Epicurus vs Aristotle: the Role of Reason vs Sensation Seeking?

This is an issue that is addressed at length by DeWitt in several chapters, and it's part of the reason why his book is so important.

I think it's also mentioned by Emily Austin by I'd have to go back and search for where.

A large part of the essential point is that Epicurus is all in favor of the use of practical reasoning based on evidence that can be verified through the senses.

What Epicurus is opposed to is the contention that "logic" (the construction of logical propositions such as A + B = C) is useful only so long as the meaning of A and B and C can be verified ultimately by observations confirmable by the senses. You don't have to see everything directly, but you have to have a chain of evidence that ultimately ends up with something that's observable. That's how Epicurus could be so certain of the existence of "atoms" even though no one at his time (or now, without equipment) has ever seen or touched an individual atom.

And Aristotle's problems often derive from the fact that he was willing to reach conclusions about the existence of a "Prime Mover" that are not verifiable by, and conflict with, the evidence of the senses.

fwiw, here's my contribution to this...

Work in progress, naturally.

Quote from Kalosyni

Don Have you looked at Aristotle's book 10 ?

Have not made it to Book 10. I was trying to go beginning to end, but it's a slog for all the things I have to rant about against Aristotle.

Quote from Kalosyni

Epicurus = "pleasure" is the telos (end) of the best life and the word "pleasure" leads most people to hear that Epicurus gave more importance to bodily sensation.

In my view you're no doubt right that '"most people hear Epicurus to be saying that he gave more importance to bodily sensation" and in my view also those people are making very incorrect about what Epicurus was saying. There are ample reliable texts indicating how wrong they are.

Quote from Kalosyni

Aristotle = "living well and doing well" is the telos (end) of the best life and humans find their highest fulfillment in exercising reason, especially through contemplation.

And yes that is a key point about Aristotle, the response to which has many aspects but one of the primary of which is that there is nothing divine about human reason, and by focusing on it to the exclusion of the rest of the human, and of nature itself, is to divorce the mind from the body in a way that is totally unjustified, improper, and disastrous. One writer who makes that point very well is Cosma Raimondi. This was directed to the Stoics but much of it applies to Aristotle too:

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If we were indeed composed solely of a mind, I should be inclined to call Regulus “happy” and entertain the Stoic view that we should find happiness in virtue alone. But since we are composed of a mind and a body, why do they leave out of this account of human happiness something that is part of mankind and properly pertains to it? Why do they consider only the mind and neglect the body, when the body houses the mind and is the other half of what man is? If you are seeking the totality of something made up of various parts, and yet some part is missing, I cannot think it perfect and complete. We use the term ‘human’, I take it, to refer to a being with both a mind and a body. And in the same way that the body is not to be thought healthy when some part of it is sick, so man himself cannot be thought happy if he is suffering in some part of himself. As for their assigning happiness to the mind alone on the grounds that it is in some sense the master and ruler of man’s body, it is quite absurd to disregard the body when the mind itself often depends on the state and condition of the body and indeed can do nothing without it. Should we not deride someone we saw sitting on a throne and calling himself a king when he had no courtiers or servants? Should we think someone a fine prince whose servants were slovenly and misshapen? Yet those who would separate the mind from the body in defining human happiness and think that someone whose body is being savaged and tortured may still be happy are just as ludicrous.

I find it surprising that these clever Stoics did not remember when investigating the subject that they themselves were men. Their conclusions came not from what human nature demanded but from what they could contrive in argument. Some of them, in my view, placed so much reliance on their ingenuity and facility in debate that they did not concern themselves with what was actually relevant to the inquiry. They were carried away instead by their enthusiasm for intellectual display, and tended to write what was merely novel and surprising — things we might aspire to, but not ones we should spend any effort in attaining. Then there were some rather cantankerous individuals who thought that we should only aim for what they themselves could imitate or lay claim to. Nature had produced some boorish and inhuman philosophers whose senses had been dulled or cut off altogether, ones who took no pleasure in anything; and these people laid down that the rest of mankind should avoid what their own natural severity and austerity shrank from. Others subsequently entered the debate, men of great and various intellectual abilities, who all delivered a view on what constituted the supreme good according to their own individual disposition. But in the middle of all this error and confusion, Epicurus finally appeared to correct and amend the mistakes of the older philosophers and put forward his own true and certain teaching on happiness.

Admin. Note: This post has been copied from thread Their God is Their Belly.

Quote from Pacatus

Quote from Cassius

who mind earthly things.

Oh the horror! That we should "mind earthly things"!? [/s]

The KJV "earthly things" makes it sound like a moral slight (earthy, base things.. And I'm sure that's part of it), but the word is literally "things on the earth, things in the world."

Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. (NRSV updated ed.)

ἐπίγαιος "on or of the earth, terrestrial" I'm assuming in contrast to things of heaven.

Admin. Note: This post has been copied from thread Their God is Their Belly.

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"earthly things"

I made a passing reference in episode 284 of the podcast (15:43 mark) to the connection between Cicero and Christianity on this point. Here is the passage from Tusculan Disputations, II, XIII:

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For you must either admit that there is no such thing as virtue, or you must despise every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue as prudence, without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived? What then? will that suffer you to labour and take pains to no purpose? Will temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life? Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things [rerum humanarum despicientiae]? Can you hear yourself called a great man, when you lie groveling, dejected, and deploring your condition, with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man, while in such a condition: you must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put out of the question.

Oh, this is a little interesting, the phrase was used by Varro in his work being written contemporaneously with Cicero:

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all worldly things [rerum humanarum...

Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"It was written in the 50s or 40s BC.[2]"

Cicero's "contempt for all worldly things [rerum humanarum despicientiae]" seems even worse than Philippians "επίγαιος". That's at least generally "on or of the world" but Cicero is advocating specifically contempt for all "human" things. Isn't virtue itself a concern of humans?

Quote from Don

Isn't virtue itself a concern of humans?

Presumably he'd say that animals don't have the same kind of virtue and classify virtue with the divine (?)

Along these lines, I'm going to quote Obbink in his On Piety by Philodemus translation and commentary:

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traditional forms of worship are viewed by Epicurus as natural responses to the recognition of divine nature, and are not merely tolerated but recommended to his followers. Numerous acts of worship are attested for Epicurus and individual Epicureans, including sacrifice, prayer, and oaths, 1 adoration of statues, dedications, mystery initiation,• participation in calendrical festivals,s and rites of private and ancestral cult. Their opponents, considering such practices were incompatible with the Epicurean rejection of natural teleology, divine providence, and divination, viewed them as insincere parodies designed to cultivate popular favour. Epicureans, however, maintained
that participation in such practices was intended to illustrate the Epicurean theory of religion and social cohesion, and the degree to which cultural phenomena (including false beliefs) could be accounted for; for Epicurus, like Prodicus and Democritus, viewed cult as a natural
outgrowth of cultural history. Similarly, we find Epicureans, in an attempt to rationalize and thereby vindicate popular belief (thus demonstrating a clear philosophical understanding of even the most primitive of ideas), maintaining the proposition that 'gods' are actually capable of doing men harm (i.e. the wicked, as a result of their own depraved conceptions of the gods).

These practices seem well-attested by the author of On Piety (it could have been Phaedrus or Philodemus, but now traditionally attributed to the latter) but they seem at odds with Lucretius in his scorn for religious practices in book V: 1198-1203: "It is no piety to show oneself / Bowing with veiled head towards a stone, Nor to be seen frequenting every altar, Nor to fall prostrate on the ground, with palms outspread ..." It seems Epicurus himself would have done these and encouraged his school to do so. I'm certain Epicurus ascribed different motivations for bowing, sacrificing, etc than would the hoi polloi but he seems to have taken part in all that.

Quote from Cassius

Quote from Don

Isn't virtue itself a concern of humans?

Presumably he'd say that animals don't have the same kind of virtue and classify virtue with the divine (?)

Agreed. And isn't that convenient for him.

In fairness to Cicero, he is writing specifically in the context of courage. Livy's mythical story of the Lacus Curtius in the Roman Forum might shed some light on what he meant by the phrase;

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The most popular story (~362 BCE), and also the one Livy deemed most likely, was a myth glorifying the nation: Rome was endangered when a great chasm opened on the Forum. An oracle directed the people to throw into the chasm “that what constituted the greatest strength of the Roman people,” and doing so would make the Roman nation last forever. After various things had been dropped into the ravine without result, a young horseman named Marcus Curtius (again, of the Curtia gens) saved the city by realizing that it was virtus that the Romans held most dear. In full armour on his horse, he jumped into the chasm whereupon the earth closed over him and Rome was saved.

More in response to Kalosyni's original question, I think Epicurus' view of 'reason' is complicated from our point of view by his eccentric approach to vocabulary as described in the Letter to Herodotus:

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First of all, Herodotus, we must grasp the ideas attached to words, in order that we may be able to refer to them and so to judge the inferences of opinion or problems of investigation or reflection, so that we may not either leave everything uncertain and go on explaining to infinity or use words devoid of meaning.

[38] For this purpose it is essential that the first mental image associated with each word should be regarded, and that there should be no need of explanation, if we are really to have a standard to which to refer a problem of investigation or reflection or a mental inference. And besides we must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations, and in particular with the immediate apprehensions whether of the mind or of any one of the instruments of judgment, and likewise in accord with the feelings existing in us, in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen.

And we can see this at work in the distinctly Lucretian phrase vera ratio, true reason or true philosophy.

Epicurus rejected reason as a criterion of epistemology, he rejected dialectic as a method of inquiry, and he was suspicious of the cult of formal logic. But in Lucretian terms, true reason is synonymous with Epicurean philosophy, and for Epicurus the outward expression of this true reason is the practical wisdom of φρόνησις, phronesis. The fruits of phronesis, in turn, are good choices and avoidances. This is fundamentally reason in service of the blessed life of pleasure (which again is to be considered according to his eccentric approach to vocabulary).

So far I've discussed the Epicurean view of reason as it relates to Canonics (where DeWitt says it has been "dethroned") and to Ethics, where it is part of practical philosophy. Reason obviously has a place also in the Physics, but I'll have to return to that later.

I think I am agreeing with Joshua when I say that I think most of us are on the same page that small "r" practical reason based on the evidence of the senses, anticipations, and feelings is a good thing to Epicurus, and he use it all the time.

The bad thing seems to be focused on propositional logic where the propositions are not tied to repeatable sensations, anticipations and feelings.

And that's related to why there can be "true reason" as opposed to "false reason." It's possible to do reason right and to do reason wrong. But the general term of "reason" as a reference to mental calculation in itself is not always a negatiove term at all.

This is fundamentally the difference between a priori and a posteriori claims of knowledge, with Epicurus largely rejecting the former but endorsing his own philosophical interpretations of the latter.