Episode 329 - Cracks In The Academy On Ideal Forms and Virtue Lead To The Emergence of Aristotle, The Stoics,And Epicurus
Welcome to Episode 329 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 9.
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 from Academic Questions - Yonge
This was the first philosophy handed down to them by Plato. And if you like I will explain to you those discussions which have originated in it.
Indeed, said I, we shall be glad if you will; and I can answer for Atticus as well as for myself.
You are quite right, said he; for the doctrine both of the Peripatetics and of the old Academy is most admirably explained.
Aristotle, then, was the first to undermine the doctrine of species (forms), which I have just now mentioned, and which Plato had embraced in a wonderful manner; so that he even affirmed that there was something divine in it. But Theophrastus, a man of very delightful eloquence, and of such purity of morals that his probity and integrity were notorious to all men, broke down more vigorously still the authority of the old school; for he stripped virtue of its beauty, and mlade it powerless, by denying that to live happily depended solely on it. For Strato, his pupi, although a man of brilliant abilities, must still be excluded entirely from that school; for, having deserted that most indispensable part of philosophy which is placed in virtue and morals, and having devoted himself wholly to the investigation of nature, he by that very conduct departs as widely as possible from his companions.
But Speusippus and Xenocrates, who were the earliest supporters of the system and authority of Plato,— and, after them, Polemo and Crates, and at the same time Crantor,— being all collected together in the Academy, diligently maintained those doctrines which they had received from their predecessors. Zeno and Arcesilas had been diligent attenders on Polemo; but Zeno, who preceded Arcesilas in point of time, and argued with more subtilty, and was a man of the greatest acuteness, attempted to correct the system of that school. And, if you like, I will explain to you the way in which he set about that correction, as Antiochus used to explain it. Indeed, said I, I shall be very glad to hear you do so; and you see that Pomponius intimates the same wish.
Transcript - Unedited
Section titled “Transcript - Unedited”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 329 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 text 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in book one of Cicero’s academic questions from an epicurean perspective. Last week we talked briefly about what Cicero characterized as the third division of philosophy in terms of dialectic rhetoric epistemology, and we made some observations about the difference between that point of view and the direction that Epicurus took in, especially the role of the senses and the determination of truth.
As we said at the end of that episode this week, we’re going to get briefly into Aristotle who began a process of challenging Plato’s ideal forms. We spent a lot of time talking about ideal forms last week, and we’ll probably continue that today because the placing of truth as something that can only be reached by contemplation of the ideal forms was very controversial even in that period, and Aristotle began a breakaway from that position when we discussed that in today’s podcast, we’re not going to be able to go into it in the level of detail that might be desirable because it’s a very deep subject and the views that Aristotle took would take us too far off the course of understanding Epicurean philosophy the way that we need to do. But for anyone who’s interested in some of the details of that Dogen ERUs in book five covers the life of Aristotle.
And in the addition I have it’s section 13, but there is a good summary of the views of Aristotle that is very useful to line up against the views of Epicurus to compare where those two stood because it’s clear that Aristotle is closer in many of his positions to Epicurus, but going into details of Aristotle’s life and the positions he ended up taking would again get us off track from what we need to do in focusing on Epicurus. But we are going to talk briefly about that as we get started today. Then Cicero is going to turn his attention to Zeno and the development of stoicism, and that would be the other introductory point that I’d like to make today, that the academy, as it stood at the time of Plato was beginning to break up on this issue of skepticism. The ideal forms were actually an attempt by Plato to come up with some kind of a criteria for truth and placing truth in the ideal forms was to an epicure, something very wrong to do, but it was at least an effort to define a criteria of truth.
Aristotle attacked that from a different perspective and placed his criteria of truth not in ideal forms in another dimension or realm, but in what he thought was an essence that was within things in this world. That direction was certainly from an epic procurement perspective, an improvement on what Plato had done, but it was an attempt to grapple with this same question of where can we find certainty? Where can we find confidence and knowledge? Is it possible even to do so? Aristotle placed it in a different location, but again, he was struggling with that same issue of when is confidence and knowledge possible? The stoics and the epicurean are attacking the same question with the stoics coming to the conclusion that you can be confident based on a position that’s probably close to that of Socrates and Plato with a strong emphasis on logic. The latter books of academic questions are going to get into that in much more detail, but we will already, as we continue here, get a sense of how firm the stoics were in their positions just as the epicurean were firm in their positions, each reaching different conclusions, but each claiming that they were confident and had firm reasons for the conclusions that they reached.
So with that as an introduction, I’m going to turn it over to Joshua to let us know if he has any additional reflections or comments from last week, and when he’s ready, we’ll go into section nine.
Joshua:
Last week we finished the summary overview of the three divisions in philosophy and what we’re now going to see Vero do as we go forward in the text is to watch as this philosophy presented by Plato changes and develops as it gets passed down from successor to successor. And we’re also going to see how that relates to the schools that were in the orbit of the academy, specifically Aristotelian or Perpe and stoicism. Section nine starts this way, Vero says this, these three divisions that he’s described previously, this was the first philosophy handed down to them by Plato, and if you like, I will explain to you those discussions which have originated in it, indeed said Cicero, we shall be glad if you will, and I can answer for Atticus as well as for myself. You are quite right, said Atticus. But the doctrine both of the Peripatetics and of the old academy is most admirably explained and then Vero continues.
Aristotle then was the first to undermine the doctrine of species, the doctrine of ideal forms, which I have just now mentioned, and which Plato had embraced in a wonderful manner so that he even affirmed that there was something divine in it. But Theus a man of very delightful eloquence, his name in Greek does mean something like divine speaker or divine speech, and of such purity of morals that his probity and integrity were notorious to all men broke down more vigorously, still the authority of the old school where he stripped virtue of its beauty and made it powerless by denying that to live happily depended solely upon it for straight out his pupil. Although a man of brilliant abilities must be excluded entirely from that school for having deserted that most indispensable part of philosophy, which is placed in virtue and morals and having devoted himself wholly to the investigation of nature, he by that very conduct departs as widely as possible from his companions.
But S Ous the first successor to Plato and ate the second successor who were the earliest supporters of the system and authority of Plato, and after them other scholar arcs of the academy like Palermo and crates. And at the same time Cranor being all collected together in the academy diligently maintained those doctrines which they had received from their predecessors. Zeno of C, the founder of Stoicism and our cess had been diligent attenders on palon, but Zeno who proceeded our cess in point of time and argued with more subtlety and was a man of the greatest acuteness, attempted to correct the system of that school. And if you like, I will explain to you the way in which he set about that correction as Antiochus used to explain it. Indeed said, I Cicero, I shall be very glad to hear you do so and you see that pomp, Titus pomp, Atticus intimates, the same wish.
Cassius:
Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading that. Just as I said when we started the episode today, it’s not possible to go into all the details of the names that are mentioned here, but I have to say this is where I think we have an example of how valuable Cicero is because while we do not agree with many of Cicero’s judgments or his opinions about the different positions Epicurus took, Cicero was a highly educated person, intimately involved in the day-to-day life of the Roman Republic of that period. And so when Cicero tells us that a general outline of the schools and the way they divide up is important for his discussion, I think we can rely that if Cicero thinks these things are important, we ought to understand why he thinks they’re important. And rather than tracing down all the details which Cicero does not do here, what we have is a high level summary of some very important aspects of these schools and how they line up against each other.
And we’ll spend some time maybe the rest of the episode going through some comments that are made here in what’s already been written because the first thing that Varo points out here is that Aristotle was the first to undermine the doctrine of the ideal forms. And for our purposes in understanding Epicurus, the doctrine of ideal forms is a huge problem and it’s important for us to note that Epicurus is not the only one who saw a problem with it. Aristotle saw a problem with it that Cicero points out. Now, it’s interesting that as we’ve gone through academic questions, as we’ve gone through Tus and Disputations as we’ve gone through own ends, it’s been interesting to me that Cicero doesn’t seem to value Aristotle personally in quite the same way he’s viewed today. It seems to me over the years when I’ve been reading about Greek philosophy, Aristotle in some departments is just considered the smartest man who’s ever lived the most significant philosopher of the world, second only to Socrates perhaps in terms of fame.
But when Cicero discusses Aristotle, I don’t get the impression that Cicero had a nearly so high an opinion of Aristotle. As we see here, Aristotle is setting in motion a line of argument that Cicero pretty strongly disagrees with because Lado had embraced the ideal forms as it says here in a wonderful manner and affirmed that there was even something divine in these ideal forms. Well, that’s an important observation because it does seem that all of those philosophers of that school were considering the ideal forms to be directly related to the supernatural to God, to the divinity that established them. They didn’t just come into being by accident from the view of these other philosophers. So placing these ideal forms in a context in which they’re close to, if not actually divine, is an extremely important point because you don’t want people questioning the divine sanction of virtue and the things that go along with these ideal forms.
So this is a very critical aspect of philosophy to Cicero and to these Romans who at this point had 200 years of studying Greek philosophy under their belts. These arguments had been well developed, and what Cicero is giving us here is the dividing lines that people over the years had come to understand was important about these different philosophers because as this says, Aristotle was the first to undermine the ideal forms. Then comes along his successor, Theo Fraus, who people apparently thought was just a wonderful guy, wonderful speaker, and had high morals and high integrity, and everybody liked him, but this theus broke down more vigorously still the authority of the old school in regard to virtue. Cicero says that fraus stripped virtue of its beauty and made it powerless by denying that to live happily depended solely on virtue. Now, I don’t know how you could get a worse conclusion from the perspective of Cicero than to strip virtue of its beauty and to make virtue powerless and deny that living happily depends solely on it.
That’s the kind of description that Cicero reserves for Epicurus and people he really dislikes to strip virtue of its beauty and its power. I can’t imagine anything from Cicero’s point of view that would be worse than doing that. And that’s the successor of Aristotle who’s supposed to be part of the academic tradition, and we don’t stop there according to Cicero, because Reto the pupil of Theophrastus, even though Cicero admits that he apparently had some brilliant abilities should be entirely excluded from this tradition because he deserted the most indispensable part of philosophy which is grounded in virtue and morals and instead walked away apparently from virtue and morals and devoted himself wholly to the investigation of nature, which in this context, Cicero is really strongly looking down upon as an abandonment of the key aspects of what philosophy is supposed to be all about. After that, in this paragraph, Cicero is going to turn his attention to those who remained with Plato. But I’ve just said some things about Aristotle and the Peripatetics that before I go further, I better go back to Joshua and see if he has any comment on this first section of section nine on Aristotle Theophrastus and then St. Strato.
Joshua:
Coming down to the question of Plato and Aristotle, I want to remind everybody that we just went through Tus Disputations and in Tus Disputations we encountered a very interesting passage in section 11 of book five because the interlocutor or the person we were calling the student in that text has said to Cicero, you compel me to be of your opinion, but have a care that you are not inconsistent yourself. And Cicero says, in what respect? In what respect am I in danger of inconsistency? And the student says, because I have lately read your fourth book on the ends of good and evil day. And in that you appeared to me while disputing against Cato to be endeavoring, to show that Zeno obsidian, the father of stoicism and the Peripatetics following Aristotle differ only about some new words. But if we allow that, what reason can there be if it follows from the arguments of Zeno that virtue contains all that is necessary to a happy life, that the peripatetic should not be at liberty to say the same for in my opinion regard should be had to the thing not to words.
And Cicero responds to his interlocutor this way. He says, what you would convict me for my own words and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere? You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules. We live from hand to mouth and say anything that strikes our mind with probability so that we are the only people who are really at liberty. But since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is whether the opinion of Xeno and his pupil aristo be true, that nothing is good, but what is honorable. But admitting that whether the whole of the happy life can be rested on virtue alone. Wherefore, if we certainly grant Brutus this, that a wise man is always happy, how consistent he is is his own business for who indeed is more worthy than himself of the glory of that opinion, still we may maintain that such a man is more happy than anyone else.
So what we see here and in this mild dispute between Cicero and his interlocutor is that the question of whether Aristotle should be regarded as separate from Xeno and from Plato on the question of whether virtual alone is sufficient for a happy life, Cicero has come down on different sides of that question in different books depending on the case that he’s trying to make in that moment. He had said in section nine in this text that Theis had laid it down that whips, torments, tortures the ruin of one’s country, banishment, the loss of children had great influence on men’s living unhappily and saying that he dare not any longer use any high and lofty expressions when he was so low and so abject. In his opinion, how right he was is not the question. He was certainly consistent. Therefore, I am not for objecting to consequences where the premises are admitted, but this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of goods, but he is attacked by everyone for that book which he wrote on a happy life in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and wracked cannot be happy.
And then on the subject of consistency moves directly into a criticism of epicurus. But you begin to see the point which is not only is there this argument between the scholar Arks who succeeded Plato as head of the academy and Aristotle and Theophrastus, there’s this dispute between them about ideal forms and whether we should preserve that aspect of Plato’s ethics and philosophy. We also have this other problem developing, which is as he says, Theophrastus a man of very delightful eloquence and of such purity of morals that his probity and integrity were notorious to all men broke down more vigorously still the authority of the old school where he stripped virtue of its beauty and made it powerless by denying that to live happily depended solely on it. And Cicero, as we have seen in his discussion of consistency with his student, has not been consistent on the question of whether Aristotle should be put into the same category.
Did Aristotle also strip virtue of its beauty, render it powerless by denying that to live happily depended solely upon it? So those are the two major issues right now. In the text, there’s this question of the undermining of the doctrine of ideal forms, and then there’s this question of whether virtue is stripped of its beauty and made powerless when theophrastus and potentially Aristotle deny that to live happily depended solely on it. And I will remind you that the question that was posed in Tus and Disputations was this, if you’re being whipped, is virtue sufficient for happiness? If you’re being tormented, tortured, if your country is hurled into ruin, if you’re banished from it, if you lose the lives of your children, if these things happen, can you still be happy if you have virtue and theis comes down on the side, that virtue is not sufficient.
We need these other things too, that for someone to placate themselves with virtue when they’ve just experienced the death of a child, that this is so dark and so horrible and no parents should ever have to experience this, that to say of this that, well, I’ve got my virtue, the city is burning down behind me, but I can leave empty handed because there are no goods external to my soul, to what I carry with me at all times. And then we get into this discussion of precipitous and sates and palon and CROs and cranor, other successors, some of whom supported Plato’s system on both questions or one or the other question and more still who deviated in their own ways from Plato on those questions.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, before we go into that, I’d like to make a couple of more summary comments about Aristotle because this is really interesting to me to see Cicero discussing it this way. And I have to say that I think I side with Cicero in what is implicit in what’s going on here Now, when in Tuscan Disputations it was pointed out that Cicero was being inconsistent in his analysis of whether Aristotle was the same as the older school or not. You could take away from that. This is a problem with Cicero being inconsistent, but I think we can understand why Cicero is struggling with this because Aristotle is someone who is highly respected in the history of philosophy, and he did apparently have a lot of very insightful things to say about how to categorize certain things and how to use logic and so forth. There is much to admire about Aristotle.
You want to claim Aristotle for your own side. From Cicero’s point of view, you want to say that, well, he wasn’t really deviating that far. You want to keep him in the family because he’s so obviously intelligent on certain things, and maybe we have a tendency to do that in discussing Epicurean philosophy as well in that we want to say that Aristotle was a stepping stone in certain ways to the development of an epicurean viewpoint. But I do sort of sympathize with the direction I see Cicero going in here in that he’s pinning down the whole Aristotelian movement as a abandonment of taking a firm position on the ultimate divinity of the ideal forms, the ultimate logical rigorousness of your view of nature, because Aristotle clearly did not go as far as Epicurus did in pinning pleasure as the guide or the goal of life.
Aristotle somewhere in this middle ground of not having broken free completely from this idealization that Plato was involved in. Aristotle’s essences have some very similar problems, as does the platonic ideal forms. So everybody wants to claim Aristotle because of the intelligence of certain aspects of this categorization. But I think Cicero has an important point here that we should not lose sight of that for all the intelligence and virtuosity and elegance that we can come up with in categorizing things. And of course, Aristotle is studying nature in a very clinical type of way. It appears that Cicero is saying and seeing that Aristotle is kind of losing track of the ultimate question, which is how to live your life and whether you’re part of a divine plan or not, because Aristotle still stands for that divine plan. He hasn’t broken free and clear to nature being self-organized and our guidance being pleasure.
And so there’s an ultimate lack of satisfac this in the direction that Aristotle went, that these few short sentences here I think do a pretty good job of summarizing for us. Okay, so in concluding that commentary on Aristotle, again, this section ends up by saying that Aristotle was moving the wrong direction in this most indispensable part of philosophy, which is placed in virtue and morals. And again, bringing all this up to the modern world and talking about how to apply epicure and philosophy. We’re focused on the meaning and role of virtue versus pleasure, morality versus pleasure, how those things work. And our investigation of nature, which Aristotle was getting into, is intended to bring us back to conclusions about the nature of virtue and morality, not to let us stay at the level of let’s categorize every type of snail we can possibly find on the continent of Africa.
The goal of categorization and the goal of investigation of nature is not to simply produce lists of things and categories. It’s to produce information that we can then understand the great scheme of things and apply that to happy living. And that’s where everyone did not go along with Aristotle and Theophrastus and St. Strato, the School of Plato continued among other leaders who were more in tune with what Plato himself had said and who also understood that Aristotle was going in a direction that was not consistent with Plato. So Joshua, we’re not going to have time today to fully develop the more consistent followers of Plato or deal very far with Zeno and our CEC who were introduced in this paragraph as well. But let me get back to you, and where are your thoughts at the moment?
Joshua:
Let me read first of all, from book four of Cicero’s Day Finns or on the ends of good and evil, which will shed more light on this ongoing question of where exactly Aristotle falls on all of these questions. But most especially on the question of whether virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life, which I think was probably just the main theme of Tus and Disputations. That was certainly the main theme of the fifth book of Tuske and Disputations. He says in book four of on ends responding to Cato, and he says this, he says, now, what has landed you in this impasse? Simply your pride and vain glory in constructing your chief. Good to maintain that the only good is moral worth is to do away with the care of one’s health, the management of one’s estate, participation in politics, the conduct of affairs, the duty of life, nay, to abandon that moral worth itself, which according to you is the be all and end all of existence objections that were urged most earnestly against aristo by Crispus.
This is the difficulty. They gave birth to those base conceits as atia had it. Wisdom had no ground to stand on when desires were abolished. Desires were abolished when all choice and distinction was done away with distinction was impossible when all things were made absolutely equal and indifferent. And these perplexities resulted in your paradoxes, which are worse than those of aristo. Ask Aristo whether he deems freedom from pain, riches, health to be goods, and he will answer no. Well, are there opposites bad? No. Likewise, ask Zeno. And his answer would be identically the same. In our surprise, we should inquire of each. How can we possibly conduct our lives if we think it makes no difference to us, whether we are well or ill free from pain or in torments of agony, safe against cold and hunger or exposed to them? O says Aristo, you will get on splendidly capitally.
You will do exactly what seems good to you. You will never know sorrow, desire, or fear. What is Zeno’s answer? This doctrine is a philosophical monstrosity. He tells us it renders life entirely impossible. His view is that while between the moral and the base, a vast enormous gulf is fixed between all other things. There is no difference, whatever. And then we get into the next section, section 26. He says, accordingly, I do not speak of desiring, but selecting these things out of wishing but adopting them and not of avoiding their opposites but so to speak, discarding them what say Aristotle and the other pupils of Plato that they call all things in accordance with nature, good and all things contrary to nature bad. Do you see therefore that between your master Zeno and aristo, there is a verbal harmony with a real difference, whereas between him and Aristotle and the rest, there is a real agreement, but a merely verbal disagreement?
Why then, as we are agreed as to the fact, do we not prefer to employ the usual terminology? So what we’ve observed from Cicero as we’ve gone through on ends on the nature of the Gods tus disputations and now academic questions is he is quite mercenary when it comes to which school between stoicism and Aristotelian. He is going to praise at any moment in time, and when it’s useful for Cicero to say it, he will hold up Aristotle over the stoics. But here in academic questions when it’s useful to him to do the opposite, he will say that no, it is zino of C. Who should be praise Zino of C, who does the best in cleaving to virtue as opposed to Theophrastus and as opposed to Aristotle, who stripped virtue of its beauty and made it powerless by denying that to live happily depended solely upon it. So we have dealt there with the first section of section nine here in the text, not even really getting into the direct successors of Plato as scholars of the academy, but already here in the opening few lines of section nine in the text today, we’ve got two major questions, two major rifts that are developing in the school. One of them on the question of ideal forms, one of them on the question of whether virtue is sufficient for a happy life.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, we have these two lines of thought going on in this relatively short paragraph. When we come back next week, we will begin looking at those who attempted to stay closer to Plato and how Stoicism ends up being a part of that movement to reinterpret Plato in a way that Xeno of Cityum thought was more consistent. It’s very interesting to consider the relationship between these two issues while because at first glance, they seem separate ideal forms versus the nature of virtue. There probably is some significant overlap and cross pollinization going on between those two issues as to what you conclude about virtue, depending on your acceptance or rejection of this idealism embraced in ideal forms. We’ll come back and discuss more of that next week as we continue in section nine. In the meantime, as always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean French Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.