Episode 351 - EATAQ33 - Heap Big Trouble For The Stoic - Platonic Approach To Knowledge

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 351 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.

Last week we concluded the session by introducing what is called the Sorites syllogism, or in more understandable terms the heap syllogism, because sorites means heap, and the question being presented by this syllogism, or paradox, or conundrum, is: at what point, when you are accumulating grains of sand or grain or anything else small like that, do you have a heap of that thing? Do you have a heap after two, after three, after four, after five, after fifty? Where is the dividing line between having a heap and not having a heap?

The point of approaching the question from this point of view is that it focuses your mind on coming up with exactly the dividing line, exactly a definition of what it is you’re talking about. Because when you’re talking about a heap of something, the question becomes: what is it, in addition to these somethings, that constitutes this other term which we are calling a heap? That type of analysis is what Lucullus is complaining about here — he calls it a captious type of argument, but I think it’s very useful, for just the reason that when we talk about an abstraction, a concept like the word “heap,” we need to know what we’re talking about. Describing it ambiguously, in general terms, as just saying “well, a heap’s a large clump of sand,” doesn’t tell you exactly what it is you’re talking about.

All of us recognize a clump or a pile of something as being something we can talk about and understand. But the question becomes, is there something about this concept of a pile, or heap, or lump, that allows us to distinguish a clump or a lump or a pile from something that’s not a pile or clump or a lump? This takes us right back into the issues involved in Plato’s ideal forms, because one answer to the question might be that there’s something about piles or heaps or clumps that exists in another dimension, another universe, a realm of ideas. There’s an idea of a pile or a lump or a clump, and what we are really doing when we talk about this object in front of us on the table is asking whether this group of sand or group of grains is partaking in this concept of a heap that exists in another dimension. Is there a form of a heap, such that we conclude this grouping of objects in front of us is a heap because it partakes in the form or the idea of a heap?

And of course, Epicurean philosophy rejects the idea that there is a realm of ideal forms, that there’s a heaven, another dimension where these ideas or forms exist. Epicurean philosophy completely rejects that, because in the Epicurean universe there are only atoms moving through the void and the things that arise from their combinations. So it’s extremely important in Epicurean philosophy to understand, right at the beginning, that there is no such thing as an ideal form. The whole Platonic approach — that there’s another dimension of things we need to get to through geometry, or through piety toward the gods, or something like that — is just totally bogus from the point of view of Epicurus.

However, to reject the idea of ideal forms does not mean we are rejecting the use of the term “heap” or the term “clump.” We’re not saying those terms simply don’t exist. Yes, we are saying they do not have an eternal, objective existence in another dimension, but the term “heap” is something we all experience through our senses and find very useful in our communications, our discussions, and our evaluations of the things right in front of us. This is where, in Epicurean philosophy, Epicurus holds that what is true and real is what is presented to us by our senses, anticipations, and feelings. We see the appearance of a heap in front of us and we understand, through past experience, what that means. It is certainly real to us to see and touch and deal with heaps of objects. We do not throw out the idea of heaps just because they don’t exist eternally in some external dimension the way Plato would suggest — heaps get their existence from their combinations of atoms moving through the void, and we understand their reality through our senses, anticipations, and feelings.

So the Socratic approach of asking, well, exactly how many grains do you have to have before you get to a heap, is objected to by Stoics and Platonists and others looking for some logical consistency with an ideal form — because they can’t point to their ideal form, they can’t prove it exists, since it is essentially a figment of their imagination. All that exists in reality are the grains we’re talking about. From the Epicurean viewpoint, a heap exists and it is true and real because it is composed of the grains of sand or the grains of wheat that we are able to touch and see and experience in our own observation. We don’t have to have a connection to some realm of ideal forms in order to understand what a heap is.

I think that’s going to prove to be the direction we’ll see consistently throughout Cicero’s discussions, because Epicurus says the senses, anticipations, and feelings are sufficient to allow us to work with and understand and use concepts such as “heap,” even though there is no form of a heap floating out in heaven or in some other dimension. Asking this question — where does a heap start and stop, how many grains do you need for a heap — focuses the mind on this issue. And an Epicurean is going to tell you that there is no form of a heap that all of a sudden inhabits the objects in front of you to make it into a heap. An Epicurean is going to say no to an Aristotle who says there’s something intrinsic within these grains that makes them a heap. An Epicurean, using the Epicurean canon, is going to say that what is true and real is what is revealed to us through the senses, anticipations, and feelings, and we evaluate whether our opinions are correct by testing them continuously against that information.

So this may end up being what proves to be our main focus on the meaning of the Sorites heap paradox, although we’ll be continuing to discuss it, no doubt, for many weeks to come. But I wanted to make that summary of where I think, at least, I am in my understanding of this issue. Then we’ll be reading here in Section 16 some of Lucullus’s most direct comments about why he objects to this approach. So, Joshua, with that as my background, give us your thoughts, and when you’re ready, read the remaining part of Section 16.

Joshua:

You know, it occurs to me, as I listen to you describe in detail the problem of the Sorites heap — this is the kind of thing that would have irritated me so much about philosophy before I became really interested in it, because it feels intuitively like such a completely pointless effort to try to demarcate the line of where a heap begins and ends. But as we’ve said many times in the last few weeks, this problem in philosophy has applications to many areas of real life, including the area of life itself. Where does life begin? This is an important question — a vexed political question, a question that matters to people to have an answer to. And like the Sorites problem, it’s apparently a problem of gradation: you have something building itself up into life. Then at the end of life, you have the same problem — when does life end? Just like with the problem of the heap, you’re picking an arbitrary line, an arbitrary demarcation, and saying this is where the line falls: on one side is life, on the other is non-life. And it informs people’s politics, their ethics, really their entire worldview about who they are as human beings, who they are as living beings, what it means to be alive.

Before we go too much further into this, though, we have to carry forward what you’ve just been talking about, Cassius, into the Middle Academy, which is who Lucullus is corresponding with. All the way back in Section 8 of Part One of Academic Questions, Varro gave us a description of Plato’s system and a history of how it had broken apart into all the successor schools of Platonism, including Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and the successive iterations and branchings of the Academy itself. He says:

“Although it originated in the senses, still the power of judging the truth was not in the senses. They insisted upon it that intellect was the judge of things — that intellect alone was the only thing deserving of belief, because it alone discerned that which was always simple and uniform and which perceived its real character. This thing they call idea, or ideal form, having already received this name from Plato, and we, the Romans, properly entitle it species, or speciēs. But they thought that all the senses were dull and slow, and that they did not by any means perceive those things which appeared subjected to the senses.”

And in Section 9, he says: “This was the first philosophy handed down to them by Plato, and if you like, I will explain to you those discussions which have originated in it.” He goes on to talk about how Aristotle and Theophrastus and Strato deviated, and then about Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, Crates, and Crantor — how all of these different people deviated from Plato’s original instruction. Then he comes down to Zeno and Arcesilaus, who, he says, had been diligent attenders on Polemo — himself a student of the Academy — and not at all like Theophrastus, who “cut through the sinews of virtue,” as it says in Section 10. Zeno, on the other hand, “placed everything which could have any effect in producing a happy life in virtue alone, and reckoned nothing else a good at all.” So we come down to Stoicism, which is where Lucullus finds his own footing.

And who he’s responding to, in his own time and place, is not Plato with his ideal forms — it’s Antiochus and Carneades and these successors to the Academy. I don’t know if I can pull up a primary text in time to hold this together, but on the Wikipedia page for Antiochus it says this:

“His Stoic background is very clearly noticeable in the natural sciences. In agreement with the Stoics, Antiochus holds matter to be infinitely divisible, contradicting the opinion of the Atomists and Epicureans. He assumes two first principles of all reality: first, an efficient cause, and second, the matter that presents itself to and is fashioned by the force of the efficient cause. According to Stoic terminology, Antiochus also called the efficient cause ‘quality’ — in Greek poiotes, in Latin qualitas. Theoretically, the primordial matter is featureless, completely unformed, and therefore suitable for receiving any form. Matter receives its diverse, constantly changing forms from the efficient cause. The efficient cause and matter belong together by nature; each of the two is contained in the other. Without matter there can be no efficient cause, as the efficient cause is unthinkable outside of matter, and matter needs the efficient cause that holds it together.”

I probably should have explained this whole thing about cause before I started. According to Aristotle, there were four kinds of causes for any given thing that exists. The formal cause determines the shape of the thing. The material cause determines what the object is made of. The efficient cause is the primary force, agent, or process that brings the object into being — for a table, you could say the efficient cause is the carpenter; for a statue, the sculptor who carved it. Then you have the final cause, the purpose, goal, or end for which an object exists, or for which it was designed to exist.

So what we’re getting here from Wikipedia is that Antiochus held the view that there were two primary forces in nature: matter, and the efficient cause — this force that brings things together and causes them to take certain shapes. “Since active force and matter cannot exist independently of one another,” it continues, “the featureless primordial matter does not really exist for Antiochus.” This is quite important — the two original principles can only be separated in the act of thinking, not in reality. We’ve been talking about this primordial matter, which combines matter and this efficient cause, but Antiochus says you can’t actually separate the two — you can’t separate the efficient cause from matter, or matter from the efficient cause, except in thought. It’s only in thought you can separate them.

Cassius:

And Joshua, before you go further, did I also hear you say earlier that Antiochus and the Stoics held that matter is infinitely divisible? As you pointed out, that’s certainly not Epicurus’s position, but did you indicate the Stoics and Antiochus held infinite divisibility of matter?

Joshua:

That’s correct. And as we saw from Cicero in On Ends, at the beginning of Book One, this is one of his areas of irritation with Epicurean physics and Democritean physics — this idea that, again, just like this Sorites syllogism, you pick an arbitrary point and say that here it stops dividing. I think Cicero said it’s unworthy of a philosopher to hold the view that it can’t be divided further, because when you look at geometry, you can divide a line segment into smaller segments, and you could do that forever. But of course, to Epicurus, it doesn’t work that way in nature.

Cassius:

I agree with you that those are very significant differences with Epicurus that play into a lot of aspects of what we’re talking about — all of them focusing on the mind superseding what the senses are able to tell us.

Joshua:

Right. And we’ll get to more of this as we go. Let me get to the second paragraph of what we’re talking about. “Since active force and matter cannot exist independently of one another, the featureless primordial matter does not really exist for Antiochus. The two original principles can only be separated in the act of thinking, not in reality.” This calls to mind for me a contentious problem in Epicureanism: the idea that if it wasn’t for the swerve, the atoms would have originally fallen straight down like rain. I think we’re seeing a similar problem there — that there is no origin, in the beginning, of the swerve itself. So the idea of the atoms falling straight down like rain doesn’t make sense as an actual prior state, but you can separate that idea out conceptually.

“Since nothing exists apart from the two principles, and everything that exists is necessarily spatial, there is no being independent of physical existence for Antiochus, in contradiction of Plato’s theory of forms, which considered ideas as independent, transcendent archetypes of sense objects. The inseparability of the connection between efficient cause and matter also means that the soul itself is material, because the existence of the efficient cause is dependent on the existence of matter.” That’s not to say — and this is me talking now, by the way — that Antiochus totally abandoned the idea of forms, but he didn’t imagine, it seems, that there was this realm of pure being outside of nature where the forms resided, or that access to that hallowed ground would be the source of all real knowledge. We’re dealing with a level of skepticism here that goes beyond Plato and beyond Socrates.

I mention all of this primarily to make one key point: for Lucullus’s interlocutors, the Sorites syllogism is not being pressed into service because they’re trying to convince him that the truth lies somewhere out there in this realm of pure being. For his interlocutors, these arch-skeptics, they’re using the Sorites syllogism because they’re trying to convince him that knowledge of any kind is impossible. That’s the key distinction here. Socrates had said, “all that I know is that I know nothing.” When you get to the Middle Academy, the expression changes — it’s no longer “all that I know is that I know nothing,” it’s “I don’t even know that I know nothing,” which is true ignorance, I guess you could say.

Now, the second thing that will be important to remember before we go into Section 16 today is that in Section 15, Lucullus had already presented the basic argument about the Sorites syllogism. What he’s doing in 16 is deconstructing that argument from a Stoic perspective. But he acknowledges in 15 that these Middle Academy interlocutors have predicated their question on the Stoic view that visions are sent by the gods during sleep, and that revelation also occurs through the oracles, the auspices, the entrails of victims — augury, I guess. “For they say,” he says, “that the Stoics against whom they are arguing admit all these things. They” — the Academics — “ask how God can make those things probable which appear to be false, and how it is that he cannot make those appear so which plainly come as near as possible to truth.”

So as much as it sounds like we’re having an argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, they’ve chosen their line of attack here very carefully. If you believe the oracles are in communion with the gods, that the auspices, the auguries, the burnt sacrifices all have real religious significance — Lucullus seems to acknowledge that the Stoics, at least the Stoics Antiochus has knowledge and experience of, do acknowledge these things. So when we get into this discussion of the Sorites syllogism today, on the question of visions brought by the gods and the minute, incremental distinctions between them, it seems to be the case that if the Stoics can’t answer this objection, then it becomes impossible to know what the gods are trying to convey.

Now, the skeptics don’t mind this — he already reported the skeptics saying, in a mocking tone, “well, what do you want us to do about it? As Democritus said, of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of the well.” It’s not their problem, not their fault, that knowledge is not accessible to humans. But you can see how, for the Stoics, this could be considered problematic if the end result was that knowledge of the logos was not accessible to humans, that knowledge of virtue was not accessible to humans. So it’s interesting — not just that they’re using the Sorites syllogism, but that this specific argument, in the context of the Sorites syllogism, comes from a group of people who are quite ready to acknowledge: we have no idea what the gods are trying to convey, or even if they exist, and we can’t know, because knowledge of any kind remains beyond the grasp of human beings.

Lucullus’s response to this is that they are blameworthy for this view, because they are using a most captious kind of interrogation. When we get into 16 today, we’ll get into his response. I’m sure, Cassius, you’ve got more to say about everything we’ve been talking about this morning, all of which is interesting. But we have to be able to follow these trails in order to keep clear in our minds where this argument is going and why it’s important.

Cassius:

I want to emphasize that this is not just some historical argument. I’d draw an analogy between this and a discussion we’ve had on our EpicureanFriends Forum just over the last week. A participant posted an article — I don’t remember the title, but what I do remember is that it specialized in coarse language throughout, calling happiness bullshit. I’ll refer to that from now on as BS: “happiness is BS,” according to this article. I think what you’ve just been talking about applies directly to the challenge that article is bringing, because happiness is something we have to be able to understand in order for it not to be an illusion, in order for it not to be BS.

People define happiness in many different ways, and they can be totally contradictory definitions. But Epicurus comes at the problem by accepting the challenge of dealing with happiness. Epicurus talks about happiness in the Letter to Menoeceus as that which we’re doing everything else in order to obtain. Epicurus, however, is not going to stop with the ambiguity of discussing happiness in the abstract, as if it’s just a euphemism for a blessed life, for the best kind of life. Epicurus ties happiness directly to pleasure — the feeling of pleasure in relation to the feeling of pain. And Epicurus comes down very clearly on the conclusion that you can be in pain, as he himself was in his last days from kidney disease, and still be happy. Happiness, if it means anything, is a balance, a feeling that ends up being a sum of your feelings of pleasure and pain, in which pleasure predominates.

So the article that became the subject of the forum discussion has a point in saying that the way many people look at happiness, without being specific, can end up being BS. But I think the article, as I read it, came from the perspective of these skeptics who don’t have a solution to the problem, who are just as happy as they can be to leave the problem undefined, to leave the word undefined, and simply say it’s not possible to define it. So therefore, everything in the world is BS. And that’s the slippery slope, or the straight path, to absolute nihilism, defeatism, all the other isms that end up as absolute nothingness.

But again, this is exactly why Epicurus focuses on his canon the way he does. Happiness need not be looked at as just a BS term that means everything to everybody. Just like the word “God,” and talking about the gods, Epicurus was willing and able to distinguish the part of divinity that is true from the part that is not true. Epicurus is saying we can assemble, through our anticipations, sensations, and feelings, an understanding of divinity that is true, that makes sense, and that is useful for our lives. Same thing with happiness. And so happiness, and divinity, and virtue — these other terms Epicurus is tackling — are real to us. They are not BS. They are not something we need to walk away from and close our minds to just because everybody has a different opinion. We can use the tools nature has given us to come to a conclusion about these issues that we can be confident of, and then act on, to live happily and preserve our lives and those of our friends, and the kind of life we want to have.

So I wanted to follow up on what you said about the details of this argument and bring it back to this very practical question of the meaning of happiness. The question of what happiness is — Torquatus insists that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure. Diogenes of Oenoanda is declaring that it’s not a question of the means to happiness; the question is, what is happiness? And he defines it as a life of pleasure.

The problem of the heap is a problem Epicurus is willing to take on and give you an answer to. It’s not going to be an answer that satisfies everybody — some people are going to say that in order to have a heap you need five, or four, or three, or ten of a thing. And the fact that there’s disagreement is fine, because we, as living human beings, can still understand that, despite that disagreement over the detail, we all understand what it means to be a heap. We can all understand what divinity really applies to. And we can all understand what happiness means as well. We’re not just left floating in the dark with nothing but disagreement and skepticism, and ultimately the dark view of life as suffering that comes from that point of view. Epicurus’s point of view ends up rejecting that kind of helplessness, that attitude of suffering and anxiety, by pointing out that nature gives us the ability to bring all of these things into focus, and keep them in focus, as long as we’re alive, and thereby act to live happily.

So this is not a historical detail. Even though people don’t talk in terms of heaps and sorites anymore — I don’t think I’d ever heard that word until I read it in Norman DeWitt some years ago, when I first read his book, and that’s an example of the depth of understanding DeWitt’s approach brings to your understanding of Epicurus — as you’ve said, Joshua, today and certainly last week, this Sorites heap approach, as foreign as it is to us now, keeps coming up over and over again. At this point I can safely say I understand why: it’s a way of focusing your mind on what reality is. Is it a foreign dimension, a set of ideas and ideals that can never be touched by humanity? Or does this world have a reality to it that we can grasp and live in successfully?

This question of this world versus some other world is constantly going to come up. And yeah, you can take the position that it’s all just BS and walk away from it, but I’d say that’s a guarantee of failure in life — you are not going to succeed if you don’t understand what it is you’re looking to attain in the first place. Whether it’s happiness or pleasure or anything else, you have to understand what you’re talking about. And talking about a heap, to understand what definitions and what truth are really about, is as good a way to get at this problem as anything else. It’s a connection we can have today between us, analyzing these problems, and these people two thousand years ago who were joining in this very same examination — to determine whether there’s a reality worth basing life on, or whether it’s all just an illusion and a dream, as the various types of skepticism, or Platonic idealism, or religion lead you to conclude.

Kalosyni:

So with regard to the Sorites, would the question be, how much pleasure determines a happy life? Does that equate to that?

Cassius:

I think that’s a very good way of getting at what the heap issue is addressing. What does happiness mean? What does it require? Are there certain types of pleasure you must have? Is there a certain amount of pleasure you must have? Is there a certain maximum of pain that’s allowed before you can say you’re happy? Where is the line? There is no line — there is no specific answer that applies to everybody, in every place, at every time. But there still is an answer, because the reality of life we assemble through the sensations, anticipations, and feelings allows us to understand what pleasure is and what happiness is. Even though we don’t have a specific list, or a specific amount, or a specific quality, we do understand what those terms mean. We don’t have to say, “well, because I can’t put a figure on how many inches or pounds or what color pleasure is, therefore I’m just going to give up on the concept of pleasure — I’m just going to give up on happiness because I can’t weigh it on a scale, because I can’t measure it with a ruler.” That would be a ridiculous position to take. Epicurus is saying you don’t have to do that — you shouldn’t even think about doing it, because it’s not possible.

In a world of atoms and void, where there’s no central authority, no designer behind it, there’s not going to be a single standard for any particular thing. Only the atoms have eternal, unchanging existence — everything else is changing. But because it’s changing, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It means the change takes place within certain parameters, within certain limits and boundaries, and our anticipations are able to bring those into focus and allow us to talk about dogs, for example, even though Pekingese and Great Danes and German Shepherds are very different from each other — we still know what a dog is. We still know what a cat is, despite the difference between a house cat and a tiger or a lion. I think this is all an application of the heap problem.

And one more thing before Joshua does eventually get into 16: the way the skeptics like to argue is that a German Shepherd is really pretty close to an Australian Shepherd, and what you do to try to confuse people is line up things that are close to each other and point out that it’s really very difficult, at times, to tell a German Shepherd from an Australian Shepherd or some other type of shepherd. You say, well, there’s really not much difference between these two things, so because there’s not much difference, maybe we could imagine there are two dogs that are not different at all. And Cicero is going to talk about wolves versus dogs, and so forth, as examples of this. You can get things that are very close to each other, so why can’t you have two different things that are identical? And if these two different things appear to be identical, or in fact are identical, then really there’s no difference between anything at all — it’s all just the same. That leads you down this road into questioning whether you can really say anything specific about anything, because you don’t know whether your decision, your conclusion, is slightly off or not.

That’s an aspect of the heap question: is ten grains of sand a heap of sand? What about nine grains? What about eleven grains? They’re pretty close — does that mean there’s no difference between a heap and a non-heap? That’s the type of argument they’re using to try to say there’s really no difference between anything at all. There’s no difference between pleasure and pain, no difference between happiness and unhappiness, no difference between anything, because things are just a continuum in which there’s really no difference between the different points on the line.

That’s where Epicurus is insisting: in terms of the line, you cannot divide the line infinitely, because there are points on the line. Yes, in your mind you can construct a calculus, or an approach to mathematics, in which you can divide things infinitely, but you cannot do that in reality. You live in reality, in which there are discrete points — in reality, there are discrete German Shepherds versus wolves. Your mind can see these differences and act based on them, and there’s no need to throw out the idea of knowledge and say that everything’s the same and walk away from these questions, like the skeptics want you to do, because that’s what skepticism leads to. Stoics — the Stoics just aren’t willing to let go of their divine creator, their divine designer. They’re trying to save the designer. Epicurus is saying, no, it’s not necessary to save the designer — as Joshua mentioned, there’s a famous saying, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” You don’t have to have a God explain things and be the designer of things in order to understand that the world operates in a natural way.

Joshua:

On the subject of where and how you apply the Sorites problem to pleasure, I think DeWitt is really good on this, because his insight is to notice a very well-known fragment from a lost work of Epicurus called Peri Telos — “On the End” — a fragment that shows up in Cicero, in Plutarch, and in Diogenes Laertius. It shows up in Athenaeus and his Deipnosophistae as well. It just keeps coming up again and again, because it seems very damning to some of these people who despise the pursuit of pleasure. DeWitt points out that it has application to this question of the Sorites problem. The fragment, as he quotes it — this is Epicurus speaking — is this:

“For my own part, I am at a loss to know what meaning I shall attach to the good, subtracting the pleasures of taste, subtracting the pleasures of love, subtracting the pleasures of the ears, subtracting also the pleasure of the eyes in beauty of form and beauty of movement.”

DeWitt responds to this passage by saying that its true import has escaped detection: “It is the Sorites syllogism in narrative form. The key word is subtract. For a correct understanding, the argument must be restored to dialogue form, where it belongs. It consists of a chain of questions: Do you deny the name of good to the pleasure of taste? Yes. Do you deny the name of good to the pleasure of love? Yes. And so on with the rest. At the end of the chain, the interlocutor has denied the name of good to everything that the man in the street calls pleasure, and there is left only the pleasures of the mind. That the argument did arrive at this termination is made plain by Cicero, who quotes the passage with more fullness. In his account is added: neither can this be said, that the pleasure of the mind alone is to be ranked among goods.”

So this is one potential application of the Sorites problem to Epicurean ethics. It’s a very useful tool, and it requires a bit of knowledge about the problem in order to give a response. As I’ve already said, Lucullus’s response was to say that the Academics who use this kind of argument are making a most captious kind of interrogation, through the system of adding or taking away step by step minute items from a proposition — “a kind of argument,” he says, “very little to be approved of in philosophy” — and it’s at this point that he returns to the question of the vision sent by God, and whether it’s possible to determine which visions are true, or false, or probable. For Lucullus, it matters to be able to distinguish this, not just here but in other areas as well, because Lucullus, like Epicurus, thought knowledge was within our grasp.

So it’s perhaps most interesting to me that, in this much later paragraph of Academic Questions, Cicero turns this question of knowledge back on the Stoics:

“For Zeno and Antiochus both denied that any of you know anything. How so, you will say? For we allege, on the other hand, that even a man without wisdom comprehends many things. But you affirm that no one except a wise man knows one single thing — and Zeno professed to illustrate this by a piece of action, stretching out his hand and showing the grasp. But even those who are themselves wise men do not venture to say that they are wise, nor does anyone who has ever lived and been a wise man. According to that theory, you, Catulus, do not know that it is daylight, and you, Hortensius, are ignorant that we are in your villa.”

And that is kind of the end result — that’s where all of this endless arguing goes when you’re arguing with the skeptic. With an extreme radical skeptic, of the kind we’re dealing with here in Academic Questions, where you end up is: you don’t even know that you’re standing in your own house. This is what it means to say that knowledge is impossible — that all you know is that you know nothing, or that you don’t even know that you know nothing, because that’s what it means to really know nothing.

Cicero ends the section — again, this is way later in Academic Questions — by saying:

“And this doctrine is confirmed also by the diligence of our ancestors, who ordained, in the first place, that everyone should swear ‘according to the opinion of his own mind’; secondly, that he should be accounted guilty ‘if he knowingly swore false,’ because there was a great deal of ignorance in life; thirdly, that the man giving his evidence should say that ‘he thought,’ even in a case where he was speaking of what he had actually seen himself; and that when the judges were giving their decision on the evidence, they should say not that such and such a thing had been done, but that such and such a thing appeared to them to have been done.”

Now, this level of caution is admirable in a justice system, and we prefer a justice system that exercises diligence and caution. But the end result of all of this — even though he’s making fun of the Stoics, saying “you don’t even know that you’re standing in your own villa” because Zeno says only the truly wise man knows anything, and none of you will acknowledge that you were wise — is that, for Cicero, you can never say more than that you think you’re in your house, or that you regard it as probable that you’re standing in your house. The idea that you can never reach any point of certainty on anything is where this goes for Cicero. And some of these Academics go even further than that, saying we don’t even know enough to know what is probable.

Cassius:

Joshua, you’ve brought up some extremely important points there. We’ve failed to make any progress in 16 today, but I think the material we’ve discussed has been some of the best we’ve discussed in a long time — some of the most important, especially what you’ve just closed on: how skepticism leads you to not knowing anything at all, even if you’re in your own house.

An understanding of the heap problem, and the approach to it that Norman DeWitt gives, is extremely helpful to us in understanding some of the most controversial material in the Epicurean texts. Because when people hear this passage repeated, that “I would not know the good if it were not for the pleasures of food and sex,” and so forth, they interpret that as Epicurus saying those are the most important things to him — that that’s what he’s really focused on, just the bodily pleasures of the moment. And that’s not at all what he’s talking about. I think DeWitt has hit the nail on the head — that logical progression Epicurus is presenting is intended to address exactly the problem we’ve been discussing today: what is pleasure? There is a concept of pleasure that people can manipulate into meaning almost anything. But the feeling of pleasure is something nature gives to us, and Epicurus is pointing out that the common denominator, the way we know something to be good, is through the feeling of pleasure that nature gives us. That’s something we understand directly, just as snow is white and honey is sweet, because the feeling of pleasure is given to us by nature. Ultimately, it’s to nature that we’re looking as the standard of the best way to live — we’re trying to avoid imagining things on our own that end up deviating from, or conflicting with, the guidance of nature through pleasure and pain.

We’ll be continuing to talk about this in coming weeks as we move further through Sections 16 and 17, but I think we’ve hit some really important points today. The meaning of this heap paradox is something we need to understand, and once we do understand it, it becomes extremely useful to see that when we talk about knowing something and having confidence in something, it’s because we’re trusting the senses, anticipations, and feelings — and not because we’re looking to some fictitious realm of ideal forms or divine standards that exist in some other universe, some heaven that does not really exist in this world.

Okay, so we’ll close today at that point. We’ll come back next week and continue in Section 16. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back soon. See you then. Bye.