Posts by Cassius

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 355 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 at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we're continuing in Book Two of Cicero's Academic Questions. We are focusing our attention on what is labeled as Section 18, in which the Stoic Lucullus is concluding his arguments against academic skepticism. Last week we spent much of our attention on Lucullus's references to Democritus, and how the academic skeptics were willing to use Democritus for their own argument about the difficulty, or in fact the impossibility, of knowledge. They enlisted Democritus's position that the universe is infinite and that there are infinite numbers of the same thing throughout the universe. That led the skeptics to say that if there are all sorts of things that are truly identical in the universe, then you have no way of knowing true from false. If a particular thing can be identical with another, you can never be confident that you're not mistaken, because your senses are certainly not going to be able to distinguish between two things that are identical.

In effect the skeptics say, "We can pick up what Democritus said and point out to you guys that there are identical things in the universe that nobody could possibly distinguish one from another, because they are identical." That is probably a reflection of something we've talked about previously, the four points of academic skepticism, which have always seemed to me to be unnecessarily complicated. But think back to their fourth point: that it is always the case that every true sensory appearance has an indistinguishable counterpart. The idea of there being indistinguishable counterparts would seem to be lifted right out of this discussion of whether there are identical counterparts in the universe, through Democritus.

So the situation Epicurus would have faced in pursuing atomism would also have required him to meet this argument, and not allow himself to be pushed down the road toward absolute skepticism, which Democritus was reputed to have gone down himself. We will continue to talk about that as we go forward, because we can pick up additional details from Lucretius and other discussions of Epicurean atomism that show us this link between physics and canonics. As we discussed last week, the cow that can recognize its lost calf is doing so based on differences in atomic structure and differences in experiences between calves. Passages like that in Lucretius have a double aspect. They give us information not only about the way things are built, but also the practical knowledge that the way things are built allows us to be confident about certain conclusions we can reach based on that nature. We're not relying on divine marks inscribed in everything by a creator at the beginning of time. We are looking at the natural differences between things as the basis for distinguishing between them.

But this week we're moving past Democritus and getting into additional arguments that Lucullus is going to bring up, because the academic skeptics were willing to enlist every argument they could find, from whatever direction. Of course, the academic skeptics don't want to take a position as to who is right and who is wrong about anything. They're simply going to stack up argument upon argument from whatever source they can find in support of their position.

Today we're going to turn back to the Stoic view of how the wise man is going to distinguish true from false under the conditions he finds himself in. The Stoics don't accept atomism any more than the academic skeptics do. The Stoics are not going to go down the road of looking for truth based on atomic structure or atomic combinations. They're going to look in other directions. And understanding what direction the Stoics went in, to try to overcome these arguments of the academic skeptics, will help highlight what Epicurus has done. We read the full Section 18 last week, so we've heard some of this already, but it is important enough for us to go back through it in detail. So today, let's get further into the Stoic position on how the wise man will distinguish true from false.

Joshua:

In the second paragraph of Section 18 of Book Two, we continue Lucullus's discourse with a discussion of the wise man, the sage of Stoic philosophy, expressed as a class of persons or as an archetype rather than any particular individual. We've encountered this person before. In Section 3 of Book Two, Cicero himself says that he's critical of the idea:

"For as to their statement that they are wholly trusting to one whom they judge to have been a wise man, I should approve of that if that were a point which they, while ignorant and unlearned, were able to judge of, (for to decide who is a wise man appears to me most especially the task of one who is himself wise.)"

And in Section 9, Lucullus himself brings up the question of the wise man:

"It cannot, therefore be doubted, that no rule of wisdom can possibly be false; and it ought not to be enough for the wise man that it is not false, but it ought also to be steady, durable, and lasting; such as no arguments can shake. But none can either be, or appear such, according to the principle of those men who deny that those perceptions in which all rules originate are in any respect different from false ones; and from this assertion arose the demand which was repeated by Hortensius, that you would at least allow that the fact that nothing can be perceived has been perceived by the wise man.

"But when Antipater made the same demand, and argued that it was unavoidable that the man who affirmed that nothing could be perceived should nevertheless admit that this one thing could be perceived, — namely, that nothing else could, — Carneades resisted him with great shrewdness. For he said that this admission was so far from being consistent with the doctrine asserted, that it was above all others incompatible with it: for that a man who denied that there was anything which could be perceived excepted nothing."

Then we come down to Section 17, in which it is said:

"But even in madness the wise man puts restraint upon himself, so far as not to approve of what is false as if it were true. And he does so often at other times, 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."

What we haven't really gotten in this text is an explanation of what makes a Stoic wise man. For that, I turn to a first- or second-century Greek writer called Heraclitus the Grammarian, not to be confused with Heraclitus the Presocratic philosopher. In his Homeric Problems, the first English translation of which was published in 2005, he set about trying to rationalize the Greek myths, and especially the myths of the Iliad, so as to preserve what was good in them without laying at the feet of the gods the monstrous crimes, foul behavior, and unwise and unscrupulous actions that are described in that poem and elsewhere in Greek mythology.

In this translation by Donald Andrew Russell and David Konstan, we come down to his discussion of the labors of Hercules. Hercules was a particularly important hero to the Stoics, and this kind of rationalization of the myth gives us, I think, an idea of what it would require to be a Stoic wise man. Heraclitus the Grammarian says this:

"I turn to Heracles. We must not suppose he attained such power in those days as a result of his physical strength. Rather, he was a man of intellect, an initiate in heavenly wisdom, who, as it were, shed light on philosophy, which had been hidden in deep darkness. The most authoritative of the Stoics agree with this account."

Then he makes a note about ignoring the labors that don't appear in the books he's currently talking about, the Iliad for example, and he goes on to rationalize the labors that are relevant:

"The Erymanthian boar, which he overcame, is the common incontinence of men. The Nemean lion is the indiscriminate rush towards improper goals. In the same way, by fettering irrational passions, he gave rise to the belief that he had fettered the violent Cretan bull. He banished cowardice also from the world in the shape of the Ceryneian hind. There was another labor too, not properly so called, in which he cleared out the mass of dung from the Augean stables — in other words, the foulness that disfigures humanity. The Stymphalian birds he scattered are the windy hopes that feed our lives. The many-headed hydra that he burned, as it were, with the fires of exhortation, is pleasure, which begins to grow again as soon as it is cut out."

Now, this kind of rationalizing of ancient myth is referred to as euhemeristic, after Euhemerus, who was an early proponent of this school of thought, I think maybe in the third century BC. It was taken up by Christians as a way to convince pagans that their gods were mortal in origin, and that the myth had merely grown up around them. As St. Paul exhorted the Athenians: if you want to know the real God, you have to look at the statue you have in the city, to the unknown God, and that's the God whose message I'm bringing to the city.

Going through these labors puts me in mind of the Via Crucis in Catholicism, the Way of the Cross, or the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, which is a particular devotion. The idea behind the Stations of the Cross is that they've taken fourteen incidents from the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and separated them into separate icons, so to speak. The church we attended when I was a boy was an amphitheater, shaped kind of like a broad wedge. Where the two walls of the wedge came together, there was the altar on a raised dais. Along each of the long walls that formed the wedge were seven carved images, each one representing a station. They didn't have anything to do with the Mass, but throughout the week there would be a separate devotion, and people would go in and pray their way through the stations. The view is that separating them in this way gives you time to meditate on each particular station, each particular moment along Jesus's path from his trial to the tomb.

The stations go like this: Jesus is condemned to death; Jesus takes up his cross; Jesus falls the first time; Jesus meets his mother; Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross; Veronica wipes the face of Jesus; Jesus falls a second time; and so on, until number fourteen, Jesus is laid in the tomb. You can imagine that in each of these stations you can see different virtues expressed. And that's what Heraclitus the Grammarian is doing with the labors of Hercules. He's taking each labor individually and asking: how can you take this old story, extract the moral from it, and apply it in your own life? What he comes up with is a very Stoic understanding of the life of the wise man.

The wise man is a person about whom we hear very little, certainly in this text, because it's all about epistemology and academic questions. But this is the figure on whom Lucullus is hanging his epistemology, saying that the wise man, when he has not remarked any special character in an object, will withhold his assent, and will never agree to any perception which is not of such a character as a false perception can never assume. It's also the wise man whom Cicero will make the subject of his response to Lucullus when we get to that section. We've already read a little of that, and the central paradox is really two paradoxes. The first is that all Stoics appeal to the idea of a wise man as the foundation of their epistemology, but no living Stoic will claim in his own right to be a wise man. The second is the one I read a moment ago from Section 3 of Book Two: Cicero's objection that it's not possible for someone who isn't himself wise to judge wisdom, or to judge who is wise — to nominate or declare another person to be wise.

Cassius:

Joshua, does this leave the Stoics very difficult to distinguish from the academic skeptics? If the Stoics are taking the position that the wise man will never assent to anything about which he could possibly be wrong, and the Stoics also assert that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be a wise man, how does that end up being different from an academic skeptic who's willing to say from the very beginning, "It's always possible for me to be wrong, therefore I'm never going to take a confident position about anything"?

Joshua:

I could say in defense of the Stoics that we've been talking, as we've gone through Book Two, about clearness. Perspicuity is the word the other translator, Rackham, uses, I think, which is very similar to the Latin word being used. Another way of phrasing the problem from the Stoic point of view is that the wise man is never going to make an error in epistemology, because he's always going to withhold his assent if there's a problem. The Stoic who is not a wise man is more like the broken clock that's right twice a day. They don't necessarily withhold their assent when things are unclear, or maybe they're incapable of doing so. But some of the things they assent to, because they didn't withhold their assent, will turn out to be true regardless, if that makes sense.

Cassius:

Yeah, I think this helps explain why the Stoics are going to run so fast away from atomism, and from the point of view that things can be identical — that there can be duplicates of things. Because if there can be duplicate things, there's not going to be a way for a Stoic to distinguish them and be sure that he's not made a mistake.

Joshua:

Yeah. You know, what I think of with this problem of two things that are the same, or so similar that they're practically the same — and certainly that we don't have the ability to distinguish between them — is a spectrum of shades from white to black. The fact that there are shades of gray that the human eye is not capable of distinguishing between does not at all diminish our capacity to tell the difference between black and white. So I guess what I'm saying is that the Stoic who is not a sage will continue, like we all will, to fail to distinguish between near shades of gray, but will nevertheless, like the broken clock that's right twice a day, give his assent to the distinction between black and white.

Cassius:

The paragraph you're going into now is focusing, it looks like, on experience: the ability of a mother to distinguish her children, or a hen raiser to distinguish eggs between hens, and so forth. So the examples we're about to get into point in the direction of saying that experience is going to be your guide. You are going to have enough instances of examining things that you'll develop an expert's eye and be able to determine something. That would be the logical direction. But Cicero is pointing out to them, or will point out later on, that you haven't logically answered your problem if things can in fact be identical. You don't really know whether you're standing in your own house or not. If you're not a true wise man, from that Stoic position, you may say, "Well, I think I'm in my house, and I'm probably in my house, and I'm pretty sure I'm in my house." But the Stoic is always going to hold back from saying "I am sure I am in my house" unless he claims to be wise.

It continues to appear to be a word game, but there's a certain logic to this debate, and you can see why they're fighting about it. You're going to have to come back in the end to a practical way of distinguishing things, and we'll see as we go forward whether this experience Lucullus is talking about right now is sufficient, or whether he's ultimately going to rely on these divine marks as well.

Joshua:

Right. And on the point that the sage is never wrong, I'm going to skip down to paragraph four in this text, because Lucullus says:

"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."

So we're making — by "we" I mean him, the Stoics in general — quite broad claims about the sage, and about his ability to detect true from false, and fact from opinion. For me, I continue to be a little disappointed that we're not hearing more about this person, and about what makes the sage different from other men. Perhaps that is the thing that makes the sage different: the fact that the sage would do no wrong, as he seems to be claiming.

Cassius:

And how do you know what's wrong unless you know what's right in the beginning?

Joshua:

Yeah. And Lucullus does say — I'm back in paragraph two now:

"But with respect to all other things he has a certain art by which he can distinguish what is true from what is false; and with respect to those similitudes he must apply the test of experience."

The test of experience is important in helping to distinguish between what is true and what is false:

"As a mother distinguishes between twins by the constant practice of her eyes, so you too will distinguish when you have become accustomed to it."

There's certainly a comparison to be made between that point about the mother distinguishing between her twins and what we read from Lucretius last week: the mother cow being able to detect that her calf is missing, and not being fooled by the presence of other calves, which might look very similar indeed to her calf.

Cassius:

Yeah, I would say this kind of terminology or analysis is pretty common with the Epicurean viewpoint as well: you form your anticipations not because they're inscribed at birth or anything, but through experience. Observing things over time, you form, through anticipation, an image in your mind of the horse, or of Socrates, or whatever, and you've got something to work with because of experience. You've developed your model of truth through experience. So from that point of view, in terms of the word "experience," I'd say this is another commonality between the Stoics and the Epicureans.

But I think as we go further, we'll see that there are divergences, because of course experience doesn't tell you that what you've experienced is true. Maybe your experience is that you're observing one identical thing after another. Again, there's always this chicken-and-egg problem. How do you know that you've reached the conclusion that something is true unless you know in the beginning what the truth is? That's the Meno paradox we're seeing over and over. Where does the idea of truth come from? Where does the view of truth come from? And at what point do you conclude that you have reached the truth if you don't have something to compare it to in the very beginning? We're going to see this over and over as we go forward.

To say that your experience is going to get you there is only going to be part of the answer, because your experience could be the experience of walking through the proverbial house of mirrors, from one distortion to another. How do you know when you're not distorted? Even given innumerable experiences, when do you know that you've reached the truth? That's the direction we're going to have to continue to look in as Lucullus goes forward. I think the house of mirrors analogy might be useful as we proceed. Maybe you're born in the house of mirrors in the beginning, and as you roll from one room to the next, you see nothing but distortions. No matter how much experience you have in the house of mirrors, are you going to be able to really come to a conclusion about the truth? Experience is part of the answer, but certainly not the whole answer.

Joshua:

Yeah, it is a serious problem. And chickens and eggs will give us an interesting hook into the nature of the problem. The paragraph does continue after the discussion of the mother distinguishing between her twins. Lucullus says:

"Do you not see that it has become a perfect proverb that one egg is like another? and yet we are told that at Delos (when it was a flourishing island) there were many people who used to keep large numbers of hens for the sake of profit; and that they, when they had looked upon an egg, could tell which hen had laid it. Nor does that fact make against our argument; for it is sufficient for us to be able to distinguish between the eggs."

That's an interesting point Lucullus is making there: that people on Delos who work with chickens might be so good that they can look at an egg and trace it back to the hen that laid it, but that this doesn't matter for us, because all we need to be able to do is distinguish between the eggs. We don't need to go that additional step.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, these analogies are similar. We haven't talked about Plato's cave recently, but I guess that's kind of what we're talking about here. The hen raisers on Delos could be raising their hens down inside the cave, based on flickers against the wall. Maybe they get really good at detecting from the flickers against the wall which eggs came from which hens, but they're still trapped in that cave. Unless they get out of that cave through geometry, or through whatever magic the particular philosopher is going to suggest, they're still trapped in the darkness — in the house of mirrors with no way out. Their senses will never get them out of that cave or that house of mirrors. There's got to be something that transcends that. That's what the Platonists and the Stoics are asserting is the answer.

Joshua:

Right. And it's interesting the way Socrates solves the problem of the cave by recourse to geometry. In geometry, all points are duplicates of each other, all identical. All triangles of a given size and shape are identical to each other. So you could ask the further question: how does that help us get any closer to the truth?

Cassius:

That's right. That's what they're doing in citing Democritus. Whether you talk about triangles or about little atoms, it doesn't make any difference. You still have the same problem.

Joshua:

I do have to digress here for a moment, Cassius, because on the subject of hens and eggs, there is a tradition in Japan going back to the 1920s: the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, which offered an intensive two-year course on how to discern males from females in newly hatched chicks. They were so successful. A person pulled off the street could guess the right sex about half the time, but a graduate of this school could do it very fast, with something like 98.5% accuracy. Graduates trained at this school could then be sent by Japan around the world to train people in other places, and Japan kind of became, as one magazine article puts it, the guardian of what became the poultry industry's rarest, weirdest, and most important skill — most important because being able to do this quickly and with little labor meant that the industry could be profitable.

It is a fascinating story, and I do urge people to go look it up, because it is astonishing what these people can do. The difference between the male and the female at that age is so small, so minute, that it's remarkable anyone can detect any difference at all. But people who studied for two years are able to do it, quickly and accurately. So when we're talking about the marks of Stoicism — the marks the wise man uses to judge what is true and false — this is the kind of thing I think of. For me it's a good example.

So it is apropos that Cicero is talking here about the egg problem on Delos, and how the farmers of Delos are able to trace the egg back to the hen — a skill that presumably no one needs, unless I suppose you have multiple farmers raising hens in the same area, and you need to be able to determine which egg belongs to which farmer. It's kind of like what they used to do in the timber industry; I don't know if they still do this. In Maine, for example, where timber was very important in the nineteenth century, and presumably still is, they would cut down the trees, and each of the timber firms had a particular sign or mark that they would put on the logs it produced. Then they'd throw the logs into the river, and people would push them down the river. When they got to the log landing downstream, they would sort them out based on the mark, so that the trees each firm cut could be given back to it, or paid to its account, or whatever. So we do see in human life all these interesting ways that people come up with to distinguish true from false, to distinguish things that are very similar to each other, and to find ways to separate them.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, let me emphasize that point before we proceed into the next section. So often in our discussions of Epicurus, everything turns on "Epicurus was the atomist; Epicurus came up with the swerve." These are the things that attract people to reading Lucretius, or to thinking that Epicurus was so far ahead of his time — that it's so interesting and dramatic that an Epicurean could understand that the universe is made of atoms, and so forth. What we're seeing as we read through Academic Questions shows us that that's really not the point at all. If the only thing we get out of Epicurus is that he was an atomist 2,000 years before it was popular, or that he came up with the swerve 2,000 years before we thought about Heisenberg and swerving atoms today, that's totally missing the point of what Epicurus was doing. Because you can have atomism — you could conceivably have had swerving — and end up just like Democritus, taking the position that the truth is at the bottom of a dark well, and that we might as well all be skeptics because truth is impossible to find.

The significance of Epicurus is not that he was an atomist, but that he understood how to take that framework and turn it into something practical that could lead us to understand how to live properly and be wise — how the proper human life arises from taking a position on truth and falsity and knowledge and wisdom that is attainable to a normal human being. Attainable to a cow looking for her calf, and not just something that the wise Stoic who has spent his life pursuing virtue is able to determine. Not just something that you have to have geometry to get out of the cave with.

What Epicurus is doing is bringing all this down to a day-to-day, practical, realistic position, and saying that it's not sufficient for you simply to observe and observe, and think about speculative things, and pursue logic on one thing after another without end. You've got to come up for air and actually live. You've got to be able to make decisions in your life about the best way to live, the choices you want to pursue, and the things you wish to avoid, and you've got to have confidence in that decision-making process, and not just play around forever with ideas about geometry and the infinite divisibility of atoms and theories that don't lead you to conclusions.

So again, yes, Epicurus was an atomist and Democritus was an atomist, but the practical results of their views of atomism are dramatically different. When we study Epicurus and see what he thought was important, we're seeing a dramatically different perspective from the one the Stoics took, or the academic skeptics took, or the original Democritus took. We're taking that information and turning it into a practical way of life — practical not in the sense of giving up on the best way of living, but practical in the sense of being realistic, and truly in conformity with nature, and not just empty words about following nature. So these examples, I think, are really helpful in bringing out what all of this is about in the first place. After the egg situation, Lucullus gets back to additional discussion, hammering down that the wise man is never going to make a mistake.

Joshua:

Yeah. Let me take what you were saying there about atomism a little further, because I totally agree with you. Echoing my opening bit this morning about euhemerism and the rationalization of myths, there is a kind of myth about the origin of atomism, although a much later one. It was in vogue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was based on the idea — which I don't necessarily dispute — that the Greeks were not the most original and most brilliant thinkers in the universe. Rather, they were at a particular crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and between Europe and Asia, and so in a crucible of culture where different ideas came together. Indeed, many of the ideas that we credit to Greek thinkers may actually have come from earlier minds, minds we have no records of.

One particular story about atomism attributes it to a Phoenician thinker named Mochus. And in the work of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century minds — minds like Isaac Newton, of all people — this Mochus the Phoenician was reinvented again as Moses, the Israelite or the Hebrew. If it were indeed true that the biblical Moses was the father of atomism, would I convert to Judaism or Christianity? No, I would not. Because just having this idea is not sufficient. It's the work you build on top of it that really distinguishes Epicurus from Democritus — even though I think there's a lot to admire about Democritus. Certainly what you're saying about his skepticism is a distinguishing feature that is very important in separating these two men, because the confusion that would result if we just pulled them together into one school would mislead us about everything that is important about both philosophers separately.

Cassius:

Exactly, Joshua. Said another way, atomism does not necessarily lead to enlightenment, or to a better way of life, or to the wisest conclusions from an Epicurean point of view. You can be an atomist and be totally lost in terms of the best way to spend your time today, the best way to spend your life. You can end up being just as skeptical, just as cynical, just as nihilistic as any religious person, or any person devoted to magic or any other fantasy, could be. Because again, atomism alone is not the key, or else Democritus is the person we would be talking about, and not Epicurus.

So as we drill down further, what we're looking for — and what I think we're finding — is this unique aspect of Epicurean philosophy that is not simply based on atomism but goes much further. Wrestling with it and getting a grip on it is exactly what I think we need to do in order to see the connection between the physics, which Epicurus is known for, and his take on ethics. That will allow us, I think, to better see what Epicurus's views on ethics really were, as opposed to the way we might overlay them with our own predispositions. But as we go forward, this next paragraph and the rest of Section 18 really pin the Stoics down on where they're going.

Joshua:

Yes, Cassius. I remember from reading this last week that there were some difficulties with this paragraph — or maybe it was just the way I was reading it, I don't know. But let me read it again in a whole chunk, and then we can talk about it. Lucullus ended the last paragraph by saying, "it is sufficient for us to be able to distinguish between the eggs," meaning of course that the ability to trace the egg back to the hen is not important. It is important, however, to note that the eggs are not in fact identical. That's important in Stoicism.

I think we're agreed, Cassius, that in Epicureanism there are an infinite number of atoms. There are innumerable different kinds of atoms. There have to be identical duplicates of atoms — atoms that are identical to each other, totally indistinguishable. But for Lucullus here, responding to Cicero's argument, and prefiguring in some ways Cicero's argument at the end of this book, it's very important that there not be exact duplicates:

"For it is impossible for one to assent to the proposition that this thing is that thing more, than by admitting that there is actually no difference at all between the two. For I have laid it down as a rule, to consider all perceptions true which are of such a character as those which are false cannot be. And from this I may not depart one finger's breadth, as they say, lest I should throw everything into confusion. For not only the knowledge of what is true and false, but their whole nature too, will be destroyed if there is no difference between one and the other. And that must be very absurd which you sometimes are in the habit of saying" — "you" meaning Cicero — "when perceptions are imprinted on the mind, that what you say is, not that there is no difference between the impressions, but only that there is none between certain appearances and forms which they assume. As if perceptions were not judged of by their appearance, which can deserve or obtain no credit if the mark by which we are to distinguish truth from falsehood be taken away."

And the first line of the next paragraph is, "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." We'll get to all that later. But here in paragraph three we're still dealing with Lucullus's statement of his ground rules of Stoicism. And one of his ground rules is that all perceptions are true, or should be considered true, which are of such a character as those which are false cannot be.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua. This morning I'm sort of enamored of the example of the house of mirrors, so let me go back to it for a second. It's the same problem as Plato's cave, but in a form we may recognize more closely in our own lives. You can walk into a house of mirrors, and basically what these guys are arguing about is: maybe you're born into the house of mirrors. Maybe you've spent your whole life walking from one mirror to the next, being distorted in width, in breadth, in length, in all sorts of ways by these mirrors. If you've spent your entire life in this house of mirrors, which of these distortions are you going to conclude is the truth of the matter? If you cannot get out of the house of mirrors through geometry, or by being a Stoic wise man, how are you going to know how you really look, how you really are, if all you've ever seen is distortion?

And the Stoics recognize that that's the problem. They're saying that the only things we're going to accept as true perceptions are those which are of such a character as the false cannot be. But if you're in a house of mirrors, how do you know which one is true and which one is false? Of course, I really like the way he's staked his claim. He's raised his flag on this point. He's saying, "I'm not going to depart from this one finger's breadth, or else everything will be thrown into confusion." And he's right. This is what everything is based on. How do you know you're not living in a house of mirrors, and that every experience you've ever had is not a distortion? How do you know the difference between one distortion and another, and whether one of them is closer to the truth or not?

And he's laying it down again without really explaining it. He's only going to consider a perception to be true if it can't be false. Well, that doesn't help you, because you don't know what true and false are if you've been in the house of mirrors your whole life. So how do you reason yourself out of that problem? How do you reason yourself out based on experience, if every experience is a distortion?

The skeptics are simply saying, "Well, you can't. Obviously you can't. I'm going to accept that example and go with it, because you're right." And they're even going to abandon what their beloved Plato said, because their beloved Plato said you could get outside the cave to the realm of ideal forms through such things as geometry. But people like Carneades became disenchanted even with that, and say, "Well, you can't get out of the cave. You can't get out of the house of mirrors. You're stuck in a house of mirrors. Therefore nothing is ever totally true or totally false. And you Stoics are being ridiculous by saying that one appearance can be so clear that it can't be false. That's no answer. That's just a word game, Stoics." And I can see that that argument is pretty persuasive. If you're going to go with experience, you'd better have a way of saying which experience was true and which one was false. But if you're in a house of mirrors, how do you know? It can't be experience alone, then, that is going to be the answer to this question.

Joshua:

As you talk about the house of mirrors, Cassius, I think of the mirages we see on the road. And I think of the fact that the sky looks blue, even though we know that if you're in orbit, or on a world that doesn't have an atmosphere, you're actually looking out into space, and the background color appears black. We live in a world where, when we're looking at a sunset and the sun still appears to be above the horizon, we know mathematically that the sun is actually already below the horizon, and what we're seeing is the image of the sun refracted through the atmosphere. So your analogy of the house of mirrors is not, I think, a bad one, because we are in a world where light plays interesting tricks.

Cassius:

And of course we also use all sorts of other analogies. This is not that different from saying that you're in a pleasure machine, or you're hooked up to a machine and everything you're seeing or experiencing is programmed by some mad scientist. They're all different ways of asking the same question. But it is helpful to carry it to that extreme. It's not just ridiculous. When we talk about mirages or the many other illusions we see, it's also familiar to us that we can look in another direction and come out of the illusion very quickly. You can spin yourself around and feel like the world is spinning, but eventually you stop. In our common experience, most of these illusions are things we can pretty readily deal with.

But carry it to its logical conclusion, its logical extreme. Put yourself in Plato's cave. Put yourself in the house of mirrors and ask: how do you know you haven't lived in the cave, or in the house of mirrors, your whole life? Which of these experiences that you say you've come across — the ones by which you can determine that one egg came from one hen, or whether the mirage is really true or not — which of them are you concluding are the true experiences? And how are you reaching the conclusion that they are true? Because if you can't tell me how to determine which experience is true and which is false, then you can say you're never going to abandon your position because everything will be thrown into confusion — you can play all sorts of word games, Stoics — but if you can't show me how to determine which experience is true, you're just blowing smoke.

And of course the stakes are so high. This is the monstrous absurdity we're going to talk about in the next paragraph: that you can say, "Well, it's probable. Some of the mirrors in the house of mirrors are more probably accurate than others." Well, that's ridiculous, and I think Lucullus is correct here in saying it's ridiculous. How do you know it's probable that some of these distorting mirrors are more accurate than others, unless you have some way of determining what the truth is other than these mirrors you've lived among your entire life? You've had no experience outside the house of mirrors to compare it to. How are you going to say that one mirror is more accurate than another? You can say, "Well, I've experienced that these mirrors seem to me to be more true than others." But both of these camps, Lucullus and the academic skeptics, are at a dead end, and are essentially ending up in a similar position: almost throwing up their hands, with the Stoics simply refusing to throw up theirs.

You used the analogy, Joshua, at the end of last week, when you asked whether we're going to find the Stoics being just like a child refusing to accept something, and saying, "I'm not going to believe it, regardless of what you tell me or regardless of what I experience." They're just shutting down their thought process and saying, "I refuse to accept something." To some extent, it seems to me, that's what the Stoics are doing. And the academic skeptics, through Cicero here, are raising points that have to be answered. They aren't answered simply by pointing to hen raisers on Delos who get really good at picking out the origins of their eggs. That is not an answer. Experience alone is not the answer, at least in the way the Stoics are taking it here. Experience from a broader perspective — saying that what we're going to do is look to the sensations, anticipations, and feelings, and interpret those correctly — I think that's the path Epicurus eventually takes, and I think we'll find the reasonableness of that position as we go further. But simply saying that you can get really good at something doesn't mean that you're not just really good at living in a house of mirrors.

Joshua:

Okay, this next sentence is the most difficult one we're going to encounter today, and it's going to take some unpicking, because I think it hinges on an understanding of concepts we haven't really covered. I'll try to explain all that. Lucullus is, I think, tired of being on the defensive, and he's going on the attack now with his claim of a monstrous absurdity on Cicero's part. That argument starts right now. He says:

"And that must be very absurd which you sometimes are in the habit of saying, when perceptions are imprinted on the mind, that what you say is, not that there is no difference between the impressions, but only that there is none between certain appearances and forms which they assume. As if perceptions were not judged of by their appearance, which can deserve or obtain no credit if the mark by which we are to distinguish truth from falsehood be taken away."

I'm not even sure I understand what he's saying there, but this is what the Rackham version, the Loeb edition, says:

"The remark that you have a way of occasionally making, Cicero, will be absurd: namely, that what you assert is not that when presentations are impressed onto the mind there is no difference between the imprints themselves, but that there is no difference between their species, or so to say, their class-forms — as if forsooth presentations were not judged with reference to their class, and will have no reliability if the mark of truth and falsehood is abolished."

And a footnote in the Loeb edition says this about species: "Species here combines the sense of 'appearances' with that of 'kinds,' which it still bears in zoology. It translates eidē; quasdam marks formas as an explanatory synonym."

But Lucullus here is explaining a particular claim that Cicero is making. What Cicero is saying is: "what you assert is not that when presentations are impressed onto the mind there is no difference between the imprints themselves, but that there is no difference between their species, or so to say, their class-forms." I don't know if we're dealing with Plato here. The footnote points to the Greek word eidē, as in eidos, which is the word used for idea, or ideal, or Platonic form. So that seems to me to be in the background of this discussion.

I don't really know if I understand this, but let me take a stab at it. Let's say you have two tables. You look at each table in turn, and each table leaves an impression on the mind — or we could say the presentation of each table leaves an impression on the mind. What Cicero is saying is not that there is no difference between the impressions left on the mind by these two tables, but that there is no difference between their species, or class-forms, or in other words, their ideal forms: that both tables have the same ideal form, and that if two objects have the same ideal form, they have to be identical. Is that the argument he's making? I'm not entirely sure, Cassius, that I really understand it. But in other words, the problem is not in the mind. The problem is in reality, in the world of sense perception. That's what Cicero is claiming, I think.

Cassius:

Yeah, this is definitely complicated, and I don't have a good summary that brings it all together. But I know that in my own thought process I'm going to have to unwind the discussion of "a mark by which we are to distinguish truth from falsehood," or, in Rackham's terms, "class." This whole issue of marks and classes — and, as you're referring to as well, ideal forms, and so forth — I think that's where we're going to have to unwind this. Probably the Stoics are willing to talk in terms of ideal forms or classes, and I'm not so sure that Epicurus is willing to agree that those things exist. I think we pretty clearly and routinely dismiss the idea that Epicurus held that ideal forms have a separate, independent existence of their own, and that same problem is going to have to be addressed in terms of words like "classes" or "marks."

Joshua:

And it's important to remember, Cassius, that in On Ends, Cicero had opened by criticizing Epicurus for his lack of categories. He doesn't divide things in philosophy into different groups or classes, right? That was a critique Cicero made of Epicurus. So it's not just us saying this; Cicero himself is levying it as a charge against Epicurus, that he doesn't indulge in this kind of thing.

Cassius:

Well, that's very possibly just another way of saying exactly the same thing. When Cicero accuses Epicurus of not being willing to talk in terms of categories, maybe that's just another way of saying he's not willing to talk in terms of ideal forms — things he in fact rejects.

And of course we're going to need to bring today's episode to a conclusion in the middle of an extremely deep section. But part of the reason we're doing this survey of Academic Questions is to get ready to look at Philodemus's On Signs, and you've got a lot of questions there revolving around this same issue. Are there signs, or marks, or ideal forms, or classes, or categories that exist in and of themselves separately somehow, either through geometry or through some other dimension or whatever? This is the heap problem. Does the heap have its own separate existence, or do we only have combinations of numbers of grains of sand, where adding or subtracting grains of sand adds nothing unique to make it a heap, or to remove it from the class of a heap? Are classes, marks, and signs something we determine in our own minds as an aid to understanding reality? Or do those things exist outside us, in reality itself? We're constantly having to unwind and address that question, and I think that's probably what we're confronted with right here as well — at least in Yonge's translation, when he concludes this paragraph with "As if perceptions were not judged of by their appearance, which can deserve or obtain no credit if the mark by which we are to distinguish truth from falsehood be taken away."

I don't like the idea of there being a mark of truth or falsehood in a Platonic, independent sense. I don't think there's a supernatural god who's handing out marks. I don't think Plato was correct to say that we can determine ideal forms through geometry. I don't think Plato was correct to say that there is an ideal form of a horse by which we recognize horses, and of which all horses partake. I don't think Aristotle is correct in talking about orange as something that exists within things that are orange, but separately from things that are orange. This question of whether marks and signs and ideal forms have independent existence is critical, and I think we are concluding through Epicurean physics that those things simply do not exist. It's going to be the same thing when we're talking about virtue or about gods. The words have a useful connotation, which is important to be able to understand, but these words can also be misused to imply things that simply do not exist. That is probably what we're dealing with here.

As we come to the end of this particular episode, we're sort of in this house of mirrors, trying to determine what the truth is: whether we have to somehow get outside the house of mirrors in order to understand what truth is, or whether we determine truth in some other way — by rejecting the idea that everything we see is a distortion, rather than by taking the position that we can determine some mirrors to be accurate. We go with Epicurus and say that all experiences have to be accepted as honestly presented to us, and that we are going to navigate our lives properly in the experiences as nature gives them to us, without labeling all of nature a house of mirrors and a woeful vale of tears, to which we are sentenced in what is essentially a hell of continuous distortion and falsity.

Joshua, we'd better bring today to a conclusion. Let me get your final thoughts, and we'll come back next week after that.

Joshua:

I know it seems like we're deep in the weeds here, but we are surprisingly close to coming up for air, because we're in Section 18. Moving into 19, it starts to turn back into a dialogue. Lucullus's monologue is coming to an end here, and in 20 Cicero takes up and starts speaking. So it feels like we're drowning in this distinction between impressions and imprints and classes and forms and marks and so on, but he is winding up his argument here and coming to the end of it, I think.

Cassius:

Yes, that's right, he is. And as Cicero responds after Section 20, we'll continue to see how the specific examples Epicurus deals with have a context that allows us to understand why they're being discussed in the first place. It's not that Epicurus was consumed with curiosity about the size of the sun, but that Epicurus was dealing with commonly known challenges to being able to live life in this world with any kind of confidence and any kind of happiness. That's what issues like the size of the sun are really about, and this argument we're going through in Academic Questions brings that front and center.

So, okay, let's leave it there for today. We'll come back next week and continue. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and participate with us in these discussions about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We'll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.