Episode 344 - What Is Our Mind's Role In Determining Truth?

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Welcome to Episode 344 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

Wrapping up Section 11 and reading Section 12 of Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Cassius and Joshua trace Lucullus’s concept of the “mark” or “sign” (signum) that supposedly makes a perception impossible to doubt, and compare it to Epicurus’s eidola and to Torquatus’s cradle argument in On Ends. Joshua reads Lucretius’s own use of signa in the opening lines of Books One and Three, tying the Epicurean love of evidence and “footprints” directly into the vocabulary Cicero puts in Lucullus’s mouth. The reading of Section 12 turns to synkatathesis — assent — and Lucullus’s argument that animals cannot help assenting to what is manifestly suited to their nature (oikeion), while humans alone can choose to withhold assent, which is why virtue is possible for us and not for animals. Cassius connects this to the Stoic claim that we participate in the divine and are therefore not bound the way animals are, while Joshua draws an extended parallel to Socrates’s cave allegory in Book Seven of Plato’s Republic, where only philosophical education can turn the soul from becoming toward being. The episode closes by contrasting Socrates’s model — in which a corrupted soul must be forcibly redirected toward the Forms — with Epicurus’s, in which the newborn infant is actually in the best position of all, since it has no corruption yet to unlearn.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 344 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. We discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we’re continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective. That’s going to allow us to understand Epicurus’s own position on knowledge when we eventually get to the longest surviving discussion of that, which occurs in Philodemus’s own On Signs.

Before we dive back into today’s details, I’ll once again remind everyone that what we’re doing on the podcast is providing foundational information about Epicurean philosophy that you can use to understand Epicurus better. There’s lots of videos, lots of discussion on the internet about happiness in general and the idea that everyone wants to be happy, and Epicurus has specific suggestions about how to be happy. But happiness, like many other terms, has very different meanings to different people. And the best way to get back into what Epicurus himself was talking about is to go back to the foundational issues through which he developed his philosophy from the beginning — from the time he was twelve years old, when he was looking into the issues of atomism, and also the issues involved in the concept of knowledge: when we can be confident of something, when we cannot be confident of something, and how we know the difference.

That essentially is what we’re talking about in Cicero’s Academic Questions. Because, of course, there are many different approaches to whether knowledge is possible, whether certainty is possible, whether confidence is possible, and the schools were very divided about basic aspects of that question. Both the Stoics and the Epicureans were on the side that knowledge is possible, and knowledge is essential in order to live the best life possible. Whether you describe that life as a happy life, or a virtuous life, or a pious life, those are very important questions. But can we even understand what those words mean with any degree of confidence? The Stoics and the Epicureans disagreed on their conclusions about what the best life would consist of, but they agreed that we have to have confidence in our discussion in order to make any kind of progress towards that target.

Where we are in Academic Questions at the moment is that Cicero is using a character by the name of Lucullus to present the Stoic position. We’re almost at the end of that section, and what we’re going to find in the most general of terms is that Cicero himself is adopting the position that knowledge is a matter of probability, and not something that you can say with certainty is true or false without exception. Lucullus has presented an argument based on what he calls a kataleptic impression, described as being something so clearly true that it cannot possibly be false. But Lucullus knows that the academic skeptics do not agree with that position, and we’re currently turning to discussion of the skeptic position associated with people like Carneades, who say that the best we can do is attain probability or persuasiveness, and that that’s good enough for us to live our lives without taking the position that some things are actually true or false. All that’s necessary is probability.

The sections we’re going into now are fairly technical, and we’re going to begin to accelerate and eventually skip over certain sections so that we can proceed to Philodemus’s book. But there remain several important points that we want to be sure we cover, always keeping in mind the big picture here, that even for those of us who are not professional philosophers, the questions being discussed have very, very important implications about how we live our own lives — when we decide that we have sufficient information to take action on particular issues, particular questions, particular choices we have to make, especially in the Epicurean context that this life is the only one available to us. In contrast to the Stoics, or more popular religions today, the Epicureans did not take the position that this life is a warm-up for eternity in heaven or hell or somewhere else. This is the only life we have. This is the only time we have available to us, and so it’s particularly important to understand what’s at stake as we decide how to live.

There are several things we want to follow up on from Section 11 that we read last week, and then we’ll turn our attention to Section 12 and beyond. But just to make sure this discussion doesn’t turn too technical, I know Joshua has several details from Section 11 he wants to comment on before we go into 12. So Joshua, how can we stress the importance of the issues being discussed?

Joshua:

Well, in the words of Lucullus, Cassius: “In order that you may have confidence, the mark of truth must be known to you.” Insigne veri is the Latin term or phrase I was looking for last week when we were talking about these marks or signs that are, for Lucullus at least, the key features of his epistemology. As you navigate your way through the world around you, something in your environment has to signal to you that there is knowledge to be gained, and it does that through these signs, or these marks. These marks are what sense perception is picking up on, in order to give us confidence in our knowledge.

As I use words like “environment” and “the world around you,” we are coming to that very idea, because in Section 12 we’re going to encounter the Greek word oikeion, which comes from the same root as oikos, or oikon, meaning “house” — the place you live. Which in turn gave us the name, I think, of Ikea, a place where you buy furniture for where you live. So it’s your environment. It’s where you find yourself right now. And no matter where you are, sense perception is picking up these cues in the environment and transmitting them to you, and that’s how we perceive what is around us — that’s how we procure knowledge of what is around us.

It’s not necessarily clear, because Lucullus is not very specific, what exactly he’s talking about when he talks about these marks. But if we look at a few examples, we’ll be able to get a sense of what he means. In Section 11, he says:

“How can you say distinctly that anything is white when it may happen that that which is black may appear to be white? Or how are we to call those things evident, or to say that they are impressed faithfully on the mind, when it is uncertain whether it is really moved or only in an illusory manner? And so there is neither color, nor body, nor truth, nor argument, nor sense, nor anything certain left to us. And owing to this, it frequently happens that whatever they say, they are asked by some people, do you then perceive that? But they who put this question to them are laughed at by them, for they do not press them hard enough so as to prove that no one can insist upon any point or make any positive assertion without some certain and peculiar mark to distinguish that thing which each individual says that he is persuaded of.”

So he’s talking here about things like color and shape, and size maybe is another mark. These are the marks by which sense perception allows us to navigate our environment.

Cassius:

Just very quickly, let me jump in and say that when you talk about the mark of truth, that’s very similar to the Epicurean view of the canon of truth. And it’s going to be that distinction — this approach of the Epicurean canon versus the marks — that we’re really going to have to be thinking about. In Epicurean philosophy, the canon of truth is the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. Lucullus seems to be talking about a particular or a peculiar mark. Is he saying that there is a mark intrinsic to the thing you’re looking at that is divinely placed there, or designed there, so that when you see this mark, you know that that’s what’s true versus what’s false? That’s the kind of comparison and analysis we’re trying to do here. Does the Epicurean approach entail marks, or does it entail simply referring to the sensations, anticipations, and feelings, and processing what they give you at any particular moment?

Joshua:

He’s being much more specific than that. He’s not giving a general overview of epistemology. He’s giving a very specific response to a very specific criticism coming from these skeptics. Skeptics are saying we cannot ever speak with confidence or certainty about anything — we can only speak in terms of probability about what we’re seeing. And what Lucullus is saying is, if you have a perception of something being white, you can’t say that it’s distinctly white if it’s only probably white. Because if it’s also possible that the thing is black, then what are you talking about? Why even bring this up as something relevant to your understanding of your surroundings? You have to be able to reach confidence.

Cassius:

I’m looking at the last sentence of the first paragraph of Eleven, before the one you just read, where Lucullus says: “Just as those things are known by the eyes, so are the other things known by perceptions, but by a mark belonging peculiarly to truth and not common to what is true and false.” For some reason I’m focusing this morning on this word “mark” and trying to relate it to whether we are familiar with Epicurus talking about marks or not. We won’t know for sure what Philodemus has to say till we get there, but the entire question of whether Epicurus talks in terms of marks or not is something we’ll have to come back to.

Joshua:

Epicurus doesn’t exactly talk about marks necessarily. What he talks about are eidola, images — the images that are being shed by everything around us. It’s these images that strike the eye and give us an impression, a perception, that there’s something out there, that this object we’re looking at exists. So it’s not a perfect connection to what Lucullus is talking about, because I don’t think Lucullus is giving us a clear overview of epistemology here — he’s already kind of done that. What he’s doing now is arguing against specific claims by the skeptics. But the eidola do bear similarities to what he’s talking about.

Another passage that bears some similarity — and it’s a passage that Kalosyni mentioned to us last week after we finished the recording — comes from the Torquatus section of Cicero’s On Ends, where the Epicurean spokesman Torquatus says this:

“Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights therein as its chief good, while it recoils from pain as the chief evil, and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, he thinks, are simply perceived, just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white, and honey sweet. No one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate arguments. It is enough merely to draw attention to the fact. And there is a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand, and a slight hint and direction of the attention on the other. The one process reveals to us mysteries and things under a veil, so to speak. The other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts. Moreover, seeing that if you deprive a man of his senses there is nothing left to him, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed to nature. Now what facts does she grasp? Or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned, unless the facts of pleasure and pain?”

I think here we get a sense — coming through Cicero, of course, the same source that Lucullus’s voice comes to us from — of how this discussion of marks could have application in the epistemology of Epicurus. There is a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand, and a slight hint and direction of the attention on the other, such as the hint that snow is white, or the hint that honey is sweet. And it seems to me that that is analogous to what Lucullus is describing with the term “mark” or “sign.”

Cassius:

Joshua, I think you’re right. That reminds me of the competing titles of Philodemus’s work that are out there. Phillip De Lacy assigns to Philodemus’s book the title On Methods of Inference, while David Sedley translates the title as On Signs. And of course we’re talking about marks, but as you’ve already reminded us today, the Latin there is signum — the sign word is really what we’re talking about. There’s a different approach to it, but the concept of mark or sign probably is something shared by the Epicureans and the Stoics. It’s just simply a matter of the nature of those signs.

I have a brief section from the De Lacy book in front of me here, where De Lacy says the Stoics hold that sign relations are a priori and rational, whereas the Epicurean view is that signs are based entirely on sense perception. The Epicurean position is that the relation between a sign and the thing signified is learned only from perception, through the method of induction or analogy. Unless a constant connection between the objects is established by perception, the Stoic test of logical signs is not possible.

So I’ve diverted us off into that tangent about where we’re eventually going to go with Philodemus. But that’s in the future. We need to get back to the text we were in before I interrupted you, Joshua.

Joshua:

It’s also worth noting that the word “sign” in Latin appears in the second line of the first book of Lucretius’s poem. He refers to caeli subter labentia signa — the gliding signs of heaven beneath which we move, the stars — these kind of marks that we navigate by. And in the next line he talks about mare navigerum, the ship-bearing sea, whose sailors are presumably most well-equipped to talk about these guiding, gliding signs of heaven.

Cassius:

And that illustrates the point that we can navigate by the stars because we can see them — they are perceived by us, and we can interpret things through them as signs. But the stars are not gods or supernatural. And if we start concluding that the stars control the future, or control our fates, that would be an improper logical deduction. It would not be based on evidence that’s available.

Joshua:

And in the opening of Book Three, he says:

“Thou who out of deep darkness didst first avail to raise a torch so clear, shedding light upon the true joys of life, ‘tis thee I follow, bright star of the Greek race, and in thy deep-set print firmly now I plant my footsteps, not in eager emulation, but rather because for love I long to copy thee.”

And again we’re dealing with the word “sign” — vestigia signa, the marks left behind, the marks that you left behind, Epicurus. I am pressing my heavy feet into the marks that you have left behind. But that’s probably enough on that level of detail on that specific question.

Cassius:

So, Joshua, I think that covers much of what we wanted to review from Section 11. As we turn to Section 12, the discussion is going to change to cover assent and approbation. As I’m reading through this, the next topic is going to be: supposing a sign of some kind is there, what is our reaction to that sign? Do we embrace the sign? Do we act on it? Do we assent to it? Do we approve it? And do we even have the power not to approve certain types of signs? So whenever you’re ready, comment and then read Section 12 for us.

Joshua:

Yeah, before I read it, let me mention that there are two Greek words coming up. One of them is synkatathesis, which just means consent, or assent, or acquiescence — exactly what you’re talking about there. The other word I’ve already mentioned is oikeion.

There’s an interesting parallel to what I already read from Cicero’s On Ends in this next sentence. Lucullus says: “For just as it is impossible for any animal to forbear discerning what is manifestly suited to its nature — the Greeks call that oikeion — so it is equally impossible for it to withhold its assent to a manifest fact which is brought under its notice.”

In the passage I quoted from Cicero, he’s talking about the newborn, the young of all species, and how they come into this world thrown onto the shores of light, as Lucretius loves to say — sense perception just flooding in, for those that can open their eyes immediately at birth, but through the other senses as well. And how do you know, as an infant, what to reach for and what to avoid? What Torquatus says in On Ends is that it is up to nature to determine what is in accord with or opposed to nature. And as Lucullus says here, it’s impossible for any animal to forbear discerning what is manifestly suited to its nature. They can’t stop it. They can’t prevent it. They can’t get in the way. It is equally impossible, he says, for it to withhold its assent to a manifest fact — as the fact, going back to Torquatus, that snow is white, honey is sweet, that pleasure is matter for approval, and pain for aversion. These are evident facts. It is equally impossible for the animal to withhold its assent to a manifest fact which is brought under its notice. There’s a lot of parallels between these two passages, Cassius.

But the main thing I wanted to note is that the Greek word oikeion, related to oikos, which just means house, also gave its name — as I mentioned — to Ikea, and gave its name to English words like “economy” and “ecology,” words that deal with, in the case of ecology, the environment, nature considered as a habitat for living things. Here, in the Greek, Lucullus seems to be using this term to refer to the nature of the animal itself, just as we would refer to human nature. He seems to suggest that oikeion has that application as well.

Cassius:

Joshua, before you read Twelve, I think there’s one more parallel worth pointing out, because when you get to the end of Section 12, we’re going to hear Lucullus talking about: if you don’t assent, then where can virtue be? How can you possibly have virtue if your actions don’t depend on some act of assent by you? And in On Ends, Torquatus said that this it does — pursue pleasure and avoid pain — so long as it remains uncorrupted. There’s that inserted caveat: yes, nature puts this in front of us, we really don’t have any choice about that, at least when we’re infants — which is presumably why he’s talking about infants in the first place, as opposed to adults, because adults can do some crazy things. But infants, who have not developed any form of intellectual corruption, are going to simply follow nature and pursue pleasure and avoid pain. When you get to the end of Twelve, there’ll be a parallel discussion about that point.

Joshua:

In Section 12, Lucullus says:

“However, we have said enough about perception. For if anyone wishes to invalidate what has been said, truth will easily defend itself, even if we are absent. These things, then, which have now been explained, being sufficiently understood, we will proceed to say a little on the subject of assent and approbation, which the Greeks call synkatathesis — not that the subject itself is not an extensive one, but because the foundations have been already laid a little while ago.”

That’s all the way back in Section 7 he’s referring to.

“For when we were explaining what power there was in the senses, this point was at the same time established: that many things are comprehended and perceived by the senses, which is a thing which cannot take place without assent. Secondly, this is the principal difference between an inanimate and an animated being, that the inanimate being does nothing, but the animated one does something. For it is impossible even to imagine what kind of animal that can be which does nothing. Either sense must be taken from it, or else assent, which is wholly in our own power, must be given. But mind is in some degree denied to those beings whom they will not allow either to feel or to assent. For as it is inevitable that one scale of a balance must be depressed when weight is put in it, so the mind too must yield to what is evident. For just as it is impossible for any animal to forbear discerning what is manifestly suited to its nature, which the Greeks call oikeion, so it is equally impossible for it to withhold its assent to a manifest fact which is brought under its notice. Although, if those principles which we have been maintaining are true, there is no advantage whatever in discussing assent, for he who perceives anything assents immediately. But these inferences also follow: that memory can have no existence without assent, no more can notions of things or arts. And what is most important of all is that, although some things may be in our power, yet they will not be in the power of that man who assents to nothing. Where then is virtue, if nothing depends on ourselves? But it is above all things absurd that vices should be in the power of the agents, and that no one should do wrong except by deliberate consent to do so, and yet that this should not be the case with virtue — all the consistency and firmness of which depends on the things which it has assented to and which it has approved. And altogether it is necessary that something should be perceived before we act, and before we assent to what is perceived. Wherefore, he who denies the existence of perception or assent puts an end to all action in life.”

Cassius:

So what’s he saying in that last part, Joshua? Is assent necessary for virtue? Is assent necessary to be alive?

Joshua:

This is the most interesting question in Section 12. He said about the animal: it is impossible for any animal to forbear discerning what is manifestly suited to its nature, so it is equally impossible for it to withhold its assent to a manifest fact brought under its notice. However, this is the difference between an inanimate and an animated being — and he says that mind is in some degree denied to those beings whom they will not allow either to feel or to assent.

I think what he’s saying here is that humans can choose to assent, or choose not to assent, but lower animals don’t have this choice — it’s impossible for them to forbear assenting to a manifest fact brought under their notice. With humans, this is different, and it seems to be the case that the problem of vice and virtue, and how it relates to epistemology, is part of why it’s different. What he says in that last paragraph is: if nothing depends on ourselves, if everything is just up to perception, and if we are like the animals — having no power to assent or not assent, driven totally by sense perception in our interactions with our surroundings, driven by what is manifestly suited to the nature of the animal — if we were like that, then virtue would be impossible. This is kind of like the free will argument: if there’s no free will, you can’t really hold someone accountable for the things they’ve done and the choices they’ve made.

Lucullus is saying there has to be a difference between us and the animals, because if there’s not, where is there room for virtue? He says it is most absurd to think that vice should be in our own power, and that no one should do wrong except by deliberate consent to do so, and yet that this should not be the case with virtue. Either vice and virtue both belong within our power, or they both have to be outside of our power.

Cassius:

Joshua, that’s exactly the direction I think he’s going in, and you’re saying it very well. It’s almost like the flip side of this kataleptic impression — that some things are so clearly true that they cannot possibly be false. The Stoics are in the position of having to acknowledge, well, some things are so true they cannot possibly be false, but every perception is not in that category, or else we’d have no vice, we’d have no virtue, we’d just be robots. We would just be mechanically reacting to what happens to us without any participation through our minds in evaluating what the proper response is. Everything cannot be, from their point of view, possibly true or possibly false — there’s got to be a distinction between the two. But in the same way, everything can’t be mandated so that we react in a particular way, or else the whole discussion of virtue and vice would make no sense in the first place. And we are not animals. If there’s one thing the Stoics are very assertive about, it is that we are divine. We participate in the divine. We have souls that make us similar to the gods in a certain respect, at least. And praise and blame are going to attach to the way we make decisions.

So everything can’t be like “snow is white” and “honey is sweet,” things we have no power to reject. Certainly we have the power to make mistakes. We have the power to reject certain things and do wrong at times — which again is, as Torquatus stated at the end of the section you read in On Ends: every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights in it as the chief good, while it recoils from pain as the chief evil, and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. That’s the key here in both Epicurean and Stoic positions — you’re not mandated to follow nature’s verdict. Certainly some perceptions are going to be so clear that you will know you are violating nature if you decide to consider honey sour and snow anything other than white. But the mind has within it the capability to assent to what nature gives you, or to reject it, or to ignore it, at least for a short period of time. You may not succeed in rejecting nature’s verdict for very long — if you decide you don’t really need to drink water, you don’t really need to eat food, you can do that for a short period of time, but that will not succeed over any length of time.

Joshua:

It’d be interesting to compare what Socrates says in Book Seven of the Republic. I think there’s very fruitful ground here for comparison. This is the book that gave us the allegory of the cave, so it’s all about this question of darkness and light, blindness and sight, mere becoming as opposed to pure and perfect being. What Socrates says is this:

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes — either from coming out of the light and going into darkness, or from going into the light out of darkness.”

Let me explain that before I go on. If you are stuck in a relatively dimly lit house all day, and you walk outside under the noonday sun, your eyes are going to take some time to adjust to the new level of light — it’s too bright for you to see. And the other problem is, if you have been exposed to bright light and then suddenly the light goes out, or you walk into a very dark room, your eyes take a moment to adjust to the darkness before you can see properly. He says that this is true also of the mind’s eye as much as it is of the bodily eye.

“And he who remembers this, when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh. He will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day, is dazzled by an excess of light.”

The point is, you don’t know. When you see someone who’s befuddled, you don’t know which condition they’re in — are they befuddled because they’ve spent their whole life in darkness and have come into the light, or are they befuddled because they’ve just been in the light and have descended into the darkness that we’re all in now, and really it’s all of us who are befuddled, and they see more clearly than we do.

“And the person watching all of this will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light and into the den of darkness.”

I mention all of that as a kind of preface to what Socrates says next.

“If I’m right about this, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already, and just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only, by the movement of the whole soul, be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, of clearness and light, and by this process learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”

And when his interlocutor agrees, Socrates continues:

“Must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner — not by implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction and is looking away from the truth?”

So without implanting the faculty of sight, which the subject already has, how do you convert someone — how do you turn a whole soul from a focus on becoming, on change, on flux, on mere sense perception, to pure being: the perfect, the good, the truthful, what is and will never be any different than what it is? The interlocutor says yes, such an art may be presumed. And Socrates says this, which is where I’m getting to in all of this:

“Whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate, they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom, more than anything else, contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable, or on the other hand, hurtful and useless.”

So by the turning of the soul from the realm of becoming to the realm of pure and perfect being — the realm of the ideal Forms — the virtue of wisdom, which contains a divine element that always remains, is by this conversion rendered most useful and most profitable, or on the other hand, most hurtful and most useless, because wisdom, or intelligence, or this faculty of insight, doesn’t occur only in sages. Socrates says:

“Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue? How eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end. He is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness. But what if his circumstances had been different in the days of his youth? What if in his youth the keen eye of the clever rogue had been severed from sensual pleasure, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which dragged them down and turned the vision of their souls upon things that are below? If, in their youth, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now. And there is another thing which is a likely, or rather a necessary, inference from what has preceded: that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of the state. Not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blessed.”

This is the Republic, remember — he’s trying to envision what the ideal state would look like.

“The business of us who are the founders of the state will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all. They must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good. But when they have ascended and seen enough, we must not allow them to do as they do now — they can’t remain in the upper world. They have to make the descent, once again, into the cave, among the prisoners, among the befuddled, to partake of the labors and honors of human life.”

So at this key point you’ve got this theory: just as with the eyes, which can be confused by darkness and light and the shades between, the soul is the same way. A soul focused on the good will tend toward the good; a soul focused on evil will tend toward evil. And that same faculty, wisdom, would have seen the truth as keenly as the rogue now sees what his eyes are turned to — and the necessary inference is that neither the uneducated and uninformed, nor those who never finish their education, will be fit ministers of the state they’re building.

There seems to me, Cassius, to be a comparison between what Lucullus is saying about the difference between the mind of the animal and the mind of the human — one incapable of anything but assent when faced with perception, the other capable of choosing whether to assent, and that choice being the root of all virtue — and what Socrates is saying here in the Republic. But with Socrates, there is no choice. You look toward whatever your soul is adjusted to looking toward. Maybe, he says, if he could have gotten hold of this person when they were young, taken charge of their education, things could have turned out differently — severed this person from the sensual pleasures of eating and drinking, the leaden weights attached at birth that dragged them down and turned the vision of their soul upon the things below. But you’d have to get them when they were young and impressionable, in order to free them from those burdens of pleasure and turn their souls in the opposite direction.

There’s a lot to sift through here between Cicero’s On Ends with Torquatus presenting, Lucullus in Academic Questions, and Socrates here in the Republic — all talking about more or less the same thing. You’ve got perception, and you’ve got an understanding of what the good is, and different classes of individuals sorting between the two. For Epicurus, or at least for Torquatus’s presentation of Epicurean ethics, it doesn’t matter what your state or condition is — whether you’re a newborn infant or a sage who’s already attained much wisdom. In fact, it’s actually better for Epicurus that you’re a newborn, because the newborn infant doesn’t have to unlearn all the corruption acquired through a whole life. That’s kind of like what Socrates is talking about with the keen eye of the clever rogue, except for Socrates the corruption comes from devotion to pleasure, while for Epicurus the corruption comes from devotion to the artifices of human culture.

Maybe I’m making too much of it, Cassius, but that seems to me an important distinction between Lucullus and Socrates. For Lucullus, his system would fall apart if anyone were too far gone — virtue has to be an option, a potential choice anyone can make, provided they have the faculties of an average human. Because if the only choice available is vice, then life itself would become impossible, and any action would come to an end, since action requires that you make a choice. You see a lot of the same themes at work in all three of these, and that’s something we could continue to explore, if I didn’t take up all our remaining time for today. But I am curious, Cassius, what you think about all of that.

Cassius:

Joshua, that was fascinating, and you’re right that we have to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. But I’ll say this about what you’ve said so far: I think you are absolutely right to look at the commonalities and the parallels between what these different schools are doing by looking at the issue of knowledge. The Stoics have always appeared to me almost to be better Platonists than the skeptics are. And you’re right that there are some distinctions between what Lucullus is saying versus what Socrates is saying, but they both are coming at things from the same type of direction, in which there is a divine sanction, a divine organizing scheme, and our goal is to look past pleasure and pain and the immediate sensations to this true world of ideal Forms or divine nature. That’s what’s really important in life.

We’ll come back to this next week and in the coming weeks, but that’s why this is so important. People who look at Academic Questions and the subject of knowledge and just say, well, everybody’s got their own little theory about how the mind works, everybody’s going to talk about perceptions, everybody’s going to talk about ideas, everybody’s going to talk about truth and falsity, and none of this really makes any difference, it’s just a matter of academic concern — that’s not right. It’s important because your orientation toward knowledge is going to be formed based on your orientation toward the nature of the universe. If you think there is a divine order, if you think logic gets you to where you want to be, if you think the senses are forces of corruption instead of forces of nature that you should align yourself with, then you’re going to come to totally different opinions about how to live based on that difference in orientation.

That’s what we’re doing by going through Academic Questions and relating it back to Epicurus. We’re digging out these foundations so we can see where the divergence takes place. I think we continue to hit very close to home when we bring up Socrates, or Plato, whichever we should really attribute the blame to for composing the material you were reading — the blame, from the Epicurean point of view, for telling us that we should look past pleasure and pain and look to something higher, or something that came before we were born. The blame for those positions rests with philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, the skeptics. And the remedy for that is the direction Epicurus was teaching: to focus on what nature gives us through pleasure and pain, and never lose sight that the senses, anticipations, and feelings are how we determine what is true versus what is false.

Okay, we’re in the middle of some very deep material — it’s too bad we have to quit now. But let’s close it for today, and we’ll come back and discuss this further 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 our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.