion last week took us up to the end of 38, the beginning of section 39, and that’s where we’ll pick up today. We’ve generally been reading in the Yang translation today. I’ll be reading first of all from the Rackham translation starting from the very end of section 38 and into section 39, Valle Valleta says the whole affair is humbug, yet you stamp these images not only on our eyes but also on our minds. So irresponsibly do you babble and how extravagantly there is a constant passage or stream of visual presentations which collectively produce a single visual impression. I should be ashamed to say that I do not understand the doctrine if you who maintain it understood it yourselves, how can you prove the stream of images is continuous or if it is, how are the images eternal? You say that there is an innumerable supply of atoms, are you going to argue then that everything is eternal for the same reason you take refuge in the principle of equilibrium for? So with your consent, we will translate is Sonoma and you say that because there is mortal substance, there must also be immortal substance on that showing because there are mortal men, there are also some that are immortal and because there are men born on land, there are men born in water and because there are forces of destruction, there are also forces of preservation. Suppose there were, they would only preserve things that already exist, but I’m not aware that your gods do exist, but be that as it may, how do all your pictures of objects arise out of the atoms, even if atoms existed, which they do not. They might conceivably be capable of pushing and jostling one another about by their collisions, but they could not create form, shape, color or life. You fail entirely therefore to prove divine immortality. Now in 40 he’s going to talk about divine happiness, but let’s stop at 39 there and see what we can get out of what Kata has said so far because he’s brought up this topic of I Sonoma, which Epicurus himself does not mention at least explicitly in the surviving works we have from Epicurus. So we probably first ought to deal with the question of how does is Sonoma relate to this issue of images and the knowledge of the gods? Before we start to examine that point about is Sonoma. Let’s go back and refresh our memory about what Valle has previously said about it back in section 19 of the same book Valle had said this Epicurus then as he not merely discerns abruce and recite things with his mind’s eye but handles them as tangible realities, teaches that the substance and nature of the gods is such that in the first place it is perceived not by the senses but by the mind and not materially or individually like the solid objects which epicurus in virtue of their substantiality entitles Nia, but by our perceiving images owing to their similarity and succession because an endless train of precisely similar images arises from innumerable atoms and streams towards the gods. Our mind with the keenest feelings of pleasure fixes its gaze on these images and so attains an understanding of the nature of a being both blessed and eternal. And this is the part about is Sonoma. Moreover, there is the supremely potent principle of infinity which claims the closest and most careful study. We must understand that it has the following property that in the sum of things everything has its exact match and counterpart. This property is turned by Epicurus as I Sonoma or the principle of uniform distribution from this principle. It follows that if the whole number of mortals is so many, there must exist no less a number of immortals and if the causes of destruction are beyond count, the causes of conservation are also bound to be infinite. Now, I think we get some clarity on this issue about which way the images are flowing because for whatever reason, whether it’s a stenographic or translation or transmission problem, Valle is recorded as saying that images flow to the gods. Well kata in this section is talking about the images coming from the gods to us. So it seems to me much more reasonable to attribute the flowing to the gods to some kind of a transmission error because kata has clearly understood that these images are flowing from the gods that give us knowledge of them. But at any rate, the real issue here that Valle has brought up is that the supremely potent principle of infinity is what gives rise to this issue of is Sonoma, that there are matches and counterparts that things exist on a spectrum or a scale of existence in which there are both mortals and immortals and there are causes of destruction and causes of preservation and that these exist in an equitable or uniform distribution. Now in terms of the equitable numbers of these things, when Velez mentions the supremely potent principle of infinity, if you’ve got an infinite universe then anything that is possible to happen if a certain thing is observed to happened and therefore we know it’s possible to happen, then in an infinite universe that happening is going to occur an infinite number of times. So one possibility of the way in which you could say that there’s an equal number of different things that are possible that are out there is to realize that everything has an infinite number of examples of its existence in an infinite universe. So I don’t know whether that’s the way they’re reaching the conclusion that there’s an equal number of causes of preservation and causes of destruction or beings that live forever versus beings that don’t live forever, but it would be worthwhile thinking through that possibility that if you’re postulating that all things that are possible are going to be happening an equal number of times because all things that are possible are happening an infinite number of times. Now, ADA is talking about this as if this is just a totally ridiculous idea and because he’s opposed to it, you wouldn’t expect kata to give the most persuasive statement of the theory. And Cicero being an opponent of epicurean philosophy, I think is leaving out one of the most important aspects of what Valis and Epicurus are suggesting. That is the difference between things that are possible and things that are not possible. In other words, things that are possible will happen an infinite number of times, but things that are not possible not only won’t happen an infinite number of times they won’t ever happen. So in what we just read in 39 where Kata says, and because there are forces of destruction, there are also forces of preservation. Suppose there were they would only preserve things that already exist, but I’m not aware that your gods do exist, but be that as it may, how do all your pictures of objects arise out of the atoms, even if the atoms existed, which they do not. They might conceivably be capable of pushing and jostling one another about by their collisions, but they could not create form, shape, color, life. That gets us back to this issue of argument by design, that you have to have a designer in order to have things happen. In order to have anything come into being, you have to have a intelligent force that brings it into being. And so that’s the level at which this argument is taking place. Valle and epicures are telling us that the atoms because of their motion and their own properties will come together over an infinite period of time in all ways that are possible so that the things we see around us come into contact not because of just absolutely random chance they come about because the movement of particular particles in a particular location and space have properties that allow them to combine in certain ways but not in other ways. That goes back to what I was saying about the difference between what is possible and what is impossible. It is possible obviously for atoms to come together and form planets and suns and stars and comets and human beings. We see human beings, we know they exist. We strongly believe that everything operates through atoms and so therefore we have reason to conclude that it is possible for human beings to exist because we know that they exist. Things that are possible will over infinity, extend an infinite number of times and in many, many different ways it is possible for human beings to extend their lifespans. Just like certain other animals have shorter lifespans and healthy humans live longer than unhealthy ones and there’s ways to improve your health over time in infinity, you’ll have a wide spectrum of periods of time over which living beings can continue to live, but over an infinite period of time, you will still never have a supernatural God because the supernatural is impossible, because nothing has eternal existence other than Adams and void. And if something does happen, it is natural. So you can logically rule out the supernatural as ever, even being possible. You run into some person, you run into some alien being who appears to you to have powers that are far superior to yours. They may be superior to yours. They may be much more intelligent than you are, but they’re not supernatural because only the natural can exist. So in concluding about paragraph 39 here, Kada is once again going back to this argument by design saying that the atoms are not capable of giving rise to bodies of any kind, much less human beings or much less gods. And when Ka says you fail entirely, therefore to prove divine immortality, Kaha is saying that you fail entirely to prove your theory of Adam. Alright, so that’s what’s going on in 39.
Joshua: Okay, so in the third sentence of section 39 here in the text today, Cicero writes this way, but there is you say a transition of images flowing on in great crowds in such a way that out of many someone at least must be perceived. I should be ashamed of my incapacity to understand this. If you who assert it could comprehend it yourselves for how do you prove that these images are continued in uninterrupted motion? I’m going to transition to Norman DeWitt’s book Epicurus and his philosophy in the chapter under the new piety. I’m looking at page 2 65 and to get something of a handle on what we’re dealing with here, we have to go back a little bit in Greek history and Norman Dewitt goes back to Heric colitis. He says this, by the time of Epicurus, the strange notion of flux combined with permanence, which now seems bizarre, had been fondled by the Greeks for a century since the days of heric colitis. It was especially familiar in the saying that no one could bathe in the same river. Twice it underwent refinement. Clear thinkers pointed out that it was impossible to bathe even once in the same river. It would be a different river from which the bather emerged where the ksi so fondled today the tourist would be warned that the Niagara falls viewed by him was not the same as viewed by previous tourists by way of refinement. He would be warned of the impossibility of getting two glimpses of the same falls the substance had changed while he glanced. Niagara Falls was about 60 miles east of the farm that Norman Dewitt grew up on, and he’s using it here as a way of talking about what we now know as the identity problem of ontology. So ontology is a branch of philosophy that deals with questions relating to being does something exist? This is the question Cera is asking and the identity problem and the identity problem of ontology deals with how do we define something in a way that accounts for its necessary changes? And the way we occasionally skirt on this issue is when we talk about the SOEs syllogism, for example, how many grains of sand do you have to remove from a heap before it is no longer a heap or the ship of theses? How many times do you have to change out the hole and the rigging and the mast and the oars, the anchor before it is no longer the same ship? That’s the question and it emerges for the Greeks from this question of flux. And for the atoms the question of flux arises out of the flows and the perpetual motion of the atoms. The atoms are always in motion when they are unbounded in compound bodies, their motion is linear and when they are bound up in compound bodies, their motion is vibratory and Norman Dewitt continues in the text here he says this, this notion of flux and permanence was no more congenial to the adamus than to the Greeks in general. The latter experienced no uplift from contemplating the everlasting hills but discerned divinity and eternity rather, in the unfailing springs and rushing rivers, things of unchanging substance were said to exist cat ariman, subject to count or measure, but idiomatically subject to limitation. This was a versatile phrase, taking its meaning from the context and might apply to time. For example, Phil Edemas points out that even a chronically bad tempered man may be subject to special spells of anger or limited duration. That is cat eman in our scum. However, the reference is to substance duet then transitions to the theories of flx and flx because if you look in the texts, there is this enduring argument about whether these images that we’re talking about, these idela which are composed of atoms and are the foundation of Epicurus theory of vision and of other sensations, there’s a question as to whether these images flow to or from. And Norman Dewitt has a solution to that and I’m going to read that now. He says this quote for the acceptance of the theory of flx and efflux, the minds of pupils had already been prepared by Epicurus through his explanation of vision in his syllabus. For beginners, it was their pointed out that even a solid body was vibrant with internal motion, which caused a perpetual discharge of subtle images preserving the surface appearance of the object. This continuous discharge was possible because an infinite supply of the proper atoms was always pressing close, eager as it were to dart into the required confirmation. So what he’s saying here is in Epicurus theory of vision, objects that we see are constantly discharging a film of atoms and this film strikes our eyes and that’s how we perceive the object in question. That is the influx of the atoms from the object to our eyes. But in order for this to continue for very long, there has to be an flx of atoms into the body so that it can continue to discharge atoms. That’s the way I’m understanding what Norman Dewitt is saying here today. Norman Dewitt continues this way. He says therefore by invoking the elementary principle that the number of atoms of each particular shape is infinite. It may be said in the words of Cicero that out of the infinite supply of atoms, an interminable form in Latin species or in Greek IDOs consisting of identical images arises and flows to the gods. This is the flx, the flow of atoms to the gods replenishing their own atoms so that a subsequent flx can flow the images of the gods to us, Cicero is very, very snide in his mocking approach to Epicurus theory of vision. I think it’s only fair though to look at another theory of vision in the ancient world, and this is Plato’s theory of vision. Plato held to what is now called the emission theory, which stated that the eyes emit rays of light that illuminate objects in front of them. And this theory of course, because it came from Plato, has a very long shelf life and it involves the following principles. The eyes, project rays of light, sort of like a flashlight, and those rays of light illuminate a pool of light in front of us and that allows us to see the objects that are in that pool of light that are lit up by the rays emitted from our eyes and then to account for darkness. The idea is that something intervenes to block the eye rays as they’re called, these light rays that come from the eyes. Furthermore, the visual stream from the eyes is made up of particles of fire. Plato is not an atom as he doesn’t hold that the cosmos is made of atoms and void. Instead, the accidents or events that we see in front of us are made of these fundamental elements and that in turn conceals the underlying truth, which is that everything that we see is a shadow of the ideal form of the thing itself. I think I’m going a little too far off the rails here though, so let me just recap by saying that this falls under because we’re dealing with flux and the flow of atoms and things are hard to get a handle on. We’re dealing with partially the identity problem of ontology and we’re dealing with the process of both flx and flx. This is Norman DeWitt’s interpretation, and of course there are other theories to explain this stuff. The flx is the flow of images into the body of the thing that we see, which replenish its atoms so that a stream or film of atoms can be thrown off of the surface and impinge onto our eyes and that’s how we see the object. I should probably give Cassius a chance to jump in here as I think I’ve maybe gone a little farther than we were intending to go today.
Cassius: No, Joshua, you’re doing fine. You’re bringing up some really important material that I do want to comment on to confirm a couple of different things you’ve said. First of all, I feel like Pavlov’s dog, whenever I hear the word flux, I cannot resist going back to diese of lander fragment number five where Diese recorded. Now Aristotle and those who hold the same peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable because things are continually in flux and on account of the rapidity of the flux evade our apprehension. We on the other hand acknowledge their flux, but not it’s being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense perception. So this is a very important issue and I do think that DeWitt’s example of Niagara Falls is helpful. You can easily imagine how the same type of people, the same personality that loves these mind game puzzles, who will say that, well, you can never bathe in the same stream twice because the particles of water are always flowing and that makes it a different stream. Well, when you hear something like that, you can be maybe for a moment taken aback by the thought of it, but when you think about it in practical terms that the Niagara Falls that you saw a year ago or a day ago or a minute ago is not the same Niagara Falls as it is that you’re seeing right now because the drops of water have changed. So that makes the falls different. Somebody of common sense is going to reject that as a ridiculous thing to be discussing and it is ridiculous. But when you’re in a philosophic debate, you have to have an understanding of your position and ultimately it comes down to the fact that the atoms are constantly moving through the void, but they’re not moving at such a speed and in such a way that what they form in terms of bodies and how the bodies have properties and qualities are not understandable. That’s the ultimate epicurean position is that all this movement is definitely there, but it doesn’t take a god. It doesn’t take the supernatural to put it all together in understandable terms because our senses allow us to do that. Now you read some really interesting material that Dewitt had to say about flux and flx as well, and this is where Dewitt has recorded for us this very interesting theory about how the gods must act to sustain their deathlessness. Well, that’s a theory that Dewitt has a series of references to support and another theory that DeWit is bringing up here in this section that I think you skipped over for good reason, but I’m going to mention it just to key anybody who might like to look into it further, is Dewitt is bringing up here on page 2 65 and 2 66 that there is evidence in the text that epicures held that there’s more than one class of gods and that one class of gods is indeed this type that survives through the constant replenishment of his atoms in this Niagara Falls type of way. But there’s actually another class of gods as well that exists as Joshua was pointing out subject to limitation with this implication that they have a more solid body, that they continue their existence in a way that’s different from the flows of the atoms that we generally talk about. And in connection with that, I think this worth reading a paragraph to Dewitt adds here about Cicero’s interpretations because what he’s basically saying is that Cicero is focusing all of his attack here through kata on the type of God that exists through this image replacement of the atoms, but that there is also evidence that Epicurus thought there was another type of God as well that doesn’t exist in the same way. And duet says this mention of Cicero affords excuse for the reminder that Cicero does not confuse the two classes of Gods as some have alleged, but speaks with precision within the limits of his purpose. This purpose, and this applies to everything we’re reading in Cicero about epicure, this issue of is Cicero lying? Does he not know what he’s talking about? Is he deliberately misrepresenting? I think what Dewitt is about to say here is probably the most accurate way of describing it. He says, Cicero’s purpose was not to present a complete or true account of Epicurean doctrine, but to select material apt for disparagement. For this reason, Cicero selected the gods of ever-changing substance and ignored the other kind. His treatment is brutally brief and no space was available for details that were reckon or uninteresting to the public. His approach was like that of certain comic poets for whom only those items that were well known and hence good for a laugh such as condensing pleasure were utilizable. It may be recalled how Cicero causes his spokesman to observe that the gods must be fearful lest sometime the stream of constituent images should fail. Cicero was engaged in a campaign for the belittlement of Epicureanism, always a trial lawyer even when philosophizing Cicero felt under no obligation to present all the evidence but only to make such a selection of the evidence as would be effective with the jury. So again, this is a point that applies to so much what Cicero says specifically if he says it specifically, especially if he puts it in the mouth of Tatu or valis or an epicurean spokesman, it’s probably relatively accurate, but he’s not going to give you the full picture because it’s not his point to do so. His point is to present a picture that he can then turn around and disparage and undercut because again, he’s writing this for a purpose. He’s not writing this to be the number one philosopher of all time. He’s writing this because he thinks that Rome would be better off if people thought the way that he did and he thinks that Rome would be worse off if the epicurean philosophy continues to grow as it had in his time. So he’s presenting parts of the story without giving the full explanation. It’s up to us to go back and pull out of the prior text, the prior discussion, pull out of other texts that we have the rest of the story so we can bring it all together in a way that makes sense. If we just listen to the part that Cicero brings out, we’re only going to get half the story looked at in isolation. That half may be accurate, but it’s only half the story. Now let’s go ahead and turn to section 40 and follow up on the discussion we had last week about activity and happiness and so forth because in Section 40, kata says quote, now let us consider divine happiness. Happiness is admittedly impossible without virtue, but virtue is in its nature active and your God is entirely inactive, therefore he’s devoid of virtue, therefore he’s not happy either. In what then does his life consist in a constant succession of things? Good. You reply without any admixture of evils things good. What things pleasures, I suppose that is of course pleasures of the body for your school recognizes no pleasures of the mind that do not arise from and come back to the body. I don’t suppose the Vals are like the rest of the epicurean who are ashamed of certain utterances of epicurus in which he protests that he cannot conceive any good that is unconnected with the pleasures of the voluptuary and the sensualist pleasures, which in fact he proceeds without a blush to enumerate by name. Well then what food and beverages, what harmonies of music and flowers of various hue, what delights of touch and smell will you assign to the gods so as to keep them steeped in pleasure? The poets array banquets of nectar and ambrosia with hebe organic and attendance as cup cupbearer. But what will you do epicurean? I don’t see either where your God is to procure these delights or how he’s able to enjoy them. It appears then that mankind is more bountifully equipped for happiness than is the deity. Since man can experience a wider range of pleasures, you tell me that you consider these pleasures inferior, which merely tickle the sense. The expression is that of epicurus. When will you ceased joking? Why even our print philo was impatient with the epicureans for affecting to despise the pleasures of sensual indulgence for he had an excellent memory and could quote verbatim a number of maxims from the actual writings of Epicurus. As for met Doris Epicurus is co-partner in philosophy, he supplied him with many still more outspoken quotations. In fact, metro Doris takes his brother Tomate to task for hesitating to measure every element of happiness by the standard of the belly. Nor is this an isolated utterance, but he repeats it several times. I see you nod your ascent as you are acquainted with the passages and did you deny it? I would procure the volumes, not that I’m at the moment criticizing your making pleasure, the soul standard of value that belongs to another inquiry. What I’m trying to prove is that your gods are incapable of pleasure and therefore by your verdict can have no happiness either. Okay? We began dealing with that last week and reminding everybody how kata and how baus, how Cicero are part of the general platonic Aristotelian position that all that really matters is virtue and the mind is what’s important and that the pleasures of the body are inferior and ignoble and not worthy of pursuit. But this is a good detailed explanation of that argument. And Ada is twisting it into the argument that you say that the pleasures of the body are all that matters. Well, your God doesn’t even have a body, so he can’t even partake in pleasure, so he can’t be as happy and he can’t experience as much pleasure as a human being can. What kind of a sense does this doctrine make? Valis is where kata is coming from.
Joshua: So kata here in section 40 is making a number of statements and a number of insinuations about epicurean ethics that I think it would be a mistake to let pass by. Even though we have dealt with all of this at length in our series of episodes on book two of Cicero’s on Ends, he says, it is certain that without virtue there can be no happiness, but virtue consists in action and your God does nothing. Much of that we’ve already dealt with at length in this series of episodes. And of course, Cicero and Kado are going to say that without virtue there can be no happiness. Epicurus does say in principle doctrine five, that it is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. And so while Epicurus is not going to place virtue as the telos, as the end or the goal of human endeavor, justice and virtue are part of the package of how we live a life of pleasure. And so they are important, right? But Cicero and Kata, they’re going to kind of ignore that for a moment. This is what you were talking about, Cassius Cicero is editing his presentation in a way that makes Epicurus look bad. And one of his favorite slurs, particularly on the question of ethics, is that Epicurus says repeatedly that he is a sensualist, that he openly ev vows, that he has no idea of any good separate from wanton and obscene pleasures, which without a blush he names distinctly. This is again, a reference to a fragment from a lost book of Epicurus called Perry Telos or on the End Goal. And Epicurus writes quote, I do not know how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures of taste, the pleasures of sex, the pleasures of sound, and the pleasures of contemplating beauty. And we did have a discussion very recently on the meaning of that fragment and how we should compare it to what is written in the letter to MEUs. And in the letter to MEUs in section 1 31, Epicurus writes this way to grow accustomed therefore to simple and not luxurious diet gives us health to the full and makes a man alert for the needful employments of life. And when after long intervals we approach luxuries, disposes us better towards them and fits us to be fearless of fortune when therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end. We do not mean the pleasures of propagates and those that consist in sensuality as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. And in our recent conversation on this, it was a question of how you square those two. And I think looking at the principle doctrines and in particular principle doctrine 10, we can get some insight as to how this all fits together. Epicurus writes this way in principle doctrine, 10, if the objects which are productive of pleasures to profligate persons really freed them from fears of the mind, the fears, I mean inspired by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, the fear of death, the fear of pain. If further they taught them to limit their desires, we should never have any fault to find with such persons where they would then be filled with pleasures to overflowing on all sides and would be exempt from all pain, whether a body or of mind that is from all evil. And so the way I would connect this would be to say it would be intellectually inconsistent of epicurus to deny that the pleasures of food and the pleasures of sex and the pleasures of observing beauty are indeed pleasures. If you’re going to say that pleasure is the goal, then you have to include all kinds of pleasures under the definition of that word. But we are also equipped by epicurus ethics with a program of choice and avoidance to choose which pleasures to pursue and which to avoid, which pains to endure and which to try and escape from. And so it’s an exposition of Epicurus ethics that you’re not going to find in Cicero because he has no interest in explaining how this stuff all fits together. He wants to use the one quote from the book that is now lost to us to make Epicurus out to be a sensualist. And my advice is, don’t fall for that trap.
Cassius: That’s right, Joshua. It is a trap. It’s a trap that we’re going to probably move on to next week as well because he starts the next section by quoting Valle and saying, well preach. You say the gods are free from pain and he talks for a while about what it would mean to be free from pain. So why don’t we defer much more of that ethics issue into next week and probably this week just emphasize that the majority of what he has just said in this section 40 goes back to these allegations about focusing on the stomach and so forth. And I want to thank Don for finding some good references for us that he’s posted in our thread for this week about their God is the belly and so forth. That’s in Ener one 30 Aeu reports that it was in fact for the sake of the belly and the pleasures of the flesh in general, that this man flattered MIUs and metro dous. And it occurs also in plu tar where plu tar says against Otus quote for it’s the men who look with contempt on all these things as old wives tales and think that our good is to be found in the belly and other passages by which pleasure makes her injury. No doubt, a loaded reference there, plu at procures makes a pleasant life, impossible, says indeed. These people, you might say, describing a circle with the belly as sinner and radius circumscribed within it, the whole area of pleasure. And Cicero in speaking against Lucius CalPERS, piso says, it is his habit in all his discussions to attach higher value to the pleasures of the belly than to the delights of the eye and the ear plu tar in another location says, oh ho, I said laughing. It looks as if you are going to hop on their belly and make them run for their flesh when you take pleasure away. Well, just as we quoted earlier from Dewitt, Cicero loves nothing more than to take something out of context and ridicule it. And apparently Metro Doris, one of the other epicurean made the point that you have a physical body and that everything that is a pleasure to you in some way is connected with the body. Now, I don’t know that we have exactly the way they explained the reference to the belly, but clearly in order for the body to sustain itself, it has to eat, it has to drink, it has to replenish our own atoms to the extent that we can. We can’t do it indefinitely like apparently some of the epicure in Gods can. But if we’re going to live, if we’re going to experience pleasure, if we’re going to commit acts of virtue, if we’re going to do anything, you ultimately have to make sure that the body is alive and sustains itself. And in that way, you can draw everything back to the pleasures of eating and drinking that sustain us, that allow us to do these other things. That’s why it is so important in the epicurean perspective to be emphasizing that any God that might exist and in an infinite universe, this could be an infinite number of things that are possible, including beings that are smarter, including beings that live longer than we do. But the one thing you can say beyond the fact that living beings are living beings is that they do have to have some way of sustaining themselves for human beings. It is eating and drinking and bringing things into our bodies to sustain ourselves. And it makes sense that an epicurean is going to want to emphasize that process and not indulge these platonic fantasies that all that matters in life is to think wonderful thoughts about beautiful things and reason in the abstract and all these things that Plato is famous for in emphasizing his realm of forms and this true world that exists beyond the one that we are able to live in ourselves. Cicero may want to ridicule the stomach, but Cicero’s not going to get very far if Cicero doesn’t humor his own stomach and Cicero doesn’t maintain his own life. As always, the Epicureans are taking the practical point of view and extrapolating it out logically to what it means. You can’t pursue pleasure, you can’t pursue happiness, you can’t even pursue virtue if you’re not alive, pain and pleasure virtue. All of these things have no meaning except to the living. If you’re not living, you’re not able to be happy, you’re not able to be virtuous, you’re not able to be anything else because you cease to exist.
Joshua: Well, I think as usual, we’re drawing on a lot of ancillary questions to the main question of the gods, and that certainly makes this text worth going through, and I’m excited to see where we go next in ADA’s protracted argument against all things epicurean.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. And that’s exactly what we’ll do next week. Like I said, we’ll get back into this issue of what it might mean for the Gods to be free from pain or for us to be free from pain, and we’ll continue on as kata attacks, the epicurean view of holiness and piety and the best life in general.
Joshua: Well, here’s a good fragment you could end on fragment 56 from on Wanda. He says this, so we shall not achieve wisdom universally since not all our capable of it, but if we assume it to be possible, then truly the life of the Gods will pass to men for everything will be full of justice and mutual love, and there will come to be no need of fortifications and laws and so forth.
Cassius: Yeah, these are really fascinating issues, Joshua. And again, they’re not of just academic question because the life of the gods is relevant in epicurean terms to the life of real people, and we have, of course, Epicurus reference about studying with each other, these issues of infinity philosophy, natural science, and you become a God among men. All sorts of references. There are productive things to be learned in exploring the nature of what the best life might be if you were able to pursue what you wish to pursue unhindered by sickness and disease and all the other issues we run into as human beings. How would we spend our time if we could get past these requirements of daily life that take us away from the things that we want to do? These are the kind of issues we’re exploring. We’ll get back into it further next week, so let’s bring this episode to a close. In the meantime, let me remind everybody to drop by the form and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or any of our other episodes. As always, thanks for your time this week. We’ll be back with you soon. See you then. Bye.