Episode 257 - There Is No Necessity To Live Under Necessity - Part 1
Date: 11/18/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4147-episode-257-there-is-no-necessity-to-live-under-necessity-part-1/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 257 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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 all of our podcast episodes. Last week we had a special episode devoted to the discussion of the epicurean gods and whether Epicurus held them to be real or thought constructs or some combination of the two, and that episode served as sort of a cap for our discussion of book one of Cicero’s on the nature of the Gods. Just like when we went through Cicero’s on ends, we stayed with the epicurean section, not only the positive section presented by the epicurean speaker, but also the first initial response to it given by Cicero. We did that in own ends In regard to ethics, we’ve now done that on the nature of the gods in regard to the epicurean view of gods and divinity. And rather than continue on to hear the stoic and academic skeptic viewpoints, we’re going to go back to a more general level of general questions about Epicurean philosophy that are of daily concern to the majority of people who study Epicurus and take it seriously much as we have it presented on the Epicurean Friends forum. On the first page of the forum, we have a list of key doctrines of Epicurus that we’ve seen over the years are of continuous interest to people who are studying epicurus. What we’ve done is pull out some of the most controversial, the most directly applicable issues in Epicurean philosophy to highlight how epicurean philosophy is different from stoicism and other philosophies of the Greek and the non-Greek worlds. Epicurus is view of the gods is of course one of the most controversial doctrines that he’s known for, and we’ve now covered that. We’ll now go through the rest of the list that we’ve put together with this week being devoted to another of his doctrines that people who are initially attracted to Epicurus for his ethical views sometimes find to be difficult for them to accept. This week will be devoted to the question of fate or necessity or determinism, which Epicurus was known for again in the ancient world, for taking an unconventional viewpoint, the majority of other Greek philosophers taking a standard approach that the universe either has a supernatural God over it or is an intelligent entity itself, and that everything that happens takes place because of some kind of design that everything that happens is preordained determined or faded to happen. With that being the conventional view of most of the other Greek philosophers of Epicurus time and even today being a majority view in many areas, people often are surprised to find that Epicurus took a view against that, which takes explanation and takes discussion to understand. We picked the necessity argument to go through first because what we’ve been doing in recent months is using Cicero’s reviews of classical philosophy as a basis for our discussions using Cicero’s own ends for ethics on the nature of the Gods, for the Gods. And in turn, we can now refer to Cicero’s on fate for the discussion of necessity, but again, rather than go through a single text in a lot of detail, what we’re going to do today is stay at a higher level and discuss the issues from a very practical point of view. Necessity and determinism being an issue that very often turns people off when they start studying it because it becomes so technical that it appears to be a word game in the hands of many people who discuss it. People simply want to know a general answer to a general question without feeling like they have to be experts in philosophy in order to understand what the issue is even about as we go through this issue today and similar high level issues in coming weeks, that’s something that we have to wrestle with ourselves as we present this in our podcast. None of us have read each and every one of the ancient authorities or modern authorities either for that matter, and so we’re not by any means ultimate experts on all of the different arguments that people can make, and yet we being ordinary people like our listeners have a need to live our lives and apply Acuring philosophy in a way that’s productive every day that goes by. We don’t have the time and the ability to read everything that’s out there on all of these issues, and so we just simply have to do the best we can and that’s what we’re going to be doing in this and coming episodes. In fact, stating the problem that way is a part of the philosophical issue that’s involved in the discussion of necessity. One of the books that I’m hoping that we’ll be able to devote some time to in the future in addition to Cicero’s on Fate is Cicero’s academic Questions. The reason that work is of particular interest is that the part of it that survives starts out by giving us a very general introduction to the principles of Socrates and how they developed in the generations after Socrates, through Plato, through Aristotle, through the stoics in different directions, but largely staying consistent to the Socratic core, one of the hearts of which was Socrates’ position that the only thing he was really sure of was that he didn’t know anything. The criticism that can be made and that Cicero did make in his essay on academic questions is how do you know that what you’re saying is right? This is a topic that we discussed last week in terms of paralysis and the problem posed by Plato in his menino dialogue, which Plato resolved by saying that we know something to be true. When we remember it from a past life, Cicero said in his academic questions about other people for as to their assertion that the teacher whom they judge to have been a wise man commands their absolute trust. I would agree to that if to make that judgment could actually have laying within the power of unlearned novices. And then he says, for to decide who is a wise man seems to be a task that specially requires a wise man to undertake it. In other words, you’ve got a regression problem that unless you are already wise, it is very difficult or impossible in fact for you to judge that a person that you’re listening to is wise. But if you’re already wise, where did that knowledge come from? Cicero argues but granting that it lay within their power for a novice to pass on who is wise, it was only possible for them after hearing all the facts and ascertaining the views of all the other schools as well, whereas they gave their verdict after a single hearing of the case and enroll themselves under the authority of a single master. The point there being, which is similar to a point that Lucian makes in his Herma timus dialogue, is that from a logical point of view, unless you have read all of the authorities, unless you have covered all the arguments, can you really say with confidence that you have considered everything and come to a conclusion that incorporates all the possible objections. Logically speaking, of course, you can’t. If you have not taken the time to read all of the sources, then there’s going to be some doubt in your mind about whether you have incorporated all of the issues in your conclusion or not. Again, though, that takes us back to the question that we have to live today. We cannot postpone the decisions that have to be made until we have time to read all the arguments of every philosopher who’s ever lived. One way that people in most of the other schools in epic’s time and even today deal with that kind of a question of having to live today even though they haven’t got all of the experience and knowledge they’d like to have, is that they take the position that things that happen in the world are faded or are necessary or are determined ahead of time. And that’s why questions like necessity remain important to us today, even though many people in educated circles no longer follow the traditional Abrahamic religion viewpoints and consider the idea that there is some supernatural God controlling everything that happens, they consider that to be obsolete. There is still a prevailing view that even in the absence of a supernatural God, there are other forces which limit us in what we can and cannot do, which is of course an obvious point. Even under epicurean philosophy, we do not have the ability to live forever. We do not have the ability to defeat death. There are many things that we are limited in doing, and in the epicurean worldview, even though there are no supernatural commandments, no ideal forms, no absolute notions of virtue, there are still decisions that have to be made about how we’re going to live our lives in the time that we have. And that leads us to this threshold question of do we have any control over the things that we do in our lives or is everything subject to forces which are beyond our control? So as we discuss necessity today, again, it’s a continuing question that is not just of historical interest because this issue of fate can be a major psychological problem for many people who feel like they’re helpless and they therefore develop anxiety and pain just because they think that there’s nothing they can do to control or influence any aspect of their future. That kind of an idea leads people to basically throw up their hands and do nothing to attempt to take charge of their own lives or to influence their own future. And it creates conditions in which many people just simply give up trying and in default of trying themselves, they end up accepting what other people tell them to do without thinking that if they themselves have no control over their own willpower, then these other people also as well are in the same boat that they are. And so the idea is that Epicurus was addressing when he confronted the consensus of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and the stoics, the people who were leading into stoicism in his time, the consensus that there was a fate that controlled the future and controlled everything that everybody does, controls even the gods. When Epicurus saw that this was the prevailing notion, he rebelled against it despite the fact that it was so deeply embedded into the culture and the religions and the philosophies of his time. And that’s the situation that I think we still find ourselves in today.
Joshua: Fate in the ancient world was one of the bedrock cultural assumptions of most of the ancient people around the Mediterranean, and we find the cultural expression of their belief in fate all over the place. Perhaps the most obvious example would be the Oracles Oracles that Delphi and Doona, because when you consult an oracle, what you’re really trying to do is shine some light on a map that you can only see backwards, but the map is already drawn and the oracle is merely there to reveal information about what’s on that map because that’s the ground that’s right in front of you. That’s the ground that you’re going to be walking through, but you can’t see it forward as you’re walking through it. And we know from Lucian ADA’s essay on Alexander the Oracle monger that these oracles were enormously popular to the extent that even Marcus Aurelius himself, the emperor of Rome, sent a delegation to consult the oracle in his name regarding an important battle. But to me, the expression of this foundational aspect of Greek culture is in looking at the epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then looking at the epic of Virgil, the Anad. And what we find in these epic poems is that not only are humans bound by faith, not only are humans bound by destiny, but the gods themselves have no power to countermand the edicts of fate. They have no power to prevent what is faded from happening. And one of the more interesting prophecies leading up to the Trojan War that described in the Iliad is a prophecy concerning the mother of Achilles, who was an OSI named Theus. It was prophesied by Prometheus, this titan, whose name means foresight. It was prophesied that any son born to her would be greater than his father. And this presented a huge problem because as we know, the Greek gods often fathered children by other kinds of beings, including Osis and Soze or the other Olympians. The idea that he might accidentally through various means have a son by Theus, and that that son would grow to be stronger than he is and overthrow him in exactly the same way that he Zeus overthrew his father, Kronos, who in turn overthrow his father, Oros. This is a terrifying prospect for an Olympian God. This would mean the end of the reign of the Gods. And so they have to be very careful to stay away from this woman. And so when a hero named Palius caught her eye while he was on the journey with Jason, Jason and the Argonaut, it’s a very famous story, the most well-known telling I think is by Apollonius of Rhodes. While he’s on that journey, he looks into the water over the site of the Argos, the ship that they’re on catches her eye, and then later he’s training under this Centar Chiron who is sort of a mentor to heroes in these stories. And he’s still thinking about this OSI that he saw so many years ago. And Chiron says, well, she happens to be my cousin. I can probably find her. They meet and eventually they marry. And this is very pleasing to the gods because now they know she’s off limits. I don’t have to worry about fathering a son by her that will be stronger than me. Of course, the son that does get fathered by Pelus is Achilles. And Achilles goes on in the Trojan War to become the greatest hero of the age. The second prophecy concerning Achilles was that if he went to Troy, he would die there, but his name would live forever. If he didn’t go to Troy, he would live a long life. He would father many children, he would have many grandchildren, but soon after his death, his name would die with him. And so wrapped up into this idea of fate, you now have the idea of Fama reputation. You now have the idea of the search for fame among these heroes because it was this search for fame that would ultimately lead to them being sorted off into the happy aisles in the underworld rather than into the place where everybody else goes. And that is very famous among literary sources all the way up through today. Anyway, so to make a long story short here, Achilles greater than his father prophesied to have victory at Troy. It was prophesied by Nestor to Aga non that they could not take Troy without Achilles, even though Aga and Achilles didn’t get along, and he didn’t really want him. Achilles. Eventually after the death of Petrolos has a new suit of armor made by Heus himself, dawns it, and in a dual with Hector, he kills him. And this is about where the story of Thelia ends after the events of the Iliad, they go through this whole business of building the Trojan horse and pretending to flee, but actually they come back and finally they do conquer the city. Achilles is shot in the heel. He dies on the way home. You have the story of Odysseus who is faded, prophesied to be delayed in getting home by 10 years. And the whole story of the Odyssey is a story of all of the absurd and ridiculous events that have to happen in order for him to be delayed from getting home for 10 years. And you might think that that was the end of the story, but Virgil writing in the late first century BC and the early first century ad is now trying to tap into fate as a cornerstone of Greek and now Roman culture. He’s trying to tap into fate and the idea that Rome will be a great power. Now of course, at the time, Rome was already a great power. It didn’t have as much land as it would go on to control under Traian and Hadrian, but it was already a great power. So he’s sort of rewriting the history of Rome and plugging it in. And he wasn’t the first to do this, plugging it into this story of fate as it came down through Homer, through the Iliad and the Odyssey. And in book five of the Ed, we have Venus offering a prayer to Neptune trying to get Neptune to intervene, to provide safe passage for Anas and his crew to get to the Tiber so they can found the city of Rome. And this is what she says, stern Juno’s wrath and breast implacable compel me Neptune to abase my pride in lowly supplication laps of days, nor prayers nor virtues, her hard heart subdue nor Jo’s command, even Jupiter cannot command another God to change their mind about something. This is one of the rules of the magic of the Gods. Nor will she rest or yield at Faith’s decree. Well, this is different. The Gods themselves are powerless before fate. So even though Venus is saying here too Neptune, that Juno will not rest or yield at fate’s decree, we know because we know that fate is infallible in these stories. We know that Juno is ultimately going to lose that argument, but Venus is trying to do a workaround here by getting Neptune to open up a sea lane so that he can get Aus and his crew to the Tiber. And she continues. Her executable grudge is still unfed, although she did consume the Trojan city ji’s mid mosts throne, and though she has accomplished stroke on stroke of retribution, but she now pursues the remnant, this last group or ship or crew of Trojan nobility trying to make a life for themselves elsewhere, the ashes and bare bones of perished ileum, ileum being Troy. And she goes on to say, behold, but now goading to evil deeds, the Trojan Dames, she basically burned his ships, his ships, he in strange lands must leave the crew of his lost fleet behind, oh, I entreat the Neptune, let the remnant sail in safety or the sea and end their way in Tiber holy stream, if this my prayer be lawful and that city’s rampart proud be still what fate intends. This one scene in the fifth book of the Anaya tells a whole story about how fate works in these myths and legends. And to the extent that one God, one Olympian, God has to supplicate another Olympian God in order to find a way to, number one, get around what a third Olympian God has intended, but also to ensure that what fate has decreed is carried out. And Venus, of course goes on to be the patron goddess, not just of Rome, but also of Julius Caesar and his family who was thought to have been descended from anus inas. And of course, she figures centrally as a feature in Lucius’s prom to book one the MPT Venus. Okay, that probably went on a little longer than I intended to. But that sets up the story of fate in the ancient world. We see it in drama, you see it in the Oedipus cycle, the bin plays. You see it in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the Argonaut, which I’ve already mentioned. All of these stories from the ancient world are crossed by destiny, they’re crossed by fate. And what fate decrees, no one, not even Zeus himself, has the power to countermand and certainly humans have no power to countermand it. And one of the themes of fate in all of these stories is that the more you try to avoid it, the more you run right into its arms. This comes from William Somerset, mom I think was his name. He was an English writer and he wrote a story called Appointment in Samara. There was a rich man who sent his servant into town to the market to buy provisions. And when the servant returned, he had this horrified look on his face and he didn’t have the provisions. And so the master of the house asked him what had happened at the market and the servant said he was buying provisions in the market and he turned around and he saw the face of death itself. And the master reading this as a bad omen puts the servant on his fastest horse and sends him to the far off town of Samara. And then the master himself goes back to the marketplace to confront death. And when he gets there, he finds death in the marketplace and he says to death, what are you doing? You’re scaring my servant. And death says to him, it wasn’t my intention to scare him. I was just surprised to see him here because I have an appointment with him tomorrow in the far off town of Samara. That’s how these stories normally go. And the Oedipus cycle works very similarly. You have two prophecies, one for the parents of Oedipus and one for Oedipus himself. And in both of these people, principally Oedipus and his father trying to avoid the horrible prophecy, the prophecy was Oedipus will kill his father and be his mother. That’s the prophecy. And so in both of them trying to avoid the prophecy, they end up running into a scenario where it gets fulfilled because Oedipus was exposed, which is a method of getting rid of unwanted children in the ancient world. You leave them out into nature to let them die of exposure or predation. It’s very horrifying practice. Oedipus gets his name from his swollen feet because stakes were driven through his feet to a stake him to the ground on the side of a mountain. But as these stories usually go, he was found by a shepherd and taken to another king and queen of another city state, and that’s how he thinks. He grows up thinking that those two are his parents, but they’re not. And then he goes on a journey to get away from them so that the prophecy doesn’t get fulfilled. Ends up going to what he doesn’t know is his original hometown kills the sphinx. He’s the savior of the people. He’s presented to the palace and he gets there and the woman who is ruling the city tells him that her husband died a few months ago or whatever. And so they get married, Oedipus and the queen, and then he finds out that on his road to this city, he had killed his father who was the king of the city, and now he’s married to his mother. And the way the story gradually unfolds, it’s meant to horrify you. It’s meant to disturb you because the queen ends up killing herself. She goes into a back room off the stage and ends her own life, and Oedipus ends up gouging his own eyes out. So a lot of these stories are quite horrifying when it comes to the question of fate because it is kind of a horror story. Some things that are beyond your control, you are caught in a very real web and you have no hope. That’s the main theme. There’s no hope of escaping.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua. So that helps us set the stage for the Greek mythology background. We probably don’t need to go into a long discussion of Judeo Christianity, Abrahamic type religions and viewpoints about fate involved in that source. What I think about is in terms of predestination and John Calvin and views within the church about how everything has been happening as it was set in motion from the beginning of time.
Joshua: I made the point at the beginning of my earlier discussion about prophecy, and again, with prophecy, you’re trying to reveal a future that has already faded to exist. And to some extent this is kind of a difference I see in the Old Testament versus the New Testament, but I’m sure that any Christian theologian would dispute everything I’m about to say. But what I see in some of these stories, particularly in the way that the coming of Jesus is said to have been prophesied in the earlier books, the way in which the coming of Jesus is claimed to have been prophesied already in the Old Testament, it kind of taps into this broader culture around the Mediterranean at the time, which is you go to prophets and oracles because they’ve been given the power of foresight, they’ve been given the power to reveal the path that is already in front of you. You just don’t know it. And so what I see Christianity doing in that respect essentially is kind of trying to have it both ways. You have prophecy, which to me implies some level of fate, some level of things are already determined, God has a plan and so forth. But they coupled this with a sort of radical view of free will, which is you are responsible not only for your own sin, but for this heritage of sin that started with Adam. And what you need to do now is believe the claims of the gospels as apparently absurd, though they may be in order to secure an eternity of bliss beyond the grave. And the alternative, of course is an eternity of pain and torment and punishment beyond the grave. And so in making free will a central part of Christian theology, you kind of see that fate has a diminished role compared to the role that it has among the Greeks and the Romans. You do have schools like John Calvin, but even with that, you’ll go on the internet and see people trying to explain every inch of predestination or double predestination out of his theology while still holding to the doctrine themselves. So I find that a very difficult and thorny question.
Cassius: Logically, it would seem to me that you can’t predict the future unless there’s some force of fate or necessity that’s bringing it into effect that go hand in hand, which is why Cicero had a separate work on divination along with his work on fate because they do seem to go hand in hand. And so in addition to what you’re talking about there, Joshua, in terms of the major religions that still are influential today, you’ve got people who believe in astrology who think that the stars have an influence over the future. Going back to the Roman and Greek periods, we have Cicero and on fate saying quote hints if while it is consistent for the stoics who say that all things happen by fate to accept oracles of this sort and all the other things connected with divination, yet the same position cannot be held by those who say that the things which are going to happen in the future have been true from all eternity. Observe that their case is not the same as that of the stoics for their position is more limited and narrow. So we have this idea of a force of fate or necessity embedded within the Greek culture from the Homeric myths and the other aspects of mythology that were familiar with from the Greek world. Those were carried into the philosophies of the time through this idea that the elements which make up everything that we see around us are not themselves the source of what happens, but that there is an external force that acts on the elements to cause things to happen. Cicero said it this way in his academica quote, and since the force that we have called quality moves in this manner, and since it vibrates to and fro, they think that the whole of matter also is of itself in a state of complete change throughout and is made into things which they term qualified out of which in the concrete whole of substance a continuum united with its parts has been produced. One world outside of which there is no portion of matter and no body, while all the things that are in the world are parts of it held together by a sentient being in which perfect reason is imminent and which is immutable and eternal since nothing stronger exists to cause it to perish. And this force they say is the soul of the world and is also perfect intelligence and wisdom, which is entitled God and is a sort of providence knowing the things that fall within its province, governing especially the heavenly bodies and then those things on earth that concern mankind and this force they also sometimes call necessity because nothing can happen otherwise than has been ordained by it under a faded and unchangeable concatenation of everlasting order, although they sometimes also term it fortune because many of its operations are unforeseen and unexpected by us on account of their obscurity and our ignorance of the causes. So that’s sort of a summary of the standard position that all of the other Greeks were holding, including also Democrat, her colitis impedes and Aristotle according to Cicero’s on fate. So again, the philosophical religious consensus of Epicurus time was that there was an overriding force of fate or necessity, we call it today determinism, but whatever word you use to describe it, that there is a force that sweeps us along as if we’re caught in a flood of a river against which we have no ability to fight, that perhaps we could influence our mind’s attitude towards these events. And that seems to be the direction that the stoics went in, in thinking that we have some control over our ascent, the way we deal with and think about these things that happen to us. But the general overriding point of all of this is that under the standard philosophical positions, God necessity controls what is going to happen and we are not in control over our lives. Epicurus, on the other hand, rejected that along with the whole framework of the nature of the universe and that rejection came through epicurus adoption and then modification of the atomic theory from ISTs and Lucas. While ISTs and Lucas had been adamants, they had also been determinists taking the position that the atoms move mechanically and that there is no way to break out of the mechanical back and forth type of actions of the atoms. One of epic’s most distinctive doctrines is to reject that point of view and say that there is a swerve of the atom which allows at least intelligent beings to break free of this source of necessity. And so epicure says in his letter to Menoras at line 1 33 for indeed who think he was a better man than he who holds reverend opinions concerning the gods and is at all times free from fear of death and has reasoned out the end ordained by nature. He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain. He laughs at destiny whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things as a scum, it is recorded. He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity and some by chance and some are within our control for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master and to it are naturally attached praise and blame. Now, that section I just quoted as a combination of what epicure said versus scum that has been attached to it over the intervening years, but there’s a lot of evidence that this is what Epicurus position was. Some things are caused by necessity but not everything, and that’s really the big distinction that has to be thought about. Those who advocate determinism and necessity in its truest form are taking the position that everything happens by necessity. Epicurus is not taking the position that nothing happens by necessity because he readily admits that some things do happen by necessity, but he also says that some things are not caused by necessity, and here we can begin to deal with a common issue that’s brought up in many of these discussions about necessity. When you go to YouTube, when you go read common discussions, you’ll find that the issue is often framed as all or nothing. Those who advocate determinism are absolutist in taking the position that everything happens by necessity in arguing against the other position. Those determinists will frequently caricature epic’s position as calling it free will as if everything is open to our control. That of course, is not Epicurus position. Everything is not open to our control. We cannot live forever. So therefore death is an example of something that clearly within epicure and philosophy is beyond our ability to control. Epicurus talks in his letter to ISTs that there are many things about the way the universe operates that we’re set in motion from the beginning of when the worlds were first created and that those things do happen mechanically. So in contrasting the epicurean position to the standard determinist position, it’s not an all or nothing proposition in responding to the determinist. Epicurus is not saying I disagree with you. You’re saying that everything happens by necessity. I’m saying that nothing happens by necessity. That is not epicures position. Epicurus is saying you’re wrong determinist in saying that everything happens by necessity because there are in fact some things that do not happen by necessity, and in fact, some things are under our control and some things are purely accidental, but you’re wrong in saying that everything happens of necessity.
Joshua: Yeah. What I connect this to and what I’m thinking of right now at least is you used to go to the mall and there would be this big cylinder, and on the top of it, it was like a dish that funneled into a hole at the bottom and you would put a coin into a track and it would roll down and it would just circle the hole for quite a while, but eventually we know it’s going into that hole, right? When Epicurus, in the letter to ISTs starts talking about the heavenly bodies, their turnings and eclipses and risings and settings and kindred phenomenon to these, we must not think that these are due to any being who controls and ordains or has ordained them and at the same time enjoys perfect bliss together within immortality, nor again must we believe that they, which are but fire agglomerated in a mass possess blessedness and voluntarily take upon themselves these movements. And then he goes into his discussion of the gods and then he concludes this way. He says, therefore, we must believe that it is due to the original inclusion of matter in such conglomeration during the birth process of the world that this law of regular succession is also brought about. When I think back to those gravity, well coin donation machines, we can say that things like that happen in nature because they’re following a few basic laws of physics. What we don’t have and what we shouldn’t make is an analogy to human life and say that just like the coin and the gravity, well, human life unbeknownst to us follows the same kind of course we’re just going around in circles, not realizing that we are ultimately faded to arrive at a specific place like the coin falling into the hole. That would be a mistaken view of human life. I think Epicurus is a very careful thinker on this point when he says something’s happened by chance, something’s by necessity and something’s happened out of our own free will. You can describe it to the swerve, the clean Aman of the atoms as lure just does, but however it comes about, there is a distinction, and we should not erase the distinction between mere mass in nature, the atoms themselves and their movements. We should not erase the distinction between the movements and the behavior of the atoms and of the compound bodies that are made of atoms in response to gravity, inertia, friction, and so forth. We should not erase the distinction between that and human life. Human life for Epicurus was not subjected to fate or free destination or determinism in the same way that some aspects of nature are merely mechanical.
Cassius: Yeah, so where we are currently in our discussion is that Epicurus makes clear in his letter to menoras, some things happen by chance. Some things happen by necessity and some things happen because it is within our control that it does. That is the basic epicure position. Now, there are many arguments in support of why this is the case, and that’s what we’ll go through next as we proceed in this discussion. First of all, as everyone knows, epic hears hell that the universe has no supernatural gods over it. The supernatural God hypothesis, of course being the primary way in which those who believe in religion and supernatural things maintain that necessity takes place, that it’s all been put in motion because of the actions of the Gods Epicurus, and this letter to Ticus said that certainly a perfect being who’s enjoying perfect bliss is not going to be managing the details of how many heroes you have on your head and all the different actions of animals and so forth. That’s not the way a perfect being is going to spend Its time. He made the same statement to ally that you don’t ascribe the regularity of the heavenly bodies to the gods as that would be burdensome for them to have to attend to. But we should understand that the regularity of the movement of the heavenly bodies should be compared to the way that regular things happen here on earth. You don’t jump to the conclusion that there’s a divine nature that is controlling those things. As Lucious says, nature has no tolerance over her, but always acts of her own will and has no part of any godhead whatsoever. So the first and most obvious response of an epicurean to the idea of fate and necessity would be that there’s no supernatural force that is bringing it into effect. Now, what about the question of whether there are non supernatural forces that bring fate into effect, and that’s where we have to go back and deal with Democrat and the epicurean criticism of democracy’s position because even though Democrats and Lucci had been adamants, they had also been determinants. Before we get to the explanation of the swerve, which Epicurus deduced in order to deal with Democrats, there’s an interesting argument that is also preserved in Lucious that David Sudley talks about in an article that’s forming the basis of much of our discussion, which is called Epicures, refutation of determinism, and Dr. Sedley points out that it would of course be farfetched to give Epicurus much credit for anticipating 20th century quantum physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of things that go along with that. But on the other hand, he deserves more admiration than he usually receives for arriving at the possibility of physical determinism within Aism on purely operatory grounds during the long reign of Newtonian physics. Only one thinker CS Pierce had the wisdom to point out that its overwhelming predictive success of Aism did not and indeed never could rule out the existence of in determinism at a level below the range of the most accurate measuring instruments. Epicurus insight was a comparably bold one when he reasoned in defense of the swerve that no amount of observation of falling objects trajectories could establish that they were perfectly rectilinear to any degree of accuracy. Now, that’s contained in re’s book two around line 2 46, but the point is this, even when we think about the billiard ball model, what we’re talking about is that we observe with our eyes the movement of the billiard balls on the table and how they knock against each other and move off in different lines and so forth, and how we think that when we drop something from a height, it’s going to fall straight to the earth. The point is that our eyes are not so accurate that they can really be able to eliminate the possibility that there is some swerving or non perfectly linear motion involved, and either they’ll build your balls or any other example that you want to come up with. You can say, I observe every time I drop something. It drops straight to the ground, absent wind or some other factor from the outside, but your eyes are not accurate enough to really be sure that what is happening is that they’re falling straight to the ground. Lucius’s discussion of the swerve makes clear that the swerve is a very minor motion at no fixed time and no fixed place, and a very minor motion is not something that your eyes are going to be able to detect. Now, the observation that our eyes can’t detect whether there is a swerve or not is not a proof of the swerve, but it’s a proof that those whoe, the swerve does not exist, are not standing on firm ground simply by saying, well, I don’t see a swerve. Let me again state that our discussion from here will be based significantly on points that Dr. Sedley has made in his article. It’s very interesting to follow Dr. S’s argument on this point because Dr. Sedley does not believe that the swerve was Epicurious, his primary reason for rejecting the claims of determinism. As we know, of course, from the letter to Menoras, the letter to Menoras says nothing about the swerve or the reason for the rejection, even while it firmly rejects necessity. Dr. S’s contention is that the swerve was actually developed later and that Epicurus primary arguments against determinism are not because of the physical existence of the swerve, but for other reasons that we’ll be developing. As we go forward in this discussion and as we compare those other arguments to what we also know from the swerve, I think we’ll begin to get a deeper understanding of how all of Epic’s arguments come together. We’ll reserve the remainder of that argument for our next episode as we conclude next week our discussion of this aspect of determinism. But for today, let’s just summarize where we are so far. By emphasizing that this is an extremely important issue for Epicurus, it mirrors epicurus rejection of skepticism, but the contention of other philosophers and the contention of religions that God necessitates everything that happens or even that atoms alone necessitate everything that happens is something that would pose an insurmountable obstacle towards your taking action to live happily if in fact it were true. It’s therefore necessary to have confidence that it’s not true. An epicurus developed a series of arguments that allow anybody who’s concerned about this issue of necessity to have a reasonable and reasoned argument about why they can and should in fact act to take control of their own experiences, to take control of their lives and act to live happily and not just be swept along by the floods of life. So what we’ve discussed today again is why does this question of fate, necessity, determinism matter? We’ve pointed out also today that it was deeply embedded in the religion, the philosophy, the mythology of the Greek and Roman world. We’ve also pointed out today that Epicurus rejected it, that he held that not everything is controlled by necessity. What we still have to do is point out the details of additional arguments that Epicurus raised to support his contention that some things are not controlled by necessity. We’re aware of the swerve, but there are other aspects and other arguments in addition to simply the existence of the swerve that need to be discussed. But before we close, is there anything else that makes sense to talk about today on what we’ve discussed so far?
Joshua: So today we’ve dealt with one aspect of the problem of determinism, which is this idea of a mechanistically determinist, billiard ball universe was the phrase you used Cassius. We’re going to have to find a way also to deal with modern ideas surrounding this issue in part because nobody ever thinks, well, I was trying to go to the grocery store this morning, but due to a series of blows of atoms on my car, I ended up at the McDonald’s drive through instead. Right? Nobody, seriously, I don’t think thinks that happens. Modern theories of determinism are far more sinuous, aren’t they? They’re far more difficult to get a handle on, and because they’re more difficult to get a handle on, they’re also more difficult, I think to refute. David Sidley’s article does a very good job of dealing with the problems of determinism that epicure is partially solving with the swerve and partially solving with other arguments, and you’ve introduced a few of them, but these modern theories of determinism I find are more challenging, and so as we go into next week, we’re going to have to find some way to deal with that, and that’s going to require more reading on my part I think. So it’s a call to action next week as we discuss this physical determinism to also get into other aspects of the question,
Cassius: Joshua, that’s a great way of describing the problem, and I think it really encapsulates where Dr. Sudley is coming from with his position and why. Interestingly enough, for those of us who’ve read a lot of lucious and followed the swerve as so much a part of Epicurean philosophy, why I think Dr. Sly is right, that the swerve may have been almost an afterthought for Epicurus in regard to determinism that the more interesting, the more far reaching arguments are not a matter of thinking about how atoms move because as Dr. Sudley points out, you really cannot explain by thinking that the atoms swerve how in fact that really brings about any amount of free will. There’s always going to be a disconnect between attempting to describe the mechanisms in detail with the final result, which is what we often call the emergent property of the way the atoms are moving. There’s truths at both levels as Dr. Sedley points out, and Epicurus it seems was not primarily focused on the swerve as the explanation for his position. That’s where we’re going to be going next week because there are logical and reasonable inconsistencies with the determinist position that are more persuasive in dealing with these arguments than the issue of the swerve. Epicare philosophy is a optimistic perspective on life in which you can control to a large degree what is going to happen to you. You do have influences. You’re not a total play thing of the universe. Neither of mechanistic forces, nor of supernatural gods, and Epicurus provides a way of understanding this at a practical level that allows you to go out and even if you’ve not read every philosopher who’s ever talked about determinism, to see that there is a very practical perspective that you can adopt and then follow to make decisions that influence the course of your life and lead you to live more happily than you would if you just decided to be tossed along the riverbed by the own rushing waters. That’s what we’ll deal with next week. In the meantime, drop by the form and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussion this week or anything else in regard to Epicurus. As always, thanks for your time. We’ll be back soon. See you then. Bye.