Episode 352 - Dogs, Wolves, And What Is That In Sheeps' Clothing?

Listen to “Episode 352 - Dogs, Wolves, And What Is That In Sheep’s Clothing?” on Spreaker.

Welcome to Episode 352 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 16 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, Joshua reads the full text of Section 16, where Lucullus lays out the skeptics’ Sorites (“heap”) argument in stages: first applied to visions supposedly sent by the gods, then to everyday categories like wolves versus dogs and honorable versus dishonorable acts, and finally resolved by an appeal to the clear, waking-life distinction between real and unreal perceptions, illustrated by the poet Ennius easily recognizing his dream of Homer as a dream. Cassius and Joshua work through what the exchange is really arguing — not whether wolves resemble dogs, but whether any line between classes of things can be non-arbitrary once similar things are granted to exist on a continuum — and bring in a Wikipedia detour into modern Sorites literature (Peter Unger’s argument that a body is “identical with everything there is” once atom-by-atom addition is granted, and A.J. Ayer’s response to it) to connect the ancient heap paradox directly to David Sedley’s work on Epicurean atomism and emergence: the reality of composite things doesn’t depend on locating one precise atom where the composite begins, any more than the reality of a heap depends on naming the exact grain that completes it. Cassius argues Epicurus charts a course between the two extremes on display in this text — the Stoics’ appeal to divine, self-evident certainty and the skeptics’ total nihilism about knowledge — grounding real, consequential differences (a wolf will kill you, a dog will not) in the senses, anticipations, and feelings rather than in either God-given certainty or unanswerable doubt. The episode closes by applying the same Sorites logic to happiness itself: there’s no dictionary-precise amount of pleasure required for a happy life, any more than there’s a precise number of coffee beans that makes a heap, but that doesn’t mean happiness or heaps are illusions — it just means nature, not a philosopher’s ideal form, is the only available standard.

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 352 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.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time talking about where we are in Cicero’s Academic Questions and why we are examining the issues we’re looking at. This week we’re going to get right back into Section 16 and deal with it directly. If you have any questions about where we are or why we’re doing it, I refer you back to the last couple of episodes, where there’s a lot of background on that. But 16 and 17 in particular are packed with information we need to discuss. So I’m going to turn it over to Joshua, and we’re going to get right into Section 16 and go forward from there.

Joshua:

Now, on all these empty perceptions, Antiochus brought forward a great many arguments, and one whole day was occupied in the discussion of this subject. But I do not think that I ought to adopt the same course, but merely to give the heads of what he said.

“In the first place, they are blamable in this, that they use a most captious kind of interrogation, and the system of adding or taking away, step by step, minute items from a proposition is a kind of argument very little to be approved of in philosophy. They call it sorites, when they make up a heap by adding grain after grain — a very vicious and captious style of arguing. For you mount up in this way: if a vision is brought by God before a man asleep of such a nature as to be probable, why may not one also be brought of such a nature as to be very like truth? If so, then why may not one be brought which can hardly be distinguished from truth? If so, then why may there not be one which cannot be distinguished at all from truth? If so, then why may there not be such that there is actually no difference between them? If you come to this point because I have granted you all the previous propositions, it will be my fault, but if you advance thither of your own accord, it will be yours. For who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or that even if he could do everything, he would act in that manner? And how do you assume that if one thing may be like another, it follows that it may also be difficult to distinguish between them, and then that one cannot distinguish between them at all, and lastly, that they are identical? So that if wolves are like dogs, you will come at last to asserting that they are the same animals.

“And indeed, there are some things not honorable which are like things that are honorable, some things not good like those that are good, some things proceeding on no system like others which are regulated by a system. Why then do we hesitate to affirm that there is no difference between all these things? Do we not even see that they are inconsistent? For there is nothing that can be transferred from its own class to another. But if such a conclusion did follow — that there was no difference between perceptions of different classes, but that some could be found which were both in their own class and in one which did not belong to them — how could that be possible?

“There is then one means of getting rid of all unreal perceptions, whether they be formed in the ideas, which we grant to be usually the case, or whether they be owing to idleness or to wine or to madness: we say that clearness, which we ought to hold with the greatest tenacity, is absent from all visions of that kind. For who is there who, when he imagines something and pictures it to himself in his thoughts, does not, as soon as he has stirred up and recovered himself, feel how much difference there is between what is evident and what is unreal? The case of dreams is the same. Do you think that the Roman poet Ennius, when he had been walking in his garden with Sergius Galba, his neighbor, said to himself, ‘I have seemed to myself to be walking with Galba’? But when he had a dream, he related it this way: ‘The poet Homer seemed to stand before me.’ And again, in his Epicharmus, he says, ‘For I seem to be dreaming and laid in the tomb.’ Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done in the forum.”

Cassius:

Okay, Joshua, thanks for reading that. Finally we have all of 16 in front of us, and we’re seeing Lucullus’s presentation of the difficulties and the captious, disputative nature of the Sorites syllogism — and we’re seeing him illustrate it. This illustration can hopefully finally pin down in our minds what exactly is meant by this issue of assembling a heap from grains of sand, because he’s giving us examples from other areas of life of what this argument is attempting to do.

We’ve spent some time on this already, but I know, especially once we get to the section that says “for who will grant to you either that God can do everything, or even if he could, that he would act in that manner” — I don’t think we’ve spent much time on these references to why he’s talking about visions from the gods, and what distinction he’s drawing, because he says it in a somewhat confusing manner. He gives examples of visions brought by a god in which the first vision is probable, the second is a little more probable, and the next is something you might say is not just more probable but very much like the truth. Then he lines up another vision where he says, “I can’t tell the difference between whether that’s true or not.” So he’s taken the example of adding grains of sand and transmuted it into something quite different — into questions about, well, God could do this, why can’t he do that, why can’t he do something else? And then, as the paragraph goes on, he changes that “vision brought by a god” example into a discussion of dreams and things that might happen to you while under the influence of wine, or just simply asleep.

So where would you like to dig into that? Do you want to take a stab at it first?

Joshua:

So one problem for us, Cassius, is that this question of visions and auguries sent by gods isn’t particularly relevant to Epicureanism, because we wouldn’t make the same concessions the Stoics in this particular case have been prepared to make.

As we move into the third paragraph of Section 16, I think we should look into some of the example cases presented with respect to the Sorites problem. In the second paragraph he talked about visions sent by the gods; in this paragraph we come down to questions of taxonomy — the question of how similar wolves are to dogs. “If, for example, wolves are like dogs, you will end by saying that they are identical. And in the same way, some honorable things are similar to dishonorable things, some good things are like some things that are not as good, and some artistic things are similar to some that are not artistic. Why do we hesitate, therefore, to aver that there is no difference between these? Have we no eye even for incongruities? For there is nothing that cannot be carried over from its own class into another class.” I don’t really have a sense of where exactly the passage ends.

But Cassius, this question of wolves and dogs, honor and dishonor, good and not-good — we’ve left, for a moment, the question of visions sent by gods, and come down to more everyday perceptible phenomena. This would be an interesting place to try to figure out what the argument is here, and really to figure out how Epicurus would respond to some of these claims, because I don’t think Epicurus’s response is necessarily going to be the same as the response given by the Stoics.

Cassius:

Right — or the skeptics. Joshua, let me take this for a few minutes and see what I can do with it. Clearly these examples Lucullus is giving are all over the board in terms of the nature of the question. He starts off talking about visions brought by a god, then dogs versus wolves, then things that are honorable versus dishonorable, some things good, some things bad, some things part of a system, some things not regulated by a system. I think it’s really important for us to dig down and think about what the common element is in all of these examples, because that tells us where the argument is really going.

Just as we started off with the question of grains adding up to a heap — at least as I see it, what he’s doing is jumping from subject to subject, pointing out that no matter which direction we look, there are things that are very similar to each other, even though we also talk about classes of things: the class of wolves versus the class of dogs, the class of things that are good versus the class of things that are bad, the class of things that are systematic versus those that are chaotic. We’re familiar with the fact that in every direction there are things that can be close to each other, and yet we still put them in separate classes. That just takes us back to the question, what is a heap? Because we have to answer where the line is between one class and another. Is it something like the line in geometry that can be infinitely divided — and the closer and closer we get to two things that are similar to each other, do we eventually just throw up our hands and say there’s just no difference at all? I think that’s where he’s really going with this argument, until he comes to a kind of summation where he says, well, why do we hesitate to say there’s no difference at all between these things?

When we try to pin down exactly what the difference is between a dog and a wolf, we can dig into all these details, find all these examples of similarities, and go on and on finding similarities. But there’s something within us that tells us there’s still a difference, and it’s an important difference to us between a dog and a wolf. Even if we can’t come down to a final list of DNA characteristics that distinguishes the two, it’s still important to us to understand that a dog is going to be our best friend, while a wolf is going to kill us and eat us. Those kinds of differences exist all across the world we live in. People can look just like each other, and yet one can be your mortal enemy and one can be your best friend. A single action, like taking someone’s life, can be murder and considered the worst possible evil — or, if you’re acting in self-defense or in defense of someone else, you can be an absolute hero, considered one of the best people who’s ever lived, for defending someone who was being attacked. But the same act — taking a life — is involved in both circumstances. So how do you decide which class to put the action of killing someone in? The action of doing anything you consider good versus bad?

We’ve discussed this somewhat already, and as you brought up last week, DeWitt points out that the Sorites approach is likely what Epicurus is doing when he starts enumerating how he would not know the good without the pleasures of X, Y, and Z. He’s pointing out that “good” is a concept made of real things, real pleasures, and if you start subtracting every possible real example of a pleasure from “the good,” you’re eventually left with nothing. He then clarifies, too, that we’re not going to accept that the pleasures of the mind are the only type of pleasure that exists. So Epicurus and the skeptics are willing to use the same approach, but for different reasons — which, again, I think we talked about last week. The skeptics want you to say these differences become so indistinguishable that in the end it’s not possible to distinguish good from bad, left from right, wolves from dogs. Epicurus is going to tell you: yes, there are all sorts of similarities between things in the world, but our anticipations, sensations, and feelings are able to assemble for us a reliable picture of important differences that allow us to live happily. And so we’re able to determine the difference between a dog, who’s going to be our best friend, and a wolf, who’s going to eat us. Those are real differences, even though we could count till the cows come home all the specific ways in which the genetic and other makeup of wolves is similar to that of dogs.

So I think you’re right to have made the comment that somewhere in here Lucullus is shifting his point of view. He’s telling us what the skeptic argument was, but toward the end of the paragraph he’s beginning to clarify the limitation of the skeptic argument, when he says, in Rackham’s terms, “consequently, there is only one way of routing the difficulty about unreal presentations, whether they are unreal because of the imagination, or because we are asleep, or under the influence of wine, or of insanity.” What I think Lucullus is saying — and I’m interpreting this, so I could be wrong — is that we, as Stoics, as defenders of knowledge and truth, have to take the position that these false presentations are devoid of perspicuity, and we have to cling to perspicuity tooth and nail. The difficulty, of course, is what he means by “perspicuity.” I think we talked about this last week — that the Stoics use the words “perceive” and “perception” to describe those things we’re confident about, which is a little different from the way we talk about it today. When I say “I perceive something,” it’s unclear whether I mean I think it’s true or I’m sure it’s true. We today tend to take “perception” as a direct reference to a sensation, rather than a statement that the thing is true to reality.

But I think what Lucullus is getting at, when he talks about perspicuity, or when he says the false cannot be perceived — we’ve struggled with that term, and I’m moving toward interpreting it this way: the Stoics are saying that which is false cannot be perceived. The reason that sentence sounds odd to us is that we use the word “perceived” without including, within it, the judgment that it’s true. The Stoics seem to be saying that when you perceive something, it’s because it is true. So the Stoics are insisting there is this cataleptic impression that cannot be false, and they’re going to defend that tooth and nail, and analogize it to a person waking up from a dream.

At the end of this section, Lucullus starts talking about Ennius and Homer, the example of how Ennius described what he observed in a dream versus what he experienced in real life. As I read this, the emphasis is on how most of us can pretty easily distinguish, when we get up in the morning, whether what happened to us while we were asleep was a dream or whether it was real. Now, of course, we sometimes say it’s hard to tell, but I think the direction Lucullus is going in here, at the end of this paragraph, is using the example of waking up from a dream as an analogy for how, when we’re stirred awake, when we come to our senses, we immediately have a firm grasp of what is real versus what is not. There’s going to be more to say as he goes into Section 17, but I’m going to stop for a moment and gather our thoughts on 16 here before we go further.

Joshua:

Yeah, the Wikipedia page for the Sorites paradox has the example of a bald man, because there we can go down minutely to individual hairs, right?

Cassius:

That’d be a great example. We talk all the time about people with very little hair as being bald, and yet we don’t do an inventory to confirm they have absolutely not one single hair on their head before we call them bald.

Joshua:

There’s something else on the Wikipedia page too. Peter Unger thinks the Sorites paradox can be solved by denying the existence of a heap in the first place, and A.J. Ayer repudiated that when Unger presented it to him. “If,” Ayer said, “we regard everything as being composed of atoms, and think of Unger as consisting not of cells but of the atoms which compose the cells, then a similar argument could be used to prove that Unger, so far from being non-existent, is identical with everything that there is. We have only to substitute for the premise that the subtraction of one atom from Unger’s body never makes any difference to his existence, the premise that the addition of one atom to it never makes any difference either.” In other words, he’s got a set number of atoms that make up his body, right, and adding one more atom doesn’t materially affect that it’s still him — so why can’t you successively add a whole cosmos worth of atoms to Unger’s body, and it would still be him? That’s an interesting one, because of this connection to atoms, right?

Cassius:

Absolutely. This is exactly what David Sedley is talking about in his refutation of determinism in Epicurus — Epicurus is focusing on the reality of emergent properties, not just the reality of atoms and void themselves. This is directly related to that, in that you consider the things made of atoms to be no less real than the atoms themselves are real. Simply because you can’t decide there’s a precise point at which this number of atoms creates this particular thing, that doesn’t prevent you from understanding that the thing composed of some number of atoms does exist.

Unger’s argument would lead you exactly to the Democritean position that nothing exists except atoms and void, and so everything else — everything made of atoms and void — is just an illusion, unreal. And I can get worked up even discussing that, because this is clearly a big, big problem, and Epicurus saw it, and very few people today discuss this. I give tremendous credit to David Sedley — this is why Norman DeWitt was focusing on the same issue. This is a huge problem for people who can’t reason their way out of it, who think that because there’s no God to arbitrate what the classes are, because there are no ideal forms to arbitrate the difference between a wolf and a dog, they want to throw up their hands and say there’s just no difference at all.

I really like the analogy that you’d better understand the difference between a wolf and a dog, because one of them is going to help you and the other is going to kill you. They may look very similar from a distance, but wolves and dogs are very different things — and it’s not because they partake of an ideal form of a dog, or because God made them that way. It’s because of the experience of thousands of years of change and evolution within certain animals, that moved in the direction of being a dog versus those that stayed wild. Those incremental, slight differences over huge periods of time are not just an illusion — they’re not unreal, they lead to very real consequences. You’ve got to be able to be confident in saying that’s a wolf versus that’s a dog, while at the same time acknowledging it’s a very close call at certain points of the perception. The hair structure, the body structure — over and over, you can go down the list of things in which wolves and dogs are similar, but one’s going to kill you and one’s going to help you, and you’d better know the difference, and not think it’s an illusion, that it’s all just a game, that the only thing real is atoms and void. That’s ridiculous — that’s not the point of what Epicurus was saying.

Now, Democritus we can’t be so sure of, because he was apparently going in that direction. But Epicurus sees that there is truth in the absolute nature of the atoms, but there’s also truth in what is composed of atoms. And it’s not a matter of waking up from a dream, or following the Stoic argument that, well, when you think about it, it’s absolutely impossible to be mistaken about certain things — and I have a problem with this phrasing from certain documents in our political system too, saying that certain things are “self-evident.” They’re not self-evident in many, many cases. It’s very difficult to say what’s self-evident as an absolute rule, because people perceive things in different ways. That doesn’t mean what they perceive differently is unreal — it just means they perceive things differently.

The argument Lucullus has been advancing here — that there are certain things we just know, through our cataleptic grasp, are true, and it has to be that way because we believe the universe was designed by God, and that’s the way we’re going to get comfortable with that idea — it’s all just nonsense. Epicurus saw that it’s nonsense, but he also saw that it’s necessary to actually live your life and have a confident position about knowledge. So he has his foot in both camps of some of these arguments. The Sorites argument makes a lot of sense to Epicurus, because it focuses your mind on what’s really the difference between a wolf and a dog. It’s not because God said so, and it’s not because there’s an ideal form of a dog, and you have to be comfortable being confident about that. We’re confident, day to day, in the way we actually live, but it seems that when we enter this realm of philosophical discussion we become deferential, and we want to be nice, and we want to say, “well, that’s an interesting position you have there, Mr. Lucullus — I can see why you’d think some things are self-evident, because you believe there’s a God. That’s very interesting.” Well, it can be interesting in the right circumstances, but it can also be just as deadly to you as not knowing the difference between a dog and a wolf.

Joshua:

That was all very good, Cassius. The problem is, I didn’t really set you up to go into that.

Cassius:

Joshua, how many years has it taken me to think through what Norman DeWitt said when I first read his book about the Sorites syllogism? How many weeks have we spent going through Academic Questions? How long has it taken, in my case, to understand that this Sorites question is so directly related to atomism? What is atomism, other than adding one atom to another, to another, to another, to come up with molecules, and larger bodies, and then people, and worlds, and everything else? The whole issue of atomism is directly entwined with this question of Sorites, from the perspective you just read out of the Wikipedia page. It doesn’t make any difference to you or to me if we lose one atom in our bodies at any particular time, or gain one atom at another. And yet — oh my gosh — Heraclitus might say you’re not the same person anymore because you’ve lost an atom or added one. So it becomes obvious, when you think about it from that perspective, how ridiculous it is to look at you, or me, or the world, or anything else, and say that it’s just an illusion, it doesn’t really exist, the only thing that exists is the atoms themselves. There’s no difference between Joshua versus Cassius versus Kalosyni versus anybody else, because we’re all just a cloud of atoms moving through space, and there’s no way to tell the difference between one cloud of atoms and another. So why don’t we all just stop worrying about distinguishing between clouds of atoms and realize it’s all just a dream? That’s just the most ridiculous reduction to the absurd. And yet that’s exactly the direction it appears Democritus was going in.

At some point everybody has to stop, I guess, and take a common-sense position, and realize how ridiculous it is. But if you take ideas seriously, if you take philosophy seriously, and decide it’s important to have a system of understanding about the way things work, then you’ve got to understand that there are important differences between things, and that’s not invalidated by the fact that many things are like each other. You’re not going to get the difference just by saying, “well, I can see it so clearly, because there’s just no possibility of making a mistake.” When you say that, what you really mean is, “I see now what the design of that thing is, how it came to be from the beginning of time, at the will of the Creator. I see these things now because this truth is a higher truth than what my eyes tell me at this particular moment. I have this connection to a prime mover, a God, that by immersing myself in the word and thinking about it all the time, I can just get comfortable with the idea that everything is true because this is the way it’s supposed to be.” And that’s just nonsense — nonsense because it’s based on wishful thinking about things that do not exist.

We’d love to point out that these things are nonsense. We’d love to point out the ridiculousness of religion in many different ways, and the things it leads to. But when we point out the ridiculousness of religion, we need an alternative explanation for what the truth really is. And if you decide there’s no explanation that makes any sense whatsoever — that there’s no difference between one thing and another, that everything’s just an opinion, and it’s all so close that we’re all just, again, clouds of atoms, all just living in a dream — then that’s as bad, or worse, than the religious perspective. As Epicurus said, sometimes it’s better to have a perspective that allows you to live happily, even if it may be false in some particular, than to have a perspective that condemns you to unhappiness and failure, the way this kind of skeptical reductionism does.

So you want the truth, you want happiness, you want them both — you’ve got to reject both the falseness of a divine order, and, at the same time, reject the absolute nihilism of radical skepticism. You’ve got to reject both. Cicero is giving us a great discussion here between these two extremes that are both wrong — the Stoics taking the divine-order position, and the skeptics taking the nihilist, total-nothingness position. He does occasionally bring in mention of Epicurus, thank goodness, so we know the alternative was available to them. But it’s very frustrating to know that the majority of the argument taking place today, versus two thousand years ago, is between these two sides that are so obtusely wrong about the nature of the universe and the nature of knowledge. The response was available through Epicurus then, and it’s still available to us now, but it’s going to take a lot of development, a lot of argument, and a lot of discussion to make people aware that this alternative exists.

Joshua:

You’ve said so much there, Cassius, that I think would be worth expanding across multiple episodes as a total response, but we don’t have the time for that right now. You cited David Sedley and his view that it doesn’t make sense to hyper-focus on the atoms — that we need to be aware there’s reality at both levels of existence. There’s reality at the atomic level, and there’s reality at the level of lived experience. We can make fact claims about both of these domains that can both be true, and so what we don’t want to do is make the atoms-and-void level the enemy of the perceived-reality level.

As you said, we need to come down eventually — and most people, regardless of their position, are going to come down eventually to a common-sense position on the Sorites problem. I think that’s exactly what Lucullus does in the last sentence of Section 16. We can talk about dreams — there’s this Chinese Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who has this famous story about dreaming he was a butterfly, and when he wakes from the dream, he’s troubled by the uncertainty of whether he’s Chuang Tzu dreaming he’s a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he’s Chuang Tzu.

Lucullus here talks about Ennius imagining that the face of Homer rises up in front of him, and we actually have a reference to that same passage from Ennius in Lucretius: “Ennius, he says, who first bore down from pleasant Helicon the wreath of deathless leaves, to win bright fame among the tribes of Italian peoples. And yet, despite this, Ennius sets forth, in his discourse of immortal verse, that there is besides a realm of Acheron, where neither our souls nor bodies endure, but as it were images, pale and wondrous wise. And then he tells that the form of Homer, ever green and fresh, rose to him and began to shed salt tears, and in converse to reveal the nature of things.” No doubt, in all our conversations about knowledge and perception and truth, poetry and dreams have their place — but where Lucullus ends this, in the last line, is this: “Therefore, as soon as we are awakened, we despise those things which we have seen, and do not regard them as we do the things which we have done in the forum.” The forum, in Roman society, is the place of business — the place you go after negotiations to seal a contract, where official things are done in the open light of day. There’s nothing more common-sense than going to the forum to handle the business of the day.

I quite like that Lucullus ends here — not that he’s really ended, obviously, we continue this in Section 17 next week — but that he comes up for air, I should say, after talking about dreams and visions and poets, and comes down to the point that nevertheless we have to get on with our lives. We have to find a way not to be derailed by these skeptical challenges, not be derailed by the Sorites syllogism, like Peter Unger, into thinking there’s no difference if our body is the size it is now or the size of the cosmos. We have to come down to a common-sense position where we can continue to live our lives.

Cassius:

Joshua, as we begin to close out for today, I’d like to take what you just said and relate it to the obvious, constant question we’re very much concerned with in Epicurean philosophy — the question of happiness — and put it again, as we did last week, back into this context of the Sorites question. How many ounces of pleasure do we have to have in order to have a happy life? How many feet of pleasure do we have to have? How many years of pleasure do we have to have? How many parts of our body have to experience what types of pleasure before we can say we’ve lived a happy life? We gloss over these questions, but the Sorites approach — which some people describe as “the devil in the details” — the details allow us to understand what it is we’re doing.

If you sit at a table and start adding up grains of sand, or coffee beans, and really focus on the question, “how many coffee beans do I have to have in order to have a heap of coffee beans,” where are you going to get that answer from? Does it come from Webster’s dictionary, where you look it up and read that a heap of coffee beans is seven and a half coffee beans? No, that’s not the truth. We all instinctively come back, at some point, to the realization that these questions have to be answered, and we need to be comfortable with the answer. Are we going to let the dictionary, or the law, tell us what a heap is? Well, in some circumstances we are — we let the government tell us what a gallon of gasoline is, we let the government specify certain things, and that’s a useful way of approaching certain issues. But on the big issues of life — death, gods, happiness — we need to drill down to the question: what is the authority? What is it that tells us whether we’re happy or not?

In Epicurean philosophy we can go straight to the Letter to Menoeceus and look at Epicurus’s approach. He’s not telling you that you have to live forty years and six months before you can be happy. He’s not telling you that you have to be married or unmarried, have children or not have children, eat certain amounts of food at certain times of day, dress a particular way, or live in a particular type of house. He’s not itemizing how much money you have to have in the bank, how many places you have to go, how many vacations you have to take. That’s not the right approach.

All of those things I’ve just mentioned do fit into a happy life, but the question is what’s the right combination and the right amount of all of them — and it’s obvious, when you think about it, that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. That doesn’t mean happiness doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean those things I mentioned aren’t components of happiness. It just means there is no God, no ideal form of happiness. We have to live our lives as human beings and understand that nature has given us the ability to understand the framework we live in. Nature has given us the ability, without a lot of logical analysis, to understand what it means to be alive versus dead, to be happy and feel pleasure versus be unhappy and feel pain. These are questions that come from nature, not from a supernatural God, or a philosopher who says, “I’ve got the key to absolute truth through geometry.”

Now, again, as we close — you made a great point that Lucullus, at the end of 16, has seemingly come back to the position that we can know the reality of things by comparing them to what we do in the forum, in the real world, and that’s the practical approach to take. But I do want to stress, I see a big problem here. We’re reading Cicero, chronicling for us, around 50 BC, the best philosophers of his time, and he’s concluding that the best arguments are made either by the Stoics, who think a God gives us all the answers, or by the skeptics, who think there are no answers to be obtained.

This is a major red flag for the future of the ancient world, because they were about to be inundated by a new religion from the East, which was going to undermine everything they believed in and wipe away both the Stoics and the skeptics. I bring that up because they were, in fact, wiped away, since their answers were so insufficient to these important questions of life that when another adversary appeared on the scene and said, “I don’t care about all your arguments about logic and reason, I’m just telling you to submit to God and you’ll live forever in heaven,” those arguments were able to overpower both the Stoics and the skeptics and wipe them away from the face of history.

I don’t think that’s a problem that ceased to exist when the Stoics and the skeptics lost their official standing in the Roman and Greek worlds. We still face the same problem today: being confident in our approach to what reality really is, and being willing to stand up for our position against opposing arguments — being willing to stand up for our own happiness in the face of people who will say you not only don’t have a right to be happy, you need to be dead. Going back to the original analogy of wolves versus dogs: wolves can look a lot like dogs, dogs can look a lot like wolves, but you’ve got to know the difference, because you want to associate with one and be as far away as possible from the other. And if you don’t have confidence in your ability to come to a conclusion about which class is which, then you’re as lost as the Stoics and the skeptics were in 50 BC, before they were swept off the face of the earth. These continue to be relevant questions today, and we’ll keep coming back to them.

So, Joshua, we finally made some progress on Section 16 this week. We’ll come back next week with Section 17. We’ll be continuing with these basic arguments for a while — I was looking at where we are, and I think this is something like our thirty-second episode on Academic Questions, and we’ve got many, many more to go, which raises the possibility that this review of Academic Questions might turn out to be one of the longest series of episodes we’ve ever done on the Lucretius Today podcast. But I think the issues being discussed are very important, and very clearly related to our understanding of Epicurus, and hearing these other people come at these same questions from what Epicurus would say are erroneous perspectives is very valuable in understanding what Epicurus thought was the right perspective.

So we’ll come back next week and continue in Section 17. In the meantime, 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. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.