Episode 353 - "The Worthless Nature Of The Argument Of Those Men Who Wish To Throw Everything Into Confusion"

Welcome to Episode 353 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 16 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 wrap up Section 16 and read through Section 17, where Lucullus turns from cataloguing the skeptics’ objections to attacking them directly. Cassius traces Lucullus’s point that the Greek gods were never considered omnipotent — not even able to undo the past or override fate — back to Vatican Saying 55 and the Epicurean insistence that some things are simply impossible, while Joshua illustrates the limits ancient mythology placed on the gods with the stories of Hephaestus’s throne-trap for Hera and the mutually impossible hunt of Laelaps and the Teumessian fox. Turning to Section 16’s closing line about the forum, Joshua connects Lucullus’s distinction between dream-visions and waking clarity to Cicero’s own attack on Epicurean ethics in On Ends — his taunt that Epicureans would never dare use the word “pleasure” in the Senate the way they use it in private — and Cassius answers that Torquatus’s own public example refutes the charge. Reading through Section 17, Joshua covers Lucullus’s case that dreams, drunkenness, and madness are precisely the wrong standard for judging ordinary waking knowledge, and his closing argument that the skeptics, having borrowed Democritus’s many-worlds theory to argue that duplicate, indistinguishable people could exist across identical worlds, undermine their own position by relying on the very natural philosophers they otherwise ridicule. The episode closes with an extended detour into Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, where Cicero’s own interlocutor catches him contradicting his earlier work on Ends, and Cicero’s startling reply — that as an Academic he lives “from hand to mouth” and answers only to what seems probable today — which Cassius and Joshua treat as exposing the same intellectual bad faith running through both his ethics and his epistemology.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 353 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.

I’ll apologize that I am congested today, so my voice sounds worse even than it usually does, but I’m going to do my best to get us through this episode, because we are in the closing sections of Lucullus’s summary and attack on the skeptics in Book Two of Academic Questions. This is one of the areas where an Epicurean can occasionally — not always, but occasionally — say something good about the Stoics, in that they too were interested in defending the possibility of knowledge, and they were willing to bring their rhetorical skills to bear against those who would say that nothing is knowable, that everything is confusion. One of the lines we’ll discuss today is how we see the “worthless nature of the arguments of those men who wish to throw everything into confusion.” That’s a Stoic speaking about the skeptics, but Epicurus and the Epicureans could say, and did say, similar things about those who held that nothing can be known — just as Lucretius categorized them as standing essentially upside down and speaking self-contradictory nonsense in saying that nothing can be known.

So Lucullus is in the process of summarizing before he turns it over to Cicero to state the academic-skeptic part of the debate. We largely went through 16 last week; we’ll probably have a few more comments on 16 before we proceed into 17, but that generally is where we are.

We’ve mentioned several times one of the lines from 16: “Who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or even if he could, he would act in that manner?” That was a statement by Lucullus after he went through the example of the skeptics’ scenario of God sending visions that were difficult to distinguish from the truth. Lucullus is saying that as soon as somebody suggests a scenario like that, you need to question whether the premises of that scenario are in fact reasonable. In fact, just before the line I quoted, he said that if you come to a conclusion through an argument in which you grant such propositions, it’s your fault, not the person advancing the propositions, because it’s up to you to examine whether a proposition is reasonable or not. As in this example, who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or that even if he could, he would act in such a manner as to send false visions like that?

I wanted to point out that this is a reminder that the Greeks had a very different impression of the gods than we talk about today — the idea was ridiculous to a Stoic that you could suggest God could do everything. This idea that God was omnipotent was not part of Greek religion. In addition to questions about how God might act — which of course Epicurus is largely focused on, since Epicurus rejects the idea that God is going to intervene in the affairs of humans here on earth — Lucullus, I think, is referencing ideas common in the Greek world, that the gods too were limited in their actions. We can cite, in the Epicurean text, Vatican Saying 55, for the proposition that we must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been, and by the recognition that it is impossible to undo that which has been done. So you don’t see in Greek mythology the idea of gods traveling back in time to change the past, because the Greek understanding of a god is a much more natural understanding than we have today, and it would be understood that there are certain things in life — such as going back and changing the past — that are not possible to do, as Epicurus cites in Vatican Saying 55. The Greeks were also familiar with the idea that the gods were limited in their ability to contradict fate or destiny. I think Joshua is much more aware of anecdotes about that than I am, but the general point being made here by Lucullus is that even when you start talking about what a god can or cannot do, you have to apply a reasonable standard and examine the premise to determine whether it should be accepted. Even though we might grant a god more power than a human being might have, if you accept premises and possibilities that are on their face impossible, then it’s your fault if you get led down the primrose path to nonsense. You have to make proper judgments all along, all through chains of reasoning, if you’re going to come out at the other end with something that makes sense.

Joshua, am I right about the gods not being able to change destiny or fate?

Joshua:

Yes, it’s an interesting feature of Greek mythology that the gods were not nearly as strong, nearly as powerful as in other religions and mythologies. For example, no god can undo the spells, transformations, curses, or enchantments of another, and there are many stories reinforcing this position. But what even the Olympians can’t do is counter the decisions of Moira — fate or destiny — or the Moirai, the three sisters of fate or destiny: Clotho, who spins the thread; Lachesis, who measures it; and Atropos, who cuts it off.

One story that illustrates the point that the immortals can’t undo the decisions of other immortals is the case of Hephaestus, who was born to Hera, but was hideous and malformed, so she threw him off the mountain. When he came of age, he forged her a golden throne and sent it to Olympus as a gift, and as soon as she sat down in it, the arms folded over and around her, and she was trapped. None of the Olympians could get it open, and Zeus promised the hand of Aphrodite in marriage to anyone who could, but none of them were able to, until Hephaestus himself walked into the hall and ordered the chair to free her.

One of the more interesting stories to me about the Greek mind in general is the story of Laelaps, the magical dog who was destined always to capture his prey, and the Teumessian fox, who was destined always to escape. This presents a paradox, right? The paradox of mutually excluding abilities — according to Wikipedia, much like the paradox of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. When this dog, Laelaps, was set on the trail of this fox, it created a problem in nature that was stable, and that the gods really couldn’t do anything about. Zeus first tried to solve the problem by turning them both into stone, but he didn’t find that a satisfying solution, because all he’d done there is just shout “stop” — he hadn’t actually resolved the paradox. So the way he finally resolved it was to catasterize these two beings — to lift them up to the heavens and turn them into constellations, Canis Major, the dog, and Canis Minor, the fox, facing each other forever through the night sky. So this is not the world of other religions, other folkways, where you have omnipotent, all-powerful immortals.

Cassius:

Joshua was saying something fairly similar. How often today do we hear people say “anything is possible”? Well, that’s also an erroneous perspective from that of the Greeks, in that anything is not possible — you’ve just given examples of the limitations that even the gods themselves would have. I think that’s another one of these perspectives that has crept into the modern view, reinforcing this kind of skeptical attitude that says, well, we can’t be sure of anything, because of course anything is possible. I think that’s a very destructive and incorrect point of view, from the way the Greeks — certainly including Epicurus — would have seen things. When Epicurus says that which has been done cannot be undone, he’s saying it’s impossible. So anything is not possible. Having a firm grasp of consistency and the limits of what is possible — the limits and boundaries, what can and cannot be — again, as we talk so often about what Lucretius says in Book One of his poem, that’s a major aspect of Epicurean philosophy. The atoms move through the void, create bodies, create worlds, create human beings, but they do not move in a way such that anything is possible. Only the combinations of atoms that are possible to them can give rise to the formation of bodies and events at our level of living. So there are definite limitations that turn into what we sometimes call natural laws — we need to be careful with that term — but certain things can be, and certain things cannot be. Ultimately that’s traceable to the eternal nature of the atoms, but not traceable to any kind of divine limitation from a supernatural God or from an ideal form.

I think you had something else you wanted to reference from Section 16, about the forum.

Joshua:

Yeah, it occurred to me during the week that we shouldn’t let this last line of Section 16 pass. The last line is this: “Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done in the forum.” This is Lucullus noticing the difference between what we see in dreams, what we see when we’ve had too much wine to drink, and what we see in the cold light of day. What we see in the cold light of day is so clear that we can be reliably certain we’re seeing a true reflection of what really is, and what we see in dreams is too amorphous — the Greek immortal responsible for dreams was Morpheus, because of the shape-shifting nature of dreams. So he’s drawing this distinction between — yes, we’re having a discussion about philosophy, and in epistemology you want to go into all these cases of “is what you see in dreams really true” and so on, but at a certain point you’ve got to return to the business of living.

It occurred to me during the week that Lucullus’s response to the skeptics on epistemology is kind of similar to Cicero’s criticism of Epicurus on ethics. The idea being: yes, within the walls of our country villa here where we’re talking about philosophy, you say whatever you like, but why don’t you try to say that in a place where you expect people to take your words seriously? “The name of pleasure,” Cicero says in On Ends, Book Two, “certainly has no dignity in it, and perhaps we do not exactly understand what is meant by it. For you are constantly saying that we do not understand what you mean by the word pleasure. Say in any assembly you please that you do everything with a view to avoid suffering. If you do not think that this language is sufficiently dignified or sufficiently honorable, say that you will do everything during your year of office, and during your whole life, for the sake of your own advantage, that you will do nothing except what is profitable to yourself, nothing which is not prompted by a view to your own interest. What an uproar such a declaration would excite in the assembly! And what hope do you think you would have of the consulship? Can you follow principles when you are alone, or with your closest friends, which you do not dare to profess and avow openly? But instead you have those maxims constantly in your mouth which the Peripatetics and the Stoics profess. In the courts of justice and in the Senate you speak of duty, equity, dignity, good faith, uprightness, honorable actions, conduct worthy of power, worthy of the Roman people. You talk of encountering every imaginable danger in the cause of the Republic, dying for one’s country. When you speak in this manner we are all amazed, like a pack of blockheads, and you are laughing in your sleeve, for among all those high-sounding and admirable expressions, pleasure has no place — not only that pleasure which you say consists in motion, and which all men, whether living in cities or in the country, all men in short who speak Latin, call pleasure, but even that stationary pleasure, which no one but your sect calls pleasure.”

So here we have two problems. The first is Cicero’s continual befuddlement at what he means to indicate by the word “pleasure.” The other problem is: okay, we’ve left the villa where we’re discussing philosophy, and now we’re going into the Senate, or the Assembly, or the court of law, or the camp — are you willing to say here what you just told me back there in private? Are you willing to avow in public the principles you say you live by? Or are you going to do what every other Epicurean apparently does, and fill your mouth with the maxims of the Peripatetics and the Stoics, and speak of duty and equity and dignity and so on? That is a crashing-back-down-to-earth moment, analogous to the moment we find here in Section 16 of Academic Questions, where Lucullus talks about comparing the things we see in dreams to the things we say and do in the forum. It’s these visions of sleep and of drunkenness that we’re going to continue to encounter as we go into Section 17.

Cassius:

Joshua, before you get to 17, let me take the opportunity to again slam Cicero for his argument that you just cited there. I agree with you entirely that the example of the forum is something everyone then understood as the most real of reality — that when you’re surrounded by your fellow citizens, when you’re being scrutinized by other people, you’re going to be extremely careful about what you say and what you do, and you’re going to do only those things you can really be firmly committed to. Cicero is just being his dismissive, absurd self by alleging that the Epicureans are not willing to discuss pleasure even in public. He’s continuing his effort to discredit the word “pleasure” as something embarrassing, something that can never be discussed plainly, clearly, and proudly. We have Torquatus’s example in Book One of On Ends — a great Roman general, one of several Cicero himself cites — who is more than willing to explain how pleasure really works, how it’s not limited simply to immediate bodily pleasure, the kind of immediate short-term indulgence Cicero wants to emphasize, and how the word “pleasure” carries over into everything anyone feels is desirable to them. Even the Roman senators, even those like Cicero who were defending duty, justice, courage, and wisdom, are things necessary to successfully live a happy life of pleasure. Epicurus and the Epicureans are absolutely willing to say, in Principal Doctrine number five, that it is impossible to live happily without doing those things. Cicero just brushes that aside, dismisses it as irrelevant, but it’s the truth, and it’s Cicero who is being ridiculous, not the Epicureans, because the Epicureans know that these things go hand in hand. Cicero was the one being ridiculous, implying to the people that there’s duty and courage and wisdom for their own sake, as if we get no reward, as if we get nothing from pursuing wisdom and courage and duty. That’s an absurd position, and Cicero knows it’s absurd — he’s just on the wrong side, as he is here in this argument about knowledge. He switches back and forth from Stoic to Academic skeptic when it suits his argument. But the analogy of the forum is not something Cicero has the advantage on over the Epicureans. Epicurus devoted his life to explaining plainly to the world how pleasure is the focus of life when properly understood, and how these other virtues of duty, courage, wisdom, and the rest are useful only because they lead to a happy life, and not because there’s some god or some ridiculous abstract ideal form giving a reason why we should pursue them. Cicero’s being ridiculous — he’s failing to be consistent himself, and that’s why he’s able to switch back and forth so easily in his arguments on knowledge.

In this case, Lucullus is correct about Cicero’s position on knowledge, and Lucullus’s reference to the forum is a good example of how we, as Epicureans, are going to hold ourselves to the standard that this is the real world we live in. Another analogy I can make quickly: the forum stands for the real world of these Roman senators, the things they held to be really important. Well, there’s such a realm as well for Epicureans, and it is this world which we hold to be important and essential to live in, and essential to conduct ourselves properly in, because there’s no future world. Cicero can talk all he wants about his soul rising, becoming lighter, rising up to the stars, becoming part of a divine fire, part of all these things that supposedly, from a Ciceronian or Stoic or Platonic view, may exist after death — but it’s the Epicureans who realize that the forum, this world, is the world where we are going to conduct ourselves properly and intensely, just as we are in the forum. So Epicureans are not interested in a dream world; it’s particularly important to Epicureans to know the difference between a dream and the forum, because the forum, this world, is the only one we have, and we can’t let confusion about what is a dream versus what goes on in the real world cause us to come to the type of indecision being argued about here between Lucullus and Cicero. We can’t get confused about whether we’re standing in our own house or not. We have to have a firm picture that the senses, anticipations, and feelings are sufficient to allow us to have confidence in our decisions.

So when you’re ready, Joshua, we can move on to Section 17.

Joshua:

And Section 17 begins with Lucullus continuing his discussion of dreams and drunkenness and the problems they represent:

“While these visions are being beheld, they assume the same appearance as those things which we see while awake. There is a good deal of real difference between them, but we may pass over that, for what we assert is that there is not the same power or soundness in people when asleep that there is in them while waking, either in intellect or in sensation. What even drunken men do, they do not do with the same deliberate approbation as sober men — they doubt, they hesitate, they check themselves at times and give but a feeble assent to what they see or agree to, and when they have slept off their drunkenness, then they understand how unreal their perceptions were. The same thing is the case with madmen: when their madness is beginning, they both feel and say that something appears to them to exist that has no real existence, and when their frenzy abates, they feel and speak like the poet — ‘But now my heart does not agree with that which with my eyes I see.’ But even in madness the wise man puts restraints upon himself, so as not to approve of what is false as if it were true, and he does so often at other times too, if there is by chance any heaviness or slowness in his senses, or if those things which are seen by him are rather obscure, or if he is prevented from thoroughly examining them by the shortness of the time. Although the whole of this fact — that the wise man sometimes suspends his assent — makes against you, for if there were no difference between his perceptions, he would either suspend it always or never.

“But from the whole character of this discussion, we may see the worthless nature of the argument of those men who wish to throw everything into confusion. We want judgment, marked with gravity, consistency, firmness, and wisdom, and we use the examples of men dreaming, mad, or drunk. I press this point, that in all this discussion we are speaking with great inconsistency, for we should not bring forward men sunk in wine or sleep, or deprived of sense, in such an absurd manner as at one time to say there is a difference between the perceptions of men awake and sober and sensible and those of men in a different condition, and at other times that there was no difference at all. They do not even perceive that by this kind of argument they are making out everything to be uncertain, which they do not wish to do. I call that uncertain which the Greeks call adelon…”

Let me pause there for a second — the Greek adelon apparently means unclear, uncertain, unknown, or sometimes invisible, but the skeptical philosophers, like Sextus Empiricus and the Pyrrhonists, use it to describe things that are non-evident, hidden from direct perception, requiring proof or inference. And it apparently shares the same root as the English word “psychedelic” — mind, and clearness, or mind, and what is known or visible.

So, continuing: “…which the Greeks call adelon, for if the fact be that there is no difference between the appearance that a thing presents to a madman and to a person in his senses, then who can feel quite sure of his own sanity? And to wish to produce such an effect as that is a proof of no ordinary madness. But they follow up, in a childish manner, the likenesses of twins, or of the impressions of rings. For who of us denies that there are such things as likenesses when they are visible in numbers of things? But if the fact of many things being like many other things is sufficient to take away knowledge, why are you not content with that, especially as we admit it? And why do you rather insist upon that assertion, which the nature of things will not suffer, that everything is not in its own kind of that character of which it really is, and that there is a conformity without any difference whatever in two or more things, so that eggs are entirely like eggs, and bees like bees? What then are you contending for, or what do you seek to gain by talking about twins? For it is granted that they are alike, and you might be content with that, but you try to make them out to be actually the same, and not merely alike, and that is quite impossible. Then you have recourse to those natural philosophers who are so ridiculed in the Academy, but whom you will not even now desist from quoting, and you tell us that Democritus says that there are a countless number of worlds, and that there are some which are not only so like one another, but so completely and absolutely equal in every point that there is no difference whatever between them, and that they are quite innumerable, and so also are men. Then you require that, if the world be so entirely equal to another world that there is absolutely not the slightest difference between them, we should grant to you that in this world of ours also there must be something exactly equal to something else, so that there is no difference whatever or distinction between them. For why, you will say, since there not only can be, but actually are, innumerable Quinti, Lutati, Catulli, formed out of those atoms from which Democritus affirms that everything is produced in all other worlds, which are likewise innumerable, why may not there be a second Catulus formed in this identical world of ours, since it is of such a size as we see it?”

Cassius:

Joshua, thank you for reading that. There is some fascinating material here in Section 17, which is going to take us quite a while to go through, especially at the end, when you get to Democritus and we find that they’re indeed familiar with the idea of the atomists talking about innumerable worlds, and innumerable examples of identical and non-identical worlds, identical and non-identical people even — Quintus Lutatius Catulus could exist in numbers of different identical forms. There’s a lot here we’re going to have to unpack.

Before we go back to the beginning and start unpacking, you do a very good job, as always, of reading this in a very clear way. I think I would detect from the wording here that Lucullus is getting intense. These arguments would be easy to read in a very forceful, argumentative way, because he’s talking about the ridiculous, absurd contentions the skeptics are making, and I suspect that to the extent conversations like this did actually occur, there was a lot of heat generated when these things were said, because he’s basically accusing the skeptics of being absolutely absurd, worthless — in terms of the line about the “worthless nature of the argument of those men who wish to throw everything into confusion.” I’d emphasize that this is not a parlor debate. You have a major school of Greek-Roman philosophy, the Academic skeptics, who in the end are throwing everything into confusion, saying knowledge is impossible. And that’s not just a contention like “it’s impossible to know what’s on the other side of the moon” or “it’s impossible to know what language the gods might speak” — this is a contention that nothing is knowable in this life, that we can’t be sure of anything. And if you take that seriously, then philosophy becomes absolutely worthless. If there’s anything most of us discussing philosophy agree on, it’s that philosophy is important and essential to living a happy life. But if you take these Academic-skeptic arguments to their conclusion, then philosophy itself is worthless. These are not physical fighting words, necessarily, but they are fighting words among people who take these ideas seriously.

So let me go back to the beginning and say that part of what I pick out, as this argument opens, is that Lucullus is making the point that it’s ridiculous to base your arguments about knowledge on the situation of people having dreams while asleep, or who are drunk, or who are madmen. Why in the world would you use such people as the standard for what a normal person of education and intelligence is able to do? The decisions of drunken men are absolutely irrelevant to the important questions of life, and this is obvious, because even men who are drunk or mad or asleep, we all know and see that they act tentatively — they understand, in many cases, that they are drunk or mad or asleep, and so they aren’t contending that they are the standard of knowledge. Why in the world are you Academic skeptics looking to them as your example? I could see an analogy here to how the Stoics and Platonists would argue with the Epicureans about why in the world you’d be looking to infants and babies for an example of how to live — but it is nature that creates infants and babies and produces in them the desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Drunkenness, madness, dreams — these are obvious disabilities that you’re not going to look to as a standard, especially when those who are drunk and mad and waking from dreams know themselves that they’re under this disability.

Lucullus says: “I press this point, that in all this discussion we’re speaking with great inconsistency, for we should not bring forward men sunk in wine or sleep or deprived of sense in such an absurd manner as at one time to say there’s a difference between their perceptions, and at other times no difference at all.” The result of this is that they don’t even understand that by this argument they’re making everything out to be uncertain — which, do you really wish to do that, Academic skeptics? Because you’re here arguing with me that knowledge is impossible. That is an affirmative statement — why do you want to claim that everything is uncertain? Because if you’re not certain that anything is true, then what’s the difference between you and being insane? How do you even know you’re insane?

Joshua:

Yeah. And along the same lines — why should we not elect a madman or a drunk man to be consul, right? This is the same problem presented by Cicero: you Epicureans, you’re never going to go say that stuff in public. If we’re regarding the view of waking men as similar to the view of sleeping men, and the perceptions of sober men as similar to the perceptions of drunk men, and the perceptions of sane men as similar to the perceptions of the insane, then on what possible grounds could you object to electing a drunk, dreaming, insane man to the consulship, right? It’s the same challenge.

I do want to respond to one thing, Cassius, which is: it’s true, Lucullus says this is an inconsistent way of speaking. What it’s absolutely consistent with, though, is this Academic-skeptic style of arguing. This is the same kind of argument as the Sorites paradox again, because in the case of the Sorites problem of the heap, it’s incremental changes, right — each point turning to the interlocutor and saying, is this where we stop? Is this where we stop? Except now they’re doing it with: well, what about the perceptions of a drunk man? What about the perceptions of a madman? What about the perceptions of a drunk madman? What about a dreaming drunk madman? They just hit you constantly with subtle changes and variations on every imaginable question. So in that way the argument is very consistent — it’s consistent with their entire approach to philosophy. It does seem like we’re missing the other half of this conversation, but it’s clear it doesn’t stop there — they keep going, they keep going. They want to talk now about, well, you’ve got identical twins in this world — what if, as Democritus says, there’s another world identical to this one, and there’s a person in that world with the same appearance and the same name as the person in this world? Are they different people? How are you going to distinguish or separate these two people? On what basis are you going to do that, if you claim that knowledge is possible?

Cassius:

Joshua, that is exactly right — you’ve just cited where he goes at the very end of this section. Before we get there, he leads up to it with a paragraph I also want to emphasize, because I’ve got an example in my mind that jumps out at me. He says: “But they follow up in a childish manner the likenesses of twins, or the impressions of rings — for who of us denies that there are such things as likenesses, when they are visible in numbers of things?” In other words, I think what this argument is saying is: you skeptics want to throw at us all these examples of things close to each other and similar to each other, and say, well, this is hard to distinguish from that, that’s hard to distinguish from this. But what Lucullus is saying here is, don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know there are twins? Don’t you think I know rings make similar impressions? Don’t you think I know there are likenesses in all sorts of things?

I’m going to indulge my personal recollection here for just a second — one of the most memorable lines I remember from the old Star Trek episodes, for those old enough to remember, is Captain Kirk confronting Commodore Decker in “The Doomsday Machine” episode, where Kirk is getting excited because Decker has beamed his entire crew down to a planet that’s been destroyed by the Doomsday Machine, and Kirk starts yelling at Decker, “Matt, you can’t have sent your men down, there is no third planet anymore.” And Decker, in a sort of madman demeanor himself, looks back at Kirk and says, “Don’t you think I know that?” That’s the impression I’m getting from Lucullus here: don’t you skeptics understand that I know twins exist? Don’t you understand that I know things look like each other? What of it? I understand that, and I’m saying that does not prevent me from knowing that some things are different from each other. This is a ridiculous direction for the skeptics to go in, but they keep, as you said, Joshua, with the Sorites method, adding little pieces, adding things that are very close to each other, as if — what about? What about rings making the same impression? What about human twins being very similar to each other? What about one heap of sand having a different number of grains than another heap of sand does? What about this, what about that, what about the other? Well, this “what about” argument leads nowhere, because in the end you know that some things are very similar to each other, but you also know that some things are very different from each other. You can keep counting until all the cows come home how many cows there are in the herd, but you still know what a herd is, and you don’t let yourself get confused by the triteness of an argument like this that tries to beat you down into thinking knowledge is impossible.

Again, I think this is something Lucullus is quite properly getting exasperated at the skeptic position for — which, again, I think is something we see from the Epicurean position as well. This is not just a parlor discussion where we all have our own opinions and say, well, you have your opinion, I have mine, and we’ll just be friends and everything’s fine. If you’re talking to somebody who says no knowledge about anything is possible, then you’re dealing with someone whose very fabric of world and existence could come apart at any minute. You’re surrounding yourself with someone whom a loose cannon would look upon with disdain — they’re not just a loose cannon, they’re a loose nuclear bomb. They’re absolutely incapable of being firm and experiencing duty or loyalty or courage or wisdom or anything, because they don’t know what anything is. They don’t even know what those words mean, because they say no knowledge is possible. So I wanted to add that, about this argument of adding additional things which any normal person knows do exist. Eggs are like eggs, bees are like bees — I understand individual bees can look very similar to other individual bees, but that doesn’t mean one bee is exactly the same as another, or one egg exactly the same as another, and we do have the ability, using our faculties, to understand the differences between the two.

And let’s go further into what you’ve already brought up, which is the example of Democritus.

Joshua:

Yeah, and it’s not just Democritus, Cassius, because under the heading of natural philosopher, Epicurus himself falls — he has a theory of nature, he has a system for understanding these things, right? So when Lucullus points out to these Academic skeptics that they’re rifling the storehouses of literature and philosophy of even the philosophers, like Epicurus, like Democritus, that they themselves so greatly ridicule and despise — this is the new low they’ve sunk to, right? The Academy is going to borrow, just steal from other schools, and present that in their never-ending avalanche of skeptic nonsense. And their new toy in this argument is Democritus and the many-worlds theory, which he held in common with Epicurus.

Cassius:

That’s exactly right. Before you go into the many-worlds theory, it’s an argument like: have you no shame, you skeptics? You’re even citing Democritus and Epicurus, whom you ridicule in other contexts, and you expect me to take them as an example of why I should believe you now? What kind of a crazy method of arguing is this? Have you no limit you’re willing to go to, to try to prove that no knowledge is possible, when you’re in fact arguing for a proposition that contradicts what you’re saying?

Joshua:

And of course, Democritus himself has given them an opening, as we’ve already quoted in the second book of Academic Questions — Lucullus represents the skeptics as basically hiding behind Democritus, saying, what do you want us to do about the fact that nothing can be known? Even Democritus himself said that of truth we know nothing, because truth lies at the bottom of the well. This does put into interesting light a slightly unrelated text, not by Cicero — this one comes from the letters of the Stoic Seneca, his letters to Lucilius. In the course of their correspondence they have this ongoing game where, every time they write a letter, they try to end it with an apropos quote — but they pull these quotes exclusively from Epicurus. The goal seems to be that we can go to the lowest of the low in terms of Greek philosophy, and still find sentiments that accord with our own, at least on important ethical questions. It appears to me the idea is: can you demonstrate your own position by using your opponent’s argument against them? That seems to be part of it — it’s a game, in the letters between Seneca and Lucilius, and it’s kind of a game here as well: let’s trot out Democritus to say truth lies at the bottom of the well, and then we’ll shunt him aside, and when we need him again we’ll pull him out to talk about many worlds identical to each other, with people on those worlds identical to people on these worlds, and how all of this informs the broader position of the skeptics — that knowledge is impossible.

Cassius:

Joshua, you’ll remember this better than I will, but I think this is what we’ve seen previously in the Tusculan Disputations, where Cicero says, “I’m the only one who’s really free, I’m the only one who is able to quote arguments from any source, and so, student, you need not point out that I, Cicero, am being inconsistent, because I’m not concerned about the fact that I’ve said something opposite in another book from what I’m saying right now — I’m free to argue whatever I want.” I think Lucullus is exactly right here in pointing out that it’s ridiculous for these Academic skeptics to cite the natural philosophers whom they so greatly ridicule, but whom they haven’t got the shame or the consideration for consistency to refrain from quoting. This really brands, in my mind, his effort in the Tusculan Disputations to make himself look good by saying he’s free, when what he’s really doing is committing the worst logical inconsistency by essentially lying in another book, taking a totally opposite position than the one he’s taking to his student in the Tusculan Disputations.

Joshua:

I certainly do remember that, even if I can’t find the exact passage at the moment. But the Tusculan Disputations was an excellent resource for us to go through, because it really gives insight into Cicero’s own views. In most of his other works he’s arguing with other thinkers, other philosophers — we started Academic Questions with this core dispute between Cicero and Varro, with Varro asking Cicero why he abandoned the Old Academy, why he abandoned Plato, and why he goes along with these new innovators like Carneades, when what he should have done, Cicero, was stick with Plato and Socrates. Cicero’s response there was something to the effect that he wanted the most up-to-date system, or something. But this is a core question in Academic Questions: what does Cicero really think, what is his own position? Because you very rarely get a full explication of Cicero’s own philosophy, and the Tusculan Disputations is the closest we come. And you’re absolutely right — in that book his interlocutor points out, “I just read your other work yesterday, and what you’re saying now contradicts what you said in this other book.”

What Cicero’s interlocutor accused him of in the Tusculan Disputations was in Book Five, Section 11. The interlocutor says: “You compel me to be of your opinion, Cicero, but have a care that you are not inconsistent yourself.” Cicero replies, “In what respect am I inconsistent?” And the student says, “Because I have lately read your fourth book on good and evil, and in that you appeared to me, while disputing against Cato, to be endeavoring to show that Zeno and the Peripatetics differ only about some new words. But if we allow that, what reason can there be, if it follows from the arguments of Zeno that virtue contains all that is necessary to a happy life, that the Peripatetics should not be at liberty to say the same? For in my opinion, regard should be had to the thing, not to the words.” And Cicero says, “What, you would convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I’ve said or written elsewhere? You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules — we live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability.”

And Cassius, I think it was very good of you to bring this passage up in connection with Academic Questions, because this describes exactly the process of Lucullus’s interlocutors, these Academic skeptics who just bounce from one thing to another — from the Sorites syllogism, if we add one more thing, if we add one more thing, if we add one more thing — and then they jump on to, well, what about drunkenness, what about dreams, what about madmen? They’re like locusts just going from thing to thing. And what we find in the Tusculan Disputations is that this is the procedure Cicero establishes and doesn’t trouble to deny: we live from hand to mouth, and we say anything that strikes our mind with probability.

Cassius:

So that we are the only people who are really at liberty. We are the only people who are truly free. We can say whatever strikes our mind with probability, because we’re not going to dispute according to established rules — we’re going to live from hand to mouth, and you’re not going to hold what I said yesterday against me today, because I don’t care about your rules of consistency. This is just awful, and hard for me to believe Cicero was willing to say this about himself, but it’s absolutely ridiculous as a position to take. Why should I believe anything you say, Cicero, when you were willing to basically lie to me yesterday, and you’re expecting me to listen to you now, ignore what you said yesterday, and think you’re an authority on anything? How ridiculous are you being, Cicero? It’s, like I say, kind of amazing to me that he was willing to commit this to writing in the Tusculan Disputations, but that’s exactly what’s going on here in Academic Questions as well, and it really highlights the depth of the divide between the Academic skeptics and the Epicureans and the Stoics. Epicurus is never going to look at you and say, well, you can ignore what I said yesterday because what I said yesterday was not the truth, because I’m free to say whatever I want one day after another, I can change my opinion regardless of what I said before, because whatever seems probable to me is what I’m going to say. How in the world can a philosopher take a position like that and expect to have any credibility at all? And yet that’s exactly what the Academic skeptics were doing — that’s exactly what Cicero was willing to embrace at different points in his arguments. And to some extent, that’s exactly what many philosophers today are willing to do — to say it doesn’t matter what was said yesterday by me or anybody else, we’re just going to go with what we have right now, because what I say today seems probable to me, and that’s all that matters. That’s a ridiculous position, but it’s hard to overemphasize the depravity of such a position. What is the good of philosophy at all, if you can change what you say tomorrow and say exactly the opposite of what you said yesterday? And of course the Academic skeptics, the Pyrrhonists, are going to say, well, whose fault is that — is it Democritus’s fault, is it my fault? No, that’s just the way things are, because there is no truth, there is no consistency, there is nothing solid to continue to hold the same opinion on. They’re going to say, don’t blame me for that, that’s just the way the world is.

If there’s anything important about Epicurean philosophy, I’d say it’s that he rejects that kind of attitude, because he does come up with a solid grounding for regularity in nature, in the eternal nature of the atoms. He’s not going to admit there are no grounds whatever for any consistency, and he’s not going to say, well, there’s no consistency in this world, but in heaven or in another world there is a grounds for consistency, and if I use geometry and all this fancy logic I can come up with an ideal form, and you should be consistent with my ideal form — you should embrace what I think is a categorical imperative, I can come up with a rule that applies to everybody, all the time, at all places, in all circumstances, and you should accept that. Now, I don’t have grounds for doing so in anything you can touch or feel or see or sense, but you should accept my viewpoint about that and just take what I’m saying as true and real and follow my lead. That is just absurd. That’s just totally absurd, and yet that is the basis for Academic skepticism — that’s the basis for much of modern philosophy, and from an Epicurean point of view, and from my point of view, it’s just absurd.

You know, Joshua, in the part we didn’t quote, Cicero ends up in the Tusculan Disputations saying, “Wherefore, if we certainly grant Brutus this, that a wise man is always happy, how consistent he is, is his own business.” Well, consistency, as a famous jurist said, might be the hobgoblin of little minds. But consistency, for those of us who want to take philosophy seriously, who want to actually live in this world happily and take it seriously, as if we are in the forum, as if people are observing us, as if we’re making major important decisions — consistency does have its merits. Certainly, when circumstances change, you’re going to change your position, but when circumstances remain the same — such as the circumstance that there is no divine God ordering the universe, such as the circumstance that death is the end and we’re not going to be flying off to meet our friends in heaven and have an eternity of happiness ahead of us — when those circumstances don’t change, you need a consistent position that tells you how to live, consistent with those premises that don’t change. You’re not going to be like a Cicero and say, well, I’m at liberty to take whatever opinion seems probable to me at this particular moment. That is absurd.

Joshua:

It’s absurd, Cassius, and Lucullus himself is going to make that argument when we move into 18 next week. He says, “But that is a monstrous absurdity of yours, when you say that you follow what is probable when you are not hindered by anything from doing so. In the first place,” says Lucullus, “how can you avoid being hindered, when what is false does not differ from what is true? Secondly, what judgment can be formed of what is true, when what is true is indistinguishable from what is false?” So it’s important to know that we’re not the only ones fed up here with Cicero’s approach to all this — this is grating on Lucullus as well. His response is that it’s a monstrous absurdity to live from hand to mouth, as Cicero says, and regard things only as probable, and say one thing today and mean it, and contradict yourself tomorrow and mean it, and never deal with the fact that you’ve contradicted yourself. What is so childish, says Lucullus, is to talk of approving what is not known — you talk in terms of probability, but when you put something forward, like “virtue is the good” — an obviously good position Lucullus himself would agree with — Cicero claims not to know that it’s true, but is nevertheless willing to approve it. And Lucullus says: what is so childish is to talk of approving what is not known.

Cassius:

It’s a great way to end the episode for today. I’m really glad you picked out that phrase, “monstrous absurdity” — I’m sure I’ll probably work that into the title of next week’s episode, when we come back and go through all of 18 in detail. Why don’t we stop for today — 17 has been extremely productive, and 18 looks like it’s going to continue that way; we have several more sections before Lucullus completes his wrap-up here. So this is very important material, and we’ll continue it next week when we get back. In the meantime, 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 to discuss more monstrous absurdities of the Academic skeptics. See you then. Bye.