Democritus' "Nothing is truly real but atoms and void" statement

Excellent finds by Don and Godfrey above - this is where we can do so much more working together than alone.

And of course by now we are close to delinquent in not relating this to the "properties" and "qualities" that are discussed pretty extensively in both the letter to Herodotus and in Lucretius book one (I think), along with the "Trojan War" analogy. I think we are missing a key piece of the Epicurean worldview by not discussing this issue of properties and qualities more frequently. Its through that insight that we explain what is real to us and what, and how we divide the permanent from the temporary. Without this distinction the universe is pretty much indecipherable and it is as if the flux is indeed too fast for us to grasp anything.

This whole issue of explaining to people how to think about what is permanent and unchanging (atoms and void) versus what we should think about what we perceive with our senses (the qualities, which are not random, but which arise from the properties of the atoms and void then and there present in our contextual circumstances) is clearly a subject of first importance. If we don't understand why things in our experience change over time, but that they do not change "randomly" or "chaotically" or "supernaturally" but according to nature, then we can never have confidence in of our conclusions about anything. We will flip flop between (1) a variation of hard determinism with implications that lead to a sort of Calvinism that everything was set in motion without exception from the beginning of time, and (2) a radical skeptical / nihilistic view that nothing can be projected with any confidence whatsoever, and then we are like flotsam and jetsam tossed about helplessly in the waves.

It's only through a coherent perspective from which we can unwind the changing from the seemingly permanent that we can make headway in explaining the universe without resorting to the supernatural or throwing up our hands in total frustration.

In a way I see this much as Sedley has talked about Epicurus' basis for the swerve. Epicurus didn't need an electron microscope to validate the swerve in particular or atomism in general. Atomism is where we arrive when we observe the facts around us and when we deduce from them a mechanism which allows us to rationally explain what we see in a way that is consistent with all the evidence we see and not contradicted by anything. The swerve is where we arrive when we observe the indeterminate actions of intelligent life, and think about the way elements must interact in space. And we have no grounds to criticize and say "Epicurus was just guessing because he didn't have an electron microscope" because what Epicurus was doing was not guesswork, but logical inquiry based strictly on justifiable rules of evidence - the same way we deduce no life after death. We don't think it's a legitimate argument in every case to require someone to go there (death, walk through a fire) and come back to tell us about it, and neither should we require that we "see" elemental particles directly before having confidence that they exist.

We never see the gods (or anything else) create something from nothing, but we see continuity and regularity in the physical world around us, so we can reason from those observations that there must be some elemental point of origin that is unchanging and eternal. It matters not whether that elemental origin is the "atom" or some "subatomic particle" or "energy" or what. What matters is that what we see, and what we do not see, impel us toward the conclusion thst there is a natural elemental foundation, without good reason (based on evidence from the senses) for doubt.

As to that article Don cited last, sounds like our back and forth on Democritus is not entirely different than the different interpretations of Democritus advanced by Sextus Empiricus vs that of Galen.

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"Galen is, then, an objective relativist, who holds, contrary to Sextus’s view that it is false to call an apple red, that the apple really is red, only not intrinsically, but in relation to perceivers."

Sounds like the way to interpret Democritus in a pro-Epicurus way is through Galen, while Sextus seems to be happier with the "slippery slope to nihilism" side. (If Sextus is in fact saying that it is "wrong" to call an apple red.)

If one says that it is false to call an apple red, then (leaving aside issues of language and definitions) that is a statement that many people of common sense would interpret as a direct challenge to the reliability of the senses on which Epicurean philosophy is built. Epicurus could not allow such an opinion to go unchallenged.

Also:

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Democritus may then be taken (following Sextus) as maintaining that things are not in fact flavored or colored, but are merely (falsely) called so (because that is how they seem to be), or (following Galen)as maintaining that things are flavored, colored, etc., not intrinsically, but insofar as that is how they seem to us and, consequently, how we (conventionally) describe them. It may be that Democritus did not in fact distinguish these two theses, which are not in any case sharply distinguished from one another, since it is frequently disputed how far something’s being generally regarded as F, or called F, is constitutive of its actually being F.

Yep - a pretty good summary of the "slippery slope" issue:

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In its moral application, the contrast clearly allows for the same ambiguity as we have identified above in the physical sphere. On the one hand, we have the thesis that, though we believe some things to be just and some shameful, nothing is in fact just or shameful. Hence, all our moral beliefs are false; this amounts to what is called an “error theory” of moral belief.8 On the other hand, we have the thesis that things are just, or shameful, not intrinsically, but insofar as there is an established usage of regarding them as such. These different versions open the way for more or less radical criticisms of morality. At one extreme, if all moral beliefs are false, morality would appear to have the status of a discredited theory, such as witchcraft or astrology, and a defender of morality would have the difficult task of showing why it is better to hang on to a set of false beliefs than to abandon them, and to accommodate to a better theory the phenomena that those beliefs attempted to describe.9 Somewhat less radically, the theory that moral characterizations are relative to our social practices seems to shift the criticism and defense of morality to the level of those practices themselves. To the extent that those practices are arbitrary, grounded in nothing more than local usage or ancestral tradition (or even the product of conscious fraud perpetrated by interested parties), the moral judgments that express them are arbitrary too; but to the extent that those practices can be seen as well-founded (e.g., as meeting fundamental human needs, or interests that are constant across a wide range of different cultures), the moral judgments in which they issue can be defended as themselves well-founded.

I definitely think Epicurus would have been very concerned to prevent an improper view of atomism from being used to rip the foundation from under ALL morality, because people need a morality they can have confidence in to organize their lives successfully.

After discarding supernatural and Platonic-based morality, he would (and apparently did) thus spend a lot of time discussing how human relations can be built on a firm foundation of recognizing pleasure and pain (and probably the anticipations and feelings) as the true basis for a science of human relationships. Once based on the right foundation, we can deduce the Epicurean view of ethics that in fact leads to happy living, and in that pursuit we deal with all the ethical issues we see mentioned in the PDs and the Vatican sayings, including justice - and in fact all the "virtues" -- after first placing them on the proper foundation. That's largely what Cicero has preserved for us in the Torquatus narrative and what we see in Menoeceus and throughout the rest of the texts.

Not sure at the moment that this hasn't already been posted in this thread, and I haven't had time to re-read it, but this David Sedley article is probably very relevant to this discussion:

Sextus Empiricus and the atomist criteria of truth

Sextus Empiricus and the atomist criteria of truth

www.academia.edu