Episode 340- The Fatal Flaw In Socratic Skepticism

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Welcome to Episode 340 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 Section 9 of Book Two.

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

Summary

Cassius and Joshua open Section 9 of Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, with Kalosyni joining briefly to share news of the first complete virtual unwrapping of a Herculaneum papyrus scroll (P.Herc. 1667) by the Vesuvius Challenge. Lucullus’s opening argument in Section 9 is that if nothing can be perceived or known, wisdom and philosophy themselves collapse — dogma can never be affirmed, conclusions can never be trusted, and society’s institutions of friendship and law depend on a foundation that skepticism destroys. Cassius and Joshua trace the debate through Carneades’s and Antiochus’s competing readings of the Academic position, and Antiochus’s attempt at a middle path: perception itself may be uncertain, but the fact that we perceive is something we can know.

Joshua draws an extended parallel to Thomas More’s Utopia, where Utopus legislates belief in an afterlife and providence because the whole edifice of Utopian ethics depends on it — a demonstration, Cassius argues, that More stops one step short of the more fundamental question of whether truth and falsehood can be known at all. The discussion turns to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, where the soul’s ascent after death to knowledge of “the good and the beautiful in their truth” depends on escaping the body and its pleasures — a view Joshua calls “revolting” for treating pleasure as an obstacle to the human good rather than its object. Cassius closes by connecting Section 9 to Epicurus’s habit of using self-refutation against skeptics and determinists alike: to claim that nothing can be known is itself a knowledge claim, just as to argue for necessity is itself an act attributed to necessity.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 340 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 take you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. We’re continuing to go through Book 2 of Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective to assist us in getting a better understanding of Epicurus’s view of the nature of knowledge. Today we are reviewing the section of Book 2 where Lucullus is continuing to argue to Cicero that Cicero and his skeptic friends are taking an incorrect view of knowledge, and that the Stoics have a better approach to knowledge — that, in fact, given the position Cicero is arguing, he can’t know anything, can’t take a position on anything, can’t do anything, because he can never know the difference between right and wrong, true and false.

The Stoics are tending to talk in terms of knowledge being something that could not possibly be false, and the phrasing they’re using is going to require us to drill down into exactly how to interpret that phrase and how Epicurus would look at this issue of possibly being false. Last week we finished up the episode comparing the Stoic position to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and we talked about how later in this text Cicero is going to say: don’t blame me that you’re frustrated, Lucullus — blame nature for doing what Democritus said and placing truth at the bottom of a deep, dark well. The battle lines being drawn are that Cicero is going to resist what Lucullus is saying here by ultimately saying that we cannot claim certain knowledge of anything, because it is always possible for us to be wrong.

That’s the situation we’re going to find ourselves in as we begin Section 9 of Book Two. But before we do that, I’m going to turn it over to Joshua — he has some news from the world of Herculaneum texts to talk about briefly, and then when we finish that, we will go right into the text of Section 9 of Book Two.

Joshua:

Yeah, this actually came to us from Kalosyni, who posted a link to a website sharing the news that a papyrus scroll from Philodemus’s library at Herculaneum, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, has for the first time been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end. So this is quite an exciting time for people who study papyri, but also, of course, for people interested in Epicureanism. This is the largest library of papyrus scrolls to survive from the ancient world, and announced on June 25th, for the first time, they have succeeded in virtually unwrapping one of these scrolls.

The Vesuvius Challenge — that’s the organization that organizes these prizes and puts up the money that the prize winners can win — has a PDF called Complete Virtual Unwrapping and Reading of a Rolled Herculaneum Papyrus. On this PDF there is a complete transcription of the Greek text of this papyrus scroll, P.Herc.1667, together with an English translation. Some of it is quite fragmentary, but there are other parts that are very readable. So I will post a link to this PDF in the thread for today’s episode — this is where you can see the Greek text and the English translation that has been produced of this complete papyrus scroll from the ancient world.

It brings us back to the century that we’ve been exploring in this book, Academic Questions, which was written by Cicero in 45 BC. It brings us back into the villas and country estates of these upper-class Roman citizens who were engaged in political strife in the public sphere and who were discussing philosophy and culture and literature in private with a group of friends in villas not unlike the one that was buried in Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius. So I will post that link. And thank you to Kalosyni for bringing this to our attention.

Cassius:

Yes, thanks, Kalosyni.

Kalosyni:

You’re welcome.

Joshua:

And with that, I think we’re ready to move finally into Section 9 of Academic Questions. We are still engaged in Lucullus’s presentation of Stoic epistemology and his contention with Cicero and the other skeptics that knowledge is possible — a position he shares with the ancient Epicureans. Section 9 starts out this way:

“But if all things which are seen were of that sort that those men say they are” — and by “those men,” we presume he’s referring to the skeptics — “so that they either could possibly be false, or that no discernment could distinguish whether they were false or not, then how could we say that anyone had either formed any conclusion or discovered anything? Or what trust could be placed in an argument when brought to a conclusion? And what end will philosophy itself have, which is bound to proceed according to reason? And what will become of wisdom, which ought not to doubt about its own character, nor about its decrees, which philosophers call dogmata, dogma, none of which can be betrayed without wickedness. For when a decree is betrayed, the law of truth and right is betrayed too, from which fault betrayals of friendship and of republics often originate. It cannot therefore be doubted that no rule of wisdom can possibly be false, and it ought not to be enough for the wise man that it is not false, but it ought also to be steady, durable, and lasting, such as no arguments can shake. But none can either be or appear such according to the principle of those men who deny that those perceptions in which all rules originate are in any respect different from false ones. And from this assertion arose the demand, which was repeated by Hortensius, that you would at least allow that the fact that nothing can be perceived has been perceived by the wise man.”

“But when Antipater made the same demand and argued that it was unavoidable that the man who affirmed that nothing could be perceived should nevertheless admit that this one thing could be perceived, namely that nothing else could, Carneades resisted him with great shrewdness. For he said that his admission was so far from being consistent with the doctrine asserted that it was above all others incompatible with it. For a man who denied that there was anything which could be perceived made no exceptions. And so it followed of necessity that even that very thing which was not accepted could not be comprehended and perceived in any possible manner.”

“Antiochus on this topic seems to press his antagonist more closely. For since the academicians adopted that rule — for you understand that I am translating by this word what they call dogma — that nothing can be perceived, he urged that they ought not to waver in their rule as in other matters, especially as the whole of their philosophy consisted in it. For the fixing of what is true and false, known and unknown, is the supreme law of all philosophy. And since they adopted this principle and wished to teach what ought to be received by each individual and what rejected, undoubtedly, said he, they ought to perceive this very thing from which the whole judgment of what is true and what is false arises. He urged, in short, that there were these two principal objects in philosophy: the knowledge of truth and the attainment of the chief good, and that a man could not be wise who was ignorant of either the beginning of knowledge or of the end of desire, so as not to know either where to start from or whither to seek to arrive at. But to feel in doubt on these points, and not to have such confidence respecting them as to be unable to be shaken, is utterly incompatible with wisdom. In this manner, therefore, it was more fitting to demand of them that they should at least admit that this fact was perceived, namely, that nothing could be perceived. But enough, I imagine, has been said of the inconsistency of their whole opinion — if indeed you can say that a man who approves of nothing has any opinion at all.”

Cassius:

This is going to be another long section for us to go through over the next several weeks, but I think it was useful to read the entire thing first, because the further we got into Lucullus’s argument, it seems to me the more clear it got. We’ll return to the beginning of the paragraph in just a second, but just to comment on the names that were mentioned here, Antiochus and Carneades — they were well known for taking different positions on this issue of skepticism.

And based on what Lucullus is saying here, I would apply it back to the question of Socrates — that’s what everybody knows and comes back to. When Socrates took the position that he knew nothing, was Socrates being logically consistent in taking that position? Because it certainly sounds like he’s saying that he knows that he knows nothing. And that question has consumed a lot of argument in the intervening centuries.

Carneades appears to be rejecting Socrates’s position and saying Socrates was wrong. He should not have said that he knew nothing, because that implies that he knows something, and knowing nothing is something. So Socrates is just being illogical — you should not have any exceptions. If you’re going to take the position that you know nothing, there can be no exceptions to that rule; you cannot even claim to know that. So Carneades took the Academic Skeptics far into this realm of skepticism.

Antiochus — and Lucullus seems to be citing him approvingly — is taking the position: well, then what in the world are we doing philosophy at all about? Because the supreme rule of philosophy is that we want to separate what’s true from what’s false. And if we can’t separate what’s true from what’s false, how are we going to make any progress? How are we going to know anything? How are we going to know what to desire, what not to desire, where to start, where to end up? We’re not going to know anything if we take the position that we can’t separate true from false.

And so Antiochus tried to find some middle ground and say that we admit that perception is uncertain, but the fact that we perceive seems to be something that we do have knowledge about. We’ll get further into exactly what Antiochus is saying as we go through this. But clearly the debate is about whether you should take the radical skeptic position that nothing can be known, nothing can be perceived — because if you do take that position, you’re going to run into all sorts of problems, and you shouldn’t even be bothering with philosophy in the first place, since the supreme rule of philosophy is that we’re trying to separate the true from the false. And if you start out knowing you can’t separate the true from the false, then what are you doing even talking about philosophy?

So again, Joshua, you pointed out last week that there are some commonalities between the Stoic and the Epicurean approach, because both Epicureans and Stoics are going to take the position that some things are knowable, and therefore it does make sense to pursue philosophy, and it does make sense to try to determine what the ultimate good is, and it does make sense, based on the knowledge you get from that, to apply it to your life and try to live happily and more successfully using that knowledge. Okay, I think that’s the general direction we’re going in. If you have any comment on the general direction, Joshua, give us that now, and then let’s go back to the beginning and deal with the first couple of sentences in Section 9.

Joshua:

Yeah, I think in this paragraph on Antiochus, we get the basic claim that Lucullus is making. The academicians have adopted a rule that nothing can be perceived, and the word for that is dogma. Are the academics not establishing as a dogma that nothing can be perceived? Which, of course, he’s setting up as a contradiction in their argument. And this is the same kind of response that Epicurus has to the view that nothing can be perceived.

Cassius:

Yeah, I think Antiochus is recognized as someone who was trying to come to a compromise position between these extreme positions of knowing nothing and having no exceptions to that rule, versus the practical reality that you cannot apply that rule in real life and do philosophy or anything else.

So Antiochus, I think, comes to us as someone who was trying to resolve this question within the Academy, but he was not willing to go with Epicurus and go down the road of following the position that all sensations are true, and that we validate knowledge through the senses, anticipations, and feelings. Antiochus is no Epicurean, but he is practical enough to have observed the incompatibilities, inconsistencies, and ultimate lack of practicality of the extreme skeptic position.

Joshua:

Exactly. And as Lucullus says in the very last sentence, it is fitting to demand of them that they should at least admit that this fact was perceived, namely that nothing could be perceived. So that’s the point on which this entire Section 9 seems to turn.

And with that in mind, when we go back to the first paragraph in Section 9, you begin to see the concern here, which is: if nothing can be known, what end will philosophy itself have, which is bound to proceed according to reason, in Lucullus’s view? And what will become of wisdom, which ought not to doubt about its own character, nor about its decrees, which philosophers call dogma, none of which can be betrayed without wickedness? For when a decree is betrayed, the law of truth and right is betrayed too, from which fault betrayals of friendships and republics often originate. It cannot therefore be doubted that no rule of wisdom can possibly be false, and it ought not to be enough for the wise man that it is not false, but it ought also to be steady, durable, and lasting, such as no arguments can shake.

This is a very powerful statement that Lucullus is making, and he’s making it to Cicero — the poster child of the Roman Republic, the paragon of wisdom in defense of public policy and wisdom in defense of the just city. But what Lucullus is saying is: if nothing can be perceived, if nothing can be known, then what happens with wisdom? If you can’t know anything, then you surely can’t be called wise. And if there’s no wisdom — if the decrees of wisdom are not obeyed, if the decrees of wisdom are betrayed — the law of truth and right is betrayed, from which fault betrayals of friendships and of republics often originate.

This idea — that what they’re experiencing here in 54 BC or 45 BC or whatever it was, in the waning years of the Roman Republic — is traced back not to Caesar’s ambition, or to the instability of the Roman constitution, or to economic or sociopolitical factors, but he’s tracing it back to this: when you say that nothing can be known, you are betraying wisdom, and you are betraying philosophy. And these are the supports that allow us to navigate friendship and to navigate politics. Without these supports, this is why these institutions fail. It’s a very interesting argument to be making to Cicero, of all people.

And it’s very similar in some ways to what we get a glimpse of in Thomas More’s Utopia, because in Thomas More’s Utopia there’s a similar point about a lack of philosophy leading to a ruin of society. But it’s very interesting the direction that Thomas More goes in setting this up. He says:

“As to more philosophy, the Utopians have the same disputes among them as we have here in Europe. They examine what are properly good, both for body and mind, and whether any outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. They inquire likewise into the nature of virtue and pleasure, but their chief dispute is concerning the happiness of a man and wherein it consists, whether in some one thing or in a great many. And somewhat surprisingly, they seem indeed more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part of a man’s happiness in pleasure. And what may seem more strange, they make use of arguments even from religion, notwithstanding its severity and roughness, for the support of the opinion so indulgent to pleasure. For they never dispute concerning happiness without fetching some arguments from the principles of religion as well as from natural reason, since without the former, they reckon that all our inquiries after happiness must be but conjectural and defective.”

“Their religious principles are that the soul of man is immortal, that God of his goodness has designed that it should be happy, and that he has therefore appointed rewards for good and virtuous actions and punishments for vice to be distributed after this life. Though these principles of religion are conveyed down among them by tradition, they think that even reason itself determines a man to believe and acknowledge them, and freely confess that if these were taken away, no man would be so insensible as not to seek after pleasure by all possible means, lawful or unlawful — using only this caution, that a lesser pleasure might not stand in the way of a greater, and that no pleasure ought to be pursued that should draw a great deal of pain after it. For they think it the maddest thing in the world to pursue virtue — that is, a sour and difficult thing — and not only to renounce the pleasures of life, but willingly to undergo much pain and trouble if a man has no prospect of a reward.”

“And from thence they infer that if a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind, there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the misery of others, to free them from trouble and anxiety, in furnishing them with the comforts of life in which pleasure consists, nature much more vigorously leads them to do all this for himself. A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but on the contrary, to keep them from it all we can, as from that which is most hurtful and deadly. Or, if it is a good thing, so that we not only may, but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin with himself? Thus, as they define virtue to be living according to nature, so they imagine that nature prompts all people to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do.”

However, the religion and philosophy of the Utopians is built up in this reasoned argument that develops by stages, and if you knock out the support structure of that argument, then suddenly the conclusion becomes untenable and unviable. And for this reason, we see the original king of Utopia making a law against people who violate the terms of the religion and the philosophy. Thomas More writes:

“Utopus made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence. But they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life, and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast’s. Thus, they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth, since a man of such principles must needs, as oft as he dares to do it, despise all their laws and customs. For there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law, and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country, either by fraud or by force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.”

These are two very, very different arguments, but they have a kind of similar foundation, and that is: just like with the Utopians, Lucullus is building up a case here — that if you cannot perceive anything, then how do you form any conclusions? What trust could you place in an argument when brought to a conclusion? And if you can’t trust in conclusions, what end will philosophy itself have, which is bound to proceed according to reason, and what will become of wisdom?

So you build this up slowly, but at the very bottom of that is the ability to obtain knowledge. And if you get rid of that, you destabilize the entire pillar. The thing sitting on top of this pillar is human society — properly functioning human society. And if the pillar collapses, what happens to that society? This is what Lucullus is kind of holding out as a threat to the academics, saying: this is where your philosophy leads people. It leads people to founding their lives not on sure, steady rock, but on quicksand.

And for the Utopians, the claim is that they have this knowledge that there is life after death. If you don’t accept that there is life after death, their argument falls apart, right? Their column crumbles. And the society that is built on top of that column is in the same position as the one that Lucullus is threatening here. That is perhaps a slightly strained comparison, Cassius, but it should probably set up something for you to respond to, I think.

Cassius:

Yes, it certainly does set something up for me, and I don’t consider it to be overly strained. I think it’s a very useful train of thought here to pursue exactly what this means in terms of Thomas More’s thought. So what More is doing through his King Utopus’s law — that you must believe that there’s a life after death, and you must believe that there is an intervening, supervising God — is he has abandoned the field of logic and reason and is saying: I can’t really prove that, but I’m going to pass a law that requires you to think these things.

And so from that point of view, Thomas More should have been equally or more concerned — not only about requiring people to believe that there’s a God and requiring people to believe there’s life after death, but he should be going back one step further and saying: you must believe that there’s a difference between true and false, between right and wrong, between knowledge and lack of knowledge. He’s not going far enough, and he’s attempting to make up the difference by just passing this law to require it to be so. All sorts of things could be said about that, no doubt. But to set up a fictional situation like that and to leave out the fundamental of there being a difference between true and false is an interesting and revealing comparison, I think, because that’s ultimately behind and prior to the conclusions about gods and life after death, reward and punishment, and so forth.

And I think this points out something that I would also focus on in this first part of Section 9 that I think illustrates the difference in direction that the Stoics and the Epicureans are going. I always hate to put too much emphasis on choice of precise words, but at least the way Yonge here has attempted to translate the Latin — when he talks about “for when a decree is betrayed, the law of truth and right is betrayed too” — I don’t think that Epicurus generally is going to talk in terms of the law of truth and right. He’s going to have truth and falsity. He’s going to have right and wrong. But as far as it being a law — and again, that may not be in the original Latin, this may just be Yonge — the tendency to perceive truth and error, right and wrong, as being the result of a law, rings of this supernatural-based approach to things that the Stoics took.

And also in the final sentence that you read in the first part there — “it ought not to be enough for the wise man that it is not false, but it ought also to be steady, durable, and lasting, such that no arguments can shake” — I sense the same echo there, because while certainly Epicurus would say that the things that he knows are steady, durable, and lasting to a degree, they are steady, durable, and lasting only to the degree that they continue to be validated by the observations of the senses, anticipations, and feelings. In Epicurean philosophy, there is no controlling God. There is no fate. There is no force of necessity that requires things to be where they are.

So in both of these cases, I’m probably making too much of the precise translation that Yonge has made here. But I would point out that I think you’d find this to be a difference in direction between Epicureans and Stoics. The Stoics are looking for some supernatural basis that provides a steady, durable, lasting, and in fact eternal law of truth and right, which is not going to be the perspective of Epicurus. It’s going to be a much more circumstantial, practical reliance on the senses, anticipations, and feelings for the validation of what is in fact true and right, steady, durable, and lasting. All of those things are something that we must validate through our senses, anticipations, and feelings. It’s not something that we are looking to discover through reason or religion that has been established by God’s eternal life.

Joshua:

Yeah, in the Latin phrase for “law of truth and right,” or however Yonge phrased it, Rackham translates it as “the betrayal of the moral law.” And in Latin, it’s lex veri rectique. So lex is law, veri is truth, and rect- just means straight, or can also just mean right — so “the right and true law,” that is right there in the Latin text.

Then in Epicureanism, there is no idea of a logos that sort of threads its way through nature, and that by living in accordance with the logos, we are living rightly and truly and justly and morally. I think logos in that context is both law and word.

Cassius:

And extending that comparison, Joshua — the word “moral” — does Epicurus talk about the moral, except in terms of pleasure and pain?

Joshua:

No, he tends to talk about justice rather than morality separate from pleasure and pain. Cicero, of course, has given us this famous expression, O tempora, O mores — “O the times, O the customs” — which is a kind of lament at the way the world is going. It apparently appears in four of his extant speeches, but is most famously the opening of his first oration against Catiline, in the Catiline conspiracy:

“O the times, O the customs! The Senate apprehends this all, the consul sees it, yet that man is living. Living? Nay, truthfully, he even comes into the Senate, takes part in public counsel, notes and remarks with his eyes each and every one of us for slaughter. We, however, brave men, do seem to do enough for the Republic if we dodge the rage and missiles of that man.”

So there are definitely differences between the way that Lucullus approaches the question of whether anything can be perceived and the way that the Epicureans approach the question. They’ve reached very different conclusions in all other areas of their philosophies, but they are kind of close to each other in dealing with this kind of radical skepticism, which claims that nothing can be known.

Cassius:

Joshua, as we move slightly further, my attention is pulled towards a reference in the next paragraph, which is largely devoted to Lucullus reciting Antiochus’s argument that the primary goal of philosophy — in his words, the two principal objects of philosophy — are the knowledge of truth and the attainment of the chief good.

Again, I think this argument is very persuasive. I can hardly imagine what Cicero’s response is when you say, like Lucullus does, that the whole goal of philosophy is to know truth and to attain the chief good. How does Cicero even begin to respond to how you can do those things without knowledge?

Joshua:

Well, let’s talk first about where Plato and Socrates end up on this question, who lean into skepticism as it refers to the material world of sense perception. Where they go in Plato’s Republic is the allegory of the cave, which I know you’re always excited to talk about, Cassius. This is the distinction they make between the world of becoming — the world of mere becoming, the world of everyday lived experience — and on the other side, the world of pure being, the world where truth and good come together and remain together perpetually and unchangingly, because this is the realm of the ideal forms. This is the realm where you’ve escaped the shifting sands of sense perception, and you’ve ascended up into this stasis of truth and goodness and beauty.

And of course, as Socrates says, in discussing which of the arts that the Greeks celebrated — whether it was drama or these athletic competitions or poetry or music — which art is going to get you there, he falls back on geometry. The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal. That’s how you acquire knowledge of the truth and the attainment of the chief good.

For Cicero, this doesn’t come until after you die. As we read in the Tusculan Disputations, his view was that as long as you’re trapped in your body — as long as the soul, the ethereal quintessence of the soul, is locked in your gross concrete flesh — it can’t make the ascent up to the ether where it belongs and where it will eventually merge with the Godhead. So looking to the Tusculan Disputations, we can get a sense of his view stated in Section 18. He says:

“I will have nothing at all to do with the fortuitous concourse of light individual and round bodies, notwithstanding Democritus insists on there being warm and having breath, that is to say life. But this soul, which is compounded of either of the four principles from which we assert that all things are derived, is of inflamed air, as seems particularly to have been the opinion of Panaetius, and must necessarily mount upwards, for air and fire have no tendency downwards, but always ascend. So should they be dissipated, that must be at some distance from the earth. But should they remain and preserve their original state, it is clearer still that they must be carried heavenward, and this gross and concrete air, which is nearest the earth, must be divided and broken by them.”

“But the soul is warmer, or rather hotter, than air, which I just now called gross and concrete, and this may be made evident from this conclusion, that our bodies, being compounded of the earthly class of principles, grow warm by the heat of the soul. We may add that the soul can the more easily escape from this air, which I have often named, and break through it, because no swiftness is comparable to the swiftness of the soul, which, should it remain uncorrupted and without alteration, must necessarily be carried on with such velocity as to penetrate and divide all this atmosphere, where clouds and rain and winds are formed, which, in consequence from the exhalations of the earth, is moist and dark.”

“But when the soul has once gotten above this region and falls in with and recognizes a nature like to its own, it then rests upon fires composed of a combination of thin air and a moderate solar heat, and does not aim at any higher flight. For then, after it has attained a lightness and heat resembling its own, it moves no more, but remains steady, being balanced, as it were, between two equal weights. That, then, is its natural seat, where it has penetrated something like itself, and where, wanting nothing further, it may be supported and maintained by the same element or food which nourishes and maintains the stars.”

“Now, as we are usually incited to all sorts of desires by the stimulus of the body, and the more so as we endeavor to rival those who are in possession of what we long for, we shall certainly be happy when, being emancipated from the body, we at the same time get rid of these desires and this rivalry. And that which we do at present, when dismissing all other cares, we curiously examine and look into anything, we shall then do with the greater freedom. And we shall employ ourselves entirely in the contemplation and examination of things, because there is naturally in our minds a certain insatiable desire to know the truth.”

“And the very region itself where we shall arrive at, as it gives us a more intuitive and easy knowledge of celestial things, will only serve to increase our desire for knowledge. For it was this beauty of the heavens, as seen even here upon earth, which gave birth to that national and hereditary philosophy, as Theophrastus calls it, which was thus excited to a desire of knowledge. But those persons will in a most special degree enjoy this philosophy, who, while they were only inhabitants of this world and enveloped in darkness, were still desirous of looking into these things with the eye of the mind.”

In all three cases — Thomas More’s Utopia, Plato’s cave analogy, and Cicero’s view of the soul ascending to union with the Godhead — the thing that holds people back is the heedless pursuit of manic and irrational pleasure. That’s the problem you have to get over in yourself. And shedding your flesh, which is the locus of the desire for pleasure — getting rid of that is the step you have to complete in order to ascend.

How revolting an idea. That’s my response to Cicero and Plato and Socrates on this point. The idea that if we’re not attached to the pleasures of this world, when it comes time to float through the heavens, we’ll float faster and rise higher if we’re not bound by our desires for the things of this world. The things of this world are so much more natural to us than the things of the heavens, because this is our home, right? We don’t live in a star. We live on a planet, in the “gross and concrete air,” as Cicero terms it.

So I can’t say enough about how much I reject this view of pleasure, of knowledge, of wisdom, and of philosophy — the idea that the purpose of philosophy is to cut yourself off from the pleasures of this world so that you can ascend to the ether after you die and join in union with true and perfect knowledge, and that the people who are going to be successful at doing that, as Cicero says at the end here, are the people who, even though stuck in this world and enveloped in darkness, were still desirous of looking into these things with the eye of the mind.

When you get up there after you die, then your eyes will see clearly. But on earth, they’re clouded over. So what do you see with? You see with the eye of the mind. It’s this probing force of reason that allows Cicero to think that he has attained knowledge in this world, or at least to come very, very close to knowledge in this world. When he speaks of what is probable in this world, in the next world he won’t have to speak of what is probable, because he will see the good and the beautiful in their truth.

Cassius:

Joshua, I completely agree with “revolting” and the other ways that you’ve described these views that Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and so forth are advocating. That’s what we’re trying to focus on as we discuss Epicurean philosophy. That’s what we’re trying to bring out in these podcasts. And it really is foundational to understand these issues. The question of whether you should want to live happily, the question of how to live happily — they all presume that there is a difference between true and false, that there’s a difference between the known and the unknown. At this basic level is the place you have to start to get confidence in your conclusions.

We’ve had a number of discussions on the forum recently that seem to me to go in this direction. It is a hugely important observation to make that Epicurus is constantly using the argument that these false ideas we’re talking about are self-refuting, turning them back on themselves — just like Cicero is going to do when the Stoics claim that none of them are smart enough to be true, virtuous, wise people. What they’re saying is that they have no knowledge themselves. They’re no different than Socrates in that sense. And that is an example of turning the logic back on itself to illustrate the point.

Epicurus does this, especially in the issues of determinism and here in this question of knowledge. As Lucretius points out, he who claims that he knows nothing is saying that he knows nothing, including that he knows nothing even about what he’s asserting. It makes no sense to assert as knowledge that you know nothing — that’s a self-refuting argument. The same with necessity, determinism: it makes no sense to claim that you’re going to argue in favor of necessity, because when you go back far enough in the argument, you’re eventually claiming that you yourself are making your argument by necessity — that the person who is arguing with you or agreeing with you is taking their position by necessity. There’s a self-refuting, self-contradictory premise embedded in your position that can be seen and drawn out and used to illustrate why that position should be rejected.

Not just why it makes no sense, because you’re still trapped in this issue of logic and playing games with words. The real issue is breaking out of those logic games and actually living your life in a way that makes sense, and having confidence in doing that. And that’s why these tools, why Epicurus’s examples, are useful to all of us — because it’s pretty difficult to just start from scratch and get up in the morning and try to compete with thousands of years of arguments that have been designed exactly for the opposite purpose: for the purpose of confusing you, for the purpose of making you conform with orthodoxy and the establishment and the way they do things.

Just like in Thomas More’s Utopia, these people pass laws that make you accept things that you should not accept, that are not by nature established and proven and beyond doubt. And what Epicurus is doing is pointing the way to a natural, true way of looking at knowledge, looking at necessity, and looking at pleasure, looking at morality, and looking at where we stand in the universe — that allows you to get out of the box that society seeks to place you in.

So as we begin to close this episode, I think we’ve seen more good arguments today from Lucullus about the importance of knowledge, the importance of wisdom, and having a framework to understand everything that helps us understand Epicurus’s emphasis on the same argument. As we close today, Joshua, any final thoughts? You know, when we first read Section 9—

Joshua:

—it seemed like we were not going to have much to talk about here, but we managed to really bring out some interesting stuff, and I hope that it’s been interesting for the people listening as well. His point, though, in Section 9 can be summarized really in a single sentence, which he makes a couple of times throughout: it is fitting, he says in the last paragraph, to demand of the skeptics that they should at least admit that this fact was perceived, namely that nothing could be perceived. They should admit that this at least is a dogma on their part, even if they hold no other dogma.

And so as we go forward in the text, we’re going to be talking about the nature of the mind and the nature of the universe that we live in, the skill with which nature has made every kind of animal and human beings above all, and how the mind of man is especially useful for the study of the things that philosophy is interested in.

For all of those reasons, I think it’s very helpful for us to be able to plug into this world — as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode — that is constantly being rediscovered in new and interesting ways. With the ongoing study of the Herculaneum papyri, with the renewed interest and interpretation of these ancient texts, I think that there’s quite a lot of interest that we can get out of this, and it’s certainly very helpful.

I know for me — and I know it’s helpful for you, Cassius, as well — to go through these arguments that were so paramount in antiquity, and that people today seem to be less interested in, but we’re still dealing with the conclusions, with the effects, with the assumptions of these arguments. Today, we just don’t have the language or the jargon or the skill to talk about it in the way they talked about it back then. And that’s, I think, part of why it’s so important to go through these texts.

Cassius:

I agree, Joshua. It seems like today, we’ve been beaten down to just abandon all of these issues and act as if they’re not important. But they are as important today as they were then, and they are of paramount importance in all times. So, we’ll continue to go further with this next week. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about what we’ve discussed about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.