Episode 313 - TD40 - Diagnosing When Words Are Empty Of Meaning
Listen to “Episode 313 - Diagnosing When Words Are Empty Of Meaning” on Spreaker.
Welcome to Episode 313 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.
Last week we began to close in on the end of our coverage of Tusculan Disputations, and one of the points made last week was that while a lot of philosophy can be viewed by non-specialists as a word game, there are deep differences in the foundations of the different schools that lead to dramatically different conclusions about how to live. The words can begin to blur together, and the definition-games can become tedious, but it is extremely important to know what is behind the analysis of any viewpoint in order to judge the ultimate result.
This issue of whether virtue is the only good, or whether virtue is sufficient for happiness, has tremendous practical implications. Who or what gets to decide what “good” is? Who or what gets to decide what “virtue” is? Who or what gets to decide what “happiness” is? Behind the Stoic / Platonic / non-Epicurean viewpoint is this idea that there are supernatural gods, or supernatural ideal forms, to which we should look to tell us what to do rather than the sense of pleasure and pain which Nature gives to each of us individually. The choice of school you choose to follow is therefore going to have tremendous implications on your life individually, socially, religiously, politically, and in probably every way imaginable.
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 313 continues from Episode 312 on word games versus reality, now using the heap/sorites paradox as the primary analytical lens. Cassius opens with an extended discussion of Epicurus’s famous passage from Long and Sedley’s Hellenistic Philosophers (TD Book 3, §41-42), where Cicero quotes Epicurus saying he cannot conceive of the good if he removes the pleasures of taste, sex, music, and beautiful sights. Epicurus uses this as a diagnostic method: strip away every individual pleasure, and you are left with nothing but empty words — virtue and wisdom without these pleasures are merely the way those pleasures are produced.
Joshua connects the heap problem to essentialism: Platonic idealism and Aristotelian essentialism hold that objects have an essence making them what they are — a view the Wikipedia article on essentialism notes was undermined by Darwin’s evolutionary biology, which shows species as a color gradient over time with no essential dividing line. Cassius ties this to Ayn Rand’s use of Aristotle’s A=A and Richard Dawkins’s critique of essentialism.
The episode then sets up a contrast between two portraits of the best life. First, Joshua reads Torquatus’s Epicurean picture from De Finibus Book 1 (Rackham translation): a man living in continuous pleasures of body and mind, free from fear of death and supernatural forces, understanding pain as light if prolonged and brief if intense — with wisdom valued only as the means to produce those pleasures. Then Joshua reads Cicero’s counter-portrait from TD Sections 23-25, skipping over the digression on the sword of Damocles and Archimedes: Cicero’s ideal wise man has three qualifications — extraordinary intellectual capacity; love of discovering truth through astronomical contemplation (which leads the mind to perceive its connection with divine reason, exemplified by Claudius Ptolemy in the Almagest dining on ambrosia in the presence of Zeus); and the logical arts of disputing and distinguishing, applied also to protecting the republic.
Cassius identifies the key flaw: Cicero, following Plato and Aristotle, “chops men up into body and mind and just discards the body.” Every component Cicero cites is mental and civic; bodily pleasures are excluded entirely. Torquatus’s Epicurean picture, by contrast, considers all aspects of life — mental and bodily. Lorenzo Valla and Cosimo Raimondi are cited as Renaissance critics making the same point. Raimondi’s letter is quoted in closing: “Since we are composed of a mind and a body, why do they leave out of this account of human happiness something that is part of mankind and properly pertains to it?”
Section 26 — Cicero’s question of whether the wise man is happy even on the rack — is deferred to the next episode.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 313 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 continuing to close in on the end of those parts of Tusculan Disputations that are most relevant to Epicurean philosophy, and we’re going to pick and choose among the remaining sections and go through some of the highlights. As a reminder of where we are: one of the points that we made last week was that a lot of philosophy can appear to look like an impractical word game, and yet there are deep differences in the various schools that can lead to dramatically different applications in terms of how we should live. The terms the schools use can begin to blur together and get very confusing, but it’s important to know what’s behind the terminology so you can predict what the result is going to be when you try to apply that school’s ideas.
The issue that we’ve been looking at over the last several weeks is whether we should consider virtue to be the only good, and whether virtue is sufficient for happiness. From the viewpoint of the Stoics and the Platonists and most other non-Epicurean philosophers, the answer to those questions is yes, but that’s not the answer that Epicurus gives. Epicurus tells us to look behind the words to get to the heart of the issues: who or what gets to decide what virtue really is? Who or what gets to decide what good is? Who or what gets to decide what happiness is? Behind the Stoic and the Platonic and these other non-Epicurean viewpoints, you’ll find that there are supernatural gods or ideal forms or words like “essences,” and those other philosophers tell us to look to those to determine how to live rather than to the feelings of pleasure and pain that nature gives us.
That’s why the choice of what school to follow is so important. Today we’re going to look at two related questions. One question is the role of the mind, reason, or logic in answering these questions. Everyone, including Epicurus, places great stress on proper use of the mind; both the Stoics and Plato and these other schools consider the mind to be so superior to the body that the body really fades into the background, and in the end all that’s really important to those other schools is what we can control in our minds. That’s why the Stoics and the religions say that the only thing that matters really is virtue or piety, because those are within the mind and we can supposedly have total control over them; to them, nothing outside the mind is of any real importance. Another question is something that is known as the heap, or sorites paradox.
The name sounds confusing, but the issue is not really that hard to understand. Think about what we might call a heap or a pile of sand. It’s easy to understand that what we’re thinking about are grains of sand stacked together in one place, but how many grains of sand must we have to constitute a heap? If we start removing grains of sand one by one, do we ever find something that has the word “heap” written on it — some one thing that makes a heap a heap? The answer Epicurus gives us is that a heap of sand is made up of the grains of sand that compose it, but the Stoics and the Platonists and even Aristotle give a very different answer. They say that there’s such a thing as an ideal form or an essence of a heap, and that what makes something in front of us a heap is that it shares what they call a metaphysical relationship with their ideal or their essential heap.
They don’t always tell us this, but what they really mean most of the time is that they think an all-powerful creator God has established what a heap is — that the only way we can be sure that what’s in front of us is a heap is to use their logic or mathematics or their divine revelation to understand what a heap is. They generally disagree among themselves about exactly how to do that, but the one thing they generally do agree on is that we cannot trust our own eyes or our own senses to determine what a heap is. And that’s exactly what Epicurus tells us to do. In that context, last week Joshua mentioned the analogy of a spectrum of colors, and how when you look at one end of the spectrum you can very clearly see that the color at one end is very different from the color at the other end, but as you move incrementally across the spectrum from one slight change in shade to another it becomes difficult to distinguish and the shades become very close to each other.
If you try to analogize life to a mathematical formula or a geometric problem and you try to say that A is equal to B and B is equal to C and therefore A is equal to C, the difficulty is always in the details of what A and B and C really are — just as in the spectrum of colors. One color that’s very close to another is very similar, but the further away you get in distance on that spectrum, the more clear the difference between the colors becomes. Last week Cicero briefly mentioned the heap problem, but previously in Sections 41 and 42 of Part Three of Tusculan Disputations he had quoted Epicurus and connected the heap problem to the things that Epicurus was saying. It’s probably worth — given that we’re on this topic — going back to that for just a minute and hopefully drawing some conclusions about what really is at stake. The passage I’m about to read comes from Long and Sedley’s Hellenistic Philosophers translation of that section.
Starting with a quotation from Epicurus himself, where Cicero says that Epicurus had written about the pleasures of taste and sex and so forth. Here’s the quotation: “For my part, I cannot conceive of anything as the good if I remove the pleasures perceived by means of taste and sex and listening to music and the pleasant motions felt by the eyes through beautiful sights or any other pleasures which some sensation generates in a man as a whole. Certainly it is impossible to say that mental delight is the only good, but a delighted mind as I understand it consists in the expectation of all the things I just mentioned to be of a nature able to acquire them without pain.” And then Cicero says a little later: “Epicurus adds: I have often asked men who were called wise what they could retain as the content of goods if they removed those things, unless they wanted to pour out empty words. I could learn nothing from them, and if they want to babble on about virtues and wisdom, they will be speaking of nothing except the way in which those pleasures I mentioned are produced.”
Okay, that’s the end of that quotation. We will often cite Epicurus talking about the pleasures of taste and sex and not knowing good without them, to emphasize that Epicurus clearly considered the stimulations of the body to be part of his concept of pleasure — an important part of it, and not just the mental pleasures, which he also admits as pleasures. Epicurus has a wider view of pleasure that includes both. But it appears that this quotation was probably related to Epicurus discussing this bigger issue. The specific way it’s stated is that he wouldn’t know what the good is if he removed them, and that becomes a method of analysis. It’s just like the color spectrum that Joshua brought up: what would the spectrum consist of if you started removing each of the individual colors within it? Would there be something left — when the colors themselves are removed — that continues to be there?
That’s the way Epicurus is approaching this question of the good. He’s saying: I can list many types of goods, both of mind and of body, but if I start removing each and every single example of these goods, is there anything left? The implication is that this term which we’ve called “the good” — just like “the spectrum of colors” — does not have a separate existence apart from the individual instances of colors or of pleasures that compose it. And Epicurus is very clearly saying: if you remove all of these examples of things that are good, then you’re left with nothing but empty words. To talk about virtue and wisdom without talking about these particular examples in which they manifest themselves is to speak essentially of nothing — virtue and wisdom in this context become nothing except the way in which these pleasures are produced.
So the benefit of approaching these questions through the heap problem is that it focuses your attention on the question of whether there is any kind of ideal form, or any kind of divine communication from some God, that tells you there’s a class of things apart from the individual instances that belong to that class. Rather than giving up on tools of analysis such as reason, the way to deal with the confusion that gamesmanship can sometimes cause is to understand the game so that you can successfully see through the deceptions that can be involved with it. Now in this context of evaluating the good life according to good things — evaluating happiness according to the pleasures of which it is composed — we can also evaluate the best life in terms of what its components would be. We have previously in On Ends Book One seen how Torquatus presented the Epicurean position — how to understand what the best life might be by itemizing the components of the best life and giving us an example of the characteristics of what would make up the best life. As we move forward today, we’re going to see Cicero give his own picture and his own list of components of the best life from an anti-Epicurean, Stoic, Academic Skeptic point of view.
Joshua:
Yeah, it is surprising, Cassius, the number of applications we find of this sorites syllogism in discussing Greek philosophy, and we could take it down to any number of rabbit holes. Before I get into the Torquatus section, let me read just the first paragraph here from the Wikipedia page on essentialism. It says: “Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an essence — an idea or form. In his Categories, Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that, as George Lakoff put it, make the thing what it is and without which it would not be that kind of thing. The contrary view, non-essentialism, denies the need to posit such an essence. Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. In the Parmenides dialogue, Plato depicts Socrates questioning the notion, suggesting that if we accept the idea that every beautiful thing or just action partakes of an essence to be beautiful or just, we must also accept the existence of separate essences for hair, mud, and dirt.”
And then Wikipedia goes on to explain that in biology and other natural sciences, essentialism provided the rationale for taxonomy — at least until the time of Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species and the development of evolutionary biology by natural selection. And suddenly we do have, with this genetic history of the living things on earth, a kind of color spectrum or gradient where if you compare the parent generation and the child generation they seem quite similar, but if you go a million years either side you end up with something that looks completely different. And so we have to choose a dividing line because there is no clear or essential definition of what makes a lizard a lizard, because over time we know that the successive generations of lizards are going to develop into something new and different with different genetic information. So it’s very interesting to see how this stuff comes up in all kinds of cases.
Cassius:
Joshua, those listeners of our podcast who might be familiar with Ayn Rand will know that one of her major themes was to quote Aristotle saying A equals A — a thing is itself. But it doesn’t really answer a question to say that a thing is itself unless you have additional information. Is the thing partaking of an ideal form? Is it partaking of an essence? Or is a thing composed of atoms moving through the void in an individual way at a particular time? I know that we’ve cited a number of times in the past as well that there is an article by Richard Dawkins that criticizes essentialism very much along the lines that you’ve just mentioned. So you’ve brought up some really interesting material, and that takes us back to where Torquatus said: I’m going to show you that the life of pleasure is the best life by illustrating a set of circumstances that we can identify as being characteristic of the best man. Joshua is going to tell us how Torquatus did that using Epicurean philosophy, and then we’ll contrast it to what Cicero is going to say is the best life from this Platonic-Socratic-Pythagorean point of view.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s right, Cassius. I’m looking here at paragraph 12 from the Rackham translation of a very notable passage from the first book of On Ends. In this paragraph the Epicurean Torquatus makes the following claim. He says: “The truth of the position that pleasure is the ultimate good will most readily appear from the following illustration. Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures, alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain. What possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain. He will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration, at its continuance by diminishing severity.
“Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power. Let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.” And then he describes the contrary view of a man crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and bodily anguish with no hope of relief and no feeling of pleasure. And he says: “Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil, and this position implies that a life of pleasure is the ultimate good. In fact, the mind possesses nothing in itself upon which it can rest as final. Every fear, every sorrow can be traced back to pain. There is no other thing besides pain which is of its own nature capable of causing either anxiety or distress. Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure, but that which is not itself a means to anything else but to which all else is a means is what the Greeks term the telos — the highest, ultimate, or final good. It must therefore be admitted that the chief good is to live agreeably.”
That’s mostly the end of that, but he does go on to say something about virtue which is relevant to the whole fifth book of Tusculan Disputations: “Those who place the chief good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamor of a name and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues, but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science but for its conduciveness to health. The art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also wisdom — which must be considered as the art of living — if it effected no result would not be desired, but as it is, it is desired because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.” I’ll stop reading there. The reason that this passage in Torquatus is relevant is because we’re about to get into a passage here in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations when he describes the features of the life of the wise man — and in the works of Cicero, this presents the clearest parallel: what he holds to be the Epicurean view versus what he holds to be his own view of the good and of the life of wisdom.
Cassius:
Right, Joshua. Now, to emphasize what you just said — at the beginning of Section 24, for example, Cicero says, “But that what I propose to demonstrate to you may not rest on mere words alone, I must set before you a picture of something as it were living and moving in the world.” And so that’s basically what we’re doing here, and it relates to the heap problem. The question before us is: what is the relationship between the big picture and the details of the picture? What is the relationship between the color spectrum and the individual colors? What is the relationship between “good” as a concept versus the individual goods that would make up a good life? Is there something beyond that exists in a world of ideal forms, emanated by God, that relates the big picture to the individual pieces — that relates the forest to the trees?
In the point of view of Cicero, Plato, and all these other guys, there is some hidden, external, otherworldly, ideal, essential factor that explains how the individual pieces come together into the big picture. And Epicurus is taking the opposite position — that the picture is the sum of its components. The pleasant life is the sum of individual pleasures, but there’s no other dimension in which the sum exists on its own. And that’s why Epicurus says that if you start removing every individual mental and bodily pleasure, there’s nothing left — you’re talking empty words about what good is. Just as if you remove from the living human being every sensation, as he says in Principal Doctrine Number Two, then there’s nothing left, because all good and evil comes to us through sensation — individual experiences. It’s not some otherworldly factor that we have to use geometry or mathematics or syllogistic logic to get into contact with. Our reality comes to us through our sensations, anticipations, and feelings, and not through some other propositional logic method. It is not necessary to know geometry in order to live a happy life, as Plato might suggest.
Joshua:
That’s right. You mentioned geometry just now, and we are skipping from Section 15 to Section 23 in the text from last week because Cicero goes on a digression through a bunch of anecdotes and passages from poetry. While there’s a whole lot of interest there — he talks about the sword of Damocles, he talks about the life of a tyrant and how that relates to the central question of virtue, and then he talks about Archimedes and Cicero’s own rediscovery of the lost tomb or grave of Archimedes — we are moving ahead to Section 23, where Cicero starts this way: “But to return to the subject from which I have been digressing, who is there in the least degree acquainted with the Muses — that is, with liberal knowledge or that deals at all in learning — who would not choose to be this mathematician rather than that tyrant? Who would not choose, in other words, to be Archimedes rather than Dionysius, the tyrant he was talking about.
“If we look into their methods of living and their employments, we shall find the mind of the one strengthened and improved with tracing the deductions of reason, amused with his own ingenuity, which is the most delicious food of the mind; the thoughts of the other engaged in continual murders and injuries, in constant fears by night and day. Now, imagine Democritus, Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras — what kingdom, what riches would you prefer to their studies and amusements? For you must necessarily look for that excellence which we are seeking for in that which is the most perfect part of man. But what is there better in man than a sagacious and good mind? The enjoyment therefore of that good which proceeds from that sagacious mind alone can make us happy. But virtue is the good of the mind; it follows therefore that a happy life depends on virtue. Hence proceed all things that are beautiful, honorable, and excellent. As I said above, this point must I think be treated of more at large, and they are well stored with joys — for as it is clear that a happy life consists in perpetual and undisturbed pleasures, it follows too that a happy life must arise from honesty.”
Cassius:
Joshua, just like last week when you were disagreeing with Cicero’s analysis, the part of this analysis that jumps out at me as questionable is where he says, “For you must necessarily look for that excellence which we are seeking for in that which is the most perfect part of man, but what is there better in man than a sagacious and good mind?” It’s like he’s chopping men up into body and mind and just discarding the body and saying the mind is all that’s important. I see that criticism raised by Cosimo Raimondi; I believe it’s raised by Lorenzo Valla as well, and it’s a common criticism of the Stoic approach — that you’re going to take one piece of the human and say that this is what’s important and ignore the rest. And the truth is that we are both a mind and a body, and you cannot legitimately analyze the best life, the goal of life, without taking both into account. But what Cicero is doing there is exactly that — he’s saying, let’s look to the most perfect part of a man as our guidance instead of looking to the whole being.
Joshua:
Exactly. And within that context we can make sense of the last line there where he says, “For as it is clear that a happy life consists in perpetual and undisturbed pleasures, it follows too that a happy life must arise from honesty.” The pleasures that he’s talking about are the intellectual pleasures of the liberal arts — the study of geometry, the study of language, the study of history as with his discovery of the tomb of Archimedes, and the study of philosophy. These are the pleasures with which he’s interested, and the rest of them he’s not even willing to consider; the pleasures of the body are right out of the equation. So in Section 24, he says: “But that what I propose to demonstrate to you may not rest on mere words only, I must set before you the picture of something as it were living and moving in the world that may dispose us more for the improvement of the understanding and real knowledge.
“Let us then pitch upon some man perfectly acquainted with the most excellent arts. Let us present him for a while to our own thoughts and figure him to our own imaginations. In the first place he must necessarily be of an extraordinary capacity, for virtue is not easily connected with dull minds. Secondly, he must have a great desire of discovering truth, from whence will arise that threefold production of the mind: one of which depends on knowing things and explaining nature; the other on defining what we ought to desire and what to avoid; the third in judging of consequences and impossibilities, in which consists both subtlety in disputing and also clearness of judgment. Now with what pleasures must the mind of a wise man be affected which continually dwells in the midst of such cares and occupations as these, when he views the revolutions and motions of the whole world and sees those innumerable stars in the heavens which, though fixed in their places, have yet one motion in common with the whole universe, and observes the seven other stars, some higher, some lower, each maintaining their own course, while their motions though wandering have certain defined and appointed spaces to run through. The sight of which doubtless urged and encouraged those ancient philosophers to exercise their investigating spirit on many other things.
“Hence arose an inquiry after the beginnings and as it were seeds from which all things were produced and composed: what was the origin of every kind of thing, whether animate or inanimate, articulately speaking or mute; what occasion did their beginning and end; and by what alteration and change one thing was converted into another; once the earth originated and by what weights it was balanced; by what caverns the seas were supplied; by what gravity all things being carried down tend always to the middle of the world, which in any round body is the lowest point.” Continuing directly into Section 25, Cicero says: “A mind employed on such subjects and which night and day contemplates them contains in itself that precept of the Delphic oracle — ‘Know Thyself’ — so as to perceive its connection with the divine reason, from whence it is filled with an insatiable joy. For reflections on the power and nature of the gods raise in us a desire of imitating their eternity, nor does the mind that sees the necessary dependencies and connections that one cause has with another think it possible that it should be itself confined to the shortness of this life.
“Those causes, though they proceed from eternity to eternity, are governed by reason and understanding, and he who beholds them and examines them — or rather he whose view takes in all the parts and boundaries of things — with what tranquility of mind does he look on all human affairs and on all that is nearer him. Hence proceeds the knowledge of virtue; hence arise the kinds and species of virtues; hence are discovered those things which nature regards as the bounds and extremities of good and evil; by this it is discovered to what all duties ought to be referred and which is the most eligible manner of life. And when these and similar points have been investigated, the principal consequence which is deduced from them, and that which is our main object in this discussion, is the establishment of the point that virtue is of itself sufficient to a happy life.
“The third qualification of our wise man is the next to be considered, which goes through and spreads itself over every part of wisdom. It is this whereby we define each particular thing, distinguish the genus from its species, connect consequences, draw just conclusions, and distinguish truth from falsehood — which is the very art and science of disputing, which is not only of the greatest use in the examination of what passes in the world but is likewise the most rational entertainment and that which is most becoming to true wisdom. Such are its effects in retirement. Now let our wise man be considered as protecting the republic. What can be more excellent than such a character? By his prudence he will discover the true interests of his fellow citizens; by his justice he will be prevented from applying what belongs to the public to his own use; and in short he will be ever governed by all the virtues, which are many and various.
“To these let us add the advantages of his friendships, in which the learned reckon not only a natural harmony and agreement of sentiments throughout the conduct of life but the utmost pleasure and satisfaction in conversing and passing our time constantly with one another. What can be wanting to such a life as this to make it more happy than it is? Fortune herself must yield to a life stored with such joys. Now if it be a happiness to rejoice in such goods of the mind — that is to say, in such virtues — and if all wise men enjoy thoroughly these pleasures, it must necessarily be granted that all wise men are happy.”
Cassius:
Joshua, it really is striking how parallel that is to the way it had been framed by Torquatus in Book One of On Ends — that here Cicero is setting up the picture of what he is contending is the best way of life, the best human being, and the factors on which he’s basing that best life. The components that he’s citing are just so different in many ways from what Torquatus had cited Epicurus as saying — oriented towards, in Cicero’s point of view, a divine will; that this best person is going to be concerned about the state in the sense of a government, a people, a republic, as opposed to the way Torquatus states it in terms of individual happiness.
Joshua:
Yeah, so let’s review the three conditions he says of what make the wise and happy mind. He says a man with this mind must necessarily be of an extraordinary capacity — so there’s a certain amount of intelligence required to begin this project, because virtue is not easily connected with dull minds. And then he says secondly, he must have a great desire for discovering truth: explaining nature, defining what we ought to desire and what to avoid, and judging consequences and impossibilities. And then he says the third qualification of the wise man is that part of the mind which sifts through information and deals with definition — distinguishing genus from species, connecting consequences, drawing just conclusions, and distinguishing truth from falsehood. So it’s really the intellect that is under consideration here as the third qualification of the wise man.
Cassius:
And that’s one way of contrasting all of this: each of these major components that Cicero is citing is mental — very much focused on the activities of the mind. Whereas what Torquatus was explaining as Epicurus’s point of view seems much wider — that the best life is one in which you’re surrounded by all sorts of pleasures of body and of mind, that you have an understanding of divinity in which you understand that it’s not a threat, that you have an understanding of death so that it’s not going to cause you a problem either, that you have an understanding of pain as something that is manageable and cannot hold you in its grip forever. All of the Torquatus-Epicurean analysis seems to me to consider all aspects of life — mental and bodily — while Cicero’s model through Plato, Aristotle, and the rest is focused exclusively on the mind.
Joshua:
Exactly, and we’re not going to get into this today, but the very next thing the student says after what I just read is: will such a man still be happy even when he’s in torments and on the rack? In other words, when his body is being subjected to torture. And of course we already know the answer, because for Cicero he will still be happy — and in fact no less happy than he would be in any other circumstance — because all of the good in life centers on what exists for us in the mind, something that’s in our control, and these accidents that happen to the body — when you consider things rightly and when you cultivate and develop virtue and devote your life to it — are something that you can just shake off and return to the mind where things are in your control.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, as you just said, let’s defer Section 26 until next week, because he’s going to immediately pick up his criticisms again of Epicurus. He’s going to pick up not the sorites heap question, but the question of what about when we’re under torture — what about when we’re on the rack? It’s fascinating how they go back time and time again to the heap analogy, the question of the wise man on the rack, the question of whether you’re still happy even when you’re under torture. These are useful hypotheticals that focus the mind on deciding: is there an essence to something? What is the difference between the one and the many? Are there universals? What is it that makes a heap a heap? What is it that makes good good? Using these examples to dramatize the question. So we’ll come back to that next week, but lining up Epicurus’s picture of the best life versus Cicero’s picture of the best life is I think a very good way to dramatize the differences.
Epicurus is based on the whole person — body and mind — whereas this Ciceronian-Platonic standard Greek model attempts to elevate the mind and uses as its justification for doing that this idea of a divine origin, a divine purpose. If you did not have that divine purpose — if you could not argue that there’s a life after death, that there’s a God behind everything — it would make no sense to go in this direction of postulating these ideals and these divine goals. And yet today when people talk about Stoicism or about Platonism, they put those issues aside and say, well, this is very intricate and the techniques that people are using, we can just pick and choose however we wish to put things together. But the target, the goal, the ultimate big picture always has to be kept in mind, because what you’re doing at a particular moment could end up being disastrous if you don’t have the big picture as your goal.
That’s why you sometimes choose pain — it can be disastrous not to choose something that’s painful in the short run. If you don’t understand that the big picture is pleasure and that you’re going to do what is appropriate and necessary, including sometimes choosing pain in order to achieve pleasure — you’re not doing what you do in order to achieve a life in heaven after death, because there is no such thing; you’re not doing what you do in order to appease a supernatural God who is telling you what to do, because that does not exist; you are not doing what you choose to do in life because you have an ideal form by which you are modeling your life, because that does not exist. What Epicurus tells you exists is pleasure and pain as revealed to you through nature and the sensations and the anticipations, and that is the basis for your choosing what to do every moment of your life. So let’s begin to come to a conclusion. Any final thoughts as we close for today?
Joshua:
At the end of Section 24 here, Cicero is talking about his second qualification of what makes this imagined virtuous ideal man, and the second qualification is to have a great desire for discovering truth — and partially this means looking at the revolutions and motions of the whole world and the innumerable stars in the heavens, which though fixed in their place have yet one motion in common with the whole universe, and the seven other planets, some higher some lower, which each maintain their own course while their motions though wandering have certain defined and appointed spaces to run through. So it’s interesting to me that, just as in the Letter to Pythocles, part of the study of nature means looking to celestial and atmospheric phenomena and trying to determine what’s going on up there.
And one of the people to do this — in the second century AD, presumably in Egypt — was a man named Claudius Ptolemy, and he wrote a book called the Almagest, which means “the greatest” or “the highest,” perhaps because he’s dealing with celestial phenomena, which is the highest subject to be studied in nature — it’s literally above our heads. But there’s a very famous passage in this book. He’s talking about what Cicero is talking about here — the difference between the fixed and wandering stars, in other words between what we now know to be other stars like our sun, and the wandering planets (in fact, the Greek word planos means “wanderer”). Claudius Ptolemy in his book says: “I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, my feet no longer touch the earth, but I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”
In other words, Cassius, what you were just talking about a moment ago with this Ciceronian project of elevating the mind — using virtue and the mind of the virtuous man to ascend to the level of the gods — this is precisely what Claudius Ptolemy is talking about. He comes across this question in astronomy of these moving stars, the wandering stars or the planets — a question he can’t really answer given the math available to him at the time. And so instead of answering the question of what the difference is between the fixed and moving stars, he says: I just trace their windings to and fro in the sky, and when I do so, my feet no longer touch the earth, but I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia. In other words, he’s coming face to face with the transcendent — with something that is beyond his comprehension and something that is evidence of the mind of the gods at work in nature. And it’s this aspect of the mind of the philosopher that I think Cicero is really citing here as one component of the best life and the happiest life.
It’s not just that we seek to discover truth in nature and to discern the differences and definitions between words and concepts. The further point is, as Cicero says in Section 25: “A mind employed on such subjects and which night and day contemplates them contains in itself that precept of the Delphic oracle — ‘Know Thyself’ — so as to perceive its connection with the divine reason, from whence it is filled with an insatiable joy.” And that’s the insatiable joy that Claudius Ptolemy feels when he’s dining on the ambrosia of the gods in company with Zeus himself. And Cicero is saying: this is what the mind of philosophy, this is what the wise mind, the virtuous mind, allows us to do — by contemplating and studying these questions in nature, to perceive its own connection, the connection of the mind itself, with divine reason. This is the project of philosophy for Cicero.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, that is a very good way of emphasizing what I think is our theme for today. Cicero, Plato, all the guys that he is advocating against Epicurus — they are divorcing the mind from the body, trying to argue that the mind is divine and the mind is all that is important. Torquatus and Epicurus emphasize that humans are both mind and body and you have to take both into account. And in closing, there’s a section in a letter by Cosimo Raimondi that is directly on point. I’ll close with this quotation. He says: “If we were indeed composed solely of a mind, I should be inclined to call Regulus happy and entertain the Stoic view that we should find happiness in virtue alone. But since we are composed of a mind and a body, why do they leave out of this account of human happiness something that is part of mankind and properly pertains to it?
“Why do they consider only the mind and neglect the body, when the body houses the mind and is the other half of what man is? If you are seeking the totality of something made up of various parts and yet some part is missing, I cannot think it perfect and complete. We use the term ‘human’ — I take it to refer to a being with both a mind and a body — in the same way that the body is not to be thought healthy when some part of it is sick. So man himself cannot be thought happy if he’s suffering in some part of himself.” That’s where I’ll leave it today. Again, it evokes the heap question: how do we relate the individual components to the whole? You have to consider the whole and not just each of the individual components separately. You don’t just segregate out the mind and say that that’s all that matters, as the Platonists are trying to do. Okay, well, with that, we’ll come back next week and take up Section 26 and other issues as we conclude Tusculan Disputations. In the meantime, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.