Episode 273 - TD03 - Is The Soul Immortal And Death Actually A Good?
Date: 03/18/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4344-episode-273-td03-is-the-soul-immortal-and-death-actually-a-good/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing the Tusculan Disputations series, Cassius and Joshua (with Kalosyni reading the student’s role) work through Sections 12–16 of Book One on the question “Is Death an Evil?” The episode opens with Joshua reading from Plato’s Apology — Socrates’s final speech arguing that death is either dreamless sleep (a gain) or a passage to a better world — which Cassius identifies as the foundational authority behind Cicero’s claim that death may actually be good. Cassius emphasizes that while Epicurus acknowledges death can be a relief from unbearable circumstances, he emphatically rejects the idea that death is generally preferable to life. Kalosyni (as student) asks Cicero to establish that souls survive death and that death is free from evil; Cicero responds with three arguments: (1) the testimony of all antiquity and the rites of the ancients; (2) the universal consent of all nations (paralleling the argument about the gods); (3) the fact that great men — Hercules, Themistocles, Epaminondas, the sculptor Pheidias — act for future generations. Cassius and Joshua critique these as resting on hearsay and wish-thinking. The episode includes a detailed discussion of Epicurean prolepsis vs. Cicero’s appeal to universal consent, with Joshua quoting the Letter to Menoeceus §123 and the Letter to Herodotus §37. Section 14’s discussion of natural law leads Joshua to quote the Catholic Encyclopedia on teleological natural law and Norman DeWitt on Epicurus’s non-teleological view of nature. In Section 16, Cicero dismisses ghosts of popular poetry and notes that Pherecydes of Syria was the first philosopher to assert the soul’s immortality, followed by Pythagoras. Cassius and Joshua conclude by emphasizing the key Epicurean counter-position: the senses — not abstract reason alone — are the guardrail of all correct thinking.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 273 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we are continuing in our series covering Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean viewpoint. The series addresses many of the greatest questions of philosophy in life, and we are currently in Book One, where we are discussing the question: Is death an evil? Last week, Cicero began with an argument that we are familiar with from the Epicurean side — which is that when we die, we cease to exist, and Cicero pointed out that if we are not at a particular location, it is impossible for us at that location to suffer any pain or any evil, because we are simply not there.
As we ended, the discussion was turning to even more than death not being an evil. Cicero argued that the soul does continue to exist in some form after death, and our discussion today is going to go down that road — and that this existence which takes place at that point is not only not an evil, but actually has good aspects to it. So as we go forward today, what we will be focusing on is the contrast between Epicurus’s position that the soul ceases to exist at death versus the dominant position of the other schools, that the soul is something superior to and above the body that can exist after the body ceases to exist. And so we will see how even though Cicero can start out acknowledging an Epicurean-type argument that nothing can be bad for us when we cease to exist, he is going to go much further than that and into an entirely different direction of saying that we should actually look upon death as something that improves aspects of our existence. And this is going to set up this major conflict and major disagreement between the Epicurean position — which focuses on life and this world and the atomic makeup of nature as being all that exists — versus the Stoic, Platonic, even Aristotelian viewpoint, that there are things in the universe that are higher and greater than our world and our level of existence, and that we should look to those for our comfort, our direction, and our orientation to how to live the lives that we do have.
Joshua: Yes, Cassius. When Cicero, as we read last week, says in his dialogue “How then, or why do you assert that you think that death is an evil, when it either makes us happy in the case of the soul continuing to exist, or at all events not unhappy in the case of our becoming destitute of all sensation?” — we can point pretty specifically to where Cicero is driving this view of things. It comes from Plato’s Apology, which is Socrates speaking in defense of his own life — or should I say, refusing to speak in defense of his own life. And the central theme of the Apology is this question: Is death an evil? And Socrates, in his final speech on this issue, says this:
“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good. For one of two things: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one — I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many days or nights when compared with the others. Now if death is of such a nature, I say that to die is gain, for eternity is then only a single night.
“But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide — what good, oh my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there — Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life — that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself too shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes and Ajax, the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment. And there will be no small pleasure as I think in comparing my own sufferings with others.
“Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge, as in this world so also in the next. And I shall find out who is wise and who pretends to be wise and is not. What would not a man give, oh judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan Expedition, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too? What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions in another world? They do not put a man to death for asking questions — assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.”
And then he finishes: “Wherefore, oh judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty that no evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods, nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance, but I see clearly that the time had arrived when it was better for me to die and be released from trouble. Wherefore, the oracle gave no sign. For which reason also I am not angry with my condemners or with my accusers. They have done me no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good. And for this I may gently blame them. Still I have a favor to ask of you. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, oh my friends, to punish them and I would have you trouble them as I have troubled you. If they seem to care about riches or anything more than about virtue, or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, then reprove them as I have reproved you for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways — I to die and you to live — which is better, God only knows.”
So here we have in the Apology, Socrates facing up to his own death — which he is going to administer to himself by drinking the hemlock — and we see he is making essentially the same argument that Cicero is making in Tusculan Disputations when Cicero says, “How then can you or why do you assert that you think death is an evil, when it either makes us happy in the case of the soul continuing to exist, or at all events not unhappy in the case of our becoming destitute of all sensation?” This endless night of dreamless sleep that Socrates describes makes it very clear: Cicero is staking out Plato and ultimately Socrates as his authority on this question. And I think it will be important to keep that in mind as we go through this. We talked about the Academic tradition that Cicero comes out of, and this is just further proof. And we also see some literary references that we see in the Apology and in this text, like the judges Minos and Rhadamanthus, which we saw Cicero talk about last week. So as we go forward today, keep Socrates in the back of your mind because he is behind all of this.
Cassius: Yeah, that is good advice, Joshua, because we are not just going through this for the sake of establishing that Epicurus held that there is no existence after death. Anyone who has done any reading in Epicurus knows that. What we are going to be doing as we go through this is looking into the arguments behind the respective positions. Today, as we discuss these issues, we have sort of a skeptical attitude that it is impossible to know what happens after death, and so therefore we just do not know what happens after death — so let us just put it out of our minds. Well, that is certainly an option, but the Epicurean perspective is to try to get to the bottom of what the facts really are, to try to get to these arguments and not just simply say, “have faith in God,” but to go behind all of that and think about what the nature of the soul is — and is it really possible that it can continue to exist after death — to try to put some kind of framework of confidence around the position, one way or the other, because the way you view death is going to have a major influence on the way you view life.
And before we go forward with our reading today, I want to emphasize something else that you just read, Joshua, from the Apology of Socrates — this moving description of Socrates’s final hours and his arguments about why he chose to go ahead with drinking the hemlock rather than resist what the city of Athens was trying to do to him. This is a famous passage and it is held up as one of the glorious triumphs of philosophy over the adversities of the real world. But I want to draw the comparison between what Socrates just said and the Epicurean position. Because if you listen to Socrates, you can convince yourself not only that death is not a bad thing, but that you are going to be entering the equivalent of paradise. You are going to spend your time talking to the great men and women of the past. You are going to be released from the burdens of your body. You are going to live in a better existence than life here on earth would be.
And think about the damaging results if you took that kind of position to heart. You would be basically in the position of Socrates committing suicide when he could have gotten away from this punishment. He is essentially committing suicide, taking the position that only God knows whether he is better off dead or alive. Think about the damaging repercussions if you were to accept that kind of a position in life. And I think that is exactly what Epicurus knew needed to be emphatically rejected. Because if you believe that this life is the only one we have, you certainly do not want to live your life thinking that you are better off dead. You could hardly come up with a worse way of looking at life than to think that life is inferior to being dead. That is the implication and the destination, though, of the reasoning that Socrates comes up with.
Now, we have a lot more to cover here in Cicero’s explanation of all this in Tusculan Disputations, but since you have brought up, Joshua, this conclusion from Socrates and Plato and the direction that they end up going — and that Cicero will explain for us — it is time to go ahead and make that distinction that Epicurus absolutely rejects the idea that you are better off dead than alive. In general, Epicurus says that life is desirable. Epicurus says, when you die, you no longer exist forever again. And if you think that pleasure is the goal, then you are going to want to maximize the amount of pleasure that you experience while you are here. You are not going to want to live your life in doubt that maybe you would be better off dead, maybe you would actually get more pleasure by being dead than by being alive. That is a very damaging point of view that Epicurean philosophy will provide an antidote to.
Okay, so let us go back into the text at Section 12, with Kalosyni once again reading for us the student’s question.
Kalosyni: Explain, therefore, if it is not troublesome to you, first, if you can, that souls do exist after death. Secondly, should you fail in that — and it is a very difficult thing to establish — that death is free from all evil. For I am not without my fears that this itself is an evil, I do not mean the immediate deprivation of sense, but the fact that we shall hereafter suffer deprivation.
Joshua: I have the best authority and support of the opinion you desire to have established, which ought and generally has great weight in all cases. And first, I have all antiquity on that side, which, the more near it is to its origin and divine descent, the more clearly perhaps on that account did it discern the truth in these matters. This very doctrine then was adopted by all those ancients whom Ennius calls in the Sabine tongue “Casci” — namely, that in death there was a sensation, and that when men departed this life, they were not so entirely destroyed as to perish absolutely. And this may appear from many other circumstances, and especially from the Pontifical rites and funeral obsequies, which men of the greatest genius would not have been so solicitous about and would not have guarded from any injury by such severe laws, but from a firm persuasion that death was not so entire a destruction as wholly to abolish and destroy everything, but rather a kind of transmigration as it were and change of life, which was, in the case of illustrious men and women, usually a guide to paradise. While in that of others it was still confined to the earth, but in such a manner as still to exist.
From this and the sentiments of the Romans in heaven, Romulus with God now lives, as Ennius has said, agreeing with the common belief. Hence too, Hercules is considered so great and propitious a God amongst the Greeks, and from them he was introduced among us, and his worship has extended even to the very ocean itself. This is how it was that Bacchus was deified — the offspring of Semele. And from the same illustrious fame, we received Castor and Pollux as gods, who were reported not only to have helped the Romans to victory in their battles, but to have been the messengers of their success. What shall we say of Ino? Is she not called Leucothea by the Greeks and Matuta by us? And has not the whole of heaven — not to dwell on particulars — been almost filled with the offspring of men? Should I attempt to search into antiquity and produce from various sources what the Greek writers have asserted, it would appear that even those who were called their principal gods were taken from among men up into heaven.
Cassius: Joshua, let me break in at this point before we go into Section 13. As we go further today, it is going to be interesting I think to see how some of Cicero’s argument is going to mirror what Velleius said in On the Nature of the Gods about the existence of gods. Now we have not gotten to that quite yet, but we will in the next section. And so it is probably useful to point out that Cicero has said: “I am going to tell you, student, the answer to your question, and I am going to prove to you that the soul continues to exist after death. And my first argument is going to be that that is what everybody thinks.” In the past, all the great men and leaders have said that the soul continues to exist. Now that would be what we would consider to be hearsay evidence, and it is just not a very persuasive argument really, but that is the direction he is going to go in — that you should think the soul continues to exist because everybody else has thought that way from basically the beginning of time.
And you should pay heed to the older opinions even more than the newer opinions, because the older people were — as he says it here — more near to their origin and to divine descent. And so because they were closer to the gods that had created them, they could discern the truth of those matters more so than we can today. Well, I do not know that any of these arguments strike us as particularly persuasive. They contain a lot of interesting background information about different figures of ancient Roman and Greek history. But Cicero’s first attempt to prove that the soul exists after death is resting on very little more than that is what everybody else thinks. Now as we go forward into Section 13, we will see this issue about whether the common consent of mankind is a reasonable argument to use in support not only of the existence of gods, but for the existence of the soul continuing after death. So let us continue with Section 13.
Joshua: Examine the rites of those which are shown in Greece. Recollect — for you have been initiated — what lessons are taught in the mysteries. Then will you perceive how extensive this doctrine is. But they who were not acquainted with natural philosophy — for it did not begin to be in vogue until many years later — had no higher belief than what natural reason could give them. They were not acquainted with the principles and causes of things. They were often induced by certain visions, and those generally in the night, to think that those men who had departed from this life were still alive. And this may further be brought as an irrefragable argument for us to believe that there are gods: that there never was any nation so barbarous, nor any people in the world so savage, as to be without some notion of gods. Many have wrong notions of the gods, for that is the nature and ordinary consequence of bad customs. Yet all allow that there is a certain divine nature and energy. Nor does this proceed from the conversation of men or the agreement of philosophers. It is not an opinion established by institutions or by laws, but in every case the consent of all nations is to be looked on as a law of nature.
Who is there then that does not lament the loss of his friends, principally from imagining them deprived of the conveniences of life? Take away this opinion and you remove with it all grief, for no one is afflicted merely on account of a loss sustained by himself. Perhaps we may be sorry and grieve a little, but that bitter lamentation and those mournful tears have their origin in our apprehensions that he whom we loved is deprived of all the advantages of life and is sensible of his loss. And we are led to this opinion by nature without any argument or instruction.
Cassius: Joshua, let me stop you again here. I see a lot of parallel in this argument here with what Velleius presented in On the Nature of the Gods as to the Epicurean view. I think the point that I would stress is that Cicero seems to want to represent Epicurus’s position — as to gods, anyway — as being that gods exist because everybody says so. I do not think that is an accurate reflection of Epicurus’s position. I think Epicurus’s position is that everybody has prolepsis as a faculty, and that this prolepsis faculty leads in a direction of thinking about gods. But if I recall correctly, when we were discussing this, prolepsis is not itself an opinion, and the discussion of the details of how a god would exist — certainly things like what language he would speak and so forth — those are matters of opinion that reason has to deduce from whatever facts we can come up with. But those deductions of reason about the nature of gods are not prolepsis themselves; they are opinions. Just as the eyes do not give us an opinion about what they are seeing, a faculty of prolepsis is not a fully formed idea, but is raw material from which we form opinions.
To come back from that — look back at Velleius. Cicero is here again, perhaps as he started out when he first told the student that you should not be afraid about death because you are not there. He seems to be employing an argument that is very close to Epicurus without giving Epicurus credit for it. He is not mentioning Epicurus here in this section, and yet much of this material is an echo at least of what Velleius had to say. But I do not believe Epicurus’s position is ever that something is true because fifty million Frenchmen say it is true. The argument that millions of Frenchmen cannot be wrong is not an argument that Epicurus would have used himself. He would have said that if people have a faculty, then you can look at that faculty and make deductions based on that faculty, but the actual opinion that is reached is not made to be true because a certain number of people hold it.
Joshua: No, and from my point of view, this is Cicero and others like him misreading Epicurus. Because if you go to the Letter to Menoeceus, Section 123, Epicurus writes this way:
“The things which I used unceasingly to commend to you, these do and practice, considering them to be the first principles of the good life. First of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men’s minds, and do not assign to him anything alien to his immortality or ill suited to his blessedness, but believe about him everything that can uphold his blessedness and immortality. For gods there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision. But they are not such as the many believe them to be, for indeed they do not consistently represent them as they believe them to be. And the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many.”
So this is a critical passage in the Letter to Menoeceus, and we have been over it again and again. Here is where I am in my interpretation of this passage. When Epicurus says, “first of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men’s minds” — the way I am interpreting this is that Epicurus is not saying that you should believe that the gods are blessed and immortal because everyone else believes that. Instead, what he is doing is what he instructs us to do in the Letter to Herodotus, Section 37. He says this: “First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words in order that we may be able to refer to them, and so to judge the inferences of opinions or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning.” So what he is saying here in the Letter to Herodotus is: we need to be clear about the words that we are using. And he will go on to say that for the purpose of being clear about the words that we are using, it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. And then he goes on to say that we must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions, whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accord with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and of the unseen.
So in the Letter to Herodotus, he is giving us this: how we should use words, how we should make sure that we are speaking clearly and in a way that is understandable. And he says the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded. Now if we go back to the Letter to Menoeceus, he says, “first of all, believe that God is a being immortal and blessed, even as the common idea of a God is engraved on men’s minds.” That is the process. He is saying the first sense of the word “God” that comes to everyone’s mind is a being blessed and immortal. Now, the multitude — as Epicurus goes on to say — is inconsistent in applying that understanding of the word to the gods, because often they behave in ways that do not suggest blessedness, at least in the myths. But this is the process: we look at the first meaning attached to the word, and that is the one we are going to use. And you can criticize that process, but this is the one that Epicurus uses here in the Letter to Menoeceus. We are going to take the first sense, the first meaning attached to the word “God,” and that is blessed and immortal. It is not to say that our knowledge of the existence or nature of the gods is derived from the consent of the multitude. That would be a wrong way to look at it.
And Cicero does make that mistake when he is talking about justice in Book Two of On Ends, when he says that Epicurus’s view of justice is whatever the herd says it is — and that is a wrong view of Epicurus’s actual view, which is that justice exists by convention and by contract for mutual benefit. So when we go back to Cicero here and he says that in every case this understanding comes from the consent of all nations, which is to be looked on as a law of nature — that is not the way Epicurus would state the position.
Cassius: Joshua, now that we have sort of reviewed what Epicurus had to say about the gods, and we are seeing that Cicero is sort of applying some of the same reasoning to the question of the immortality of the soul — what do you think would be the right way to apply Epicurus’s reasoning based on prolepsis to this question? When Cicero says that in every case the consent of all nations is to be looked on as a law of nature — I think you and I are in a hundred percent agreement that that is not the way Epicurus would state the position. Simply because all nations say it is so does not mean that it is, by virtue of their agreement, a law of nature. How do you think Epicurus would apply his reasoning about the existence of gods to the question of the existence of a soul?
Joshua: I do not know if I have a quick answer to that.
Cassius: I do not either.
Joshua: What I would say about Epicurus and his view of death is that his view is that everything that begins to exist is reducible either to compound bodies made of the atoms themselves or of the processes of the interaction of those bodies. And so the soul — such as we perceive it — is no different. The soul also proceeds from the atoms themselves. It is made of atoms in Epicurus’s view, just like everything that exists that has body or that has mass is made of atoms. And so just as the soul and the body come into being at the same moment — you will remember in our first episode we had this conversation about Democritus and his view, which is maybe the soul takes a little while to dissipate and so it continues to experience sensation for some time after the body has died — this I do not think is Epicurus’s view. His view is the soul and the body come into being at the same moment, and when the soul dies, the body dies and vice versa. When the body dies, the soul dies. You need both of them.
Cassius: The parallel that occurs to me that might be suggested could possibly be that Epicurus uses prolepsis as the foundation of his argument that we are to think of gods as being blessed and imperishable. It might be possible to transfer that reasoning to the soul and to say that we have a prolepsis that there is something within us that we should consider to exist. In fact, we know from other Greek authorities that Cicero is going to quote for us that there were some people who took the position that there is no such thing as a soul at all. I do not think that is Epicurus’s position — that there is no such thing as a soul. He thinks that there is a soul, but that the opinion that the soul is immortal is incorrect, just in the same way that there are many incorrect positions about the gods. If there would be a parallel at all, it would probably be that the fact that all of mankind thinks about this subject — whether it be the gods or the soul — is an indication that this faculty of prolepsis is at work. But the conclusion that the soul can exist outside the body is not a true opinion, just as there are many untrue opinions about the gods.
I think you are right, Joshua, that Epicurus’s primary approach to this question is that all good and evil comes to us through sensation, death is the end of sensation, therefore there is nothing good or evil that can exist for us after death. It is hard to say whether Cicero is really considering this argument in Section 13 to be an Epicurean argument. He certainly does not cite Epicurus within Section 13, and he is not talking about the Atomists. But Joshua, do you think Section 13 was written with the Velleius section of On the Nature of the Gods in mind?
Joshua: It need not have been, because he could write this in just about any context. When he says, for example, that many have wrong notions of the gods — for that is the nature and ordinary consequence of bad customs — he is kind of echoing the Letter to Menoeceus, which says that the multitude is inconsistent in applying its view of blessedness to the gods. And you could certainly say that. But it does not take any reading in philosophy to know that different people have different views of the gods. So he could be saying that. And of course we went through Velleius, but I have not read it since then, so I do not know if he is responding to that specifically or not.
Cassius: Right. Why do we not just go forward then into Section 14 and put Section 13 aside — perhaps with a note that at some point it would be interesting to discuss on the forum whether Section 13 here is intended to be in any sense a mirror of the Velleius section on On the Nature of the Gods, and whether the argument is similar, whether it is the same, whether it reflects something about Cicero’s understanding of Velleius’s position that we can learn from — in that he is either accurately or inaccurately employing an argument that mirrors that of Epicurus.
Joshua: Let me touch on this issue of natural law. Let me read what the Catholic Encyclopedia at NewAdvent.org has to say about it in English:
“This term is frequently employed as equivalent to the laws of nature, meaning the order which governs the activities of the material universe” — laws of science like the speed of light is a constant, and so forth. “However, among the Roman jurists, natural law designated those instincts and emotions common to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct of self-preservation and love of offspring. In its strictly ethical application — the sense in which this article treats it — the natural law is the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which he has endowed us.”
God created nature. We look to nature not just for the physical laws that science is interested in, but we look to nature to give us a sign toward moral laws. Cicero goes in this direction — in fact, his quotation about the same law at Athens and Jerusalem and the same law today and tomorrow is the root of one of the most important passages in the history of this whole question. The Catholic Encyclopedia goes on to say this: “When God willed to give existence to creatures, he willed to ordain and direct them to an end. In the case of inanimate things, the divine direction is provided for in the nature which God has given to each. In them determinism reigns, like all the rest of creation. Man is destined by God to an end and receives from him a direction towards this end.”
Now we had a thread on teleology recently, and these two philosophical views are deeply entwined, because natural law does not work in a non-purposive nature. You cannot look to non-purposive nature and derive absolute moral law in the way that Thomas Aquinas wants to look at the nature which his God is alleged to have created and discover moral law there. So those two are linked in interesting ways. And for Epicurus, the cosmos has always existed because the atoms and the void that make it up have always existed. The cosmos will always exist. There was no need for a creator. Things cannot be created out of nothing by the will of the gods, and what exists — namely the atoms — cannot be reduced to nothing. So there is no room for this view of purpose, and therefore there is no room for this view of natural law in Epicureanism. You do not look to nature to furnish specific moral inducements or prohibitions.
Now, Epicurus does look to nature in noticing that the young of all species are motivated by pleasure. And Norman DeWitt describes it very beautifully in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy, in the chapter called “The New Hedonism,” pages 222–223. He writes this way:
“In passages where the word ‘nature’ does not mean human nature, it signifies the blind activity of the universe, the sum of all matter and all motion, which is non-purposive and almost equally destructive as creative. Both Epicurus and Lucretius personify nature, but Epicurus also personifies prudence or the practical reason, making a teacher of her. This is mere figurative language. There is no fallacy in the thought. Even though Epicurus affected the bald style of Euclid and abjured figures of speech, there was a poetical vein in his own nature which he yielded to at times. Thus, so far as touches teleology, the net situation may be described as follows: There is no purposiveness in nature, but in the processes of non-purposive creation, she has brought into being a purposive creature — man. For him, being capable of reason, a telos is conceivable.”
And so this whole discussion of natural law — and whether you can look to nature to furnish moral guidance or moral requirements for you to follow — in almost every case is derived from a view of nature that is essentially teleological, where everything in nature is designed with a view to a purposed end. Which is why in the Catholic Encyclopedia we see them say, “In the case of inanimate things, this divine direction is provided for in the nature which God has given to each. In them determinism reigns, like all the rest of creation. Man is destined by God to an end and receives from him a direction towards this end. This ordination is of a character in harmony with his free, intelligent nature. In virtue of his intelligence and free will, man is master of his conduct. Unlike the things of the mere material world, he can vary his action, act or abstain from action as he pleases. Yet he is not a lawless being in an ordered universe. In the very constitution of his nature, he too has a law laid down for him, reflecting that ordination and direction of all things which is the eternal law. The rule, then, which God has prescribed for our conduct is found in our nature itself. Those actions which conform with its tendencies lead us to our destined end and are thereby constituted right and morally good. Those at variance with our nature are wrong and immoral.”
So that is the upshot on all of this: if you start with teleology, that leads you into natural law, and pretty soon you are at such a wide variance with where Epicurus was going in his cosmos — which was ordered but not ordered for any particular end — that I am still trying to figure a way to talk about this stuff without droning on and on. But I think it is important to notice these differences when they come up, because the implications of this are immense.
Cassius: Definitely immense. And getting a grip on Epicurus’s position and how it differs from Cicero’s and Plato’s and the Christian position is one of the most important things we can do here, because we continuously come back to this question of nature and how we should look at nature — whether nature is a god, whether nature orders us in particular directions, whether nature gives us opinions, or whether nature simply gives us a faculty such as pleasure and pain, or prolepsis, or faculties of the senses, which we then have to turn around and use ourselves to make the best decisions that are possible for us.
We are going to move on to Section 14, but I think there will be a lot more to think about in the future regarding Section 13. My eye is even drawn to the last sentence of what we have here in Yonge for Section 13, where it says, quote: “And we are led to this opinion by nature without any argument or instruction.” Boy, that line seems very close to what Cicero places in Torquatus’s mouth about how we are led to the conclusion that pleasure is desirable directly by nature — without, if I recall correctly, anything like argument or instruction. And given that argument and instruction and geometry, logic, and syllogisms are very important to Cicero, I continue to wonder if this whole section is not somewhat a mirror of Book One of On the Nature of the Gods, around Sections 15–17, where in Section 17, for example, Velleius has said that belief in the gods “has not been established by authority, custom, or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind” and therefore “it must be admitted that the gods exist.” Now, that is Velleius the Epicurean in On the Nature of the Gods talking about why this argument applies to the nature of gods. It looks to me like Cicero has something like that in his mind in what we have just read in Section 13. But let us go forward into Section 14 and see if we can sort more of this out as we proceed.
Joshua: Yeah, because in Section 14 he says this: “But the greatest proof of all is that nature herself gives a silent judgment in favor of the immortality of the soul, inasmuch as all are anxious — and to a great degree — about the things which concern futurity.” And then he uses a quote which is beautiful. He says: “One plants trees for the benefit of another age.” Then he goes on to say: “What is his object in doing so except that he is interested in posterity? Shall the industrious husbandman then plant trees the fruit of which he shall never see, and shall not the great man found laws, institutions, and a republic? What does the procreation of children imply, and our care to continue our names, and our adoptions, and our scrupulous exactness in drawing up wills, and the inscriptions on monuments and panegyrics, but that our thoughts run on futurity?
“There is no doubt but a judgment may be formed of nature in general from looking at each nature in its most perfect specimens. And what is a more perfect specimen of a man than those who look on themselves as born for the assistance, the protection, and the preservation of others? Hercules has gone to paradise. He never would have gone there had he not, whilst amongst men, made that road for himself. These things are of old date and have, besides, the sanction of universal religion. What will you say? What do you imagine that so many and such great men of our republic, who have sacrificed their lives for its good, expected? Do you believe that they thought that their name should not continue beyond their lives? None ever encountered death for their country but under a firm persuasion of immortality. Themistocles might have lived at his ease; so might Epaminondas; and not to look abroad and amongst the ancients for instances, so might I myself. But somehow or other there clings to our minds a certain presage of future ages, and this both exists more firmly and appears most clearly in men of the loftiest genius and greatest souls. Take away this and who would be so mad as to spend his life amidst toils and dangers?
“I speak of those in power. What are the poet’s views but to be ennobled after death? What else is the object of these lines? ‘Behold old Ennius here, who earthed thy father’s great exploits rehearsed.’ He is challenging the reward of glory from those men whose ancestors he himself had ennobled by his poetry. And in the same spirit he says in another passage, ‘Let none with tears my funeral grace, for I claim from my works an immortality.’ Why do I mention poets? The very mechanics are desirous of fame after death. Why did Pheidias include a likeness of himself in the shield of Minerva when he was not allowed to inscribe his name on it? What do our philosophers think on the subject? Did they not put their names to those very books which they write on the contempt of glory? If then universal consent is the voice of nature, and if it is the general opinion everywhere that those who have quitted this life are still interested in something, we must also subscribe to that opinion. And if we think that men of the greatest abilities and virtue see most clearly into the power of nature because they themselves are her most perfect work, it is very probable that, as every great man is especially anxious to benefit posterity, there is something of which he himself will be sensible after death.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, we have read Sections 14 and 15 together because they are basically the same argument. But to remind everybody of what the argument is supposed to be: he is supposed to be persuading the student that there is a soul that survives after death. What I have just heard Cicero saying in Sections 14 and 15 is that you should think that people have souls that survive after death because great men act for future generations — Hercules and the Mysteries and various other people. He is basically trying to say that simply because they acted in ways that benefited generations after them, you should believe that there is an immortal soul. Well, to me that is a transparently insufficient argument, because as an Epicurean could argue themselves — Epicurus acted in his will for the future of his school. After his death, he acted to protect the futures of the children of Metrodorus. Diogenes of Oenoanda erected a wall and specifically mentioned on the wall that he was erecting it for the instruction and the benefit of future generations. Many examples can be given of people who were acting for the benefit of future generations, but who also had no belief whatsoever in the existence of a soul that would continue after death. Epicurus and others — these people took the actions that they did while at the very same time specifically taking the position that they knew that they would not exist after death. So Cicero could go on and on and on listing out any number of great Greeks and Romans, but actions such as he is praising are not restricted to people who believe that there is a soul that survives death. And so the existence of these people that Cicero is citing is of really very little benefit to his argument. You do not have to think that there is an immortal soul in order to act with the future in mind.
Joshua: Yeah, I mean, essentially what he is saying here is: there are no atheists in foxholes. Quote: “None ever encountered death for their country but under a firm persuasion of immortality.” The idea that you might extend to yourself, accept risk to your own person and to your own body for the sake of a future that you will never know yourself, is abhorrent to him. It is like he thinks that if you did not believe in immortality, there would be no point in risking your life for other people.
So Cicero is very good at poking with the needle. Like what he says: look at the philosophers — they write books against glory and vanity, but they put their own name on it. They want people to know their name too. He says about the poets that they write their poems with the view to being ennobled after death. He says of Pheidias — who was the sculptor associated with the Parthenon — why did Pheidias include a likeness of himself in the shield of Minerva when he was not allowed to inscribe his own name on it? And there is an even better story about the Lighthouse of Alexandria, where the man who oversaw its construction carved into the rock, before it was done, his own name — and then plastered over that and wrote the name of the king who was in charge at that time, Ptolemy the Third. This thing is going to stand for centuries; eventually that plaster is going to weather away and fall off in chunks, but his name — the name of the man who oversaw construction — is going to stand there until that entire building collapses.
So people are motivated by the pursuit of glory and fame even after they are dead. And Cicero is saying this is evidence that we should understand that they expect themselves to exist after death. At the end there he says, “it is very probable that, as every great man is especially anxious to benefit posterity, there is something of which he himself will be sensible after death.” Now he is not making a very good argument there. I would say: there is something of which he hopes to be sensible after death. You cannot say that Pheidias adding a portrait of himself into the shield of Athena is evidence that he is going to exist after death. It might be evidence that he wants to exist after death. And those are two different things. Cicero is not doing a very good job here of separating fact from wishful thinking. That would be one of my main criticisms — it is great that the illustrious men of Greek and Roman antiquity all did wonderful things, and everybody was doing everything they could for the benefit of posterity, and people risked their lives for their countries and so forth. That is not in itself evidence of the immortality of the soul. You might want that to be evidence, but that does not mean that it is.
Cassius: I think you are right about that, Joshua. For our final section today, let us go ahead and read Section 16, because when we come back next week after Section 16, we are going to get into the details of some of the Platonic ideas about why the soul is immortal. But Section 16 is more transition material. So let us read Section 16 next.
Joshua: But as we are led by nature to think that there are gods, and as we discover by reason of what description they are, so by the consent of all nations we are induced to believe that our souls survive. But where their habitation is and of what character they eventually are must be learned from reason. The want of any certain reason on which to argue has given rise to the idea of the shades below, and to those fears which you seem not without reason to despise. For as our bodies fall to the ground and are covered with earth — from whence we derive the expression “to be interred in the earth” — that has occasioned men to imagine that the dead continue during the remainder of their existence underground. Which opinion has drawn after it many errors which the poets have increased; for the theater, being frequented by a large crowd among which are women and children, is wont to be greatly affected on hearing such pompous verses as these:
“Lo, here I am who scarce could gain this place Through stony mountains and a dreary waste, Through cliffs whose sharpened stones tremendous hung, Where dreadful darkness spread itself around.”
And the error prevailed so much — though indeed at present it seems to me to be removed — that although men knew that the bodies of the dead had been burned, yet they conceived such things to be done in the infernal regions as could not be executed or imagined without a body. For they could not conceive how disembodied souls could exist, and therefore they looked out for some shape or figure. This was the origin of all that account of the dead in Homer. This was the idea that caused my friend Appius to frame his necromancy. And this is how they got about that idea of the lake of Avernus in my neighborhood, from whence the souls of undistinguished shape, thronging in thick shade, rush from the open gate of Acheron — vain phantoms of the dead. And they must needs have these appearances speak, which is not possible without a tongue and a palate and jaws, and without the help of lungs and sides and without some shape or figure. For they could see nothing by their mind alone; they referred all to their eyes.
To withdraw the mind from sensual objects and abstract our thoughts from what we are accustomed to — this is an attribute of great genius. I am persuaded indeed that there were many such men in former ages. But Pherecydes the Syrian is the first on record who said that the souls of men were immortal, and he was a philosopher of great antiquity in the reign of Numa. His disciple Pythagoras greatly confirmed this opinion, who came into Italy in the reign of Tarquin the Proud. And all that country which is called Great Greece was occupied by his school. Pythagoras himself was held in high honor and had the greatest authority. And the Pythagorean sect was for many ages after in such great credit that all learning was believed to be confined to that name.
Cassius: Okay, in this section we start out with another series of statements that the soul is going to migrate underground after death, and Cicero even draws a parallel between that opinion and the way the poets at the theater appeal to large crowds of women and children.
Joshua: The line that is really worth the price of admission here in that last paragraph is this one. He is talking about the poets and the playwrights describing essentially ghosts, and that these apparitions are speaking — but this is not possible because they do not have a tongue and so forth. And then he says: “For they could see nothing by their mind alone. They referred everything to their eyes.” However, “to withdraw the mind from sensual objects and abstract our thoughts from what we are accustomed to is an attribute of great genius.”
So this is his epistemological statement: withdraw from the senses, which are debased, and abstract your thoughts into high matters using reason and logic and geometry and the rest. The senses are to be distrusted — and this is really where he sets himself up in stark disagreement with Epicurus, who said that the senses were not alone in furnishing us information, because we have the senses and the feelings and prolepsis to form the three parts of the canon — the way that we know what is true and what is not. But the senses have such importance in the Epicurean view of things. And for these other philosophers, they are just tossing them aside. The senses are degraded and they show us a world that is essentially a lie, because you have people like Heraclitus who said everything is in flux and the things of the world are changing so fast it is not possible for the senses to really sink in and get ahold of any one thing and know whether that one thing is true. And then you have of course the Allegory of the Cave, which is all about how deceived the senses are and can be, and how you need logic and geometry and syllogistic reason and so forth — you need those things, and you need to dull your senses and lean into those mental attributes, and those are going to get you out of that cave, because the senses fundamentally cannot be trusted in the Academic view.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I agree that that is really the important thing to hit home as we conclude our episode today. It is tempting to come to the defense of someone like Cicero or even Plato and say, “Well, he is not saying to just ignore the senses. He is just saying raise your vision up and include more than the senses.” But that is not what he is saying. He is saying, quote: “To withdraw the mind from sensual objects and abstract our thoughts from what we are accustomed to is an attribute of great genius.” And he is setting it up as a sort of all-or-nothing false dilemma. Epicurus is saying, yes, you are going to apply reason and logic in order to come to correct opinions, but you are going to apply reason and logic to the data that you get from the senses. You are not going to ignore the senses. You are not going to treat them as liars or deceivers and just throw them out entirely.
But that is the direction that Cicero, Plato, Pythagoras were going in. And although it is charitable for us to think that well, they must not really have meant it — that is what we are going to be finding out as we go further into Tusculan Disputations. Cicero is going to explain all of this in much more detail than we have covered today, and we are going to see: absolutely they did mean it. They did mean that the senses are deceivers and liars, not to be trusted and to be thrown out, and that you are better off once you have gotten to heaven and are released from the encumbrances that the body places on the soul. We are going to have to call time on today’s episode, but that is what we are going to see next week, and that is going to be the big benefit out of going through all of this.
In order to really appreciate where Epicurus is coming from, you have to see in stark terms what he was reacting against — and why it is not just a simple matter of a slight play of words that if we just adjust this and adjust that we are all on the same team about using the senses and using reason. Well, that is not what Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras were saying. It is what Epicurus is saying. You will look to both in the end, but you will always consider the evidence of the senses to be the guardrail, the boundary mark, the way that you judge whether your reason has come to a correct opinion or not. You do not just throw them out entirely and say that the mind can ascend into paradise or heaven to a better existence. But we will come to more of those details next week as we get further into Section 17 and beyond in Book One of Tusculan Disputations. So as we come to a close for today — any final thoughts?
Joshua: Yeah. I think what you have just said there, Cassius, is well said. Because one of the things we tend to encounter is: those old Greek philosophers, they all basically said the same thing. Jesus and Buddha basically said the same thing. The Stoics and the Epicureans basically said the same thing. And when you get into it, nothing could be further from the truth. These are widely divergent opinions about the most essential questions in human life. But you do not know that until you go to the text and see it for yourself. If you take the bird’s-eye view — just the summary, never going into the detail — you can form connections that upon further examination do not really exist. That is why we do what we do — essentially going through these texts, which we have been doing since the beginning of this podcast: trying to get closer to understanding Epicurus and his world, and why the arguments that they were having then are still relevant to human life today. And you do not get there if you just assume that there were no arguments and that everybody agreed about everything. So we are going to get into more disagreements as we go through the text. But that is a huge takeaway — to understand that there were widely divergent views on all of these subjects in the ancient world, and we gain nothing by pretending that there were not.
Cassius: We are going to come back next week at Section 17 and immediately get into the stark disagreements that we were just alluding to. But that is all the time we have for today. Thanks for being with us. As always, we invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or our other episodes, or anything regarding the philosophy of Epicurus. We will be back again soon. See you then. Bye.