Epicurean Isonomy In The Context Of Statements By Balbus As To Gradations In Life In Book 2 of "On the Nature of the Gods"

Quote from TauPhi

An attempt at answering such questions is pointless.

We'll just have to disagree on that. Understanding the reasoning behind the paradox, and pointing out a resolution is as essential as understanding the error of arguing that motion is impossible. Epicurus himself employed it to illustrate the problems with those who assert that the good has some metaphysical explanation.

Again, we always have to keep in mind that there is a difference between (1) understanding Epicurus' position and (2) deciding whether we agree with it.

I'll include myself in this, and so far I don't think many of us have approached even an approximate understanding of phase one on either the heap paradox or the isonomy issue.

In regard to the sorites issue, I would say that this section of Chapter 15 of Frances Wright's "A Few Days In Athens" is and addresses the same issue:

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“What is in a substance cannot be separate from it. And is not all matter a compound of qualities? Hardness, extension, form, color, motion, rest — take away all these, and where is matter? To conceive of mind independent of matter, is as if we should conceive of color independent of a substance colored: What is form, if not a body of a particular shape? What is thought, if not something which thinks? Destroy the substance, and you destroy its properties; and so equally — destroy the properties, and you destroy the substance. To suppose the possibility of retaining the one, without the other, is an evident absurdity.”

“The error of conceiving a quality in the abstract often offended me in the Lyceum,” returned the youth, “but I never considered the error as extending to mind and life, any more than to vice and virtue.”

I would say that Epicurus' question as reported by CIcero in Part 3 of Tusculan Disputations is making a similar point:

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Why, Epicurus, do we use any evasions, and not allow in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast of with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that book which contains all the doctrine of your school; for I will perform, on this occasion, the office of a translator, lest any one should imagine that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good; for I have perceived men's minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above, and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain.” And these are his exact words, so that any one may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted. Then he speaks thus, a little lower down: “I have often inquired of those who have been called wise men, what would be the remaining good if they should exclude from consideration all these pleasures, unless they meant to give us nothing but words? I could never learn anything from them; and unless they choose that all virtue and wisdom should vanish and come to nothing, they must say with me, that the only road to happiness lies through those pleasures which I mentioned above.”

I would presume that what this means is that abstractions such as "color" or "good" do not have an independent existence apart from the things that we are describing as colored or good. Nor do "happiness" or "pleasure" as concepts have any independent meaning apart from individual instances of real people experiencing real feelings.

On the other hand, words such as "color" and "good" are useful, and so everyone - including Epicurus - uses them. When we use them, it is important to understand that concepts have usefulness given by assignment of the human mind, but that these concepts are not created by supernatural forces or the reflection of ideal forms, and those who assert that these concepts have independent existence are wrong and asserting ideas that have dangerous implications.

If concepts do not original from gods or ideal forms, then we still have to answer the question of how to identify them and use them properly.

It's not generally considered to be necessary to see every cow that ever existed in order to form a useful concept of a cow.

These issues are going to bleed over into all sorts of other questions about when to form opinions as to concepts. We've discussed many times that Epicurus never saw or touched an atom and yet was convinced that they exist. That's the "down" direction, but the same analysis is going to be at work in the "up" direction, and I would expect Epicurus to be willing to reach conclusions about things that he cannot see or touch in the "up" direction just as he was in the "down" direction. The conclusions are going to need to be based on rational extrapolation from evidence, and not pure imagination ("it exists because I can imagine it") but rational extrapolations are not going to be limited to those things that have already been observed.

In Chapter 16 of A Few Days In Athens Frances Wright goes on and on about "imagination," but here is one passage where she focuses on it:

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“The ascertaining the nature of existences, the order of occurrences, and the consequences of human actions constituting, therefore, the whole of knowledge, what is there to prevent each and all of us from extending our discoveries to the full limits prescribed by the nature of our facilities and duration of our existence? What nobler employment can we invent? What pleasure so pure, so little liable to disappointment? What is there to hold us back? What is there not to spur us forward? Does our ignorance start from the very simplicity of knowledge? Do we fear to open our eyes lest we should see the light? Does the very truth we seek alarm us in its attainment? — How is it that, placed in this world as on a theatre of observation, surrounded by wonders and endowed with faculties wherewith to scan these wonders, we know so little of what is, and imagine so much of what is not? Other animals, to whom man accounts himself superior, exercise the faculties they possess, trust their testimony, follow the impulses of their nature, and enjoy the happiness of which they are capable. Man alone, the most gifted of all known existences, doubts the evidence of his superior senses, perverts the nature and uses of his multiplied faculties, controls his most innocent, as well as his noblest impulses, and to poison all the sources of his happiness. To what are we to trace this fatal error, this cruel self-martyrdom, this perversion of things from their natural bent? In the over-development of one faculty and neglect of another, we must seek the cause. In the imagination, that source of our most beautiful pleasures when under the control of judgment, we find the source of our worst afflictions.”

Unfortunately Frances Wright is not going to give us much more help on these issues, because her book barely touches on atomism or physics of any kind -- a problem I attribute to her being much more of a skeptic than Epicurus himself, and therefore she was unwilling to argue for any clear method for how to distinguish true from false when only circumstantial evidence is available. if this book is any indication, Wright didn't seem to care at all about humanity's place in the universe as a whole, and I would say that that is a large part of why an otherwise very intelligent book seems to have made almost no impact in her time or afterwards.

Quote from Pacatus

(Bertrand Russell notwithstanding).

Pacatus what are you referring to there? I know Russell is a major figure but I am not familiar with the details of his works.

Glad to see i am not the only one who is not super familiar with Bertrand Russell. I know he is extremely well known, but the impression I have of his views is not at all totally favorable - I gather he was much more inclined to skepticism than was Epicurus.

However, he's a major figure, like Will Durant (with whom I was confronted recently) and so it's good to know where to find major points from influential people that are relevant to Epicurus.

Quote from Don

It seems to me that "universals" is simply a high falutin' way of recognizing patterns across disparate individual entities, physical or abstract. To me, that sounds like the faculty of prolepsis and not some complicated philosophical construct.

Yes I agree that's the basic point, stated in a very friendly way.

Stated more pointedly, there's a huge "life or death" divide between (1) the desire to look for universals in other worlds of ideal forms or divine aspects of this world, and (2) the desire to look for the best way of life in natural processes that are open to any normal human being with no requirement of priest or expert to explain it to you.

In my view an awful lot of the division between Epicurus and the other schools comes down to exactly this. Epicurus' opponents identified exactly this issue very early on, and they have treated him and his philosophy in a very unfriendly way for 2000+ years as a result.

As long as the discussion stays within the guard rails of "being happy" or "finding pleasure through simplicity," it's all fun and games and smiles.

Go much deeper than that, however, in discussion of Epicurus with an intellectual activist, and you'll find out what that activist really cares about, and it's not how best to balance pleasure and pain. That's why all this is so important.