Episode 332 - The Stoic Failure To Grasp That Judgment Never Happens In The Senses
Welcome to Episode 332 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 transition to Book Two, where we will begin with Section 7
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 332 transitions from Book One to Book Two of Academic Questions, picking up at Section 7. The speaker in Book Two is Lucullus (Lucius Licinius Lucullus), a Roman general and statesman who was an eyewitness to the major schism in the Platonic Academy and a lifelong friend of Antiochus of Ascalon. Lucullus argues from the Stoic side, with the Academic skeptics as his main opponents.
Section 7 opens with Lucullus’s defense of sense perception: the senses, when in sound and healthy order, contain the greatest truth. He brushes aside the classic skeptical examples (the bent oar in water, the varying colors of a dove’s neck), arguing that we resolve such apparent illusions by changing the light, adjusting our distance, and improving conditions until confidence is reached. He further argues that expert practitioners — painters who perceive shadows and projections others miss, musicians who identify a piece from its first note — demonstrate how much truth the senses can yield with training. He also treats the inner touch of pleasure and pain as obviously certain: anyone who denied the difference between being in pain and being in pleasure would be “flagrantly mad.” The Cyrenaics held that pleasure and pain were the only reliable criterion of truth.
Cassius and Joshua identify the crucial divergence: for the Stoics, truth resides in the senses (or in the senses’ grasping of things under the right conditions — katalepsis). For Epicurus, the senses supply raw perceptual data without opinion, and judgment — which is what can be true or false — happens only in the mind. No amount of skill, light adjustment, or practice places truth in the senses themselves; truth is always what the mind concludes from sensory data. This distinction will become central as the Academic skeptics attack the Stoic position in the sections ahead.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 332 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’re continuing in our series on Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective, and as we discussed at the end of last week’s episode, we’re now transitioning from book one to book two. We have to explain: book one breaks off abruptly, and we’re going to skip a lot of the opening of book two to try to stay with the question of the nature of knowledge — the views of the traditional Academy about knowledge, and the reaction of Epicurus and the Stoics to the increasing skepticism that was breaking into the Academy at that time.
What we’re going to find is that both the Stoics and the Epicureans were working to develop a system by which they could say that certain things are true — to resist the tide of total skepticism that was breaking over the philosophical landscape at the time — but what we’re going to also find is that they took a very different approach in how to do that. We’ve talked a lot in the past about different aspects of the Epicurean approach. What we need to now get a grounding on is the direction that the Stoics were going in, and we’re going to be doing that today starting around section seven. But before we get back into the detail, I do want to stress the importance of what we’re talking about: we really don’t care about the development of details within the Academy, but what we do care about is the importance of this question of knowledge. And as Joshua brought up at the end of last week, there is an inherent self-defeating paradox within skepticism — that if you take their ideas seriously, that no knowledge is possible, then you’re really going to have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning or making decisions about anything, because you’re not going to be able to separate the true from the false.
It’s certainly true that there are many things we do not know, that there is in fact a constant flux in the universe. And this is where Diogenes of Oenoanda set it so carefully: yes, the Epicureans admit that there is a flux, but not a flux so fast that we cannot make heads or tails of what is going on from moment to moment. We may not be able to step into the exact same river at any moment, or even stay in the same river as we’re standing there, but using our proleptic ability to process information, we are able to know what a river is, and we can generally understand from moment to moment the outline of things that are going on around us. Some things we can grasp — that we are standing in a river — but we cannot grasp the atomic structure of the drops of water as they pass us by.
Our senses allow us to do some things but not others, and it is critically important to understand the distinction between the information that we justifiably conclude the senses are providing, versus error that our minds can make when we misjudge the perceptual data that the senses are providing. Again, the key is that the senses are providing perceptual data — they are not providing opinions about what is right and wrong. And as we go into this dispute between the Stoics and the Epicureans, we’re going to find that the Academic skeptics, who are attacking the Stoics predominantly in the material we’re talking about, the Academic skeptics are right about the Stoic position — because the Stoics are trying to say that the senses have a right opinion, that in certain circumstances we can be confident that the senses are telling us right opinion correctly. Well, Epicurus throws out that entire approach, because the senses are never telling us something rightly or wrongly.
The senses are always just giving us raw data that our minds are responsible for assembling into things that are true versus things that are false. That’s going to be the distinction that we see as we go forward, but it’s going to be worth developing this in more detail because Stoicism is so popular today. Stoicism still can rightfully claim far more interest in the public than Epicurean philosophy does, and it’s going to be very helpful to us to see how the Stoics are coming to their conclusions, because that will allow us to see the flaws in their approach and the superiority of the Epicurean approach. To the question of knowledge, the Stoics were totally unsuccessful in defending their position against the attacks of the Academic skeptics. That’s why we today are so confident that no knowledge is possible, why skepticism has taken control of everything, why people love to say things like “never say never,” and they’re very, very careful about asserting anything with confidence in the world today. The Stoic argument against the skeptics failed because the Stoics ultimately assumed that the universe is intelligently designed, that the faculty of intelligence that we use to process information is ultimately divine, and they locked into a view of a divine logic that allows — from their perspective — us to understand the senses as telling us information, some of which is correct and some of which is not correct.
Again, as we get further into that, we’re going to find that the Stoics understood that it is extremely difficult from that perspective to determine what is right and wrong. There is a famous statement of Chrysippus that the sage — who they thought was really the only person equipped to judge right from wrong — is as rare as a phoenix. What we end up concluding as we get into the Stoic position is that they have a totally impractical view of separating right from wrong and conveying an understanding of knowledge and when it is possible. We’re going to get to the Epicurean correction of that as we go further, but we first need to understand the direction the Stoics were going in. So to repeat: there is a lot of good information in book two before we get to section seven, but in the interest of time, we’re going to go straight into a discussion of the critical issue of the nature of the senses and how the Stoics were attempting to look at the senses as conveying truth under certain circumstances.
The best way to get into it is just going to be to grapple with exactly what Cicero is telling us about this, because again, even the Stoics will admit that Cicero’s information here about the Stoic analysis in Academic Questions is among the clearest and best-preserved information we have about the Stoic approach. So anyone diving into this issue is well advised to look into Academic Questions. And again, I will repeat something else we’ve said in the past: what we are trying to do is get a practical understanding of the issues so that we can decide what’s important to us and what’s not important to us — again, the same kind of approach that Cicero himself was taking. Cicero is not a professional philosopher; Cicero is a statesman, a man of action. He is intending to know what is important for him to know and to throw the rest of it aside. So when Cicero gives us this analysis, it is from someone who is a practical person who’s not interested in chasing rabbits. What we’re going to do is identify the direction of the hole and then move on, and when we complete this, get back into Philodemus, who will explain to us in detail the Epicurean position. Okay, so with that as a background, Joshua, if you could read section seven when you’re ready.
Joshua:
So having finished book one of what remains of Academic Questions last week, we have left Varro behind in his summary of the history and development of the Academy. Moving into book two, we are going to be getting into a summary overview of the Stoic approach to epistemology and a contrast between the Stoic approach and the Academic skeptic approach. And our speaker is Lucullus — Lucius Licinius Lucullus — a Roman general and statesman connected with the Roman general and conqueror Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a patron of the arts and sciences and a lifelong friend of Antiochus of Ascalon, who has come up to chime in again in our reading of Academic Questions and other sources by Cicero. Wikipedia says that during his long delay in the royal palace at Alexandria in the summer of 86 BC, Lucullus witnessed the beginning of the major schism in the Platonic Academy in the first century BC, and so he is friends with several of the key figures involved here on both sides, and he is an eyewitness to some of the events as they’re unfolding.
So Cicero is using him as the interlocutor to explain these developments and to explain them from a Stoic point of view as regards epistemology. And almost the first thing he’s going to do here in section seven is set the outer limits of what Stoic epistemology looks like. For his first example, he’s going to use Epicurus — Epicurus occupying terrain that the Stoics are not going into, that would be too far for them — and almost the first thing he’s going to do here in section seven is to cite the epistemology of Epicurus and say that Epicurus goes farther towards the confidence end of this spectrum than he or the Stoics are willing to go, but nevertheless they are willing to go further in the direction of confidence than the Academic skeptics that he’s arguing against.
Before we get into section seven, though, let’s review the end of the paragraph in the preceding section, section six, because Lucullus says in the last sentence: “Wherefore all this discourse against the Academy is undertaken by us in order that we may retain that definition — or, as Zeno puts it, that we may preserve the process of definition — which Philo wished to overthrow. And unless we succeed in upholding it, we admit that nothing can be perceived.”
So Philo had asserted that there was nothing which could be grasped or apprehended. This is that Greek word katalepsis that we discussed briefly last week. This is key to Zeno’s understanding of how some things are knowable. Some things do fall within our grasp in Stoic epistemology; some things are beyond our grasp and so we can’t know them; but there are things that fall inside our grasp. But Philo — who was an heir and successor in the Academy — had maintained that there was nothing that could be grasped. This is the absolute skepticism that we keep coming up against. And so it’s important to look at that last sentence in section six, where Lucullus says: “All this discourse against the Academy is undertaken by us in order that we may retain that definition which Philo wished to overturn. And unless we succeed in that, we grant that nothing can be perceived.”
That’s exactly what Philo wants them to grant. Philo wants it to be admitted that nothing can be perceived, nothing can be grasped, nothing can be known. And so that’s the major argument as we come into section seven. And section seven, Lucullus starts this way. He says:
“Let us begin then with the senses, the judgments of which are so clear and certain, that if an option were given to our nature, and if some God were to ask of it whether it is content with its own unimpaired and uncorrupted senses, or whether it desires something better, I do not see what more it could ask for. Nor, while speaking on this topic, need you wait while I reply to the illustration drawn from a bent oar in the water, or from the neck of a dove. For I am not a man to say that everything which seems is exactly of that character of which it seems to be. Epicurus may deal with this idea, and with many others; but in my opinion there is the very greatest truth in the senses, if they are in sound and healthy order, and if everything is removed which could impede or hinder them.”
“Therefore we often wish the light to be changed, or the situation of those things which we are looking at to be changed, and we either narrow or enlarge distances, and we do many things until our sight causes us to feel confidence in our judgment; and the same thing takes place with respect to sounds and smell and taste, so that there is not one of us who in each one of his senses requires a more acute judgment as to each sort of thing.”
Cassius:
Joshua, this is going to be a long section. What you’ve just read has some very interesting comments that would probably help us understand if we deal with them as we go through it. And I stop you largely because it’s very interesting that he’s immediately pointing out and saying that you don’t have to wait — I’m going to go ahead and deal with the illustration of the bent oar or the neck of a dove seeming to be different colors from different angles — and he dives immediately here into this question of the fact that we often want the light to be better so that we can see things better, or that we want to get closer to something so we can see it closer. “Narrowing or enlarging distances” is the way he says it there.
Joshua:
We may have slightly different interpretations of that sentence, though, because he says: “nor while speaking on this topic need you wait while I reply to the illustration drawn from a bent oar, or the neck of a dove, for I am not a man to say that everything which seems is exactly of that character which it seems to be.” What I hear Lucullus saying here is: you don’t need to wait for me to explain every little detail of everything in creation and why it is apprehensible by our senses, because I’m not Epicurus, and I’m not going to do that. That’s my interpretation of what he’s saying there.
Cassius:
Yeah. When he says “Epicurus may deal with this idea and many others” — I presume we probably do agree that he knows Epicurus’s reputation is to say that all sensations are true. And so when he says in the next sentence that “in my opinion there is the very greatest truth in the senses when they are sound and in a healthy order and when everything is removed that can impede or hinder them,” that’s the kind of depth that we’re trying to explore here — to see exactly what he means there. Because: is he already acknowledging that when Epicurus says that all sensations are true, he’s acknowledging that Epicurus is not saying that the opinions are right or wrong? There’s already an implicit tension here. Does he understand Epicurus’s position that the senses are not right or wrong? When you read that paragraph, that would be something good to discuss. Joshua, does he have an opinion about Epicurus’s view of the senses? Exactly the sentence you singled out — “I am not a man to say that everything which seems is exactly of that character which it seems to be” — what does he mean by that?
Joshua:
Kind of an expression, right? “Your reach has exceeded your grasp.” I don’t know if that’s exactly where they’re going with this word katalepsis or apprehension — that there are things in your immediate orbit that are clear and can be gotten hold of, but that there are things outside of it that are beyond that, and that it would take a lot more work. There’s kind of a law of diminishing returns, right, in trying to get secure knowledge about things that are outside of your little sphere. And what I see him saying here is that it’s a job for Epicurus to go and try to explain every little phenomenon that occurs to us or appears to us in nature. Lucretius, for example, has I think several hundred lines on how magnetism works — anything that might be considered to present an objection by its mere existence has got to be assimilated into our body of known knowledge. And so Epicurus, if he wants to make a convincing case that the senses are reliable and that judgment doesn’t happen in the eyes — it happens in the brain, right, or it happens in the mind — that you do have to explain the bent oar: why an oar that you know to be straight, because it was straight when it was in your hand outside the water, why it appears to be bent the moment you put it into the water.
It would be enough for Lucullus and for Zeno to say that, well, some things are knowable, some things aren’t knowable, because they haven’t gone to the extreme or to the distance that Epicurus has gone to make a case that things in nature are explicable to us. In the last sentence of section six, he said: “We retain the definition which Philo wishes to overturn. Unless we succeed in doing that, we grant that nothing can be perceived.” The alternative to “nothing can be perceived” is not “everything can be perceived” — it’s “some things can be perceived,” and that’s the case that he’s trying to make here. He’s not trying to make the case that opinion is in the mind and the senses are reliable because they don’t furnish commentary on the data that they are inputting. I don’t know if I’m being very clear about that.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, in the sentence where it says “Epicurus may deal with this idea and with many others,” which you’ve just been explaining — Epicurus is going into great detail in order to explain what’s going on in certain situations that we often consider to be illusions. Let me focus on the next clause of that sentence, though. When Lucullus says “in my opinion there is the very greatest truth in the senses if they are in sound and healthy order,” I don’t know that I think Epicurus would agree with that sentence. What do you think about that?
Joshua:
Yeah, the word “truth” is problematic, because we come back again to the Epicurean position that sensory input is neither true nor false. That’s a judgment, and judgment never happens in the senses. Judgment happens in the mind. It is the mind working on the data, operating on the data, that offers judgments, and those can be true or false. Your opinion on what you’ve seen or experienced can be true or false, but the data that streams in — these flaring streams striking your eyes and striking your soul or whatever — these do not have an added layer of opinion or judgment. I think that would be a significant disagreement.
Cassius:
And that’s where you and I come back together. I think that’s a huge point that we’re going to see translates into lots of implications as we proceed. I think about DeWitt’s analogy that we should never confuse the tools we use to build the wall with the stones of the wall itself. And we are constantly dealing with this question of what the canon of truth means, and what it means to be a standard of truth. Epicurus is saying that the senses are the tools by which we ultimately judge truth, but the senses are not truth in themselves. And I think in the end, that difference of opinion is a lot of what we’re going to see as we go forward — that depending on your translation and how you read exactly what Lucullus is saying here when he says “there is in fact the very greatest truth in the senses,” that’s the issue we’re going to have to keep an eye on. Because I don’t think Epicurus thinks that the truth is in the senses. It’s almost like Plato or Aristotle saying that the senses, or the thing itself, contain truth coded in as it were by a divine intelligence — and that’s not Epicurus’s approach here.
The senses, or the things, are not in themselves coded divinely or intelligently with information within them. The senses provide the raw data to us truly, without their own opinion, by which we have to judge what is true and what is false. Unless you see something further on that section, Joshua, why don’t you continue to read in section seven and we’ll see how this plays out.
Joshua:
Well, on the distinction I’m trying to make between reach and grasp — he does say that if you change the light that is being cast on an object, or the situation of the object in relation to other objects, if you narrow or enlarge the distances between objects or between yourself and the object, we do all of these things, and as we’re doing these things, we can develop greater confidence in what our eyes are reporting to us. To quote directly: “we do many things until our sight causes us to feel confidence in our judgment, and the same thing takes place with respect to sounds and smell and taste, so that there is not one of us who in each one of his senses requires a more acute judgment as to each sort of thing.”
This to me is kind of like the classic problem of the square tower that looks round from far away. If you want to get a better understanding of what’s really going on with this tower, you have to change your position relative to the tower. You have to see the tower at a different season or a different time of day, when the light hits it differently, or from a different angle. You have to get right up close to it — maybe stand on top of it if you can. It’s not like everything that you see, everything that your eye falls upon from any distance, suddenly becomes completely known by you. There are limits to sensation. And that’s why Epicurus in his letter to Pythocles makes the key distinction between meteorological phenomena — the phenomena of the heavens — and what happens on earth. Because on earth you can go right up to something, and you can touch it, or you can look at it, you can walk all the way around it. But with regard to things that happen in the sky, in Epicurus’s time we just don’t have the ability to get any closer in any measurable or meaningful way to what we’re seeing up there. We’ve only got the one point of view, which is standing on this planet, and we can’t change the lighting or the position or the situation. And so our knowledge is necessarily more limited of what’s going on up there. I think that’s perhaps a point of agreement between the two schools — with the proviso that, again, Epicurus is placing the judgment not in the senses themselves, but in the judgment faculty in the mind.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, and on that particular point, I think it would be fair to say: no matter how close you get to the tower, no matter how good your light is, no matter what perspective — whether you have a magnifying glass, no matter how you examine that tower — the evaluation that the tower is square is not in the senses themselves. It is in the mind. Do you agree with that?
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. This is again where prolepsis becomes difficult to talk about, right, because it’s kind of a pattern-recognition element of prolepsis. But yes, the judgment that the tower has a square footprint — I think that would be in the mind.
Cassius:
Which is where I think we’ll begin to see this terminology distinction come into play. Because it sounds like Zeno is saying, in his grasping analogy, that if you really, really get close to it and squeeze both hands together and really, really push — at that point, truth is in the senses. And that’s not what Epicurus is saying. No matter how hard you squeeze, no matter how close you get, no matter how good the light is, it’s still the mind that makes the judgment and not the senses themselves. There’s never truth in the senses. Truth comes through the senses, comes from the data that we process in the mind, but there is no truth in the senses. As we go forward, we can decide whether there are better ways to say that, but I think that’s what this grasping illustration is intended to convey: that you can grasp it hard enough and tight enough that you can squeeze truth out of it, because the truth is really in there in the first place if you squeeze hard enough. And I don’t think that’s the approach that Epicurus is taking.
Joshua:
Yeah. The next paragraph he says: “But when practice and skill are added, so that one’s eyes are charmed by a picture and one’s ears by songs, who is there who can fail to see what great power there is in the senses? How many things do painters see in shadows and in projections which we do not see? How many beauties which escape us in music are perceived by those who are practiced in that kind of accomplishment? Men who at the first note of the flute-player say, ‘That is the Antiope, or the Andromache,’ when we have not even a suspicion of it. There is no need for me to speak of the faculties of taste or smell, organs in which there is a degree of intelligence, however faulty it may be. Why should I speak of touch, and of that kind of touch which philosophers call the inner one — I mean the touch of pleasure or pain — in which alone the Cyrenaics think that there is any criterion of truth, because pleasure or pain are felt.”
“Can anyone say that there is no difference between a man who is in pain and a man who is in pleasure? Or can anyone think that a man who entertains this opinion is not flagrantly mad? But such as those things are which we say are perceived by the senses, such also are those things which are said to be perceived not by the senses themselves but by the senses after a fashion: as ‘this is white, this is sweet, that is tuneful, this is fragrant, that is rough.’ We have these ideas already comprehended by the mind, not by the senses.”
“Again: ‘This is a house,’ or ‘That is a dog.’ Then the rest of the series follows, connecting the more important links, such as these which embrace, as it were, the full comprehension of things: ‘If he is a man, he is a mortal animal partaking of reason.’ From which class of arguments, the notions of things are impressed upon us, without which nothing can be understood nor inquired into nor discussed. But if those notions were false — for you seem to me to translate the Greek word ennoia as ‘notions’ — if I say they were false, or impressed, or perceptions of such a kind as not to be able to be distinguished from false ones, then I should like to know how we were to use them, and how we were to see what was consistent with each thing and what was inconsistent with it.”
“Certainly no room at all is here left for memory, which of all qualities is the one that most completely contains not only philosophy but the whole practice of life and all the arts. For what memory can there be of what is false? Or what does anyone remember which he does not comprehend and hold in his mind? And what art can there be except that which consists not of one nor of two, but of many perceptions of the mind? If you take these away, how are you to distinguish the artist from the ignorant man? But we must not say at random that this man is an artist and deny that that man is an artist; but we must only do so when we see that the one retains the things which he has perceived and comprehended and that the other does not.”
“And as some arts are of that kind that one can only see the fact in one’s mind, others such that one can design and affect something — how can a geometrician perceive those things which have no existence, or which cannot be distinguished from what is false? Or how can he who plays on the lyre complete his rhythm and finish verses? And the same will be the case with respect to similar arts, whose whole work consists in acting and in effecting something — for what is there that could be effected by art unless the man who exercises the art has many perceptions?”
Cassius:
Okay, Joshua, we’re probably not going to be able to go any further than section seven today, but let’s talk about what we’ve read so far after that first part. I would say that one of the important things being said here is the focus on adding practice and skills — in other words, that an expert musician can, from the first note of a song, know what is going to come. Painters can see things in shadows and projections which we who are not expert painters cannot see. Illustrations like that are pointing in the direction that training is essential for the recognition of the truth of what you’re attempting to examine — which carries on the analogy from the earlier paragraph that if you change the light often enough, if you get closer, if you look at things from different perspectives, you can train yourself to the point where you are grasping through the senses what the truth really is.
This is enticingly similar in wording to the direction that Epicurus is going, but there remains this central distinction: no matter how much training you get, it is not the senses that tell you what the truth is. The senses are the test of truth, but truth is not designed in, divinely placed in, ideally formed in, or in the essence of the thing or the senses themselves. It is the judgment of the mind based on the senses that is true or false. But we can’t look to the thing itself as if an ultimate intelligent designer has placed within the thing some kind of ultimate truth. In other words, you are always going to need to look to the perceptions of the senses in every moment, in every situation, to determine what the ultimate truth of that situation is. No matter how much music you play, no matter how many paintings you paint, no matter how many drawings you draw, you are never going to be able, through a process of definition, to reach what the ultimate reality is.
In fact, one of the citations here — “if he is a man, he is a mortal animal partaking of reason” — and the definitions that are being pointed to here in this section: those definitions are useful, those definitions are helpful tools, but they are not connecting to some kind of an ultimate design reality in a physical object. The limitation of the definition is that it always has to be tested according to the perceptions of the senses at the particular moment. I think those are directional differences that we can dig out of what we’re reading here, but the language is very broad. This is a general overview that Cicero is giving, and no doubt there is a lot of subtlety here that people could spend lifetimes trying to pull out. What do you see in this section, Joshua, and what are you thinking?
Joshua:
The thing that is so interesting to me is how Lucullus is reaching to the human sphere for his examples, because Epicurus so rarely does this — if he does it at all. Lucullus is saying: go into the painter’s studio and watch him at his work; go into the musician’s orchestral space, and you will be exposed to a greater perception of what is coming in through the senses when you’re looking at these things through their eyes or when you’re listening to music through the musician’s ears. You get a grasp of how much more is there and available to us than you as a layman are normally able to focus on or perceive. I’m thinking over the whole surviving body of Epicurean works — the thing that strikes me is we don’t get sort of intimate looks into the lives of ordinary people like we’re getting here from Lucullus.
When Lucretius wants to use humanity as an example or as an analogy, he places himself on a ridgeline overlooking the sea, and it’s a battle on a plain or it’s a shipwreck out on the water that catches his eye — nothing this close and nothing this intimate. And that’s not the most insightful comment perhaps, but it is an interesting one. It’s interesting that Epicurus doesn’t reach for this kind of example. His sphere is the sphere of the natural world, and he’s less interested in the cultural world of painters and musicians and poets and all the rest.
Cassius:
Joshua, yeah — the natural world that anyone can observe using their senses, as opposed to an artisan or an expert musician or an expert designer of some kind who is bringing in expertise that developed through many years of practice, that layman normal people just using their senses can’t even begin to appreciate. To me, when I hear you describe that, that would be the direction I’m hearing: you talk about how Epicurus does not cite to experts. He doesn’t tell you to look to the musician, to the chemist, to the different types of experts, in literature to the poets, for example. He doesn’t tell you to look to the poets and trust in their expertise. He’s telling you to look to your senses and use those as your guide.
Joshua:
And the other interesting thing about this passage is we get into some discussion of pleasure and pain. It’s a Cyrenaic reference that he makes. He says: “Why should I speak of touch, and of that kind of touch which philosophers call the inner one — I mean the touch of pleasure or pain — in which alone the Cyrenaics think that there is any criterion of truth, because pleasure or pain are felt? Can anyone then say that there is no difference between a man who is in pain and a man who is in pleasure? Or can anyone think that a man who entertains this opinion is not flagrantly mad?” And he goes on to say that anyone who does say there’s no difference between a man who is in pain and a man who is in pleasure must be flagrantly mad. The Rackham version of the text says: “Is it therefore possible for anybody to say that there is no difference between a person experiencing pain and a person experiencing pleasure? Or would not the holder of this opinion be a manifest lunatic?”
It’s clear to us when we are experiencing pleasure, and it’s no less clear to us when we are experiencing pain. And this too is a kind of sensation — it must be, because we know it’s happening. We’re not being struck necessarily by something from the outside. He does call it an “inner touch,” but we are so clear about it when it’s happening that it has to fall, from his point of view, under the realm of sensation. And anyone who says that the difference is not real or does not exist — that person would be a manifest lunatic. I think that’s an interesting expression given what we usually encounter from Cicero when we’re talking about pleasure and pain, right?
Cassius:
I agree, Joshua, because I would certainly say that Epicurus would say anyone who held that there’s no difference between being in pain versus being in pleasure is a lunatic. That probably has interesting implications as well. If the truth is not in the senses directly, from an Epicurean point of view, that would lead to some interesting questions as to whether pain and pleasure are true or false — or rather simply something that must be accepted for what they are. Now, Joshua, we’re going to run out of time for today. Let us know if you have any closing thoughts, but unfortunately we’ll have to reserve more for next week.
Joshua:
I agree, it’s a good place to stop. Because next week we’re going to be getting into the next passage in section seven — we’re still in section seven here in book two — and we’re going to go into the third passage next week. And this is going to get us into some discussion of the difference between sense, perception, truth, judgment, and opinion, and this is an area of difference between what Lucullus is saying and what Epicurus says on all of these questions. So this is going to be a very interesting passage for us to look at next week.
Cassius:
Yeah, this discussion of memory is intriguing as well. There’s all sorts of material in here that we can pull out information from and hopefully make use of as we proceed. But let’s bring today’s episode to a close. At this point, 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 or our other discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.