Episode 348 - Neither Logic Nor Logos Are Shortcuts To Truth

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Welcome to Episode 348 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 14 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

Continuing Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Cassius and Joshua close out Section 14, where Lucullus wraps up his summary of the Stoic case by taking a final swipe at Epicurus: that even Epicurus, who tried harder than anyone to rescue confidence in knowledge from the errors of opinion, “did not in the least remove the errors of opinion itself.” Cassius reads the passage in both Rackham’s and Yonge’s translations and argues Epicurus never claimed infallibility, only that some opinions can be tested against the senses and confirmed true or false, with a third category left open where the evidence isn’t yet sufficient to decide. Joshua turns to Epicurus’s own Letter to Herodotus to trace Epicurus’s actual method: fix clear terms first, ground inquiry in the senses and feelings, and only then move to the obscure — with error entering not through the senses themselves but through the mind’s own opinions layered on top of them, illustrated by Vatican Saying 69 on the soul’s ingratitude. The conversation turns to Plato and Aristotle’s distinction between doxa (opinion) and episteme (knowledge), which leads into the heart of the episode: Joshua reads an extended passage from Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy on how Plato, captivated by the romantic promise of geometry, reasoned by a false analogy from mathematical definition to ethical definition — if a triangle can be precisely defined, Plato assumed, so can justice or piety. Cassius pushes past DeWitt’s academic caution to the plainer conclusion: virtues and triangles are not true similars, and treating ethics as a branch of geometry is not a minor methodological slip but a foundational error that leads directly to belief in eternal, unchanging Forms. The episode closes on the deeper appeal of both Platonic idealism and Academic skepticism as two opposite escapes from the discomfort of a changing world, with Epicurus’s Canon offering the only realistic path: not eternal certainty, and not despair of ever knowing anything, but a human, senses-based truth that is genuinely available to us.

Transcript

Cassius: Welcome to Episode 348 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 still in Cicero’s Academic Questions. We’re in the second book, and we’re finishing this week Section 14 and moving into 15. The section we’re in continues to be the Stoic Lucullus stating the Stoic position on the possibility of knowledge. He is wrapping up his argument by summarizing what he has said previously to Cicero, and the section he’s in right now is going to be part of his summary, where he goes over a couple of the skeptic objections to the Stoic position. The skeptics, of course, are arguing that knowledge is not possible, and Lucullus is going through these arguments, stating to us the Stoic position about why knowledge is possible. As we’ve said many times, the Epicurean position is in agreement with the Stoic position that knowledge is possible, but it’s not consistent with the Stoic view about how you reach that conclusion and how you determine what is known versus what is not known.

Last week Lucullus was focusing on the self-contradiction argument — an argument that Epicurus likes to make as well — that you need to look at exactly what is being asserted and see if it is internally consistent before you accept a position. The Stoics are pointing out to the skeptics that even though the skeptics like to argue that it’s impossible to determine the difference between true and false, that very statement of the problem implies some type of understanding that true and false are, in fact, different things — that true and false have their own identity or their own definition, which we do have the possibility of grasping. And if we can grasp that there’s a difference between true and false, then that in itself is a type of knowledge that would contradict the skeptic position that all knowledge is impossible. So Lucullus had focused on that in the early part of Section 14, and that’s what we focused on last week.

Now, before he finishes 14, Lucullus makes a comment about Epicurus that’s going to be worth us talking about, because again, we read all of Section 14 last week, but it finishes this way. I’m going to refer variously to the Rackham versus the Yonge translations as we proceed here. I’m going to read the final section, though, from Rackham to start us off:

“But let us advance further and proceed in such a manner as not to appear to have been unduly partial to our own views, and let us go through the doctrine of these thinkers so thoroughly as to have nothing passed over. First, then, what we have termed perspicuity has sufficient force of itself to indicate to us things that are as they are; but nevertheless, so that we may abide by things that are perspicuous with more firmness and constancy, we require some further exercise of method or of attention to save ourselves from being dislodged by trickeries and captious arguments from positions that are clear in themselves. For Epicurus, who desired to come to the relief of the errors that appear to upset our power of knowing the truth, and who said that the separation of opinion from perspicuous truth was the function of the wise man, carried matters no further, for he entirely failed to do away with the error connected with mere opinion.”

Now, that’s the Rackham version. Since we’re talking about Epicurus, let me repeat the Yonge version, which in this case might actually be slightly clearer. The same section reads:

“In the first place, then, that evidentness which we have mentioned has sufficiently great power of itself to point out to us the things which are just as they are. But still, in order that we may remain with firmness and constancy in our trust in what is evident, we have need of a greater degree of either skill or diligence, in order not, by some sort of juggling or trick, to be driven away from those things which are clear of themselves. For Epicurus, who wished to remedy those errors which seemed to perplex one’s knowledge of the truth, and who said that it was the duty of a wise man to separate opinion from evident knowledge, did no good at all, for he did not in the least remove the errors of opinion itself.”

Okay, that sets us up for the opening of our discussion today, because whether you want to talk about perspicuity, as Rackham does, or simply evidentness, as Yonge is doing here, to get us started I would say that what we’re talking about is hearkening back to the Stoic position that some sensations we can get what they term a cataleptic grasp of — so clear that it cannot possibly be anything but true, that there’s really no possibility that it’s false. As we’ve discussed many times by now, the Stoics are wishing to defend some sensations as true, but not all sensations as true, as Epicurus did.

So it seems to me that what this paragraph is starting out by doing is saying that Lucullus acknowledges that there are going to be arguments used against us. He calls it a sort of juggling or trickery that is going to try to convince us that we should not be certain of these sensations that we believe are so clear that they can’t possibly be false, and he’s about to launch into, in 15 and 16, a discussion of what these trickeries and juggling acts are. But before he moves into that, he has to cast aspersion on Epicurus, and he admits that Epicurus too wished to remedy the errors which drive us away from knowledge of the truth. Then he says that Epicurus held that it was the duty of the wise man to separate opinion from evident knowledge, but that this perspective, in his view, does no good at all, because — in Yonge’s version — Epicurus “did not in the least remove the errors of opinion itself,” or, as Rackham says it, Epicurus “entirely failed to do away with the error connected with mere opinion.”

We probably need to spend some time talking about this, because what he’s getting at here is that Epicurus says all sensations are true in the sense of honestly reported — they don’t have their own opinion. But Epicurus does not say, obviously, that all opinions are true. Some opinions are true and some opinions are false. Epicurus says we can determine which are true versus which are false by using the sensations, anticipations, and feelings. But Lucullus is trying to summarily say here that what Epicurus did was of no usefulness, because it does not remove errors from opinion itself.

So maybe the first thing we should look at is this final comment, that Epicurus doesn’t remove the errors of opinion itself. It’s probably obvious that Epicurus does not claim to be infallible himself, or claim to allow people to be infallible. Epicurus does not go so far as to say that mistakes are no longer possible if you use the Epicurean Canon as your basis for decision-making. It’s not necessary to say that infallibility is possible. The goal is simply to be able to say that sometimes knowledge, sometimes truth, sometimes reality are possible to determine — not in every situation, not in every choice or every evaluation you have to make in life, but sometimes it is possible to say that something is true and something is false. And then you launch into a long discussion about under what conditions truth is separable from falsity, and there’s a lot to be said about all that.

But the skeptics are saying: never can you be sure that you are not wrong in any conclusion. Epicurus and the Stoics aren’t saying that infallibility is possible, but they are saying that knowledge, in the sense of truth in a particular situation, is at least occasionally possible. Is that the direction you see it going, or how would you evaluate what Lucullus is saying here, Joshua?

Joshua: It’s deeply unfortunate, Cassius, that we don’t have Epicurus’s master text on epistemology, which is the celestial volume, the book that fell from heaven — the Canon. But we are not without anchorage here, and I would point to the Letter to Herodotus as being important. As Epicurus himself says in the opening of the Letter to Herodotus:

“For those who are unable to study carefully all my physical writings, or to go into the long treatises at all, I have myself prepared an epitome of the whole system, to preserve in the memory enough of the principal doctrines to the end that on every occasion they may be able to aid themselves on the most important points, so far as they take up the study of physics.”

This is a letter on physics, on the study of nature, but because we can’t study nature without having some sense of our grounding in epistemology, he does have to kind of start there. And it’s there that this question of opinion comes in — the problem of opinion that Lucullus is pointing to, saying that even Epicurus, who went as far as anyone in trying to rescue confidence in knowledge from the errors of opinion, couldn’t get rid of opinion. That’s true. But this is what Epicurus himself says in the Letter to Herodotus on the subject of opinion — and I’m reading, by the way, from the Hicks translation:

“In the first place, you must understand what it is that words denote, in order that by reference to this we may be in a position to test opinions, inquiries, or problems, so that our proofs may not run on untested ad infinitum, nor the terms we use be empty of meaning. For the primary signification of every term employed must be clearly seen, and ought to need no proving; this being necessary if we are to have something to which the point at issue, or the problem, or the opinion before us, can be referred.”

So his first piece of advice on epistemology, and how it relates to the study of nature, is this: number one, move aside Cicero, move aside Plato. We are not going to spend all our time arguing about the definitions of words. We are not going to waddle and wallow in this kind of low-hanging-fruit area of disputes about proper diction and the meanings of words — the kind that produced the image, as I mentioned last week or the week before, of Diogenes the Cynic striding into the Academy with a plucked chicken and saying, “Behold, this is Plato’s man.” It’s not that the question of how words are defined isn’t interesting or important. It’s that it doesn’t help us get any closer, Epicurus thinks, to solving the problem of opinion.

Next, he says:

“We must by all means stick to our sensations — that is, simply to the present impressions, whether of the mind or of any criterion whatever, and similarly to our actual feelings — in order that we may have the means of determining that which needs confirmation and that which is obscure.”

When this is clearly understood — in other words, when you are using terms that are clear and the meaning is apparent, and when you’ve decided to conduct your inquiry using sensation and the other elements of the canon of epistemology — then it is time to consider generally the things which are obscure. This is when he gets into his broad-stroke description of what nature looks like, and I won’t go any further into that, but he says before you go into a large, massive subject like this, you need to have those two points in place.

Now, further down in the letter, speaking of color and of the motions of the atoms and the projection of atomic films off of objects as they pass through the air and strike our own senses — our eyes, our ears — allowing us to form our knowledge or understanding of the world around us, he says:

“Whatever presentation we derive by direct contact with these images, whether it be with the mind or with the sense organs, be it shape that is presented or other properties, this shape as presented is the shape of the solid thing, and it is due either to a close coherence of the image as a whole or to a mere remnant of its parts. Falsehood and error always depend upon the intrusion of opinion when a fact awaits confirmation or the absence of contradiction, which fact is afterwards frequently not confirmed or even contradicted, following a certain movement in ourselves connected with, but distinct from, the mental picture presented, which is the cause of error.”

And his final discussion of opinion in this letter comes with the discussion of the gods:

“We are bound to believe that in the sky, revolutions, solstices, eclipses, risings and settings, and the like, take place without the ministration or command, either now or in the future, of any being who at the same time enjoys perfect bliss along with immortality. For troubles and anxieties and feelings of fear and partiality do not accord with bliss.”

In other words, it’s too much work for the gods to be in charge of all of this stuff.

“Nor again must we hold that things which are no more than globular masses of fire, being at the same time endowed with bliss, assume these motions at will.”

So he’s speaking there about the view that the fixed and moving stars are themselves gods in the sky, and he’s saying we do not need to hold to that. And this is where he finishes:

“Nay, in every term we use we must hold fast to all the majesty which attaches to such notions as bliss and immortality, lest the terms should generate opinions inconsistent with this majesty. Otherwise such inconsistency will of itself suffice to produce the worst disturbances in our minds. Hence, where we find phenomena invariably recurring, the invariability of the recurrence must be ascribed to the original interception and conglomeration of atoms whereby the world was formed.”

Presumably there he’s talking about the endless but ordered motion of the heavenly bodies across the sky. And he closes the letter by saying to Herodotus:

“Here you have the chief doctrines of physics in the form of a summary, so that if this statement be accurately retained and take effect, a man will, I make no doubt, be incomparably better equipped than his fellows, even if he should never go into all the exact details, for he will clear up for himself many of the points which I have worked out in detail in my complete exposition — his thirty-seven books on nature — and the summary itself, if borne in mind, will be of constant service to him. It is of such a sort that those who are already tolerably or even perfectly well acquainted with the details can, by analysis of what they know into such elementary perceptions as these, best prosecute their research in physical science as a whole, while those, on the other hand, who are not altogether entitled to rank as mature students can, in silent fashion and as quick as thought, run over the doctrines most important for their peace of mind.”

So on the subject of opinion, we can summarize Epicurus’s position and approach in this way. First, we have to use clear terms, and terms associated with clear mental images in our heads, as we discuss phenomena, and we must not go on rediscussing and redefining our terms endlessly, because that can itself be a source of tumultuous opinion-making and other problems. As we proceed — we’ve got the terms now — we move on to the use of sensation and feeling and prolepsis in our study of the world that we live in. We have to understand that where opinion comes in is not through the senses. It is through the judgments that our mind makes acting upon the senses, and there’s a very good example of this, I think, in Vatican Saying 69: Epicurus says the thankless nature of the soul makes the creature endlessly greedy for variations in its lifestyle. I think the point is that the mind or soul has an opinion about what it needs, and the opinion of the mind or soul does not match reality, but the real problem comes in when the opinion colors our perception of reality.

Now, he’s talking specifically there about the ethical problem of the ungratefulness of the mind or soul — that we don’t get what we want, that there’s no limit to what we could want except the limit that we ourselves, and that Nature, place on what is necessary for us — but you can apply this to many other cases where the mind or soul has produced an opinion, and the opinion does not correlate with sense perception but does change or add a layer to sense perception as we’re experiencing it. We have to be clear that the error there is not coming from the perception. It’s coming from us. It’s coming from our minds, from the part of us that is competitive as an adaptation, that is selfish to the point of injustice when it comes to our own desires, or honor, money, fame, whatever else, and that is resistant to a clear understanding of things because a clear understanding of things is not to its advantage, or puts it in a bad light. But all of that is coming from our minds. It’s not coming from Nature. It’s not coming from the images that are cast off by objects in nature, and it’s not coming from those objects striking our sensory organs. This lens or filter that we’re applying to everything we’re looking at — that’s coming from us.

So as we look at what Lucullus says — Lucullus says Epicurus entirely failed to do away with the error connected with mere opinion — that’s true. That’s entirely true. Epicurus has no power to completely remove error or opinion. All we can do is try to mitigate it, and to gain control over ourselves and our own minds, so that opinion and error can be minimized to the greatest extent, but they can never be removed, because we will always be us. What are you thinking about that, Cassius? I don’t know if there’s a better way to get at the heart of this — I’m sure there probably is — but that’s the direction that my mind goes in this morning.

Cassius: Okay, you’ve covered a lot of material there, Joshua, and I’m glad we opened up this way, because you’ve basically given a general summary of Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics that I would not attempt to restate in the depth that you’ve just gone into. But I think there are several aspects of it worth commenting on before we proceed, so let me selectively go back over pieces of what you’ve talked about and bring out a couple of points.

When you were talking about the Letter to Herodotus, you cited a part that I think is particularly underappreciated — the section about how, when you do see things in the universe that appear with regularity, that regularity does not come from the intervention of supernatural gods but from events that were set in motion from the foundation of the universe, or something to that effect. I always like to talk about that when it comes up, because there’s this perception a lot of people have, I think, that in Epicurean philosophy the swerve renders everything uncertain and unpredictable, and that’s just simply not the case. The article I cite all the time on this point is A. A. Long’s “Chance and Natural Law in Epicureanism,” and one of the passages he cites is that Cicero and the other opponents of Epicurus in the ancient world did not accuse Epicurus of making everything uncertain — which would have been the case if the swerve in fact were interpreted that way. There are certain things in the universe that occur with regularity from the foundation of the world, so to speak, and that’s where Epicurus, in the Letter to Menoeceus as well, says that some things happen by necessity.

So there are many things that do happen in the world by necessity, and I think that relates to canonics in this way: our assembly of opinions from repeated observations is not something that happens totally by necessity. We are not going to be able to claim that there is an automatic or magical function that allows us to observe a certain number of times and infallibly come to a conclusion based on those observations. This is where we go back to Diogenes Laertius and his description of prolepsis in his biography of Epicurus — how we see a number of oxen, or a number of cows, or a number of particular objects, over time, and we form a picture of those in our minds, and that becomes our source of comparison for when we see future oxen or future cows; we can compare it back to the picture we’ve assembled in our minds. The process of assembling that picture happens honestly — the senses don’t have their own opinion when they present things to us — but within the process of comparing new observations to the pictures we’ve assembled in our minds, we can jump to erroneous conclusions about which picture fits a new observation. I think that’s the general area you’ve already commented on — that error occurs not in the senses themselves, but in that we add on something, or take away something, in our minds, in our efforts to fit new observations into past pictures or patterns we’ve formed. Our opinion as to which pattern applies can be erroneous, but on the other hand, there are certainly times when the patterns we’ve assembled — the opinions we’ve drawn — are correct.

I noticed in the discussion you were presenting a few minutes ago, it’s possible some listeners might have gotten the impression that all opinions are false, and I don’t think that’s correct either. There are true opinions and false opinions in Epicurean philosophy. An example of a true opinion would be, for example, in regard to atomism — and this drives home the point that even though, in regard to atoms, Epicurus takes the position that you cannot see or touch or feel an atom, the senses don’t have direct perceptions of atoms; at the same time, because we derive opinions by testing those opinions against reality, we come to the conclusion that atoms — which simply means “uncuttable” — are not infinitely divisible. The opinion that atoms are not infinitely divisible is a position Epicurus would say is a true opinion, and it’s not true because a god told us it’s true, and it’s not true because we hold Epicurus to be infallible. It’s held to be a true opinion because it is the only opinion consistent with the reality we continue to observe, for all the reasons Epicurus states in the Letter to Herodotus, that Lucretius goes into in greater detail in Books One and Two of his poem. We test this opinion against the sensations and what we observe about reality, and we come to the conclusion that it would be impossible for atoms to be infinitely divisible.

So I think that would be one example of the fact that Epicurus does say that some opinions are true and some opinions are false, just as he holds that certain opinions about the gods are true and certain opinions about the gods are false. And of course, as you’ve mentioned, there’s the whole other category of opinions about things we don’t have enough information to reach a firm conclusion on, and so we wait before we take a position on what is true or false on that question.

So to drive this back in the direction of the general position Lucullus is talking about: Epicurus is not saying he can provide a formula so that every opinion you’d like to address can be held to be true or false. He specifically is saying you can’t even reach those two categories alone, because there’s a third category of waiting, where you simply don’t have enough information. So Epicurus is not providing a test of infallibility — a test that in every opinion you wish to come to, you can say it is so true it cannot possibly be false. That’s simply an unrealistic, impossible standard. But — and this is where, again, Epicurus is a logician himself, a defender of logical consistency — there are positions you can take that are false, certain opinions that are true, and then there are many other opinions that don’t fit in either category.

So again, maybe the bottom line for this part of the discussion is that Lucullus is saying Epicurus does not in the least remove the errors of opinion itself, and I think Epicurus would totally deny that. He certainly does present a method for testing whether opinions are true or false, and this is the theme we’re hitting on over and over: Epicurus’s method for testing whether an opinion is true or false is not grounded in divine reason or divine logic — it is grounded in the senses. He is saying you can tell a true opinion from a false opinion by testing whether it is consistent with the evidence of your senses. If it’s consistent, if it’s not contradicted, if you have enough information to be confident that the test results are going to be the same over and over again, you can conclude the opinion is true. It’s just that not every opinion can reach that level of certainty. So Epicurus is giving a realistic approach to dividing true from false, real from unreal, whereas the Stoics, as we’re going to continue to see as we go further, are not willing to accept the senses as that test. The Stoics reject the sensations as the test of truth, and that’s where the contest really is: Epicurus is going to defend the senses as an unbiased test of truth; the Stoics are not willing to defend the senses, and are going to go off looking for something else, claiming that some sensations are just known by the sage — presumably through geometry and other methods of dialectical logic — to be true. Again, that’s just a path Epicurus is going to reject.

So this has been a deep discussion already this morning, just on this paragraph at the end of Section 14, but I think where I would leave it and summarize the essential point is: Lucullus is wrong in accusing Epicurus of not providing a method for separating true and false opinion. Now, Joshua, let’s talk about that for just a minute — are we in agreement that there are such things as true opinions and false opinions?

Joshua: Yeah, I mean, the word is doxa in Greek, so the Principal Doctrines — the Kyriai Doxai — are presented as doxa, and certainly we wouldn’t say that they’re a list of false opinions. They’re presented as opinions, but regarded by Epicurus as true.

Cassius: And so I know you’ve at times in the past pointed out the difference between doxa versus episteme, or something like that. What is that distinction?

Joshua: You have a better memory for this than I do. I must have read it on the Wikipedia page, because I’m on the Wikipedia page right now, and it says doxa is a common belief or popular opinion; in classical rhetoric, doxa is contrasted with episteme, which is knowledge.

Cassius: Okay, so we need to discuss whether there is a difference between true opinion and knowledge. I use those interchangeably in our discussions — should we be using those terms interchangeably?

Joshua: Well, there is a Wikipedia page for episteme. This is primarily of importance to Plato, who does contrast these two terms, and to Aristotle, who distinguished apparently five virtues of thought: techne — craft, or applied practical knowledge; episteme — knowledge; phronesis — practical wisdom; sophia — wisdom; and nous, which is the Greek word for mind, but presumably has an additional meaning here — in modern common parlance, nous is associated with a kind of practical foresight.

Cassius: Joshua, let me say this: I don’t think it is essential for the common person in 2026 to know a single word of Greek in order to understand and get the benefit out of a correct philosophy like Epicurean philosophy. It is tremendously helpful in our studies — it is essential to our efforts to remain consistent and to understand what these people actually said — to be able to dive down into the Greek and Latin and do our very best to recreate what they were saying. But in the end, I’m committed to this point of view: those people were not a bit smarter than we are today. They had no access to any knowledge that we do not have today, and in fact they had access to a lot less knowledge than we have today. That’s not to say there was anything inferior about their reasoning, and I have tremendous respect for them, but in general, if we cannot reduce what we’re talking about to commonly understandable modern terms, then we’re not getting the benefit out of philosophy that we really need to be getting.

So I’m saying two things at once: we certainly want to be accurate, we certainly want to be able to dive back into all these details, but if we can’t come back to our level of everyday experience and existence, and understand and apply these concepts in understandable modern language, then we’re wasting our time. So when we debate whether there’s a difference between episteme and doxa, no doubt there are important implications in pulling out the subtleties of what each person thought, but in the end the concepts and issues we’re talking about are the same today as they were then. Is there a difference between an opinion that is true versus knowledge? And I think the way you have to analyze a question like that is going to be the same for us as it was for them. Is there some source of knowledge that is supernatural, or eternal, or transcendental, that is different from saying, “Well, my opinion about this is true because X, Y, and Z, and this is my evidence”? Is there a real distinction for us, in our day-to-day lives, between the words “knowledge” and “true opinion”? What should we be looking for as we attempt to live our lives today — is there a difference in those concepts?

Joshua: You have to understand that this is the appeal of geometry for the old Academy, because in geometry — like in the Elements of Euclid, for example — you only have to define a very few elements. You can define a line as the shortest distance between two points, for example. You define just a few of these regular features, and from that you can build and expand and combine these features in interesting ways. And what you’ve essentially done — certainly for Plato, preferably using a compass and a straightedge — is you’ve started with a definition of a line and a few other things, and you’ve built up real, inarguable knowledge. It’s not an opinion that a triangle is a shape with three angles and three sides — for Plato, that is a fact. And the trick now is to figure out: okay, how do we take this brilliant method in geometry, that works so well, that is clear and plain and doesn’t resolve down to opinion at any level, and apply it to other areas? How do we reach a place in ethics, for example, where we can have real knowledge and not just opinion? How do we reach, in our study of nature, a place where we can have real knowledge and not just opinion?

Cassius: Joshua, you’re citing exactly the argument that DeWitt makes in Epicurus and His Philosophy about whether geometry and real life are true similars — whether you can really extend mathematics to real life. That’s where we’re going with all these questions; that’s the essential question. Because when you say “how do we do that,” how do you know that you can do that? Why in the world would anybody think you can take a mathematical concept that the human mind has invented and somehow think the universe is going to conform to a formula that some human mind in Athens in 200 BC has come up with? The very idea, the very form, the very concept, that we can derive a conceptual formula to which the universe is going to subscribe and follow — that’s an essential question right there, and I think that’s the direction we’re seeing: Epicurus is rejecting that kind of approach, that the universe is essentially mathematical in function or in nature — again going back to that section in DeWitt that’s probably in your mind like it is in mine at the moment.

That’s the kind of issue we’re discussing in trying to separate a concept of knowledge from a concept of true opinion. Is there something called knowledge that is universally the same, always unchanging, eternal — there was never a time when it did not exist, there never will be a time when it does not exist in the future, there never was a time in the past when it did not exist? Is that not something supernatural, which is, by definition, in the Epicurean point of view, non-existent? Is the search for something that fits that kind of definition doomed to fail from the very beginning, and is it something we should recognize as ridiculous from the very beginning? Are the Stoics looking for some type of knowledge that transcends reality, that Epicurus would say you’re a fool to be looking for in the first place?

Joshua: Yeah, I mean, Socrates said that the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and your reference to DeWitt — I mean, we’re thinking along the same track here, because that’s exactly where I was going. Let me read that. This is from page 16 of Epicurus and His Philosophy:

“Geometry, he says, though itself a positivistic study, inspired in the minds of men a new movement that was genuinely romantic. It was the romantic aspect of the new knowledge that captivated Plato, who was no more than up-to-date as a mathematician himself. In geometry he seemed to see absolute reason contemplating absolute truth, perfect precision of concept joined with finality of demonstration. He began to transfer the precise concepts of geometry to ethics and politics, just as modern thinkers transfer the concepts of biological evolution to history and sociology. Especially enticing was the concept which we know as definition. This was a creation of the geometricians. They created it by defining straight lines, equilateral triangles, and other regular features. If these can be defined, Plato tacitly reasoned, why not also justice, piety, temperance, and other virtues? This is reasoning by analogy, one of the trickiest of logical procedures. It holds good only between sets of true similars. Virtues and triangles are not true similars. It does not follow, therefore, because equilateral triangles can be precisely defined, that justice can be defined in the same way. Modern jurists warn against defining justice — it is what the court says it is, from time to time.”

Cassius: And see, that’s where DeWitt stops, and I understand why he stops there — he’s an academic commentator, he’s not attempting to place himself in the role of Epicurus himself and take it to a final conclusion. But I think the final conclusion of what DeWitt has just properly observed is that you’re a fool to try to reduce ethics to mathematics. It’s actually insufficient to simply point out, “Well, Plato, you probably should not do that, because those are not true similars” — that’s a very diplomatic and nice way of saying, “You’re a fool, Plato — you are doing something that’s absolutely wrong and absolutely damaging, and it just leads to the worst type of mistakes and tragedies in human life.” I wouldn’t expect Norman DeWitt, or some academic commentator, to put it in those terms, but the ancient Epicureans didn’t mince words about whether they liked or disliked an opinion, or a particular philosopher, and this whole direction of saying there is a realm of truth, of ideal Forms, that can be communicated with, and that that’s what our goal should be — is just false from the very beginning.

So again, when Lucullus says here that Epicurus did not in the least remove the errors of opinion itself — well, you can’t remove the errors of opinion itself, because if you don’t understand the nature of what true and false opinion really is, if you’re trying to say there is an absolute truth of opinion that cannot possibly be wrong, you’re barking up the wrong tree to start with. Opinion of the truth is tested against the circumstances revealed to you by the senses. There is no eternal, unchanging truth other than the atoms themselves and the world we live in, which comes from the movement of bodies through space that is, in fact, constantly changing. That doesn’t mean there’s no truth — it just means there’s no eternal, unchanging truth. There is a truth of our world that we assemble and perceive through the operation of the senses. That’s the statement of Diogenes of Oenoanda I go back to all the time, where he said that we acknowledge the flux that Aristotle and others say exists, but we don’t acknowledge that the flux moves so fast that we cannot assemble from it the things we determine to be true and real. That’s a little paraphrasing on my part, but that’s basically what’s going on: the atoms are constantly moving through the void, the flux is constantly changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t assemble our own reality from that. You may not be able to step into the same river twice — you may not be able to stay in the same river for more than an instant, as the drops move past you — but that doesn’t mean you don’t know what a river is, it doesn’t mean you don’t know what water is, it doesn’t mean your mind cannot see the reality of where you’re standing at a particular time. It’s crazy to demand eternal, unchanging truth, but it’s essential and very possible to assemble a human truth through the senses and through the evidence they provide us.

Now, we’ve spent the entire episode today, it seems like, on this final paragraph of Section 14, and there’s probably more to say, Joshua, as we begin to close for today — I’m sure you’ll have some additional thoughts — but at this moment, given the length of what we’ve done so far, let’s not go into 15; we’ll reserve that for next week. What are you thinking as we begin to put a conclusion to today’s episode?

Joshua: You know, as we try to work through these problems, you can get a sense of why Plato, and his focus on geometry, is so appealing — why this idea that, okay, here we have something, here we have an island in a sea of fog, here we have something that is crisp and clear and that no one can argue about — must be a deep source of satisfaction for people who relied on that in antiquity and sought that out as the ground of truth, if you will. In our reading of Lucullus and Cicero, and our study of the Stoics here, we have not come across a discussion of logos — this idea that there is, in the universe itself, an active rational principle permeating everything, directing the motions of, as Epicurus says in the Letter to Herodotus, the repeated recurrences, or whatever he was referring to. There is the logos — not an attempt to do the same thing the Platonists are doing with geometry, to kind of take a shortcut and get directly to inarguable truth. And as you say, Cassius — is there not something supernatural in that approach? Are they not appealing to something supernatural in that approach?

Cassius: You’re damn right they are. That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s not just the ancients who were attracted by this — it’s us today as well. The pull, the attractiveness of the idea that we can get connected to something that’s eternal, is extremely seductive and always has been and probably always will be. You’re pulled to wanting to find something eternal in this sea of change. You’re pulled to the idea that there’s a better, eternal world beyond this one, that if I could just make contact with it, I’d be so superior and I’d be so happy. But it doesn’t exist, and that’s this true-world-versus-reality conflict that different philosophers will point out — you’ve got to go with this world as it exists, or invent your own world. And that’s what they’re doing, it seems to me — they’re inventing their own reality, and —

Joshua: — I suppose, Cash, the other draw, the other lure, then as now, is the lure of absolute skepticism — the lure of throwing up your hands and saying all knowledge is impossible, that we’re not going to go in the direction of a Plato and say there are these ideal Forms out there, we’re also not going to go in the direction of an Epicurus and say there is hope of finding true opinion. The absolute skeptical approach would be to deny all of these things and say there is no refuge — from not just change, but from ignorance and from error.

Cassius: That’s exactly right, also, Joshua. That’s why, to me, Epicurus is so unique and so important — because he saves you from both of these major problems: either thinking that the ideal world beyond this one is all you should be concerned about, or giving up on knowledge and giving up on truth and saying that everything is absolutely in flux, there’s no truth anywhere, it’s impossible to find anything of any significance at all, let’s just all be nihilists and throw ourselves off a cliff. Both of those extremes are wrong, and Epicurus is, in my observation, one of the few philosophers who does a really good job of pointing out the problems in both.

So, Joshua, again, that’s an extremely important point, and probably a good place for us to close for today. All of our episodes are pretty deep — this has been a deeper one than normal, just on this final paragraph of Section 14 in Book 2 of Academic Questions — but again, these issues we’re discussing are of extreme practical importance. The very words we’re looking at on these pieces of paper, or PDFs, are the same words that intelligent people for 2,000 years or more have read. We’re reading the same debates, the same words, that Thomas Jefferson or Friedrich Nietzsche or all these other philosophers for 2,000 years in the West have looked at and debated, and the issues are just as important for us today as they were 2,000 years ago. These are eternal questions, in a sense, that have to be dealt with, and it’s a mistake to think we have somehow reached a point in our society where we don’t need to worry about these things anymore — that we’re smarter than they were and can just ignore these issues that have been so important for Western civilization over the whole course of its history.

Well, we’ll come back and examine more of this and get into Section 15 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.