Episode 345 - We Can't Find True and Complete Happiness Unless We Have Knowledge Of What True and Complete Happiness Is

Listen to “Episode 345 - We Can’t Find True and Complete Happiness Unless We Have Knowledge Of What True And Complete Happiness Is” on Spreaker. Welcome to Episode 345 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 10 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

Continuing Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Cassius and Joshua open with Kelly Arenson’s Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus, using her reading of the Philebus and Republic Book Nine to trace how Plato’s opposition between being and becoming consigns ordinary bodily pleasures to an inferior, ever-changing status compared to the philosopher’s supposed access to eternal Forms. Joshua connects this to the ancient dispute between extramission and intromission theories of vision, arguing that Epicurus’s own epistemology — built on eidola streaming into the eye — embraces change as the very mechanism of perception rather than treating it as an obstacle to truth. The hosts then turn to Lucullus’s argument in Sections 10 through 13: that denying the possibility of certain knowledge destroys virtue and philosophy alike, that assent (synkatathesis) is what separates humans from animals and makes virtue possible, and finally to the Academic skeptics’ syllogism — read from the Rackham rather than the Yonge translation for clarity — that because a false presentation can always appear identical to a true one, no presentation can ever be said to be perceived with certainty. Cassius and Joshua work through the syllogism’s logic, its connection to counterfeiting and Augustine’s argument against poisoned bread, and Lucullus’s own citation of the bent oar and the iridescent neck of the dove as classic examples of sensory illusion, closing with Cassius’s reminder that what’s really at stake in this debate is whether ordinary people — not just philosophers claiming special access to eternal truth — can trust their own senses and feelings enough to live a genuinely pleasurable and happy life.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 345 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.

Today we are continuing in Cicero’s Academic Questions. We’re in Book Two, around Sections 12 and 13, and we’ll be diving back into Lucullus’s concluding statement — the Stoic who is arguing to Cicero that the skeptics are wrong in their view that we can never achieve anything more than probability, and that we can never determine what is really true and false about anything.

Before we go back into that, I have a couple of general comments I’d like to make about the significance of what we’re going through here in Academic Questions. As we go through this, I’m reminded that the arguments Cicero brings to bear on this question are all over the board — involving physics, involving epistemology, involving this issue of knowledge, but also involving ethics and issues about the chief good, and so forth, which Cicero was going to return to before we get to the end of the book.

To place that in further context, it’s important to remember that Epicurus was not just some hermit out in the desert writing whatever came to his mind. Epicurus was immersed in the controversies of philosophy in his age, in ancient Greece, at a time when Socrates, Plato, Protagoras, and many others had established certain lines of argument that everybody was familiar with — that everybody in philosophy at all knew they needed to deal with. As a result, it’s really important for people who want to understand what Epicurus was talking about to know the background of those arguments, so they can understand why Epicurus addressed certain topics and how he addressed them. We’ve discussed that a lot, going all the way back to the beginning of the podcast, and in our work on EpicureanFriends for many years we have frequently referred to authors like Norman DeWitt, who have stressed that much of Epicurean philosophy is a reaction to — an argument against — positions that had been taken previously by Plato or others.

And a book that’s recently come to my attention on the same subject is Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus by Kelly Arenson of Duquesne University. I’ll have a lot more to say about that book in coming weeks, but I’m finding it extremely helpful — she has gone through the history of the dispute between Plato and others who discussed pleasure before the time of Epicurus, and lined up their arguments alongside how Epicurus was responding to them.

In our episode last week, Joshua spent a significant amount of time pointing out issues in Plato’s Republic about knowledge that are directly relevant to what we’re discussing here in Academic Questions. In Arenson’s book, she goes through other sections of the Republic and points out how they argue against pleasure in a way that is both similar to, and in some ways different from, the arguments against pleasure Plato gives in the Philebus. There are many aspects of that we’ll cover again in the future, but one that’s directly related to what we’re talking about in Academic Questions is that Plato spends much of his time arguing against the use of the senses in determining truth. As we’ve discussed many times, Plato postulated that there are ideal Forms, and that we can have knowledge of these ideal Forms, but not true knowledge of the things right in front of us as revealed by the senses. The senses are deceptive or misleading, and any attempt to derive truth from what the senses provide us is doomed to failure, because they simply are inadequate to the task.

Joshua:

And it’s also because, in Plato’s work, the world of sense perception is the world of the cave — the world of people who take the flickering shadows cast by real objects as stand-ins for those real objects, because they don’t know what the real objects look like. The Forms work in that same way: the Forms, which exist in this realm of pure and perfect being, have emanations that exist in this world, the world of sense perception, according to Plato. But what we’re looking at is a second-rate or third-rate approximation, and one that is also immersed in a constant state of change and flux.

Cassius:

And so, if you really want to get to the truth, you have to use your mind, your wisdom, your intellect, to escape this world of sense perception and go find that realm of pure and perfect being, and go see those Forms — and there you will see the nature of the good in its truth.

Joshua, thanks for jumping in there, because what you said is exactly right, and it’s what we really need to be focusing on here. One aspect of it, particularly the one you mentioned, is change and flux. We’ve been hearing about change and flux ever since Heraclitus talked about not being able to step in the same river twice — or even once, when you take it to an extreme. This issue of flux was addressed also by Diogenes of Oenoanda in his inscription on the wall, saying that we Epicureans acknowledge that there is flux, but not that it is so fast that what is important to us is not perceptible by our senses.

The issue of change we’ve been discussing in recent weeks comes in connection with these terms being versus becoming — that becoming is a reference to change, and that change is something that’s not permanent, not eternal, not true. If you’re changing, then you don’t have truth, and what we really want, from this Platonic perspective, is truth — the ideal. So let’s look past the changing, flickering shadows on the wall to some real truth that exists outside the cave, in another world.

There’s going to be some great material in Arenson’s book that I’m going to be bringing in here in the future, but one quotation from it that applies to this — where she discusses how Plato brings this question to bear in the Philebus — is this, from page thirty of her book:

“If pleasure is a process toward health rather than an end, then it belongs to the realm of becoming rather than that of being, and so it cannot, on Plato’s view, qualify as good in itself. Clearly much is at stake for the hedonist in this dispute. Plato aims to diminish the goodness of pleasure by employing a certain description of pleasure’s nature.”

What she’s saying is that if you consider pleasure to be change — if you consider pleasure to be something totally tied to replenishing things, if you think there has to be a lack that has to be filled before you can have pleasure, that that’s all pleasure does — then you’re locking pleasure into this realm of becoming, of flux, of change, and that locks it into the realm that Plato is saying is nothing more than flickering shadows on the wall. You are being held in chains to think that that is reality, because reality that is true is outside the cave, and you have to get outside the cave, away from the sensations, before you can find what is really true in the world.

So even though we haven’t been talking completely about ethics in these discussions of Academic Questions, the whole issue of what something is, and how you know it, is related to this question of pleasure and happiness — because, again, what Arenson is pointing out is that if pleasure is something that’s in flux, up and down, constantly changing, then that takes it out of the realm of being good in itself. And that’s about as different from Epicurus’s position as you could possibly be, because Epicurus takes the position that only pleasure is good, only pleasure is desirable in itself.

So this issue of change and flux, and whether you can ever know anything with certainty or whether it can only be probable, is related to, and will often determine, the conclusions you’re going to reach about pleasure. We’ve had many discussions in the forum recently about this issue of kinetic and katastematic pleasure, which Arenson deals with at length in her book. If you conclude that kinetic pleasure is the pleasure we all recognize — eating, drinking, food, sex, music, rock and roll, things like that — and if you conclude that those are all tied to change, then that places that category of activity in an inferior position from the word go. If what you should really be concerned about in life is that which does not change, then the implication is that you should concern yourself with those things, and simply minimize any activity that takes your attention away from what does not change.

In her conclusion, Arenson comes to a different viewpoint about what kinetic and katastematic mean, as she differs from other writers who have looked at this issue, like Gosling and Taylor and Nikolsky, whom we’ve talked about in the past. She agrees with them in certain aspects, but the direction of her conclusion is that we cannot understand what Epicurus is talking about — about limits, about absence of pain, about kinetic or katastematic pleasure — unless we understand the arguments Plato had been using about change, about permanency, and about the truth being in ideal Forms rather than in the sensations. All these issues are wrapped together, and if you attempt to take one piece of the argument out of the context of the whole, you’re seriously endangering your ability to understand what the whole thing is about.

Arenson points out that in Republic Book Nine there’s a lot of discussion of Plato’s views of pleasure, and that by treating pleasure as a process of change, Plato ends up consigning the normal pleasures to an inferior status. Arenson translates Plato’s Republic 585b, discussing pleasures, as saying this:

“Which kinds do you think partake more of pure being — filling up with bread, drink, delicacies, and food in general, or the kind of filling up that is with true belief, knowledge, understanding, and, in sum, every virtue? Judge it this way: that which clings closely to what is always the same, immortal, and true, and is itself of that kind, and comes to be in something of that kind — do you think it is more, than that which clings closely to what is mortal and never the same, is itself of that kind, and comes to be in something of that kind?”

As usual, it’s a long sentence that has to be understood in context to even see where Plato is going, but the basic distinction he’s drawing — the point I’m calling attention to — is that he’s saying bread, drink, delicacies, and food are a kind of filling up that is part of change, not of pure being, and that the pure-being type of pleasure is found in true belief, knowledge, understanding, and the virtues. So there’s a deep argument going on, well before Epicurus ever came on the scene, about the nature of pleasure, and whether it involves change or does not involve change — whether there’s some higher type of pleasure above the senses and above the realm of change, the realm of becoming.

Joshua:

And it’s worth noting that Epicurus himself takes flickering streams of change and actually makes them core to his epistemology, because this is the difference between the extramission theory of vision in the ancient world and the intromission theory of vision. The extramission theory of vision, held by people like Plato and Aristotle and that school, was analogous to the idea that the eyes were doors to a lamp — when the doors were opened, the light of the lamp was cast out onto the world, and the subject could see what was out there. They had theories to account for why, if it’s a kind of light, it doesn’t light up dark rooms the person is standing in, and so on — I don’t want to go too deep into it. The point is that this theory has been totally discredited now, but it was rivaled in the ancient world by a view held by the atomists, called the intromission theory. The intromission theory wasn’t really solved until Ibn al-Haytham, who is credited with solving the problem of vision as reflections of light and so on. But for Epicurus it was emanations, films that were being cast off by the objects themselves, that flew through the air to strike the eyes, to strike the soul of the person who’s seeing the thing. It’s streaming into the person, giving them vision, rather than streaming out and giving them vision. So in the extramission theory, you could say that you’re looking out at something that is unchanging, if you could find any such thing that was visible to the eyes. But with the intromission theory, change is how the system works in the first place — if there were no change, vision would not even be possible. We’re going to have to find a way to continue to bring out that issue, and issues like that, as we go through this — and finally into Philodemus’s On Signs, or On Methods of Inference.

Cassius:

It’s very important — people need to realize that the whole atomist framework is a discussion of atoms moving through the void constantly. Plato and Aristotle, and these thinkers who are talking about ideal Forms and unchanging, immortal things, are rejecting atomism — they think atomism is bunk, and they therefore don’t approach things from the idea that everything is essentially in motion all the time, that there’s no bottom, no center of the universe at which anything can come to rest. So the reliance of Epicurus on the motion of particles through space as the basis and foundation for the senses is exactly what Lucretius talks about in Book Four of his poem at length, and it’s essential to understanding Epicurus’s whole approach to things. He’s not looking for anything immortal and eternal except the atoms themselves — only the atoms are unchanging, but everything that comes together from the atoms into bodies is constantly changing, and that’s not a demerit to bodies. It’s just a fact of nature, that’s how things work, and we’re not going to reject the way nature works — we’re going to embrace it, if we want to use nature as the standard for understanding the best way to live.

Now one more thing I’d like to add — from Arenson, which Joshua may have a better background on than I do. Continuing in the Republic, Arenson points out that Plato ends up holding that the philosopher’s pleasure outranks the profit-lover’s or the honor-lover’s or other types of lives, not because the philosopher’s pleasure feels better in any sensory aspect, but because the philosopher alone has true access to the immortal realm of ideas at which this highest pleasure is supposed to be graded. And it jumps out at me that one of the conclusions Plato reaches because of this analysis is that the philosopher-king lives seven hundred twenty-nine times more pleasantly than does the tyrant. Aronson — I’m going to quote from her rather than from Socrates directly — describes this conclusion, on page twenty-six of her book, this way:

“Socrates’s comparison of the qualitative pleasure of the kingly and tyrannical lives is so over the top as to be utterly ridiculous. In Plato’s calculation in Book Nine there is in fact no pleasure unit; Socrates arrives at 729 by first counting the tyrant’s distance from the king in the ranking of psychic constitutions, and then performing some squaring and cubing.”

That’s referring to Republic 587d and following, in Book Nine. So, again, getting back to where we are in the overall scheme of things: Epicurus was confronted with the primary philosophical position that pleasure is part of the realm of darkness we’re chained to in the cave, that as such it should not be looked upon as good in itself at all, and that our focus should be on things outside the cave — the realm of ideal Forms.

And of course — as I was just saying — that’s the issue we’re discussing in Academic Questions: what is the role of sensation in understanding what’s true and real, and what we should really be concerned about. Epicurus rejects the Platonic analysis because he rejects the idea that the sensations are lying to us, that they’re misleading us. The way he does that, as he points out, is that the sensations are always honestly reporting what it is they receive — the error is not in the senses but in the opinions we reach from processing the information the senses give us.

One last practical application of this dispute that I want to be sure to point out is this: if you take Plato’s position that only the ideal Forms count as real knowledge and truth, then happiness in anything else is available only to the person capable of contacting that realm of ideal Forms. That would mean, if it were true, that only the philosopher has the ability to live a truly happy life — everybody else is simply left with nothing but shadows on the wall, something that’s only a fraction of the pleasure that a philosopher is supposedly able to access through this logical, geometrical, abstract process of dialectic that they hold to be the source of truth. So what ends up being at stake here — when we debate whether a real person has access to the truth, whether the senses allow us access to the truth, or whether we have to be geometricians or something even worse in order to understand what the truth is — the real issue is not just whether we have access to true or false, but whether we have access to the best way of life: to true pleasure, true happiness, true health. Whether we, as normal people, are able to get the best things in life, or whether that’s totally foreclosed from us by the fact that we’re not in the same league as Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras — the type of person who thinks he can calculate pleasures seven hundred twenty-nine times over to reach something he thinks is correct.

So what’s actually at stake in the end is whether pleasure and happiness can belong to everyone, to any normal person, or only to the few — like Socrates and Plato — who allege they have some special knowledge through dialectic. Even the Stoics, as we’ve been discussing, equivocate as to whether true knowledge is even accessible to the sage — in many cases we’ve been quoting the statement that the sage is apparently as rare as the phoenix. So what we’re fighting about, when we’re fighting about knowledge, is whether the lives we can lead as regular people are the best lives possible, or whether we are simply locked in a cave forever, in an inferior world, for which we should look to these Platonist philosophers, or to religion, or to other esoteric types of knowledge, for the truth. Epicurus rejects all that, and that’s what we’re going to continue to discuss as we go through the remainder of Academic Questions.

Joshua:

Well, I know you haven’t finished Arenson’s book, and I haven’t even started it myself — so, as you told me this morning, I think we’re going to wait to go too much further into some of this in detail until we have some more clarity on where she comes out at the end of her argument. So for now, I’m happy to return to Section 13 of Academic Questions today.

In Section 10, Lucullus had said:

“Those men who affirmed that nothing can be comprehended take away, by their assertion, all these instruments or ornaments of life — or, rather, I should say, utterly overturn the whole of life and deprive the animal itself of mind, so that it is difficult to speak of their rashness as the merits of the case require.”

And by “these instruments or ornaments of life,” he is talking about sense perception — he is talking about philosophy and virtue, virtue above all, to which single thing all life is subordinate. Those who say that nothing can be comprehended are making it impossible to live according to virtue, and, for that reason, they’re making it utterly impossible to live at all, really.

He does say, at the end of Section 10:

“But others defend themselves more elegantly, who complain also that we accused them of calling everything uncertain, and they endeavored to explain how much difference there is between what is uncertain and what cannot be perceived, and to make a distinction between them. Let us then now deal with those who draw this distinction, and let us abandon as incurable and desperate those who say that everything is as uncertain as whether the number of the stars be odd or even. For they contend that there is something probable, and, as I may say, likely, and that they adopt that likelihood as a rule in steering their course of life, in making inquiries, and in conducting discussions.”

And it is into this latter category of skeptic that Cicero himself falls. Section 11 opens his treatment of this second class of skeptics with his discussion of marks, or signs — the little things by which we identify what is true and what is false, and how we perceive the difference between them, and that there is a difference in the first place.

In Section 12, which we discussed last week, he brought up this question of assent: while other sentient beings — lower orders of animals, for example — are incapable of epistemic assent, and just have to take everything they see or hear or taste or touch or smell as it is presented to them, humans fall into the category of those who possess minds capable of conferring or withholding assent when confronted with information from the senses. He says, in the last paragraph of Section 12:

“What is most important of all is that although some things may be in our power, yet they will not be in the power of that man who assents to nothing. Where then is virtue, if nothing depends on ourselves? But it is above all things absurd that vices should be in the power of the agents, and that no one should do wrong except by deliberate consent to do so, and yet that this should not be the case with virtue — all the consistency and firmness of which depends on the things which it has assented to and which it has approved. And altogether it is necessary that something should be perceived before we act, and before we assent to what is perceived. Wherefore, he who denies the existence of perception or assent puts an end to all action in life.”

And then, as we come to Section 13 for today, we’re going to see a shift away from this question of assent, toward the arguments presented by these skeptics — these “probabilists,” to coin a term — to examine the arguments advanced by those who say that while nothing is known, some things could be said to be probable. Lucullus is going to try to deal with them in advance, before Cicero, around Section 20, responds in full detail to all of the points Lucullus is making now. So that’s where we are as we go into Section 13 for today.

Okay, now, for clarity’s sake, we are going to be reading today from the Rackham translation — this is the Loeb edition. Typically we read from the Yonge translation, but there’s a very tricky and important sentence that Yonge seems to translate rather poorly — or perhaps it’s just formatted poorly, I can’t really tell — but that’s what we’re doing today. So, in Section 13, Lucullus says this:

“Now let us examine the arguments usually advanced by this school on the other side. But before that — this is an opportunity for you to learn the foundations of their whole system. Well, they begin by constructing, as we have rendered the term, a ‘science of presentations,’ and defined their nature and classes, and in particular the nature of that which can be perceived and grasped, at greater length than the Stoics. They then set out the two propositions that hold together the whole of this investigation. The first proposition: when certain objects present an appearance of such a kind that other objects also could present the same appearance, without there being any difference between these presentations, it is impossible that the one set of objects should be capable of being perceived and the other set not capable. But this is the second principle: not only in a case in which they are alike in every particular is there no difference between them, but also in a case in which they cannot be distinguished. Having set out these propositions, they compress the whole issue within a single syllogistic argument. This argument is constructed as follows: some presentations are true, others are false. What is false cannot be perceived. But the true presentation is invariably of such a sort that a false presentation also could be of exactly the same sort, and among presentations of such a sort that there is no difference between them, it cannot occur that some are capable of being perceived and others are not. Therefore — and this is the conclusion of the argument — there is no presentation that is capable of being perceived.”

Okay, so that’s the central argument. Lucullus is about to talk about the premises required to build that argument, but before we go to that — in the Rackham version of this text, there’s a footnote on page 518 of the Loeb edition that attempts, for the layman like me, to explain this rather difficult argument. Let me read that:

Two objects entirely alike, A and A′, present the same appearance, a. But two objects only superficially alike — though not really alike entirely, and indistinguishable by the senses — present X. And why? Both present the same appearance, x. We may have the presentation x and think it comes from X when it really comes from Y, X not being there — in this case we do not perceive X. So when we have the presentation x and think that it comes from X, and X is not there, we cannot be said to perceive X. If perception is impossible…

I should clarify that X and Y in that example are capitalized, but the appearance of x is lowercase, which I think is easier to understand if you look at it visually. But that’s the core of the argument.

Cassius:

Joshua, if that’s the core of the argument, it’s about as clear as mud to me. Do you see an essential point here that’s being asserted, other than that no perception is ultimately reliable?

Joshua:

Well, let’s work through it and see what we can pull out of it, because some of it is probably worth talking about, and it’s going to be important as we go through the text. Another feature of having switched from the Yonge version of the text to the Rackham version is that Rackham tries to be very clear about a distinction that was entirely invisible to me, Cassius, until you pointed out this vocabulary question. As we’ve gone through this, it’s become clear that when we use the word “present” or “presentation” in this Rackham version of the text, this is not a synonym of perception.

He says, as the first principle: when certain objects present an appearance of such a kind that other objects also could present the same appearance, without there being any difference between these presentations, it is impossible that the one set of objects should be capable of being perceived and the other not. So there’s a distinction here: if I’m looking at an object and it’s presenting an appearance, I am perceiving the appearance of that object. And if you have two such objects, alike in every particular, producing the same appearance, it would be impossible to say that one of them can be perceived while the other cannot, because they present the same face.

Here’s the thing: you can have a case where two objects present the same appearance and they are the same — they have the same reality. But you can also have a case where two objects present the same appearance and they don’t have the same reality. In either case, you could say that the appearance of both of them is capable of being perceived, or that the appearance of both of them is not capable of being perceived. What you can’t say is that the appearance of just one of them is capable of being perceived and the appearance of the other is not. That’s true for both groups — I think this is going to be important when we get to the syllogism.

Cassius:

Yeah — and isn’t this directed at the issue that the Stoics are saying, that there’s a type of impression that cannot be otherwise but true?

Joshua:

That’s exactly right — we talked about that in Sections 11 and 12, last week and the week before.

Cassius:

You would expect two things that are the same to present the same impression, and you would be right. But you cannot eliminate the fact that something that is different may present the very same impression — and in that case, if you accept that impression, you’re wrong.

Joshua:

Exactly, yeah — and this brings up interesting problems related to counterfeiting, for example. I think it was Thomas Aquinas who said that the Church cannot tolerate the spread of false ideas for the same reason that the state cannot tolerate the spread of counterfeit currency — though he was partially riffing on something Saint Augustine had said: that the Church cannot tolerate the spread of false ideas for the same reason the state cannot tolerate the sale of poisoned bread. You can’t allow this kind of harm to come to people. People have to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is false. But, of course, the skeptic position is that you can’t distinguish between what is true and what is false, and this syllogism is in service of that position. Let me go over the syllogism one more time, just so we’re clear what we’re talking about:

“Some presentations are true, others are false — so when an object presents an appearance, some of those appearances are true, others are false. What is false cannot be perceived. But a true presentation is invariably of such a sort that a false presentation also could be of exactly the same sort, and among presentations of such a sort that there is no difference between them, it cannot occur that some are capable of being perceived and others are not. Therefore, there is no presentation that is capable of being perceived.”

This is the process by which they attempt to prove not only that a given appearance, or given representation, cannot be perceived, or cannot be thought to correspond to a reality out there — this is the syllogism they use to undermine the whole project of epistemology, saying that no presentation is capable of being perceived.

Cassius:

In our everyday Epicurean terminology, that means no sensation we ever receive can be trusted.

Joshua:

I think that’s right — I think that’s where they’re going here.

Cassius:

Which Epicurus handles by saying: you’re wrong — there’s not a question of truth in the senses at all. All sensations are honest and have to be accepted, and we’re going to build our opinion about what is true and false on our analysis of the sensations. We’re not going to get rid of them and say that they’re lying to us — that’s the Epicurean position on it. The Stoics are going to say: well, no, no, no, I’m not going to take the position that all sensations are reported honestly — I’m just going to say that some perceptions are so clear that they cannot be otherwise but true.

Joshua:

Yeah, it’s very important to remember that all the way back in Section 7 — I think it was — of Book Two of Academic Questions, Lucullus started with sensation, and then he said something to the effect that he was not, like Epicurus, going to give an answer for every edge case, every illusion, or every possible problem with sensation the way Epicurus feels the need to do — that Lucullus is only concerned with some sensations, only concerned with some appearances. The exact quote — he says in Section 7:

“While speaking on this topic, I need to reply to the illustration drawn from the bent oar and the neck of the dove. For I am not a man to say that everything which seems is exactly of that character of which it seems to be. Epicurus may deal with this idea, and with many others, but in my opinion there is the very greatest truth in the senses, if they are in sound and healthy order, and if everything is removed which could impede or hinder them.”

And he goes on to say throughout this that some sense perceptions are so clear that the object perceived cannot be otherwise than truly represented — the kataleptic perception.

Cassius:

Joshua, that may be the place where we need to think about coming to an end for today’s episode. This is extremely complicated material, but — back to where we started the podcast today — it’s extremely complicated but extremely important, because this is not just tea-party debate about something that makes no difference. This is debate about whether the senses, including feelings of pleasure and pain, can ever be trusted. If you can’t trust your feelings, your senses, the things you have access to through nature, then you are forever trapped in this cave — which these guys are going to tell you they have the ability to get you out of. You should listen to them about how to live your life, because as long as you’re just chained inside this darkness, feeling around with no ability to determine what’s true and what’s false, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s truly pleasurable or truly painful, they’re keeping you locked in darkness through this kind of word game about whether reality can really be perceived or not.

So let’s go ahead and close for the day. I know you probably have some final thoughts to bring it all together — so what do you think, where do we end up for today?

Joshua:

Unfortunately, where we end up is in the middle of the section, which we’ve tried to avoid up to this point. At least in the reading, as we go through it, this has been a very complex and difficult portion, and I cannot overemphasize the poor job Yonge does with this passage — that’s where we started, and it was completely indecipherable, so thankfully we switched to Rackham to help us through this. But I think it’s just going to take time to understand the argument being made, and it’s going to take time also to formulate a response to it, because next week we’re going to be talking about what Lucullus identifies as the underlying premises of the syllogism. That’s going to present an opportunity to better understand some of what’s happening here, and how we can respond to it.

Cassius:

I think you’re right — it’s interesting that we are still, and will be for a while, in this Stoic section, in which the Stoics are actually attempting to defend the possibility of knowledge and the possibility of concluding right from wrong, which Epicurus would to some extent at least agree with. So the arguments we’re going to be seeing over the next several weeks are at least somewhat on the same side as the Epicurean position. Hopefully, between Rackham, Yonge, and perhaps other sources we can come up with, we can get more of a grasp on this, because it’s important to understand the arguments, and maybe more important to understand the conclusions and implications. We’ll do our best to bring those out over the next several weeks as we go through this.

As you say, unfortunately we’re out of time for today. As always, we invite everyone to drop by the EpicureanFriends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. We’ll be back next week and continue where we’ll be discussing Section 13. Thanks for listening today. We’ll be back again soon to do that. See you then. Bye.