Episode 262 - He Who Says "Nothing Can Be Known" Knows Nothing
Date: 12/29/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4200-episode-262-he-who-says-nothing-can-be-known-knows-nothing/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua explore Epicurus’s rejection of radical (capital-S) Skepticism and his insistence that some things can be known with confidence — that the “wise man will dogmatize.” The episode traces the origins of ancient skepticism through Heraclitus (flux), Parmenides (static being and illusory senses), and above all Pyrrho of Elis — whose biography in Diogenes Laertius Book Nine is examined in detail, including Pyrrho’s connection to Nausiphanes of Teos (a successor of Pyrrho who became Epicurus’s teacher and whom Epicurus nicknamed “the jellyfish”). Dr. David Sedley’s account of “reductionist Atomism” — Democritus’s tendency to doubt phenomenal truths since they reduce to mere atomic configurations — is contrasted with Epicurus’s non-reductionist alternative: truths at the phenomenal level (including pleasure as a direct datum of experience) are real and not undermined by atomic-level descriptions. Lucretius Book Four (lines 418, 469, 478, 500) and Principal Doctrines 23–25 are cited as the Epicurean responses to radical skepticism. The self-refuting nature of the position “nothing can be known” is highlighted via Lucretius, Sedley, and Diogenes of Oenoanda Fragment 5. Lucian of Samosata’s Alexander the Oracle Monger illustrates how Epicurean firmness of mind — as contrasted with credulity — uncovers religious fraud. The Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams (August 15, 1820) and Joseph Conrad’s Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line frame the continuing relevance of Epicurean epistemological confidence. DeWitt’s concept of skepticism-as-paralysis closes the discussion.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 262 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 texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we’re continuing our review of key doctrines of Epicurus, and today we’re going to focus our attention on one that we’ve summarized as: “He who says nothing can be known, knows nothing.” This is an issue that is sort of a companion to the issue of determinism, and over the years there is nothing as controversial in the discussion of Epicurus as the twin issues of determinism and dogmatism.
Dogmatism is a word that nobody likes, and to paraphrase Nathan Hale: people have the attitude, “give me liberty or give me death, but whatever you do, don’t call me a dogmatist.” The word evokes pictures of narrow-mindedness and failure to be reasonable that are rightly condemned. So why in Diogenes Laertius, Book Ten, in his biography of Epicurus, does he report that Epicurus said “the wise man will give definite teaching and not doubt” — that is sometimes translated as saying that the wise man will dogmatize?
This characterization of Epicurus was even used as sort of a biting joke by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods, Book One, Section 8, where Cicero introduces his Epicurean speaker Velleius by saying: “Hereupon Velleius began, in the confident manner — I need not say — that is customary with Epicureans, afraid of nothing so much as lest he should appear to have doubts about anything. One would have supposed he had just come down from the assembly of the gods in the intermundane spaces of Epicurus.”
So as DeWitt says, the tag of being a dogmatist is a claim that Epicurus made that was not denied to him by his enemies, because the position that you’re able to know something with certainty is about as much anathema to most philosophers as anything can possibly be. The Academic Skeptics, who took over the Platonic Academy and who were popular at the time of Cicero, looked aghast at anybody who would take a position that they’ve resolved any question at all.
So what we’re going to be discussing today is: what is skepticism? There’s a wide variety of ways in which that word is used — some of which are completely endorsed by Epicurus, some of which are completely condemned by Epicurus. And so in order to understand Epicurus’s position, we have to look behind a flat interpretation of a word like “skepticism,” “determinism,” or “reductionism” and look behind it to see what the issue really is that these words are attempting to address.
As Epicurus said in regard to determinism, some things are determined in this world mechanically from the time when a world is formed — but other things are not. Epicurus is himself renowned for being skeptical in a generic sense of the claims of supernatural religion, and yet he denounces Skepticism as a philosophy. Epicurus was influenced by Democritus possibly as much as any other philosopher influenced him, and yet Democritus was reputed to have endorsed a reductionist view of nature which Epicurus rejected. So to some extent Epicurus can be classified as a reductionist himself, and yet Epicurus condemns reductionism when it leads to certain of the conclusions that Democritus reached.
This is an issue that isn’t discussed often at all in most modern discussions of Epicurus that focus on his ethics of pleasure and pain and natural and necessary desires and so forth. And so you have to exert some effort to even find where the issue is discussed. People who pick up Lucretius’s poem as a way to learn Epicurean philosophy often don’t get far enough to Book Four of the poem, where Lucretius writes about this issue at length. But Lucretius does mention it in Book One of his poem, where he says at line 418: “For that body exists is declared by feeling, which all share alike, and unless faith in this feeling be firmly grounded at once and prevail, there will be nothing to which we can make appeal about things hidden, so as to prove anything by the reasoning of the mind.”
Now, as is much of our discussion about dogmatism and skepticism, what’s wrapped up behind that question is that of trusting the senses and whether the senses are able to bring to us anything that we can be confident about or not. But as Lucretius is pointing out in what I just quoted, unless you have confidence in your senses about the things that are right in front of you — that you can see and touch and feel three feet away from you — then there’s nothing to which you can appeal to start discussing or come to any conclusions at all about things that are hidden and things that have to be deduced through logical reasoning from the things that you see. So there’s a hierarchy here in which you have to start out with some kind of confidence in your senses before you can speculate about anything at all that is beyond the senses, and these are issues that people often overlook and they have to be brought out in order to understand the significance of them.
In Book Four, Lucretius goes into much more detail about this. Now it’s buried after a discussion of images — which are called “idols” — and people will today recoil at the idea of even discussing the possibility that Epicurus had anything significant to say about his theory of images. But what Lucretius is doing in Book Four, in discussing images, is showing how they relate to the issue of illusions — those things that we think we see, such as the bent oar in the water or other illusions that cause us to doubt our senses. He brings up a long list of illusions and tells us how they are the creation of the mind in coming to false opinion, rather than an error in the senses themselves. And once he goes through that list of illusions, he goes into this at line 469, from which we get the title of our episode today:
“Again, if anyone thinks that nothing is known, he knows not whether that can be known either, since he admits that he knows nothing. Against him then I will refrain from joining issue who plants himself with his head in the place of his feet. And yet were I to grant that he knows this too, yet I would ask this one question: since he has never before seen any truth in things, whence does he know what knowing is and not knowing each in turn? What thing has begotten the concept of the true and the false? What thing has proved that the doubtful differs from the certain?”
Then Lucretius at line 478 goes into the issue of how the senses cannot be second-guessed: there is nothing that can be found with greater surety than the senses themselves. And then at line 500, Lucretius says:
“And if reason is unable to unravel the cause why those things which close at hand are square are seen round from a distance, still it is better through lack of reasoning to be at fault in accounting for the cause of either shape, rather than to let things clearly seen slip abroad from your grasp, and to assail the grounds of belief, and to pluck up the whole foundation on which life and existence rest. For not only would all reasoning fall away — life itself too would collapse straight away — unless you choose to trust the senses and avoid headlong spots and all other things of this kind which must be shunned, and to make for what is opposite to these. Know then that all of this is but an empty store of words which has been drawn up arrayed against the senses.”
“Again, just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry and if the square is wrong and out of straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked — all awry, bulging, leaning forwards or backwards and out of harmony, so that some parts seem already to long to fall or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements. Even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which springs from false senses.”
That last part is an emphasis that if your senses really are false, then all of your reasoning based on falsity is also going to be defective and eventually collapse. Now we’re going to be returning to this issue in another of our podcasts when we focus on this point about all sensations being true, but the basic point and significance of both of them are the same: that you have to have confidence in your conclusions if you’re going to be successful in implementing them and living a happy life as a result of it. Life itself will collapse straight away unless you have confidence in the senses and confidence in our ability to take the information from the senses and come to a clear conclusion about at least part of what these senses indicate to us.
DeWitt says: “In the succession of philosophers, the place of Epicurus is immediately after Plato and Pyrrho, the skeptic. Platonism and skepticism were among his chief abominations. The false opinion is to think that Epicurus was opposed to Stoicism. The traditional order of mention — Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic — is the exact reverse of the chronological succession. The philosophy of Epicurus was an immediate reaction to the skepticism of Pyrrho, and it was offered to the public as a fully developed system before Zeno the founder of Stoicism even began to teach.”
So before we go further, let me summarize: what we’re discussing in this podcast does not mean that Epicurus took a position that you should not have a skeptical attitude about certain things, or that Epicurus took the position that nothing is determined in life, or that Epicurus took the position that many aspects of our world cannot be reduced to an understanding of the atoms and void of which they’re composed. Instead, what Epicurus is doing — and what we will hope to go into today — is that these words, which we often use casually, also have a very clear philosophical meaning, related in time and related in history to the schools which made them famous. And when you take them to their logical conclusions, there are implications to those conclusions that can be very damaging to your life from an Epicurean point of view.
Joshua: I think we can develop what you’ve been saying, Cassius, by looking at the origin of skepticism in the ancient world and how it arises in different philosophers — and then coming back to Epicurus and taking up the question you posed there, which is: how can we be skeptical in the modern sense of specious claims and so forth, while not throwing out knowledge entirely?
Cassius: Yes, that’s the point.
Joshua: And of course where we’re going to go first is right back into this question of motion. We have two philosophical positions on motion and they both relate to knowledge. We have first Heraclitus, who lived around the sixth century BC from the city of Ephesus, and of course he’s known principally for his famous quote about rivers: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” You can’t step into the same river twice from Heraclitus’s point of view because everything in nature is in flux. And so even if the senses are reliable — and we’re going to get to many philosophies that don’t consider the senses to be reliable — even if the senses are reliable as to what you see, what you see is changing so quickly that the information you get from the senses can’t be relied upon to predict what’s going to happen next, or when you return to a given scene, everything will have changed so much that whatever knowledge you think you gathered from your senses is pretty useless.
And so what that leads us to is a distinction in the ancient Greek mind between the state of becoming — as we see in Heraclitus — and the state of being. And that’s where Parmenides and Zeno of Elea come in. Parmenides lived in the late sixth century, so perhaps a little bit after Heraclitus, and he takes sort of the opposite view. If Heraclitus thought that everything was in flux and that this was a challenge to our notions about knowledge, Parmenides says that actually the world of the senses is so illusory that even though nothing changes, we perceive change because the senses are not providing accurate information. And so everything that exists, for Parmenides, is in the state of static being, and for Heraclitus it’s in the state of becoming — it’s always bubbling up, there’s always more, there’s always change. And for Parmenides, it’s a finished product and there is no change, there is no development, and there is no knowledge that can be derived from the senses because the senses perceive change where there is none.
I don’t want to dwell too long on that, but I think it’s important to see where this stuff comes from. In the ancient world, coming down the line, we have much closer to the life of Epicurus — in fact almost contiguous with the life of Epicurus — Pyrrho, who was born around 360 and died around 270. And Diogenes Laertius has recorded the life of Pyrrho in Book Nine of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. This is the same book from which we get the structured biography of Epicurus as well as the extant letters — all recorded by Diogenes Laertius in Book Ten. In Book Nine we have a number of philosophers, and one of them is Pyrrho and his successors, Timon and others. And the good thing about this eleventh chapter of Book Nine of Diogenes Laertius — this chapter on Pyrrho — is that Epicurus does get mentioned four times, and so there is some ground to compare the thinking of the two philosophers.
Diogenes Laertius starts his biography of Pyrrho this way. He says: “Pyrrho of Elis, the son of Pleistarchus, as Diocles relates, according to Apollodorus in his Chronology, was first a painter. Then he studied under Bryson son of Stilpo. Afterwards he joined Anaxarchus, whom he accompanied on his travels everywhere, so that he even foregathered with the Indian Gymnosophists and with the Magi. This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy — to quote Ascanius of Abdera — taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgment. He denied that anything was honorable or dishonorable, just or unjust. And so universally he held that there is nothing really existent but custom and convention govern human action, for no single thing is in itself any more this than that.”
He goes on to say later in the text that Pyrrho’s pupils included Timon of Phlius and also Nausiphanes of Teos, said by some to have been a teacher to Epicurus. So this is the connection between Epicurus and Pyrrho. Nausiphanes was a teacher in Colophon near the city of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, and this is the first place Epicurus goes when he leaves the island of Samos, the island of his birth. He goes to study under Nausiphanes, and Nausiphanes had himself been a student of Pyrrho. About that relationship, Diogenes records this: “On being discovered once talking to himself, he answered when asked the reason that he was training to be good in debate. He was looked down upon by no one, for he could both discourse at length and also sustain a cross-examination — so that even Nausiphanes when a young man was captivated by him. At all events, he used to say that we should follow Pyrrho in disposition but himself in doctrine. And he would often remark that Epicurus, greatly admiring Pyrrho’s way of life, regularly asked him for information about Pyrrho. And he was so respected by his native city that they made him high priest, and on his account they voted that all philosophers should be exempt from taxation.”
And then to get into the philosophy again with the connection to Epicurus, we have this genuine quote: “There is nothing good or bad by nature, for if there is anything good or bad by nature, it must be good or bad for all persons alike, just as snow is cold to all. But there is no good or bad which is such to all persons in common. Therefore there is no such thing as good or bad by nature. For either all that is thought good by anyone, whatever it may be, must be called good, or not all. Certainly all cannot be so called, since one and the same thing is thought good by one person and bad by another. For instance, Epicurus thought pleasure good and Antisthenes thought it bad. Thus on our supposition it will follow that the same thing is both good and bad. But if we say that not all that anyone thinks good is good, we shall have to judge the different opinions, and this is impossible because of the equal validity of opposing arguments. Therefore the good by nature is unknowable.”
And then finally we have a word on his successor Timon of Phlius, and again we have a connection to Epicurus. Diogenes Laertius starts this way: “Again, the dogmatic philosophers maintain that the Skeptics do away with life itself in that they reject all that life consists in. The others say this is false, for they do not deny that we see — they only say that they do not know how we see. We admit the apparent fact, say they, without admitting that it really is what it appears to be. We also perceive that fire burns; as to whether it is its nature to burn, we suspend our judgment. We see that a man moves and that he perishes; how it happens we do not know. We merely object to accepting the unknown substance behind phenomena. When we say a picture has projections, we are describing what is apparent; but if we say that it has no projections, we are then speaking not of what is apparent but of something else.”
“This is what makes Timon say in his Python that he has not gone outside what is customary. And again in his Conceits he says: ‘But the apparent is omnipotent wherever it goes.’ And in his work On the Senses he says: ‘I do not lay it down that honey is sweet, but I admit that it appears to be so.’ Therefore the apparent is the Skeptic’s criterion, as indeed Timon says. And so does Epicurus. Democritus, however, denied that any apparent fact could be a criterion. Indeed, he denied the very existence of the apparent.”
Okay, that goes a little deeper into the weeds on Pyrrhonism than maybe we want to do today — but as we can see, Epicurus is regularly engaging with this school. Certainly when these Skeptics say “I do not lay it down that honey is sweet, but I admit that it appears to be so,” we can connect that back with something that Torquatus says in Cicero’s On Ends, when Torquatus is talking about how we know that pleasure is the good and he says: “We know that pleasure is the good in the same way that we know that fire is hot, honey is sweet, and snow is white — none of which are we bound to support by elaborate argument.”
And yet, given this context in the conflict between dogmatism and skepticism, we do have a passage in Lucian of Samosata’s Alexander the Oracle Monger — or Alexander the False Prophet. Lucian is writing to his friend Celsus and he says: “And at this point, my dear Celsus, we may, if we will be candid, make some allowance for these Paphlagonians and Pontics, the poor, uneducated fat-heads. As Alexander calls them, they might well be taken in when they handled the serpent — this fake papier-mâché serpent head that was speaking through a series of tubes with a priest on the other end of it out of sight. He says that handling the serpent was a privilege conceded to all who chose, and they saw in that dim light its head with the mouth that opened and shut. It was an occasion for a Democritus, nay for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus — a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight — one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that though this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.”
So given Epicurus’s stance on Skepticism, it may be surprising to see Lucian of Samosata hold up Democritus, Epicurus, and Metrodorus and say that these guys would have seen through Alexander the Oracle Monger’s lies because their minds are steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight. This is the difference that we’re trying to draw, Cassius, isn’t it — between capital-S Skepticism, the Skepticism of Pyrrho and Heraclitus and to some extent Socrates even, and lowercase-s skepticism: the attitude that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that claims that appear to violate what we do know about nature need to be approached with a critical eye.
And I think to me that’s the main difference between these two forms of skepticism. The Pyrrhonian version of Skepticism says that knowledge is impossible and that we can only deal with what appears to be the case. But for Epicurus, his dogmatism — his confidence in what he knows about the atoms and the void, about pleasure as the good — this confidence in certain areas allows him to pronounce on claims for which there is no evidence, precisely because those claims violate what we know to be the case about nature. And so it’s that version of skepticism I think that we’re going to hold to with Epicurus and say: this works, we’re not going to throw this out with Heraclitus and Parmenides and Zeno of Elea and all the rest. This works and we’re going to keep it.
Cassius: Joshua, as you were going through that analysis, the only thing I heard you say that I would draw a distinction with would be that I think you said that you had gone further into the detail of Pyrrhonism than we might want to go — and that’s the only point I would differ on, because while I want to go into even more detail, we just don’t have time in this episode to go as far into this as we’d like. Your review of Book Nine of Diogenes Laertius really brings out these issues that we’re talking about, and they highlight what the problem was that Epicurus put his finger on.
Being aware how little time we have to dig into all of the details, I don’t want to go any further without citing another excerpt from David Sedley that I’ve been citing an awful lot recently, but which bears directly on this point. It’s from his article “Epicurus’s Refutation of Determinism,” and in that article Dr. Sedley develops an argument that he had first started in his book on the Hellenistic philosophers.
Dr. Sedley says: “In confirmation of this, we can return to the close and apparently conscious parallelism between Epicurus’s treatment of determinism and skepticism. The skeptics refuted in Lucretius’s Book Four must be or prominently include those fourth-century figures like Metrodorus of Chios and Anaxarchus and even Epicurus’s own reviled teacher Nausiphanes, who had played up the skeptical side of Democritus’s thought and against whom Epicurus was eager to marshal the positive empiricist arguments which Democritus had also bequeathed. This skepticism was the result of what I shall call reductionist Atomism, because phenomenal objects and properties seemed to reduce to mere configurations of atoms and void. Democritus was inclined to suppose that the atoms and void were real, while the phenomenal objects and properties were no more than arbitrary constructions placed upon them by human cognitive organs. In his more extreme moods, Democritus was even inclined to doubt the power of human judgment since judgment was itself no more than a realignment of atoms in the mind.”
“Epicurus’s response to this is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of his thought. It was to reject reductionist Atomism. Almost uniquely among Greek philosophers, Epicurus arrived at what is nowadays the unreflective assumption of almost anyone with a smattering of science — that there are truths at the microscopic level of elementary particles and further, very different truths at the phenomenal level; that the former must be capable of explaining the latter, but that neither level of description has a monopoly of truth. The truth that sugar is sweet is not straightforwardly reducible to the truth that sugar has such and such a molecular structure, even though the latter truth may be required in order to explain the former. By establishing that cognitive skepticism, the direct outcome of reductionist Atomism, is self-refuting and untenable in practice, Epicurus justifies his non-reductionist alternative, according to which sensations are true and there are therefore bona fide truths at the phenomenal level accessible through them.”
“The same will apply to the pathē, which Epicurus also held to be infallible. Pleasure, for example, is a direct datum of experience. It is commonly assumed that Epicurus must have equated pleasure with such and such a kind of movement of soul atoms, but though he will have taken pleasure to have some explanation at the atomic level, I know of no evidence that he any more than most moral philosophers or psychologists would have held that an adequate analysis of pleasure could be found at that level. Physics are strikingly absent from Epicurus’s ethical writings, and it’s curious that interpreters are so much readier to import them there than they are when it comes to the moral philosophy of Plato or Aristotle.”
So in that excerpt, Dr. Sedley has covered several of the things that you mentioned, Joshua, in talking about Nausiphanes — who, if I recall correctly, Diogenes Laertius says Epicurus gave the title of “jellyfish,” probably indicating his spinelessness, which would come from having a radically skeptical position. Now while Dr. Sedley points out that in this case with Democritus the skepticism was a result of reductionist Atomism, there are many different paths to skepticism, and while Epicurus condemned Atomism’s skeptical conclusions, he certainly endorsed Democritus’s view of atoms and void and the atomic theory in general. Which is an example of what we’re talking about — what we have to do is separate out the correct aspects of reductionism or skepticism toward certain things from the incorrect conclusions that some people will draw from those, when they forget the point that Epicurus is making about the phenomenal level: that the level at which we live also has its own truths that are not contradicted by truths at the atomic level.
You mentioned earlier, Joshua, that the Eleatics concluded that motion is impossible even though we clearly see it with our eyes in front of us — we feel it, we touch it, we sense it in many ways — that motion is possible. But they took their Skepticism to the point of concluding that something obvious to us, like motion, is an illusion. Other philosophers did the same thing with time — they considered time to be an illusion. Socrates believed that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and therefore all of the rest of what he thought was the case was merely probable.
The word “probable” becomes developed by the time of Cicero to be the basis of Academic Skepticism: “We’re not saying that motion is impossible. We’re not saying time is impossible. We’re not saying that it’s impossible that if you jump off the edge of a canyon you’re going to fall to your death. We’re simply saying that you can’t know that to be certain. We’re saying it’s merely probable that those things are what’s going to result from jumping off a cliff.” And by the time you get to that kind of a position, somebody of a practical mindset like Epicurus is going to conclude that you’ve crossed over any red line of reasonableness that we could be talking about and that you’ve gone off the edge yourself into nonsense.
When Dr. Sedley says “in his more extreme moods, Democritus was even inclined to doubt the power of human judgment since judgment itself is nothing more than the movement of atoms” — that’s an example of the type of damaging conclusion you can come to if you are a capital-S Skeptic.
Now as we discuss these issues, we often hear the objection from people who consider themselves to be skeptics that nobody is so extreme as to take that kind of a position — that in attacking Skepticism you’re basically attacking a straw man because nobody is really a capital-S Skeptic and takes the positions that you’re characterizing as so damaging. But as we see from Diogenes Laertius, there was — and to some extent still is — a school of thought that says that knowledge is impossible. That’s what I was referring to earlier when I said, “call me anything in the world but don’t call me a dogmatist.” It’s the attitude that so many people have, and it’s because of this incessant drumbeat by Academic Skeptics and others that the claim of knowledge is inherently suspect — that everyone who’s confident of anything is, as Cicero accused Velleius of being, concerned about nothing more than being in doubt about anything — and that even in talking about religion, an Epicurean is going to sound like they just came down from the intermundia. They sound so certain about things not because what they’re saying is something that is beyond where they should be, but because taking a certain position about anything is inherently wrong from the Skeptical point of view.
The more you talk about it, the more it’s possible to see that this is not a minor issue. It’s not something that’s splitting hairs. It’s extremely significant to anyone who is seriously committed to following their philosophy to its logical conclusions. So even today, this issue of skepticism still matters, because it’s of critical importance to take a position on whether knowledge of any kind is possible. Again, like determinism — as Epicureans, we don’t have to prove that everything is random or that nothing is determined. All we have to prove is that some things are not determined. And in the issue of skepticism, we’re not trying to say by any means that an Epicurean knows everything about everything. But some things about some issues are in fact knowable.
Epicurus’s disposition is a powerful antidote to nihilism and many other psychological issues that people today get when they become totally confused about everything, totally confused about finding anything firm at all. If you doubt everything, then you’re never going to make any progress towards any goals of any kind. And while not all doubt is bad — doubt is a very good thing in many instances — there certainly are many types of doubt that are in fact painful. And if you’re analyzing things from an Epicurean point of view, putting everything into a pleasure-pain category, doubt about whether you’re going to be burning in hell for the rest of eternity is something that can be very painful and something to be dealt with — and not just put into the category of “things I don’t know and I’ll never know, but I have to keep in mind as a possibility.” Saying that you can dismiss certain things like that with confidence and not entertain them as even a possibility — that’s what Epicurus is doing.
Presumptions about this issue are so deeply embedded in our culture. We often hear people say things like “never say never,” or “dogmatism is always wrong.” Even Cicero himself became identified with the position that there are times that justice has to be viewed in such a wide sense that things that appear to be unjust have to be engaged in nevertheless. So what we have to have is an understanding of how and when to be sure of something, so that we can know when we can be confident about our knowledge and when we should wait before being sure of our conclusions.
Now Joshua, one of the things that you pointed out from quoting Pyrrho is this argument that because people disagree with each other about the most fundamental questions, the fact that there is disagreement shows that knowledge is impossible. I believe you were quoting Pyrrho to say that nothing is really good or evil because since people disagree on what is good or evil, that in itself is proof that good and evil do not exist. I thought that was a particularly good illustration of the radical conclusions that you can come to from that kind of a skeptical position.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s right. It’s often been said that in his journeys he came as far as possibly India, and he encountered the Gymnosophists — what we might call yogis — and noticing the way in which their view of things was totally different from the way the Greeks viewed things, he emerges with the conclusion that everybody just has their opinions. And for the Greeks to say “we are right about this, this, and this, or such and such a thing is true” — that would be going too far.
Cassius: Yeah. Cicero uses a very similar argument — if I recall correctly — in our discussion of On the Nature of the Gods, near the beginning of that book. I believe one of the things Cicero says to introduce the discussion is that he’s talking to the reader and saying that one of the things you’re going to hear is that people have so many different opinions about religion, that what you’re going to conclude from all these different opinions is that the best position to take is that nobody knows anything about it at all. I don’t have that exact quote in front of me, but that’s the same argument — that simply by looking at the fact that people disagree about things, not only should you be cautious about endorsing one side or the other, you should take the position that it’s simply impossible to know. You should throw up your hands and walk away from the question to the extent that you can.
Unfortunately, you can’t always walk away from the issue at hand. Many of these questions are going to come into direct conflict with the way you choose to live your life — such as questions of supernatural religion. You can try your best to avoid them and sometimes you can be successful for a while. But in the world we live in, many questions like this — the issue of life after death, the issue of supernatural religion — stand out among them as issues that are going to have a direct impact on your life. Regardless of whether you’re willing to come to a firm conclusion about them yourself or not, you can drift along and accept the opinions of others and your peers instead of having your own analysis. But I think Epicurus would tell us — and most of us would agree — that it’s far better for you to examine the issues for yourself so that you can direct your life rather than letting others do it.
In the case of Cicero himself and the Roman way of life that he valued so highly: what eventually destroyed that Roman way of life was not an invading army of soldiers, but first of all the thorough destruction of Rome’s cultural confidence by an opposing religious force which overcame the confidence that the Romans previously had — precisely because the Romans had not developed the kind of firmness of mind against the claims of supernatural religion that the Epicureans were teaching. Had the Romans adopted the attitude that Lucian of Samosata described in Epicurus or Metrodorus — as having minds steeled against superstition so as to be confident that whatever was the claim, there was a natural explanation for the phenomena — then the entire history of the world might have been very different. Judeo-Christianity would never have been able to undermine Greco-Roman civilization had the Greeks and the Romans fully adopted the views of Epicurus on these issues.
Now in regard to this question about disagreements that arise from differences of opinion: in Chapter Eight of Epicurus and His Philosophy, Norman DeWitt talks about Lucretius’s commentary on how the senses cannot be refuted, and he quotes Lucretius this way: “Nor does anything exist that can refute the sensations; for neither can a sensation in a given class refute the sensation in the same class because they are of equal validity, nor can a sensation in a given class refute the sensation in another class because they are not criteria of the same phenomenon.” Now here’s the point. The first limb of this statement has reference to the objection urged by the Skeptics that one drinker reports the wine to be sour and another sweet, or one bather reports the water to be warm and another cold. The answer of Epicurus was sensible: the difference was in the observer. Neither does the one judgment cancel the other, because each has validity for the observer. Nor does the contradiction prove the fallibility of sensation, because the sensation in each instance performs its function as a criterion.
In other words, some people say a particular wine is sweet but others taste it as sour. Some people feel that the water is warm while others feel it to be cold. That difference in perception is a result of the observer, and any issue with the opinion being true or false is a matter of opinion which is formed by the observer. It is not a blanket indictment that the senses are themselves giving us false information, because were it not for the data that the senses were gathering, we would have nothing to even start the analysis with. Differences of opinion derive therefore from differences in the observer’s premises and the observer’s observations, and that’s not to be used to derive the conclusion that the senses themselves are useless — so let’s go to logic and reason alone, separated from the senses. That’s the direction that Plato and the Skeptics ended up going.
This is where the issue comes down to Epicurus’s argument that the contention that knowledge is impossible is self-contradictory. Lucretius, Book Four, line 469: “Again, if anyone thinks that nothing is known, he knows not whether that can be known either, since he admits that he knows nothing.”
David Sedley, in his same article about the refutation of determinism, says: “The Skeptic’s ability to use the words ‘know’ and ‘not know’ significantly presupposes that he possesses the conceptions of true and false, doubtful and certain. Since ‘true’ and ‘certain’ feature in the definition of ‘know,’ this conflicts with his claim to have had no experience of truth and certainty, for without that experience he could not have acquired the preconceptions.”
And again, Dr. Sedley relates that to the issue of necessity, where Epicurus himself in the Vatican Sayings says that he who says that everything happens by necessity cannot complain when somebody denies that — because that too happens by necessity.
This issue of self-contradiction within the argument of Skepticism is key to understanding where Epicurus is coming from. Diogenes of Oenoanda said the same thing in Fragment 5: “Now, Aristotle and those who hold the same peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable because things are continuously 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. And indeed, in no way would the upholders of the view under discussion have been able to say — and this is just what they do say — that at one time this is white and this is black, while at another time neither this is white nor that black, if they had not had previous knowledge of the nature of both white and black.”
Now this argument about self-contradiction, as DeWitt points out, does not tell us the mechanism by which we can really understand the way the senses are operating. But it does tell us that these people who are asserting to us that the senses are totally untrustworthy and that nothing can be known with certainty are not to be believed, because their position is itself nonsense. As Principal Doctrine 23 says: “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.” Principal Doctrines 24 and 25 make the same point.
So opposition to radical Skepticism is clearly a key aspect of Epicurean philosophy that Epicurus thought was extremely important to living happily. In this context, we also have the letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August the 15th, 1820, in which Jefferson described Adams’s letter of May the 12th of that year as: “Its crowd of skepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it and laid it down, read it, and laid it down again and again, and to give rest to my mind I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual: I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself. There are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”
And then Jefferson continues and says: “Rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonism with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind. A single sense may indeed sometimes be deceived, but rarely, and never all our senses together with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities, and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be but of which I have no evidence.”
So we’ll eventually come back to this issue again when we have a separate episode devoted entirely to the question of all sensations being true. But for purposes of introducing the topic and hitting the high points of this issue of skepticism in general, we can just make note of the fact that Epicurus did not stop by rejecting Skepticism and saying that the positions of the radical Skeptics were nonsense. He went further and developed his whole canonical approach to knowledge, which relies on the senses and logical deductions which our minds can properly draw conclusions from when we use the evidence of the senses and follow the methods of reasoning that he lays out.
So as we begin to come to the end of today’s episode: the important point is that while we wish to have a skeptical attitude about things that deserve to have skepticism applied to them, we never want to fall into the trap of capital-S Skepticism to the point where we deny the possibility of all knowledge entirely. It may seem like we’re splitting hairs. It may seem like a word game. But Epicurus put his finger on something that to this very day remains a huge problem in both philosophical and common, ordinary everyday life discussions. Joshua, any closing thoughts for today?
Joshua: Well, I never want to give up an opportunity to recommend people go read Lucian of Samosata’s Alexander the Oracle Monger. And I do have another interesting passage from that relating to the question of how this false oracle was said to have given prophetic responses to people’s questions. And Lucian says: “The prophet would receive the packets with the questions and enter the holy place — by this time the temple was complete and the scene already set. He would learn the god’s mind upon each and return the packets with their seals intact and the answers attached, the god being ready to give a definite answer to any question that might be put.” This is the kind of thing I think that applies to all oracles from the ancient world, including famous ones like the Pythia at Delphi or the oracle of Zeus at Dodona.
He goes on to say: “The trick here was one which would be seen through easily enough by a person of your intelligence, but which to the ordinary person would have the persuasiveness of what is marvelous and incredible. He contrived various methods of undoing the seals, read the questions, answered them as seemed good, and then folded, sealed, and returned them to the great astonishment of the recipients. And then it was: ‘How could he possibly know what I gave him carefully secured under a seal that defies imitation, unless he were a true god with the god’s omniscience?’”
And then we have Lucian going into sort of pulling back the curtain on how this fraudulent aberration took place. And if you gave credence to the myths on which these oracles were founded — as he reports, even the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius himself sent a message to the oracle on the eve of a great battle — if you give credence to these myths, you’re going to fall prey to stuff like this. And Lucian goes into detail here:
“Perhaps you will ask what these contrivances were. Well then, the information may be useful another time. One of them was this: he would heat a needle, melt with it the underpart of the wax, lift the seal off, and after reading, warm the wax once more with the needle, both that below the thread and that which formed the actual seal, and reunite the two without difficulty. Another method employed the substance called cerium. This is a preparation of bitumen, pitch, gum, pounded glass, and mastic. He kneaded the cerium into, heated it, placed it on the seal previously moistened with his own tongue, and so took a mold. This soon hardened. He simply opened, read, replaced the wax and reproduced an excellent imitation of the original seal as from an engraved stone. One more I will give you: adding some gypsum to the glue used in bookbinding, he produced a sort of wax which was applied still wet to the seal and on being taken off solidified at once and provided a matrix harder than horn or even iron. There are plenty of other devices for the purpose to rehearse, which would seem like airing one’s knowledge. Moreover, Celsus, in your excellent pamphlets against the Magi — most useful and instructive reading they are — you have yourself collected enough of them, many more than those I have mentioned.”
So this gives us an interesting insight into what’s going on over here in Asia Minor — the region where Epicurus met many of his friends — in the second century AD, where you have these communities of Epicureans and people who have minds like them, using their knowledge of nature to uncover the charlatanism of these oracles and priests and so forth. And I think this is a really interesting period of time, and I think probably if you’re a Christian today reading this, you might say, “Well, yes, clearly the religions of the ancient world were false, but this says nothing about the truth or falsity of Christianity.” And what I would say to that is that fraud of the same or a similar kind has been used all throughout religious history. Hero of Alexandria was a guy who made machines specifically for use in temples so that the temple doors would swing open on their own, or if you lit a fire on the altar, it would produce a sound or some other effect from inside the temple — so it would seem that the god had directly responded to your sacrifice.
We may not have that today, but what we do have are things like the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, stuff like this — forgeries that can be reproduced and can be discovered. And if this is what people who dedicate themselves to priests fall into as a way of gaining converts and solidifying their own faith, I think it says something about that faith.
And so when Lucian says that it would take an Epicurus or a Metrodorus to uncover the impostor, what he’s saying isn’t actually quite true, because Lucian is none of those things and yet he was able to do it. How was he able to uncover the impostor? By studying Epicurus, by studying these earlier thinkers who had ruled out the supernatural by their study of nature and of death. And Joseph Conrad in his Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line speaks to the same issue. He says: “All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is — marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which, take it any way you like, is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living in their countless multitudes, a desecration of our tenderest memories, an outrage on our dignity.”
And the sense you will get reading Alexander the Oracle Monger is that this is an outrage on your dignity. To be expected to believe these things is an outrage on your dignity. They’re taking you for fools, and it’s because we can be confident in our knowledge that we are able to see through the frauds.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh, with that point is exactly where I wanted to end today’s episode — with a hammering home of the reason this is such an important issue. Many of us are able to spend much of our lives in a relatively calm and intellectual environment discussing issues like this as if it’s something that need not be resolved, that it’s good conversation to be conducted — especially if we have a glass of wine available at a symposium — something fun to talk about but that doesn’t really have practical ramifications. But in the real world, there are life-and-death decisions being made by people all the time who have to decide how firmly they are going to respond to the kind of frauds that Lucian talks about with Alexander the Oracle Monger. And having confidence in your response to those things is exactly what Lucian is pointing out.
You have to have a firmness of mind that is going to give you the strength to take the position that you may not know at this moment precisely the way in which this imposture is being worked, how this fraud is being conducted. Or in the case of other aspects of life, you may not know at this moment how the movement of atoms through the void exactly occurs in a way that gives rise to your life and your mind and your consciousness. But simply because you don’t know every detail along the way is no reason for you to suspend your confidence and take the position that “well, anything is possible, I don’t know, let’s just ignore the issue.” If you do that, you will be that proverbial deer staring into the headlights and you’ll be run over in many aspects of life in a way that can be literally fatal in the wrong situation.
In DeWitt’s book, under the chapter title “New Freedom,” DeWitt has this to say about determinism — but I think it’s exactly applicable to the question of skepticism, and let me read it, using the word “skepticism” instead of “determinism”: “It may be interposed here that the concept of skepticism is not offensive to the intellectual. It was consequently the duty of Epicurus, as a moralist, a reformer, and hence a pragmatist — or in the ancient parlance as a truly wise man who will be more powerfully moved by his feelings than other men — to declare the significance of skepticism for human conduct. His verdict was that it meant paralysis.”
In the case of determinism, his solution was to postulate a sufficient degree of freedom in the motion of the atoms to permit freedom in the individual — this is the doctrine of the swerve. What I would say is that in the context of skepticism, his solution was to postulate a canonical approach to reasoning in which you can be confident of the conclusions that you’re drawing, even though there are unknowns and details which you will never have the ability to describe in exact detail.
That’s the point I think we ought to drive home as much as any other: that Epicurus is not the kind of person we often identify as a dry philosopher. He’s not a clinical psychologist. He was a moral reformer who Lucretius and the ancient Epicureans saw as virtually a god among men — virtually a savior who brings freedom to humanity from the oppression of religious imposition and supernatural ideas, and not only supernatural ideas, but also ideas of intellectualism that lead to radical Skepticism and attempts to make you believe that you know nothing — that you should accept the word of someone who’s telling you that nothing is possible to know, and accept that as the truth, when that person is really telling you that he doesn’t know anything either.
It’s not often easy, it’s not often diplomatic to look at somebody like that and reject what they’re saying to their face. It’s not always wise — as Lucian says — to be alone as a skeptic in a crowd of people who wish to believe, and who, if you say out loud to them what you think the truth really is, they’ll stone you to death. So you have to be careful about how you approach these things. But for your own happiness and your own confidence in your ability to live your life happily, it’s important for you to understand — and to explain to your friends to the extent that you can — what is involved in this issue of skepticism and how Epicurus points the way to resolving it in a way that lets you make the most of the time you do have when you’re alive.
Okay, let’s bring today’s episode to a conclusion. At that point, as always, we invite you to drop by our Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything related to Epicurus. Thank you for your time today. We’ll be back soon. See you then. Bye.