Episode 310 - TD38 - Neither Happiness Nor Virtue Are Binary States
Listen to “Episode 310 - Neither Happiness Nor Virtue Are Binary States” on Spreaker.
Welcome to Episode 310 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 14 of Part 5 of Tusculan Disputations, continuing to look at how the Stoic/Platonic philosophers use logic to deduce that since only virtue is within our control, happiness comes from exclusively relying on virtue, excluding all else from being considered to be truly good.
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 310, featuring Cassius and Joshua, covers Section 14 of Tusculan Disputations Book 5 (with a preview of Section 15), focusing on whether happiness and virtue are binary states or matters of degree.
Binary vs. gradual: Joshua opens with the Game of Thrones “rotten onion” analogy — the Stoic (and Ciceronian) position is that virtue is all-or-nothing, just as an inch under water is no different from a mile under water. Epicurus rejects this binary and treats happiness as comparative — “the wise man always has more reason for joy than for vexation” — not a zero/one toggle but a running balance.
Section 14 text: Cicero argues that only the person who relies entirely on virtue can be truly happy. The Spartan anecdote: “a fortune depending on ropes is not very desirable.” The Lacedaemonian/Philip exchange (sourced via Montaigne’s Essays): “What can they suffer who do not fear to die?” — death as the ultimate exit gives the virtuous person absolute security.
Epicurean response: Epicurus makes the same point about death as exit (Letter to Menoeceus: “nothing terrible in life for those who know nothing terrible in not living”), but on natural-philosophical grounds, not Stoic-virtue grounds. Lucretius Book 1: priests exploit fear of eternal punishment — Epicurean physics eliminates that fear entirely.
Root of the disagreement: Heraclitus’s flux + Plato’s cave: Plato demands escape from the world of becoming to the world of perfect being, using geometry as a bridge to eternal truth. This demand for perfection runs through all their ethics. Epicurus rejects it as illusory — only atoms are eternal; all compounds are temporary.
DeWitt on Epicurean virtue (Joshua): DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, Chapter 14 (“The New Virtues”) — Epicurus’s parresia (frankness/honesty) as the central Epicurean virtue, grounded in looking to nature rather than divine reason.
Sorites/heap paradox: Cicero applies the sorites heap to happiness — if a happy life must be composed entirely of things that are honorable, any mixture with non-honorable elements corrupts the whole. Cassius identifies this as the logical engine behind Cicero’s absolutism. Next week: Section 15 in full.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 310 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 14 of Part Five of Tusculan Disputations, where the topic is the issue of whether virtue is sufficient for a happy life or not. For quite a while now, Cicero has been talking about whether happiness or virtue are things that are absolute and complete in themselves or whether approximations of them can be good enough. Several paragraphs prior to where we’re reading today, Cicero brought up this subject saying that there are certain philosophers who take the position that words are not absolute — that a happy life can be a happy life even though it has moments of unhappiness within it.
That virtue can be virtue even though there are moments of small deviations from virtue. And when you focus on that kind of a question, you can understand where Cicero is coming from when he tries to take the dictionary viewpoint that “I don’t want to be almost happy. I don’t want to be almost virtuous. I want to be virtuous, I want to be happy, and if there are times when I’m not virtuous, if there are times when I’m not happy, then I’m not completely happy. I’m not completely virtuous.” And so he needs to get to the root of all of these issues so that he can be completely happy, because partly happy is not good enough. He wants the best — total happiness, total virtue in life. And of course that begs the question of whether total happiness and total virtue are even possible, which is something that we need to drop back and cover and decide from Epicurus’s perspective — whether it even makes sense to be talking in these absolute terms, whether in the type of universe that Epicurus believes is correct (based on atoms and void, where there is no central designer and no central unifying controller) whether it makes sense at all to be talking about absolute virtue or absolute happiness, because if those things are not possible, then you’re definitely setting yourself up for frustration if you think that you should be pursuing something that is impossible to reach.
There is a line in Diogenes of Oenoanda in which Diogenes is critical of those who do not pursue the study of natural science. Diogenes says, “Who will seek what he can never find?” — meaning that if you know from the beginning that something is not achievable, then it doesn’t make sense to pursue it. That takes us back in the direction of where we are in Section 14, because a lot of what Cicero is focusing on is that you cannot be completely happy if happiness requires things that are beyond your control to obtain, and that is Cicero’s complaint with Aristotle and those who say that there are good things in life beyond virtue. He has a much worse problem with Epicurus than he has with Aristotle, but with Aristotle — who likes to divide things up into categories — Cicero can fix on Aristotle’s division of goods into external goods and goods of the body and say that goods of the body and external goods are impossible for you to control.
There are times when you will not have those goods of the body — you’ll have disease and sickness. There are times when there will be things external to you that you cannot control, and therefore those things cannot be something that you require to be happy. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you think that happiness requires those things. So this is a dividing line between Epicurus and these other philosophers, because Epicurus is willing to frankly embrace the idea that there are good things that are beyond our control. However, through the use of reason and a proper understanding of how the senses operate, the good things in life are relatively easy to get — to paraphrase the Tetrapharmakon — and that what is bad in life ultimately can be dealt with and kept under control so that we’re not constantly and forever held in the grip of pain that is beyond our ability to resolve. Epicurus knows that there is pain — just as he knew there was kidney disease, since he experienced it himself — but through intelligent living, the wise man is always going to have more reason for joy than for vexation, and if you employ a reasonable definition of happiness in which you are happy when you have more reason for joy than for vexation and you don’t require absolute total elimination of every vexation in life, then it makes sense to consider yourself happy and that you are living and can live a happy life.
Joshua:
Whenever we encounter Cicero’s opinion on this, I always think of a bit of dialogue that comes from the books that Game of Thrones the show was based on, and the dialogue goes like this — with a woman who’s kind of a witch saying to a man: she says, “Are you a good man?” And he replies, “I am a man. I am kind to my wife, but I have known other women. I’ve tried to be a father to my sons, to help make them a place in this world. I’ve broken laws but I never felt evil until tonight. I would say my parts are mixed, good and bad.” And she replies: “A gray man — neither white nor black but partaking of both. Is that what you are?” And he replies, “What if I am? It seems to me that most men are gray.” And she says: “If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion.”
A man is good or he is evil. So she ends there in a place that Cicero and the Stoics in particular tend to end when it comes to virtue — at a binary state. You’re either virtuous or you’re not. You’ve either attained the goal or you haven’t. There is no halfway point, there is no three-quarters way point on the road to virtue. As we’ve said before: to be drowning an inch under the surface of the water is no different than to be drowning a hundred yards under the surface of the water. There is no difference of degree when it comes to virtue — there is only a difference in kind. Either you have it or you don’t. But it does put me in mind of another question, which is that on the subject of the experience of pleasure and pain, Cicero and Epicurus kind of come down on opposite sides.
Cicero comes down on the side that most men are gray — that some people are in pleasure, some people are in pain, but the mass of men at any given point in time are neither experiencing pain nor pleasure. And it’s a core piece of Epicurus’s ethics to reject that view and to say: no, the feelings are limited to pleasure and pain, and when you’re not in pain, you’re not in a middle state but you are experiencing pleasure in that moment. There is something interesting there about the difference in the way they approach these two questions, because Cicero tends to be much more of a binary thinker in terms of it’s either black or it’s white. There is no gray — except on the question of pleasure and pain. On that he comes down on the opposite side.
Cassius:
Joshua, well, let’s talk about these examples that you’ve just raised. Let’s go back first to the issue of drowning in an inch of water. It clearly is possible to drown in an inch of water — why does that analogy not show the deficiency of Epicurus’s outlook? That happiness can be obtained even if you have moments of pain in your life — you can drown in an inch of water and you’re still dead just as if you drowned a mile under the ocean. Why doesn’t that shut up the Epicurean position?
Joshua:
Well, because we are talking in that case about a binary state. Either you’re drowning or you’re not, and what they’re doing is transferring the concepts of this thought experiment — in which the answer is binary — to a situation where it isn’t. I think that’s the real issue.
Cassius:
So why is it not valid to compare the state of being drowned to the state of being virtuous?
Joshua:
Well, just for clarity’s sake, I think we should make the point that the drowned person in the analogy that the Stoics are making is the person who is not virtuous, who has not attained perfection in virtue — because to have attained perfection in virtue, that person is above the surface of the water. And what we’re looking at now is the people who haven’t attained it, who are either an inch below the surface of the water or a hundred feet below the surface of the water or a mile below the surface of the water.
Cassius:
Right. We all agree that the person who is below the surface of the water — who is therefore no longer able to breathe, is drowned, and is dead — we all agree that that person is in a particular situation. It seems the difference is that we can’t seem to agree on who is virtuous or not. And why is that the case?
Joshua:
Well, the person who’s virtuous — he’s above the surface, he’s not drowning. I mean, that’s the key distinguishing feature in this little thought experiment: you have the binary state, which is you’re either under the surface or over it, and then you have — from Cicero’s point of view and from the Stoics’ point of view — the wrong perspective, which is that there’s a gradual ascent to get to the good side of that binary state. But that doesn’t work, because a gradual ascent from drowning to drowning to drowning — you’re just still drowning in all cases. The result is the same, except on the all-important distinction of whether you are entirely over the surface of the water or under it. That’s all that matters.
And then if the question is why doesn’t Epicurus immediately fall to his face and accept what Zeno and Cicero and others like them are saying about virtue — that if you allow something that is outside of your control, like pain, if you allow that that is an evil, then you can’t possibly ever be happy, because even if you’re free of pain now, you can never be sure that you will remain free of pain in the future.
And so whatever present happiness you think you’ve attained has been spoiled by the confident expectation that you’re going to be unhappy later. But the solution to this problem is that Epicurus does not accept that this is a binary state — you either have it or you don’t. As that phrase we always quote, Cassius — the wise man always has more reason for joy than for vexation — is not describing a situation analogous to the Stoic drowning thought experiment. It’s not analogous to a situation where you either have it or you don’t. We’re talking about adding up all the reasons for joy and all the reasons for vexation and then comparing them with each other. Whereas Cicero would say, if you have any reason at all for vexation then you have no reason for joy — you can’t be happy. But that’s not where Epicurus goes with this. He does not accept the absolutism that is inherent in the Stoic view and the Zenonist view of this question.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua, we quoted exactly from Section 8 where Cicero was quoting Antiochus and said: “Many things derive their names from the predominant portion of them, though they do not include everything — such as strength, health, riches, honor, and glory — which qualities are determined by their kind, not their number. Thus a happy life is so-called from its being so in a great degree, even though it should fall short at some point.” Now that’s Cicero describing a position that someone else is taking and he’s going to disagree with that, but I think that’s the analysis. The difference between being drowned and not being drowned versus virtue — being drowned or not drowned — is something that most all of us are going to agree is a binary state. You are either drowned or you’re not drowned. Virtue, on the other hand, is not so clearly a binary state.
It can be defined in a binary way as Cicero is attempting to do, but I guess that’s ultimately the question: is it reasonable, is it valid, to look at virtue as a binary state? Again, all of us can agree that the person who’s talking to us — we are alive, we are not drowned — and there’s absolutely no question in our minds about whether that person is drowned or not. But as your analogy from Game of Thrones illustrated, the question of whether someone is virtuous or not is an evaluation that is not binary. It depends on your definition. There are certain things in life where the nature is so clear that all of us agree that it is binary — you are living or dead. But the question of whether you’re virtuous or not is not something that has the same level of clarity, because the whole issue of virtue is a mental construct in the first place, unless you postulate that there is a God that has dictated it or that there is a realm of ideal forms where it exists. The whole question of what is virtue, how to be virtuous, when are you virtuous, when are you not — is an abstraction that is not in the same realm as whether you’re dead versus whether you’re alive.
Joshua:
I think that’s exactly the right response. Last week we talked about Cicero’s view that the human mind was like nothing so much as the divine mind or the divine — you could think of it in terms of the Logos of the Stoics. So we’re looking there at a system of thought in which virtue is not subject to difference in definitions, that it has one meaning, one particular meaning, and we can express that meaning in different words, but the meaning is real and it’s in some way verifiable and it’s not really subject to argument. You either accept that this explanation of things is true or you don’t. And Epicurus generally didn’t. In his book Epicurus and His Philosophy, in the chapter on the virtues called “The New Virtues” — Chapter 14 — DeWitt says: “When Epicurus rejected reason and adopted nature as the norm, discovering in the behavior of the newly born or not yet perverted the basis for identifying pleasure as the end or telos, he created by implication a doctrine of what may be called original honesty. To preserve this natural honesty became the main objective of the new education, and thus the virtue of honesty was raised to a status of prime importance.”
The Greek name is parresia — frankness of speech. This I think contains part of the response, which is: do you look to the divine reason or the divine mind for your answers about virtue, or do you look to nature? Now, a Stoic would say of course they’re doing both — they’re looking to the Logos, which is the divine mind and which is also infused throughout nature.
Cassius:
You’re calling it honesty. I think we could also call it reality — it’s your position on what really is real. You’re being honest that a person is either alive or dead because you’re committed to the reality that is in front of you through your senses. But as far as whether somebody is virtuous or not, that’s a different question. The senses are not going to tell you whether somebody is virtuous or not, apart from the input they give you as to pleasure and pain. So with that framework of looking to reality and looking honestly at what nature gives us, as opposed to what we might speculate would be a state of perfection through God or through some other dimension — let’s get back to where Cicero is precisely today in Section 14, where he will take the issue further in the direction of analyzing whether happiness is something that is completely within your control or not. So Joshua, if you could read Section 14.
Joshua:
Yeah, we ended Section 13 last week with the following sentence. Cicero said: “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, and Polemo.” And then in Section 14 he says this: “To me, such are the only men who appear completely happy. For what can he want to a complete happy life who relies on his own good qualities? Or how can he be happy who does not rely on them? But he who makes a threefold division of goods must necessarily be daunted, for how can he depend on having a sound body, or that his fortune shall continue? But no one can be happy without an immovable, fixed and permanent good. What then is this opinion of theirs?
So that I think that saying of the Spartan may be applied to them, who on some merchants boasting before him that he had dispatched ships to every maritime coast, replied that a fortune which depended on ropes was not very desirable. Can there be any doubt that whatever may be lost cannot be properly classed in the number of those things which complete a happy life? For of all that constitutes a happy life, nothing will admit of withering or growing old or wearing out or decaying. For whoever is apprehensive of any loss of these things cannot be happy. The happy man should be safe, well-fenced, well-fortified, out of the reach of all annoyance — not like a man under trifling apprehensions, but free from all such. As he is not called innocent who but slightly offends, but he who offends not at all — so it is he alone who is to be considered without fear who is free from all fear, not he who is but in little fear. For what else is courage but an affection of mind that is ready to undergo perils and patient in the endurance of pain and labor without any alloy of fear?
Now, this certainly could not be the case if there were anything else good but what depended on honesty alone. But how can anyone be in possession of that desirable and much-coveted security — for I now call a freedom from anxiety a security on which freedom, a happy life depends — who has or may have a multitude of evils attending him? How can he be brave and undaunted and hold everything as trifles which can befall a man, for so a wise man should do, unless he be one who thinks that everything depends on himself? Could the Lacedaemonians, without this, when Philip threatened to prevent all their attempts, have asked him if he could prevent their killing themselves? Is it not easier to find one man of such a spirit as we are inquiring after than to meet with a whole city of such men? Now if to this courage I’m speaking of we add temperance, that it may govern all our feelings and agitations, what can be wanting to complete his happiness who is secured by his courage from uneasiness and fear and is prevented from immoderate desires and immoderate excess of joy by temperance? I could easily show that virtue is able to produce these effects, but I have explained that on the foregoing days.”
Cassius:
Thank you Joshua for reading that. Cicero is using a couple of analogies there, some of which are clear to us I think and some of which are not so clear. The first one — where he quotes the Spartan as telling the merchant who was boasting about his ships that “a fortune which depends on ropes is not very desirable” — that’s pretty clear. A rich person who boasts about his happiness coming from all sorts of interactions with other people and lands that he has very little control over, subject to being ripped away from him at almost any moment by storms or anything else — that’s pretty clearly an example of Cicero’s point that it’s much better to base your happiness on things that are within your direct ability to control than it is to become a global merchant, which has all sorts of possibilities of running into problems at any time.
That’s where Cicero says, “Can there be any doubt that whatever may be lost cannot be properly classed in the number of things which complete a happy life?” That would be one of the reasons why the Bible talks about your treasure being in heaven — because your treasure that’s in heaven is not something that you can lose, from that point of view. But as we were discussing previously, the first question to ask is: what is the reality of the situation in the first place? Is there a heaven in which you can lay all your treasure and rely on that and be truly happy based on that religious viewpoint of life? Or are you, as part of the world we live in, necessarily reliant on the way this world works — and the knowledge that you can pursue life reasonably and rationally and organize your affairs so that you can all but eliminate disasters from your life, but that you can still be happy even while knowing that there are things you cannot prevent, that you will eventually die, that there are accidents that happen that are beyond your control?
Are you willing to live in this world under those conditions and consider yourself to be happy? Or are you going to go off looking for a way to say that you are complete within yourself and that nothing makes any difference that you do not have total control over? That’s where Cicero says too: “For of all that constitutes a happy life, nothing will admit of withering or growing old or wearing out or decaying. For whoever is apprehensive of loss of these things cannot be happy.” So he’s setting up a situation that is impossible from Epicurus’s point of view, because if you accept that there are important things in your life that can grow old or wear out or decay, then you’re necessarily going to be living in anxiety of those things happening — and the man who lives in anxiety of those things cannot be happy.
It’s a subset of the bigger question: does the knowledge that you’re one day going to die prevent you from living a happy life? Does the knowledge that you’re going to grow old prevent you from being happy? Are you willing to accept the terms of life that nature has given to you and be happy within those terms, or are you going to reject what nature has given you and say, “I want perfection. I want something that is totally within my control, and I’m not going to admit that anything that is not in my control is important to me at all”? Because that’s the direction that Stoicism takes you. That’s the direction that religion takes you. When you lay up your treasure in heaven or in some other dimension of perfection, you are in essence in rebellion against the world as you live in it.
You are in rebellion against nature as it exists. And Cicero is willing to do that and willing to go down this road because he is projecting that there is a divine design behind everything that is more important than the reality we live and see through our senses. That is why physics is such an important part of Epicurean philosophy — because what physics means is your assessment of the way the world really is. Do the senses give us an accurate, realistic, true understanding of the world, or is the world just an illusion where a man behind the curtain designs and manipulates and decides what is really important? Cicero goes on and on with analogies like this: “He is not called innocent who but only slightly offends. The person who’s innocent is one who does not offend at all. So it is he alone who is considered without fear who is free from all fear, not he who is but in little fear.”
Again, it’s this perfection being the enemy of the good. Don’t call yourself fearless if there is any possibility in life that would put you in fear. Don’t call yourself innocent if you have ever transgressed in any way at all. That’s a very Christian viewpoint there — “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” — that we’re all worms because we’re not perfect in the sight of God. He says, “What is courage? An affection of mind that is ready to undergo perils without any alloy of fear.” And I think that last phrasing there is the key aspect of it, because Cicero under this viewpoint is not going to admit that anyone is courageous if they have any deviation from what Cicero considers to be courage. If you have any ounce of fear within you, then you’re not courageous.
Joshua:
After his discussion of courage, there’s a reference here in the text which I didn’t recognize. He said, “Could the Lacedaemonians without this, when Philip threatened to prevent all their attempts, have asked him if he could prevent their killing themselves?” So I was looking up the source of that, and I cannot find it in any ancient text. I’m sure it’s there — it must be, because it’s quoted by Montaigne in one of his essays. So let me read what he wrote. He said: “Philip — that’s Philip II, who is Alexander the Great’s father — Philip, having forcibly entered into the Peloponnesus, and someone saying to him that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they did not in time reconcile themselves to his favor, replied, ‘Why, you pitiful fellow? What can they suffer who do not fear to die?’ It being also asked of Diogenes which way a man might live free, ‘Why,’ said he, ‘by despising death.’ These and a thousand other sayings to the same purpose distinctly sound of something more than the patient attending the stroke of death when it shall come, for there are several accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself.”
It goes on to say: “Witness the Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus and sold for a slave, who being by his master commanded to some base employment, said to him, ‘You shall see who you have bought. It would be a shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty,’ and having said so, threw himself from the top of the house.” And Montaigne relates another story. He says: “Antipater, severely threatening the Lacedaemonians that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of his — ‘If thou threaten us with more than death,’ replied they, ‘we shall die the more willingly.’ And to Philip, having written them word that he would frustrate all their enterprises, ‘What, wilt thou also hinder us from dying?’” And that last bit there seems to be what Cicero is quoting, and Montaigne goes on to say: “This is the meaning of the sentence that the wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can, and that the most obliging present nature has made us — and which takes from us all color of complaint of our condition — is to have delivered into our own custody the keys of our life.
She has only ordered one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out. We may be straightened for earth to live upon, but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting.”
Cassius:
Those are great quotations, Joshua, that explain what’s going on here. And I would say that Epicurus would agree and in fact said almost exactly the same thing in the section we quote regularly from the Letter to Menoeceus — “there is nothing terrible in life for those who know that there’s nothing terrible in death.” It’s basically the same point. And Epicurus is embracing it because it is important to an understanding of why you are not trapped in life by pain. There is always exit from even the worst pain. The idea that there is a supernatural force that can punish you forever for violating its rules is nonsensical, ridiculous, and simply untrue, because death will allow us to escape from even the worst punishments. As Lucretius talks about in Book One of his poem, the priests are constantly at work spinning false tales of eternal punishments because they know that men who once realize there is an escape from all of those punishments through death will no longer be intimidated by those threats — but so long as men believe that there is a supernatural God who can hold you in eternal punishment, those people are frozen into subservience to supernatural religion because they think there’s a possibility they will be held in eternal punishment, and no one would want that.
That’s an argument that appears very early in Lucretius, which I think emphasizes the importance of it. An understanding that death is nothing to us gives us this liberty of knowing that we cannot be punished forever, that we cannot be held in intolerable circumstances forever. We were talking earlier about whether the fact that we are going to die means that we must live in constant fear and anxiety about that happening to us. And if you’re concerned that death could lead to eternal punishment, then yes, you would be in eternal anxiety about that. But that’s where the physics of Epicurus comes into play — that that is not going to happen to you, that when you die you do cease to exist, and that gives you the strength of mind and courage to face the problems that we do encounter in life, and also to appreciate life and realize that we have more reason for joy than for vexation and can be happy while we’re alive.
There’s no need to retreat to this absolute fiction of there being a perfect world after death or there being a supernatural realm that makes everything work together for those who love the Lord. Those things are false, but also in addition to being false, they’re simply not needed. They’re not needed, and they make things worse in many ways when you believe those things that are not true. And a lot of it does seem to derive from this viewpoint that if you’re not perfect, you’re not anything at all. As Cicero was saying in this section, and as we’ve referred to many times before in terms of the sorites question — this heap analogy — Cicero says: “Let us see if a happy life is not made up of parts of the same nature as a heap implies a quantity of grain of the same kind, and if this once be admitted, that happiness is compounded of good things which alone are honorable.”
If there is any mixture of things of another sort with these, nothing honorable can proceed from such a composition. So here in the midst of this argument, we’re back on this sorites heap question again, which is where ultimately Cicero is placing his reliance on this logical game of saying that a theme must be perfectly pure in order to be considered to exist — as in the analogy used earlier, Joshua, an onion which contains a part that is rotten should be considered to be a rotten onion, which presumably means you’re going to throw the thing away and consider it to be corrupted, as opposed to simply cutting out the bad part and using the part that’s not bad. If you consider that a rotten onion is totally unacceptable, then you won’t even make an effort to cut out the bad part and use the good part.
Is that the way that we should be looking at life — as a rotten onion to be thrown away because a part of it contains something that we don’t like? Or is it the better point of view to look at reality and say that reality does include some things we don’t like, but there’s a lot more reason to like reality than there is to dislike it, and so we’re going to stick with reality and not invent our own reality to take its place. Joshua, I realized that in talking about the heap there I’ve jumped into Section 15, and we’ll come back to that next week when we read Section 15 in full. But the basic issue that we should close today on is this question: whether we should look at virtue or happiness as something that is pure and unadulterated, and that if we have any deviation from absolute purity then we don’t have the thing itself. We cannot be happy unless we are absolutely happy. We cannot be virtuous unless we’re absolutely virtuous. And what our attitude towards that problem should be.
Joshua:
Well, and this is a cultural obsession for these people, and it doesn’t start with virtue. It doesn’t start with happiness — it starts with nature. It was Heraclitus in his view that everything was in flux, and the view of people like Plato building upon that, that said we can’t rely on our senses. We can’t look to a sensory grasp or a sensory understanding of what is in nature and use that as a guide, because this is something that is flawed and imperfect. And it’s from there that he jumps to his allegory of the cave, which is: what we’re really looking for as we’re trapped in this flickering world of continuous becoming — what we really need to do is transcend the cave, get out of it, and ascend into the world of pure and perfect being. And that distinction is kind of iterated across every aspect of all of the questions that divide these thinkers, and virtue is one in a long chain, but it’s certainly not the only area where someone like Plato or Cicero is demanding perfection or demanding a kind of absolutism in their view of these things.
We see it in the allegory of the cave, in Plato and in Socrates and in their reliance on geometry — that by using the unchanging and perfect definitions of geometry, and transferring those principles from the world of mathematics into the world of ethics and into the world of justice, and looking for that all-important permanence, that unchanging nature which is the subject of their whole inquiry, we’re looking for something that is immutably good, immutably perfect, immutably reliable in a way that sensation and the pursuit of pleasure and the claims of the body as opposed to the mind — these things are not reliable to someone like Plato or Cicero. So that’s kind of what we’re up against. And as I said, it’s not just in the ethics that we run into this. The real foundation of this is in the physics — it’s in this argument about nature and about whether mere sensation is reliable as a guide to nature.
And Epicurus of course thinks that it is, and someone like Plato is going to absolutely reject that view. You have to use logic, reason, dialectic. We have to find a way to lift this conversation out of this world of flux and up into the light and air of pure and perfect being. And for as long as the conversation is held on those grounds, Epicurus is arguing against the crowd — against all of these people. As Socrates himself said: “The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal.” And he’s talking about geometry as a key to open that door, but the thing that’s driving us to do this is the love of wisdom and the pursuit of a life lived according to it. And for someone like Plato, that means finding things that are perfect and unchanging and eternal. And the reality is that for Epicurus, this is an illusory pursuit. The only things that are eternal and unchanging are the atoms themselves. No compound made of atoms can ever possibly last forever, and it would certainly be an error to look for this kind of perfection in things which are bounded merely by words.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, I think you’re exactly right. The issue ultimately comes down to this question of the nature of reality and the nature of the universe. Epicurus grounds his position that there is nothing eternal but the atoms — that they are moving through the void eternally and infinitely — but that, as you said, the compounds that come from the atoms are not in themselves eternal. A thing is going to last only so long as it can sustain itself from being destroyed by outside blows. As Lucretius and Epicurus talk about, the very idea that there is anything eternal is not supported by anything we can see or touch or verify through our senses, because in fact everything that we do see through our senses is constantly changing. But the idea that everything is changing is not reason to just despair and reject what life does have to offer. Just because things are not eternal does not make them bad.
As you talked about with the cave analogy, Socrates and Plato and Cicero are looking for something outside of our reality that they would prefer to find, and it’s very seductive — because if such a realm did exist, any of us would wish to be there, go there, do that, and participate in that. Eternal life would be desirable if it were available. Perfection is desirable where it is available. But perfection that does not exist becomes an enemy of what does exist. If you allow your mental constructions to compare the two and decide that reality is wanting in comparison to your fantasy of perfection, Epicurus is warning against that in virtually every aspect of his philosophy. You are right that the majority of philosophers go in another direction, but the fact that they are more numerous does not make them correct. And each of us has to come to our own position, our own understanding about what is correct and what is not correct, because that serves as the basis for all of our other ethical decisions. Okay, we’ll come back next week and go into the full text of Section 15 and discuss these issues further. In the meantime, we invite you to drop by the forum if you have any comments or questions about these discussions. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.