Posts by Cassius

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 356 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.

We’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective, of course, and we are closing in on the end of the Stoic presentation about why and how knowledge is possible, and why the academic skeptics are incorrect in denying the possibility of knowledge. Lucullus has been going on for quite a period of time to represent the Stoic position, and we’re almost at the section where Cicero himself is going to pick up and respond to these points. So over the coming weeks we’re actually going to be going through many of the same issues that we’ve been discussing so far, but as we go forward, we’ll be hearing Cicero’s attack on the Stoic position.

And while, again, this can all seem very deep, the more you think about what is being said here, the more you understand that this is very practical and very important. It’s not just some word game. The examples that the Stoics and the Epicureans and the skeptics were using back then bring this home to us, when we’re talking about raising eggs and determining which hen they came from, or determining the difference between two twins, and whether there are identical things in the universe or not. These are realistic, practical questions, where you’re taking your thought processes to logical conclusions and testing them that way. And if your logic doesn’t survive a logical test, then it doesn’t make much sense to use it to make important decisions in your life.

So you should be confident in your approach to things, and eventually take a position on the key perspectives that these parties are representing. Because if you’re an academic skeptic, you’re going to end up concluding that “I can never be sure of anything, and I’m never going to take a position that anything is true or anything is false.” Or if you go with the Stoics, you can take the position that “I can tell some things to be true and some things to be false, and I’m going to live my life knowing that it’s important to see that difference.” And of course, that is a viewpoint that is shared with Epicurus.

But when you start diving into the question of how you determine what is true versus what is false, you’ll find that there’s a dramatic difference between the way the Stoics do it and the way the Epicureans do it. If you’re comfortable saying that you can base your truth and falsity on divine inspiration and divine creation and the inscriptions of a divine creator, then you should go with the Stoics, because their logic makes sense if that is the nature of the universe. But if you’re with Epicurus, that the universe is natural, that it was not created as a plaything of an omnipotent creator, and that both humans and all other living things are a part of nature and need to understand nature in order to live the best way possible, then you’ll go with the Epicurean position. And that has many distinctive characteristics that, once you dive into this, become very easy to see.

But it does take effort. It does take time. And it’s not self-evident until you take the time to learn what these people were arguing about, and see that not only were they no less intelligent than we are today, but in many cases they were more intelligent. They had a better understanding of ultimate issues that we just brush aside and ignore today, as if they have been resolved, when in fact they have not been resolved.

We’re not sure that we’ll finish the Stoic argument today, but we’re coming a lot closer to the end of it. When we finished last week, we were pointing out a particularly difficult passage in which Lucullus, on behalf of the Stoics, had attacked a skeptical position about the possibility of knowledge. There are different ways to interpret what’s being said here, but one way of looking at where we left off last week is that Lucullus was saying, on behalf of the Stoics, that you academic skeptics are particularly absurd when you say, “Well, we will grant to you that everything is unique. But even though that may be the case, there are many things whose appearances, whose looks, the impressions they make on you, are indistinguishable, and you can’t tell the difference. Let’s put aside whether we grant to you Stoics that everything is material and that God has put a mark on everything. Even if God has put a mark on everything, if you’re not able to see that mark, if the appearance of these things is the same to you, then those marks might as well not exist. If the appearance of what is true is identical to the appearance of what is false, then you have no way to determine the difference between them. You’re never going to be able to take the position that one is true and the other is false, and you darn well better never assent, never strongly take the position that one thing is true or one thing is false.”

That’s one way of looking at the academic attempt to undermine the Stoic position. But the Stoics come back against that with an argument that I think we’re going to see repeated as we go forward: “No matter how you argue your case, academics, if you say that it is impossible to distinguish true from false, then why are we even having this argument? If you don’t think that the position you skeptics are arguing is true, then why are you even asserting to me that I should believe it? Every argument you make, from any perspective, that I should believe one thing rather than another assumes that there’s a difference between true and false. But you keep constructing these ridiculous arguments that say there is no difference between true and false, and then continue your argument anyway. That makes no sense. It’s ridiculous. It’s destructive. It leads to nihilism, and it’s absurd.” That is ultimately the viewpoint of the Stoics on this, and as an Epicurean, I would say it is largely correct.

As we conclude the Stoic position today, we will again see references to Carneades and other skeptics who are basically twisting themselves into pretzels with this continuing problem. Should I take the position of Socrates that I don’t know anything? My gosh, if I say I don’t know anything, that means I know that I don’t know anything. That’s self-contradictory. That’s absurd. How can I get around that? And so someone like Carneades will say, “Well, I’m not even going to say that I don’t know anything. I’m just going to take no position at all on anything.” Of course, the circularity and the nonsense of that position eventually becomes clear to people, and you end up with Cicero and others arguing that probability is good enough, instead of saying something is true or false. And that’s the direction we’re going in this discussion today.

So Joshua, let me turn it over to you to summarize anything further you’d like to say about last week, and then continue on in Section 18.

Joshua:

It does seem to me, Cassius, that of the many dividing lines between these schools, one of the most relevant in this passage, and in what we’ve been reading up to this point, is the question of whether there can be true duplicates, genuinely identical objects in nature. The academic skeptics come down on the side that there are duplicates, and for that reason we can’t claim to have real knowledge, because if there are two things so identical that you can’t tell them apart, it reveals a fundamental flaw in the claim that knowledge is possible.

As we’ve said before, I think you and I both come down on the side that in Epicureanism, especially when you’re talking about the atoms themselves, we do expect to find exact duplicates. There are an infinite number of atoms, but for Epicurus there is not an infinite number of different kinds of atoms, of different shapes and configurations of atoms. There is merely an innumerable number of shapes of atoms. And if this is the case, we would certainly expect, given an infinite number of atoms, that some would be truly identical. And yet for Epicurus, this does not mean that knowledge is impossible. The Stoics, meanwhile, take the position that there can be no true duplicates, because if there were, the academic skeptics would be right and knowledge would be impossible. I didn’t expect this to be a fault line between the major schools at this time, but it turns out to be an important question.

The analogy I’ve been using is that the inability of the human eye to distinguish between very similar shades of gray, or even identical shades of gray, should not be used to invalidate our ability to detect the difference between black and white. That would be a foolish way to proceed. But that is kind of the way the academic skeptics are proceeding, and that is the argument that Lucullus feels he has to respond to. It’s a feature, once again, of the Sorites, the problem of the heap. If Cicero can convince you that there’s a problem at all in differentiating between two different shades of gray, then once he’s got his foot in the door, all he’s got to do is keep adding one thing or taking one thing away, and pretty soon he’ll convince you that you are completely befuddled and that you know nothing.

I don’t think we need to be very troubled by that, because I don’t think any of us claim to be omniscient. We don’t know everything. We can’t know everything. That doesn’t mean that we can’t know some things.

Lucullus is now going to change tack here and shift the argument he’s making against Cicero’s position. I’ve already quoted some of this in a previous episode, but it is well worth reviewing, and we haven’t actually done a deep dive on it yet. So let me read this paragraph, and then we can go into it:

“But,” says Lucullus, “that is a monstrous absurdity of yours, when you say that you follow what is probable when you are not hindered by anything from doing so. In the first place, how can you avoid being hindered, when what is false does not differ from what is true? Secondly, what judgment can be formed of what is true, when what is true is undistinguishable from what is false? From these facts there springs unavoidably epoche, that is to say, a suspension of assent” (or, as some translate it, a suspension of dogma), “for which Arcesilas is more consistent, if at least the opinions which some people entertain of Carneades are correct. For if nothing can be perceived, as they both agree in thinking, then all assent is taken away. For what is so childish as to talk of approving of what is not known?

“But even yesterday we heard that Carneades was in the habit, at times, of descending to say that a wise man would be guided by opinion, that is to say, would do wrong. To me, indeed, it is not so certain that there is anything which can be comprehended, a question which I have now spent too much time in discussing, as that a wise man is never guided by opinion, that is to say, never assents to anything which is either false or unknown.”

Let me step in here to note that when Lucullus talks about what we heard yesterday, about what Carneades was in the habit of doing or saying, “yesterday” may refer to a text that we don’t have, a text that doesn’t survive. One of the problems with the Academic Questions is that we have two versions, or revisions, and they don’t neatly correlate to one another. What we call Book Two is thought to belong to a series the rest of which does not survive. So we probably don’t have what Carneades was in the habit of saying.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, what you just referred to there about “yesterday” is exactly what I see Charles Brittain suggests in the notes to his version of the Academic Questions: that the reference is to Catulus’s discussion of his father’s skepticism in a lost book.

But as you say, we have talked about this sentence a lot, and we need to make sure we don’t pass over the question of probability, about people who, like Cicero, are going to say that they follow what is probable, and that this is a sufficient substitute for following what is true or avoiding what is false, that the probable is the right standard rather than something more certain. Lucullus starts out his refutation of that by asking how you can avoid running into a problem even with probability if you don’t think that the false differs from the true. In other words, even when people say that something is probably true or probably false, what do those phrases mean if the words “true” and “false” have no meaning? If they have nothing in their mind already that is a particular position about something, then how can they say whether that position is probably true or probably false? It’s another self-contradictory, self-refuting position that the skeptics hold.

And this gets further into what Lucullus says about Carneades. If you’re going to be consistent and say that you know nothing, you’ve got a problem, because you can’t even say that you know nothing. But these skeptics tried to chase that rabbit as far as they could, by refusing at every turn to say that anything is true or false. And Lucullus is pointing out here that if you’re going to be consistent, then just do nothing. Just say nothing. Take no positions whatsoever. Don’t even get involved in a discussion. Because what is a discussion? What is a debate? What is a search for knowledge, except something that is based on truth or falsity? It’s a search for a conclusion that can be reached.

I regularly think of a line from Diogenes of Oenoanda on this point, where Diogenes asks, “Who will seek that which he cannot find?” I remember posting that on Facebook many years ago, and someone saying, “Well, people look for things that they can’t find all the time.” But that way of looking at it misses the point. Because if you are looking for something, then you have in your mind some idea of what that something is. Even if you’re just unhappy and you’re looking to be happy, and you don’t have any more articulate definition of what it would be to be happy, you still have some idea in your mind that your current situation is unsatisfactory, that you want to improve your situation, and you have an opinion as to what would be better. You’re not just taking no position at all about what would make you happier or less happy. You have an idea about what happiness is. No matter how ambiguous it might be, no matter how uncertain you might be, if you’re looking for something, you have some notion of what that something is.

And I think that’s the essence of Lucullus’s argument here: “Don’t tell me, skeptics, that something is true or something is false, and then turn around and say that there’s no such thing as true or false. That makes no sense.” And it’s absurd, or in the wording of this particular translation, it’s a “monstrous absurdity.”

Joshua:

Yeah, we don’t have to wonder what Cicero’s response to this would be. We’ve already seen it. Lucullus has pointed out that when the academic skeptics are pushed into a corner, they just say, “What do you want us to do?” Democritus already said, “Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of a well.” And Cicero himself wrote in the Tusculan Disputations that “we alone live from hand to mouth,” that we don’t have to worry about being consistent. We just say whatever seems most probable to us at any given moment. And if what I say today is the opposite of what I say tomorrow, that’s not a problem for me, because I live from hand to mouth.

Cassius:

You know, we’ve already seen Lucullus argue that the Sorites way of arguing things is irritating and not something to be approved of, just the kind of thing that evokes the response “This is absurd.” And what you’ve just said that Cicero argues has the same taste to it. Cicero says he’s the only one who’s free. He’s the only one who lives from hand to mouth, and he can say anything he wants to. Well, then why are we even talking to such a person in the first place, who holds to nothing with consistency over time, and who is basically taking the position, “I don’t know anything myself, but you’re wrong,” to the person he’s talking to? He’s going to disagree. He’s going to shoot holes in any position, as Socrates was famed to do. He’s a contrarian to the extreme. And that does have such an irritating air to it.

We’ve made comments in the past about the treatment of Socrates, and how the city fathers of Athens were arguably justified in the sentence they gave to Socrates. He just pushed them and pushed them and pushed them, when he could have just left them alone and said, “OK, I understand, guys, you have a different opinion. My opinion is I don’t know.” Why does somebody like Socrates have to insert himself into these arguments and assert that he takes no position himself, but that your position is wrong? Always coming up with negatives, always coming up with obstacles, always talking about things that hinder someone from reaching a true conclusion, without ever presenting anything positive of his own.

We see echoes of that even in someone like Seneca, in the many passages where he asks, “How can you be so impractical? How can you be so absurd, when people are dying, when people are living in misery, attempting to do something better with their lives? Instead of giving them answers, you’re talking about mice and syllables, and whether syllables can eat cheese, and so forth. You’re following logical arguments that totally miss the point of actually living your life.” I would say that, to a large extent, that’s what this negativity, this acidic, cynical approach to knowledge leads to, and Lucullus is attacking it here in words like “monstrous absurdity” as he addresses Cicero.

Joshua:

And of course, Socrates himself would probably welcome this description of him. In the Apology, he refers to himself as a gadfly. He describes the city-state of Athens as a sluggish horse, drooping its head and drifting along. It’s not focusing, it’s not aware of what’s going on around it, and Socrates is the fly that just keeps stinging the horse. The horse tries to brush it away with its tail, but he just comes back, and he stings and he stings and he stings, and it’s irritating. And Cicero has learned the art well, because he is the same species of gadfly. It’s irritating. They know it’s irritating when they’re doing it. Socrates considers it to be a public service to be irritating in this way. What do you say to a guy like this? How do you deal with a person whose mission in life is to be a constant source of irritation to other people?

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, I always try to be careful when I say good things about the Stoics, or even in this case Cicero, because Cicero tries to plant his feet in both camps. I guess that’s part of his viewpoint, that he’s the one who’s free to do so. He will argue for the Stoics in terms of virtue and courage and wisdom and so forth when the interests of the state are in jeopardy. When he wants to summon people to living virtuously, he’ll talk as if he’s the most certain person who’s ever lived. So he himself often deviates from Socrates’s approach in his public presentations.

But the Carneades types, the others who followed Pyrrhonian skepticism to its logical conclusions, are really not the same as Cicero in that sense. These Pyrrhonian skeptics that Cicero is happy to cite at certain times are not ultimately in the same camp as Cicero. When you started today, Joshua, I noted that you made the point that the academic skeptics had come down on the side of saying that there are atoms or bodies that are identical, and that’s what we read last week, where the academic skeptics were citing Democritus. But question them for a moment about that, and the academic skeptics will be the first to admit that they don’t believe Democritus either. They’ll pull in Democritus’s argument at the moment, for purposes of arguing against a materialist. But if a materialist wants to cite Democritus for something else, they’re going to argue against Democritus. They are always taking a contrarian position.

It sounds good to want to be an inspiration to people who are, in fact, sluggish. But I know in my own experience, there’s nothing more irritating than a gnat or some other insect that is, from our perspective, contributing nothing to the world other than irritation.

Joshua:

That is where Lucullus goes in the next paragraph. He’s talking about this habit of speaking against every side and in favor of every side.

Cassius:

Yeah, let’s go forward into that. This will finish Section 18, so we can wrap these points into a single conclusion later in the episode as we come to the end of today. So yes, go ahead.

Joshua:

“There remains,” says Lucullus, “this other statement of theirs, that for the sake of discovering the truth, one ought to speak against every side, and in favour of every side. I wish then to see what they have discovered. We are not in the habit, says he, of showing that. What then is the object of all this mystery? or why do you conceal your opinion as something discreditable? In order, says he, that those who hear us may be influenced by reason rather than led by authority. What if they are influenced by both? would there be any harm in that? However, they do not conceal one of their theories, namely, that there is nothing which can be conceived. Is authority no hindrance to entertaining this opinion? It seems to me to be a great one. For who would ever have embraced so openly and undisguisedly such perverse and false principles, if there had not been such great richness of ideas and power of eloquence in Arcesilas, and, in a still greater degree, in Carneades?”

Cassius:

Joshua, I think you’ve mentioned it before. Isn’t there a story about Carneades going to Rome and giving contrary presentations? Do you remember that?

Joshua:

That is exactly on point. Yeah, that’s a good memory. Let me read from the Wikipedia page on Carneades and his life, which tells the story. In the year 155 BC, he traveled to Rome along with the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon and the Peripatetic Critolaus, as ambassadors “to deprecate the fine of 500 talents which had been imposed on the Athenians for the destruction of Oropus,” a border town between ancient Attica and Boeotia. Apparently the Athenians destroyed this town, the Romans imposed a fine of 500 talents, and these three philosophers were sent to deal with the problem. It says:

“During his stay in Rome, Carneades attracted great notice for his eloquent speeches on philosophical subjects. It was here that, in the presence of Cato the Elder, he delivered his several orations on justice. The first oration was in commendation of the virtue of Roman justice. The next day, he delivered the second oration, in which he refuted all the arguments he had made the day before. He persuasively attempted to prove that justice was inevitably problematic and not a given when it came to virtue, but merely a compact device deemed necessary for the maintenance of a well-ordered society. The oration shocked Cato. Recognizing the potential danger of Carneades’s arguments, Cato moved the Roman Senate to send Carneades back to Athens, to prevent the Roman youth from being exposed to a re-examining of Roman doctrines.”

That is well remembered, Cassius, and that is exactly on point with what we’re talking about, this habit of arguing both sides. Except that the charge Lucullus is making is that they argue both sides, but they say they’re not in the habit of revealing what they have discovered by this process.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, this is an important issue, because I certainly understand that one of the best ways to get at the truth of a situation is to hear from both sides of an argument: not only to hear facts that are alleged to support both sides, but to hear the most eloquent arguer you can find presenting each opinion in the best way possible. And so what Carneades would have done in illustrating both sides of the argument is, I would say, in itself a contribution and something to be applauded.

But the context of the overall picture is that in the end, as in a jury trial, as in a court situation, you come to a verdict. You cannot afford in life to debate things endlessly and never take a position, never move forward along a particular path and consider something to be settled. You have to do the best you can and move on.

That seems to be a continuing theme of the Epicurean criticism of Socrates. There’s a lot out there in the literature about the Epicurean position on Socrates himself, and how Socrates basically hid the ball. He would argue both sides, but never come to a conclusion of his own, never represent that one of the sides is better argued or better founded than the other.

Again, there are going to be many situations where it’s not possible to say that one argument is clearly superior. That’s what Epicurus talks about in terms of waiting when you do not have sufficient information, or, in the Stoic terms, withholding your assent. Clearly there’s agreement between the Epicureans and the Stoics that there are times when you’re not going to know the final answer, so you have to either withhold your assent or wait before committing to a particular position. This is a theme we come back to over and over: yes, that is true as to some questions. It is true as to many questions, but it is not true as to every question. As I believe you said earlier in the episode as well, there are some things that you can conclude to be true in this world, and it is important to be willing to explore where those lines are, and how you take a position when it is essential to do so.

I know there’s additional background about Cato’s reaction to Carneades and to the Greek philosophers who he thought were going to undermine the public virtue of Rome, very much as the city fathers of Athens apparently thought about Socrates. And so the Romans, Cato, Cicero, and others, ended up largely associating themselves with Stoic philosophy, and the position that virtue and courage and wisdom and so forth are things that you can take strong positions about. In fact, I don’t know of a famous Roman public figure who is associated with a Pyrrho style of skepticism. I suppose as you get into the imperial period, you’ll have all sorts of writers who become associated with criticisms of society. And criticism of society is something that Epicurus was certainly able and willing to do at the highest of levels. Yet Epicurus never took the position that knowledge is impossible. His position was, “I’m criticizing society because there are things that society is doing wrong, and they can be improved upon,” not simply being a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian and ending up at the position that nothing can be decided with confidence. I think Epicurus would be in the same camp with Cato in recognizing that this direction of skepticism is poisonous and has to be resisted.

Joshua:

We do know, of course, of a Roman-era Pyrrhonist from the late second or early third century AD. We don’t know exactly where he lived, and it’s probably the case that he wasn’t of Latin extraction, you might say; he appears to have been a Greek. That is Sextus Empiricus. The Wikipedia page quotes him on an issue somewhat relevant to what we’re talking about:

“Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is trustworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum.”

And the Wikipedia page says this view is known as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which Sextus Empiricus differentiated from academic skepticism as practiced by Carneades, which, according to Sextus, denies the possibility of knowledge altogether, something Sextus criticized as being in itself an affirmative belief. Instead, Sextus advocates simply giving up belief; in other words, suspending judgment, epoche, that Greek word from before, the withholding of assent, or suspending belief in dogma, something like that. Only by suspending judgment can we attain a state of ataraxia.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, Sextus Empiricus is an extremely important source of information, and we have not spent much time with him. We will hopefully do some of that in the future, because we have to deal with Sextus’s position that ataraxia should be the goal, and that the best way to get to ataraxia is to take no position about anything. That is in total contradiction to Epicurean views. It is not ataraxia but pleasure which is the goal for Epicurus.

So Joshua, we’re going to reach the end of today’s episode before we get into Section 19, which will be the transition to where Cicero begins speaking. But continuing with the comments made in this last paragraph about speaking on both sides of every issue: Lucullus is asking why the skeptics conceal their own position, and he says the skeptics answer, “so that those who hear us may be influenced by reason rather than by authority.”

Joshua:

What he’s saying is, “You skeptics think that you are led by reason, but actually it is the imposing authority of Carneades.” The self-serving presentation, from the point of view of the academic skeptics, is that “we are led by reason and not by authority,” in these hidden discussions where they argue both sides. I’m thinking of something like the Oxford Union debating hall, where you’ve got multiple people debating, and the practice is, “We’re not going to let it be known who argued which side, because we want people to be influenced by reason rather than authority.” And Lucullus is saying, “What if they’re influenced by both?” Even in spite of your efforts to contain this, “Is authority no hindrance to entertaining this opinion,” the opinion that nothing can be conceived? “It seems to me to be a great one. For who would ever have embraced so openly and undisguisedly such perverse and false principles, if there had not been such great richness of ideas and power of eloquence in Arcesilas, and, in a still greater degree, in Carneades?”

The idea is that the academic skeptics have not succeeded in being led only by reason and not by authority, because the authority of Carneades, the impressive and imposing orator who caused so much trouble when he went to Rome, has influenced people to cast aside what they think they know and accept his position, which is that nothing can be conceived.

I notice also that this question of authority appears in what I read a moment ago from Sextus Empiricus: “Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is trustworthy?” Who are you relying on for your opinion that your criterion of truth is trustworthy in the first place? “For no matter of dispute,” he says, “is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved.” And you get an infinite regress: for everything that you approve, you have to approve the thing by which you approved the first thing, and then you have to approve the thing by which you approved the second thing, and so on down the line. It does seem to me to be related to this question of authority. How do you know whether someone is a reliable guide to what is true and false? If you determine that they are a reliable guide, you have to have a standard by which you judge them to be a reliable guide. And how do you know that your standard for judging reliable guides is itself reliable?

And I’ll say one more thing about Lucullus’s question, “What then is the object of all this mystery?” You academic skeptics are getting together and having these arguments, playing both sides, against every side and in favor of every side, but you don’t put this stuff out there. You say you’re not in the habit of showing what you discover by this method.

It’s common in antiquity for schools of philosophy to have esoteric and exoteric teachings. The exoteric is the public teaching, and the esoteric is the private teaching, the members-only teaching. Some philosophers, like Pythagoras, go to absurd extremes in the direction of the esoteric, to the point where they didn’t even write down their ideas. Epicurus, by contrast, is incredibly open in his teaching. My point is that it’s not necessarily a problem if these academic skeptics have an esoteric element, a hidden and secret element, to what they’re doing, because that would have been customary for philosophical schools of the age. Indeed, some of the most culturally important religious ceremonies and festivals of the age were mysteries, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, where, generation after generation, the priests who conducted the mysteries were drawn exclusively from a few families, and the secret never went beyond those families. It was hidden, and everyone who was initiated into it was bound to secrecy.

Cassius:

And that turns out to be an important distinction between the way most of these other schools proceeded and, as you said, Epicurus, whose teachings were laid out plainly for everybody to understand, as opposed to those Lucullus is criticizing here when he asks, “Why do you conceal your opinion as something discreditable?”

In general, I’m seeing a similar self-refutation argument here. The academic skeptics are saying, “We argue both sides of every case so that reason, rather than authority, can be our guide.” But Lucullus is pointing out the hypocrisy of that, because in the end it’s not because of reason that people follow the absurd positions that Carneades and Arcesilaus advocated. It’s because they were really good at arguing, because they had such power of eloquence. That’s what they were really appealing to in convincing people to take the absurd position that nothing can be known. They weren’t appealing to reason. They were appealing to their own authority.

I see that Brittain has translated this sentence this way: “Who would have followed such perspicuously false and manifestly preposterous views without Arcesilaus’s mastery of arguments and force of eloquence, and Carneades’s even greater powers?” So, as I said, I’m seeing this as another effort to point out the hypocrisy of the skeptics: though they say they rely on reason rather than authority, in the end it’s the authority of Arcesilaus and Carneades that converted people to their position, which is manifestly preposterous on its face.

Joshua:

That’s true, Cassius. It’s also true that the authority, the eloquence, the Latinity of Cicero’s writing is the reason he gets taken so seriously. He has been carried forward through history on the shoulders of people who greatly admire his work, even when they disagree with what he’s saying.

The perfect example of this is St. Jerome. St. Jerome was the translator of the Vulgate version of the Bible, and, going from memory, he’s generally depicted in paintings with a rock in one hand that he uses to beat his chest, and I think there’s a lion sitting at his feet. The story goes that he was so enamored of the incredible beauty of Cicero’s Latin prose that, to be quite honest, Holy Scripture kind of paled in comparison, and he was spending more time on Cicero than on Scripture. He felt incredibly guilty about this. He writes that God came to him in a dream and asked him what the condition of his soul was. Jerome said, “I am a Christian.” And God replied, “You are not a Christian. You are a Ciceronian.” Jerome says he woke up from the dream, got rid of all of his pagan books, vowed never again to read the works of the pagans, and dedicated himself to translating the Vulgate, because he was so terrified of this trap. He was pulled strongly by Cicero and by the power of his writing, but felt that he had to give it up, again because of authority, in this case the authority on the other side.

And the rock in his hand is corporal mortification, mortifying the flesh to subdue it and more readily get the flesh to do what the spirit wants it to do. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” and all the rest.

So it’s certainly not just Carneades who is relevant to this question. Cicero himself was, as I said, carried down the ages on the backs of people who looked to him as the arbiter of good taste, the arbiter of what made Roman literature, Latin literature, worth reading and worth writing.

Cassius:

And you could certainly include Plato in that same category of people whose writing style is so strong that it carries over the finish line, so to speak, some of the most absurd ideas that could possibly exist. It’s the force and eloquence of the way it’s presented that often carries the day, even though the opposite position may in fact be closer to the truth.

Well, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion? We have just about finished Lucullus’s presentation. He is going to make a few final points next week, and then we’re going to see a transition over to Cicero. Any further thoughts today, Joshua?

Joshua:

On the subject of the authority of Cicero, Cassius, that’s exactly where we’re going, because we are very, very close to wrapping up Lucullus’s portion of the second book of the Academic Questions. Once we do so, we’re going to be moving into Cicero’s counter-argument. As is often the case when we get to this second stage, Cicero’s attempted refutation of the system, it’s not always easy for us to navigate our way through it or to deal with some of the points he’s making. But this is where it gets really interesting, when we start to deal with the counter-arguments. And as we go forward, we hope more of it will be relevant to the question of how Epicurus would respond to these questions.

Cassius:

Yes, that’s exactly right. Cicero, as we’ve said, is going to go back over these questions from his own point of view, and we will not be doing what the academic skeptics do. We are not just going to give you both sides and say it’s interesting. We are going to do our very best to unwind this from an Epicurean perspective, and present how Epicurus offered an alternative to both the academic skeptic and the Stoic positions.

With that, we’ll leave it for today. We’ll come back next week and continue. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know your comments about our presentations of Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.

"Book 2 Section 18" is Yonge's chapter numbering. In the modern numbering used by Rackham and Brittain this is §58. Brittain's note 77 (which points to 65 above) and Rackham's footnote are on this sentence.

The Three Translations

Yonge:

Quote

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

Rackham (Loeb):

Quote

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

Brittain:

Quote

Hence another view you sometimes express is also absurd—that, when impressions are stamped on our minds, you don't assert that there is no difference between the stampings themselves, but only between their 'looks' or, as it were, 'forms'. As if impressions were not judged by their 'looks'! And they won't have any credibility once the mark of true and false has been removed.

The Latin

Quote

Ut illud etiam absurdum sit quod interdum soletis dicere, cum visa in animos imprimantur, non vos id dicere, inter ipsas impressiones nihil interesse, sed inter species et quasdam formas eorum. Quasi vero non specie visa iudicentur! quae fidem nullam habebunt sublata veri et falsi nota.

Two words carry the argument:

• impressiones: the physical stamping itself. For the Stoics a phantasia (Cicero's visum) was literally a typōsis, an imprint made in the soul's ruling part, like a seal pressed into wax.
• species / formae: the look of the impression, meaning how it appears to the person who has it. Species comes from specio, "to look."

Rackham's "class-forms" is misleading. It reads species in the logical sense of genus and species, but nothing here is about classification. Brittain's "looks" or "forms" is correct, and Yonge's "appearances and forms" is close.

The Debate This Sentence Belongs To

The Stoic claim. Zeno defined the "kataleptic" (grasping) impression as one that (1) comes from what really exists, (2) is stamped in exact accord with that thing, and (3) is of such a kind that it could not come from what does not exist. The third clause is the key one. It requires a true impression to carry an internal mark (nota, Greek idiōma) that no false impression could have. That mark is what makes it a criterion of truth.

The Academic attack (Arcesilaus, then Carneades). Their main weapon was indiscernibility (aparallaxia). Twins such as the Servilii, eggs, seal impressions from one ring, dreams and madness all supposedly produce cases where a false impression is exactly like a true one. If that happens even once, clause (3) fails, and no impression certifies itself.

The Stoic reply in §§54–57. Lucullus answers in two ways:

• Nature has no two truly identical things. Every egg and every hair has its own distinguishing character. Mothers can tell their twins apart, and the poultry-keepers of Delos can tell whose hen laid which egg.
• Where the sage really cannot tell two things apart, he simply withholds assent.

What §58 Is About

At this point the Academics had a refined, defensive version of their claim, and §58 is Lucullus's answer to it. The Academics would say something like this:

Quote

"We're not claiming the imprints themselves are identical. Grant that the stamping from a real Servilius differs from the stamping from his twin, or from a dream. It differs in cause and origin, and perhaps physically. We claim only that their looks are identical. Nothing in how they present themselves to the mind tells them apart."

This is a clever concession. The Academics give up the metaphysical point that Stoic physics insists on (no two things are identical, and every impression is a different physical event). They keep the point about what can be known, which is the one that matters: the difference is undetectable from the inside.

There is a close parallel in Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians (M VII.402–410). He reports that the Academics placed indiscernibility in the impression's vividness and convincing force, not necessarily in its imprint or shape.

Lucullus's Rebuttal

He says the refinement is "absurd" because it concedes nothing useful:

1. Impressions are judged by their look (specie visa iudicantur). The mind only ever has access to how an impression appears. A difference hidden in the wax, which the perceiver can't see, is no use to anyone judging.
2. So if the Academics admit the looks can be identical, they have admitted the whole point: no mark of truth exists (sublata veri et falsi nota).
3. Without a mark of truth, impressions "have no credibility" (fidem nullam habebunt). The opening of §58 already said what follows from that: "not only knowledge but the very nature of true and false is abolished... I would confound everything" (ne confundam omnia).

In short, Lucullus says the Academics can't hide behind a difference nobody can perceive. A criterion has to work at the level of appearance. If it fails there, it fails completely.

The Two Sides in Summary

Lucullus's Position

Lucullus speaks for Antiochus of Ascalon. Antiochus called his view the "Old Academy," but on this question it is plain Zenonian Stoicism. His position:

• Knowledge is possible only if some impressions carry a mark of truth that is visible in their appearance and that no false impression can share.
• Such impressions exist, because nature never makes two truly identical things, and a trained mind can perceive the differences.
• The sage assents only to these grasping impressions. In doubtful cases, such as twins, eggs or dreams, he suspends judgment rather than err.
• An Academic who concedes "different imprints, identical looks" has conceded indiscernibility, because judgment happens only through looks. So the refinement is no defense, and the Academic position becomes self-defeating: it destroys even the distinction between true and false that the Academics need in order to talk about "the persuasive."

How This Bears on Our Material

The Stoics could be cornered here only because they made the impression itself a judgment-bearing item that has to certify itself. The Epicureans never accepted that premise. For Epicurus every sensation reports truly, and indiscernible twins pose no threat, because error lies in the opinion added afterward. That opinion gets tested through confirmation and non-contestation, not by an internal mark.

Lucullus's warning ne confundam omnia is strikingly close to Principal Doctrine 24: reject any one sensation and "you will confound all the rest." Both sides feared the same collapse. Only Epicurus avoided it without relying on a mark that the Skeptics could show to be fallible.

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 355 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But even in madness the wise man puts restraint upon himself, so far as not to approve of what is false as if it were true. And he does so often at other times, if there is by chance any heaviness or slowness in his senses, or if those things which are seen by him are rather obscure, or if he is prevented from thoroughly examining them by the shortness of the time. Although the whole of this fact, that the wise man sometimes suspends his assent, makes against you. For if there were no difference between his perceptions, he would either suspend it always or never."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

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

Joshua:

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

"But even yesterday we heard that Carneades was in the habit, at times, of descending to say that a wise man would be guided by opinion, that is to say, would do wrong. To me, indeed, it is not so certain that there is anything which can be comprehended, a question which I have now spent too much time in discussing, as that a wise man is never guided by opinion, that is to say, never assents to anything which is either false or unknown."

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

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

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

Cassius:

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

Cassius:

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

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

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

Cassius:

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

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

And the first line of the next paragraph is, "But that is a monstrous absurdity of yours, when you say that you follow what is probable when you are not hindered by anything from doing so." We'll get to all that later. But here in paragraph three we're still dealing with Lucullus's statement of his ground rules of Stoicism. And one of his ground rules is that all perceptions are true, or should be considered true, which are of such a character as those which are false cannot be.

Cassius:

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

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cassius:

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua:

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

Cassius:

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

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