Episode 342- Does The Fact That Our Minds Are Good At Pursuing Knowledge Mean They Were Designed To Be That Way?
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Welcome to Episode 342 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 10 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
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua continue their review of Cicero’s Academic Questions Book Two, working through Section 10, where Lucullus argues that the mind’s evident power to acquire knowledge shows it was designed by nature for that very purpose — and that Academic Skeptics who deny this undermine not just knowledge but virtue, philosophy, and art itself. Joshua and Cassius separate what Epicurus would accept in this argument (that the senses and mind are genuinely reliable, and that abstruse questions shouldn’t be tackled before the things directly in front of us are grasped) from what he would reject (the teleological premise that the mind or the eyes were designed for their function). Joshua reads Lucretius’s own rebuttal from Book Four — that nothing was born in order to be used, but what is born creates its own use — and brings in a long passage from DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy distinguishing Epicurus’s rejection of both Platonic and Aristotelian teleology from the Democritean extreme that reduces everything but atoms and void to mere convention. The discussion turns to whether Epicureans are being inconsistent in denying nature has a purpose while still holding that pleasure is life’s goal; Cassius argues the two positions are reconciled by accepting the senses, anticipations, and feelings — including pleasure and pain — as nature’s own given starting points, not conclusions requiring further proof. Joshua closes with a Jefferson letter mocking unintelligible doctrine and a passage from Lucian’s Hermotimus, where a disillusioned Stoic renounces philosophy after being persuaded that certainty is unreachable — a case, Joshua suggests, that mirrors Lucullus’s own warning about what’s lost when the light of truth is abandoned.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 342 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
We’re continuing this week in Book Two of Cicero’s “Academic Questions,” going through it from an Epicurean perspective, and we are now up to Section 10, which is nearing the end of Lucullus presenting the Stoic view of knowledge and how to obtain it. He’s coming to the end of that argument and is beginning a transition, summarizing some of the reasons behind his position, and he’s going to be shifting to the attack even more than he has already about the implications of taking the position that knowledge is impossible. Eventually we’re going to focus on the position that Cicero himself takes, which is that you don’t have to have knowledge — you can just simply say that some things are more probable or less probable, and we’re going to be dealing with that, but not until next week or the week after that.
Today we’re going to be spending most of our time on Section 10, and there are several important points in here that we need to discuss. When we finished Section 9, Lucullus was continuing his argument to the effect that people who say knowledge is impossible are not going to be able to take any consistent opinions or even have opinions at all. If we move into Section 10, he’s going to extend that and talk about the nature of the mind and the sensations, and how it appears that they have such great power that they were actually designed exactly for the purpose of attaining knowledge, and that those who say knowledge is impossible are rejecting that built-in design.
So as we go into Section 10, Joshua, whenever you’re ready, let us know any thoughts you have about where we are at the moment, and then if you will read Section 10, we’ll go through it point by point.
Joshua:
That’s right, we think we may be coming upon a break point here where he kind of finishes his own argument and moves on to the discussion of the problems associated with other schools of philosophy and their relationship with knowledge. But we’re still in the same argument, I think, which is this argument that started in Section 7. He said, “Let us start 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.” And then makes the point that he is willing to defend the senses, but he’s not going to go as far as Epicurus and demand or try to provide an answer to every possible objection on this question. It’s just that some things are knowable — that’s his position, and we don’t have to go as far as saying that everything that we see, under any condition, under any arrangement of light and matter, that all of it is knowable, but certainly some things seen from a certain angle under certain light are clear, and that clarity is the sign that the mind has taken hold of this thing, and that we can say that it is real, that it’s knowable. And so in the course of his longer argument, we’re going to come back to questions of the relationship between the senses and the mind, and the relationship between nature and the mind.
In Section 10, the next point for discussion, says Lucullus, “is one which is copious enough but rather abstruse, for it touches in some points on natural philosophy, so that I am afraid that I may be giving the man who will reply to me too much liberty and license. For what can I think that he will do about abstruse and obscure matters who seeks to deprive us of all light? But one might argue with great refinement the question with how much artificial skill, as it were, nature has made, first of all, every animal, secondly man, most especially how great the power of the senses is, in what manner things seen first affect us, then how the desires moved by these things followed, and lastly in what manner we direct our senses to the perception of things.
“The mind itself, which is the source of the senses, and which itself is a sense, has a natural power which it directs towards those things by which it is moved. Therefore it seizes on other things which are seen in such a manner as to use them at once; others it stores up, and from these memory arises; but all other things it arranges by similitude, from which notions of things are engendered, which the Greeks call at one time ennoiai and at another prolepseis. And unto this there is added reason and the conclusion of the argument and a multitude of countless circumstances, then the perception of all those things is manifest, and the same reason, being made perfect by these steps, arrives at wisdom.
“As therefore the mind of man is admirably calculated for the science of things and the consistency of life, it embraces knowledge most especially, and it loves that katalepsis — which, as I have said, we will call comprehension, translating the word literally. It loves this for its own sake, for there is nothing more sweet than the light of truth, and also because of its use, on which account also it uses the senses and creates arts, which are as it were second senses, and it strengthens philosophy itself to such a degree that it creates virtue, to which single thing all life is subordinate. Therefore those men who affirm that nothing can be comprehended take away by their assertion all these instruments or ornaments of life, or rather I should say utterly overturn the whole of life and deprive the animal itself of mind, or animus in Latin, so that it is difficult to speak of their rashness as the merits of the case require.
“Nor can I sufficiently make out what their ideas or intentions really are. For sometimes, when we address them with this argument that if the doctrines which we are upholding are not true, then everything must be uncertain, they reply, ‘Well, what is that to us? Is that our fault? Blame nature, who, as Democritus says, has buried truth deep at the bottom of the sea.’ But others defend themselves more elegantly, who complain also that we accuse them of calling everything uncertain, and they endeavor to explain how much difference there is between what is uncertain and what cannot be perceived, and to make a distinction between them.
“Let us then now deal with those who draw this distinction, and let us abandon as incurable and desperate those who say that everything is as uncertain as whether the number of the stars be odd or even; or they contend — and I notice that Arcesilaus especially was moved by this — that there is something probable, and, as I may say, likely, and that they adopt that likelihood as a rule in steering their course of life and in making inquiries and conducting discussions.”
Cassius:
Okay, thanks for reading that, Joshua. That’s the end of Ten. Let’s go back to the top and pick out some important parts of this. Much of it is something that Epicurus would agree with, probably, but not all of it by any means, so let’s try to separate out the good from the bad and make sure we understand before you go further into Section 11.
Joshua:
Yeah, he starts out Section 10 with an interesting claim, or an interesting point, and it’s spread throughout — modern readers have the instinct to compare this with perhaps the Christian view, you know, that the number of the hairs on your head were counted before you were born, or whatever — that things were designed for a purpose, and that the mind itself is one such thing, that the mind itself has a purpose, or at the very least the mind itself has a kind of instinct, an instinct toward knowledge. He does talk here about the mind directing itself as it ascends towards things by which it is moved, so the mind in this view of things is regarded as being an instrument that is engineered for investigation, and the whole point of investigation is to arrive at knowledge.
And so one of the first challenges that he makes to certain skeptic groups — and we’ll try to get into a little bit here the distinction that he’s making, if we can — is that these certain skeptic groups who deny that the mind has this particular orientation towards knowledge also deny what he calls the instruments or ornaments of life, by which he means that it’s this faculty of the mind that allows us to create art, that allows us to talk about philosophy, and most importantly it’s this faculty of the mind, this investigative approach of the mind, this instinct or design of the mind, this is what makes virtue possible and pursuable. And that if you don’t allow that the mind has this faculty, and if you leave everything uncertain, as these skeptic groups that he’s talking about do, then you can’t have virtue, and you can’t have philosophy, and you can’t have art, or good Latin — the kind of prose style that Cicero himself prides himself on. You can’t have these things in a world where everything is thrown into uncertainty, but this is the world that you are leading yourself towards if you deny the mind’s power to acquire knowledge as its first instinct.
Cassius:
Joshua, those are very good points. One thing I would point out: when Lucullus says, “What can I think he will do about abstruse and obscure matters who seeks to deprive us of all light” — in my mind that echoes very closely to what Lucretius says, I believe it’s in Book One, about how you first have to grasp those things that are directly in front of you before you can move to understanding things that are hidden. That may even also appear in the Letter to Herodotus, but I think that’s a point that Epicurus would certainly agree with — that you need not talk about abstruse and obscure matters if you can’t even be confident of those things that are directly in front of you. Lucullus here talks about depriving us of light, but I think that’s pretty similar to the point that Lucretius makes about the things that are directly in front of you — you have to be able to be confident about those first.
The other issue I want to raise, Joshua — you know, it’s a very familiar argument, I believe in Lucretius Book Five, about the eyes, for example, or the legs, not being invented by the gods for the purpose, or being designed for the purpose to which we place them — that you cannot infer from the existence of the eyes, for example, that they were designed by some prior power for that purpose. A lot of this first part of Section 10 is targeted towards arguing, it looks like, that the mind, both of men and of animals, has a natural power that directs it towards the gathering and understanding of knowledge. What do you think Lucretius and Epicurus would say about this — is his argument proper to the extent that he’s saying that this talent is there and you need to make use of it, or is he going further and trying to say that, well, this is obviously designed this way and you should be using these talents for the purposes for which they’re designed? Do you think this part of his argument is something Epicurus would agree with?
Joshua:
It’s not clear to me if he’s talking there about instinct or long-term development, or if he’s talking about the mind being created for this purpose, or if he’s just talking in terms of the Aristotelian final cause — that everything that exists, exists for a reason, and this is the reason the mind exists. We certainly know what the Epicurean response to that would be, and Lucretius has given us in the fourth book of his poem a direct response to this teleology, I guess is what it is that I most associate with Aristotle, but that most of these other thinkers have an interest in and make use of in some of their arguments. The Epicureans, of course, can’t make use of it, because if something has a purpose, it has to have been made by an intelligence with that purpose in view. I don’t see how you can talk about purpose in any other way — we talk about instinct, we talk about an orientation perhaps, but to say that something has one correct use and only that use means that there’s someone setting limits, marking things out in advance, and Epicurus did not avail himself of that kind of thought.
What Lucretius says in the fourth book of his poem, around line 823, he says: “You must eagerly desire to shun this fault, and with foresighted fear to avoid this error: do not think that the bright light of the eyes was created in order that we may be able to look before us, or that in order that we may have the power to make long strides, therefore the tops of the legs and thighs, based upon the feet, are able to bend, or again that the forearms are jointed to the strong upper arms, and hands given us to serve us on either side, in order that we might be able to do what was needful for life.” Which is directly on point to what Lucullus is saying, that if the mind isn’t naturally attuned to the pursuit of knowledge, then how do you build up philosophy, how do you pursue the arts, how do you seek virtue?
And what Lucretius is saying, his response to that, is that we actually have to shun the idea that there is a purpose in things, in order to more directly connect with an unthinking and unfeeling nature that has produced us all, and that is the subject that we’re trying to get a hold of with our minds. “All other ideas of this sort,” he says, “which men proclaim, by distorted reasoning set effect for cause, since nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, but what is born creates its own use.” So maybe if you’re Cicero, or some of these other skeptics, you could respond to Lucullus’s argument thereby saying that Lucretius, you are setting effect for cause — you are saying that it is a design of the mind to search for knowledge, rather than that the mind comes into being and is exposed to knowledge, or is exposed to sensory input, is exposed to perception. Neither Cicero nor the other skeptics are very likely to go the Lucretius direction and say that “nothing at all was born in the body that we might be able to use it, though what is born creates its own use” — “they cannot then have grown for the purpose of using them.”
Cassius:
Yeah, Josh, let me jump in and point out something that’s so obvious I probably don’t need to say this, but Lucretius is certainly not saying that you should not use your eyes, or you should not use your legs, or you should not use your arms. He’s not saying that the eyes and the legs and the arms are not very admirably employable — in using them, he’s simply saying that the goal of using them is developed by a living being who has them, and it was not designed into it by an all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful creator.
Joshua:
Yeah, and Lucretius makes kind of that point directly in the following, when he says that before training and culture taught us to hold up a shield, it was nature who taught us to hold up an arm in the face of a blow, right, to stop a blow — that there is this instinct for the use of these faculties, but it just doesn’t come from a mind that preexists us.
Cassius:
Yeah, this is a really important distinction going on here, because some of this argument does appear, and is probably very similar to what Epicurus is saying. For example, focus on this for just a moment: when he says, “Therefore those men who affirm that nothing can be comprehended take away by their assertion all these instruments of life, or rather I should say utterly overturn the whole of life and deprive the animal itself of mind, so that it is difficult to speak of their rashness as the merits of the case require” — meaning it’s difficult to describe how absurd and damaging this position would be. To me, this line is very similar to what Lucretius is saying in Book Four about how, if you do not trust the senses, everything is going to fall apart — you won’t even know to avoid walking over canyon cliffs and things like that.
So this conclusion of this section we’re talking about echoes in my mind many aspects of the Epicurean argument, but at the same time it’s embedded in this false premise that there is a designer behind it. In fact, the sentence before what I just read, Lucullus says that the mind strengthens philosophy to such a degree that it creates virtue, to which single thing all life is subordinate. Well, this is my opportunity to once again say: in Epicurean philosophy, the single thing all life is subordinate to is pleasure as the end, not virtue — which is again the kind of argument Lucullus is going to be expected to sneak in here, being a Stoic. So there are very different premises that need to be understood, even while both sides, Stoics and Epicureans, are arguing for the importance of using the mind to be able to attain knowledge. They’re both ending up at the point of “yes, use the mind to obtain knowledge,” but the Stoics are planting the presumption that this is something that god has designed the mind to do, and that this is the argument for why you should therefore use it, and that’s how you’re going to create virtue, which is the single thing you should be aiming at — when, of course, Epicurus would reject both the origin and the goal that Lucullus is arguing for here.
Joshua:
Yeah, let me respond to that, Cassius, because I can see a counter-argument being made here by someone who says, “Okay, you say that the mind wasn’t created in order to seek out knowledge, you say that there was no sight before the eyes, but then you say that pleasure is the goal, that pleasure is this purpose that we move towards — how do you square that contradiction, of saying there is no teleology in nature, and yet there is a telos?” And my response is to go to the Norman DeWitt book, “Epicurus and His Philosophy,” because — what he says, and I’ll actually read the longer paragraph this time, usually I read the shorter one on this question — what he says is this:
“In respect of teleology Epicurus was also independent of his teachers. It is true that he may have learned of the teleology of Plato from his first teacher, Pamphilus, but this brand of teleology became an abomination to him: in his view the universe was eternal and had always been an orderly cosmos, and along with creationism all arguments drawn from evidences of divine design or superintendence. As for another teacher, Praxiphanes, if he took time off from literary criticism to expound the biological teleology of Aristotle, the mind of Epicurus was closed to it, because it was not the Epicurean view that ears had been created to hear or eyes to see. From Nausiphanes, yet another teacher of Epicurus, in turn, if he was an orthodox Democritean, no teleology could have been learned at all, because it was inconsistent with a universe of non-purposive atomic motion.”
So these are the two extremes, right? You have the extreme of everything that exists in nature has a telos — the telos of the eyes is to see, the telos of the ears is to hear, the telos of the mind is to seek knowledge — and then you have this other extreme, which is “by convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hard, by convention cold, by convention color; in reality, atoms and void” — only the atoms and void. There’s no telos, because there’s only the raw building blocks of nature — that’s all that really exists in the Democritean view, and so there can be no telos in philosophy.
And I love the way DeWitt ends this, because he says in the next paragraph: “The limited teleology at which Epicurus finally arrived had nothing to do either with creationism or adaptation of organ to function. It had nothing to do with the universe at large, which was ruled by natural laws. It had nothing to do even with animals, although animal behavior afforded evidence that pleasure was the end or telos of living: it was recognized, to be sure, that animals possess volition, and that certain kinds of animals are actuated by innate ideas to organize themselves into herds for mutual protection, but only the rational human being was believed capable of intelligent planning for living and for keeping steadily in view that pleasure is the end or telos ordained by nature. This amounts to saying that a non-purposive nature had produced a purposive creature, for whom alone an end or goal of living could have a meaning. This is teleology at a minimum; for such a belief no teacher had set a precedent.”
And I don’t agree with everything DeWitt is saying there — he says that only the human being is capable of intelligent planning for living and for keeping steadily in view the fact that pleasure is the end or telos ordained by nature. We certainly anticipate that there will be other intelligent beings in the universe, right, that there are innumerable worlds inhabited by life forms of every description, from the lowest to the highest, and that somewhere out there there will be life forms with a capacity for thought and abstract reasoning and language like our own, and that for those life forms a similar limited teleology, or “teleology at a minimum,” as he says, might exist — for those beings also, a non-purposive nature might have produced a purposive creature for whom alone an end or goal of living could have a meaning.
So it’s true that we would disregard, as Epicureans, the view that the eyes were designed for sight, or that the mind was designed for the investigation and pursuit of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we have to go the full Democritean approach of saying that actually almost everything you see is illusory except the atoms and the void — everything else just exists by convention, and we talk about it and we read about it and we live our lives as if these things matter, but really it’s just the atoms and the void. I’m sure you’ll have a response to that, Cassius, I know you love to talk about that problem in particular.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua, I do. You’ve raised a couple of important things I’d like to comment on, but I’ll start with that one — that’s where Epicurus comes back to making the decision that we’re going to regard what our senses, anticipations, and feelings present to us as real, just as real as the atoms and the void. And in fact, the atoms are not even immediately discoverable to us through the senses — we have to infer their existence from reason, and so we are really taking our fundamental first steps by deciding to trust the senses, as Lucullus says. So that plays right into the main point I wanted to make from the way you first phrase the question: are we being inconsistent ourselves by exempting pleasure from the general observation that there is no goal? And you’ve raised the question very well — somebody’s going to ask, “Well, you say there’s no goal, but then you talk about pleasure being the goal — where did pleasure come from? What’s the consistency of your position there?”
And the way I think I would reconcile that is pretty much the way you have DeWitt doing it, but simplifying it even further, to this: that Epicurus is saying to take what the senses, anticipations, and feelings give us as real. He is saying, just like with the eyes, the ears, and the other parts of the body — any other fact of our existence that is presented to us through the senses, we take that as the starting point, without inventing some other world, some supernatural force that is the true thing behind the world. Pleasure — the feelings of pleasure and pain — is presented to us by nature as a given. You don’t challenge the givens of life through nature, you accept nature, you embrace nature, as nature might say, you say “yes” to nature, you don’t say “no, no, no, I’m rejecting this, I have a better idea myself, there is another world of ideal forms, there is a supreme creator of the universe living in heaven, that’s what’s real, not what the senses tell us.”
Ultimately, I think that’s where the basic division lies — you accept the eyes, the ears, the senses, your feet, all parts of your body, the things that your senses present to you, you accept those as real, of which pleasure and pain are part. Pleasure being the go-signal is pretty easy to conclude, as even an infant would, that you go towards pleasure and you avoid pain — that’s the kind of analysis, and why Epicurus says it’s not even necessary, or even appropriate, to try to go behind that and come up with a logical syllogism that is going to try to prove logically that pleasure should be the goal. Pleasure is the goal that nature has provided to us — there is no way for us to get behind that.
And so I think ultimately that’s the way you reconcile this, and say, “Yes, I’m going to use my mind to obtain knowledge, I certainly embrace the observation that it’s very good at doing that, and so therefore I’m going to use it — I’m going to use my eyes, I’m going to use my ears, I’m going to use my brain, I’m going to use pleasure, because that’s what’s given to me. I am not going to use them then to turn around and deconstruct the universe, using critical theory to say, well, I can come up with words that would imply that this universe is not even real, everything I’m seeing is not real.” That is exactly the wrong way to go, and to obsess over that kind of deconstructive analysis is extremely destructive to happiness in life, is what I would allege, and I think that’s what Epicurus is getting at — you don’t go in that direction, you accept what the senses, anticipations, and feelings, pleasure and pain, give you as the starting point.
Now, Joshua, we’re probably about to come to the end of today’s episode, so we need to wrap up with concluding thoughts for today.
Joshua:
You know, Cassius, as we read Lucullus here dealing with what he calls abstruse and obscure matters, in the first paragraph of Section 10 here, when he says — he says his next point for discussion “is one which is copious enough but rather abstruse, for it touches on some points on natural philosophy, so that I am afraid that I may be giving the man who will reply to me too much liberty and license, for what can I think that he will do about abstruse and obscure matters who seeks to deprive us of all light” — and then he references also this quote from Democritus, “of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the well.” And at the end of Section 10 he says we will abandon as incurable and desperate those who say that everything is as uncertain as whether the number of the stars be odd or even.
And it puts me in mind of this quote from one of the letters of Thomas Jefferson — it’s a letter to Francis Adrian van der Kemp, dated the 30th of July, 1816, and he’s writing here to a Unitarian — a Unitarian Christian, of course — and mocking the idea of the Trinity, and he says this: “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is the mere abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood, it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the cuttlefish, through the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy.”
And I’m reading this here on the forum, and I see also a reference to a dialogue, Cassius, that you love, from Lucian, which is the “Hermotimus” — this dialogue in which Hermotimus, who is this Stoic figure who’s finally been convinced that he does nothing, and that Stoicism is not a guide to knowledge, says to his interlocutor Lycinus: “You are quite right, and now I will be off to metamorphose myself. When we next meet there will be no long shaggy beard, no artificial composure — I shall be as natural as a gentleman should. I may go as far as a fashionable coat, by way of publishing my renunciation of nonsense. I only wish there were an emetic that would purge out every doctrine they have instilled in me. I assure you, if I could reverse Circe’s plan with the hellebore, and drink forgetfulness — not of the world, but of Stoicism — I would not think twice about it.”
And Lycinus says: “I owe you a debt indeed — I was being swept along in a rough, turbid torrent, unresisting, drifting with the stream, when, lo, you stood there and fished me out, a true deus ex machina. I have good enough reason, I think, to shave my head, like the people who get clear off from a shipwreck, for I am to make votive offerings today for the dispersal of that thick cloud that was over my eyes. Henceforth, if I meet a philosopher on my walks — and it will not be of my will — I shall turn aside and avoid him as I would a mad dog.”
And the irony of this passage from Lucian, Cassius, is that what he’s saying is not that skepticism is a thick cloud that was over his eyes — it was this Stoic epistemology that we’re reading now that he regards as a thick cloud that was over his eyes, and in many ways it’s the skepticism that convinced him to abandon philosophy altogether. He’s really reinforcing Lucullus’s point here in a very interesting way — it never would have occurred to me to make that connection, but it’s probably worth making, and we’re going to have to pursue that line, not today, but at some point, because I think it’s very interesting that that’s where Lucian ends that dialogue, in exactly the same place that Lucullus fears we will find ourselves if we abandon the light of truth, “than which there is nothing more sweet.”
Cassius:
Joshua, that’s a good place for us to stop for today. We can come back next week and discuss the implications of that conclusion as we move into Section 11.
Joshua:
And it’s going to be more and more obscure as we go forward, because we’re dealing with his response to not just skepticism, but to the various layers of skepticism in antiquity.
Cassius:
That’s exactly right, and I think the comment I’ll close on is that Hermotimus there is rejecting Stoicism, rejecting the arguments that Lucullus is making, and yet he’s confidently rejecting the arguments of Stoicism — he sounds like he’s made up his mind with a very strong degree of confidence that this is the right course for him to pursue. So, as you’re pointing out, there’s all sorts of twists and turns in all of these arguments — as Cicero likes to argue, everybody’s got a different opinion, and by that you can infer that nobody knows anything. Well, that’s not the end result of the analysis, because you have to live your life, you have to make decisions on what direction to go, and just as Hermotimus is doing there, Epicurus tells us to go out and follow pleasure, go out and actually buy that coat that Hermotimus was talking about, and live your life, and not waste it deconstructing arguments that ultimately lead to nothingness and taking no action at all, which is what leads, more than anything else can, to a totally wasted life.
Okay, let’s stop there for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our podcast. Thanks for your time today, we’ll be back again soon. See then. Bye.