Episode 346 - Epicurean Defense of The Senses Against Plato's Cave Analogy

Listen to “Episode 346 - Epicurean Defense Of The Senses Against Plato’s Cave Analogy” on Spreaker.

Welcome to Episode 346 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 13 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 Section 13 of Book Two of Cicero’s Academic Questions, Joshua traces the syllogism under discussion back to Arcesilaus by returning to Book One, Section 12, where Cicero and Varro debate the legacy of Zeno’s cataleptic grasp and the “canon” or gnomon as a measuring rod of knowledge. Joshua reads testimonia from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Plutarch’s Against Colotes establishing Arcesilaus as the originator of the New Academy’s attack on Stoic certainty, along with Aristo of Chios’s quip that Arcesilaus’s philosophy had “the head of Plato, the tail of Pyrrho, and the midsection of Diodorus.” The hosts then work through the skeptics’ four axioms — that some perceptions are false, that a false presentation cannot be perceived, that one cannot consistently accept some presentations as true while rejecting others as false, and that every true presentation has an indistinguishable false counterpart — reading from Rackham rather than Yonge for clarity. Cassius connects this back to Lucretius’s square tower that appears round from a distance and the bent oar, explaining that error belongs to the mind’s assembly of a pattern from repeated sensations (prolepsis), never to the senses themselves, and that the Stoic search for a “cataleptic” criterion to sort true from false sensations is therefore self-defeating. Joshua closes the epistemological argument with an extended bar-magnet analogy contrasting Plato (truth located entirely outside the cave), Arcesilaus and the skeptics (both true and false located within sense perception, with no reliable way to sift them), and Epicurus (the senses as neutral witnesses, with judgment belonging to the mind alone). The episode ends with a broader reflection on Plato’s cave as a dangerously seductive image that can feed messiah complexes and conspiratorial thinking, and Cassius’s closing reminder that Epicurus offers no perfect answers or supernatural escape from reality — only the recognition that some paths, judged by pleasure, are genuinely better than others.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to episode 346 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’re continuing in our series reviewing Academic Questions from an Epicurean perspective, and we’re going to follow up on what we discussed last week, which I ended up titling the episode “We Can’t Find True and Complete Happiness Unless We Have Knowledge of What True and Complete Happiness Is.” This is a continuing issue in the question of knowledge in the first place. How do you know that you’ve found something? How do you know what something is if you’ve had no previous experience with that thing? Unless you have a definition, an understanding, an example to go by, how can you be confident? How can you be certain that what you’re looking for actually exists, and that what you’re looking for is something that you’ve found? How can you analyze whether happiness or virtue or piety is the proper goal in life if you don’t know what happiness, piety, or virtue is? How can you decide whether a life of happiness is a life of pleasure, as the Epicureans say, if you don’t have some understanding of what pleasure is?

And the Epicurean approach to all of these questions is always going to be going back to nature and to the information given to us by the senses in order to build a foundation for understanding the answer to these questions. Just as Epicurus said, snow is white, honey is sweet. Those things are provided to us by the senses in a way that does not require logical proof to establish. Analysis about what does snow mean, what does white mean — all of those things, the construction of words, will require some degree of logical analysis and reason in order to be able to communicate with other people. But ultimately, what we understand “snow is white” to mean is something that our senses provide to us. We can use all sorts of different words to convey those conclusions in different languages, but unless we have the evidence of the senses, we can’t really understand what it means to say that snow is white or honey is sweet. Ultimately, we have to connect those sentences back to a reality that we can be certain of. And it is a core, fundamental, bedrock principle in Epicurean philosophy that there is nothing of greater certainty than the senses. This is argued at length in Book Four of Lucretius.

Now, we’re in the middle of a detailed argument between Lucullus, who is representing the Stoic position, and Cicero, who appears several paragraphs later to attack the Stoic position. Cicero is widely identified with being a Stoic, but on the issue of knowledge, and whether it’s possible to get it or not, Cicero was not a Stoic. Cicero was a skeptic, and while not a radical skeptic, he was of the type of skepticism that says that nothing can be more than merely probable — that we don’t have the ability, and should not search for anything that we consider to be certain. It’s sufficient to act in life if we can find probabilities. The Stoics rejected that view entirely, and Lucullus is arguing strongly against it here to Cicero.

And so it’s also important to remember that the Stoics are somewhat on the same side as the Epicureans in terms of the possibility of finding knowledge. I think they would probably agree with the statement that you can’t have virtue unless you know what virtue is — that’s what’s been argued for weeks in the material we’ve been going through here. But there’s a major problem here, in that the Stoics believe that the senses are not ultimately the way you can determine what truth is. The Stoics support the senses, and we’ve seen lots of commendation of the senses here in this material through Lucullus. But there’s a fatal flaw in the Stoic position, in that the Stoics take the position that some sensations can be false, which puts them in the position of having to go to some other standard to determine whether a sensation is actually true or false.

That can be a very attractive position, because people are drawn to the idea that illusions are something we see every day. Oars submerged in water can appear to be bent — so doesn’t that mean that the senses are wrong when it looks like the oar is bent? Epicurus is telling us not to go down that road, because it is not in the eyes that we form the incorrect opinion that the oar is bent. It is in the mind. The eyes are simply reporting to the mind what they perceive. If there is an error in construing what we perceive, it is in the mind, which is going to correct the error — not by going outside for some other standard of truth, but by looking to additional sensations from additional perspectives, additional times, additional people, and using the senses themselves to produce the correct opinion.

The Stoics have not been clear about where they’re going exactly in the material we’ve read so far. They’ve hinted at it, and we’re going to hear some more before Lucullus finishes. But the bottom line is that the Stoics are giving in to the idea that some sensations can be false. That contradicts the Epicurean position, which says all sensations are true. The Stoics are trying to say that only some sensations are true, and if you take that position, you’re going to have to go to some other source of evaluation to determine which are true and which are false.

So that’s the basic lay of the land at this point. We started Section 13 last week, and we found that it’s complicated and unfamiliar territory that’s going to take some time for us to really begin to understand. For right now, we are listening to Lucullus insist that the skeptics are wrong in doubting the possibility of knowledge. As Joshua always does, I’m sure he’s going to have a framework for us to tackle where we are in Section 13. So at this point, let me turn it over to Joshua, and then we’ll proceed from there.

Joshua:

One way, Cassius, we can figure out where we are is to go back to Book One of Academic Questions and look at Section 12 of Book One. This is where the first book of Academic Questions abruptly stops and where Cicero starts to kind of reinvent his project. It’s not entirely clear where he was going, because this is a very muddled text, due to the rewritings and editings and so on. But in Section 12 of Book One, we have a brief exchange between Cicero and Varro on the subject of the work of Arcesilaus and the new academy in bringing skepticism to the forefront of the Academy — which was never the case with Plato in his original Academy. In the New Academy, by contrast, skepticism was at the absolute forefront.

In Section 12, it’s actually Cicero who starts, in response to Varro’s presentation. In Section 11, Varro had described the innovations of Zeno — Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. He had described Zeno’s articulation of the cataleptic grasp: that on the strength of the credibility of the grasp, the senses were deemed trustworthy, because he held that a grasp achieved by the senses was both true and trustworthy — not because it grasped all the properties of the thing, but because it let go of nothing that was capable of being its object, and because nature had bestowed, as it were, a measuring rod of knowledge and a first principle. This, of course, is the word “canon” — or another word presented here in the footnote is “gnomon,” in Greek. The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts the sun’s shadow as a marker; wherever the shadow falls on the dial, that shows you what the time of day is. The words are canon or gnomon: a measuring rod of knowledge and a first principle of itself, from which subsequently notions of things could be impressed upon the mind — out of which not first principles only, but certain broader roads to the discovery of reasoned truth, were opened up. On the other hand, error, rashness, ignorance, opinion, suspicion, and in a word all the things alien to firm and steady assent, Zeno set apart from virtue and wisdom. And it is on these points, more or less, that all of Zeno’s departure and disagreement from the doctrine of his predecessors turned.

He is saying this on the grounds that Zeno himself is coming out of the tradition of the Academy — the same Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian group. He’s coming out of that, forging off ahead on his own. And these are the key points of his disagreement: that there is this cataleptic grasp, that the senses are trustworthy, creditable, reliable — all things that the skeptics who had taken over the Academy rejected. Now, that’s the end of Section 11. That’s the end of Varro’s long presentation of the change of the Academy over time.

Section 12: Cicero responds. He says, “When Varro had said this, I remarked: ‘You have certainly given a short and very lucid exposition of the theory both of the old academy and of the Stoics, so I think it to be true, as our friend Antiochus used to hold, that the Stoic theory should be deemed a correction of the old academy rather than actually a new system.’” “‘It is now your role,’ rejoined Varro, ‘as a seceder from the theory of the older period and a supporter of the innovations of Arcesilaus, to explain the nature and reason of the rupture that took place, so as to enable us to see whether the secession was fully justified.’”

Now, I can’t quite figure out why the spelling Arcesilas is used in this text, but I want to be clear: this is Arcesilaus. This is the founder of academic skepticism, and according to Wikipedia, what is variously called the second, or middle, or New Academy — a phase of Plato’s Academy in which it embraced philosophical skepticism. So Arcesilas and Arcesilaus are the same person, as far as I can tell. And I’m not sure why — but it’s even true in the Latin text of Cicero that he calls him Arcesilas.

But anyway, Cicero replies to that. He says, “It was entirely with Zeno” — it was entirely with the founder of Stoicism. “So we have been told that Arcesilaus set on foot his battle, not from obstinacy or desire for victory, as it seems to me at all events, but because of the obscurity of the facts that had led Socrates to a confession of ignorance, as also previously his predecessors, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the old philosophers, who utterly denied all possibility of cognition or perception or knowledge, and maintained that the senses are limited, the mind feeble, the span of life short, and that truth, in Democritus’s phrase, is sunk in an abyss. Opinion and custom are all-prevailing. No place is left for truth. All things successively are wrapped in darkness. Accordingly, Arcesilaus said that there is nothing that can be known — not even the residuum of knowledge that Socrates had left himself, the truth of this very dictum. In other words, we do not even know that nothing can be known.”

All right, now I’m quoting all of this from Section 12 of Book One to point out that this rupture, so-called, that takes place between Zeno and the old academy sets the stage for Arcesilaus’s conflict, as the leader of the New Academy, with Zeno and Stoicism. And the syllogism that we read last week in Section 13 of Book Two of Academic Questions — this syllogism is attributed to Arcesilaus. That’s why I’ve gone back to Book One and set all this up, because when I look at the Wikipedia page for Arcesilaus, it says that Zeno of Citium and the other Stoics were his chief opponents, that he attacked their dogma of the cataleptic grasp, or a convincing conception understood to be a mean between episteme (knowledge) and doxa (opinion). He argued that this mean could not exist — it involved a contradiction in terms, as the very idea of phantasia implied the possibility of false as well as true conceptions of the same object. As such, it was merely the interpolation of a name.

And what we’re dealing with in this syllogism is precisely that argument, because in the syllogism we’ve been presented with two objects entirely alike, which present the same appearance, and we’ve contrasted that with two objects that are only superficially alike — that, not being entirely alike, are nevertheless indistinguishable by the senses. This is that whole problem of false as well as true conceptions of the same object, I think, that is being described on the Wikipedia page. What I’m saying is that this whole syllogism is referred back to Arcesilaus, and there are many other resources that point the same way.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, says this: “Arcesilaus argued against the possibility of there being any sense impressions which we could not be mistaken about. In doing so, he paved the way for future academic attacks against Stoicism.” To summarize the attack: for any sense impression S, received by some observer A of some existing object O, and which is a precise representation of O, we can imagine the circumstance in which there is another sense impression which comes either from something other than O, or from something non-existent, and which is such that this second sense impression is indistinguishable from S to A. In other words, it’s indistinguishable from the first sense impression to the observer — the observer cannot tell these two sense impressions apart. The first possibility is illustrated by cases of indistinguishable twins, eggs, or imprints of wax made by the same ring. And we’re going to get into all of this as we go further in the text.

But the key point, again, is that all of this originates with Arcesilaus. I don’t know if we had made that clear, Cassius, and feel free to correct me, but the whole point of me going into all of this is to point out where this is coming from, because it seemed to me that the text was a little bit vague.

Cassius:

Yeah, I agree. The text is vague, and it continues to be vague, because it talks about people like Antiochus as well, Philo of Larissa, who just are not very familiar to us today. But I think what you’ve done is exactly correct. It dates all the way back to people shortly after Socrates and Plato, who were looking at what Socrates said and realizing, hey, this is not logically consistent. Socrates says, “I know nothing, but I do know that I know nothing.” How can both of those things be true? It’s very logical to question that. So, no doubt, whether it’s Arcesilaus or someone else at that particular time, they started questioning the logic of that premise, especially since we’ve had all this discussion by Socrates and Plato about ideal forms and these things that really are true outside the cave. So there’s all sorts of questions that dilemma sets up.

The Stoics are right to be concerned, because if you conclude that nothing in this world is truly knowable, you are on the slippery slope to nihilism, existential crisis — however you want to describe the fact that you can’t be confident of anything. The Stoics are right to be concerned about it, but they take the wrong approach in dealing with it, because Socrates and Plato had attacked the senses as being unreliable and lying to us. Instead of defending that point and saying, as Epicurus argues, that the senses are not lying, the Stoics decided that apparently the senses can lie to us sometimes, but sometimes they’re not lying to us — and on those times that they’re not lying to us, we’re going to call that a cataleptic impression. And we’re going to say that that impression is so clear that it cannot possibly be false. And so they go down this road of trying to come up with a structure for separating false from true impressions, which is a road that leads to disaster, and one Epicurus refused to take.

So that’s just another way of summarizing, I think, what you’ve just said. But I think your description of it dating all the way back to Socrates and Plato is extremely important. So much of what Epicurus is doing is diagnosing and remedying the mistakes, the errors, that these earlier philosophers had made — not only in knowledge and epistemology, but also in ethics, in regard to pleasure. But you’ve got to understand the original error and the original dispute, or when you hear Epicurus say all sensations are true, you think, what in the world is this idiot talking about? Obviously all sensations are not true. But you dig back into the history of the dispute, like you just did, Joshua, and it becomes very clear what they’re talking about, and very clear why Epicurus took the position he did. And that gives you the key to unwinding the rest of the story.

Joshua:

And it says also, on the Wikipedia page, that Plutarch, in his Adversus Colotem — Against Colotes, Section 26 — writes this: “The reputation of Arcesilaus, who was the best beloved and most esteemed of all the philosophers in his time, seems to have been no small eyesore to Epicurus, who says of him that, delivering nothing peculiar to himself or of his own invention, he imprinted in illiterate men an opinion and esteem of his being very knowing and learned. Now, Arcesilaus was so far from deserving any glory by being a bringer-in of new opinions, and from arrogating to himself those of the ancients, that the sophists of the time blamed him for attributing to Socrates, Plato, Parmenides, and Heraclitus the doctrines concerning the retention of assent and the incomprehensibility of things, having no need so to do, but only that he might strengthen them and render them recommendable by ascribing them to such illustrious personages.”

And in all of these cases, there are accusations that Arcesilaus is straddling multiple boundary lines between different schools and making his own positions very difficult to disentangle, and that his skepticism is as much Pyrrhonism as it is Platonism. In fact, his contemporary, Aristo of Chios, said of Arcesilaus that “his head was Plato, his tail was Pyrrho, and his midsection was Diodorus” — a reference to the Chimera of Greek mythology, which had, I can’t remember, the face of a human and the body of a lion and the head of a goat sticking out of its back, or something like that. And Sextus Empiricus said that Arcesilaus’s philosophy appeared essentially the same as Pyrrhonism, but granted that this appearance might have been merely superficial, and that there were real differences between Arcesilaus and Pyrrhonism.

It’s all very difficult and very complex, but it’s worth knowing that all of that is out there before we go further in the text, because at the beginning of Section 13, which we’re in right now, Lucullus had said, “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, and it’s worth having some clarity here about who we’re talking about. And who we’re talking about here is primarily Arcesilaus, I think.

Now, last week, we left off in the middle of a section — in fact, we didn’t even read the rest of the section. We left off at the end of that syllogism, which is on page 519 of the Loeb edition. And so we would be beginning now in the third paragraph of Section 13, still speaking of the syllogism, as you’ll see as I go forward.

“Now, of the axioms which they assume in order to draw the conclusions which they desire, they think that two ought to be granted to them, for no one objects to them. They are these: first, that those perceptions which are false cannot really be perceived; and second, of those perceptions between which there is no difference, it is impossible that some should be of such a character that they can be perceived, and others of such a character that they cannot.”

Now, one reason we didn’t go with the Yonge translation here in Section 13 is that it makes a confusion between the words “perception” and “representation” or “appearance,” by just using the same word for all three. So I’m going to be sticking with the Rackham translation, the Loeb edition. And the two premises that the New Academy — that Arcesilaus assumes to be granted and nobody disputes — again, are these: first, that false presentations cannot be perceived; and second, that of presentations that have no difference between them, it is impossible that some should be such as to be capable of being perceived, and others such as to be incapable. Those are the two premises, the two axioms.

He goes on to say, “But the remaining premises they defend with a long and varied discourse. These also being two: first, that of presentations, some are true, others false; and second, that every presentation arising from a true object is of such a nature that it could also arise from a false object.” These two propositions they do not skim over but develop with a considerable application of care and industry. They divide them into sections, and those of wide extent — first sensations, next inferences from sensations and from general experience, which they deem to lack clarity. Then they come to the section proving the impossibility of perceiving anything even by means of reasoning and inference. These general propositions they cut up into still smaller divisions, employing the same method with all the other topics, as you saw in yesterday’s discourse, that they do with sensation — aiming at proving, in the case of each subject minutely subdivided, that all true presentations are coupled with false ones in no way differing from the true, and that, this being the nature of sense presentations, to comprehend them is impossible.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how far down you go in subdividing these into different categories — the principal objection is that true presentations are coupled with false presentations, that the false presentations are in no way different from the true, you can’t tell them apart, and that, this being the case, it’s not possible to detect what is true from what is false in sense perception. That seems to be key to the New Academy’s argument at every level of its argument and at every level of its categorization of its argument. And as Lucullus points out, he is pointing back to, quote, “the other topics, as you saw in yesterday’s discourse.” And yesterday’s discourse, I presume, is the first book of Academic Questions. But that’s confusing in its own way, because I don’t remember if Lucullus was even there for that. Again, this is a very muddled text, and it’s not clear exactly how it all fits together. Cassius, do you have some clarity you can bring to this as we go forward here?

Cassius:

I can try, for just a second. I doubt I’ll succeed. But let me say this: one saving grace of the presentation here is that Cicero is going to say the same thing several times. And when he gets down to what we’re going to have as paragraph 26, he’s going to say it in a way that I think might be a little bit clearer — going back to the Yonge edition. And it probably helps us to try to use as few words as possible in summarizing what each one is.

So, in Section 26, he lists them more succinctly this way. He says, “the first principle is that some perceptions are false.” Okay, that’s very clear — the first principle they’re starting with is that some sensations are false. The second one: “that a false presentation cannot be perceived.” That seems kind of confusing, but what they’re saying is that if it’s false — if it’s not really true — then whatever it is you’re seeing is not true either. So you can’t really perceive something that doesn’t exist. And of course, we’ve talked about before that that has all sorts of issues, like imagination and all sorts of weird things you could throw at it. But what they’re saying makes sense: if the thing you’re talking about is false, then when you get it in your mind, it’s going to be false too. You don’t convert it into being true by getting it into your mind. So that’s the second one.

Then the third — as you said very well last week, Joshua — you’ve got to be consistent. If some are true and some are false, then you can’t say that you perceive properly only the true ones. If you’re perceiving, you’re perceiving both the true and the false. You’ve got to take a consistent position about whether you’re accepting the truth of your presentations or not. That’s the third point.

And then the fourth point just kind of hammers home the third one, by saying that for every true impression that is out there, there’s also a false one that goes with it. You can’t say that there are just some that are true that are not accompanied by falsity, because everything out there has an accompanying possibility of illusion or being wrong.

So, to try to briefly encapsulate it: number one, some sensations are false. Number two, false presentations cannot be understood, because they’re false. Third, you’ve got to be consistent — you can either say all sensations are true, or you can say all sensations are false, but you can’t say that some are true and some are false, because you have no grounds for saying something like that. You’ve got to be consistent. And then the fourth one: that there’s simply no such thing as a true perception that is not accompanied by the possibility of it being false. And there are different ways to say that.

But we do go through this over and over and over again. And to point back to what we said at the very beginning of the podcast: Epicurus begs to differ, at the very beginning, where they say some perceptions are false. That’s the error — don’t ever grant that presumption, because a perception is neither true nor false. Truth and opinion are functions of the mind. They’re not functions of the senses. All of this argument, as we go through it in the coming weeks, is going to rotate around this very same question. Because once you grant that some sensations are false, you have a big problem, and the skeptics are right — you cannot grant that some perceptions are false, because if you do, you’ve then got to come up with a method for saying which ones are true. And there is no such method in the senses themselves, if you’ve granted that some of them are false.

The Stoics are to be commended for wanting to try to save knowledge, but they’re to be condemned for the method which they used. The skeptics are to be commended for their method of saying, “hey, you’ve got to be consistent,” but they are to be condemned for their initial premise of failing to trust the senses in the first place. Both of them are wrong. Only Epicurus has both the correct method and the correct conclusion.

Joshua:

And, Cassius, walk us through that — because most people who have spent any amount of time in Epicurean philosophy will be familiar with the example that Lucretius gives us in Book Four, around line 353, when he says: “Further, when we see the square towers of a city at a distance, they commonly appear round to us, because all angles seem, far off, to show obtuse — or rather, they do not show at all. Their strokes die away, and the blows never reach our eyes. For as the images are carried through long tracks of air, the air beats upon them continually in their passage, and so wears off their corners.” And he goes on and on. But that is the classic example, isn’t it, of the square tower that looks round from far away. This is exactly what they’re talking about, or it would seem to be. You’ve got an object, and that object produces one sense perception, and then it produces a different sense perception, and they can’t both be true.

Cassius:

Yes. And the answer to that is the same as the answer to the question of the bent oar, or any other illusion. When you are looking at a tower at a distance, you are perceiving a certain combination of light and shape and texture and so forth, which your mind then uses to produce the opinion that it is either square or round. Your senses never use the word “square” to you. Your senses never use the word “round.” Those are things in your mind that are the result of your processing of the data that the senses have brought to you. The opinion — whether it’s square or round — is either wrong or right, and you test that by additional observations of the tower, by getting closer to it. And the closer you get, the more observations you make. If you even touch it, if you touch it from different directions, you begin to assemble a pattern of sensations that all point in the same direction in your mind, toward the opinion that it is square.

No matter how close you get to the tower, no matter how frequently you touch it or how many places you touch it, none of those perceptions is true or false. It is always in the mind where you assemble the perceptions into an opinion that can be true or false. And again, that applies to every possible illusion — the bent oar, sailing on the ship and looking at the shore, all of them are examples of the same situation. Your senses are not giving you an opinion about anything. Your mind is forming opinions based on the data from the senses.

And let me emphasize this before I move on: the point is not that if you get close enough to the tower, the sense at that point becomes correct. I think that’s confusing to many people. It is not a matter of getting close to the tower and thereby your sense becomes correct. The sense at that moment, when you’re right next to the tower, when you are touching the tower — those sensations are no more true or false than any other sensations. All sensations have to be given equal credence. This is the issue of prolepsis that we talk about, as a pattern-recognition function, in that what the prolepsis is doing is assembling a pattern, and the continuity of the pattern over time, through repeated sensations, is what guarantees that the pattern being assembled is correct. “Correct,” really, in this sense, is going to mean repeatable — it’s going to mean consistent, it’s going to mean that the senses are assembling the same pattern over time from different perspectives. And then your mind is going to take that pattern and make an opinion, true or false.

The problem with the Stoic or the skeptic objection to all this is that if you say you can’t trust the senses — if you say that you can’t come to a reliable opinion by taking additional observations through the senses, if you say that no matter how many times you look, you don’t know whether the sense at that moment is true or false — then you’re put in the position of saying, well, if you can’t trust the senses to reach a correct conclusion, what can you trust? And you can take the skeptic road and go straight to nihilism and Pyrrhonism and say, well, you can’t trust anything. You’re right — you guys who are saying that the senses can’t be trusted, you just need to take your conclusion to its extreme. You can’t trust the senses ever, no matter how close you get, no matter how many samples you take — none of them are reliable, so stop trying. Just sit back and try to find your ataraxia by not being disturbed, because there’s no way to get out of your situation other than to accept it, since the senses will never allow you to do anything like that.

The Stoics are rightly horrified by that prospect. Obviously, you can’t sit back and do nothing — that’s what Lucullus has been arguing for several weeks now in our reading. Obviously, you can’t take that position, guys — you’ve got to have something reliable. And so they say, well, we can see that some sensations are true while others may be false. And again, Cicero was very good to us by pointing out that “I’m not going to be like Epicurus and try to say all sensations are true. I’m just going to defend some sensations.” So the Stoics try to find a way to defend some sensations, and say that these sensations — implicitly, because they’ve been designed that way, implicitly, because there’s an order of things that we can determine through reason and dialectic — that these certain sensations are true of themselves. And that gives us the cataleptic grasp, to know which of them to accept and which of them not to accept.

Of course, at the same time, the Stoics are going to be quick to say that the sage is the only one who can do this reliably, and the sage is as rare as a phoenix. So in the end, the skeptics are going to say, well, you don’t even give me a rational ability to make a decision, because you’ve agreed that only the sage can do it, and essentially nobody’s a sage. So why are you even bothering to argue with the Stoics about this? Why are you coming up with these logical dilemmas and trying to argue something that, in the end, you’re admitting yourself is not possible?

So it’s a very intense argument between Cicero and Lucullus here that we’re going through. But in the end, despite all the tendency that these Academics, the Stoics, have to try to reduce things to formulas, and reduce things to X and Y and A and B and syllogistic reasoning, in the end it comes back to what Epicurus said about trusting the senses — because if you can’t trust them, there is nothing else you can trust. There is no realm of ideal forms. There is no supernatural force that’s going to tell you that certain things are true and certain things are false. You’ve come equipped in this world with your sensations, with the faculties that nature gave us, and that’s all you come equipped with. So stop trying to find something else, because you don’t have anything else.

And you can imagine things, you can construct logical syllogisms all day long, but you cannot create something from nothing. You cannot imagine into existence a set of ideal forms, or a set of supernatural forces, that in fact give you reliable confidence and knowledge. You can spend your life pursuing religion and idealism, and you can convince yourself that those things are helpful to you. But when you step back and look at nature from its very foundations, as Epicurus does through his physics, you’re going to conclude that you’re just deluding yourself to do that. And both the skeptic and the Stoic position end up being a rejection of the faculties that nature gave to us, in favor of some supposed other world outside the cave.

Joshua:

You know, listening to you talk, Cassius, I’ve got this image in my head of a bar magnet, with truth at one end and false at the other. And the question with all of these schools is, how do you adjust this magnet so that it is a representation of the truth as they understand it in their philosophy? For Plato, the false end of the magnet is stuck down in the cave, and the true end of the magnet is up in the realm of ideal forms. It doesn’t matter how many times you use sense perception to approach this tower to determine whether it’s square or false — sense perception cannot but be false, because it is stuck in the realm of the cave. You’ve got to use geometry to get a better understanding of the truth. You’ve got to use dialectic to get a better understanding of the truth. And that all happens in the mind, right? As Socrates says, the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal. And that’s what Plato is after — knowledge of the eternal, the unchanging, something that is beyond the realm of flux, and that’s where the truth lies.

And for the skeptics — for Arcesilaus, here — he’s got the true end and the false end within sense perception itself, and it’s a job of trying to sift through sense perception to figure out which perception is reliable and which perception is not; which perception is going to give you the perfect, flawless representation of an object, and which perceptions are false representations of an object. And for, as you say, Cassius, for Epicurus, the senses are neither true nor false. They are just witnesses in court, and the judging faculty of the mind is what sifts between true and false.

Cassius:

Yes, Joshua. And let me extend this a little further in this direction as well. The cave analogy that we keep talking about actually is very useful in many ways, because it’s understandable — it’s a picture, which is no doubt why Plato is using it. It allows us to understand that there’s a difficulty here that he’s painting in the form of a cave. But everybody understands — especially in the world today — we all understand how difficult it is to determine what the truth really is. You can’t watch a YouTube video, you can’t listen to a podcast, you can’t watch a television, without all sorts of discussion that the truth is hidden, that there are secret things going on that are behind appearances, and that nothing is to be trusted.

And I think it’s valid that many of us have reached the conclusion that, in fact, that’s largely true — that the world as we live in it today, which is probably not that much different from 2,000 years ago in this sense, is in a sense a hallucination, in the sense that everybody gets the same perspective on a situation and evaluates it the same way, whether it’s through religion or politics or some other perspective. You begin to have a groupthink mentality in which it’s clear, when an individual steps back, that what the majority is doing is totally wrong and totally disconnected from reality.

So it’s very appealing to think about this cave analogy and say, “hey, he’s exactly right — I’m inside a cave, I’m in a matrix where I am being manipulated by other people, and I need to get out of this cave and find the truth outside the cave.” Well, that’s, again, like I say, an appealing analogy. But the truth is, as Epicurus saw it and taught it, there is no cave that we are in other than in our minds. The reality of the world is that this is the only world that exists. There is no realm of ideal forms outside the cave. There is no superman outside the cave waiting to lead us to salvation, or to heaven, or to some other world that has a different reality. There is only this reality.

And yes, we may in fact be chained to the floor, but that fact of us being chained to the floor does not mean that there is a world outside the cave. That does not mean that there is a realm of ideal forms, or a heaven where there’s some supernatural leader who’s going to conduct us to a true reality outside the cave. If we’re chained to the floor of the cave, looking at shadows, then that is the world that we’re in. But you don’t get away from it by getting outside the cave — you get away from it by breaking your chains, taking off the blindfolds, finding your own source of light within the cave, and illuminating what really is going on.

Analogies and hypotheticals always have their limitations, so you have to be careful about how you apply them. But the cave analogy in particular has the danger of planting in people’s minds the idea that there is another world. And if there’s anything that Epicurean physics and Epicurean philosophy stands for, it’s that there’s only one world. And if you fail to use your mind — or if you are, in fact, chained in, and in fact forced by other people not to deal with reality directly, if you’re brought up in religion or some false philosophy from the time you’re a child — then that’s a bad thing for you. But that doesn’t mean there’s another world. You’ve got to come to terms with this world.

Trust the senses. Do what George Orwell’s 1984 society said is the most important thing not to do, which is to trust your sight and trust your hearing and trust the things that the senses provide to you. And using that method, you can extricate yourself from this problem, and the world that is true, that you do live in, you can change and make better and live a happy life within. But no amount of imagination, no amount of dialectic, no amount of geometry is going to create a true world outside of this world. That’s just a fact of life. All that exists comes from atoms and void. The things that come from atoms and void are real, but there’s no other reality other than what our senses are able to reveal to us.

So, Joshua, I apologize for that rant there, but I do think it’s important to try to focus on the implications of what we’re talking about, because it can be very, very easy to get caught up in the complexity of the trees and not see that it really is a readily identifiable forest once we put the pieces together and see what really is going on. So as we reach the end of today’s episode, Joshua, we’re still not finished with Section 13, but where do you see us landing for today?

Joshua:

Well, the main thing I wanted to say before we come to an end is: anytime we talk about Plato’s cave, and this idea that there’s a realm that only the special, only the pure, only the good are going to find their way to, we have to be clear here that Epicurus does not endorse this kind of messiah complex — you know, savior, hero figure — who’s going to stride out of the cave and then come back in a blaze of glory, having achieved all known knowledge. You make the point that even if you are in the cave, you have to sift through sensory data in order to come to an understanding of what is true and what is false.

We have to be very careful with the analogy of the cave, because it tends to appeal to people who have delusions of grandeur and who overestimate their own importance in coming to terms with how we determine true and false. And you’ve mentioned the matrix also, which is another arena for this kind of mental delusion to take hold of people. And it’s something we should always be on guard against, however useful it might be as an analogy.

Cassius:

Joshua, before you state your final conclusion in just a minute, let me say this about what you just said. It’s very interesting to think there too about the savior figure. Actually, the Epicureans did consider Epicurus to be a sort of savior figure, as Lucretius says in his poem. But you are exactly right — it’s not a savior that is going to lead you to another world. It’s a savior who is going to tell you how to live in this world and connect you to this reality.

And the key there is: Epicurus cannot change reality. Nobody can change reality. As Lucretius says at the beginning of his poem, Epicurus travels through the universe in his mind and comes back and tells us what can be and what cannot. We stay in our reality, because it’s impossible to leave our reality. And Epicurus is a savior within our reality, in a figurative way. But it’s a figurative way that inspired the devotion of Lucretius and the ancient Epicureans, who continued to talk about his philosophy for hundreds of years after he was gone, and to see Epicurus’s contribution as monumental in the history of human philosophy.

Joshua:

I know, Cassius, because you’re in a more prominent place on the internet than I am, you come across these people, and they send you their Google document — 495 pages of “look, I figured everything out, I’ve got it all figured out, I’m going to be the one to do it, and if there’s a problem that comes up, I should be the one to go and negotiate, because I’m the messiah, I’m Neo, I’m the guy who’s solved the puzzle,” as it were. And we have to be very clear not to cater to these people, or to this point of view that suggests that you have to have something special.

As we’ve always said in doing this, we are not professional philosophers. You do not have to be a professional philosopher to get something out of philosophy — anyone can do this. And if you do have this niggling feeling of grandiosity or of messianism, then what you probably need is a psychiatrist. That is not what we’re trying to do. We’re never trying to be the new whatever-pill movement here at Epicurean Friends. That’s not the goal. The goal is just to get a better understanding, every day we come together, about what they thought in antiquity and how we can apply that to our own lives.

What we’re going to come back to and talk about next week is probably Lucullus’s response to what he has laid out as the major premises of the New Academy, of people like Arcesilaus, that went into the syllogism. So we’re not going to be done with this whole syllogism for quite some time. It will be useful to keep it in our minds as we go forward, because today Lucullus has laid out this is what they want us to accept as axioms, and this is what they have elaborate justification for believing. We haven’t actually heard Lucullus’s response, as a Stoic, to any of this so far — not to the syllogism itself, not to the propositions that went into it. So all of that is coming up. You’re exactly right, Joshua.

Cassius:

I’ll close with the reminder of one of the clichés that we talk about almost as much as anything else: that the perfect is not the enemy of the good. No one is going to say — certainly not here, or in any reasonable conversation — that Epicurus or anyone else is a perfect model, that perfection is possible. When Lucretius was calling Epicurus a savior, as you say, he’s being figurative, because in reality there are no saviors, as you just said. In reality, there is no ability to get outside of or beyond our reality.

We all have a relatively short time to live. We are all going to cease to exist for an eternity after we’re dead, and nothing can change that. We all have a number of decisions that we can make and experiences we can have while we’re alive, and we can decide whether to guide those decisions and experiences according to pleasure, or according to virtue, or according to piety, or according to logic, or according to some other standard. We all have to make the decisions for ourselves on which of those we’re going to follow, and there’s no perfect answer.

But when you look at the universe in the way that Epicurus does, you do conclude that some paths are better than others. Some paths are going to take you closer to what you think your best life is than others are going to. And as you said, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do in discussing all these things — to bring a better approach to understanding some of the basic issues we’re confronting today. This issue of whether everything is an illusion, everything is a hallucination, nothing is real — we are surrounded with today, causes concerns to all of us, that make Epicurean philosophy extremely important to understand and apply, if we agree with it.

Okay, let’s leave it at that for today. We’ll come back next week and continue. We invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our podcast. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.