Posts by Cassius

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 352 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.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time talking about where we are in Cicero’s Academic Questions and why we are examining the issues we’re looking at. This week we’re going to get right back into Section 16 and deal with it directly. If you have any questions about where we are or why we’re doing it, I refer you back to the last couple of episodes, where there’s a lot of background on that. But 16 and 17 in particular are packed with information we need to discuss. So I’m going to turn it over to Joshua, and we’re going to get right into Section 16 and go forward from there.

Joshua:

Now, on all these empty perceptions, Antiochus brought forward a great many arguments, and one whole day was occupied in the discussion of this subject. But I do not think that I ought to adopt the same course, but merely to give the heads of what he said.

“In the first place, they are blamable in this, that they use a most captious kind of interrogation, and the system of adding or taking away, step by step, minute items from a proposition is a kind of argument very little to be approved of in philosophy. They call it sorites, when they make up a heap by adding grain after grain — a very vicious and captious style of arguing. For you mount up in this way: if a vision is brought by God before a man asleep of such a nature as to be probable, why may not one also be brought of such a nature as to be very like truth? If so, then why may not one be brought which can hardly be distinguished from truth? If so, then why may there not be one which cannot be distinguished at all from truth? If so, then why may there not be such that there is actually no difference between them? If you come to this point because I have granted you all the previous propositions, it will be my fault, but if you advance thither of your own accord, it will be yours. For who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or that even if he could do everything, he would act in that manner? And how do you assume that if one thing may be like another, it follows that it may also be difficult to distinguish between them, and then that one cannot distinguish between them at all, and lastly, that they are identical? So that if wolves are like dogs, you will come at last to asserting that they are the same animals.

“And indeed, there are some things not honorable which are like things that are honorable, some things not good like those that are good, some things proceeding on no system like others which are regulated by a system. Why then do we hesitate to affirm that there is no difference between all these things? Do we not even see that they are inconsistent? For there is nothing that can be transferred from its own class to another. But if such a conclusion did follow — that there was no difference between perceptions of different classes, but that some could be found which were both in their own class and in one which did not belong to them — how could that be possible?

“There is then one means of getting rid of all unreal perceptions, whether they be formed in the ideas, which we grant to be usually the case, or whether they be owing to idleness or to wine or to madness: we say that clearness, which we ought to hold with the greatest tenacity, is absent from all visions of that kind. For who is there who, when he imagines something and pictures it to himself in his thoughts, does not, as soon as he has stirred up and recovered himself, feel how much difference there is between what is evident and what is unreal? The case of dreams is the same. Do you think that the Roman poet Ennius, when he had been walking in his garden with Sergius Galba, his neighbor, said to himself, ‘I have seemed to myself to be walking with Galba’? But when he had a dream, he related it this way: ‘The poet Homer seemed to stand before me.’ And again, in his Epicharmus, he says, ‘For I seem to be dreaming and laid in the tomb.’ Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done in the forum.”

Cassius:

Okay, Joshua, thanks for reading that. Finally we have all of 16 in front of us, and we’re seeing Lucullus’s presentation of the difficulties and the captious, disputative nature of the Sorites syllogism — and we’re seeing him illustrate it. This illustration can hopefully finally pin down in our minds what exactly is meant by this issue of assembling a heap from grains of sand, because he’s giving us examples from other areas of life of what this argument is attempting to do.

We’ve spent some time on this already, but I know, especially once we get to the section that says “for who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or even if he could, that he would act in that manner” — I don’t think we’ve spent much time on these references to why he’s talking about visions from the gods, and what distinction he’s drawing, because he says it in a somewhat confusing manner. He gives examples of visions brought by a god in which the first vision is probable, the second is a little more probable, and the next is something you might say is not just more probable but very much like the truth. Then he lines up another vision where he says, “I can’t tell the difference between whether that’s true or not.” So he’s taken the example of adding grains of sand and transmuted it into something quite different — into questions about, well, God could do this, why can’t he do that, why can’t he do something else? And then, as the paragraph goes on, he changes that “vision brought by a god” example into a discussion of dreams and things that might happen to you while under the influence of wine, or just simply asleep.

So where would you like to dig into that? Do you want to take a stab at it first?

Joshua:

So one problem for us, Cassius, is that this question of visions and auguries sent by gods isn’t particularly relevant to Epicureanism, because we wouldn’t make the same concessions the Stoics in this particular case have been prepared to make.

As we move into the third paragraph of Section 16, I think we should look into some of the example cases presented with respect to the Sorites problem. In the second paragraph he talked about visions sent by the gods; in this paragraph we come down to questions of taxonomy — the question of how similar wolves are to dogs. “If, for example, wolves are like dogs, you will end by saying that they are identical. And in the same way, some honorable things are similar to dishonorable things, some good things are like some things that are not as good, and some artistic things are similar to some that are not artistic. Why do we hesitate, therefore, to aver that there is no difference between these? Have we no eye even for incongruities? For there is nothing that cannot be carried over from its own class into another class.” I don’t really have a sense of where exactly the passage ends.

But Cassius, this question of wolves and dogs, honor and dishonor, good and not-good — we’ve left, for a moment, the question of visions sent by gods, and come down to more everyday perceptible phenomena. This would be an interesting place to try to figure out what the argument is here, and really to figure out how Epicurus would respond to some of these claims, because I don’t think Epicurus’s response is necessarily going to be the same as the response given by the Stoics.

Cassius:

Right — or the skeptics. Joshua, let me take this for a few minutes and see what I can do with it. Clearly these examples Lucullus is giving are all over the board in terms of the nature of the question. He starts off talking about visions brought by a god, then dogs versus wolves, then things that are honorable versus dishonorable, some things good, some things bad, some things part of a system, some things not regulated by a system. I think it’s really important for us to dig down and think about what the common element is in all of these examples, because that tells us where the argument is really going.

Just as we started off with the question of grains adding up to a heap — at least as I see it, what he’s doing is jumping from subject to subject, pointing out that no matter which direction we look, there are things that are very similar to each other, even though we also talk about classes of things: the class of wolves versus the class of dogs, the class of things that are good versus the class of things that are bad, the class of things that are systematic versus those that are chaotic. We’re familiar with the fact that in every direction there are things that can be close to each other, and yet we still put them in separate classes. That just takes us back to the question, what is a heap? Because we have to answer where the line is between one class and another. Is it something like the line in geometry that can be infinitely divided — and the closer and closer we get to two things that are similar to each other, do we eventually just throw up our hands and say there’s just no difference at all? I think that’s where he’s really going with this argument, until he comes to a kind of summation where he says, well, why do we hesitate to say there’s no difference at all between these things?

When we try to pin down exactly what the difference is between a dog and a wolf, we can dig into all these details, find all these examples of similarities, and go on and on finding similarities. But there’s something within us that tells us there’s still a difference, and it’s an important difference to us between a dog and a wolf. Even if we can’t come down to a final list of DNA characteristics that distinguishes the two, it’s still important to us to understand that a dog is going to be our best friend, while a wolf is going to kill us and eat us. Those kinds of differences exist all across the world we live in. People can look just like each other, and yet one can be your mortal enemy and one can be your best friend. A single action, like taking someone’s life, can be murder and considered the worst possible evil — or, if you’re acting in self-defense or in defense of someone else, you can be an absolute hero, considered one of the best people who’s ever lived, for defending someone who was being attacked. But the same act — taking a life — is involved in both circumstances. So how do you decide which class to put the action of killing someone in? The action of doing anything you consider good versus bad?

We’ve discussed this somewhat already, and as you brought up last week, DeWitt points out that the Sorites approach is likely what Epicurus is doing when he starts enumerating how he would not know the good without the pleasures of X, Y, and Z. He’s pointing out that “good” is a concept made of real things, real pleasures, and if you start subtracting every possible real example of a pleasure from “the good,” you’re eventually left with nothing. He then clarifies, too, that we’re not going to accept that the pleasures of the mind are the only type of pleasure that exists. So Epicurus and the skeptics are willing to use the same approach, but for different reasons — which, again, I think we talked about last week. The skeptics want you to say these differences become so indistinguishable that in the end it’s not possible to distinguish good from bad, left from right, wolves from dogs. Epicurus is going to tell you: yes, there are all sorts of similarities between things in the world, but our anticipations, sensations, and feelings are able to assemble for us a reliable picture of important differences that allow us to live happily. And so we’re able to determine the difference between a dog, who’s going to be our best friend, and a wolf, who’s going to eat us. Those are real differences, even though we could count till the cows come home all the specific ways in which the genetic and other makeup of wolves is similar to that of dogs.

So I think you’re right to have made the comment that somewhere in here Lucullus is shifting his point of view. He’s telling us what the skeptic argument was, but toward the end of the paragraph he’s beginning to clarify the limitation of the skeptic argument, when he says, in Rackham’s terms, “consequently, there is only one way of routing the difficulty about unreal presentations, whether they are unreal because of the imagination, or because we are asleep, or under the influence of wine, or of insanity.” What I think Lucullus is saying — and I’m interpreting this, so I could be wrong — is that we, as Stoics, as defenders of knowledge and truth, have to take the position that these false presentations are devoid of perspicuity, and we have to cling to perspicuity tooth and nail. The difficulty, of course, is what he means by “perspicuity.” I think we talked about this last week — that the Stoics use the words “perceive” and “perception” to describe those things we’re confident about, which is a little different from the way we talk about it today. When I say “I perceive something,” it’s unclear whether I mean I think it’s true or I’m sure it’s true. We today tend to take “perception” as a direct reference to a sensation, rather than a statement that the thing is true to reality.

But I think what Lucullus is getting at, when he talks about perspicuity, or when he says the false cannot be perceived — we’ve struggled with that term, and I’m moving toward interpreting it this way: the Stoics are saying that which is false cannot be perceived. The reason that sentence sounds odd to us is that we use the word “perceived” without including, within it, the judgment that it’s true. The Stoics seem to be saying that when you perceive something, it’s because it is true. So the Stoics are insisting there is this cataleptic impression that cannot be false, and they’re going to defend that tooth and nail, and analogize it to a person waking up from a dream.

At the end of this section, Lucullus starts talking about Ennius and Homer, the example of how Ennius described what he observed in a dream versus what he experienced in real life. As I read this, the emphasis is on how most of us can pretty easily distinguish, when we get up in the morning, whether what happened to us while we were asleep was a dream or whether it was real. Now, of course, we sometimes say it’s hard to tell, but I think the direction Lucullus is going in here, at the end of this paragraph, is using the example of waking up from a dream as an analogy for how, when we’re stirred awake, when we come to our senses, we immediately have a firm grasp of what is real versus what is not. There’s going to be more to say as he goes into Section 17, but I’m going to stop for a moment and gather our thoughts on 16 here before we go further.

Joshua:

Yeah, the Wikipedia page for the Sorites paradox has the example of a bald man, because there we can go down minutely to individual hairs, right?

Cassius:

That’d be a great example. We talk all the time about people with very little hair as being bald, and yet we don’t do an inventory to confirm they have absolutely not one single hair on their head before we call them bald.

Joshua:

There’s something else on the Wikipedia page too. Peter Unger thinks the Sorites paradox can be solved by denying the existence of a heap in the first place, and A.J. Ayer repudiated that when Unger presented it to him. “If,” Ayer said, “we regard everything as being composed of atoms, and think of Unger as consisting not of cells but of the atoms which compose the cells, then a similar argument could be used to prove that Unger, so far from being non-existent, is identical with everything that there is. We have only to substitute for the premise that the subtraction of one atom from Unger’s body never makes any difference to his existence, the premise that the addition of one atom to it never makes any difference either.” In other words, he’s got a set number of atoms that make up his body, right, and adding one more atom doesn’t materially affect that it’s still him — so why can’t you successively add a whole cosmos worth of atoms to Unger’s body, and it would still be him? That’s an interesting one, because of this connection to atoms, right?

Cassius:

Absolutely. This is exactly what David Sedley is talking about in his refutation of determinism in Epicurus — Epicurus is focusing on the reality of emergent properties, not just the reality of atoms and void themselves. This is directly related to that, in that you consider the things made of atoms to be no less real than the atoms themselves are real. Simply because you can’t decide there’s a precise point at which this number of atoms creates this particular thing, that doesn’t prevent you from understanding that the thing composed of some number of atoms does exist.

Unger’s argument would lead you exactly to the Democritean position that nothing exists except atoms and void, and so everything else — everything made of atoms and void — is just an illusion, unreal. And I can get worked up even discussing that, because this is clearly a big, big problem, and Epicurus saw it, and very few people today discuss this. I give tremendous credit to David Sedley — this is why Norman DeWitt was focusing on the same issue. This is a huge problem for people who can’t reason their way out of it, who think that because there’s no God to arbitrate what the classes are, because there are no ideal forms to arbitrate the difference between a wolf and a dog, they want to throw up their hands and say there’s just no difference at all.

I really like the analogy that you’d better understand the difference between a wolf and a dog, because one of them is going to help you and the other is going to kill you. They may look very similar from a distance, but wolves and dogs are very different things — and it’s not because they partake of an ideal form of a dog, or because God made them that way. It’s because of the experience of thousands of years of change and evolution within certain animals, that moved in the direction of being a dog versus those that stayed wild. Those incremental, slight differences over huge periods of time are not just an illusion — they’re not unreal, they lead to very real consequences. You’ve got to be able to be confident in saying that’s a wolf versus that’s a dog, while at the same time acknowledging it’s a very close call at certain points of the perception. The hair structure, the body structure — over and over, you can go down the list of things in which wolves and dogs are similar, but one’s going to kill you and one’s going to help you, and you’d better know the difference, and not think it’s an illusion, that it’s all just a game, that the only thing real is atoms and void. That’s ridiculous — that’s not the point of what Epicurus was saying.

Now, Democritus we can’t be so sure of, because he was apparently going in that direction. But Epicurus sees that there is truth in the absolute nature of the atoms, but there’s also truth in what is composed of atoms. And it’s not a matter of waking up from a dream, or following the Stoic argument that, well, when you think about it, it’s absolutely impossible to be mistaken about certain things — and I have a problem with this phrasing from certain documents in our political system too, saying that certain things are “self-evident.” They’re not self-evident in many, many cases. It’s very difficult to say what’s self-evident as an absolute rule, because people perceive things in different ways. That doesn’t mean what they perceive differently is unreal — it just means they perceive things differently.

The argument Lucullus has been advancing here — that there are certain things we just know, through our cataleptic grasp, are true, and it has to be that way because we believe the universe was designed by God, and that’s the way we’re going to get comfortable with that idea — it’s all just nonsense. Epicurus saw that it’s nonsense, but he also saw that it’s necessary to actually live your life and have a confident position about knowledge. So he has his foot in both camps of some of these arguments. The Sorites argument makes a lot of sense to Epicurus, because it focuses your mind on what’s really the difference between a wolf and a dog. It’s not because God said so, and it’s not because there’s an ideal form of a dog, and you have to be comfortable being confident about that. We’re confident, day to day, in the way we actually live, but it seems that when we enter this realm of philosophical discussion we become deferential, and we want to be nice, and we want to say, “well, that’s an interesting position you have there, Mr. Lucullus — I can see why you’d think some things are self-evident, because you believe there’s a God. That’s very interesting.” Well, it can be interesting in the right circumstances, but it can also be just as deadly to you as not knowing the difference between a dog and a wolf.

Joshua:

That was all very good, Cassius. The problem is, I didn’t really set you up to go into that.

Cassius:

Joshua, how many years has it taken me to think through what Norman DeWitt said when I first read his book about the Sorites syllogism? How many weeks have we spent going through Academic Questions? How long has it taken, in my case, to understand that this Sorites question is so directly related to atomism? What is atomism, other than adding one atom to another, to another, to another, to come up with molecules, and larger bodies, and then people, and worlds, and everything else? The whole issue of atomism is directly entwined with this question of Sorites, from the perspective you just read out of the Wikipedia page. It doesn’t make any difference to you or to me if we lose one atom in our bodies at any particular time, or gain one atom at another. And yet — oh my gosh — Heraclitus might say you’re not the same person anymore because you’ve lost an atom or added one. So it becomes obvious, when you think about it from that perspective, how ridiculous it is to look at you, or me, or the world, or anything else, and say that it’s just an illusion, it doesn’t really exist, the only thing that exists is the atoms themselves. There’s no difference between Joshua versus Cassius versus Kalosyni versus anybody else, because we’re all just a cloud of atoms moving through space, and there’s no way to tell the difference between one cloud of atoms and another. So why don’t we all just stop worrying about distinguishing between clouds of atoms and realize it’s all just a dream? That’s just the most ridiculous reduction to the absurd. And yet that’s exactly the direction it appears Democritus was going in.

At some point everybody has to stop, I guess, and take a common-sense position, and realize how ridiculous it is. But if you take ideas seriously, if you take philosophy seriously, and decide it’s important to have a system of understanding about the way things work, then you’ve got to understand that there are important differences between things, and that’s not invalidated by the fact that many things are like each other. You’re not going to get the difference just by saying, “well, I can see it so clearly, because there’s just no possibility of making a mistake.” When you say that, what you really mean is, “I see now what the design of that thing is, how it came to be from the beginning of time, at the will of the Creator. I see these things now because this truth is a higher truth than what my eyes tell me at this particular moment. I have this connection to a prime mover, a God, that by immersing myself in the word and thinking about it all the time, I can just get comfortable with the idea that everything is true because this is the way it’s supposed to be.” And that’s just nonsense — nonsense because it’s based on wishful thinking about things that do not exist.

We’d love to point out that these things are nonsense. We’d love to point out the ridiculousness of religion in many different ways, and the things it leads to. But when we point out the ridiculousness of religion, we need an alternative explanation for what the truth really is. And if you decide there’s no explanation that makes any sense whatsoever — that there’s no difference between one thing and another, that everything’s just an opinion, and it’s all so close that we’re all just, again, clouds of atoms, all just living in a dream — then that’s as bad, or worse, than the religious perspective. As Epicurus said, sometimes it’s better to have a perspective that allows you to live happily, even if it may be false in some particular, than to have a perspective that condemns you to unhappiness and failure, the way this kind of skeptical reductionism does.

So you want the truth, you want happiness, you want them both — you’ve got to reject both the falseness of a divine order, and, at the same time, reject the absolute nihilism of radical skepticism. You’ve got to reject both. Cicero is giving us a great discussion here between these two extremes that are both wrong — the Stoics taking the divine-order position, and the skeptics taking the nihilist, total-nothingness position. He does occasionally bring in mention of Epicurus, thank goodness, so we know the alternative was available to them. But it’s very frustrating to know that the majority of the argument taking place today, versus two thousand years ago, is between these two sides that are so obtusely wrong about the nature of the universe and the nature of knowledge. The response was available through Epicurus then, and it’s still available to us now, but it’s going to take a lot of development, a lot of argument, and a lot of discussion to make people aware that this alternative exists.

Joshua:

You’ve said so much there, Cassius, that I think would be worth expanding across multiple episodes as a total response, but we don’t have the time for that right now. You cited David Sedley and his view that it doesn’t make sense to hyper-focus on the atoms — that we need to be aware there’s reality at both levels of existence. There’s reality at the atomic level, and there’s reality at the level of lived experience. We can make fact claims about both of these domains that can both be true, and so what we don’t want to do is make the atoms-and-void level the enemy of the perceived-reality level.

As you said, we need to come down eventually — and most people, regardless of their position, are going to come down eventually to a common-sense position on the Sorites problem. I think that’s exactly what Lucullus does in the last sentence of Section 16. We can talk about dreams — there’s this Chinese Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who has this famous story about dreaming he was a butterfly, and when he wakes from the dream, he’s troubled by the uncertainty of whether he’s Chuang Tzu dreaming he’s a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he’s Chuang Tzu.

Lucullus here talks about Ennius imagining that the face of Homer rises up in front of him, and we actually have a reference to that same passage from Ennius in Lucretius: “Ennius, he says, who first bore down from pleasant Helicon the wreath of deathless leaves, to win bright fame among the tribes of Italian peoples. And yet, despite this, Ennius sets forth, in his discourse of immortal verse, that there is besides a realm of Acheron, where neither our souls nor bodies endure, but as it were images, pale and wondrous wise. And then he tells that the form of Homer, ever green and fresh, rose to him and began to shed salt tears, and in converse to reveal the nature of things.” No doubt, in all our conversations about knowledge and perception and truth, poetry and dreams have their place — but where Lucullus ends this, in the last line, is this: “Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done in the forum.” The forum, in Roman society, is the place of business — the place you go after negotiations to seal a contract, where official things are done in the open light of day. There’s nothing more common-sense than going to the forum to handle the business of the day.

I quite like that Lucullus ends here — not that he’s really ended, obviously, we continue this in Section 17 next week — but that he comes up for air, I should say, after talking about dreams and visions and poets, and comes down to the point that nevertheless we have to get on with our lives. We have to find a way not to be derailed by these skeptical challenges, not be derailed by the Sorites syllogism, like Peter Unger, into thinking there’s no difference if our body is the size it is now or the size of the cosmos. We have to come down to a common-sense position where we can continue to live our lives.

Cassius:

Joshua, as we begin to close out for today, I’d like to take what you just said and relate it to the obvious, constant question we’re very much concerned with in Epicurean philosophy — the question of happiness — and put it again, as we did last week, back into this context of the Sorites question. How many ounces of pleasure do we have to have in order to have a happy life? How many feet of pleasure do we have to have? How many years of pleasure do we have to have? How many parts of our body have to experience what types of pleasure before we can say we’ve lived a happy life? We gloss over these questions, but the Sorites approach — which some people describe as “the devil in the details” — the details allow us to understand what it is we’re doing.

If you sit at a table and start adding up grains of sand, or coffee beans, and really focus on the question, “how many coffee beans do I have to have in order to have a heap of coffee beans,” where are you going to get that answer from? Does it come from Webster’s dictionary, where you look it up and read that a heap of coffee beans is seven and a half coffee beans? No, that’s not the truth. We all instinctively come back, at some point, to the realization that these questions have to be answered, and we need to be comfortable with the answer. Are we going to let the dictionary, or the law, tell us what a heap is? Well, in some circumstances we are — we let the government tell us what a gallon of gasoline is, we let the government specify certain things, and that’s a useful way of approaching certain issues. But on the big issues of life — death, gods, happiness — we need to drill down to the question: what is the authority? What is it that tells us whether we’re happy or not?

In Epicurean philosophy we can go straight to the Letter to Menoeceus and look at Epicurus’s approach. He’s not telling you that you have to live forty years and six months before you can be happy. He’s not telling you that you have to be married or unmarried, have children or not have children, eat certain amounts of food at certain times of day, dress a particular way, or live in a particular type of house. He’s not itemizing how much money you have to have in the bank, how many places you have to go, how many vacations you have to take. That’s not the right approach.

All of those things I’ve just mentioned do fit into a happy life, but the question is what’s the right combination and the right amount of all of them — and it’s obvious, when you think about it, that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. That doesn’t mean happiness doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean those things I mentioned aren’t components of happiness. It just means there is no God, no ideal form of happiness. We have to live our lives as human beings and understand that nature has given us the ability to understand the framework we live in. Nature has given us the ability, without a lot of logical analysis, to understand what it means to be alive versus dead, to be happy and feel pleasure versus be unhappy and feel pain. These are questions that come from nature, not from a supernatural God, or a philosopher who says, “I’ve got the key to absolute truth through geometry.”

Now, again, as we close — you made a great point that Lucullus, at the end of 16, has seemingly come back to the position that we can know the reality of things by comparing them to what we do in the forum, in the real world, and that’s the practical approach to take. But I do want to stress, I see a big problem here. We’re reading Cicero, chronicling for us, around 50 BC, the best philosophers of his time, and he’s concluding that the best arguments are made either by the Stoics, who think a God gives us all the answers, or by the skeptics, who think there are no answers to be obtained.

This is a major red flag for the future of the ancient world, because they were about to be inundated by a new religion from the East, which was going to undermine everything they believed in and wipe away both the Stoics and the skeptics. I bring that up because they were, in fact, wiped away, since their answers were so insufficient to these important questions of life that when another adversary appeared on the scene and said, “I don’t care about all your arguments about logic and reason, I’m just telling you to submit to God and you’ll live forever in heaven,” those arguments were able to overpower both the Stoics and the skeptics and wipe them away from the face of history.

I don’t think that’s a problem that ceased to exist when the Stoics and the skeptics lost their official standing in the Roman and Greek worlds. We still face the same problem today: being confident in our approach to what reality really is, and being willing to stand up for our position against opposing arguments — being willing to stand up for our own happiness in the face of people who will say you not only don’t have a right to be happy, you need to be dead. Going back to the original analogy of wolves versus dogs: wolves can look a lot like dogs, dogs can look a lot like wolves, but you’ve got to know the difference, because you want to associate with one and be as far away as possible from the other. And if you don’t have confidence in your ability to come to a conclusion about which class is which, then you’re as lost as the Stoics and the skeptics were in 50 BC, before they were swept off the face of the earth. These continue to be relevant questions today, and we’ll keep coming back to them.

So, Joshua, we finally made some progress on Section 16 this week. We’ll come back next week with Section 17. We’ll be continuing with these basic arguments for a while — I was looking at where we are, and I think this is something like our thirty-second episode on Academic Questions, and we’ve got many, many more to go, which raises the possibility that this review of Academic Questions might turn out to be one of the longest series of episodes we’ve ever done on the Lucretius Today podcast. But I think the issues being discussed are very important, and very clearly related to our understanding of Epicurus, and hearing these other people come at these same questions from what Epicurus would say are erroneous perspectives is very valuable in understanding what Epicurus thought was the right perspective.

So we’ll come back next week and continue in Section 17. In the meantime, as always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.

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.