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”Sections 39-40 of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. Section 39 covers Cotta’s attack on Velleius’s use of isonomia — the Epicurean principle of uniform distribution — to argue that since there are mortal beings there must also be immortal beings. The hosts trace the underlying problem of flux through Heraclitus, DeWitt’s Niagara Falls analogy, and the Sorites heap paradox, then read DeWitt’s Chapter 11 (pp. 265-266) on the influx/efflux theory of how the gods maintain their substance by absorbing atoms while projecting images. DeWitt also argues that Cicero deliberately selected only the “image-flow gods” for attack while ignoring a second class of Epicurean gods with more solid bodies — Cicero the trial lawyer presenting only the evidence apt for disparagement. Section 40 covers Cotta’s attack on Epicurean happiness: since the gods supposedly have no body, they can’t experience the bodily pleasures Epicureans champion. Cassius and Joshua respond with Principal Doctrine 5, Principal Doctrine 10, the Letter to Menoeceus on simple pleasures, and the lost Peri Telous (“On the End”) where Epicurus listed pleasures. The episode closes with Fragment 56 from Diogenes of Oinoanda on wisdom bringing the life of the gods to men.
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 discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread to discuss this and each of our podcast episodes.
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 prolepsis and the Epicurean theory of knowledge of the gods that comes through the mind, taking the information that the images or prolepsis 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 Menoeceus, when it says “believe that a God is a living being blessed and imperishable,” presents the question of whether that is a 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 prolepsis — 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 gods 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 Section 38 and the beginning of Section 39, and that’s where we’ll pick up today. We’ve generally been reading in the Yonge 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. Velleius — Cotta 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.” Then:
“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 isonomia — “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 Section 40 he’s going to talk about divine happiness, but let’s stop at Section 39 there and see what we can get out of what Cotta has said so far. Because he’s brought up this topic of isonomia, which Epicurus himself does not mention — at least explicitly — in the surviving works we have.
So we probably first ought to deal with the question of how does isonomia relate to this issue of images and the knowledge of the gods? Before we start to examine that point about isonomia, let’s go back and refresh our memory about what Velleius has previously said about it. Back in Section 19 of the same book, Velleius had said this:
“Epicurus then — as he not merely discerns and recites 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 bodies, 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 isonomia:
“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 termed by Epicurus isonomia, 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 — Velleius is recorded as saying that images flow to the gods. Well, Cotta 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 Cotta has clearly understood that these images are flowing from the gods and give us knowledge of them.
But at any rate, the real issue here that Velleius has brought up is that the supremely potent principle of infinity gives rise to this issue of isonomia — that there are matches and counterparts, that things exist on a spectrum or scale of existence in which there are both mortals and immortals, and there are causes of destruction and causes of preservation, and these exist in an equitable or uniform distribution.
Now in terms of the equitable numbers of these things: when Velleius 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 happen and therefore we know it’s possible, 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 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 — but it would be worthwhile thinking through that possibility. 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, Cotta is talking about this as if this is a totally ridiculous idea. And because he’s opposed to it, you wouldn’t expect Cotta 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 Velleius 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 Section 39, where Cotta says: “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 the Argument from 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 an intelligent force that brings it into being. And so that’s the level at which this argument is taking place.
Velleius and Epicurus 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 existence not because of just absolutely random chance, but because the movement of particular particles in a particular location in 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. Things that are possible will, over infinity, extend an infinite number of times and in 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 are 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 atoms 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 Section 39 here: Cotta is once again going back to this Argument from 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 Cotta says “you fail entirely, therefore, to prove divine immortality,” Cotta is saying that you fail entirely to prove your theory of Atomism.
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 265, 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 Heraclitus. 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 Heraclitus. 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. Were the axiom 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 sixty 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. Ontology is a branch of philosophy that deals with questions relating to being — does something exist? This is the question Cotta is asking. And the identity problem of ontology deals with how do we define something in a way that accounts for its necessary changes? The way we occasionally skirt this issue is when we talk about the Sorites 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 Theseus — how many times do you have to change out the hull and the rigging and the mast and the oars and 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 unbound, 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 Atomists 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 kata arithmon — 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, Philodemus points out that even a chronically bad-tempered man may be subject to special spells of anger of limited duration.”
DeWitt then transitions to the theories of influx and efflux — because if you look in the texts there is this enduring argument about whether these images that we’re talking about, these eidola which are composed of atoms and are the foundation of Epicurus’s 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:
“For the acceptance of the theory of influx and efflux, the minds of pupils had already been prepared by Epicurus through his explanation of vision in his syllabus. For beginners, it was there 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 conformation.”
So what he’s saying here is: in Epicurus’s 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 efflux of the atoms from the object to our eyes. But in order for this to continue for very long, there has to be an influx 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.
Norman DeWitt continues this way:
“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, eidos) consisting of identical images arises and flows to the gods.”
This is the influx — the flow of atoms to the gods — replenishing their own atoms so that a subsequent efflux can flow the images of the gods to us.
Cicero is very, very snide in his mocking approach to Epicurus’s 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. It involves the following principles: the eyes project rays of light, sort of like a flashlight, and those rays illuminate a pool of light in front of us — and that allows us to see the objects that are in that pool of light, lit up by the rays emitted from our eyes. 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 Atomist — 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 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: this falls under — because we’re dealing with flux and the flow of atoms — we’re dealing with partially the identity problem of ontology, and we’re dealing with the process of both influx and efflux. This is Norman DeWitt’s interpretation, and of course there are other theories to explain this. The influx is the flow of images into the body of the thing that we see, which replenishes 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 Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 5, where Diogenes 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 its 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 you can never bathe in the same stream twice because the particles of water are always flowing and that makes it a different stream… when you hear something like that, you might for a moment be taken aback by the thought of it. But when you think about it in practical terms — that the Niagara Falls you saw a year ago or a day ago or a minute ago is not the same Niagara Falls 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 those bodies have properties and qualities — are not understandable. That’s the ultimate Epicurean position: 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 influx and efflux 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 DeWitt is bringing up here — in this section that I think you skipped over for good reason, but I’m going to mention just to key anybody who might like to look into it further — is that DeWitt is bringing up here on pages 265 and 266 that there is evidence in the text that Epicurus held that there’s more than one class of gods. One class of gods is indeed this type that survives through the constant replenishment of its 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 the implication that they have a more solid body and continue their existence in a way that’s different from the flows of atoms that we generally talk about.
And in connection with that, I think it’s worth reading a paragraph that DeWitt adds here about Cicero’s interpretations, because what he’s basically saying is that Cicero is focusing all of his attack here through Cotta 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. DeWitt 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 Epicurus — “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 of what Cicero says. Specifically, if he says something specifically — especially if he puts it in the mouth of Cotta or Velleius 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 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. Because in Section 40, Cotta says:
“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 Velleius is like the rest of the Epicureans 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 pouring and in attendance as cup-bearer. 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 cease joking? Why, even our Antipater 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 Metrodorus, Epicurus’s co-partner in philosophy, he supplied him with many still more outspoken quotations. In fact, Metrodorus takes his brother Timocrates 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 assent 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 sole 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 Cotta, how Balbus, 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 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 Cotta is twisting it into the argument: “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 sense does this doctrine make?” That is where Cotta is coming from, Velleius.
Joshua: So Cotta 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 Cotta are going to say that without virtue there can be no happiness. Epicurus does say in Principal Doctrine 5 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. But Cicero and Cotta are 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 avows 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 Peri Telous (On the End Goal), and Epicurus writes: “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 Menoeceus.
And in the Letter to Menoeceus, in section 131, 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 profligates 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 Principal Doctrines — and in particular Principal Doctrine 10 — we can get some insight as to how this all fits together. Epicurus writes this way in Principal 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, for they would then be filled with pleasures to overflowing on all sides and would be exempt from all pain, whether of 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, 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’s 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’s 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 Cotta starts the next section by quoting Velleius and saying, “Well, you say the gods are free from pain” — and then 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 Cotta has just said in 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. Athenaeus reports that it was in fact for the sake of the belly and the pleasures of the flesh in general that — according to Timocrates — Epicurus flattered Idomeneus and Metrodorus. And it occurs also in Plutarch, where Plutarch says against Colotes: “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 entry” — no doubt a loaded reference there. Plutarch says Epicurus “procures makes a pleasant life impossible” — “These people,” he says, “you might say, describing a circle with the belly as center and radius, circumscribed within it the whole area of pleasure.” And Cicero, in speaking against Lucius Calpurnius 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.” Plutarch 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 Metrodorus — one of the other Epicureans — 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 Epicurean 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 and 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 include an infinite number of things that are possible, including beings that are smarter, 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 — 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 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, 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 Cotta’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 Cotta 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 Diogenes of Oinoanda. He says this: “So we shall not achieve wisdom universally, since not all are 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’s 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 forum 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.