Posts by Cassius

Mako there is an article by Alexander Brown entitled "Epicurus on Truth and Falsehood" which I can upload here (or you can get on JSTOR) if you like. It focuses on the details of some commentary by Sextus Empiricus which bears on "truth." But I'm not really sure that I recommend that to you, however, as it might be more technical logic and hair-splitting than you are interested in reading. After glancing back at it I had a hard time finding a passage that jumped out at me as being a clear statement on the issue we're talking about.

I checked Dewitt and he has chapters on the Canon of Truth, and its relationship with Reason, which you probably ought to read first if you have not already. To me the best overview of the system before digging into particular details is always DeWitt.

But let us know how deeply you want to dig into that part because you may not find that necessary. I think the basics are the epistemology parts of the PD's (Bailey version):

1. We must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception, to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise, all will be full of doubt and confusion.
2. If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.
3. If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.
4. If on each occasion, instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other nearer standard when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.

Plus a pretty direct expansion of the basic physics: If the universe is matter and void, and infinite in extent and universal in time, then there is no "absolute" point of perspective from which someone can say that anything is "absolutely true." And there are no "ideal forms" against which to compare for absolute truth, and no supernatural "god" to ask either. There are only particular perceptions of particular things at particular times, generalized into summary opinions / concepts, and the "test of truth" is whether our opinions / concepts correspond faithfully to the thing we are observing at the time, as measured by the information we get from our five senses, feelings, and anticipations. And it's also important to remember that the senses / feelings / anticipations are our test for what is "real" to us at any time, regardless of whether we move to another level of generalization by calling them "true."

After thinking about this and glancing back at the Brown article, I think what I would recommend as much as anything else if you are interested in reading on this beyond DeWitt is the Appendix by Phillip De Lacey to his translation of Philodemus' "On Methods of Inference." The surviving part of the work by Philodemus is very interesting, but I would say start with the appendix on page 120. DeLacey gives a really interesting review of the development of Epicurean logic and how it relates to what came before in Greek thought. It has been a while since I read this but I remember that when I did, I thought it was excellent, especially in helping distinguish Epicurus from Plato and Aristotle.

I think we got started on this because Hiram pointed out that you probably meant "real" when you wrote "true," and that might be good enough for now. But the issue of reason and logic in the canon is pretty closely related to the same topic, and if I recall correctly the De Lacey article is a really good place to start reading if you want more.

Yes the issue I think does go more to the matter of what is "real" rather than what is "true." The senses are our key to determining what is "real," but if the "true" is defined to mean "absolutely true at all places and all times" then nothing ever gets us to that point because that is an impossible standard.

Yes Mako we need to drop back to the issue of "what is truth" and what Epicurus had to say about that, and the implications of the physics. I am not able to answer that fully now or ever, but here are some initial comments:

What is "truth"? Many people seem to think that there is an "objective" truth from which we can conclude that everyone at all places and all times will reach the same conclusion. And in fact Epicurus tells us to have confidence in many conclusions, such as that the universe is infinite and eternal, that nothing exists except matter and void, etc. And he also says that unless we can be confident of things immediately in front of us, we can have no confidence in things that are hidden.

But from that we have to think about the meaning of "truth" and what that means between different people at different times and different places, because there is no central god or central observation point from which we can stand and say "THAT is the truth of ice cream, or cats, or whatever.....

"Do any of the three letters written by Epicurus mention or explain static versus dynamic pleasures? If not, then it is not essential. How about the principle doctrines? Even so, a list of doctrines is never as clear, as a letter. If not then it is not Epicurus himself. Not essential."

<<< To me that is the key and the start of the analysis. The great majority of this k/k analysis comes from Cicero with a little added personal commentary from Diogenes Laertius, which was probably written hundreds of years later even than Cicero. We don't have anything within 200+ years of Epicurus himself that even hints that Epicurus considered a distinction between "static" and "active" to be helpful. And if Epicurus dealt with it at all, it's a safe bet that he did so only to unwind the **harm** of thinking about pleasure as static, and to refute Plato, just as Wenham and Nikolsky indicate. The letter to Menoeceus, where this k/k category would certainly have been discussed if it were significant, does not devote a word to it. Instead it says the opposite - ALL pleasure is desirable, not some pleasures intrinsically more than others, or some pleasures intrinsically for the sake of others.

The only way to read this k/k distinction into Menoeceus is to presume that "absence of pain" means a state of non-feeling, and therefore "absence of pain" means "katastematic" under a different name. That's not just wrong, but absurd, given the clear intent of the rest of the letter and many other reliable statements that pleasure is a feeling we all recognize by nature, not an "absence of" anything else. Pain is to be avoided so that we can experience pleasure, not so we can experience a state of non-feeling. Any attempt to describe the pleasures that we experience when we are living without pain is simply a list of ordinary and familiar mental and bodily pleasures.

But I will go further than to say that "it is not essential." It's not just non-essential, it is terribly harmful to a philosophy based on feeling to state or imply that a state of non-feeling is the goal of life. That is sabotage of the highest order, the kind of thing with have to expect from a master lawyer with an agenda to defeat and wipe out Epicurean philosophy - which it has very nearly succeeded in doing.

Charity in dealing with a lawyer's motives is a dangerous thing! I like many aspects of Cicero, but I agree with Norman DeWitt here too: "I do not believe he could have misrepresented the truth so successfully had he not understood it so completely."


And I think that conclusion applies to at least a significant number of the modern commentators who can see the same thing that Nikolsky, Wenham, and Gosling & Taylor see, yet who still argue that the Epicurean goal of life amounts to an absence of pleasure as that term is ordinarily understood.

Martha Nussbaum's "Therapy of Desire" is a widely known book with much commentary on the implications of Epicurean philosophy for psychology. These comments are not a review of the book and I do not intend them too be taken too negatively. However I think that a reader can more fairly assess the claims Nussbaum makes about Epicurean philosophy earlier in the book if the reader is aware of the ultimate negative conclusions she draws at the end. Here are several excerpts, mostly from the final chapters:

I am not sure how thoroughly I will be able to go through this tonight but Nussbaum seems to regularly describe herself as an Aristotelian (?)

"Here I side with the Socratics and Aristotelians..."

I do not agree that Epicurean philosophy slights development of critical thought, nor do I consider the Stoics to be superior in any way, or the Epicureans "authoritarian"

Nor do I agree that Epicurean philosophy subordinates truth and good reasoning to "therapeutic efficacy" (she presumably is referring to the goal of living pleasurably) nor would I consider the Stoics and Aristotelians superior in this department.

Certainly not a high assessment of Epicurus in this paragraph:

I reject this paragraph in totality:

Now I see why in the past so many Stoics I have run into like Nussbaum so much:

More anti-Epicurean assessment:

So Nussbaum considers Seneca "an advance of major proportions" over the Epicureans

I don't agree that Lucretius contradicts Epicurus, and I don't agree that Epicurus excluded marriage, sexual love, children, and political community

Look at fragment 113, also without wider context. Applied literally this one would be a prescription for living in a cave, and I would consider it significantly contradictory to other passages if it were not placed in context.

For example from Lucretius Book VI (Baliey):

"And so with his discourse of truthful words he purged the heart and set a limit to its desire and fear, and set forth what is the highest good, towards which we all strive, and pointed out the path, whereby along a narrow track we may strain on towards it in a straight course; he showed what there is of ill in the affairs of mortals everywhere, coming to being and flying abroad in diverse forms, be it by the chance or the force of nature, because nature had so brought it to pass; he showed from what gates it is meet to sally out against each ill, and he proved that ’tis in vain for the most part that the race of men set tossing in their hearts the gloomy billows of care."

Why would we ever strive or strain for anything, why would we ever sally out from any gate to meet any ill, if we were going to set a rule of never being occupied with much business, never tackling distasteful matters, or pushing ourselves to expand our capabilities?

So I would say this one requires gentle handling due to the lack of context.

That 112 is particularly interesting to me - I see it is a fragment not in a larger context - The latter part about not wanting to be in an occupation under the control of others makes perfect sense, but to say "the sum of happiness consists in our disposition of which we are master" is a very broad statement that probably has obvious context requirements as to the definitions of "sum" and "happiness." That would relate to the Ciceronian criticism that a man can be happy even while being roasted alive. I remember DeWitt deals with that by distinguishing happiness as being a reference to general attitude. But to equate happiness with disposition as full equivalents seems to me requires lots of caveats and definitions. I bet this is a phrase where scrutinizing the translation from the Greek would be interesting.

What I keep running into is the two extremes - some people want to define free will as "there are absolutely no limits on anything I want to do" which is obviously untrue.

Then there is "there is absolutely nothing I can choose for myself" even whether i pick salt or pepper, and that seems to me to be equally absurd.

It seems obvious to me that the common sense position is similar to what you have listed - some things are in our control, some things out,

Good breakdown Maciej. Everything in that list seems eminently sensible to me, and it is frustrating that people with other agendas seem to want to insist on definitions of "Free will" that no one in their right mind, on either side of the debate, should consider to be reasonable.

An excellent catch Maciej! The entire topic of "images" gets far too little attention in our online discussions, and it definitely relates to "free will." I think somewhere (maybe more than one place) Cicero ridicules the Epicurean treatment of images. Found one here:

CICERO TO C. CASSIUS LONGINUS (AT BRUNDISIUM), January 45 BC

I think you must be a little ashamed at this being the third letter inflicted on you before I have a page or a syllable from you. But I will not press you: I shall expect, or rather exact, a longer letter. For my part, if I had a messenger always at hand, I should write even three an hour. For somehow it makes you seem almost present when I write anything to you, and that not “by way of phantoms of images,” as your new friends express it, who hold that “mental pictures” are caused by what Catius called “spectres”—for I must remind you that Catius Insuber the Epicurean, lately dead, calls “spectres” what the famous Gargettius, and before him Democritus, used to call “images.”

Well, even if my eyes were capable of being struck by these “spectres,” because they spontaneously run in upon them at your will, I do not see how the mind can be struck. You will be obliged to explain it to me, when you return safe and sound, whether the “spectre” of you is at my command, so as to occur to me as soon as I have taken the fancy to think about you; and not only about you, who are in my heart’s core, but supposing I begin thinking about the island of Britain—will its image fly at once into my mind? But of this later on.

Maciej do you have an opinion on what Epicurus was saying about free will here? (Bailey translation):

"He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfil and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain; he laughs at (destiny), whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things. (He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity) and some by chance, and some are within our control; for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame. For, indeed, it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation. As to chance, he does not regard it as a god as most men do (for in a god’s acts there is no disorder), nor as an uncertain cause (of all things) for he does not believe that good and evil are given by chance to man for the framing of a blessed life, but that opportunities for great good and great evil are afforded by it. He therefore thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason. For it is better in a man’s actions that what is well chosen (should fail, rather than that what is ill chosen) should be successful owing to chance."

Text is here: https://archive.org/stream/Epicuru…ge/n89/mode/2up

This is a hot topic that flares up regularly. If anyone has anything to offer on this to get the ball rolling, please go ahead. Otherwise at some point I'll find a way to phrase the question so we can at least get the ball rolling. The key passages are at the end of the Letter to Menoeceus, one of more Vatican Sayings, and this from Lucretius: (Martin Ferguson Smith, the best and most recent translator, from Lucretius Book 2):

"Moreover, if all movements are invariably interlinked, if new movement arises from the old in unalterable succession, if there is no atomic swerve to initiate movement that can annul the decrees of destiny and prevent the existence of an endless chain of causation, what is the source of this free will possessed by living creatures all over the earth? What, I ask, is the source of this power of will wrested from destiny, which enables each of us to advance where pleasure leads us, and to alter our movements not at a fixed time or place, but at the direction of our own [260] minds? For undoubtedly in each case it is the individual will that gives the initial impulse to such actions and channels the movements through the limbs.

Have you not observed too that, at the very moment when the starting gates are opened,16 the horses, despite their strength and impatience, cannot burst forward as suddenly as their minds desire? The reason is that the whole mass of matter throughout the whole body must be actuated: only when the whole frame has been actuated can it respond with energy to the eagerness of the mind. So you can see that the initial movement is produced by the mind: it originates from the act of mental [270] will, and is then diffused through every part of the body."

Hiram I checked your page but didn't see a direct quote from Oinoanda that we are in control of our mental disposition. If you know of such a passage that would be relevant to the "free will" debate.

I think we are still some distance even from framing the question clearly as to what we are talking about. I think we all agree that pleasures from different activities differ from each other in many respects, yet in other respects they share similarities. If we regard there to be a single faculty of pleasure, then anything that faculty tells us is pleasurable is makes it pleasurable, even if it also has many distinct characteristics which allow us to identify it separate from other pleasures. Just like "yellow" does not exist separate and distinct from things that are yellow, "pleasure" does not exist separate and distinct from things we find pleasurable. I think we are agreed at least on that (?)

Elli when you have time would you comment on the Greek that is being translated as "condensed" in PD9?

My first reaction to that is that I would want to dig into the Greek to see how the translators come up with "condensed" as the best translation in the first place. Using the definition you suggest would certainly lead to your conclusion that pleasures are qualitatively different, but it seems to me that your definition presumes that result (cannot be properly added to themselves because they are qualitatively different), and so I would still have to question why that result should be presumed. If I could go back in time I would take up the study of ancient Greek instead of just a little Latin.

What do you take "condensed" to mean?

As you can tell in my responses I am looking to link this back to the existing context of discussion of pleasure at the time of Epicurus. I need to reread Gosling & Taylor / Greeks on Pleasure for more detail on all this. If you are aware of other good references please let me know. Time is always short but I need to assemble a list of at least the arguments that were current - I set up a forum to work on cataloging them here: Arguments Against Pleasure By Other Philosophers At The Time of Epicurus (It's going to take me years to make any progress, I'm afraid - time is so short.)

Tell me what you think, Maciej! I appreciate the opportunity to exchange ideas with you on these issues, whether or not we agree. This is a very difficult passage and I am sure I have not caught all the subtleties, and in fact I could easily be completely wrong!

"do you agree that epicurus's conclusion in pd9 is that pleasures differ?"

I better try to be very precise in understanding your question.

If you are asking "is the point of PD9 that pleasures differ" I would answer: No not really, or at least not fully. I think Epicurus held that pleasures are the same in many respects (they all feel pleasurable; all come to us through the same faculty); but certainly Epicurus would say also that we have no trouble distinguishing the difference between the pleasure of eating and the pleasure of sex.

I think we have to presume common sense always, and that Epicurus would respond as anyone would that the pleasure of sex differs in some ways from the pleasure of eating, but that there are still a great many important similarities, the most important of which is that they are reported to us as pleasures by our faculty of pleasure.

Does that respond to your question?