Episode 309 - TD37 - The Error of Basing Happiness On The Alleged Divinity Of The Human Mind
Welcome to Episode 309 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.
We’ll pick up this week at Section 11 of Part 5 of Tusculan Disputations. Here Cicero’s student points out that Cicero has been contradicting himself in his own books as to the significance of the different positions on whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness.
Cicero - Tusculan Disputations - EpicureanFriends Handbook
The heart of this argument is going to reveal how the line of non-Epicurean Greeks including Pythagoras/Socrates/Plato and the others listed here insist on finding the good only through their divinely-ordained reasoning of the mind:
Quote
But the human mind, being derived from the divine reason, can be compared with nothing but with the Deity itself, if I may be allowed the expression. This, then, if it is improved, and when its perception is so preserved as not to be blinded by errors, becomes a perfect understanding, that is to say, absolute reason, which is the very same as virtue. And if everything is happy which wants nothing, and is complete and perfect in its kind, and that is the peculiar lot of virtue; certainly all who are possessed of virtue are happy. And in this I agree with Brutus, and also with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, Polemon.
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 309 features Cassius (host), Joshua (co-host), and Kalosyni reading the student’s role in the Tusculan Disputations dialogue. The episode covers Sections 11–13 of Tusculan Disputations Book 5.
Section 11: The student accuses Cicero of inconsistency — he has just condemned Theophrastus and Aristotle for recognizing goods beyond virtue, but in De Finibus Book 4, Cicero argued that Zeno and the Peripatetics differ only in words, not substance. Cicero’s reply invokes Academic Skepticism: “I live from day to day and say anything that strikes my mind as probable.” Cassius identifies this as textbook special pleading. Joshua reads the passage from De Finibus Book 4 comparing Aristo of Chios (the extreme Stoic: everything is indifferent except virtue) with Zeno (who posits preferred and dispreferred indifferents — proegmena, producta, praecipua, praeposita) and then with Aristotle, finding Zeno and Aristotle agree in substance while differing only in terms.
Section 12: Cicero retreats to Platonic authority. Joshua reads from Plato’s Gorgias (Socrates on Archelaus, son of Perdiccas — happiness requires virtue, not external fortune) and from Plato’s Menexenus funeral oration (the self-sufficient person depends entirely on himself).
Section 13: Cicero’s master argument: nature perfects each creature in its own kind. The distinguishing feature of humans is that the mind derives from divine reason and is comparable only to God itself. If cultivated correctly, it becomes perfect understanding = absolute reason = virtue. Everything perfect in its kind is happy; virtue is the human perfection; therefore all virtuous people are happy. “In this I agree with Brutus, and also with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo.”
Cassius and Joshua respond from the Epicurean perspective:
- Epicurus rejects the premise that the human mind is divine or shares in divine reason
- Lucretius offers a Hobbesian view of nature (“nasty, brutish, and short” — Thomas Hobbes) that anticipates Darwin’s natural selection: fitness, not divine perfection, is the criterion (Darwin’s Descent of Man, 1871; his 1860 letter on parasitic wasps and a beneficent God)
- Lucretius Book 5 (~lines 1161–1194): early humans attributed natural phenomena to the gods; Lucretius identifies this as a primary source of human misery — “lay all to the charge of the gods”
- Matthew Stewart (Nature’s God) quoted at length: Epicurus is uniquely implacable among ancient philosophers — unlike Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, he cannot be “wrestled to the ground and marked with the sign of the cross”
- The episode closes on Principal Doctrine 1: the root issue is whether the universe is natural or divinely originated. Epicurus says natural; all the others in this debate say divine in some form
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 309 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.
We’re picking up this week in Section 11 of Part Five of Tusculan Disputations, which we’re continuing to go through from an Epicurean viewpoint. The general subject continues to be whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. When we finished last week, Cicero had been criticizing Epicurus and Metrodorus for saying things that Cicero admitted sounded noble, but that Cicero alleged were totally inconsistent with the merits of a consistent philosophical position.
From Cicero’s point of view, if you think that pain is evil then you are sentencing the wise man to always be subject to evil, because even a wise man is going to be subject to pain. Cicero says that makes no sense, and I don’t care how noble your sentiments sound, Metrodorus and Epicurus — you need to worry more about consistency. Cicero’s last words from Section 10 were that philosophers should be judged not by isolated utterances but by uninterrupted consistency, and that is particularly ironic because Cicero’s student is going to point out that uninterrupted consistency is the last thing Cicero himself is demonstrating in the argument he is making. That’s because before he had gotten into the discussion of Epicurus and Metrodorus, Cicero had been attacking Aristotle and Theophrastus for taking the position that there are goods other than virtue. Cicero’s Stoic-informed position was that virtue is not only the highest good, but it is the only good.
Virtue is the only thing that makes any difference in life. If you have virtue, it doesn’t matter how many of your friends and family members are burned at the stake — because you have your virtue and you’re just fine. So in that section of the argument, Cicero had been taking Aristotle and Theophrastus to task for grossly violating the idealist position that Plato, Socrates, and to some extent Pythagoras had put forth before them.
As we take up Section 11 today, that is going to be the context. Cicero has just raked Aristotle and Theophrastus over the coals for saying that there’s something good in life besides virtue, but Cicero’s student is going to say in effect: “How funny you are, Cicero, because you said exactly the opposite thing in your recent book De Finibus.”
Again, it’s extremely ironic that the last words out of Cicero’s mouth were that philosophers should be judged by uninterrupted consistency rather than by isolated utterances. Yet Cicero is going to not only reject the student’s argument, but double down on it in a way that brings up another aspect of Cicero’s character — not only his Stoic leanings but his Skeptical leanings. So with that as introduction, why don’t we go ahead and read Section 11.
Kalosyni:
You compel me to be of your opinion, but have a care that you are not inconsistent yourself.
Joshua:
In what respect?
Kalosyni:
Because I have lately read your fourth book on good and evil, and in that you appeared, while disputing against Cato, to be endeavoring to show that Zeno and the Peripatetics differ only about some new words. But if we allow that, what reason can there be — if it follows from the arguments of Zeno that virtue contains all that is necessary to a happy life — that the Peripatetics should not be at liberty to say the same? In my opinion, regard should be had to the thing, not to the words.
Joshua:
What? You would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere? You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth and say anything that strikes our minds with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty. But since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is whether the opinion of Zeno and his pupil Aristo be true, but admitting that, then whether the whole of a happy life can be rested on virtue alone. Wherefore, if we certainly grant Brutus this, that a wise man is always happy, how consistent he is is his own business — for who indeed is more worthy than himself of the glory of that opinion — still we may maintain that such a man is more happy than anyone else.
Cassius:
Thank you for reading that. Let me also add to the discussion this translation of what Cicero said there: “You are confronting me with sealed documents and putting into evidence what I have sometimes said or written. Take that way with other people, who are handicapped in argument by rules. I live from day to day — I say anything that strikes my mind as probable, and so I alone am free.”
I don’t want to pass over that section without addressing that this is Cicero at his skeptical worst. He’s taking the position that he’s just going to say what is probable. He’s not going to take a position as to what’s right or wrong, and he doesn’t let the student extend this argument any further at this point. But this is the grossest inconsistency when he has just finished saying that a philosopher should be judged by consistency and not just by the way the words sound.
He’s admitting that consistency is not something that he himself is going to follow, because probability is not going to allow you to say something is true and false and stick with it in a way that even the Stoics themselves would do. This is Cicero shifting his ground when it’s convenient to him — being a Stoic when it sounds noble, but when the Stoics take the position that truth is knowable and that you can be consistent, Cicero retreats back to being a Skeptic and says that he’s not going to take that position. He’s going to take the position that nothing is really firm, only some things are more probable than others. And in that regard, before we go further in the argument, I wanted to reach back a couple of episodes where we discussed Cicero attacking Theophrastus and Aristotle. Cicero has a very narrow view of what is right and what is wrong, and he’s willing to switch his opinion depending on what his own interest is.
Narrow-minded analysis would be what I would suggest is the ultimate problem with Cicero’s view of the Epicurean position. He can have all the access that we don’t have today to the original texts. He can have access to Epicurean teachers, he can have access to all sorts of Epicurean friends who are advocating that position. And yet he is doggedly going to ignore the merits of the Epicurean position and oppose it when it suits his personal preference to do so. And here in this context, he is citing his philosophy of Skepticism to say that he’s only going to take positions that are probable — ignoring what he himself has been saying about the necessity of being consistent in your arguments. So Cicero is not going to address it further here, but there is tremendous merit in what the student has just thrown in Cicero’s face: you are now condemning Theophrastus and Aristotle here, Cicero, but in your last book on the ends of good and evil, which you’ve written very recently, you said something totally the opposite. And I think Joshua, you have some of that and can bring that to us now.
Joshua:
Yeah, in the fourth book of De Finibus, Cicero is in a discussion with Cato the Younger, who is standing in here as a sort of successor to Zeno on the virtue side of things. And in this particular passage in the text, Cicero is going to compare what Zeno says with what Aristo — who was a fellow Stoic — says. Then he’s going to compare both of them with Aristotle and Plato and Socrates and all the rest of them, because he wants to bring the schools whose ethics he most agrees with together, so he can hold that up as what’s good even when they appear to be saying very different things. And that’s kind of the point of this text. Cicero writes: “Suppose you were to ask Aristo whether these things — freedom from pain, riches, and good health — appear to him to be goods. He would deny it. What next?
Suppose you ask him whether the contrary of these things — meaning poverty, pain, and poor health — are bad. He would deny that equally. Suppose you were to ask Zeno the same question. He would give you the same answer word for word. Suppose further that we, being full of astonishment, were to ask them both how it will be possible for us to live if we think that it makes not the least difference to us whether we are well or sick, whether we are free from pain or tormented by it, whether we are able or unable to endure cold and hunger. ‘You will live,’ says Aristo, ‘magnificently and excellently, doing whatever seems good to you. You will never be vexed, you will never desire anything, you will never fear anything.’ What will Zeno say? He says that all these ideas are monstrous and that it is totally impossible for anyone to live on these principles, but that there is some immense difference between what is honorable and what is base — but that between other things, indeed there is no difference at all.”
In other words, they are indifferents. Pain, riches, health — these things are regarded by Zeno to be indifferents. They are externalities, they’re outside your mind, and the only thing you really control is virtue. “He will also say,” Cicero continues, “all those intermediate things between which there is no difference are nevertheless such that some of them are to be chosen, others rejected, and others utterly disregarded. That is to say that you may wish for some, wish to avoid others, and be totally indifferent about still others. But you said just now, O Zeno, that there was no difference whatever between these things. ‘And now I say the same,’ replied Zeno, ‘and that there is no difference whatever as respects virtues and vices.’ Well, I should like to know who did not know that.” So he appears to be carving a fine line here — among things that are indifferent to us, like health, wealth, security, and freedom from pain, while these are indifferents, it is nevertheless the case that some indifferents are preferred and some indifferents we would prefer not to have to deal with.
And the test in all cases is of course virtue, which is the very point Cicero is trying to make in this section of Tusculan Disputations. And he continues: Cicero says, “However, let us hear a little more. Those things, as Zeno, which you have mentioned — that is, to be well, to be rich, to be free from pain — I do not call goods, but I will call them in Greek proegmena, which you may translate by the Latin producta, though I prefer praecipua or praeposita, for they are more easily comprehended and more applicable terms.” He’s talking here about what is preferred even among things that are neither in themselves good or bad — that’s the point. “And again, the contraries — wants, sickness, and pain — I do not call evils, though I have no objection to styling them, if you wish, things to be rejected. And therefore I do not say that I seek for them first, but that I choose them.
Not that I wish for them, but that I accept them. And so too, I do not say that I flee from the contrary, but that I as it were elude them. What says Aristotle and the rest of the disciples of Plato? Why, that they call everything good which is according to nature, and that whatever is contrary to nature they call evil.” And then we get to the point that the student in Tusculan Disputations has quoted and kind of flung in Cicero’s face, because it so contradicts what we’ve been hearing so far. Cicero says: “Do you not see, Cato, then that your master Zeno agrees with Aristo in words but differs from him as to facts, but that he agrees with Aristotle and those other philosophers as to facts but differs from them only in words?” Okay, that’s as much as I’ll read out of De Finibus Book Four — going back to Tusculan Disputations.
Let’s review again what we’ve had so far. The student has said: “You compel me to be of your opinion, but have a care that you are not inconsistent yourself.” And Cicero says, “In what respect am I inconsistent?” And the student says: “Because I have lately read your fourth book on good and evil, and in that you appeared, while disputing against Cato, to be endeavoring to show that Zeno and the Peripatetics differ only about some new words. But if we allow that, what reason can there be — if it follows from the arguments of Zeno that virtue contains all that is necessary to a happy life — that the Peripatetics should not be at liberty to say the same? In my opinion regard should be had to the thing, not to the words.” This is a great point that the student has made, and it’s probably one, Cassius, that you and I wouldn’t have thought to do — we wouldn’t have thought to go back to De Finibus.
So for Cicero to put this in here, he’s probably speaking to an audience who is very well acquainted with his works and who would have brought this up if he hadn’t done it first. But Cicero replies to the student: “You would convict me from my own words and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules, but we live from hand to mouth — or day by day, as it said in the other translation — and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who were really at liberty.” This is a textbook example of a logical fallacy called special pleading. Cicero is carving out an exemption for himself so that he is judging his own behavior by a different set of standards. Everyone else — Aristotle, Theophrastus, Epicurus, Zeno, and all the rest — everyone else is expected to maintain a level of consistency in what they’re saying.
But Cicero is exempt from this because he is free to say whatever is probable, whatever strikes his mind at the current moment. And if we want to go nitpicking through his works and finding apparent cases of inconsistency, the problem Cicero is implying is not with him — it’s with us. Cicero goes on to say: “But since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is whether the opinion of Zeno and his pupil Aristo be true, that nothing is good but what is honorable, but admitting that, then whether the whole of a happy life can be rested on virtue alone.” And then he says — and I just love this line — “wherefore, if we certainly grant Brutus this, that a wise man is always happy, how consistent he is is his own business.” So he’s giving everyone permission to carve out a little exception for themselves, but he’s still not going to judge other philosophers by that standard. He’s going to demand consistency from everyone else and forego it in his own case.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, this section does not make Cicero look good at all. And as we are at this point in the argument, it’s interesting to try to predict: well, where is Cicero going to go from here? And how is he going to extricate himself from this predicament, because he’s been convicted of being inconsistent himself. At the end of what you’ve already read, he says, well, it doesn’t really matter what they’re saying — let’s look at the merits of the question instead. And we’re going to go in now into Section 12. And one of the things I think we need to get out of Section 12 is how this is going to hammer home that what is often at stake is that everybody else, to one degree or another, wants to say in the end: “Well, let’s just go back to Socrates, Plato, and to some extent Pythagoras, and that’s where we’ll find the justification for our position. I may be inconsistent right this second, but let’s go to the real authority — Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras.” And the real authority on all of these issues is a position that Socrates and Plato took, which we’re now going to discuss in Section 12.
Joshua:
So Cicero continues here and he says: “Though Zeno the Citiaean, a stranger and an inconsiderable coiner of words, appears to have insinuated himself into the old philosophy, still the prevalence of this opinion is due to the authority of Plato, who often makes use of this expression that nothing but virtue can be entitled to the name of good.” Agreeably to what Socrates says in Plato’s Gorgias, for it is there related that when someone asked him whether he thought Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, who was then looked upon as a most fortunate person, to be a happy man, he replied: “I do not know, for I never conversed with him.” And then the interlocutor responded: “What, is there no other way you can know it by?” And Socrates says: “None at all.” And the interlocutor says: “You cannot pronounce whether the great king of the Persians is happy or not?”
And Socrates says: “How can I, when I do not know how learned or how good a man he is?” And the reply is: “What do you imagine a happy life depends on?” “That depends on being learned and a good person.” And Socrates says: “It is my conviction absolutely that the good men are happy and the wicked are miserable.” And the interlocutor says: “Is Archelaus then miserable?” And Socrates says: “Certainly he is, if he is unjust.” And then Cicero picks back up his narrative. He says: “Now does it not appear to you that Socrates is here placing the whole of a happy life in virtue alone?” But what does the same man say in his Funeral Oration? There Socrates says: “Whoever has everything that relates to a happy life so entirely dependent on himself as not to be connected with the good or bad fortune of another and not to be affected by or made in any degree uncertain by what befalls another — whoever is such a one has acquired the best rule of living.
He is that moderate, that brave, that wise man who submits to the gain and loss of everything and especially of his children and obeys that old precept, for he will never be too joyful or too sad because he depends entirely upon himself.” So the upshot of this whole paragraph is: is Archelaus, son of Perdiccas, happy? We don’t know until we know whether he’s virtuous. If he’s virtuous, then he’s happy. And this is Cicero’s whole point here in Part Five of Tusculan Disputations — that virtue is indeed sufficient and the only thing necessary for a truly happy life. And there is some disagreement between the translations we’re looking at as to whether this next sentence should fall in Section 12 or 13, but Cicero sums up everything he’s just read from the Gorgias by saying: “From Plato, therefore, all my discourse shall be deduced as if from some sacred and hallowed fountain.”
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, what you’ve just read can be confusing, and it’s good to go back and forth between the different translations, but I think you’ve done a very good job of summarizing it. That is ultimately the point here — that Cicero is extricating himself from his own inconsistency by saying, “Let’s all just look back to Plato.” And when we look at Plato and we look at what Socrates had to say, Socrates clearly said in the Gorgias that we don’t know whether a person is happy or not until we know whether they are virtuous or not. It doesn’t matter what we see from the outside. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the king of Persia. It doesn’t matter what external goods you might have. Happiness depends upon your education and your relationship to virtue. As he quotes Socrates saying: “It is my conviction absolutely that the good are happy, the wicked are wretched” — meaning if you’re virtuous, you’re happy; if you’re not virtuous, you are miserable. And Cicero says: “Don’t you think Socrates makes all happy life rest upon virtue alone?” So Cicero is using Socrates through Plato as his authority that virtue alone is the basis for happiness.
Joshua:
And let me just clarify quickly here that the Perdiccas mentioned by Socrates in this dialogue of Plato’s is of course not Perdiccas — the general and one of the successors of Alexander the Great — because he lived a century after the figures we’re talking about. So Perdiccas in this story was a king of Macedon who predated Philip II and Alexander the Great. I don’t know if anyone else is confused about that, but I was a little bit.
Cassius:
Yeah, thanks for clarifying that, Joshua. Now as we begin to move into Section 13, what we’ve had set up for us here now is: the student has pointed out Cicero’s being inconsistent. Cicero’s saying, “I don’t care about consistency, but I’m telling you what I do care about — I care about the authority of Plato and Socrates.” And he’s quoted Socrates as saying that all you need for happiness is virtue, and if you don’t have virtue, you’re not happy no matter what external goods you have. Now that is an assertion by authority from Cicero that Socrates and Plato are right. Now in Section 13, he’s going to explain why he thinks Plato is correct. And I don’t know how far we’ll get into that today, but Joshua, when you’re ready, let’s go into 13 and get what Cicero is saying was the argument made by Plato. And that will take us into the heart of what all of this is really all about. Even Cicero is probably not going to say that just because Plato said it, it’s true. He’s not going to say just because Socrates said it, it’s true. He’s going to want to point to the reasoning of Socrates and Plato about why they said what they said. And that’s what we’re going to get to in Section 13.
Joshua:
And let’s keep in mind as we go through this that the charge of inconsistency leveled by the student at Cicero was that he was — in that text in De Finibus — inconsistently judging the Peripatetics, right? So Plato kind of stands above that whole argument. The argument is whether Aristotle and Theophrastus and the later Peripatetics are internally consistent in themselves and whether they’re consistent with what Zeno says about virtue being sufficient for the happy life — but Plato is anterior to all of that and kind of stands above that argument. And so that’s why, when we get to the last sentence which I’ll actually read first here, where Cicero says “and in this I agree with Brutus and also with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo,” the question as we go through this text is whether Aristotle and the Peripatetics are on the right side of this question — with Plato, with Socrates, with Zeno — or whether they are on the wrong side of this question because they do not sufficiently regard virtue as the only thing necessary for a happy life, since they regard other things besides virtue as goods. So that’s the nature of the argument as we go forward.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s right, Joshua. And as we launch into Section 13, give a slight warning that 13 is relatively long and somewhat involved and flowery. So let me plant the seed that what we’re about to hear is going to be the argument that Cicero is going to use to reconcile everybody except Epicurus — because the argument is going to essentially end up being, let’s look at the nature of the living thing that we’re talking about. And as we go through the nature of these different types of living things, we’re going to come, in Cicero and Plato and Socrates’s positioning, to a fundamental nature that is significantly different from what Epicurus comes to. But with that, let’s go into Section 13 and we’ll then dissect it after you finish.
Joshua:
“From Plato, therefore, all my discourse shall be deduced as if from some sacred and hallowed fountain. When can I then more properly begin than from nature, the parent of all? For whatsoever she produces — I’m not speaking only of animals, but even of those things which have sprung from the earth in such a manner as to rest on their own roots — she designed to be perfect in its respective kind. So that among trees and vines and those lower plants which cannot advance themselves high above the earth, some are evergreen, others are stripped of their leaves in winter and warmed by the spring season put them out afresh, and there are none of them but what are so quickened by a certain interior motion and their own seeds enclosed in every one so as to yield flowers, fruit or berries, that all may have every perfection that belongs to it — provided no violence prevents it.
But the force of nature itself may be more easily discovered in animals, as she has bestowed sense on them. For some animals she has taught to swim and designed to be inhabitants of the water; others she has enabled to fly and has willed that they should enjoy the boundless air; some others she has made to creep, others to walk. Again, of these very animals, some are solitary, some are gregarious, some wild, others tame, some hidden and buried beneath the earth. And every one of these maintains the law of nature, confining itself to what was bestowed on it and unable to change its manner of life. And as every animal has from nature something that distinguishes it — which everyone maintains and never quits — so man has something far more excellent. Though everything is said to be excellent by comparison, the human mind, being derived from the divine reason, can be compared with nothing but with the Deity itself, if I may be allowed the expression. This, then, if it is improved, and when its perception is so preserved as not to be blinded by errors, becomes a perfect understanding — that is to say, absolute reason, which is the very same as virtue. And if everything is happy which wants nothing and is complete and perfect in its kind, and that is the peculiar lot of virtue, then certainly all who are possessed of virtue are happy. And in this I agree with Brutus and also with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo.”
Cassius:
Okay, Joshua, thanks for reading that. We probably won’t read more today, but we’ve now been set up here. Where Socrates and Plato are going is that we should look to nature — but instead of looking to nature as Epicurus does and finding the leadership of pleasure and pain, what Socrates and Plato and Cicero are going to do is look to nature and say: what is it that distinguishes each living thing? And when we look at the interior of each living thing and see what gives it its power and its uniqueness and distinguishes it — in the case of men, it is the mind and the soul of man as it is derived from the divine mind, which can be compared with nothing else, if it is right to say so, save God alone. Therefore, if this soul has been so trained and its power of vision has been so cared for that it is not blinded by error, the result is mind made perfect.
That is, complete reason, and this means also virtue. So this is where the Platonic-Pythagorean-Socratic viewpoint is going to point everything back to the mind and reason as partaking in the divinity of God and transcending every other consideration. We need to go straight to the source of what distinguishes man from all other creatures, and that is logic and reason, which are synonymous with virtue. And so when we see the different viewpoint of Epicurus — where he rejects that and looks only to practical reason, which is grounded in the senses and in the feelings of pleasure and pain — we get pretty close to the root of the whole disagreement between these schools. And of course there are all sorts of different details about how they go off in different directions, but I think what we’ve seen already here is sort of the root of the problem.
What are we going to look to as the touchstone of our analysis? And as we’ve seen many times, there’s a lot of criticism of Plato and the Socratics from the Epicurean point of view — that they forget that we are both a body and a mind, they elevate the mind as the only thing that’s really important, they throw out the fact that we would not exist but for our body, that we are a unified being, and they deify that single aspect of the mind as all that is important to life.
Joshua:
Well, it is a picture-perfect view of nature which Cicero has offered us, and he uses the word “perfect” several times — that animals are perfectly designed and fitted for the things appropriate to them by nature, but that nothing is more perfect or more divine than the cultivated absolute reason, comparable with nothing so much as with the Deity itself. This is quite a different conclusion from the one reached by Epicurus and by Lucretius. Lucretius offers us a view of nature that is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short” — that the early things that were produced by nature were caught up in a struggle for survival, and that certain mutant forms died out, and that there were things produced that were not at all suited for their environment, which is kind of prototypical of the later view of natural selection, that fitness for one’s environment — not perfection in virtue or reason, but fitness for one’s environment — is the defining characteristic of a successful species.
And of course it was in 1859 with the publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin that this found its fullest early explication. But Lucretius was laying the seeds of this long beforehand — already in the first century BC, he set the seeds of it when he said: the eye does not develop in order to let you see. It wasn’t designed with that purpose in view. The ability to see is something afforded by the existence of the eye; the existence of the eye is not afforded by the desire that we should be able to see. This is a very tricky concept, but it’s one that works very well with modern evolutionary biology. And regarding Cicero’s view of perfection in nature, I do have two quotes from Charles Darwin. The first one comes from the Descent of Man, published in 1871, in which he says: “We must however acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man — with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to others but to the humblest living creature, with his God-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system, with all these exalted powers — man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” That indeed we were not the perfect creations of nature or of any God, but that the process by which we came to exist was a slow and gradual one with rather more random elements than we might prefer, and from origins that were so humble and so lowly that many people are horrified by the idea that we might have emerged from them.
But this is the view that you get in Lucretius, and one of his more famous quotations from Charles Darwin regarding the alleged perfection of nature comes from a letter to a friend written in 1860. He says: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasp with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” I don’t know whether people have witnessed this in nature. I used to see this in Florida where a wasp would burrow a hole in the ground and then inject paralytic toxins or whatever into a larger insect or larva like a caterpillar and then drag it into the hole. And then what they do is lay their eggs into the living flesh of this other insect — and when the eggs hatch, the young of the wasp eat their way out of the living tissue of the caterpillar. I realized this is fairly disgusting and I’m sorry for bringing it up, but it makes the point. What is Cicero going to say about the perfection of the caterpillar here, designed by nature, if its function and fate in some cases is to come to so horrible an end? Certainly Charles Darwin himself could not be persuaded that a beneficent and omnipotent God could have designed things this way.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, I think you’re talking about the heart of the problem here — that Cicero, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras are looking for an ideal, perfect foundation or generator for their view of life in the divine, and they want us as humans to partake in that divinity. They don’t want to allow anything to be good outside of that construct. They want us to focus on our shared divinity with God and latch onto that as all that is important in life. And by doing so, from their point of view, we can be assured of happiness — we can be assured of the best life because that’s all that is really important. Now we’re going to need to stop for the day in a few minutes and we’re not going to take up much more, but as Joshua, you’ve referenced earlier, the King version — which is the Loeb edition — adds a couple more sentences which I’ll add here as a transition to next week, right after Cicero says he’s agreeing with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo.
Cicero says: “But to me, virtuous men seem also supremely happy. For what is wanting, what is lacking to make life happy for the man who feels assured of the good that is his? Or how can the man who is without assurance be happy? The man who makes a threefold division of good must necessarily be without assurance.” And that is an attack more focused on Aristotle, but it certainly applies in spades to Epicurus. Aristotle and Theophrastus were dividing goods into a threefold division. And Cicero is saying that necessarily means you cannot be assured of complete virtue and complete happiness because two of those three — the external goods and the bodily goods — are not within your control. And again, that argument extends even further against Epicurus, who doesn’t segment them out into external and bodily, but just talks about how the pleasures of life are what makes up happiness.
And he has basically an unlimited number of pleasures that can compose happiness. So the heart of this dispute is the accuracy of saying that humans have a divine spark, a divine soul, a divine mind within them, that that is a part of the divine prime mover — the divine generator of the universe — and that ultimately our connection with that divine is all that should make any difference to us. That’s the direction that Cicero and all these other philosophers, even Aristotle, are going in. Aristotle can divide things down three ways if he wants to, but he’s still ultimately going with his prime mover. And so the Cicero of De Finibus is probably more reflective of the Greek mainstream than the Cicero of Tusculan Disputations, because in the end, Aristotle is largely consistent with Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato in focusing on this divine reason, this divine logic, as being what makes humans human and what is really important in life. It is Epicurus who rejects that and says that there is not a divinity out there — there is only nature — and we have to focus our efforts for happiness on what nature gives us through our bodies and our minds, but through pleasure and pain and the senses more so than this idealized divinity, which from the Epicurean point of view does not exist. The Cicero of De Finibus is taking the position that there’s no real difference between the Stoics and the Aristotelians and Socrates and Plato.
Joshua:
We’ve been talking about this question of perfection and deification and so on — in fact, we shouldn’t overlook that this is one of the major criticisms of Epicurus. Because what Cicero says here is: “The human mind, being derived from the divine reason, can be compared with nothing but with the Deity itself.” It is not just that Epicurus is outside of the Greek mainstream when it comes to the question of virtue — whether it is the good and whether it alone is sufficient for a happy life. There is another question here: for someone like Cicero to hear the things that Epicurus says and interpret them the way Cicero tends to do, while considering that Epicurus like them has a mind which can be compared with nothing so much as with divine reason — even though they think he’s grossly wrong, right?
They think he has completely abused this gift and this faculty by not paying homage to the divinity and by not coming to the conclusion that virtue was the only and sufficient source of human happiness. I think this is part of what gets people so irritated about Epicurus — the idea that, as the Christians say, you were made in God’s image, and look how you’re living your life, look at the choices you are making. You have the same origin I do, the same origin everyone else does. You have an immortal soul destined to an eternal afterlife of one kind or another. And look at where you’ve ended up, even with all these blessings. And for some of them, I think this can be rankly offensive — but Epicurus would come to the conclusions he comes to even though he bears in the minds of Cicero and others like him a spark of the divine fire.
One of the advantages of Greek myth is that there isn’t this demand for slavish devotion, and indeed one of the more complex heroes is Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. Now obviously I don’t think that story is true, but I think the actions of Prometheus in that story are admirable — that this kind of slavish devotion to what we perceive to be the divine causes us no end of grief as a species. And in fact, Lucretius makes a very similar point. It’s Book Five of Lucretius, around line 1161. I’m reading the Bailey translation, in which he says this, speaking of early humans:
“Moreover, they beheld the workings of the sky in due order and the diverse seasons of the year come round. Nor could they learn by what causes that was brought about. And so they made it their refuge to lay all to the charge of the gods and to suppose that all was guided by their will, and they place the abodes and quarters of the gods in the sky — because through the sky night and the moon are seen to roll on their way; moon, day and night, and the stern signs of night, and the torches of heaven that rove through the night, and the flying flames, clouds, sunlight, rain, snow, winds, lightning, hail, and the rapid roar and mighty murmurings of heaven’s threat.”
And then he goes on to say this, around line 1194:
“Oh, unhappy race of men! When it has assigned such acts to the gods and joined therewith bitter anger. What groaning did they then begin for themselves, what sores for us, what tears for our children to come! For it is not piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone and to draw near to every altar, no, nor to lie prostrate on the ground, outstretched palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with the streaming blood of beasts, nor to link vow with vow; but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.”
And that last line is translated by H.A.J. Munro as “being able to look on all things with a mind at peace,” and there’s another translation I like that says “to look on all things with a master eye and a mind at peace.”
In other words, it’s in our study of nature that we begin to have an understanding of what the good is — just like what the rest of these thinkers are saying — but unlike the rest of these thinkers, we are not going into this with a dubious and corrosive understanding of the role of the gods in that process. And Lucretius in Book Five here makes it very clear that the tendency to do exactly that — to lay all to the charge of the gods, as he says, to lay everything at their feet — is a tremendous source of human misery. This is not the source of virtue. This is not the source of understanding. We do not need to bring ourselves closer to this view. The fear of the Lord is not, in fact, the beginning of wisdom. We should look to nature and we do look to nature.
Epicurus says that he finds his own peace chiefly occupied in a life devoted to the study of nature, but we’re not projecting onto nature our moral values. That’s what the rest of these philosophers are doing. We’re not projecting onto nature what we want to find there. Epicurus looks to nature and doesn’t find any standard for absolute, objective morality. He looks to nature and he doesn’t find any standard for an absolute perfect justice. One of the delegates to the Continental Congress of the early American Revolution said in notes recorded by John Adams: “I have looked for our rights in the laws of nature and I can find them only in the bonds of political societies. I have looked for our rights in the constitution of the English government and I have found them there. When you claim that you are finding this stuff in nature, you have to show me where you’re looking, because I’ve looked and I do not see it there.”
I do not see the perfect justice that you claim to be represented there. I do not see the rights and protections that you claim you found there. I do not see any absolute or perfect virtue or understanding of morality in any of my study of nature. And the conclusion that I draw from this is: I don’t think it’s there. I think that you are misleading me when you say that you find the foundation of a flawless justice and morality and divinity of soul in nature, because it just isn’t there. And as Lucretius makes clear, the view that these things are to be found there and that everything is to be laid to the charge of the gods doesn’t make us happy — it makes us wretched and unhappy. And that to me is the thing to take away from this argument that Cicero has made today.
You are absolutely right, Cassius, to say that it is Epicurus against the crowd here, because Cicero says at the end: I agree with Brutus. I agree with Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, and Polemo. We already know that he agrees with Plato and with Socrates and with Zeno and Aristo. He’s arranged things so that everything is in his corner, but Epicurus will never go there. Matthew Stewart, in his book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, makes a point which I will quote: “The Epicurean Revival was not the first such challenge to the hegemony of the Christian religion over European culture. Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics were pagans too, and in their work they sounded many of the themes that would make the Epicurean philosophy so dangerous — as did a number of the more radical theologians of the late medieval period. One could further complicate the narrative by pointing out that for some of the people some of the time, the Epicurean revolution passed for a renovation of the established religion from within.”
Speaking there, I think, about Gassendi and others like him — and I know, Cassius, as you’ve been working your way through some of the material that comes from Gassendi and finding that actually quite a lot of good is to be found in there. Matthew Stewart continues: “However, in Epicurus there was nothing of that compromising dialectical spirit that pervaded Aristotle and the others and allowed them to be wrestled to the ground and marked with the sign of the cross. Among all the ancient obdurate atheists and inveterate enemies of religion, no one seems more sincere and more implacable than Epicurus” — as the poet Richard Blackmore observed. And we could spend a whole episode just talking about this book, but we should come to an end here. We’ve already run long.
Cassius:
Well, we may have run long, but that was an excellent summation. This is the issue that we’ve been wrestling with all day long, and it’s the reason why Principal Doctrine Number One is Principal Doctrine Number One. This issue of whether the universe is natural or whether it has a divine origin underlies every other issue, and you can try to be condescending if you like and reconcile Epicurean philosophy with there being a divine creator, but in the end it just doesn’t work. Epicurus is committed to a natural universe that does not have a divine designer behind it, and that is the question everybody has to wrestle with. You can talk all day long about whether chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla ice cream and talk about individual preferences as to pleasure, but when you get down to brass tacks about what makes Epicurus Epicurean, it is that he has rejected this religious consensus that the universe has a divine nature, and he has said that the universe is natural and we are going to construct a way to live and a way to be happy.
That is based on what nature gives us and not on what this alleged divine entity — which we don’t believe exists — is alleged to have done. Everything comes back to these issues, and that’s where everyone needs to start their understanding of Epicurus and take a position. Unlike Cicero, who just wants to float from position to position and take only a position about what is probable — in the end, Epicurus is rejecting that kind of Skepticism and saying that the evidence the universe has given us is sufficient for us to conclude that we are a part of a natural universe. We are not distinguished from everything else by some share of divinity, and we should live our lives as part of nature and not in rebellion against nature. Okay, let’s stop there for today. We will continue next week — Cicero is dealing with some very important arguments and I want to make sure that we cover them and make sure we’ve expressed the Epicurean position before we end Tusculan Disputations. So we’ll come back next week and continue doing that. In the meantime, we invite everyone as always to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know what you think about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.