Episode 325 - The False Platonic Division of The Universe Into A Force Which Causes And That Which The Force Acts Upon
Welcome to Episode 325 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we start are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective. We are focusing first on what is referred to as Book One, which provides an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and gives us an overview of the philosophical issues being dealt with at the time of Epicurus. This week will will continue in Section 6
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 325 continues the Academic Questions series through the second half of Section 6 and into Section 7, focusing on the Platonist view of nature and physics — and the direct Epicurean contrast to it.
Cassius opens by recapping the ethical discussion from the previous week (Section 6’s treatment of the good and the problem of pleasure) and introducing the episode’s main theme: Varro’s presentation of the old Academy’s division of the universe into an active, efficient cause and passive matter. This duality — a force above and outside the material world acting upon it — is the opposite of the Epicurean view, in which the universe is self-contained, eternal, and consists only of matter and void with no external organizing force.
Joshua introduces Plato’s Timaeus as the philosophical source for this view of nature. He quotes Benjamin Jowett’s introduction to the dialogue, noting that it is the most obscure and influential of Plato’s works, and draws out the core distinction Timaeus makes between “being” (apprehended by reason alone) and “becoming” (apprehended by sensation and opinion, always changing, created). The sensible world — the world we can perceive — is for Timaeus always “becoming” and therefore inferior to the world of pure being. This means that the senses, by giving us access only to the world of becoming, give us access only to something that “never really is.”
Cassius highlights the critical contrast: for Epicurus, sensation is free of opinion — opinion only enters when the mind makes judgments. For Plato and Timaeus, sensation is inherently bound up with opinion and becoming, and therefore unreliable. DeWitt, Cassius notes, observed that Epicureans always discussed nature and canons together, because one’s epistemology is inseparable from one’s physics.
The episode then covers Section 7’s brief interlude on Latin philosophical vocabulary — Varro’s coining of the Latin word qualitas (from Plato’s Greek poiotes, meaning “what-ness”) to render Greek philosophical concepts in Latin, and the exchange between Atticus and Cicero on whether Greek words should be retained.
Cassius closes with an extended discussion of Nietzsche’s “Reason in Philosophy” from Twilight of the Idols, which he reads as a satirical attack — from a broadly Epicurean position — on the Platonic tradition’s “hatred of becoming,” its insistence that the senses lie, and its demand that the philosopher free himself from the world of appearances. Nietzsche names Heraclitus as the exception who did the senses justice. The conclusion drawn is that the Platonic claim of a “true world” beyond the senses is simply a lie, and that the apparent world accessible through the senses is the only one that exists.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 325 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 continue this week in a series devoted to going through Cicero’s Academic Questions, which of course in itself is not an Epicurean text, but which preserves for us important information about the positions that Epicurus was taking in regard to the major competing philosophies of the time. I’ve always thought the title Academic Questions was particularly dry, but the topics that are being covered here are some of the most important in philosophy as a whole and certainly in Epicurean philosophy, and we are about to move into some extremely deep material.
We’ve started off in recent weeks talking about the three divisions of philosophy that basically all the philosophers agreed on — that it helps to divide things into discussions of nature or physics, ethics or how to live, and then epistemology or the theory of knowledge, which in many aspects is considered by these other philosophers to be something that is involved with logic or dialectic, as opposed to the way Epicurus saw it, which becomes canons based on the senses, anticipations, and feelings, as opposed to the manipulation of words and ideas as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest in that line of philosophers began to focus on. Last week we were in Section Six in which we devoted most of the discussion to the question in ethics of the nature of good and whether good should be considered to be a single thing — either from the stark point of view embraced in virtue or from the Epicurean point of view embraced in pleasure — or whether it should be divided down into categories preferred by Aristotle and others who were extending the reasoning of Socrates and Plato into goods of the mind, goods of the body, and external goods, or things related to our condition in life that feed into the question of whether we are leading the happiest life possible.
In fact, that is another aspect of the question of discussing the good. The question becomes: is the good a single thing, is the good many things, and if the good is many things, if it can be divided down into different categories, which of these categories, which of these goods are necessary in order to lead a happy life? The question often comes down to whether it’s even appropriate to think about a happy life being something that is different from person to person. Can a particular happy life be happier than another happy life, or by saying that a life is happy have you said simply that you’ve reached the summit, that that is the ultimate good and that all men who are happy are in exactly the same condition? Those kinds of questions consumed the schools during this period of philosophy, with the Epicureans and the Stoics beginning to focus on answering that question by looking either to pleasure or virtue and using those terms, those concepts as ways to encapsulate the happy life — without being held hostage essentially to a categorization scheme in which you have to list out goods of the mind, goods of the body, and then all sorts of other things such as health, beauty, riches, fame, glory, power, and in which you have to have basically all of those things in order to say that you’re leading the happiest life possible.
We also discussed at length last week this issue that became magnified in Socrates and Plato of considering pleasure as something that not only is not a part of the happy life, but which is an enemy of the happy life. Joshua presented last week a very good discussion of parts of Plato’s Republic in which it becomes clear when you look at that analysis that the senses and pleasure were held by those philosophers to be not even something that’s nice to have if you can get it, but actual obstacles or enemies of the happiest life possible. Now, we’re pulling all that out of a discussion from Cicero in which he’s trying to argue that the Aristotelians, the Stoics, and those who consider themselves part of the old Academy might be saying it in a slightly different way, but they were basically on the same page — they were all agreeing that in the end, happiness comes down to virtue and that if you have virtue you’re at least well on your way to having the best life possible. We’re going to be continuing to talk about some of those issues, but let’s continue to move on by going further in Section Six and reading the rest of this section. We’ll stop there briefly and then we will move on to Section Seven. Let me now turn it over to see if Joshua has anything to add from last week and then let him proceed to finish Section Six for us.
Joshua:
So last week we finished up on ethics and concluded with reference to Plato’s Republic. This week we move on to the second division of philosophy dealing with nature and abstruse matters, and the ground we’re going to be covering as we talk about the Academic understanding of nature is ground covered by a different dialogue of Plato. It’s in the Timaeus, and I thought it was interesting to note what the translator Benjamin Jowett says about the Timaeus. He says, of all the writings of Plato, the Timaeus is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and medieval world. The obscurity arises in the infancy of physical science out of the confusion of theological, mathematical, and physiological notions, out of the desire to conceive the whole of nature without any adequate knowledge of the parts, and from a greater perception of similarities which lie on the surface than of differences which are hidden from view — to bring sense under the control of reason, to find some way through the mist or labyrinth of appearances, either the highway of mathematics or more devious paths suggested by the analogy of man with the world and of the world with man, to see that all things have a cause and are tending toward an end.
This is the spirit of the ancient physical philosopher, and what we’re going to be dealing with as we go into the material which Varro is adapting from the Timaeus. We are going to have a very breezy overview of the main points, but you can go as deep as you want to by looking at that dialogue, and I’ll try to pull out some bits. We’ll also have the Yonge translation side by side with the Rackham translation as we go through this to get the most clarity out of it, because this is an area of Platonism that I’m not that familiar with myself. So in Section Six of Academic Questions, we got through the first main large paragraph which was on ethics and those three divisions of goods in ethics, and then we come to the second division in philosophy, which is nature, and Varro is speaking once again and he says this.
He says, but concerning nature, for that came next, the early Academics spoke in such a manner that they divided it into two parts — making one efficient and the other lending itself, as it were, to the first as subject matter to be worked upon. And the Rackham translation says that they divided nature into two principles: the one active and the other passive, on which the active operated and out of which an entity was created. So you could say we have an efficient part of nature and a material part of nature, or we have an active part of nature and a passive part of nature. For that part which was efficient or active, they thought there was power; and in that which was made something by it, they thought there was some matter; and something of both in each. They considered that matter itself could have no cohesion unless it were held together by some power, and that power could have none without some matter to work upon — for that is nothing which is not necessarily somewhere. But that which exists from a combination of the two they called at once body, and a sort of quality, as it were. For you will give me leave in speaking of subjects which have not previously been in fashion to use at times words which have never been heard of, which indeed is no more than the Greeks themselves do who have been long in the habit of discussing these subjects.
Cassius:
Okay, thanks Joshua. I know you have a lot to add even though we’re going to be in the middle of a lot of very subtle material here. I do think it’s possible to keep the context clear about what we’re talking about. Varro is asserting on behalf of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the conventional Greek philosophers that they are looking at the totality of things as divided between the material of the universe versus something that’s above the universe and acting upon it. And you’ve already introduced the question of causes and so forth, things that are acting versus things that are acted upon, and I just want to call attention that their analysis presumes this duality of things — into a power of action that is over and above the material of the universe — which is totally contradictory to the way that Epicurus saw the universe, as everything resolving down into matter and void without any external power, anything external to the universe of matter and void to act upon it.
That all action, all events within our universe according to Epicurus take place naturally within the universe itself and that there’s nothing outside of it. So I know that’s pretty clear to most of us, but again, that’s the big picture to keep in mind as we proceed in looking at the Rackham material. Rackham uses terms like “active principle” and the other one being a “material,” so that there is an active principle acting on this other material. In the translation that we’re looking at, there’s a sidebar commentary that this is Antiochus’s physics — entities are matter informed by force — all of which leads to the same conclusion that these other philosophers had held, that there’s some force in the universe that is the organizing principle that leads everything to come into being in the way we see it around us.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s right. In the Timaeus dialogue, Socrates and Critias invite Timaeus — who they consider to be the best astronomer among them — to give a kind of summary description of nature, and Socrates says, I see that I shall receive in my turn a perfect and splendid feast of reason. And now, Timaeus, you I suppose should speak next after duly calling upon the gods. And Timaeus says, all men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon the gods. And we too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe — how created or how existing without creation — if we be not altogether out of our wits, must invoke the aid of gods and goddesses and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with themselves.
Let this then be our invocation of the gods, to which I add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most intelligible to you and will most accord with my own intent. And then he says this: first then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, what is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state, but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now, everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, but without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator — whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchanging pattern — must necessarily be made fair and perfect.
But when he looks to the created only and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect. And then he asks a question: was the heaven then, or the world — whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name, assuming the name I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning of an inquiry about anything — was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning, or was it created and had it a beginning? And Timaeus says, I replied that it was created, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible, and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation, and therefore are created. I’m going to stop there. We’ve got a lot going on here already. There is a key difference between the world that Timaeus is describing and the world of Epicurus.
In Epicurus’s epistemology, sense perception does not carry with it any opinion. Opinion is something that comes with judgment and something that comes with the application of reason to a problem. But what we’re getting here from Timaeus is exactly the opposite. He says that which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state, but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. So he’s saying that if the world as we approach it is conceived by sensation without reason, it is conceived by opinion and it is in the process of becoming. If we approach it with reason without sensation, that is without opinion, we appreciate the unchanging aspect of it — the part that’s always there. In other words, we return again to the ideal forms. He started this dialogue, by the way, with a summary of what they had already talked about in the Republic.
This is following directly on the heels of the Republic, and very early into this dialogue we get a core difference between the Platonist and the Epicurean view of nature — but not only nature, also of epistemology, how we approach and understand and learn about nature. And we make it very clear as well by returning to Timaeus that the view described here is one in which Timaeus is coming to the conclusion that the world and the heavens were created. He says they were created, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore they are sensible, and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation — the very fact that we can perceive them with our senses, in other words, is proof — all the proof that we need — that they are created. And then we get to the next question, which is: he says, now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause.
If you go back to the second section of Academic Questions, you have Cicero and Varro and they’re discussing style, the art of writing and how you should write. And Varro says this: he says, I did not choose to write treatises which unlearned men could not understand and learned men would not be at the trouble of reading. And you yourself are aware of this. For you have learned that we cannot resemble Amafinius and Rabirius, who without any art discuss matters which come before the eyes of everyone in plain ordinary language, giving no accurate definition, making no divisions, drawing no inferences by well-directed questions, and who appear to think that there is no such thing as any art of speaking or disputing. He says, but we in obedience to the precepts of the logicians and of orators also, as if they were positive laws, are compelled to use words, although they may be new ones, which learned men, as I’ve said before, will prefer taking from Greek and which unlearned men will not receive even from us, so that all our labor may be undertaken in vain.
He says, but now even if I approved of the doctrines of Epicurus, that is to say, I could write of natural philosophy in as plain a style as Amafinius — for what is the great difficulty when you have put an end to all efficient causes in speaking of the fortuitous concourse of corpuscles, for this is the name he gives to atoms? You know, our system of natural philosophy which depends upon the two principles — the efficient cause and the subject matter out of which the efficient cause forms and produces what it does produce — and then he says, for we must have recourse to geometry, since if we do not, in what words will anyone be able to enunciate the principles he wishes, or whom will he be able to cause to comprehend those assertions about life and manners and desiring and avoiding such and such things?
That’s quite a lot stirring around in the pot already, Cassius. But the key point is this: number one, in the world described by Timaeus, not only do we have to invoke the gods in any discussion of nature, we also have to recognize that nature itself was created, and that the evidence that nature was created is that it is perceptible by the senses — because it’s perceptible by the senses, we know that it is in a state of constant becoming rather than in a state of pure and perfect being. And it is precisely those things that are perceptible by the senses that are the most subject to dispute, because with sense perception that’s where opinion enters — in contrast to Epicurus, who thought that sense perception was free of opinion. Opinion doesn’t enter into it until you begin the process of rational judgment. As you listen to all of this, Cassius, how would you summarize where we are now? Is that making sense?
Cassius:
It is, Joshua. No doubt it is difficult, but it definitely makes sense, and again, it is very difficult to overstress the importance of this. I know in my own case I have spent many years being confused when I would encounter this discussion of being versus becoming. It seemed to me in the past that no one could fail to understand that being is something you want to be and therefore superior, and becoming is obviously something that is negative — if it’s changing, then surely no one would want something that changes over something that is eternal and does not change. And I realized that they were talking in these terms, but I don’t think I related it to the question of the senses and the true world versus the apparent world and issues of canons. Not that I fully understand it now by any means, but I can see where DeWitt makes the comment that the Epicureans would talk about nature and canons together frequently, combining the discussion, because they go hand in hand.
You have to have an understanding of the relationship between the realities of nature and your ability to understand things, and you have to take a position on where the senses stand in this process — whether they can be relied on or whether they are lying to you. And even now, I’m not sure I fully appreciate the extent of the dramatic difference in viewpoint between what we’ve been talking about — Varro and Cicero and Socrates and Plato advocating in favor of being and in favor of logic and dialectic, as opposed to becoming and the senses. But it’s becoming more clear to me over time that this is not just an academic question that we can sit back and toss around in our minds and think about, well, this is an interesting puzzle but it really doesn’t have anything to do with ethics and the way we live our lives.
So let’s just put it aside. And the reason we can’t do that is that this background is what’s going to form the total foundation for our decisions as to the best way to live. If we think that our world is a world of becoming, and that by definition — by the very fact that we can apprehend it and we are a part of it — it is inferior to some eternal realm of causes which are beyond our senses’ ability to appreciate, then I wouldn’t call that just setting ourselves up for failure. That’s worse than any Judeo-Christian view of mankind as a worm in relation to the perfection of God. It is a total perversion of this world and this reality and a rejection of it in favor of not just a nice mind game but an absolute lie about reality. As we go forward today, eventually I’m going to bring in some material from Nietzsche that I think states this in a much more eloquent way than I could ever do, but what you’ve done so far in setting up this discussion of causes and of being and becoming sets the table for us to begin to understand differences that are just not capable of being appreciated without this background.
If we had more of the original Epicurean texts, we would no doubt have the words of Epicurus and Philodemus and the other Epicureans in their own presentation of this analysis. Most of that is lost to us today, but the further you dig into the parallels between what Lucretius talks about versus what we see being talked about by Cicero in summarizing the other philosophers, the parallels are striking — they’re talking about the same things. The presentation that we have of those things in Plato, in these works of Cicero, is more refined because it’s more complete and we have it in a more final form passed down for the last two thousand years. If we look at that and understand the importance of the issue, we can then take the facts that are preserved in the Epicurean texts and understand the context in which they were stated and the implications jump out in a way that they don’t jump out if you just read through Lucretius and let the discussion of atoms and void glaze over your eyes.
And if you place it in the context of, oh, this is interesting science, it’s so much better that we know so much more today than Lucretius did, we can just look back at what Lucretius wrote and smile at our superiority today over the understanding that Epicurus and Lucretius had — I think of course that that is a dramatic mistake. And when you actually look at what they said, you see that they’re talking in conceptual, logical, conclusive terms about issues that the details of terminology don’t affect. So yes, Joshua, the material we’re discussing is dense, but it’s extremely important. And as we begin Section Seven, we’ll see Varro and Cicero making basically the same point — that it’s important for us to understand what the Greeks said, we need to be able to take their terminology and understand it in our own terms. In the case of Cicero, he was looking at translating it into Latin. In our case, we’re attempting to take both the Latin and the Greek and make it understandable in words we can use today. With that as background, let’s move into Section Seven.
Joshua:
So Varro ended Section Six by saying, for you will give me leave, in speaking of subjects which have not previously been in fashion, to use at times words which have never been heard of, which indeed is no more than the Greeks themselves do who have been long in the habit of discussing these subjects. And then Atticus replies: to be sure we will. Moreover, you may even use Greek words when you wish, if by chance you should be at a loss for Latin ones. And Varro says, you are very kind, but I will endeavor to express myself in Latin except in the case of such words as these — philosophia, rhetorica, physica, or dialectica — which, like many others, fashion already sanctions as if they were Latin. I therefore have called those things “qualities” (qualitas in Latin), which the Greeks call poiotes — a word which even among the Greeks is not one in ordinary use but is confined to philosophers.
And let me read a footnote from the Rackham text on that. The footnote says, Cicero apologizes for coining the word qualitas to render poiotes — a term coined by Plato. The Latin abstract noun, like the Greek, is used for the concrete: a thing of a certain quality, an object possessing certain properties. So poiotes and qualitas both are meant to mean something like “what-ness.” Both Plato and Cicero have invented a word, they’ve coined a new word to try to grapple with this philosophical concept. That’s what they’re discussing at the moment. And Varro continues: he says, and the same rule applies to many other expressions. As for the dialecticians, they have no terms in common use — they use technical terms entirely. And the case is the same with nearly every art, for men must either invent new names for new things or else borrow them from other subjects.
And if the Greeks do this, who have now been engaged in such matters for so many ages, how much more ought this license to be allowed to us who are now endeavoring to deal with these subjects for the first time? And then Cicero himself replies: he says, O Varro, it appears to me that you will deserve well of your fellow countrymen if you enrich them not only with an abundance of new things, as you have done, but also of words. We will venture then, said Varro, to employ new terms if it be necessary, armed with your authority and sanction. It’s interesting to note there that Atticus — as the name implies, very fond of Athens and of all things Greek — is the one to propose using Greek words, and Cicero is the one — the bulwark of Roman culture — to suggest that Varro continue to do what he has done and use Latin words to enrich their fellow countrymen.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, this little excursion into Latin versus Greek words might not seem particularly important, but there are many aspects to it, and maybe the most important of which is to simply emphasize what they understood as well — that we have to be able to grasp the meaning of these concepts in our own minds if we’re going to make use of them. And these Greek philosophers were using terminology that they themselves didn’t use all that often, but they were trying to get to something that needs to be understood. And that really is in many ways not all that difficult. It becomes difficult when you break things down in so many different ways and use technical words, which become a sort of jargon — a sort of power trip for those people who are able to reference in their minds the particular philosopher who came up with it or the particular meaning of a particular word in a particular context.
But as always is the case, the big issues of life are much more general than questions of who said it first, how did they say it, and what words did they use? What we’re going to find as we proceed through Section Seven is that we’re going to come fairly quickly back to the ultimate question again about whether the universe was created by an outside force or whether in fact the universe is eternal. And that is going to be the big picture. This question of the intermediate steps about how you describe the processes and procedures in getting to that conclusion are definitely important, but they’re the easiest to understand when you keep the context in mind. For example, in the list of Greek words that you referenced — rhetorica, physica, dialectica — we can pick up that we understand philosophy, we understand physics, but the meaning of words like rhetorica or dialectica are not nearly so familiar to most of us. And in the case of dialectica, that’s the word that is being used in most cases here by Cicero’s line of philosophy to describe this issue of knowledge.
Joshua:
That’s right. And there’s a footnote also in the Rackham edition that says logic — including both formal logic and epistemology, or the theory of knowledge — included both dialectic and rhetoric. So dialectic and rhetoric together go up to make what they called logic.
Cassius:
Great point, Joshua. And that focuses what I was saying — that Cicero’s philosophers are focusing knowledge on dialectic, on rhetoric, on logic, on the processing of words, as opposed to the processing of the senses. And here’s where I’d like to bring in an external reference. Joshua does a great job of bringing in other references that I would never be able to find myself, but it happens today that I came across this in a section of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols that I think is directly on point. And I use it not because we should accept that it might be correct because Nietzsche said it — I am myself very unfamiliar with most of Nietzsche’s work — but it does help us when people listen to our podcasts and our podcasters talk about things not part of our lifelong training that we’re trying to get as accurate as we possibly can. It’s helpful to look to recognizable names who are saying something similar. And for those people who want to explore these issues more deeply, they can go to the discussions of this in both Nietzsche himself and in the many commentators on Nietzsche, and they’re going to find that Nietzsche is expressing something very similar to what Joshua and I are trying to express in translating Epicurean philosophy and applying it to what we’re reading in Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Cicero, and the like.
What I’m about to quote from is a section called “Reason in Philosophy.” Again, at least in this text, the word “reason” is set off in quotes to indicate that there are many implications of that word, and we have to be careful what we really mean. But this overall issue of the processing of words as the basis of truth is something we have to dive into.
This is what Nietzsche said in the section “Reason in Philosophy”: You ask me which of the philosophers’ traits are really idiosyncrasies. For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeternitatis — when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. And of course, as I’m quoting this, I want to emphasize, I think that this is being stated not against Epicurus, but from the position of someone who sees things as Epicurus does — against the other philosophers.
Now, I’ll continue the quote: When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it. They threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections — even refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. Now they all believe desperately even in what has being, but since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it’s kept from them. There must be mere appearance. There must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being. Where is the deceiver, these philosophers ask?
Now I’m paraphrasing here for just a moment, in saying that Nietzsche — from the position I would say is Epicurean — is looking at these philosophers like Socrates and Plato who are complaining that there is some deceiver that is preventing them from seeing a true reality. Now we’ll continue and see what Nietzsche has to say about that.
He says: We have found him, they cry ecstatically! It is the senses. These senses, which are so immoral in other ways, deceive us concerning the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies. History is nothing but faith in the senses — faith in lies. Moral: let us say no to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of mankind. They are all mob. Let us be philosophers. Let us be mummies. Let us represent monotono-theism by adopting the expression of a gravedigger. And above all, away with the body! This wretched fixed idea of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible — although it is impotent enough to believe itself real.
As I read this, I acknowledge that it’s dense and it’s important to look back at the original text, but again, he is there sarcastically stating the view of the Platonists who complain against the senses. Now, here comes Nietzsche responding, I think, in his own perspective with the highest regard.
I accept the name of Heraclitus: when the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity — which I interpret to mean that he is sarcastically excluding Heraclitus from the first category of those who simply objected to the senses as showing change. Heraclitus added the objection that the senses showed things as if they had any permanence. Nietzsche continues: on Heraclitus too the senses did an injustice. Here again, Nietzsche: they, the senses, lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as Heraclitus believed. They do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony — that alone introduces lies. For example, the lie of unity, the lie of thing-hood, of substance, of permanence. Reason is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses.
And so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie, but Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The apparent world is the only one. The true world is merely added by a lie. Now, again, I would recommend people go back to the original, parse this very carefully because Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to follow and to understand, but I think most of what I’ve just read there at the end would be Nietzsche’s conclusion that the assertion of these philosophers who are attacking the senses is a lie, and that in fact this world that is apparent to us through the senses is in fact the only world that exists. Those who say that there is a true world beyond the senses are merely adding that contention through a lie.
Now, just as a lot of the material that we’ve quoted today is very deep — again, I’ll repeat, go back to the original of Nietzsche, go back and read the rest of the section that I’m not going to quote today from the Twilight of the Idols — but combining this with some of the commentary that Nietzsche also makes about the problem of Socrates and the problem of there being a “true world” beyond the realm of the senses, these are issues that he brings a lot of intensity to in pointing out that they’re not just parlor games that have no importance to us. They are in many cases actual lies. We can consider them to be a noble lie as is frequently assigned to Plato, but they are a lie from the Epicurean point of view. The only world that exists is the world that we understand through the senses. We use our minds to reason to conclusions about the way the world is — with a classic example being that we do not ever through sensation see or touch an atom. We reason our way to the conclusion that atoms, indivisible particles, do exist and are the basis for the way the world works. But that is in fact the only world that exists — that is the true world which comes to us through the senses and we understand through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings and the proper processing of that information. There is no added-on world above and beyond this one that is the force, the real efficient cause of this world being what it is. This world operates on its own and without that external influence. Joshua, I know that we’re probably running long already, but any closing thoughts from you? We’ll have a lot more to say about all this next week, but I don’t want to close without giving you the opportunity to add any final thoughts today.
Joshua:
This is, I think, some of the densest material we’ve ever covered, probably going through Academic Questions here, because as I’m comparing what we’re seeing here to what I’m reading in the Timaeus, what we’ve seen elsewhere in Cicero, every sentence of it almost could be expanded into an argument that needs to be dealt with, and we’re going to get into next week a whole discussion on qualities and on the relationship between matter and efficient cause and on the role of divine providence. There’s a whole lot more to come.
Cassius:
You’re exactly right, Josh. The people who read through Lucretius Book One will get down well into the book and he’ll start talking about Helen of Troy and whether that really exists or not and the properties and qualities of atoms and accidents and events, and they’ll think to themselves, why in the world is Lucretius boring us with these details which could be of interest to no one but a technician or a physicist? Why are you bothering us with this information? Well, the reason he’s bothering us with it is what we’re seeing here in Academic Questions. Cicero was a statesman. He was a man of action. He was absolutely interested in practical arguments, and yet these issues are exactly what Cicero was himself talking about because he understood the implications of this science of nature to the decisions we make in everyday life. Okay, with that we’ll close today and come back and continue in Section Seven next week. As always, we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions on our podcast or any other aspect of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.