Episode 336 - A Coherent Whole Or An Arbitrary Mess - The Necessity of The Study of Nature and Knowledge In Addition To Ethics
Welcome to Episode 336 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 are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and helps us understand Epicurus’ position on the same issues. This week will continue in Book Two, where we will take up 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 Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 336 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. At the end of our episode last week we had read Section Eight of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends for the first time, and it’s likely that most of today’s episode will be devoted to talking about Section Eight. But before we get into that, this is going to be one of those situations where we drop back for a second and talk about the significance of what we’re doing, and I’m going to bring in some commentary that Voula Tsouna and another author have written in a recent book discussing the differences between Epicurean and Stoic epistemology.
But before we get back to the material today, it’s worth stressing that the reason we are going through Academic Questions in such detail, the reason we are studying Epicurean epistemology and Epicurean canonics in such detail, is similar to the reason that we started off this podcast many years ago now by first going through Lucretius, which is devoted primarily but not exclusively to Epicurean physics. One thing I think we see as an important indicator of how someone is going to interpret Epicurus is whether they’re willing to engage not only with the ethics of Epicurus, but also with the canonics, the epistemology of Epicurus, his theory of knowledge and his theory of the nature of the universe in physics. When Lucretius presents Epicurean philosophy to Memmius, when Diogenes of Oenoanda presents Epicurean philosophy to the passersby in his hometown, they combine the discussion of all of these things together because they really make no sense without each other reinforcing themselves in a coherent whole.
Just as in Stoicism, there is a divide today among those who simply want to talk about the ethics of keeping calm and carrying on and the things that are so identified with the Stoic suppression of emotion and calmness. Above all, there’s an active, traditional Stoic movement in the world today that insists that the theory of knowledge and the physics of the Stoics should not be ignored. There’s a traditionalstoicism.com site that sets all of this out very clearly — that if you divorce Stoicism from its roots in seeing the universe as divinely inspired and divinely ordered, then the focus on the ethics of Stoicism really makes no sense, because the ancient Stoics justified their conclusions on their views of the universe, just like the ancient Epicureans justified their conclusions on ethics based on the nature of the universe and how to understand it. What we’re finding as we’re going through Cicero’s Academic Questions is that it was a hotly contested issue in the ancient world about whether we could be sure of anything whatsoever.
The material that we’re reading has been focused mostly on the Stoic view and will be responded to by the Academic Skeptics, but the Epicurean position on knowledge — which is why we’re talking about this and what we’re learning about as we hear how the Stoics took a different position — was also directly engaged with these issues. And when Cicero and the people of the several hundred years after Epicurus talked about Epicurean philosophy, they were talking about Epicurus’s view of the nature of the universe, and they understood that the nature of the universe is going to inform your decisions about how you’re going to spend your life, how you’re going to spend the time that you have, the meaning of the word “pleasure,” the meaning of the word “happiness,” the meaning of the word “blessedness.” Those words are going to have connotations and implications that are going to be directly determined by your view of the universe.
If you think that there is a divine God who is ordering everything, then blessedness is going to be something that you’re going to consider to be relevant in that context of an actual living, breathing, intelligent being who is directing the universe. If you, on the other hand, do not think that the universe was designed by a creator, then you’re not going to consider that kind of a force to be relevant. You’re going to focus on the fact that you have one life to live, that that life is going to be short, and you had better take the time to determine what the best use of that life is, because you’re not going to get a second chance after you die. You have to decide whether virtue or piety or pleasure are the categories that you should look to, or whether there’s something else you should look to in order to organize your life.
One of the statements that’s made in the material for today that Lucullus the Stoic brings up — and I think he is absolutely right about — is that if you cannot be confident of anything, then you’re frankly not going to do anything with your life, because you’re going to be frozen like the proverbial deer in the road, staring at the headlights, not knowing what to do next, not caring what to do next, because you think that everything is beyond your ability to understand. So why even try? So what we’re finding as we go through this is that the Stoics understood the same issue that the Epicureans did: that you have to have confidence in knowledge. Now we’re finding out that the Stoics took a very different route to that conclusion, but the Stoics and Epicureans who take Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy seriously understood then — and I would contend understand now — that these philosophies are coherent wholes.
You do not just pick and choose what you prefer to do, what pleasures or what activities or what piety you think arbitrarily in your own mind makes sense. You come up with a conclusion that you can have confidence in, based on your processing of what the senses give you and based on the conclusions that you think you can firmly reach after going through the respective processes of obtaining knowledge. Norman DeWitt even mentions that Epicurus considered Plato to be a skeptic, because Plato had held that while we could be sure what the idea of a horse is in some other dimension, we can never be sure that a particular animal in front of us is a horse, because the senses are lying and deceiving us. Only the dialectical, geometrical, analytical approach to rationality can give certainty in the eyes of Plato — which is something that Epicurus rejected. As the Academics went further and further in that direction, even the Stoics rejected that approach. The Stoics, for the reasons I’ve mentioned already, also appreciated the necessity of confidence in knowledge.
So I won’t go too much further in that direction here in the opening. But the reason we are doing this is that those people in the ancient world — and I would contend those people who are today serious about understanding either Stoicism or Epicurean philosophy — need to not be limiting themselves only to one of the three legs of the philosophy. They all work together and stand or fall as a whole. Absent the supporting foundation, everything that’s said about ethics is just purely arbitrary — purely personal preference that has no foundation, no verifiable or repeatable foundation in the way that your senses and your contacts with reality reveal the world to you. You’re always going to be uncertain about how to spend your time if you think you can’t be certain about anything, and you’re never going to be confident about whether to spend your time trying to appease God so as to avoid ending up in hell after you die.
If you can’t take a position on whether there is a supernatural God and whether there is a supernatural hell, you’ll always worry about those things and never be able to get free of them. All of these issues are where the Stoics and Epicurus decided you need an answer. The Stoics went in a totally different direction, affirming a divine being, affirming a cosmic sense of justice, while the Epicureans rejected all that and said: you have one life to live, and you had better use it right, because you’re not going to get a second chance.
So in that context, before we get back to Section Eight again, I wanted to mention — just as we discussed last week — that Martin Ferguson Smith has published a new edition of the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription. One of our friends on our forum, Brian Harris, is now working on an interlinear version of Lucretius. He’s finished Book One of that and a PDF is available on the EpicureanFriends.com website. But I’d just like to hold Brian up as an example of someone who has contributed tremendously to the advancement of Epicurean philosophy by all of the work he’s done — not only on this new Lucretius translation, but the previous work he’s done on organizing an accessible version of Hermann Usener’s collection of Epicurean sayings that we refer to all the time. Brian does an excellent job of doing what I’m referring to here in terms of looking at and making the effort to understand all significant aspects of Epicurean philosophy that remain. And obviously it is all a virtually impossible task to do. But when you think about the different categories of physics, ethics, and canonics, what Brian has been doing is making sure that he’s covered all three of those categories and has a reasonable grounding in each.
And then as questions arise in one aspect of the philosophy, he’s able — just as Epicurus talks about in the Letter to Herodotus in terms of considering outlines and being able to flip from the high view to the detailed view and back and forth again — to move back and forth, see how they relate, and never get too far off in a direction that would contradict one of the other two legs of the philosophy. That really is probably the most important point right there: because it is all a coherent whole, you can look to the other legs of the philosophy when you get into an ambiguity that you think is difficult to resolve. And we run into those all the time in terms of ethics, in terms of what pleasures to pursue, whether pleasure is the goal, what pleasure means.
The best way to understand Epicurus’s viewpoint on those issues is going to be to understand where he’s coming from on canonics and on physics. And you’ll see that, as David Sedley has discussed in his article “Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics,” Epicurus’s ethics follows the same logical processes as does his physics. If you don’t know what Epicurus’s physics processes are about, you’re not going to know how Epicurus’s ethics thought processes work either. So all of these things are extremely important, and there are a lot of resources out there — far too many for any one person to become a master of — but I wanted to single out the work that Brian is doing as an example of the best way to proceed in terms of getting a grounding in all three legs of the philosophy. Joshua, I have just delivered a long and rambling opening there, but before we get into Section Eight, what are your thoughts?
Joshua:
I think you made excellent points, and I especially want to be sure to agree with and confirm your congratulations to Brian. Some people may remember that I made an effort at an interlinear edition of Lucretius before, and it was painfully slow going and I abandoned it. I never got very far. I certainly didn’t get to the end of Book One, so I’m very impressed with what Brian has done there, and I continue to encourage him in his work.
Cassius:
Before we go further there, Joshua, just let me throw in quickly: it’s going to be a great addition to what we already have, because it’s very good to compare different translations and we have a good version of that available on the forum already. But we don’t have a word-for-word interlinear version where you could compare the actual words, and so his work will be a great addition to what we already have. I’m sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead.
Joshua:
On the subject of epistemology, I think it would be helpful to do something that we haven’t done in Academic Questions, and that is actually go back to Section One of the second book and see what Cicero does. He’s trying to give us an idea of who Lucullus is as a person, what his history with Rome and its tragedies and triumphs is, what his scholarly achievements are in philosophy, and it’s interesting what he cites as being the essential ingredient. So he talks in the first paragraph in Section One about how Lucullus climbed the cursus honorum — the ladder of honor that marked out a Roman aristocrat’s ascent through the various ranks of public office, ultimately leading to the consulship at the top — and Cicero says that Lucullus did proceed to the consulship, the duties of which he discharged in such a manner that everyone admired his diligence and recognized his genius.
Afterwards, he was sent by the Senate to conduct the war against Mithridates, and there he not only surpassed the universal expectation which everyone had formed of his valor, but he even surpassed the glory of his predecessors. And then he gets into the interesting point, which we’ll take a bit to set up. In the second paragraph, he says this, “And that was the more admirable in him because great skill as a general was not very much looked for in one who had spent his youth in the occupations of the forum and the duration of his quaestorship in peace in Asia, while Murena was carrying on the war in Pontus. But the incredible greatness of his genius did not require the aid of experience, which can never be taught by precepts. Therefore, having devoted the whole time occupied in his march and his voyage partly to making inquiries of those who were skillful in such matters and partly in reading the accounts of great achievements, he arrived in Asia a perfect general.
Though he had left Rome entirely ignorant of military affairs, where he had an almost divine memory for facts — though Hortensius had a better one for words — but as in performing great deeds, facts are of more consequence than words, this memory of his was the more serviceable of the two. And they say that the same quality was conspicuous in Themistocles, whom we consider beyond all comparison the first man in Greece. And this story is told of Themistocles: that when someone promised to teach him the art of memory, which was then beginning to be cultivated, Themistocles answered that he should much prefer learning to forget. I suppose because everything which he had either heard or seen stuck in his memory — Lucullus having this great genius added to it. That study, presumably the study of memory, which Themistocles said he despised — therefore, as we write down in letters what we wish to commit to monuments, he in like manner had the facts engraved on his mind.
Therefore, he was a general of such perfect skill in every kind of war — in battles and sieges and naval fights and in the whole equipment and management of war — that that king, Mithridates, the greatest that has ever lived since the time of Alexander, confessed that he considered Lucullus a greater general than any he had ever read of. He also displayed such great prudence in arranging and regulating the affairs of the different cities, and such great justice too, that to this very day Asia is preserved by the careful maintenance of the regulations and by following, as it were, the footsteps of Lucullus.”
So it’s interesting to me that the thing that Cicero cites in Lucullus as kind of the key ingredient is his grasp of the relevant facts. This is what made him a good general. This is what made him a good governor in Asia. This is what made him a good consul. What made him really good at what he did — for all the things that Cicero himself loves: the furtherance of the interests of Rome, the development of Roman citizens, all of this public-minded stuff — he commends Lucullus for doing all of this. But the thing that he says allowed Lucullus to do it was his command of the facts. It’s not enough that Lucullus was conscious of his duty. It’s not enough that Lucullus had some ideas about how nature works. He has to have some grounding in epistemology in order to confront the things that he’s going to confront on the battlefield or in diplomacy. And so you could probably go a lot deeper here than I’ve gone in looking into this and contemplating why Cicero himself — an Academic Skeptic, a profound skeptic in many ways — finds this to be the thing in Lucullus that is really worth praising, comparing him to Themistocles, who he says is the first man in Greece. So that’s who we’re continuing to read here in Section Eight as we get into it today.
Cassius:
Joshua, I am very glad you brought up that history because we did skip over most of it, and I think it’s extremely relevant to what we’re talking about. And I’ll criticize myself here — I spent most of my life avoiding Academic Questions and reading much of Cicero because I thought it was just totally impractical and a waste of time. But as I’ve now finally got to the point in my life where I’ve had more time to read this, the point that jumps out at me is that Cicero brings to life all the people that are directly engaged here, even if they’re fictional dialogues. These are people who understood and were identified with these philosophies in the ancient world, and that’s why Cicero used them in their respective positions. These people were not egghead intellectuals who sat around and did nothing all day.
I know that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about as we go further: well, what about those Epicurean gods? They just sit around and do nothing all day — that is Cicero’s allegation against the Epicurean gods. The idea that the ancient true Stoics or the ancient true Epicureans would sit around and do nothing all day, that all they wanted to do was find ataraxia, all they wanted to do was remove pain, all they wanted to do was escape the problems of life and not deal with them and essentially anesthetize themselves so they could get rid of all disturbance — the idea that either the ancient Stoics or the ancient Epicureans took that position is absolutely absurd. Cicero and these people who are talking about these ideas were concerned about them because they were people of action who understood that decisions have to be made in life. And we have to understand whether there’s a supernatural God, we’re going to have to understand what our ultimate goal is — in terms of virtue or piety or pleasure, or in the case of Hieronymus or people like Pyrrho, just absolute absence of pain and absence of disturbance — because that’s what they want to focus on.
Those fundamental issues were not just put off in some monastery or some Cambridge lecture hall like they are today. They were things that people who were running the world and who were directly involved in the ebb and flow of civilization — these were things that they were wrestling with. They understood what the basic positions were that were being advocated by the different schools, and they understood the necessity of identifying what they considered to be the right answer. And what you’ve just quoted about Lucullus is a direct example of all of this. He may have been Stoic and he may have thought that the world was directed by divine forces and providence and all that, but he understood that he was taking a position on those issues and those positions would lead him to take action. Those positions would lead him to decide that the Stoic ethics in his case were things that should be pursued and defended and fought for in his own life.
That’s why Cicero ended up with a foot in both camps, because although Cicero decided to go with the probabilistic skeptic camp to a certain degree, he was obviously very admiring of the Stoic ethics. That’s what he keeps pushing throughout all this — the virtue position that the Stoics were arguing. And so even Cicero, sliding down the hill of skepticism, understood that his life, his world, and everything that he valued was dependent upon him understanding these positions and taking a viewpoint that allowed people to take action to defend virtue. That’s presumably why Cicero did not go all the way into Pyrrhonian absolute ataraxia, because Cicero understood that even though he couldn’t be sure totally, even though it was only probable that virtue was the path to follow, it was still probable, and he understood the practical importance of pursuing virtue. He didn’t have to be led around like a blind man to make sure he didn’t fall off bridges. He didn’t have to have food put in his mouth versus in his ear. He didn’t have to be told to write down these things to educate other people, unlike other skeptics who didn’t write anything at all, who didn’t even make an effort.
That is the end of skepticism — when you absolutely do nothing, you care about nothing, you are involved in nothing, you are engaged in nothing. That is the road to which radical skepticism leads, and some of the radical skeptic philosophers actually followed it. Cicero was much smarter than that. And to give Cicero his due, and to give the Stoics their due from an Epicurean position, I would advocate to the end of time that when you understand that there are no rewards after death, when you understand there is no existence after death, and you understand that your life is short and for all eternity you’re going to cease to exist — then no person in their right mind is going to think that sitting around and doing nothing is the right thing to do.
Now, obviously some people can come to that conclusion, but it’s not the conclusion that either the Stoics or the Epicureans of the ancient world came to. We can come to that today because it’s a free country in most of the world. But the Stoics and the Epicureans were engaged in life, arguing these positions, not retreating into their individual caves and simply living like hermits or monks apart from the world.
And so I’m glad you brought up Lucullus and gave the history that Cicero provided, because it hammers home exactly who’s talking about these things and exactly why they’re talking about it. Okay, so now as we move back towards Section Eight, this past week I found a new book issued in 2026 — a philosophical history of the concept, edited by Steven Smid and Hammed Tib — and the second chapter in that book is aptly enough entitled “Concepts in Epicurean and Stoic Philosophy,” and it’s an article that’s addressed almost directly to the material that we’re looking at now.
I recommend it to everyone because I don’t know the other author, but Voula Tsouna is a highly reputable writer on Epicurean issues. And before we get back into Section Eight directly, I wanted to read just briefly from the conclusion of that article, which I think highlights what we’re talking about as we move back into Section Eight. The conclusion is this:
“While both Epicureans and Stoics accepted the broadly empiricist assumption that all concepts originate in experience and that none are innate, they diverged in how they interpreted and applied this shared starting point in ways that reflected their contrasting worldviews. In our opinion, the Epicureans’ interest in preconceptions is primarily epistemological. In their view, the preconceptions are epistemically fundamental and deeply intertwined with Epicurus’s mechanistic and natural account of the universe. They’re understood as clear, direct imprints on the mind derived from sensation, which function as self-evident truths guiding both everyday reasoning and scientific inquiry. The preconceptions differ from the categories of concepts that are derived from the preconceptions and are involved in all sorts of mental operations and cognitive endeavors, including philosophical and scientific investigation and making inferences about non-evident things.
The Stoics likewise view the preconceptions as foundational cognitive elements, but integrate them into a broader metaphysical framework characterized by divine reason and cosmic order. The Stoics’ belief in a universe thoroughly suffused and governed by logos or God causes them to focus on the part of philosophy that they call dialectic — the study of the main aspects of logos — which comprises rational impressions, in particular cognitive impressions (the principal Stoic criterion of truth), language, semantics, logic and rhetoric, and also importantly the study of preconceptions, derivative concepts, and the mechanisms of concept formation.”
The reason I wanted to read that is I find in this conclusion a validation of the approach that it’s essential to keep in mind the Stoic focus on the divine order and divine reason, and how that leads them to conclude that everything has to be evaluated within the perspective of there being a logos or a God that is involved in this dialectic aspect of things — that leads them to conclude that rational analysis of impressions is where you end up with the Stoic criterion of truth, which is very different from the way Epicurus approaches it.
So with that sort of as a footnote to where we are, it’s time to go back into Section Eight. We won’t read the whole thing again — we read it last week — but just as we’ve been trying to do with all the important sections, we’ll pick out things as we look through Section Eight that seem to be most relevant to what we’re discussing, and see if we can use it to understand Epicurus better by doing so. Joshua, would you see a place you’d like to start?
Joshua:
Yes, I do. First of all, we need to kind of recap more specifically where we are in his argument. The first sentence in Section Seven was: “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 could be asked for.” And the rest of Section Seven was: how do you build on — let’s say we agree with Lucullus that some sensations are true — how do you build from that up to what he considers to be the real standard of epistemology, which is reason? He says: “Then the rest of the series follows, connecting the more important links, describing reason as it were as the full comprehension of things — from which class of arguments the notions of things are impressed upon us, without which nothing can be understood, nor inquired into, nor discussed.”
And the precise relationship between the initial sense perception and the later application of reason to the problem was described in an analogy to the hand — right, this cataleptic grasp. And I remember last week, Caius, we said we were going to review that one more time. Maybe we should do that before jumping right back into Section Eight, because we do need a little bit more clarity with his argument thus far. And it is actually Cicero who transmits this argument to us from Zeno, although much, much later in Academic Questions — all the way in Section 47 of Book Two, and we don’t know how far we’re going to go in Academic Questions. We’re on Section Eight, so this is a long way away.
Yeah, Cicero in Section 47 starts talking about the arguments between different philosophers on this question, including among the Stoics, and his object here is to point out to Lucullus that even according to their own Stoicism, they themselves cannot say that they know anything. Cicero is using their own argument to try to bring them over to his side. He says: “Do we then — we who are called Academics — have the glory of this name? Or why are we to be compelled to follow those men who differ from one another in this very thing which the dialecticians teach among the elements of their art: how one ought to judge whether an argument be true or false? Which is connected in this manner: ‘If it is day, it shines.’ How great a contest there is! Diodorus has one opinion, Philo another, Antipater a third. Need I say more? In how many points does Antipater himself differ from Chrysippus his own teacher? Again, do not two of the very princes of dialectic — Antipater and Archedemos, men most devoted to hypothesis — disagree in numbers of things?
Why then, Lucullus, do you seek to bring me into odium and drag me as it were before the assembly? And why, as seditious tribunes often do, do you order all the shops to be shut? For what is your object when you complain that all the trades are being suppressed by us, if it be not to excite the artisans? But if they all come together from all quarters, they will be easily excited against you. For first of all, I will cite all those unpopular expressions of yours when you called all those who will then be in the assembly exiles and slaves and madmen. And then I will come to those arguments which touch not the multitude, but you yourselves who are here present.
For Zeno and Antiochus both deny that any of you know anything. How? You will say. For we allege on the other hand that even a man without wisdom comprehends many things. But you affirm that no one except a wise man knows one single thing.
And Zeno professed to illustrate this by a piece of action. For when he stretched out his fingers and showed the palm of his hand — ‘perception,’ said he, ‘is a thing like this.’ Then when he had a little closed his fingers — ‘assent is like this.’ Afterwards when he had completely closed his hand and held forth his fist — that he said was comprehension, and from this simile he also gave that state a name which it had not had before, and called it catalepsis. But when he brought his left hand against his right and with it took a firm and tight hold of his fist — ‘knowledge,’ he said, ‘was of that character, and that was what none but a wise man possessed.’ But even those who are themselves wise do not venture to say so, nor anyone who has ever lived and been a wise man according to that theory.
You, Lucullus, do not know that it is daylight, and you, Hortensius, are ignorant that we are now in your villa.”
So Cicero is saying here that if only wise men have, first, this cataleptic grasp — and then, putting the left hand over the right fist, that is what he calls knowledge — if only wise men possess this knowledge, and if even those who are themselves wise will not admit to being wise, then no one who has ever lived has been a wise man, and therefore no one who has ever lived has possessed knowledge.
Cassius:
Joshua, on that point that you’re discussing there, I may be wrong in saying this, but my mind goes to the Stoic position that the attainment of virtue — and of course wisdom is just one of the virtues, so everything we’re going to say about virtue applies also to wisdom — is an all-or-nothing thing at the top of the mountain, so to speak. So that logically and theoretically they are always traveling towards virtue and they don’t ever claim to have gotten there. They don’t claim ever to have achieved wisdom, from that point of view. So potentially what Cicero is saying here is that even you confirmed Stoics — who don’t claim to have reached the summit of the mountain and claim to be a wise man — can’t say that it’s daylight or daytime or nighttime, because you haven’t reached the summit of wisdom. And so therefore you’re still in that process and don’t know for sure. That’s basically where we are. Cicero would say.
Joshua:
I think that’s right. Yeah, there’s no quarter-way mark or halfway mark or three-quarter-way mark on the way to virtue. It’s an absolute state. You either have it or you don’t, and they compare it to a man drowning. If you’re drowning in an inch of water, that is no different than drowning in a hundred feet of water. Either way, the salient fact is you’re drowning — just as the salient fact is you do not possess virtue.
Cassius:
And I believe that you quoted for us last week the Wikipedia article, and that’s where it said that Chrysippus held that the wise man was as rare as a phoenix or something like that. So Cicero, being the good lawyer that he is, is hanging them by their own admissions — that the wise man being as rare as a phoenix obviously does not include most people. And so therefore by the Stoic viewpoint, most people can’t even tell whether it’s day or nighttime, much less anything else. And actually I would say that’s a win for Cicero. Cicero’s got a pretty good point logically, taking their position to the extreme that they themselves point to. If only the wise man can really know something, and the wise man is as rare as a phoenix, then that means that most people know nothing. And I think that’s a pretty persuasive argument by Cicero.
Of course, as you mentioned, Joshua, we’re way down in Academic Questions and we’re going to make editorial decisions as we go forward in terms of how much we read. But I think that we’ve already laid the foundation for this in some of the prior episodes: that Lucullus is giving us the Stoic position so that Cicero can come along and knock it down. And I think ultimately that’s the position that I would take as the proponent of Epicurean philosophy — that most, and potentially all, of Cicero’s arguments against the Stoics are going to be valid and persuasive, because the Stoics are not taking all sensations to be true. They’re taking an arbitrary position about dialectic that really can’t in the end be supported. And Cicero is right to knock down all of these Stoic arguments.
Joshua:
Except that Cicero does it from the perspective that admitting that you know nothing is what makes you wise, right? That’s the Socratic dictum.
And certainly Epicurus would not agree with that. But we still have to understand the argument that Lucullus is making before we go into Section Eight here. So let me leave out Cicero’s criticism and his response, and let’s just look one more time at this metaphor of Zeno — or this hand gesture. He says: holding out your palm in front of you with your fingers stretched out, “a visual appearance is like this.” Closing the fingers a little, he said “an act of assent is like this.” And Wikipedia says that an act of assent is an adherence to the truth, thus understood. He then pressed his fingers closely together and made a fist, and said that was comprehension or catalepsis — the cataleptic grasp. And then, maintaining the fist with your left hand, you put your right hand over that fist and squeeze it tightly and forcibly. And he would say that this is knowledge — and again, knowledge is within the power of nobody save the wise.
So that is the argument from Zeno, and we’ve seen Lucullus building that up. He starts with sensation, he starts with the initial impression, and he’s trying to build towards reason and comprehension.
Cassius:
Joshua, we keep promising to get to Section Eight and we will at least touch on Section Eight. But before you move further there, I want to remind everybody who might not have heard last week’s podcast that Joshua had an excellent takedown of the gesture method of proof by referring to the Buddhist monk story. That is well worth listening to in our prior episode if you’ve not already heard that.
Joshua:
So we’ve been preparing to go into Section Eight and we will continue, but we’re already running out of time in today’s episode. There’s a novel by Laurence Sterne in English — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman — and it’s an autobiography written by Tristram Shandy, but he spends all 800 pages or whatever it is and he never actually gets born to start the life that he’s supposed to be describing in the novel. That’s kind of how today’s episode feels to me, because we’re not going to make any progress here in Section Eight.
Cassius:
Let me pile onto that, Joshua, by saying how much I appreciate your bringing tidbits like that into the discussion. Because I’ve forever — since I first became aware that Thomas Jefferson was an admirer of Epicurus — been also aware that Thomas Jefferson was an admirer of Sterne and this Tristram Shandy. I’ve picked it up to try to get some idea of it and it made no sense to me whatsoever, so I’ve just never made any progress with it. So you’re in the same category as Brian Harris in terms of having my admiration for having this kind of background that informs your knowledge and gives you a big-picture grasp of what we’re talking about in so many of these issues.
Joshua:
When we do get into Section Eight — which will happen next week, clearly, at this point — what we’re going to find is that he’s been talking up to this point about epistemology, about knowledge, about apprehension, comprehension, impressions, perceptions, and so on. But what he’s going to do in Section Eight is introduce ethics into this and make the claim that ethics is actually reinforcing the point that he’s trying to make about epistemology. If you can’t determine what is true and what is false, then how does someone like Marcus Regulus — this revered figure of the Roman side of the conflict in the Punic Wars, who was captured by the Carthaginians, negotiated with the Carthaginians to be sent back to Rome so that he could secure a peace treaty on the condition and the promise that after he did that he would return to Carthage — how do you explain people doing this if you’re also going to claim that it’s not possible for these people to have any knowledge about what they’re doing?
This is kind of a good argument against Cicero, because Marcus Regulus is his top example. That’s his favorite person. He says in On Ends, when he is arguing against Torquatus, he says to Torquatus that whether the Epicureans want to admit it or not, their key figure — the person that they most strive to live their lives in emulation of — is Lucius Thorius Balbus, the Epicurean who sleeps on a bed of roses and dines off of gold plates and so on. And he says that I don’t even need to say who I select as the better person, because virtue herself will make the choice, and virtue herself chooses Marcus Regulus.
And so Lucullus is now saying here in Section Eight to Cicero: how do you justify supporting Marcus Regulus for doing what he did if he didn’t know what he was doing? If your position, Cicero, is that nothing is knowable — like Socrates — and that if Marcus Regulus was wise, then he must have admitted that he knew nothing, and if he claimed to know anything at all, then he must have been a fool, how do you justify the description of his actions as virtuous or dutiful in light of your positions on epistemology? He doesn’t quite go that far. Lucullus isn’t quite making that argument to Cicero, but that’s what emerges from the text for me — a clear challenge to Cicero, because the Stoics and the Academic Skeptics on ethics come to a very similar place. In fact, Cicero is far more willing to embrace Stoic ethics than the ethics of certain dissenting Platonists or Peripatetics, and he has far more admiration for the Stoic position in ethics. And that was kind of what we covered in the first book of Academic Questions.
And now we have Lucullus making the point that there’s a deep connection between duty and virtue and knowledge. If you don’t know anything, then how can you behave well or wisely? And that is an argument that we’re going to have to respond to next week. And we’ll probably find things in this section that we agree with, as we’ve been doing thus far — some of Stoic epistemology is agreeable to Epicurus, certainly more agreeable than a lot of the Academic Skeptics’ epistemology. And since we’ve already read Cicero’s response to Lucullus from Section 47 precisely on the point of knowledge and wisdom, this can be read as kind of a preemptive response to that. So we’ll have to deal with all that next week.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, there is so much going on here. You could spend a lifetime trying to psychoanalyze Cicero and figure out why someone as smart and as active a person as he was got himself into the difficulties that he did — how, from an Epicurean point of view, he could be so wrong in his judgment about the desirability and the persuasiveness of the different schools. It’s almost like all of ancient philosophy can be categorized within the different debates going on within Cicero himself.
Clearly, as you were just saying, Cicero was aligned with the Stoics in terms of ethics, and he was, again, a man of action willing to make decisions and take actions in support of those decisions. So he did not go full-blown radical skeptic like the purists who had done exactly that. Cicero was aware of them. He was aware of the radical skeptic arguments and he pulled back from those. But in an aspect of this that is deeper than we’re going to get into, it appears that Antiochus and people like that were doing their best to try to reconcile these schools and sort of bring them together and say: we’re really not all that far apart. The only people who are outside of our consensus are those darned Epicureans. But we Skeptics and you Stoics — in the end you’re seeing things much the same way, and you’re still seeing virtue as the key, and so why can’t we all just get along and stop arguing with each other?
That seems to be where Cicero tries to come down in his own mind — keeping a foot in both camps and holding out Stoic ethics while at the same time holding out a type of skeptical epistemology. But for all of the ambiguities involved in all that, we’re never going to get to the ultimate end of Cicero’s psychology. But we can use this information to understand Epicurus better as he was understood in the ancient world by those people who knew him best.
That’s the best guidance to understand Epicurus — it’s not just picking one particular letter, one particular passage, one thing here and there, and then ignoring Lucretius, ignoring Philodemus On Signs, ignoring these other aspects of philosophy that they themselves were considering to be critical. The best way to understand all this and make the most intelligent decisions out of it is to understand the sweep of the philosophy and bring a big-picture perspective to it. We’ll continue trying to do that next week as best we can. As always, we thank you for your time this week. We invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this episode. Again, thanks for your time. We’ll talk to you again soon. See you then. Bye.