Platonic Ideal Forms, Aristotelian Essences, And Divine Revelation Do Not Exist

Table of Contents

  • Part of the Canonics section of the outline of Epicurean philosophy. Topics: Platonic Forms, Aristotelian Essences, and Divine Revelation Do Not Exist.

    1. Platonic Forms, Aristotelian Essences, and Divine Revelation Do Not Exist

    Plato held that behind the visible world of ordinary experience there is a higher realm of eternal, unchanging "Forms" or "Ideas" -- the Form of Beauty, the Form of Justice, the Form of the Good -- and that these Forms are more real than the physical objects that imperfectly instantiate them. The result is a philosophy in which the sensory world is demoted to the status of illusion or shadow, and pure reason -- claimed to be capable of accessing the Forms directly -- is elevated above sensory experience as the judge of reality. Aristotle modified this framework but retained the notion that things have immanent "essences" that define what they truly are beneath all their observable properties. Both positions share a commitment to a reality that lies behind or beyond what the senses can directly access, knowable only through abstract reasoning.

    Epicurus rejected both. Since the sensations, anticipations, and feelings are the only reliable criteria of truth, any claim to a reality that cannot be confirmed through these faculties -- whether Platonic Forms, Aristotelian essences, or divine revelations -- falls outside the bounds of what can be known. The insistence that a "truer" reality lies elsewhere, accessible only to pure reason or to those who have received divine communication, is not a neutral philosophical position: it is one that systematically undermines confidence in the very faculties nature has given us, and it opens the door to unlimited speculation dressed up as knowledge. For Epicurus, all truth is in this world, accessible through the natural faculties we actually possess. This is one of the sharpest points of conflict between Epicureanism and both the Platonic and later Christian traditions.

    The Epicurean rejection of Forms and essences has an epistemological foundation and a physical one. Epistemologically: preconceptions (the concepts we use to understand the world) are formed through repeated sensory experience, not through rational access to a separate realm of eternal truths. The concept "man" is formed by repeatedly encountering men; it has no existence independent of those encounters. Physically: the world is atoms and void, and there is no third category of being. A "Form" of Beauty that is not composed of atoms and exists in no region of space is not a third kind of real thing: it is nothing. Saying that real beauty somehow "participates" in the Form of Beauty is saying that a real physical property of a real material compound participates in nothing -- which explains nothing.

    Quote from Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 39-40

    Moreover, the totality of things is bodies and void. That bodies exist is universally witnessed by sensation itself, by reference to which it is necessary to judge by reason what is non-evident, as I have already said above. And if there were not that which we name void and room and intangible substance, bodies would not have anywhere to be or to move through in the way in which they are seen to move. Beyond these nothing can be conceived, either by comprehensive grasp or analogically to things grasped, as fully substantial entities, and not rather spoken of as the accidents or properties of such entities. (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Lucretius 1: 329-45

    [Note: header locus corrected -- the real content below is Lucretius's "third nature" argument, Book I.420-451, not I.329-345; the same real passage in Bailey's own translation is quoted elsewhere in this file under the correct locus.]

    Now I return to the sequence of my argument. All nature, then, as it exists in itself, is made up of just two components: there are bodies, and there is void in which those bodies are situated and through which they move this way and that. That body exists as an entity in its own right is declared by our sensation, universally shared. Unless confidence in this is firmly grounded in the first instance, there will be nothing by reference to which we could establish anything about what is hidden from our view, by proceeding through reasoning. Next, if there were no room and space, which we call void, bodies could not be situated anywhere, nor could they move this way and that at all, as I showed to you a short while before. Moreover, there is nothing you could posit which is separate from all body and distinct from void, to be discovered as a third nature: for whatever exists must be something in its own right; and if it admits of touch, however slight or great, as long as it exists, it will increase the tally of body by an increment large or small and be added to its sum; but if it is intangible and unable to prevent anything from moving freely through it in any direction, then it will certainly be that which we call empty void. Further, whatever exists in its own right, will either act, or must itself be acted on when other things act, or will be such that things are able to exist and happen in it. But nothing can act or be acted on without body, nor provide room except empty void. Therefore, other than void and bodies, no third nature could be left in the tally of things, either to fall under our senses at some time, or to be grasped by anyone through reasoning of the mind. (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Lucretius 4.823-842 (Things Did Not Come Into Being For A Purpose -- Against Teleology)

    One mistake in this context, which I am determined you should shun and take precautions to avoid, is that of supposing the clear lights of the eyes to have been created in order that we might see; that it is in order that we might be able to take lengthy strides that the knees and hips can be flexed above their base of feet; and again that the forearms were jointed to the powerful upper arms, and hands supplied on either side, as our servants, in order that we could perform whatever acts were needed for living. All other explanations of this type which they offer are back to front, due to distorted reasoning. For nothing has been engendered in our body in order that we might be able to use it. It is the fact of its being engendered that creates its use. Seeing did not exist before the lights of the eyes were engendered, nor was there pleading with words before the tongue was created. Therefore they cannot have grown for the sake of their use. (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1.18-23 (tr. Long & Sedley) (Velleius Against Platonic Creation)

    Listen to no ungrounded and fictitious doctrines: no creator and builder of the world like the god from Plato's Timaeus; no prophetic hag like the Stoics' Providence, no world which is itself an animate, sentient, spherical, glowing, rotating god. These prodigies and marvels are the work of philosophers who dream, not argue. By what kind of mental vision could your Plato have envisaged that great building enterprise by which he has god construct the world? What were the building techniques, the tools, the levers, the machines, the laborers, for such an enterprise?... To crown it all, having introduced a world which was not merely born but virtually hand-made as well, he said that it would be everlasting. Do you suppose that this man had so much as sipped at the cup of natural philosophy -- that is, of the rationale of nature -- when he thinks that something with an origin can be everlasting? What compound is not capable of dissolution? (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Lucretius 5.419-431 (tr. Bailey) (No Intelligence Behind The Formation of Worlds)

    And not by design did the primary bodies of things station themselves each in their right place, guided by keen intelligence, nor indeed did they make contracts about the movements each was to perform; but because many primary bodies of things in many ways, struck with blows and carried along by their own weight from infinite time up to the present, have been accustomed to move and meet in every way and to try everything that they could produce by coming together, on this account it happens that, scattered abroad through a vast time and trying every kind of combination and motion, at length those come together which, being suddenly brought together, often become the beginnings of great things -- of earth, sea, and sky, and the generation of living creatures. (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 77 (corrected from a stated locus of "76")

    Among celestial phenomena, movement, turning, eclipse, rising, setting, and the like should not be thought to come about through the ministry and present or future arrangements of some individual who at the same time possesses the combination of total blessedness and imperishability. For trouble, concern, anger and favor are incompatible with blessedness, but have their origin in weakness, fear and dependence on neighbors. Nor should we think that beings which are at the same time conglomerations of fire possess blessedness and voluntarily take on these movements. (tr. Long & Sedley)

    Quote from Lucretius 1:449 (Only Body, Void, and Their Properties or Accidents Are Real)

    For all things that have a name, you will find either properties linked to these two things or you will see them to be their accidents. That is a property which in no case can be sundered or separated without the fatal disunion of the thing, as is weight to rocks, heat to fire, moisture to water, touch to all bodies, intangibility to the void. On the other hand, slavery, poverty, riches, liberty, war, concord, and other things by whose coming and going the nature of things abides untouched, these we are used, as is natural, to call accidents. Even so time exists not by itself, but from actual things comes a feeling, what was brought to a close in time past, then what is present now, and further what is going to be hereafter. And it must be avowed that no man feels time by itself apart from the motion or quiet rest of things. So that you may see clearly that all events from first to last do not exist, and are not by themselves like body, nor can they be spoken of in the same way as the being of the void, but rather so that you might justly call them the accidents of body and place, in which they are carried on, one and all. (Bailey)

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