Episode 356 - "The Skeptics Argue Every Side But Conceal Their Conclusions"

Listen to “Episode 356 - The Skeptics Argue Every Side But Conceal Their Conclusions” on Spreaker.

Welcome to Episode 356 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 18 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 finish Section 18, where Lucullus calls the skeptics’ appeal to “the probable” a “monstrous absurdity”: if the true cannot be told from the false, even “probably true” means nothing, and a skeptic who argues at all assumes the difference he denies. Joshua compares Socrates the self-described gadfly with Cicero, who claims to live “from hand to mouth.” Lucullus then attacks the Academic habit of arguing on every side while concealing their own conclusions, and Joshua recounts Carneades’s two opposite orations on justice in Rome in 155 BC, which so alarmed Cato the Elder that he had Carneades sent home. Cassius argues that hearing both sides is valuable, but life requires a verdict, and that Epicurus never held knowledge to be impossible. Joshua brings in Sextus Empiricus’s infinite regress of criteria, which ends in suspended judgment for the sake of ataraxia, a goal Cassius contrasts with Epicurus’s goal of pleasure. Lucullus’s last charge is that the skeptics, who claim to follow reason rather than authority, won their followers by the eloquence of Arcesilaus and Carneades. Joshua and Cassius note that the same power of style carried Cicero (as St. Jerome’s dream shows) and Plato down the centuries, and contrast the secrecy of the other schools with Epicurus’s open teaching.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 356 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

We’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective, of course, and we are closing in on the end of the Stoic presentation about why and how knowledge is possible, and why the academic skeptics are incorrect in denying the possibility of knowledge. Lucullus has been going on for quite a period of time to represent the Stoic position, and we’re almost at the section where Cicero himself is going to pick up and respond to these points. So over the coming weeks we’re actually going to be going through many of the same issues that we’ve been discussing so far, but as we go forward, we’ll be hearing Cicero’s attack on the Stoic position.

And while, again, this can all seem very deep, the more you think about what is being said here, the more you understand that this is very practical and very important. It’s not just some word game. The examples that the Stoics and the Epicureans and the skeptics were using back then bring this home to us, when we’re talking about raising eggs and determining which hen they came from, or determining the difference between two twins, and whether there are identical things in the universe or not. These are realistic, practical questions, where you’re taking your thought processes to logical conclusions and testing them that way. And if your logic doesn’t survive a logical test, then it doesn’t make much sense to use it to make important decisions in your life.

So you should be confident in your approach to things, and eventually take a position on the key perspectives that these parties are representing. Because if you’re an academic skeptic, you’re going to end up concluding that “I can never be sure of anything, and I’m never going to take a position that anything is true or anything is false.” Or if you go with the Stoics, you can take the position that “I can tell some things to be true and some things to be false, and I’m going to live my life knowing that it’s important to see that difference.” And of course, that is a viewpoint that is shared with Epicurus.

But when you start diving into the question of how you determine what is true versus what is false, you’ll find that there’s a dramatic difference between the way the Stoics do it and the way the Epicureans do it. If you’re comfortable saying that you can base your truth and falsity on divine inspiration and divine creation and the inscriptions of a divine creator, then you should go with the Stoics, because their logic makes sense if that is the nature of the universe. But if you’re with Epicurus, that the universe is natural, that it was not created as a plaything of an omnipotent creator, and that both humans and all other living things are a part of nature and need to understand nature in order to live the best way possible, then you’ll go with the Epicurean position. And that has many distinctive characteristics that, once you dive into this, become very easy to see.

But it does take effort. It does take time. And it’s not self-evident until you take the time to learn what these people were arguing about, and see that not only were they no less intelligent than we are today, but in many cases they were more intelligent. They had a better understanding of ultimate issues that we just brush aside and ignore today, as if they have been resolved, when in fact they have not been resolved.

We’re not sure that we’ll finish the Stoic argument today, but we’re coming a lot closer to the end of it. When we finished last week, we were pointing out a particularly difficult passage in which Lucullus, on behalf of the Stoics, had attacked a skeptical position about the possibility of knowledge. There are different ways to interpret what’s being said here, but one way of looking at where we left off last week is that Lucullus was saying, on behalf of the Stoics, that you academic skeptics are particularly absurd when you say, “Well, we will grant to you that everything is unique. But even though that may be the case, there are many things whose appearances, whose looks, the impressions they make on you, are indistinguishable, and you can’t tell the difference. Let’s put aside whether we grant to you Stoics that everything is material and that God has put a mark on everything. Even if God has put a mark on everything, if you’re not able to see that mark, if the appearance of these things is the same to you, then those marks might as well not exist. If the appearance of what is true is identical to the appearance of what is false, then you have no way to determine the difference between them. You’re never going to be able to take the position that one is true and the other is false, and you darn well better never assent, never strongly take the position that one thing is true or one thing is false.”

That’s one way of looking at the academic attempt to undermine the Stoic position. But the Stoics come back against that with an argument that I think we’re going to see repeated as we go forward: “No matter how you argue your case, academics, if you say that it is impossible to distinguish true from false, then why are we even having this argument? If you don’t think that the position you skeptics are arguing is true, then why are you even asserting to me that I should believe it? Every argument you make, from any perspective, that I should believe one thing rather than another assumes that there’s a difference between true and false. But you keep constructing these ridiculous arguments that say there is no difference between true and false, and then continue your argument anyway. That makes no sense. It’s ridiculous. It’s destructive. It leads to nihilism, and it’s absurd.” That is ultimately the viewpoint of the Stoics on this, and as an Epicurean, I would say it is largely correct.

As we conclude the Stoic position today, we will again see references to Carneades and other skeptics who are basically twisting themselves into pretzels with this continuing problem. Should I take the position of Socrates that I don’t know anything? My gosh, if I say I don’t know anything, that means I know that I don’t know anything. That’s self-contradictory. That’s absurd. How can I get around that? And so someone like Carneades will say, “Well, I’m not even going to say that I don’t know anything. I’m just going to take no position at all on anything.” Of course, the circularity and the nonsense of that position eventually becomes clear to people, and you end up with Cicero and others arguing that probability is good enough, instead of saying something is true or false. And that’s the direction we’re going in this discussion today.

So Joshua, let me turn it over to you to summarize anything further you’d like to say about last week, and then continue on in Section 18.

Joshua:

It does seem to me, Cassius, that of the many dividing lines between these schools, one of the most relevant in this passage, and in what we’ve been reading up to this point, is the question of whether there can be true duplicates, genuinely identical objects in nature. The academic skeptics come down on the side that there are duplicates, and for that reason we can’t claim to have real knowledge, because if there are two things so identical that you can’t tell them apart, it reveals a fundamental flaw in the claim that knowledge is possible.

As we’ve said before, I think you and I both come down on the side that in Epicureanism, especially when you’re talking about the atoms themselves, we do expect to find exact duplicates. There are an infinite number of atoms, but for Epicurus there is not an infinite number of different kinds of atoms, of different shapes and configurations of atoms. There is merely an innumerable number of shapes of atoms. And if this is the case, we would certainly expect, given an infinite number of atoms, that some would be truly identical. And yet for Epicurus, this does not mean that knowledge is impossible. The Stoics, meanwhile, take the position that there can be no true duplicates, because if there were, the academic skeptics would be right and knowledge would be impossible. I didn’t expect this to be a fault line between the major schools at this time, but it turns out to be an important question.

The analogy I’ve been using is that the inability of the human eye to distinguish between very similar shades of gray, or even identical shades of gray, should not be used to invalidate our ability to detect the difference between black and white. That would be a foolish way to proceed. But that is kind of the way the academic skeptics are proceeding, and that is the argument that Lucullus feels he has to respond to. It’s a feature, once again, of the Sorites, the problem of the heap. If Cicero can convince you that there’s a problem at all in differentiating between two different shades of gray, then once he’s got his foot in the door, all he’s got to do is keep adding one thing or taking one thing away, and pretty soon he’ll convince you that you are completely befuddled and that you know nothing.

I don’t think we need to be very troubled by that, because I don’t think any of us claim to be omniscient. We don’t know everything. We can’t know everything. That doesn’t mean that we can’t know some things.

Lucullus is now going to change tack here and shift the argument he’s making against Cicero’s position. I’ve already quoted some of this in a previous episode, but it is well worth reviewing, and we haven’t actually done a deep dive on it yet. So let me read this paragraph, and then we can go into it:

“But,” says Lucullus, “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, 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 undistinguishable from what is false? From these facts there springs unavoidably epoche, that is to say, a suspension of assent” (or, as some translate it, a suspension of dogma), “for which Arcesilas is more consistent, if at least the opinions which some people entertain of Carneades are correct. For if nothing can be perceived, as they both agree in thinking, then all assent is taken away. For what is so childish as to talk of approving of what is not known?

“But even yesterday we heard that Carneades was in the habit, at times, of descending to say that a wise man would be guided by opinion, that is to say, would do wrong. To me, indeed, it is not so certain that there is anything which can be comprehended, a question which I have now spent too much time in discussing, as that a wise man is never guided by opinion, that is to say, never assents to anything which is either false or unknown.”

Let me step in here to note that when Lucullus talks about what we heard yesterday, about what Carneades was in the habit of doing or saying, “yesterday” may refer to a text that we don’t have, a text that doesn’t survive. One of the problems with the Academic Questions is that we have two versions, or revisions, and they don’t neatly correlate to one another. What we call Book Two is thought to belong to a series the rest of which does not survive. So we probably don’t have what Carneades was in the habit of saying.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, what you just referred to there about “yesterday” is exactly what I see Charles Brittain suggests in the notes to his version of the Academic Questions: that the reference is to Catulus’s discussion of his father’s skepticism in a lost book.

But as you say, we have talked about this sentence a lot, and we need to make sure we don’t pass over the question of probability, about people who, like Cicero, are going to say that they follow what is probable, and that this is a sufficient substitute for following what is true or avoiding what is false, that the probable is the right standard rather than something more certain. Lucullus starts out his refutation of that by asking how you can avoid running into a problem even with probability if you don’t think that the false differs from the true. In other words, even when people say that something is probably true or probably false, what do those phrases mean if the words “true” and “false” have no meaning? If they have nothing in their mind already that is a particular position about something, then how can they say whether that position is probably true or probably false? It’s another self-contradictory, self-refuting position that the skeptics hold.

And this gets further into what Lucullus says about Carneades. If you’re going to be consistent and say that you know nothing, you’ve got a problem, because you can’t even say that you know nothing. But these skeptics tried to chase that rabbit as far as they could, by refusing at every turn to say that anything is true or false. And Lucullus is pointing out here that if you’re going to be consistent, then just do nothing. Just say nothing. Take no positions whatsoever. Don’t even get involved in a discussion. Because what is a discussion? What is a debate? What is a search for knowledge, except something that is based on truth or falsity? It’s a search for a conclusion that can be reached.

I regularly think of a line from Diogenes of Oenoanda on this point, where Diogenes asks, “Who will seek that which he cannot find?” I remember posting that on Facebook many years ago, and someone saying, “Well, people look for things that they can’t find all the time.” But that way of looking at it misses the point. Because if you are looking for something, then you have in your mind some idea of what that something is. Even if you’re just unhappy and you’re looking to be happy, and you don’t have any more articulate definition of what it would be to be happy, you still have some idea in your mind that your current situation is unsatisfactory, that you want to improve your situation, and you have an opinion as to what would be better. You’re not just taking no position at all about what would make you happier or less happy. You have an idea about what happiness is. No matter how ambiguous it might be, no matter how uncertain you might be, if you’re looking for something, you have some notion of what that something is.

And I think that’s the essence of Lucullus’s argument here: “Don’t tell me, skeptics, that something is true or something is false, and then turn around and say that there’s no such thing as true or false. That makes no sense.” And it’s absurd, or in the wording of this particular translation, it’s a “monstrous absurdity.”

Joshua:

Yeah, we don’t have to wonder what Cicero’s response to this would be. We’ve already seen it. Lucullus has pointed out that when the academic skeptics are pushed into a corner, they just say, “What do you want us to do?” Democritus already said, “Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of a well.” And Cicero himself wrote in the Tusculan Disputations that “we alone live from hand to mouth,” that we don’t have to worry about being consistent. We just say whatever seems most probable to us at any given moment. And if what I say today is the opposite of what I say tomorrow, that’s not a problem for me, because I live from hand to mouth.

Cassius:

You know, we’ve already seen Lucullus argue that the Sorites way of arguing things is irritating and not something to be approved of, just the kind of thing that evokes the response “This is absurd.” And what you’ve just said that Cicero argues has the same taste to it. Cicero says he’s the only one who’s free. He’s the only one who lives from hand to mouth, and he can say anything he wants to. Well, then why are we even talking to such a person in the first place, who holds to nothing with consistency over time, and who is basically taking the position, “I don’t know anything myself, but you’re wrong,” to the person he’s talking to? He’s going to disagree. He’s going to shoot holes in any position, as Socrates was famed to do. He’s a contrarian to the extreme. And that does have such an irritating air to it.

We’ve made comments in the past about the treatment of Socrates, and how the city fathers of Athens were arguably justified in the sentence they gave to Socrates. He just pushed them and pushed them and pushed them, when he could have just left them alone and said, “OK, I understand, guys, you have a different opinion. My opinion is I don’t know.” Why does somebody like Socrates have to insert himself into these arguments and assert that he takes no position himself, but that your position is wrong? Always coming up with negatives, always coming up with obstacles, always talking about things that hinder someone from reaching a true conclusion, without ever presenting anything positive of his own.

We see echoes of that even in someone like Seneca, in the many passages where he asks, “How can you be so impractical? How can you be so absurd, when people are dying, when people are living in misery, attempting to do something better with their lives? Instead of giving them answers, you’re talking about mice and syllables, and whether syllables can eat cheese, and so forth. You’re following logical arguments that totally miss the point of actually living your life.” I would say that, to a large extent, that’s what this negativity, this acidic, cynical approach to knowledge leads to, and Lucullus is attacking it here in words like “monstrous absurdity” as he addresses Cicero.

Joshua:

And of course, Socrates himself would probably welcome this description of him. In the Apology, he refers to himself as a gadfly. He describes the city-state of Athens as a sluggish horse, drooping its head and drifting along. It’s not focusing, it’s not aware of what’s going on around it, and Socrates is the fly that just keeps stinging the horse. The horse tries to brush it away with its tail, but he just comes back, and he stings and he stings and he stings, and it’s irritating. And Cicero has learned the art well, because he is the same species of gadfly. It’s irritating. They know it’s irritating when they’re doing it. Socrates considers it to be a public service to be irritating in this way. What do you say to a guy like this? How do you deal with a person whose mission in life is to be a constant source of irritation to other people?

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, I always try to be careful when I say good things about the Stoics, or even in this case Cicero, because Cicero tries to plant his feet in both camps. I guess that’s part of his viewpoint, that he’s the one who’s free to do so. He will argue for the Stoics in terms of virtue and courage and wisdom and so forth when the interests of the state are in jeopardy. When he wants to summon people to living virtuously, he’ll talk as if he’s the most certain person who’s ever lived. So he himself often deviates from Socrates’s approach in his public presentations.

But the Carneades types, the others who followed Pyrrhonian skepticism to its logical conclusions, are really not the same as Cicero in that sense. These Pyrrhonian skeptics that Cicero is happy to cite at certain times are not ultimately in the same camp as Cicero. When you started today, Joshua, I noted that you made the point that the academic skeptics had come down on the side of saying that there are atoms or bodies that are identical, and that’s what we read last week, where the academic skeptics were citing Democritus. But question them for a moment about that, and the academic skeptics will be the first to admit that they don’t believe Democritus either. They’ll pull in Democritus’s argument at the moment, for purposes of arguing against a materialist. But if a materialist wants to cite Democritus for something else, they’re going to argue against Democritus. They are always taking a contrarian position.

It sounds good to want to be an inspiration to people who are, in fact, sluggish. But I know in my own experience, there’s nothing more irritating than a gnat or some other insect that is, from our perspective, contributing nothing to the world other than irritation.

Joshua:

That is where Lucullus goes in the next paragraph. He’s talking about this habit of speaking against every side and in favor of every side.

Cassius:

Yeah, let’s go forward into that. This will finish Section 18, so we can wrap these points into a single conclusion later in the episode as we come to the end of today. So yes, go ahead.

Joshua:

“There remains,” says Lucullus, “this other statement of theirs, that for the sake of discovering the truth, one ought to speak against every side, and in favour of every side. I wish then to see what they have discovered. We are not in the habit, says he, of showing that. What then is the object of all this mystery? or why do you conceal your opinion as something discreditable? In order, says he, that those who hear us may be influenced by reason rather than led by authority. What if they are influenced by both? would there be any harm in that? However, they do not conceal one of their theories, namely, that there is nothing which can be conceived. Is authority no hindrance to entertaining this opinion? It seems to me to be a great one. For who would ever have embraced so openly and undisguisedly such perverse and false principles, if there had not been such great richness of ideas and power of eloquence in Arcesilas, and, in a still greater degree, in Carneades?”

Cassius:

Joshua, I think you’ve mentioned it before. Isn’t there a story about Carneades going to Rome and giving contrary presentations? Do you remember that?

Joshua:

That is exactly on point. Yeah, that’s a good memory. Let me read from the Wikipedia page on Carneades and his life, which tells the story. In the year 155 BC, he traveled to Rome along with the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon and the Peripatetic Critolaus, as ambassadors “to deprecate the fine of 500 talents which had been imposed on the Athenians for the destruction of Oropus,” a border town between ancient Attica and Boeotia. Apparently the Athenians destroyed this town, the Romans imposed a fine of 500 talents, and these three philosophers were sent to deal with the problem. It says:

“During his stay in Rome, Carneades attracted great notice for his eloquent speeches on philosophical subjects. It was here that, in the presence of Cato the Elder, he delivered his several orations on justice. The first oration was in commendation of the virtue of Roman justice. The next day, he delivered the second oration, in which he refuted all the arguments he had made the day before. He persuasively attempted to prove that justice was inevitably problematic and not a given when it came to virtue, but merely a compact device deemed necessary for the maintenance of a well-ordered society. The oration shocked Cato. Recognizing the potential danger of Carneades’s arguments, Cato moved the Roman Senate to send Carneades back to Athens, to prevent the Roman youth from being exposed to a re-examining of Roman doctrines.”

That is well remembered, Cassius, and that is exactly on point with what we’re talking about, this habit of arguing both sides. Except that the charge Lucullus is making is that they argue both sides, but they say they’re not in the habit of revealing what they have discovered by this process.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, this is an important issue, because I certainly understand that one of the best ways to get at the truth of a situation is to hear from both sides of an argument: not only to hear facts that are alleged to support both sides, but to hear the most eloquent arguer you can find presenting each opinion in the best way possible. And so what Carneades would have done in illustrating both sides of the argument is, I would say, in itself a contribution and something to be applauded.

But the context of the overall picture is that in the end, as in a jury trial, as in a court situation, you come to a verdict. You cannot afford in life to debate things endlessly and never take a position, never move forward along a particular path and consider something to be settled. You have to do the best you can and move on.

That seems to be a continuing theme of the Epicurean criticism of Socrates. There’s a lot out there in the literature about the Epicurean position on Socrates himself, and how Socrates basically hid the ball. He would argue both sides, but never come to a conclusion of his own, never represent that one of the sides is better argued or better founded than the other.

Again, there are going to be many situations where it’s not possible to say that one argument is clearly superior. That’s what Epicurus talks about in terms of waiting when you do not have sufficient information, or, in the Stoic terms, withholding your assent. Clearly there’s agreement between the Epicureans and the Stoics that there are times when you’re not going to know the final answer, so you have to either withhold your assent or wait before committing to a particular position. This is a theme we come back to over and over: yes, that is true as to some questions. It is true as to many questions, but it is not true as to every question. As I believe you said earlier in the episode as well, there are some things that you can conclude to be true in this world, and it is important to be willing to explore where those lines are, and how you take a position when it is essential to do so.

I know there’s additional background about Cato’s reaction to Carneades and to the Greek philosophers who he thought were going to undermine the public virtue of Rome, very much as the city fathers of Athens apparently thought about Socrates. And so the Romans, Cato, Cicero, and others, ended up largely associating themselves with Stoic philosophy, and the position that virtue and courage and wisdom and so forth are things that you can take strong positions about. In fact, I don’t know of a famous Roman public figure who is associated with a Pyrrho style of skepticism. I suppose as you get into the imperial period, you’ll have all sorts of writers who become associated with criticisms of society. And criticism of society is something that Epicurus was certainly able and willing to do at the highest of levels. Yet Epicurus never took the position that knowledge is impossible. His position was, “I’m criticizing society because there are things that society is doing wrong, and they can be improved upon,” not simply being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian and ending up at the position that nothing can be decided with confidence. I think Epicurus would be in the same camp with Cato in recognizing that this direction of skepticism is poisonous and has to be resisted.

Joshua:

We do know, of course, of a Roman-era Pyrrhonist from the late second or early third century AD. We don’t know exactly where he lived, and it’s probably the case that he wasn’t of Latin extraction, you might say; he appears to have been a Greek. That is Sextus Empiricus. The Wikipedia page quotes him on an issue somewhat relevant to what we’re talking about:

“Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is trustworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum.”

And the Wikipedia page says this view is known as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which Sextus Empiricus differentiated from academic skepticism as practiced by Carneades, which, according to Sextus, denies the possibility of knowledge altogether, something Sextus criticized as being in itself an affirmative belief. Instead, Sextus advocates simply giving up belief; in other words, suspending judgment, epoche, that Greek word from before, the withholding of assent, or suspending belief in dogma, something like that. Only by suspending judgment can we attain a state of ataraxia.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, Sextus Empiricus is an extremely important source of information, and we have not spent much time with him. We will hopefully do some of that in the future, because we have to deal with Sextus’s position that ataraxia should be the goal, and that the best way to get to ataraxia is to take no position about anything. That is in total contradiction to Epicurean views. It is not ataraxia but pleasure which is the goal for Epicurus.

So Joshua, we’re going to reach the end of today’s episode before we get into Section 19, which will be the transition to where Cicero begins speaking. But continuing with the comments made in this last paragraph about speaking on both sides of every issue: Lucullus is asking why the skeptics conceal their own position, and he says the skeptics answer, “so that those who hear us may be influenced by reason rather than by authority.”

Joshua:

What he’s saying is, “You skeptics think that you are led by reason, but actually it is the imposing authority of Carneades.” The self-serving presentation, from the point of view of the academic skeptics, is that “we are led by reason and not by authority,” in these hidden discussions where they argue both sides. I’m thinking of something like the Oxford Union debating hall, where you’ve got multiple people debating, and the practice is, “We’re not going to let it be known who argued which side, because we want people to be influenced by reason rather than authority.” And Lucullus is saying, “What if they’re influenced by both?” Even in spite of your efforts to contain this, “Is authority no hindrance to entertaining this opinion,” the opinion that nothing can be conceived? “It seems to me to be a great one. For who would ever have embraced so openly and undisguisedly such perverse and false principles, if there had not been such great richness of ideas and power of eloquence in Arcesilas, and, in a still greater degree, in Carneades?”

The idea is that the academic skeptics have not succeeded in being led only by reason and not by authority, because the authority of Carneades, the impressive and imposing orator who caused so much trouble when he went to Rome, has influenced people to cast aside what they think they know and accept his position, which is that nothing can be conceived.

I notice also that this question of authority appears in what I read a moment ago from Sextus Empiricus: “Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is trustworthy?” Who are you relying on for your opinion that your criterion of truth is trustworthy in the first place? “For no matter of dispute,” he says, “is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved.” And you get an infinite regress: for everything that you approve, you have to approve the thing by which you approved the first thing, and then you have to approve the thing by which you approved the second thing, and so on down the line. It does seem to me to be related to this question of authority. How do you know whether someone is a reliable guide to what is true and false? If you determine that they are a reliable guide, you have to have a standard by which you judge them to be a reliable guide. And how do you know that your standard for judging reliable guides is itself reliable?

And I’ll say one more thing about Lucullus’s question, “What then is the object of all this mystery?” You academic skeptics are getting together and having these arguments, playing both sides, against every side and in favor of every side, but you don’t put this stuff out there. You say you’re not in the habit of showing what you discover by this method.

It’s common in antiquity for schools of philosophy to have esoteric and exoteric teachings. The exoteric is the public teaching, and the esoteric is the private teaching, the members-only teaching. Some philosophers, like Pythagoras, go to absurd extremes in the direction of the esoteric, to the point where they didn’t even write down their ideas. Epicurus, by contrast, is incredibly open in his teaching. My point is that it’s not necessarily a problem if these academic skeptics have an esoteric element, a hidden and secret element, to what they’re doing, because that would have been customary for philosophical schools of the age. Indeed, some of the most culturally important religious ceremonies and festivals of the age were mysteries, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, where, generation after generation, the priests who conducted the mysteries were drawn exclusively from a few families, and the secret never went beyond those families. It was hidden, and everyone who was initiated into it was bound to secrecy.

Cassius:

And that turns out to be an important distinction between the way most of these other schools proceeded and, as you said, Epicurus, whose teachings were laid out plainly for everybody to understand, as opposed to those Lucullus is criticizing here when he asks, “Why do you conceal your opinion as something discreditable?”

In general, I’m seeing a similar self-refutation argument here. The academic skeptics are saying, “We argue both sides of every case so that reason, rather than authority, can be our guide.” But Lucullus is pointing out the hypocrisy of that, because in the end it’s not because of reason that people follow the absurd positions that Carneades and Arcesilaus advocated. It’s because they were really good at arguing, because they had such power of eloquence. That’s what they were really appealing to in convincing people to take the absurd position that nothing can be known. They weren’t appealing to reason. They were appealing to their own authority.

I see that Brittain has translated this sentence this way: “Who would have followed such perspicuously false and manifestly preposterous views without Arcesilaus’s mastery of arguments and force of eloquence, and Carneades’s even greater powers?” So, as I said, I’m seeing this as another effort to point out the hypocrisy of the skeptics: though they say they rely on reason rather than authority, in the end it’s the authority of Arcesilaus and Carneades that converted people to their position, which is manifestly preposterous on its face.

Joshua:

That’s true, Cassius. It’s also true that the authority, the eloquence, the Latinity of Cicero’s writing is the reason he gets taken so seriously. He has been carried forward through history on the shoulders of people who greatly admire his work, even when they disagree with what he’s saying.

The perfect example of this is St. Jerome. St. Jerome was the translator of the Vulgate version of the Bible, and, going from memory, he’s generally depicted in paintings with a rock in one hand that he uses to beat his chest, and I think there’s a lion sitting at his feet. The story goes that he was so enamored of the incredible beauty of Cicero’s Latin prose that, to be quite honest, Holy Scripture kind of paled in comparison, and he was spending more time on Cicero than on Scripture. He felt incredibly guilty about this. He writes that God came to him in a dream and asked him what the condition of his soul was. Jerome said, “I am a Christian.” And God replied, “You are not a Christian. You are a Ciceronian.” Jerome says he woke up from the dream, got rid of all of his pagan books, vowed never again to read the works of the pagans, and dedicated himself to translating the Vulgate, because he was so terrified of this trap. He was pulled strongly by Cicero and by the power of his writing, but felt that he had to give it up, again because of authority, in this case the authority on the other side.

And the rock in his hand is corporal mortification, mortifying the flesh to subdue it and more readily get the flesh to do what the spirit wants it to do. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” and all the rest.

So it’s certainly not just Carneades who is relevant to this question. Cicero himself was, as I said, carried down the ages on the backs of people who looked to him as the arbiter of good taste, the arbiter of what made Roman literature, Latin literature, worth reading and worth writing.

Cassius:

And you could certainly include Plato in that same category of people whose writing style is so strong that it carries over the finish line, so to speak, some of the most absurd ideas that could possibly exist. It’s the force and eloquence of the way it’s presented that often carries the day, even though the opposite position may in fact be closer to the truth.

Well, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion? We have just about finished Lucullus’s presentation. He is going to make a few final points next week, and then we’re going to see a transition over to Cicero. Any further thoughts today, Joshua?

Joshua:

On the subject of the authority of Cicero, Cassius, that’s exactly where we’re going, because we are very, very close to wrapping up Lucullus’s portion of the second book of the Academic Questions. Once we do so, we’re going to be moving into Cicero’s counter-argument. As is often the case when we get to this second stage, Cicero’s attempted refutation of the system, it’s not always easy for us to navigate our way through it or to deal with some of the points he’s making. But this is where it gets really interesting, when we start to deal with the counter-arguments. And as we go forward, we hope more of it will be relevant to the question of how Epicurus would respond to these questions.

Cassius:

Yes, that’s exactly right. Cicero, as we’ve said, is going to go back over these questions from his own point of view, and we will not be doing what the academic skeptics do. We are not just going to give you both sides and say it’s interesting. We are going to do our very best to unwind this from an Epicurean perspective, and present how Epicurus offered an alternative to both the academic skeptic and the Stoic positions.

With that, we’ll leave it for today. We’ll come back next week and continue. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know your comments about our presentations of Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.