Episode 338 - Are Knowledge And Wisdom Available Only To Gods?

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Welcome to Episode 338 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.

This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero’s “Academic Questions” from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato’s Academy and helps us understand Epicurus’ position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 8 of Book Two.

Our text will come from
Cicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We’ll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we’ll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Summary

Cassius and Joshua continue their review of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Book Two, Section 8, still within Lucullus’s Stoic argument. The episode opens with Lucullus’s claim that wisdom must be able to recognize itself: if you profess to know nothing, as Socrates famously did, you cannot possess wisdom. Joshua reads extensively from Plato’s Apology to show Socrates grounding all wisdom in divine authority — the Pythian Oracle declared him wisest, and he goes to his death certain it is right despite professing to know nothing. Cassius and Joshua identify the core Epicurean critique: Socrates, by locating all true wisdom in the supernatural, laid the philosophical groundwork for the Christian and Muslim teaching that human knowledge is worthless without divine confirmation, and Colotes and other Epicureans called Socrates insincere precisely on these grounds.

Lucullus then argues that desire and virtuous action require confident knowledge: a principle adapted to nature must first be laid down for wisdom to follow, and the mind cannot be moved toward something unless it first perceives that thing as true. Joshua connects this to the Republic’s image of the paltry soul of the rogue — the same faculty of mind either serves wisdom or serves vice depending on what principle guides it. The episode closes with Cassius noting that both the Stoics and Cicero himself, in the Tusculan Disputations, may be heading in the same direction as Socrates — rooting knowledge ultimately in supernatural conformity — which makes the Epicurean alternative all the more distinctive and necessary.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 338 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. What we are doing presently is going through Cicero’s Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective. What we’re doing in this series of podcasts is diving deeper into the reasons that Epicurus held, that he was confident that the conclusions that he reached about how to live life were the best possible conclusions given the information that we have available to us. Cicero’s Academic Questions is focused on this issue of confidence in knowledge and whether it can be gotten at all, what the nature of knowledge is, what it means to be wise and things like that.

Cicero focuses most of his attack on the Stoic position. Even though Cicero himself adopts the ethics of the Stoics, he focuses most of his attack on the question of knowledge, and the position that the Stoics were taking about their view of how it is possible to gain confidence and knowledge. We’re now in the middle of Book Two in which Lucullus is the speaker and he is advocating the Stoic position. But as we go through this material, we’re constantly finding things to comment about how the Stoic view differs from that of Epicurus, and of course that gives us an opportunity to explain what Epicurus’s own views were. Last week we were continuing in Section 8 and we had essentially reached the middle of that section, and at this point, the focus has turned to the argument that if you do not know anything, then you can’t really have confidence even to get out of bed in the morning. If everything is totally new to you every time you experience it, you can never make any progress in analyzing things and deciding what is the best thing to do next as opposed to the things that are not so good for you to do next.

The Stoics, of course, do not look to pleasure and pain for guidance as Epicurus does. The Stoics are looking for something else to give them confidence in the best way of life and in what they choose to pursue themselves. So this is of course a highly practical question that everybody faces. You can choose to ignore it if you like. You can choose just to say, well, I don’t care. I’m just going to do what I want to do. But if you really want to put the most intellectual horsepower into your decision making and you really want to try to make sure that your decisions will be as successful as possible, you need a theory. You need an understanding of the method that you’re going to tackle each day with, and that’s what Lucullus is talking about, where we are in the text today, the question of how to recognize how to apply wisdom itself. So just like last week, let me turn it over to Joshua to pick out where he was in his review of this section and we’ll proceed from there. Joshua,

Joshua:

As we proceed into the rest of Section 8 today, it’s worth remembering again, we are still in Lucullus’s presentation of Stoic epistemology, beginning with the sensations as he says at the first sentence of Section 7, and he’s still building up his argument as we go forward here. In the first paragraph of Section 8, he dealt with the question of how anyone can claim to know what is virtuous if they don’t have knowledge. How can you choose to do the moral thing if you don’t know what the moral thing is, and who would dare to undergo something as horrible as torture or death or loss of loved ones in choosing what they think is moral if they didn’t have knowledge that it is moral, if they didn’t have that confidence? Lucullus then ends the first paragraph in Section 8 by talking about one virtue in particular, and that virtue is wisdom.

He says, as to wisdom itself, if it be ignorant of its own character, and if it does not know whether it be wisdom or not in the first place, how is it to obtain its name of wisdom? And when he finishes with wisdom, he’s going to move into the rest of what we’re going to be talking about today, which is: how can you do anything virtuous or otherwise? How can you make any choice? How can you make any action or movement unless you have knowledge? That’s going to be what we’re going to talk about today. Before we go on though, I do want to linger for a moment on his allegation that if you have no knowledge, then you have no wisdom. If wisdom is ignorant of its own character and it does not know whether it is wisdom, how is it to obtain the name of wisdom?

Because we didn’t mention this last week, but this can be read as a direct challenge to Socrates, because Socrates famously said, all that I know is that I know nothing. And as he says in the Apology, when he is arguing before the Athenian assembly for his own life, having been charged with impiety and corrupting the youth and all the rest of it, the person he is going to summon to his defense to support his claim that he is wise is no human, but in fact the God of Delphi, Apollo himself. He says his friend Chaerephon, who was very impetuous in all his doings, went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether anyone was wiser than Socrates was, and the Pythian Prophetess answered that there was no man wiser. Now, Chaerephon is dead, but his brother who is in court today will confirm the truth of what I’m saying.

In the same defense, Socrates says, the simple truth, Athenians, is that I have nothing to do with physical speculations. He’s not interested in the nature of the universe. He’s not interested in what makes up matter and in what makes up the world we live in. And when referring to another man, Socrates says, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows something, whereas I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular I seem to have the slight advantage of him. He says, as he’s going through Greece and through the different professions and through the different classes and castes of society, trying to put the Pythian Oracle’s statement to the test — as the Pythia had said that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece — now he’s going about looking for people who are wiser than he is.

He says, at last I went to the artisans. I was conscious that I knew nothing at all and I was sure that they knew many fine things. And here I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets: because they were good workmen, they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom. And therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both. And I made answer to myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I was. And as he comes near the end of his defense, he says, this inquisition has led to my having many enemies of the worst and most dangerous kind, and has given occasion also to many calumnies, and I am called wise for my hearers

always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others. But the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise, and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing. He is not speaking of Socrates. He is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, “He, O men, is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” And so I go about the world obedient to the God and search and make inquiry into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise. And if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle, I show him that he is not wise, and my occupation quite absorbs me and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the God.

And then he tells about how the young men of the richer classes tend to gather around him, not because he is trying to corrupt the youth, but because they want to see him cross-examine these people who claim to be wise, but who he thinks he has revealed are not actually wise. And at the end he says, this is the truth and the whole truth. I have concealed nothing. I have dissembled nothing, and yet I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I’m speaking the truth? Hence has arisen the prejudice against me, and this is the reason of it, as you will find out either in this or in any future inquiry.

So it’s interesting to see the way in which Lucullus has said that if you think that you know nothing, then you cannot be wise, because wisdom must be able to recognize itself. It has to be able to recognize itself, and you have to be able to recognize it in order to have it. And so if someone like Socrates says, I know nothing — I don’t know anything at all, I don’t have the technical skill of the artisans, but I also don’t have their great ignorance which is disguised as knowledge on matters of philosophy, what I bring to the table is that I know nothing about their profession and I know nothing about philosophy and I don’t claim to know anything about either of them — Lucullus says, if that’s the case, what you have is not wisdom, because you can’t have wisdom without knowledge. In the next sentence Lucullus says, but when it doubts what is the chief and highest good, being ignorant of what everything is referred to, how can it be wisdom? These artisans who have this technical skill and who think they know something about philosophy don’t yet have knowledge of the chief and highest good, and they are ignorant of that to which everything else is referred.

How can you say they have knowledge or wisdom? This just kind of sets up where we’re going today, but it’s worth pointing out that Lucullus is staking out a position here that is going to be not just antithetical to Cicero’s own point of view, but that is also critical of really the greatest culture hero of ancient Greece, certainly of ancient Athens — Socrates, the person whose name has come down through the millennia as one of the wisest people who ever lived — and Lucullus is saying: not wise. If you don’t have knowledge, you can’t be wise.

Cassius:

Joshua, I’m glad that you went into all of that. The Epicureans were highly critical of Socrates for exactly what you’ve been pointing out. At least one Epicurean called Socrates a buffoon; Nietzsche called Socrates a clown. Socrates is saying things that cannot be taken seriously. For example, back in the Letter to Menoeceus, in addressing those people who are concerned about death, Epicurus says, and he who counsels the young man to live well, but the old man to make a good end is foolish, not merely because of the desirability of life, but also because it is the same training which teaches us to live well and to die well. And here’s the main part I wanted to quote: yet much worse still is the man who says it is good not to be born, but once born make haste to pass the gates of death. For if he says this from conviction, why does he not pass away out of life?

For it is open to him to do so if he had firmly made up his mind to this. But if he speaks in jest, his words are idle among men who cannot receive them. Now, regarding the trial of Socrates and the conviction that eventually led to him drinking the hemlock: he did not have to drink the hemlock. He did not have to submit himself to the trial. He could have avoided the entire thing in the first place, but even in the sentencing, he had the opportunity to escape if he had wanted to. Nevertheless, he goes on and on and on in his Apology about why it’s the right thing for him to do to accept the death sentence. Well, where the heck does he get the idea that he can be so certain it’s the right thing to do to accept death for the sake of being able to maintain the position that he knows nothing?

Of course, we’re discussing Epicurus, we’re discussing Lucretius, we’re discussing philosophy because we take these things seriously. What in the world is Socrates doing to say he knows nothing and yet going on and on and on about the afterlife and how his soul is going to ascend to heaven and how it’s the right thing to do to give in to the citizens of Athens and carry out their sentence? It’s just totally irreconcilable to take Socrates seriously that he knows nothing and yet think that he is the wisest man who ever lived, and he’s such a glorious figure to have submitted to the verdict of the judgment of Athens. We don’t have a lot that’s been preserved specifically about Socrates in the Epicurean texts, but we certainly have at least Colotes and others making this very argument that Socrates is insincere, and exactly as Epicurus says here in general about the other person who said that he’d rather make haste to pass the gates of death.

If you’re going to say these things, why don’t you carry out your own suicide? Because you can easily do that. If it’s so important to you to carry out the judgment of the jury of Athens, then by all means explain to us why you know that is the right thing to do and why that does not contradict everything you’ve already said about not knowing anything. And when Joshua, you read the material about the only person who’s wise is God, you could strip that right out of the pages of the New Testament or of the Quran. That’s not philosophy, that’s religion — that’s absolute deference to a supernatural being whom you have no proof actually exists. You can walk around all you like, Socrates, and say, well, you’re not interested in physics, you’re not really taking a position on anything. In fact, you’re taking a position on nothing because you know nothing.

Why should you, men of Athens, be offended or feel threatened by me, because I’m the first one who says I don’t know anything? There’s a great contradiction in listening to these words and taking them seriously and also considering Socrates to be one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, and that’s largely the conundrum that the Stoics were in, because the Stoics did value Socrates and Plato, but by the time Zeno and Chrysippus and the others were developing Stoicism, they were having to confront the fact that the seeds of this destruction had already been planted by Socrates a long time ago. You can’t listen to Socrates talk about knowing nothing without realizing that there’s a problem in taking a firm position on anything when you say that you’re the wisest man alive because you know nothing. So that’s what Lucullus is having to deal with here.

And while he’s not referring to Socrates directly in the section that we’re quoting, as Joshua has pointed out, the statements and arguments that Lucullus is making now directly reflect back on what Socrates himself had been arguing. In fact, as I bring my comments here to a conclusion, another thing we’ve pointed out regularly is that the Stoics love to talk about the great exploits of the wise men of the past whom they admire so much for their virtue. I’m not sure how well Socrates himself really fits into that pattern. Did the Stoics really take him seriously, that the most virtuous life possible is to go around telling everybody that they don’t understand anything about wisdom, that nothing but a supernatural God knows anything about wisdom? Did Socrates really work to establish or preserve the greatness of Athens that the Stoics love to praise as the ultimate example of virtue, or was Socrates basically a clown?

I’m sure we’re going to get a lot of interesting commentary from Cicero before this is over, because Cicero himself is going to take the position that all he understands is probabilities, and yet Cicero himself is more than willing to take what he considers to be strong, wise, virtuous, courageous action. But for the moment, Lucullus has brought out a very persuasive argument that if you’re going to take strong virtuous action, you need to be confident that it’s the right thing to do. And I think it’s totally legitimate for us to point out that Socrates, the supposed paragon of virtue, was laying down teachings that would totally contradict what Lucullus is saying.

Joshua:

And there is another direct reference, Cassius, in the fourth book of Lucretius, who says: again, if anyone thinks that nothing is known, he knows not whether that can be known either, since he admits that he knows nothing. Against him, then, I will refrain from joining issue — who plants himself with his head in the place of his feet. And yet, were I to grant that he knows this too, yet I would ask this one question: since he has never before seen any truth in things, whence does he know what is knowing and not knowing each in turn? What thing has begotten the concept of the true and the false? What thing has proved that the doubtful differs from the certain? And I suppose that Socrates would answer Lucretius by saying the thing that has begotten the concept of the true and the false, and the thing that has proved that the doubtful differs from the certain, is again the God, right? He’s saying that only God has this knowledge. Only Delphi’s Apollo has this knowledge. But that is Lucretius from Book Four directly on the point that we’re talking about.

Cassius:

Joshua, that’s exactly right. Socrates is setting up knowledge as something that only a supernatural being can have. If that’s the case, and if we are not supernatural beings, then the clear conclusion from that becomes that humans do not have the ability to know anything. In fact, on that particular passage from Lucretius that you quoted, I have seen commentators suggest that part of the allusion in placing your feet where your head should be is intended to reference an entertainer or someone who is an acrobat and who is basically entertaining people as opposed to teaching them wisdom. And if so, I would say that’s potentially another allegory of Socrates being a clown as opposed to being a serious philosopher, because that’s what Socrates is doing. He is turning everything upside down by saying that he knows nothing and it is impossible for anything but a God to know anything, and that has infected so much of intellectual discussion for the last 2,000 years, because now what you’ve come down to today is that ultimately what we’re supposed to do is leave every question to God, because ultimately we can’t know — but God, who is perfect wisdom, does know. That’s something that seems to me has been adopted almost completely by the modern revealed religions, who take the position that, as the New Testament says, the wisdom of man is nothing and that God takes great pleasure in confounding the wisdom of men. A very strong foundation for that orientation seems to me to exist in what Socrates was saying.

Joshua:

And the effect of a lot of this is that we are going to find ourselves probably agreeing again with Lucullus on some of what he has to say about epistemology, especially in response to the Academics, in response to people like Socrates and Plato.

Cassius:

That’s right. There clearly was a problem here that needed to be addressed, and it sounds like not only Epicurus but also the Stoics and presumably others as well, were attempting to deal with what Socrates had injected into the philosophical heart of the Greek intellectual world.

Joshua:

And so on that point, we continue with Lucullus into the next paragraph. After having said, if wisdom doubts what is the chief and highest good, being ignorant of what everything is referred to, how can it be wisdom? He says this: and that also is manifest, that it is necessary that there should be laid down in the first place a principle which wisdom may follow when it begins to act, and that principle must be adapted to nature or otherwise the desire — for that is how I translated horme, by which we are impelled to act and by which we desire what has been seen — cannot be set in motion. But that which sets anything in motion must first be seen and trusted, which cannot be the case if that which is seen cannot be distinguished from what is false. But how can the mind be moved to desire anything if it cannot be perceived whether that which is seen is adapted to nature or inconsistent with it?

So just again, like in Lucretius, we have this idea that we can infer free will from the split second between the starting gate flinging open and the horse lurching itself into forward motion, right? There’s that short gap. And for Lucretius that gap is the mind building itself up towards bodily motion. And likewise, you might say in response to that, well, that’s not free will — isn’t the horse just moving because it was struck with a blow from behind? And Lucretius says, no, because just as the horse has this ability to fling itself into motion, humans have the ability to brace themselves to withstand an impact or an impulse that would otherwise drive them into motion. So the important thing here, I think, is that Lucullus is describing desire as this kind of blow or this kind of impulse or force, the kind of force that impels us to act. And so this is interesting because this is kind of the first time in this argument that he has made this connection between the mind and the body. So far we’ve just been talking about the mind’s knowledge as an intellectual property or whatever, but now we’re moving — or at least dipping our toe — into the relationship between mind and body, so we should probably stay with that at least for a moment before moving into the final paragraph in Section 8.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, Lucullus is definitely talking about the connection between mind and body, and in a way that I might not necessarily have expected him to, because I think the premise here is when he says, for something that sets us in motion it must be something that we first see and trust, and that’s not going to be the case if we can’t distinguish true from false. In my own understanding of the Stoics, I tend to equate them as being very fatalistic and wishing to conform themselves to the will of God, which no doubt they are, but here Lucullus is clearly talking about a choice that we can decide to make or not depending upon whether we see and trust this motivational force. As you’re talking about with the horse: horses can receive blows from the whip to motivate them to go in a particular direction.

Horses can pull against a rope when they don’t want to do something that their farmer or caretaker is attempting to get them to do. They clearly have will; they can resist, they can comply with motivation, they can also choose to resist motivation, just as human beings can. Even animals seem to have the ability to do that, just like humans can. And Lucullus is arguing that the mind, in order to be moved to desire something or move in a particular direction, has to have some ability to perceive and trust that which it perceives, or else it’s not going to comply with that motivation. Again, going back to the Socrates situation: Socrates is associated in our minds with this idea that he knows nothing except that he knows nothing. Putting aside all the complexities and all the details of philosophy and the learning that we have from reading the different dialogues of Plato, that is a practical position that has come down to us — that Socrates was insisting he really did not know anything — and yet another practical understanding that we have from the life of Socrates is that he voluntarily chose to drink the hemlock and go to his death because he thought that was the right thing to do.

How do you reconcile those two positions? He was so certain it was the right thing to do that he would drink the hemlock and give in to a death sentence, at the same time that he’s arguing that he really doesn’t know anything and he really would not even know that if the gods hadn’t told him that he was the wisest person out there. So you’ve got a contradiction between skepticism and action that has to be reconciled, and Lucullus is clearly going in the direction of insisting that knowledge and trustworthiness of perception is a necessary step in order to take virtuous action. You see in this passage as well another commonality in argument between Stoics and Epicureans in referencing nature and saying that we should do these things in conformity with nature — as Lucullus says here, that principle must be adapted to nature — and he concludes the passage by referencing the mind being moved to desire anything by perceiving whether that choice is adapted to nature or inconsistent with nature.

The terminology of appealing to nature is common between both the Stoics and the Epicureans, and no doubt between many of the other philosophical schools as well, but that simply kicks the can down the road to the question of what do you mean by nature. Is nature a supernatural intelligent force directing you what to do, or is nature a non-supernatural, eternal movement of bodies through space that does not have an intelligent goal for your particular life, which requires you to understand your situation and for you to determine the best course for your life? The Stoics are right to insist that knowledge is required for action. The Stoics are right to refer to nature, but the Stoics are wrong in how they understand knowledge to come about and what they understand nature to be.

Joshua:

There is something very surprising about what Lucullus seems to be saying. He seems to be saying that if you don’t have wisdom, and if wisdom in turn doesn’t have a first principle to follow when it begins to act, the desire by which we are impelled to act and by which we desire what has been seen cannot be set in motion. I would think that for the Stoics it would be almost the opposite point of view — that you are most susceptible to receiving the impulsive force of desire when you don’t have wisdom, when you don’t know first principles. It’s precisely the people in Stoicism who claim to be, or who are claimed to be by other Stoics, wise, that these are the people who try to withstand the impulse of desire that drives them away from virtue.

Cassius:

Very good point, Joshua. The Stoics are generally opposing desire and opposing passion, and yet here he’s arguing that you can’t have desire or strong action unless you have knowledge.

Joshua:

I keep thinking of this passage from Plato’s Republic where he’s talking about the intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue. Socrates says, did you never observe this narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue, how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end? He is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness. And Socrates goes on to say that if these rogues had been in different situations in their youth, and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures such as eating and drinking, which like leaden weights were attached to them at their birth and which dragged them down and turned the vision of their souls upon the things that are below — if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them, this narrow intelligence he’s talking about flashing from the keen eye of the rogue, the very same faculty would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.

So perhaps we’ll get to a point where Lucullus comes to a conclusion very similar to Socrates, because Socrates says: whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem akin to the bodily qualities, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable, or on the other hand, hurtful and useless. I’m very curious to see how Lucullus resolves this, because he seems to be saying here that if you don’t have wisdom, and if wisdom doesn’t have a first principle consistent with nature to act by, adapted to nature, then desire cannot be set in motion. And what Socrates is saying in the Republic is the faculty is there whether you have wisdom or not. The difference is that when you don’t have wisdom, the faculty is oriented towards the things that are below.

And when you do have wisdom, the very same faculty would see the truth as keenly as you now see what your eyes are turned to. I don’t know if I’m making any sense at all there, but I’m interested in the relationship between wisdom, knowledge, and desire. Because my impression of Stoicism is that they’re saying that desire is something that we are all acted upon by, that we all feel the pressure and the impulse of desire, whether we have wisdom or not, and we’re all driven to action by desire, and that part of the goal of becoming a sage is to sort of build a fortress around your mind so that you’re no longer susceptible to this and so that you are the sole author of all of your choices. But that’s very different from what we’re reading here today.

Cassius:

Yes, it sure is different. Of course, we always hear, Joshua, that Stoicism is hard to get your mind around because it mutated and changed over the centuries and was different things to different people. I think you’re exactly right to see a contradiction or a wide divergence between what Socrates is teaching versus what either Lucullus or Cicero would interpret the right way to live to be. Both Lucullus and Cicero were interested in reason, wisdom, and knowledge working together to allow them to take action. Cicero is going to come down on the side of probability rather than on the side of kataleptic impressions like the Stoics do. But both Cicero and Lucullus are interested in a practical philosophy that allows them to take action. They weren’t spending their time like Socrates going around to everybody they could find, attempting to convince them that nobody knows anything and we must simply rely on God for all wisdom. There was an element of that apparently in Cicero and potentially in Lucullus, but what Lucullus is arguing here is going to be a formulation of knowledge and wisdom and reason that allows people to take action.

Joshua:

And also that allows people to withstand impulses that they feel they shouldn’t act upon. I mean, in fairness to both of these positions, Lucullus is not saying, well, if you don’t have wisdom you can’t be impelled to act, so that foolish people will never do anything or will never act in any way. We’re going to get into some of that next week, but the idea that in addition to wise people acting wisely, wise people can also resist the impulse that impels them to action in the first place.

Cassius:

Yeah, we’re basically still in the middle of Lucullus’s argument here. One part of it that we probably ought to stress is that clearly he’s saying that in order to do anything, that which occurs to him must appear to be true. But if those things are true, Cicero, is not the whole of reason — which is as it were the light and illumination of life — put an end to? Will you still persist in that wrongheadedness?

Joshua:

Yeah, that sentence where he says, but if those things are true, is the whole of reason — which is as it were the light and illumination of life — put an end to?

Cassius:

Rackham has that sentence. What about the total abolition of reason — life’s dayspring and source of life — that must take place if your doctrines are true? Will your school continue steadfastly in such perversity all the same? Rackham seems to think Lucullus is talking to Cicero.

Joshua:

That’s kind of what it sounds like.

Cassius:

Okay, Joshua, we’re in the midst of some very deep material here as Section 8 concludes, and we’re going to need to come back next week and bring Section 8 to a conclusion and move on to Section 9. What do you think is the takeaway point of what we’ve been discussing today? Obviously, we’ve spent a lot of time criticizing Socrates and pointing out the inconsistencies in Socrates’s position, but where do you think Lucullus is going to take this as we go from here?

Joshua:

Well, we’ve already seen Lucullus make the point that if you don’t have knowledge, or knowledge is impossible, then no one is going to be able to live the life of virtue, because you have to know what virtue is in order to act virtuously, right? You have to know what virtue is in order to risk torture and death in defense of virtue. And he further says that when we are struck by a desire or an impulsion to act, we have to first have not only wisdom, but there should also be laid down a first principle adapted to nature for wisdom to follow when we begin to act. And where we’re going next week is sort of a continuation of that: if it does not occur to a man’s mind what his duty is, he will in fact never act. He will never do anything. He will never be excited to any motion.

But if he ever is about to do anything, it is necessary that that which occurs to him must appear to him to be true — that you have to have some kind of knowledge, or you have to at least be convinced, however rightly or wrongly, that you have knowledge in order to make choices. And we still don’t know what Cicero’s response to some of this is going to be, but this is all part of Lucullus building up his case that we don’t have to speak in terms exclusively of what is probable. We can speak in terms of knowledge and we can speak in terms of wisdom, and that in fact human life demands that we do so, or we would never get on with the business of living it.

Cassius:

Joshua, a distressing thought occurs to me about how some of this might be reconciled between the Stoics and Socrates, in that I suppose arguably you could say that Socrates took the position ultimately that wisdom is simply trusting in God and looking to God to tell him what to do. And of course, we have already, I think, established very well that the Stoics take a similar viewpoint, that the universe itself is supernatural, and that ultimately what we need to do is simply bring all our opinions in conformity with the supernatural universe. So I hope we’re not going in that direction, but perhaps that’s one way that the Stoics reconcile themselves to Socrates’s apparent inconsistencies, because if Socrates is ultimately just simply looking to God for what wisdom is, then in a naturalistic kind of way, maybe that’s what the Stoics were doing as well. Any thought on that? And then we’ll close.

Joshua:

It is interesting that when Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations gives us his own view of theology and of eschatology, of the afterlife and what happens when you die, that part of his view involves, after the death of the body, the survival of the soul, which then is kind of pushed upward by the dull and dense and concrete air on the surface of the earth. It’s sort of pushed upward by buoyancy up into the more ethereal regions, closer to the heavens, and that’s where the soul ultimately will reunite with the Godhead from which it emerged, right? But before the soul reunites, it’s going to spend its time learning everything there is to know, because all the barriers to knowledge have been stripped away, and Cicero describes flying over the surface of the earth and learning things about the earth and about human life from this new perspective in the heavens.

So your fears may well be justified, Cassius, that that’s the direction that we’re going here, and that like Socrates, all three of these thinkers — Cicero, Lucullus, and Socrates — they’re all going to come to the same conclusion: that if you don’t adapt yourself to the Logos, or to the Delphic Oracle, or to the Godhead, or whatever it is — this supernatural thing that exists out there — if you don’t conform yourself to that, then you can’t have knowledge or wisdom. I always think, when we talk about this kind of thing, that it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to return to the reading of Epicurus and Lucretius and their fellow travelers, because they present such a wildly different and unique understanding of nature — a nature free of all of these disparate supernatural entities that are being described by the other philosophers, and a nature where death, when it does come, is the end and not just a new beginning into something even more tedious than the life that we’re already living in many ways. I don’t know where Cicero is going to end up in response to Lucullus here, but we’ve certainly covered ground before that suggests that where he might be going is in a very similar direction to the direction that Socrates himself went in the Apology.

Cassius:

Well, Joshua, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing and going through Academic Questions. We are digging into the details so that we can avoid simply taking people at face value and picking and choosing certain things that sound good when Socrates, or when the Stoics, say something that seems to agree with what Epicurus is saying. The problem is when you peel back the motivation and the ultimate reasoning behind it, you find something that’s very ugly and very deeply irreconcilable with Epicurus’s positions. So that’s the purpose of doing this. I think we’re succeeding in bringing some very important questions to light, and we’ll continue with that as we move into Section 9 next week. So let’s bring the episode to a conclusion. At this point, as always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean Friends forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about any of our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.