Episode 154 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 10 - The Canon, Reason, and Nature 01

Welcome to Episode One Hundred Fifty-Four of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we'll walk you through the ancient Epicurean texts, and we'll 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 you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.

We're now in the process of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book "Epicurus and His Philosophy."

This week we are going to begin Chapter Seven - The Canon, Reason, and Nature

• The Dethronement of Reason
• Ridicule
• Nature as the Norm
• Priority of Nature over Reason

PD16. In but few things chance hinders a wise man, but the greatest and most important matters, reason has ordained, and throughout the whole period of life does and will ordain.

PD22. We must consider both the real purpose, and all the evidence of direct perception, to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise, all will be full of doubt and confusion.

PD23. If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.

PD24. If you reject any single sensation, and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion, as to the appearance awaiting confirmation, and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations, as well, with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation, and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.

PD25. If on each occasion, instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other, nearer, standard, when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.

Diogenes Laertius:

Logic they reject as misleading. For they say it is sufficient for physicists to be guided by what things say of themselves. Thus in The Canon Epicurus says that the tests of truth are the sensations and concepts [preconceptions / anticipations] and the feelings; the Epicureans add to these the intuitive apprehensions of the mind.

The Wise Man will found a school, but not in such a manner as to draw the crowd after him; and will give readings in public, but only by request. He will be a dogmatist but not a mere skeptic; and he will be like himself even when asleep.

Epicurean Canonics - Epicurus College Course Material

Scheduling note: The podcasting team had a good conversation during the last recording session but given the importance of the subject we decided to postpone the recording of the first program on Chapter Seven til our next recording session. We expect to be back on a normal schedule next week.

The main topic was the reading Epicurean theory about the virtue of friendship is not sufficient - we need to take steps to cultivate actual Epicurean friends, first online (since that today is currently the only practical way to do so), and then move next to "real life."

OK my first comment would be that by placing 'CONCEPTION" as one of the three labels on the legs at the far left, you are taking sides (which you may or may not want to do) with Anticipations / Preconceptions BEING THE SAME AS conceptions. DeWitt advocates against that and I think for good reason. Yes that is a very possible reading of Diogenes Laertius, and Bailey uses that word, but most other translators do not. Against that view is Velleius, and to take that position from the beginning would skirt the very deep issues that I think DeWitt does a good job of describing. DeWitt's formula is that "conceptions" are the "output" of the thinking process, while the better labelings of the "inputs" are 1 - anticipations (or preconceptions or prolepsis) / 2 -feelings / 3 - 5 senses,

And the real issue is being clear to illustrate the location in the chart where "error" arises, which most people seem to agree to be in the opinion-making process (which seems to me to be more the "conceptualization" process). Until that point the three legs of the canon at the very left are presumably operating irrationally and mechanically and wherein 'all sensations are true". I personally think that the three legs of the Canon MUST be considered to operate "automatically" in that sense (of not having any component of opinion) in order for them to function as standards of "truth" or "measurement." To me, the "all sensations are true" formula makes the most sense by seeing all of the inputs from all of the 3 legs as "sensations" rather than just using that word to describe the 5 bodily senses. It makes sense to me to refer to the data from pain and pleasure as "senses" (I sense pleasure and pain) and for the sake of being parallel I would see "an anticipation" as data received from the faculty of anticipations just as would see light or sound as data received from the faculty of the 5 senses.

That leaves concept-formation and concept-application much further to the right on the chart, almost near the end, which is where error can and does occur and where you have to do the "waiting" and the "analogizing" and the application of the PDs in the mid-20s.

And given the way you are drawing the chart, you may want to have "images" in there somewhere too, or at least annotate it as to whether you see images to be part of anticipations, feelings, or sensations. This is where DeWitt hypothesizes that they were seeing the brain as a "suprasensory organism" - because you don't see "images" with your eyes.

Also Joshua topics to be considered here are:

1 - We've been discussing anticipations since the forum started and there likely is not enough evidence to be 100% sure which theory is correct. I personally think that DeWitt is onto something with his "intuition" word, and I think the most persuasive discussions we've had in the past consider words like a faculty of "pattern-recognition" which is not so far from intuition. In this discussion the "images" discussions are critical to include and not just exclude, like some people want to do when the read the Diogenes Laertius description and conclude that it's simple: we see series of oxes and put together a picture in our minds of an ox. Surely that does happen as part of the thinking process, but i think the great weight of the evidence is that this comes later in the thought process, while anticipations are a faculty that generate raw input closer to the beginning of the process.

2 - And closely related is the whole "blank slate" issue. I think DeWitt and others are persuasive that "blank slate" is Arisotelian or otherwise, and that Epicurus did NOT consider himself to be a blank slate person who thinks that everything in our minds comes strictly through the five senses.

Of course what we are talking about now is not all in this chapter - it's in the later discussions of Anticipations.

There is a good Voula Tsouna article on Anticipations in which she reviews what Sedley has said and disagrees with some of his analysis, so if those two are not together then we are going to have to go in from the beginning keeping several alternatives in mind. Personally however I think the best way to steer clear of an improper conclusion is to insist that "images" be included in the picture before we can conclude we have a good answer as to what Epicurus really thought.

And one more thing Joshua, I would not set in stone any thoughts on this chapter (Canon, Reason, Nature) until you have read the upcoming chapter (Sensations, Anticipations, Feelings) as they are tightly connected.

Quote from Joshua

Since I've only focused on sensations in the chart I'm going to restrain myself to one thing right now--which is that I question whether error really does enter in that late in the process.

"that late"? Just so I am clear what you are saying, what is your current view of "all sensations are true"?

....this is the Lucretius book iv material we discussed last night:

[478] You will find that the concept of the true is begotten first from the senses, and that the senses cannot be gainsaid. For something must be found with a greater surety, which can of its own authority refute the false by the true. Next then, what must be held to be of greater surety than sense? Will reason, sprung from false sensation, avail to speak against the senses, when it is wholly sprung from the senses? For unless they are true, all reason too becomes false. Or will the ears be able to pass judgement on the eyes, or touch on the ears? or again will the taste in the mouth refute this touch; will the nostrils disprove it, or the eyes show it false? It is not so, I trow. For each sense has its faculty set apart, each its own power, and so it must needs be that we perceive in one way what is soft or cold or hot, and in another the diverse colours of things, and see all that goes along with colour. Likewise, the taste of the mouth has its power apart; in one way smells arise, in another sounds. And so it must needs be that one sense cannot prove another false. Nor again will they be able to pass judgement on themselves, since equal trust must at all times be placed in them. Therefore, whatever they have perceived on each occasion, is true.

DeWitt reconciles this by concluding that "true" means "truly reported" without injection of opinion. Is that what you are saying or do you see it differently?

Just for the record we were also talking last night about the contrast between

Descartes: "I think therefore I am"

vs

Jefferson:

Jefferson to John Adams, August 15, 1820:    (Full version at Founders.gov)

…. But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May 12. on matter, spirit, motion etc. It’s crowd of scepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down, again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organisation of matter, formed for that purpose by it’s creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall shew how he could endow the Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the tract of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and, by that will, put matter into motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart.

Quote from Joshua

Another way to put this would be to say that any given sensation gives accurate information, buy no individual sensation contains all possible accurate information.

Yes I think that's the key. The senses are irrational and do not inject any opinion when they report something. The report what they receive without comment. But no single sensation tells the whole story, nor does a later sensation have the power to say that the first one was "wrong." The key seems to be that all issues of
"right" and "wrong" or "true" or "false" are issues that are assembled in the volitional mind, and a large part of all this epistemology we are about to discuss is how to assemble the data into concepts or pictures or opinion or whatever, and what standards we are going to use to decide whether the concept or picture or opinion is "true" or 'false."

And I think that's where the issue of "certain" or "confident" comes in, and we have to define what those words mean, beause we're not fictional supernatural gods who have access to omniscience or omnipresence to be able to say that your own perspective or conclusion is "final." We don't have access to that kind of finality (which is made up in the first place) and yet we still have to have an understanding of what it is for us to "know" something with enough confidence to base our life on it and make decisions.

That section of Lucretius that we are discussing in Book 4 is probably one of the best ways to get at all this, in my view. And it's interesting that that discussion comes right around the same place as the discussion of "illusions" and also "images."

If we don't have a theory that allows us to understand this approach, then that's when we lose confidence in the natural faculties and start looking for other means of understanding the "true world" that is allegedly beyond the reach of our senses.

Quote

[500] And if reason is unable to unravel the cause, why those things which close at hand were square, are seen round from a distance, still it is better through lack of reasoning to be at fault in accounting for the causes of either shape, rather than to let things clear seen slip abroad from your grasp, and to assail the grounds of belief, and to pluck up the whole foundations on which life and existence rest. For not only would all reasoning fall away; life itself too would collapse straightway, unless you chose to trust the senses, and avoid headlong spots and all other things of this kind which must be shunned, and to make for what is opposite to these. Know, then, that all this is but an empty store of words, which has been drawn up and arrayed against the senses.

[513] Again, just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, all awry, bulging, leaning forwards or backwards, and out of harmony, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.

[522] Now it is left to explain in what manner the other senses perceive each their own object—a path by no means stony to tread.

It has always struck me that this sentence seems to be particularly thorny for the translators to make clear. This is Bailey:

[500] And if reason is unable to unravel the cause, why those things which close at hand were square, are seen round from a distance, still it is better through lack of reasoning to be at fault in accounting for the causes of either shape, rather than to let things clear seen slip abroad from your grasp, and to assail the grounds of belief, and to pluck up the whole foundations on which life and existence rest.

The different translations I have seen almost never fail to seem awkward, but the meaning seems to be:

It's better to admit that you don't know rather than to admit that there is anything beyond or above the senses that will let you determine the answer without them, or in contradiction of them. Because if you fall for that trap then you'll be totally lost in imaginary traps.

[Edit: Scratch that. More importantly, the sentence that is even harder to translate seems to be at the end of that, because the "senses" should not be described as false. (As it seems to me he often does Brown does a little better):

Bailey: [513] Again, just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, all awry, bulging, leaning forwards or backwards, and out of harmony, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.

Brown: So the reason of things must of necessity be wrong and false which is founded upon a false representation of the senses.

Munro: Once more, as in a building, if the rule first applied is wry, and the square is untrue and swerves from its straight lines, and if there is the slightest hitch in any part of the level, all the construction must be faulty, all must be wry, crooked, sloping, leaning forwards, leaning backwards, without symmetry, so that some parts seem ready to fall, others do fall, ruined all by the first erroneous measurements; so too all reason of things must needs prove to you distorted and false, which is founded on false senses.

]