Episode 328 - Sensation - While Neither Right Or Wrong - As The Touchstone Of Reality
Welcome to Episode 328 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 focus on the ending of Section 8.
Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:
Quote
The third part of philosophy, which is next in order, being conversant about reason and discussion, was thus handled by both schools. They said that, although it originated in the senses, still the power of judging of the truth was not in the senses. They insisted upon it that intellect was the judge of things. They thought that the only thing deserving of belief, because it alone discerned that which was always simple and uniform, and which perceived its real character. This they call idea, having already received this name from Plato; and we properly entitle it species.
But they thought that all the senses were dull and slow, and that they did not by any means perceive those things which appeared subjected to the senses; which were either so small as to be unable to come under the notice of sense, or so moveable and rapid that none of them was ever one consistent thing, nor even the same thing, because everything was in a continual state of transition and disappearance. And therefore they called all this division of things one resting wholly on opinion. But they thought that science had no existence anywhere except in the notions and reasonings of the mind; on which account they approved of the definitions of things, and employed them on everything which was brought under discussion. The explanation of words also was approved of — that is to say, the explanation of the cause why everything was named as it was; and that they called etymology. Afterwards they used arguments, and, as it were, marks of things, for the proof and conclusion of what they wished to have explained; in which the whole system of dialectics — that is to say, of an oration brought to its conclusion by ratiocination, was handed down. And to this there was added, as a kind of second part, the oratorical power of speaking, which consists in developing a continued discourse, composed in a manner adapted to produce conviction. Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackam translation here:
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 328 moves into Academic Questions Book One, Section 8 — the third division of philosophy: reason, discussion, and the question of how (or whether) truth can be known. Cassius opens by contextualizing the discussion: understanding the Platonic view of nature (covered last week) is essential background for understanding why Lucretius’s poem devotes so much space to atoms and the void before getting to ethics.
Joshua reads Section 8, in which Varro presents the Platonic-Aristotelian position on knowledge: though knowledge originates in the senses, the power of judging truth does not reside in the senses. The senses are “dull and slow” and cannot perceive the eternal, simple, and uniform things that alone deserve belief — namely Plato’s ideal forms (idea, rendered into Latin by Cicero as species). Knowledge (scientia, mistranslated by Yonge as “science”) exists only in the notions and reasonings of the mind; the senses deliver only opinion, which is always suspect.
The episode turns on a careful Epicurean analysis of this position. Cassius and Joshua walk through the key distinction: does Epicurus agree that the senses do not judge truth? Yes — but for a different reason. For Epicurus, the senses neither lie nor tell truth; they simply deliver raw data. Opinion is added by the mind in processing that data. Epicurus condemns the Platonist move of concluding from this that the senses should be discarded, replaced by pure intellect working on eternal forms. For Epicurus, nature and sensation together remain the path to reliable knowledge.
The discussion also distinguishes Epicurus from Democritus, who held that “only atoms and void are real; everything else is merely thought to exist” — collapsing the reality of emergent phenomena. Epicurus rejected this reduction: both atoms and the things that emerge from their combination are real.
Joshua introduces DeWitt’s analysis from Epicurus and His Philosophy: Plato transferred the method of geometric definition to ethics, assuming that if triangles can be precisely defined, so can justice. DeWitt and modern jurists warn that justice cannot be defined this way — it is contextual, varying case by case. Cassius draws out the Epicurean implication: contextual reality is still reality. The fact that justice changes does not mean it does not exist.
Joshua closes with a discussion of doxa (opinion/appearance) versus episteme (knowledge) — and notes that Aristotle, unlike Plato, saw practical value in doxa. Epicurus too does not share Plato’s contempt for opinion: the Kyriai Doxai (Principal Doctrines) are themselves “authorized opinions” of Epicurus.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 328 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 this week in Cicero’s Academic Questions. We completed Section Seven last week and we’ll be moving into Section Eight this week. But as usual, before we do get back into it, I’d like to make a couple of comments about where we are, why we’re doing this, what’s going on exactly, and how in fact this relates to Lucretius since we entitled the podcast Lucretius Today.
And in doing so, what I’d immediately point out to everyone is that in Lucretius’s poem he starts out with a long discussion of the nature of the universe, the way things work at a fundamental level. And for those of us today who don’t immediately understand why he’s talking in such detail about the way the universe works, the issues that we’re going over in Academic Questions put all of that in perspective, because as we found out last week, Cicero is explaining to us how the Platonic view of the universe and the way things are and the way to live are all based on certain presumptions about how the universe operates — that there is in fact a divine force, an active principle, a prime mover that causes the universe to be the way it is, that actually through necessity brings about the world that we live in and provides us a basis for how to live.
And of the things we discussed last week when Joshua was quoting from the Timaeus, one of the things that jumped out at me was the section about why did the creator create the world, with Plato providing the answer that the creator was good and not jealous, and being free from jealousy desired that all things should be like himself. That phrasing from last week just really impressed me as a very clear way of stating so many of the issues that arise in Epicurean philosophy versus these other schools — because if in fact you believe that there is an all-powerful creator who wanted all things like himself, then you are definitely going to go down a road in which you not only suggest that there is a best way of life, you’re going to want to help the creator along and make sure other people conform to that best way of life which you think God himself has established.
And that kind of analysis seems to me clearly leading in very strong absolutist, centralized-control directions that are just totally opposite to what you would conclude is natural if you believe that the universe is not designed by a central intelligence. If you believe the universe does operate through the atoms moving through the void in ways that give emergence to all that we see around us — not only human beings, but also the mental capacities which we take pride in and we value as much as anything else in our lives. So we’re talking about very basic material here and we’re not even having to dive too far into the details to see the dramatic implications of the different points of view. Cicero cannot even write more than a couple of paragraphs about the nature of the universe without jumping to the divine nature of it. Now this week as we move into Section Eight, we’re going to move away from the nature division and discuss the knowledge division, and we’re going to see the knowledge perspective. This is the subject of dialectic and rhetoric and the question of whether truth is even possible for a human being. So I’ll turn it over to Joshua and we’ll move forward in Sections Seven and Eight of Academic Questions.
Joshua:
So as we move into Section Eight, we are still in the summary overview of the three divisions in philosophy. We talked about a brief summary of ethics and then last week we discussed the summary overview of nature, and this week we come to the third division, which Varro is going to continue to insist was handled more or less the same by both schools — both schools in this case meaning the Academics following Plato and the Peripatetics following Aristotle. But I’m going to move a little bit forward here into Section Nine first and point out that right away in Section Nine we’re going to start to get into the differences between Plato and Aristotle, particularly on the doctrine of ideal forms which Aristotle and Theophrastus start to break down and begin to reject. And Aristotle is not going to go along with Plato in his conclusion that sense perception as applied to the things of this world is all just illusory opinion, right?
Aristotle goes in the direction of valuing sense perception and he actually becomes, I think, of all philosophers in the ancient world, the philosopher most interested in cataloging the things of nature, the things of the world that we live in. And in fact, Pliny tells us that Alexander gave Aristotle control of all the hunters, fishermen, and fowlers in his empire, making him the overseer of all the forests, lakes, ponds, and cattle ranges as recognition of his tutor’s masterly knowledge of all things natural. It’s also reported that Alexander sent many books and treasures back to Aristotle from the libraries of Babylon, Persia, and India. I’m quoting there from a book called The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid. But that reference in Pliny — the idea that Alexander, who’s a conqueror and a political leader, was tutored by Aristotle in his youth and now he’s come to immense incredible power, and part of what he’s doing with that power and with the control over a wide area of land that that power has given him is he is determining that people all around that empire should send new and interesting things they find to Aristotle.
Aristotle is sort of credited with founding the first museum, a collection of specimens and examples taken from nature that he can use while he’s lecturing to aid him in making a point. And so he’s interested in animals, in fruits, in the juices that come from fruits — he’s got whole books about this stuff. So we are going to get next week probably, but maybe this week, into where there starts to be a break between Plato and Aristotle on these key points, and everything we’re talking about today is going to be subject to that division between those two schools. Even though Varro says at the beginning that the third part of philosophy, which is next in order being conversant about reason and discussion, was thus handled by both schools, we’re already getting into a division between the two schools. That is the first sentence of Section Eight, and he continues:
They — the thinkers of both schools — said that although it originated in the senses, still the power of judging of the truth was not in the senses. They insisted upon it that the intellect was the judge of things. They thought that the only thing deserving of belief, because it alone discerned that which was always simple and uniform and which perceived its real character. This they call idea, having already received this name from Plato, and we properly entitle it species in Latin — which is a translation being used for the Greek word idea, both of them meaning in this context the ideal forms of Plato. We’re reading from the Yonge translation. He’s going to keep using species to translate idea and we’ll try to make it clear that there is that distinction going forward, because the Rackham version of the text uses just the word “form” to translate it, which is probably more clear. The word species can also mean just the face or the aspect of a thing — so using it for the form or the appearance of something makes sense from that context, and it is the Latin word that Cicero uses in the text here.
So we are going to keep encountering this, and like I said, we’re just going to try to make it clear that we’re dealing with a translation issue here, but when we talk about species, we’re talking about the ideas, we’re talking about the ideal forms of Plato. Varro then continues: but they thought that all the senses were dull and slow and that they did not by any means perceive those things which appeared subjected to the senses, which were either so small as to be unable to come under the notice of sense, or so moveable and rapid that none of them was ever one consistent thing nor even the same thing, because everything was in a continual state of transition and disappearance. And therefore they called all this division of things one resting wholly on opinion. But they thought that knowledge (scientia) had no existence anywhere except in the notions and reasonings of the mind, on which account they approved of the definitions of things and employed them on everything which was brought under discussion.
The explanation of words was also approved of — that is to say the explanation of the cause why everything was named as it was, and that they called etymology. Afterwards they used arguments and as it were marks of things for the proof and conclusion of what they wished to have explained, in which the whole system of dialectics — that is to say of an oration brought to its conclusion by ratiocination — was handed down. And to this there was added as a kind of second part, the oratorical power of speaking, which consists in developing a continued discourse composed in a manner adapted to produce conviction.
Cassius:
Joshua, thanks for reading that. Before we go further, you’ve brought it out in your reading already, but not only the word species, but there are several words here that it would pay us to spend some time making clear what they really are referring to, and we can do that by comparing it to Rackham as you’ve done with species. But I note the same thing is going to apply with the word “science,” which you read there. Rackham translates that word as “knowledge” instead of “science.” And I don’t know that we should pass over this opportunity to really be clear about what’s being discussed here, because I know this is something that I probably fell into in the past and maybe am still subject to myself — but when I read one of these relatively older translations that uses a word like species in a way that I’m not familiar with, I tend to just gloss over the whole thing and move on and don’t take the time to understand what really is being discussed.
For example, you come across the word species. In my case I start thinking about ducks — for some reason I start thinking about categorizing animals and that’s the only thing I can put into the word species in my mind, but it’s not that that’s being referred to. “Form” is the way we discuss this, and “form” doesn’t always mean a lot to everybody either. “Idea” maybe grasps another aspect of what we’re talking about that’s important. So probably this section is important enough for us to go through and make sure we pull out any difficult concepts like that and make sure that we have made them clear, because it’s this issue that split up the different successors to Plato and the schools that thought they were following Plato. And it’s not particularly easy for us to follow and understand exactly what Epicurus is saying about this either, because these issues are not things that we talk about every day.
The ultimate question behind them though is extremely important and relatively clear and simple in the end, because it always brings you back to this question: what is truth? What is reality? What does it mean to prove something? What does it mean when you say that something is real versus an illusion? What are the requirements of something to be true? Does something, in order to be true, have to always be the same? How does this fit into the discussion of being versus becoming? Those are things that are very difficult — at least I’m going to say in my own situation, they have been a huge obstacle in my life to digging into what really is being discussed here — and they prevent many of us from absorbing what really is at stake. Because whether you take Rackham or Yonge or any other translator, the thrust of what is being said here is the issue of understanding the question of, as Cicero says, the power of judging of the truth, and whether that power is in the senses or whether it is somewhere else.
Sticking with that for just a moment, I do think Epicurus would agree that the senses do not judge truth. The senses do not give you an opinion of anything. The senses simply report what it is they receive. The judgment of what is true and false comes from, in Epicurus’s view, the process of applying reason to the senses and comparing the different observations you make over time and from different perspectives and coming to a conclusion that over time brings the different observations into a consistency with each other. That’s largely this issue of whether the atoms or the makeup of the universe moves so fast that it can’t ever be understood — and that’s where Diogenes of Oenoanda makes the point that yes, there is a flux in things, there is a constant motion, but that flux is not so fast that our natural faculties cannot make sense out of it.
Even as I say that though, the important aspect of it is that yes, the senses are able to provide the data from which you can grasp the truth from the Epicurean perspective, but it is not the senses themselves that deliver on a platter an opinion that you can consider to be right. There is a process involved in it. What Plato and Aristotle and these other schools did, however, was to conclude from that observation that the senses cannot be trusted, that they’re deceitful, and that the mind therefore has to take the place of the sense. And I don’t know that there’s a better way for me to compare it at the moment than to say simply that I think Epicurus is using both reason and the senses and combining them together in a way that he sees to be the natural way to do things, to arrive at the conclusion that reality and truth are something that you can make right opinions about.
The way I’m reading Cicero to be summarizing Plato and Aristotle is that all opinion is always suspect, that there is no such thing as right opinion. There is probable opinion, but in order to say that something is true, you must refer to the ideal forms which are outside of and not visible to the senses. So as you’ve already pointed out, Joshua, there’s this issue of the word species and what that refers to — in our terminology today, ideal form. There’s also the issue of “science,” and when Yonge uses that word here and says that they thought that science had no existence anywhere except in the notions and the reasonings of the mind, what he’s referring to there — and Rackham translates it as “knowledge” — they deemed to exist nowhere except the notions and reasonings of the mind. And Rackham continues that sentence by saying, consequently they approved the method of defining things and applied this real definition to all the subjects that they discussed.
It occurs to me to make the point that that’s the title of Lucretius’s poem, De Rerum Natura — Of the Nature of Things. And to some extent that’s really what we’re talking about as well — we’re getting to the question of is it possible to have a right opinion about things, or can we say nothing firm about things and conclude that we are incapable of saying anything with confidence unless it refers to ideal forms. And before I turn it back over to Joshua, this is also important not only in distinguishing Epicurus from where Plato and Aristotle were going, but also to distinguish Epicurus from where Democritus was going — because Democritus, even though he shares a framework of atomism with Epicurus, was also questioning whether we can be confident of anything with the information that the senses provide us. Because Democritus, referring over to the wiki quotes page, is recorded to have said that atoms in the vacuum were the beginning of the universe and that everything else existed only in opinion.
And another translation: the first principles of the universe are atoms in empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. This is often paraphrased as “nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion” — which is related to another quotation that comes from Democritus: by convention, sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color, but in truth there are only atoms and the void. Another one: we know nothing accurately in reality, but only as it changes according to the bodily condition and the condition of those things that flow upon the body and impinge upon it. So this issue extends not only to divide Epicurus from Plato and Aristotle, but also to divide Epicurus from Democritus. And before we move on, it pays for us to hammer this point as clearly as we can.
Joshua:
Yeah, I often quote from, I think it might be Richard II, where one of the characters says, who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast? In other words, if heat, cold, sweetness, bitterness — if these things only exist by convention, if we can disregard these things because reality only exists at the atomic level and everything above that is just opinion, then when you’re being burned by heat you’re being burned by your own opinion of heat or something, right? This is the idea that if you’re holding something really hot and you change your opinion about it, if you think about something really cold instead you can maybe counterbalance that or endure it better. There’s a lot of rather difficult implications of this, but there’s something, Cassius, that you often quote from one of these modern articles — and I can’t remember which one it is — about how there is truth at both levels. There’s truth at the atomic level, but there’s also truth at the level of lived experience.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s a David Sedley article you’re referring to there, and I’ll pull that out and put it in the show notes for today as well. He’s making the point that neither level has a monopoly on truth — that it is wrong to say that only the atoms exist and the phenomena we observe around us do not exist. It would equally be wrong to say that only the phenomena exist and that the atoms do not exist. And Joshua, you’ve used that comparison in some of our discussions recently, that it’s almost possible to trace the error or the problem in both directions: Plato is placing truth at a higher level in some other universe; Democritus is taking the reverse position and saying the truth exists only at the lowest level, at the atomic level. And I would not put Epicurus in the middle, because saying simply “being in the middle” is not going to answer the question and produce much that’s of benefit to anyone.
But Epicurus is certainly taking a third position: that the truth does not exist only at the smallest level; it also does not exist in some other-worldly level according to Plato. And you could probably add Aristotle into that mix by talking about the essences that Aristotle ends up coming up with, and we’re beginning to get into that in Section Nine. But yes, Aristotle rejected Plato’s ideal forms, but he did not totally reject the idea that there is a universal nature of things, an essence of things that exists within them. And I believe we can contrast Epicurus’s view of that by saying that while it is in fact the components of the thing that make it what it is, you cannot reduce a thing at our level of existence solely to its components. You cannot solely say that because water contains hydrogen and oxygen, for example, you can take hydrogen and oxygen and throw them on the table in front of you and come up with water.
There are these emergent aspects of things that we don’t have the ability to fully explain how they happen, but we can understand that there is an emergent process involved in the combination of atomic things that produces a reality that is different from the pure existence of the atoms that compose it. Water may be composed of hydrogen and oxygen, but it has much different real characteristics to us than the two atoms separately do, and that’s where Epicurus I think is going here — that there are no ideal forms, there are no universal essences, but there is a reality that derives from the qualities that emerge from the interaction of atoms through the void.
Joshua:
I want to pick up on something you just said there, which was there is an emergent aspect in things. That word “aspect” is one translation of the Latin word species. In fact, in the tenth line of Lucretius, in the opening invocation of Venus, he refers to the speciem of the springtime day — the aspect or the face of the springtime day — and that in the changes that we experience at this level of our lived experience, this is where we see changing forms, this is where we see species in more of a modern sense, and we shouldn’t be looking for the pattern or archetype existing in a separate realm outside of nature. That’s one way to put the difference: Lucretius and Varro can be using the same word, but they’re discovering the thing that corresponds with that word in very different places. Lucretius sees it in the changing of the seasons.
He sees it in what emerges from atoms coming together and falling apart at the level of sense perception, and Varro is pointing to the realm of ideal forms — that’s where we see what we call species, that’s where we see these forms, and everything at our level of reality, including the changing of the seasons and so on, is mere opinion colored by the frailty and the weakness of sense perception. The senses, as he says, are dull and slow and they do not by any means perceive those things which appeared subjected to the senses — which were either so small as to be unable to come under the notice of sense, or so moveable and rapid that none of them was ever one consistent thing or even the same thing, because everything was in a continual state of transition and disappearance. This is that Heraclitean flux again, and the text that Varro is drawing his explanation of Platonism from is probably again the Timaeus, which I’ve been quoting a lot from. But we should go back into that because we’ll see expressed in perhaps a little more detail the point that Varro is trying to make. The point that Cicero in quoting Varro is trying to get across. Timaeus in the dialogue says:
First I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes, and which is apprehended by reason and reflection; and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense. All that becomes and is created is the work of a cause, and that is fair which the artificer makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is fashioned after a created pattern is not fair. Is the world created or uncreated? Created, he says, being visible and tangible and having a body and therefore sensible; and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause. And the cause is the ineffable father of all things who had before him an eternal archetype. For to imagine that the archetype was created would be blasphemy, seeing that the world is the noblest of creations and God is the best of causes, and the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern is the copy of something.
And we may assume that words are akin to the matter of which they speak. What is spoken of the unchanging or intelligible must be certain and true, but what is spoken of the created image — the sensible, in other words — can only be probable. Being is to becoming what truth is to belief. And amid the variety of opinions which have arisen about God and the nature of the world, we must be content to take probability for our rule, considering that I who am the speaker and you who are the judges are only men — to probability we may attain, but no further.
How many times have we heard Cicero take recourse to that little anodyne, right — that to probability we may attain, but no further. This passage here in the Timaeus and the context in which this passage occurs is a huge source for the epistemology of Plato that gets picked up by Cicero and by Varro. We see a lot of the same points made here that we’ve read in the text for today: that there is a distinction between reason and sensation, and that the knowledge (scientia), which is translated probably wrongly as you say, Cassius, by Yonge as “science” — the knowledge that we attain or think we attain through sensation is actually colored by opinion to the extent that it becomes unreliable.
The knowledge that we gain by reason, by building up an argument, by dialectical cross-examination — this kind of knowledge, the knowledge particularly of the ideal forms — this is knowledge that we can rely upon. The power of judging of truth, says Varro, is not in the senses; the intellect is the judge of things.
Cassius:
Joshua, on that point that you’ve just quoted from — how would you say Epicurus would tweak that statement? Because I do think we agree and have said many times on the podcast that the senses do not provide their own opinion. The senses don’t provide a fully developed statement about something, they just provide raw data that the mind does have to assemble. So again, having quoted what you just quoted, how do you think Epicurus would express that?
Joshua:
Well, the analogy that we’ve often used in the past is that the senses are like witnesses in court. You can probably state this better than I can, but that’s one way we’ve put it — in that they don’t give you the whole truth, right? Because they’re not omniscient. Sense perception is very limited. They just give you, as you said, the raw data, the stimulus that is streaming in from nature and striking upon the body — and of course in Epicurean physiology, upon the soul which is inside the body — that this is furnishing information to us, and that a layer of opinion is added not by the senses themselves, but by the mind acting on them. The mind acting on the raw data of the senses is what adds the layer of opinion.
Cassius:
Yeah, part of the difficulty here, I think, Joshua, is — at least in my case, and you tell me if I’m wrong — but the word “opinion” in our terminology and our uses of it implies strongly that it’s not right. It implies that you should not rely on it, in fact, because it’s just an opinion, and I don’t think it necessarily needs to have that connotation, but I think in our common usage that’s what’s going on a lot. When you say something is an opinion, that is a dismissive term. It means that you should not take it to the bank, so to speak. You should just consider it as someone’s opinion, which may or may not be right and you have no idea whether it’s right or not. So when we use the word “opinion” in our discussion of what the senses are providing, I think we have to be careful.
It’s even difficult to state this in words about what it is that you see. For example, I’m thinking of talking about seeing a bird. Well, the eyes don’t report to you that what you are seeing is a bird. The eyes don’t report to you that what you’re seeing is the color red. If you see a red bird, the eyes don’t report to you that you’re seeing feathers. The eyes don’t report to you anything that basically you can put into a word — they provide what we keep calling sensory data or perception data, but the actual categorization of what that data is does take place in the mind and not in the senses themselves. It appears to me in reading all this that from that observation, the Platonists are going to take the position that, well, you don’t even need the senses. You can just take what the mind gives you and totally jettison the senses because they’re just lying to you.
But I don’t think Epicurus would agree that they’re either lying or telling the truth in the sense of giving us a true opinion. They’re providing very raw data from which we assemble every conclusion that we come to about what the senses are providing. And even though as we describe it, it can start to sound like it all comes together in the same thing, I don’t think it does. When the Platonists take the position that the senses are actually lying, Epicurus wouldn’t say necessarily that they’re telling the truth, but that the truth can be obtained through the senses — and that’s not exactly the same thing.
Joshua:
The first thing I would say is that sensation does not add opinion according to Epicurus. Are we agreed on that point?
Cassius:
Absolutely. We are agreed on that. Opinion can be right or wrong, but the senses are never right or wrong. The senses are what they are.
Joshua:
Right? Exactly. And in the Letter to Herodotus, at paragraph 50, Epicurus writes this: and every image which we obtain by an act of apprehension on the part of the mind or of the sense organs, whether of shape or of properties, this image is the shape or the properties of the concrete object and is produced by the constant repetition of the images or the impression it has left. Now, falsehood and error always lie in the addition of opinion with regard to what is waiting to be confirmed or not contradicted and then is not confirmed or is contradicted. So just what you said there, the data that comes to us through sense perception is neither right nor wrong as such, because the very idea of right or wrong exists as an act of judgment — the judgment that we make about the data and about the opinion that gets layered onto the data almost without even thinking about it, right?
There’s that classic example of four blind men touching an elephant, and one of them touches the leg and says it’s a tree, one of them touches the trunk and says it’s a snake, one of them touches the ear and says it’s paper or leaves or something. And the point is that we reach these snap judgments in real time as the data is streaming in and without too much thought, and we have to go back over it and rethink about what we’ve experienced and what that corresponds to in nature — because the opinion that gets added on gets overlaid so quickly by our judgment. Of course, this relates to prolepseis or anticipations, which is connected with pattern-seeking and the idea that you see a horse and you instantly know that it’s a horse. He does go on in the Letter to Herodotus to say: for the similarity between the things which exist, which we call real, and the images received as a likeness of things and produced either in sleep or through some other act of apprehension on the part of the mind or the instruments of judgment could never be unless there were some effluence of this nature actually brought into contact with our senses, and error would not exist unless another kind of movement too were produced inside ourselves, closely linked to the apprehension of images different from it.
And it is owing to this, supposing it is not confirmed or is contradicted, that falsehood arises, but if it is confirmed or not contradicted, it is true. Therefore we must do our best to keep this doctrine in mind in order that on the one hand the standards of judgment dependent on the clear visions may not be undermined, and on the other error may not be as firmly established as truth. And so throw all into confusion. So when Varro says that though the power of judging of the truth originated in the senses, it was not in the senses — they insisted upon it that the intellect was the judge of things, they thought that the only thing deserving of belief because it alone discerned that which was always simple and uniform and which perceived its real character.
Cassius:
Joshua, can we parse those sentences for just a second? What you just read — although it originated in the senses, still the power of judging of the truth was not in the senses. Do we as Epicureans agree with that sentence?
Joshua:
I think maybe so, because the senses don’t judge. That’s the point, right? That’s what I was just reading from the Letter to Herodotus. We’re kind of figuring this out in real time, I think.
Cassius:
Exactly, exactly. But okay, let’s stop there for a second. I agree with you. I think we agree with that sentence. The next sentence: they insisted upon it that the intellect was the judge of things. I think we agree with that too. Do you agree with that?
Joshua:
I think so, yeah.
Cassius:
Okay. Then the distinction I think is going to come in this next sentence: they thought that the intellect was the only thing deserving of belief — and that’s probably true too — but I think the crux really comes here: because it alone discerned that which was always simple and uniform and which perceived its real character. I think that’s where the problem comes in. Rackham translates that as “because it alone perceives that which is eternally simple and uniform and true to its own quality.” I don’t think that Epicurus would say that anything is always simple and uniform and true to its own quality except an atom. What do you think?
Joshua:
I think you’re making really good points. We do have to be careful about words like “judging” and “intellect” because the way we’re using them in the context of sensation is: the raw data comes in through the senses and then the intellect and judgment works on the raw data. But he’s almost saying that raw data comes in through the senses and we reject that entirely, and then the intellect works instead on things that are not perceived by sensation — like geometry.
Cassius:
Exactly. Exactly. That’s the way I read that as well. When he starts talking about “its real character” and “that which is always simple and uniform” — well, in the Epicurean universe, there’s nothing that’s always simple and uniform except the atoms. And so if you’re going to say that in order for something to be considered to be deserving of belief, it has to always be simple and uniform, then you’re going to throw out all reality that we perceive as being unreal.
Joshua:
Exactly. And this is the whole thing with the analogy of the cave, right? The whole point is the goal is not to try to figure out or to attain the best level of judgment on the flickering images on the wall of the cave. That’s not the goal. The goal is to abandon those images — and I mean that’s the analogy of sense perception — the goal is to abandon that, leave the cave, and go up to the realm of pure being, the realm of these ideal forms and study that. That’s the goal. That’s what the intellect is for, that’s what judgment and reason are for — not so that we can better grasp the illusion, but so that we can escape the illusion and grasp what is true, which for them of course means what is always simple and uniform: the ideas, the ideal forms.
Cassius:
Skipping down a couple of sentences, that’s where Varro goes to: the division of things was resting wholly on opinion when you’re talking about the senses, and they say that they thought that knowledge has no existence anywhere except in the reasonings of the mind. The basic issue is they’re focusing on these ideas which they say are the source of truth and are not accessible to the senses. And as you said a moment ago, they’re basically throwing the senses out as having any ability to assist you in forming any truth about the ideas. And that’s just totally incompatible with considering this world to be real. And this is where the implication of this is that everything in our world is an opinion. You can be lying in a hospital bed eaten up with cancer, totally feeling nothing but excruciating pain, and they’re going to tell you, well, it’s just your opinion — and opinion means that it’s not truly real, because it’s not eternal.
And so again, all of this is a manner of speaking and sort of a framework of things, and you can say it’s a matter of words and not reality. You can say you’re saying the same thing but using different words. But in the real world, people take these things to heart, and if everything is an opinion that comes to you through your senses, then you’re going to be led down this slippery slope towards: nothing in your life really matters, it’s really not real, it’s really not true, it’s just a flickering on the wall, and you should just devote all your attention to the things of eternal significance — the things of the ideal forms, the things that are in heaven, the things that God is going to reveal to you. That’s the problem with this whole approach, I would say.
Joshua:
Exactly. And I think that having laid that groundwork, we can now examine some of the rest of this. I know we’re running long on time here, but where he gets into the discussion of definitions, of etymology, of dialectics, of oration and so on — I particularly want to talk about definitions, because we just mentioned that with Plato, with Varro, they are not saying that the intellect applies its faculty of judgment on the information that comes from the senses. They are turning away from the senses and applying that faculty of judgment on the forms. And the connection with geometry should be obvious there. But DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy connects this back again with this issue of definitions. He says:
Geometry in particular, though itself a positivistic study, inspired in the minds of men a new movement that was genuinely romantic. It was the romantic aspect of the new knowledge that captivated Plato, who was no more than up-to-date as a mathematician himself in geometry. He seemed to see absolute reason contemplating absolute truth — perfect precision of concept, joined with finality of demonstration. He began to transfer the precise concepts of geometry to ethics and politics, just as modern thinkers transferred the concepts of biological evolution to history and sociology. Especially enticing was the concept which we now know as definition. This was a creation of geometry. It created it by defining straight lines, equilateral triangles, and other regular features. If these can be defined, Plato tacitly reasoned, why not also justice, piety, temperance, and other virtues? This is reasoning by analogy, one of the trickiest of logical procedures. It holds good only between sets of true similars. Virtues and triangles are not true similars. It does not follow, therefore, because equilateral triangles can be precisely defined, that justice can be defined in the same way. Modern jurists warn against defining justice: it is what the court says it is from time to time.
So we see there the structure of the argument: you’ve got the intellect and its faculty of judgment, you’ve turned away from sensation which is dull and slow and consists of opinion, and you turn the judgment faculty of the intellect away from sensation and toward what was simple and uniform and unchanging — the ideal forms. And then we get into definition and why that’s important in the context of epistemology, in the context of logic and dialectic, which is this third division of philosophy. And the point is that we are now going to go to geometry, which has got nothing to do with sensation, it’s not subject to the faults of sensation, it is pure reason contemplating absolute truth as DeWitt said there summarizing Plato’s position. And that we can now take the definitions of geometry and by analogy we can circumvent sensation and we can apply geometric thinking directly to ethics. And if you’re lying in the hospital bed fraught with pain and injury and disease — which is mere smoke of opinion — we circumvent that entirely and we say nevertheless that virtue, which can be precisely defined just as triangles can be defined, requires you to disregard your pain, as we saw in Tusculan Disputations, that long section on whether pain was regarded as an evil. There’s a whole lot more we could say about this. Cassius, where are you as we wind down here?
Cassius:
Joshua, you’re right. We’re about to come to the end of today’s episode. I do want to comment on your quotation from Norman DeWitt though — there’s one aspect of that that I’ve always wondered about, and it’s the part where DeWitt says that modern jurists caution against attempting to define justice, pointing out that justice is what courts say it is from time to time. I think that’s a really good analogy and important to think through, because I know in my own case I tend to think, well, from that statement you conclude that justice does not really exist. That if justice changes from time to time and is only what courts say it is, then you should just dismiss the idea of justice and say that it really doesn’t exist. And as I think about where we are in our discussions and what DeWitt might have meant by that, I don’t think that’s the takeaway point at all.
The takeaway point is not that justice does not exist, but that justice does not have a quality of remaining eternally the same for everyone at all times in all places — just as Epicurus points out in his discussions of justice. Justice is contextual, but it does exist. Just to say that something is contextual, just to say that something is dependent upon circumstances, does not mean that it does not exist. We don’t throw out the window the concept of justice and say that because it changes, it’s ridiculous to talk about it. That’s not the point. The point that Epicurus is making is that the realm that we live in is truly real, that we do have to account for the changes in things, we do have to account for the way things happen, but we don’t throw it all out the window and say that it’s not real just because things change.
So that one aspect of that quote is something that’s bothered me for a long time, and I think I’m perhaps coming up with a better way of understanding it that brings all of these points together. And all roads lead to Rome in a sense in where we’re going in our recent discussions. Our world is real and we should not spend all of our time worrying about the existence of some true world beyond our ability to comprehend through our senses and through true reasoning. We have to come up with the framework in which we understand that opinions can be right or wrong. We are limited human beings who are not going to have all the evidence we would like to have in most of our decisions in life. We have not lived forever. We won’t live forever. We can’t visit every location in the entire universe. We are going to have to make decisions based on limited information, and we have to come up with a practical method of deciding how to separate right opinion from wrong opinion. And we don’t do that by saying that the senses lied to us and throwing them out and saying only through syllogistic logic, through geometry and through abstract calculation, can we come up with truth — that is a prescription for disaster. But that is exactly the direction that Plato and all the various forms of idealism go in. Any final thoughts today, Joshua, before we conclude?
Joshua:
Yeah, let me follow up on the distinction between opinion and knowledge — or we’ve been calling it true knowledge or truth or whatever the words in Platonism and in rhetoric that get opposed to each other are: doxa, which is opinion or appearances — that which seems to be — and episteme, of course, which we know as knowledge and has been translated into Latin as scientia and wrongly translated into English probably as “science” in the context of our conversation today. And I’m on the Wikipedia page for doxa, and as a hint of maybe where we’re going here — because Plato sees doxa, opinion, appearance, as being something of a snare, it’s a trap that confuses people, that gets people wrapped up in wrong ideas and so on. So he rejects it. The Wikipedia page on doxa that I’m reading from says Aristotle, Plato’s student, objected to Plato’s theory of doxa, appearances or opinion.
Aristotle perceived that doxa’s value was in practicality and common usage, in contrast with Plato’s philosophical purity relegating doxa or opinion to deception. I think that has been part of our conversation today as well, Cassius, with you asking earlier whether opinion was always a bad thing, right — that, well, that’s just your opinion, is this something we should always reject? And Aristotle strikes a note here that I think is far more reasonable than where Plato goes, which is: we don’t have to remain so philosophically pure in our devotion to the ideal forms and so on as to regard the appearances of things, the doxa, as deceptive falsehoods. This has use at the practical level of existence, at the practical level of pursuing knowledge. And that I think is maybe closer to Epicurus’s own view. And of course, Epicurus does not hold Plato’s revulsion when it comes to the word doxa in Greek either, because of course the Principal Doctrines are the Kyriai Doxai — the authorized opinions of Epicurus, you might call them. Calling them “opinions” in that context probably isn’t entirely right, but there is not the skepticism towards doxa that we see in Platonism in Epicureanism.
Cassius:
Absolutely. We’ll go further into it next week. This is all very deep material, and I think there’s an analogy between considering all opinion to be something to be dismissed and using the word you used a moment ago about “practical.” There’s a negative connotation about “practical” — that well, you’re settling to be practical. You’re not aspiring to the ideal of absolute truth when you’re just simply being practical. When you accuse somebody of being practical, you’re saying that, oh, they are just making a decision they have to make because they haven’t had the time or the ability to come to what’s really true. They’re just being practical. And a lot of what we’re talking about here is the right attitude towards these words — the right understanding of whether opinion can be right or wrong, whether practical is necessarily inferior to the ideal, because does this ideal that Plato is talking about even exist?
Is it just a totally wrong understanding of nature and the universe that places you on the defensive to even talk about it? Are we necessarily just giving up and checking out by talking about practical reality, or when we do use the term practical reality, are we discussing the only reality that does exist? We’ll continue to get into this next week in Section Nine, so okay, we’ll stop there today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this podcast or our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.