Episode 240: The False Allegation That "General Assent" Was The Epicurean Basis For Divinity

Episode 240 - 08/06/24 - Cicero's On The Nature of The Gods - Part 14 - The False Allegation That "General Assent" Was The Epicurean Basis For Divinity

Transcript of Episode 240. Note: The following transcription was prepared with speech to text software, and has been only lightly edited for accuracy. This file has been prepared primarily as an aid in searching for material in the audio episode. This transcript likely contains errors, and should not be relied on for anything other than searching for discussions relevant to particular topics. Please consult the original audio episode for accurate information. If you come across egregious errors in the transcript below, please let us know in the Epicureanfriends.com forum!

Welcome to episode 240 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 text and 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 have a thread to discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

Today we're continuing with Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods. We have completed Velleius's presentation, and starting today in Section 23, we are getting into the heart of the argument that Cotta, the Academic Skeptic, is going to use to try to refute what Velleius has said.

We started off last week with some general observations about Academic Skepticism and the inconsistency of Cotta's ultimate position. The Academic Skeptics are devoted to the idea that nothing is knowable, but nevertheless, that does not stop them from saying that all sorts of things are false, which they themselves know to be false. Cotta will be expanding on this argument as we move forward over the next several weeks, challenging the falsity of the Epicurean position without explaining to us how he is sure that it is false, other than his belief that it makes no sense.

Today, right off the bat, we're going to have something we need to discuss at length, but let me introduce the subject by reviewing what Cotta says in Section 23. Yang translates it this way:

You have said that the general assent of men of all nations and all degrees is an argument strong enough to induce us to acknowledge the being of the gods. This is not only a weak but a false argument. For first of all, how do you know the opinions of all nations? I really believe there are many people so savage that they have no thoughts of a deity. What do you think of Diagoras, who was called the atheist, and of Theodorus after him? Did they not plainly deny the very essence of a deity? Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just now mentioned, the greatest sophist of his age, was banished by order of the Athenians from their city and territories, and his books were publicly burnt because these words were in the beginning of his treatise concerning the gods: “I am unable to arrive at any knowledge whether there are or are not any gods.” This treatment of him, I imagine, restrained many from professing their disbelief of a deity since the doubt of it only could not escape punishment. What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, and the perjured? If Tubulus, Lucius Lupus, or Carbo, the son of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had believed that there were gods, would either of them have carried his perjuries and impieties to such excess? Your reasoning, therefore, to confirm your assertion is not so conclusive as you think it is. But as this is the manner in which other philosophers have argued on the same subject, I'll take no further notice of it. I rather choose to proceed to what is properly your own.

Before we go on to the second part of Cotta's argument, let's deal with this very first opening salvo, which starts with the sentence: "You have said that the general assent of men of all nations is an argument strong enough to induce us to acknowledge the being of the gods."

The first thing I would say about that is that I think this is not an accurate representation of what Velleius has said. If we think back to our discussions of several weeks ago, Velleius stated that Epicurus grounded belief in the gods in the prolepsis, one of the three canonical faculties of human beings. Prolepsis is a faculty equivalent to the five senses or the feeling of pain and pleasure, which we take as a given due to our human makeup as a contact with the outside world.

When Cotta talks about the general assent of men of all nations and all degrees, "general assent" implies a concept that has been formed after reasoning. In other words, if I assent to something, I agree that it is true, that a particular construct has been well-argued, and that the rationality behind it is acceptable. But that is exactly the stage at which Velleius and Epicurus are not looking first. They're looking to prolepsis, which is a pre-rational stage of perception, and pointing out not that all men agree that Yahweh is the lord of the universe or Allah is the lord of the universe or any particular god—Zeus, Venus, any particular construct—is true.

Epicurus is saying that the belief in the class of beings we call gods is something that derives from prolepsis, but any particular conclusion about the nature of the gods is an opinion. The proleptic basis provides the perception that the class of entities called gods is something to take cognizance of, something to be examined further, and about which we can and should develop theories that we then argue as to whether they are true or false or not.

The proleptic basis is an assertion that there is, in the human makeup, just like there are eyes and ears, just like there are feelings of pleasure and pain, a faculty that disposes us to recognize this question as something to be examined. That is a far cry from saying that the general assent of men in Greece is that there is a Zeus, that the general assent of men in Rome is that There is a Jupiter that the general assent of men in Jerusalem is that there's Yahweh, and that the general assent of men in Saudi Arabia is that there's Allah. Those are very different constructs from what Epicurus is talking about, and each of the ones I've just mentioned can be examined to determine whether they are true or false. From an Epicurean point of view, they are determined to be false because they conflict with basic physics and understanding. When you allege that a god has created the universe, you're alleging something that is simply not acceptable in Epicurean physics. However, the proleptic origin of humans recognizing that the issue of gods is something that has to be addressed, and that gods, to the extent that they exist, are going to be blessed and imperishable, is a much stronger argument. This is different from what Cotta is picking out here to attack. When Cotta says that this is not only a weak but a false argument and questions whether we even know the opinions of all nations, he is not addressing the argument that Velleius has presented. Velleius is not arguing that gods are X, Y, and Z because 50,000 Frenchmen say so. Velleius is arguing that the subject of gods is significant to men and that any proper conception of the gods would have to include that they are blessed and imperishable. That's the foundation of what Velleius and Epicurus were presenting.

The remainder of the presentation, when Velleius starts talking about quasi-blood and quasi-bodies and so forth, clearly extends into the realm of reason, speculation about particular assertions about the gods, which is not at the same level of proleptic clarity as the fact that they are blessed and imperishable or that they are issues for us to consider in the first place. The material that we're going to be covering in section 23 and the next several weeks contains a lot of very interesting detail about how these arguments were constructed that we don't necessarily get from Velleius himself. Cotta will point back to Democritus as the originator of the idea of images, the different types of images, and their potential relationships to divinity. We'll get more detail as we go forward and as Cotta gives us these criticisms.

First and foremost, I would argue that anyone who asserts that Epicurus said there are gods because 50,000 Frenchmen, or even 50 billion Frenchmen, say so is not representing Epicurus's argument accurately. Epicurus's argument is that human beings have a proleptic faculty, just like they have a faculty of pleasure and pain, and just like they have the five senses. It is on the basis of this faculty, which reveals to us the significance of a discussion of the gods, that Epicurus asserts this. He is not agreeing with any particular contention about a specific god in France, Athens, Jerusalem, or anywhere else.

Yeah, I agree with you, Cassius. It's very important to get very clear what the Epicureans were actually saying. In section 123 of the Yonge translation of the letter to Menoeceus, it says this: "Those things which without ceasing I have declared unto thee, those do and exercise thyself therein, holding them to be the elements of right life. First, believe that God is a living being, immortal and blessed according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind, and so believing thou shalt not affirm of him anything that is foreign to his immortality or that agrees not with his blessedness, but believe about him whatever may uphold both his blessedness and his immortality. For verily there are gods, and the knowledge of them is manifest, but they are not such as the multitude believe, seeing that men do not steadfastly maintain the notions they form respecting them. Not the man who denies the gods worshiped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious."

In section 124, he continues, "For the utterances of the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions but false assumptions. Hence it is that the greatest evils happen to the wicked and the greatest blessings happen to the good from the hand of the gods, seeing that they are always favorable to their own good qualities and take pleasure in men like unto themselves but reject as alien whatever is not of their kind."

So, I think it's important to get this straight, and I take on board, Cassius, that you mentioned that the primary knowledge of the gods does not come from any argument or from any application of reason but from a direct proleptic experience. This was the Epicurean view of things. But even considering the arguments that he made, either in support of the position or to modify the position, it's important to get straight what Epicurus himself is actually saying. What he's not saying is this: we should believe in the gods because everyone else the whole world over believes in the gods. If that were the case, if this was Epicurus's argument, then he would be left in a position where he would also have to accept other ideas about the gods that everyone else the whole world over believes about the gods, even though they are contradictory to other elements of his philosophy.

example, I think that Epicurean theology is unique in the sense that the gods he's describing are not supernatural beings. Diogenes Laertius records in his book on Pyrrho, whom we talked about last week under the subject of skepticism, that Epicurus often went to hear what Pyrrho had to say in describing what he experienced in Bactria and in India when traveling with the army of Alexander the Great. One of the things that Pyrrho saw there was that when you go to these other parts of the world, just like the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, and all these other places, they have their own ideas about the gods. Their ideas about the gods don't match our ideas about the gods, and for Pyrrho, this was a plank in support of his skepticism. The idea being that if nobody knows what's going on here and everybody has a different opinion, how are we supposed to find the truth?

However, for Epicurus, because this is not the main reason he accepts his understanding of the gods, he is not left in that position. If this was the only argument that he offered—we have to believe in the gods because everybody believes in the gods—then you would have to believe in the efficacy of animal sacrifice because pretty much everybody in the periphery of the Greek world at the time had gods that were propitiated by animal sacrifice. If that was the case, you would have to believe that the gods are going to punish you for acting in the wrong way because, again, in the periphery of the Greek world at the time, pretty much everybody's god was like that. You would also have to believe in the validity of oracles because pretty much everybody in that world consulted the oracles and thought that their pronouncements were true.

Epicurus rejects pretty much all of that, but he keeps this idea of the gods and interprets it in a way that is consistent with his philosophy but also consistent with itself. The idea of the gods is consistent with the definition of gods. If the gods have a need to create and they have a need to intervene in the affairs of men, then they are not as self-reliant as you would expect someone who had attained the greatest pleasure of Epicurean philosophy to be. I think there are a lot of problems with the way Cicero interprets this from Epicurean philosophy, in part because Epicurus says yes, you should believe in the gods, but to believe what the multitude believes about the gods is true impiety. Of course, someone who just said, "I'm just going to believe what everyone else believes and that's it," could never reach that position. Cicero is missing what's actually going on here.

Joshua, yes, let me agree with you by giving an example that comes to my mind. Hearing you discuss it that way, the more I read and think about this academic skeptic argument, the more irritated it makes me. We've got the equivalent here of Cotta taking the position: Look around you, Velleius. Don't you see lots of different types of four-legged animals who bark and chase cats? But, you know, some of them are big, some are small, some are white, some are black, some are friendly, some are unfriendly, some look spotted, some look pure white, and some are pure black. There are so many different types of these four-legged animals out there. How can you tell me, Velleius, that dogs exist because there are so many different perceptions of dogs in the world? Dogs can't exist as a thing in themselves because you've got so many discrepancies in the way people look at dogs.

Now, that may not be a perfect allusion, but this is the academic skeptic argument. Because there are so many different perspectives on something, that means that no knowledge is possible. That means that the very thing you're talking about—the thing that we all can understand in our minds as a reference point, such as the word "dogs" or "cats" or something like that—does not exist as a unified concept because there are so many differences between individual dogs and cats.

Velleius and Epicurus are talking about the issue that we can communicate with each other about dogs and cats. We understand what this concept is that we're talking about, even though we all understand at the same time that every individual dog and every individual cat is unique in some way. Because every dog is not exactly like every other dog, that does not prevent us from talking about dogs. It does not prevent us from talking about cats. It does not prevent us from talking about snowflakes, if indeed every snowflake is individually unique. It is possible for us to focus on a concept that we're talking about and discuss it, even though there are tremendous numbers of different perspectives about them. I'm not saying that any of those perspectives are correct in the sense that a particular observation of a particular snowflake or a particular dog or a particular cat is absolutely true. The person who's talking about a dog or a cat at a particular moment may, in fact, be hallucinating, may just be speculating about what he's talking about, and the particular one he's mentioning may not exist. We can and should attempt to get behind what this person is saying and either prove what he's saying to be accurate for all of us or not accurate for all of us. But the implication of where Cotta is going here is exactly that.

In fact, if you look closely at the way Yonge is describing this in this first sentence, he says that the general assent of men of all nations is an argument strong enough to induce us to acknowledge the being of the gods, is the way Yonge translates that first sentence: "the being of the gods." Further on, he says, "I really believe there are many people so savage that they have no thoughts of a deity." It is not proper to confuse the issue of talking about the essence or being or thoughts of a deity with particular deities.

That's the direction Cotta is going to take as we move further along, but even at this very beginning point, this is the key issue that distinguishes Epicurus from the other philosophers. We often hear it discussed that Epicurus was extremely pious and had great respect for the gods, but there is no example that I'm aware of where Epicurus makes a specific allegation that a specific god exists in a specific way. There's no allegation in the letter to Menoeceus that he's talking about Zeus, Venus, Athena, or any particular god. He's discussing the general approach to the subject and the way we understand it can be discussed.

In fact, we haven't gotten into the details of the second part of section 23 here, but even when Cotta is discussing, for example, Protagoras of Abdera, who says that he was unable to arrive at any knowledge whether there are or are not any gods, I would suggest that the devil in the detail here is what Protagoras was really saying. Was he referring to gods in the sense of Olympians, or Zeus, or Athena? In the very act of making the statement that he's not able to arrive at any knowledge about whether there are any gods, he is expecting people to understand in general what he is talking about. He's not being specific, at least in this quotation, about whether he's talking about Zeus or Athena, but Protagoras is saying there's a subject that I want to communicate with you about. There's a subject generally called gods, and what I'm telling you is that I don't have any evidence whether gods exist or not. The most logical interpretation of that sentence is that he doesn't have evidence of whether a particular god exists or not, but that does not prevent him from talking about the subject. He's not saying that the subject of our discussion does not exist; he's saying that he has no knowledge that a particular instance of it exists or not.

Regardless of what Protagoras meant, what we do know is that when you combine the evidence from the letter to Menoeceus with the way that Velleius has told us that Epicurus was grounding his reasoning, Epicurus is approaching the subject of gods as something that we can discuss intelligently. We can arrive at the conclusion that they are blessed and imperishable based on a proleptic faculty that all men, at least all normal men, all healthy men, have; otherwise, they would not be able to discuss the subject in the first place.

To wrap up that comment, the essential point is we should not accept the premise of an academic skeptic who is telling us that knowledge of this subject is impossible at the same time that he is asserting that particular positions are false. He cannot know that a particular position is false unless he is taking a position on what is true.

Of course, Cassius, this wouldn't be Cicero if he didn't go into a lengthy diatribe about Greek and Roman history, so we have a few names we should deal with. One of them is Diagoras, who was called an atheist. Then he mentions Theodorus, who plainly denied the very essence of a deity. Protagoras of Abdera, whom you just now mentioned, the greatest sophist of his age, was banished by the Athenians from their city and his books were publicly burned because these words were in the beginning of his treatise concerning the gods: "I am unable to arrive at any knowledge whether there are or are not any gods." Cicero further mentions a few Roman names; he says, "What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, and the perjurers if Tubulus, Lucius Lupus, or Carbo, the son of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had believed that there were gods? Would either of them have carried his perjuries and impieties to such excess?"

So the question as to the extent or existence of atheism or agnosticism as a proposition that was put forward by people in the ancient world is in question. Part of the reason it's in question is that we have a lot of claims like the ones we find here in Cicero, where we have an author who's living centuries after these philosophers making claims about what they thought. Unfortunately, a lot of ancient fragmentary sources are in this vein, just like Cicero making claims about what Epicurus said and then getting it slightly, but very importantly, wrong.

So I don't know whether Diagoras, Theodorus, and Protagoras could really be said to have been atheists in the modern sense of the word, but there are signs of people who rejected the prevailing orthodoxy. In fact, in the Bible, we have this interesting quote, and everyone's heard it: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" Well, for someone to write that down, they have to have heard someone else saying either there is no God or something that sounded quite a lot like that to the author. So there's clearly some pushback in the ancient world.

Last week I quoted Edward Gibbon, who said that "the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful." So we do have this kind of Whig history approach of saying that in the ancient world everything was great and the philosophers were brilliant and none of them believed in this silly idea of supernatural gods that trouble us, and then we had the Middle Ages and they were horrible, and then we had the Renaissance and everything was great again. This is a simplistic view of things.

In my estimation, probably there were people in the ancient world who outright rejected the existence of the gods. I see no real problem with that approach. I don't think it's such a revolutionary and universal idea that no one anywhere in the ancient world could have possibly had that idea. I think it's very likely that there were people who were thinking along those lines.

Joshua, let me jump in there. I think you're right about people in the past thinking along the lines of what is today considered modern atheism. Perhaps Protagoras was the equivalent of a modern atheist, but Epicurus did not consider himself to be an atheist. I think we can make the same distinction today with the modern atheists who simply say, "Well, Jehovah doesn't exist," or "Allah doesn't exist." Those are specific factual allegations that a particular god does not exist. However, when modern atheists properly reject the claims of a particular god, they generally do not go further to say, "Well, Yahweh, Allah, and Zeus may not exist, but I'm not telling you that there are no other beings in the universe who are actually blessed and imperishable, and who did not create the universe, but who are essentially godlike in the way they are able to live." Modern atheists don't go so far as to say that, and it seems likely to me that these ancient atheists, like Protagoras, were also mainly concerned with denying the existence of particular gods, such as Zeus, whom they found objectionable. They never got around to addressing the direction that Epicurus is going in—getting behind the question of the error of a particular god's existence and starting to deal with the more important issue of why we are even talking about all of this in the first place. What is it in our nature that has disposed us to feel like this issue needed to be addressed? Epicurus apparently was addressing the fact that nature has disposed us to conceptualize blessedness and imperishability as attributes that real living beings can possess.

Again, I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but bouncing off what you just said, I think that that's one way of approaching this analysis that gets us behind what Cotta is attempting to do. Those who simply want to say Jehovah doesn't exist are making a point that has some limited value, but it is a point that doesn't address the deeper human relationship to the topic in the first place. Just because certain people get it wrong when they categorize a particular god as creating the universe and controlling our destiny, that doesn't end the discussion. The discussion of blessedness and imperishability and the potentiality of that in the real universe is a subject that demands further analysis beyond simply saying that Zeus doesn't exist. Saying that Zeus doesn't exist or a particular religion is absurd is not the end of the story. We hold that centaurs don't exist because the physics that would allow centaurs to exist would not be consistent with the rest of our physics. We hold that supernatural gods creating universes cannot exist because such a construct would be contradictory to our knowledge of physics and the nature of the universe. But saying that a particular thing does not exist does not end a discussion that starts because of a natural faculty that brings something to our attention in the first place.

As you've said, Joshua, Cotta is asserting that looking to the opinions of men, "is the manner in which other philosophers have argued on the same subject," so he will take no further notice of it at present and is going to proceed to discuss what is purely Epicurean, as opposed to looking at the arguments of other philosophers. But as Velleius has reminded us, Epicurus has not looked to the opinions of other philosophers as the basis for his own opinion, either in ethics, physics, or in any other assertion that Epicurus makes. Epicurus always goes back to what he can validate for himself through his natural faculties. He does not accept conclusions of other people that he cannot validate for himself.

I would again say we really just need to look at the letter to Menoeceus to understand this, where it says, "First, believe that a god is a living being, immortal and blessed according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind." When you look at that sentence, Cicero appears to have interpreted this to say that according to the notion indicated by the common sense of mankind, gods exist. But that's really not what Epicurus says here. He says later that gods are manifest through this proleptic perception. What he's saying now is that the nature of the gods as blessed and incorruptible is the notion indicated by the common sense of mankind. But again, this is not his only reason for thinking that gods exist, which Cotta is sort of implying that it is. Again, this is not even really an argument in favor of their existence, because Epicurus doesn't need an argument in favor of their existence. He's using this direct perception. This is partially an argument for the nature of how they exist, which is as blessed and incorruptible.

That's not to say that Epicurus agrees with the common notion of mankind in other aspects of the nature of the gods, because he thinks, you know, they don't intervene and so forth. For Cotta to present this as Epicurus's argument for the existence of the gods, as Cotta says in section 23, "You have said that the general ascent of men of all nations and all degrees is an argument strong enough to induce us to acknowledge the being of the gods." The simple fact is, that's not really what Epicurus is saying. Epicurus is saying that the faculty of prolepsis is what induces us to acknowledge the being of the gods. What we get not from the general ascent of men of all nations, but from the "notion of a god indicated by the common sense of mankind" from the letter to Menoeceus, is not knowledge that they exist but an understanding of how they exist, and that's not true because people believe it. What Epicurus is saying really is this: the definition of a god. He's establishing his terms more than anything else. This is not an argument in favor of the gods being blessed and incorruptible.

This is not an argument in favor of the existence of gods; he's simply stating what a god is according to the definition people use when they talk about gods. A god is a being that is blessed and incorruptible, and when you accept this definition, you will not affirm anything about them that is foreign to their immortality or that disagrees with their blessedness. Later, he says, "For verily there are gods," and this is really where he makes this claim. Then he adds, "The knowledge of them is manifest." He does not say, "For verily there are gods, and the knowledge of them comes from looking at everywhere on Earth where they believe in the existence of gods." That's not the argument he's making, and Cotta is interpreting this to be the argument he's making.

Yes, I think that's the essential point here. Just because everybody in the world is making specific assertions about gods doesn't mean that any of those specific assertions are accurate, but it tells you something. The fact that everybody is making assertions about gods is significant. There is some reason that people are making assertions about gods, and I think that's what Epicurus is trying to get to the bottom of: the subject we're talking about has a natural basis to it. We just have to cut through all of the ridiculous overgrowth of weeds and get back to the discussion of why we're talking about the subject in the first place. It’s not because a god had to have created the universe. There's something deeper within the human makeup telling us that this subject is important to address.

To begin bringing today's episode to a conclusion, let me make a quick reference to the end of Section 23 that we haven't covered so far. After Cotta says that he's going to proceed to discuss what's uniquely Epicurean, he says this: "I'll accept for purposes of this discussion that there are gods. Instruct me, then, concerning their origin; inform me where they are, what sort of body and mind they have, and what their course of life is. These I am desirous of knowing. You attribute the most absolute power and efficacy to atoms. Out of them, you pretend that everything is made, but there are no atoms, for there is nothing without body. Every place is occupied by body, therefore there can be no such thing as a vacuum or an atom."

The first sentence of 34 says, "I advance these principles of the naturalist without knowing whether they are true or false, yet they are more like the truth than those statements of yours, for they are the absurdities in which Democritus or before him Leucippus used to indulge." This is the irony and the irritating aspect of Cotta: he's saying, "I don't really know anything and I'm not trying to tell you that anything is true," but when criticizing Epicurus, he is absolutely confident that atoms don't exist, which is a total contradiction of his ultimate philosophical position that we can't be sure of anything. But that is the direction that Cotta is attempting to take these arguments. He's going to attack specific allegations without asserting his own counter-allegations as being true. He's going to attempt to convince people to infer from his criticisms that a position of Epicurus, which in fact Epicurus has not taken, is false. He's going to argue that Velleius's speculations about quasi-blood and quasi-bodies are so ridiculous that they suggest we should reject everything Epicurus said about gods, even though the arguments about quasi-bodies and quasi-blood are opinions that are reasonably possible but are beyond what is required to understand divinity, which is nothing more than the idea that divinities are imperishable and blessed.

So we won't go further into the details of this today, but we'll begin to bring today's discussion to a resolution, again focusing on the point that what Cotta is criticizing is not what Epicurus has said or what Velleius has advocated. As we end this discussion today, we find ourselves back at the realization that Cotta is ultimately grounding his own positions not solely in radical skepticism but in rejecting an atomic basis, a natural basis to the universe, which alone is the basis for coming to a rational, natural explanation of the way things are and the subject of gods in the first place.

If Cotta is going to reject atomic theory as the basis for discussing the way the world works, it's essential for us to carefully examine what Cotta will substitute in its place, which will end up being the kind of supernatural arbitrariness and capriciousness that allows someone to be a priest like Cotta, while at the same time not believing in his own heart what he says to other people about the gods. As we bring the episode to a close, Joshua, do you have any final thoughts today?

The more I look at that passage from the Letter to Menoeceus, I think Epicurus is not even relying on the common notion of mankind to give him an understanding of the gods. He's using that as a working definition to discuss the subject more than anything else. He's not really getting anything from men of all nations and what they believe. Cassius, what I’m thinking about as we go through this, with Cotta constantly on alert to decline any certainty in any matter whatsoever, is a quote from Cicero in another book. I see this comes from a work called De Senectute (On Old Age), and the speaker is supposed to be Cato the Elder, but I see Cicero himself in this. He says:

“For these reasons, Scipio, my old age sits light upon me, for you said that this has been a cause of wonder to you and Laelius; and not only is it not burdensome, but it is even happy. And if I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error, which gives me pleasure, to be wrested from me while I live. But if when dead I am going to be without sensation, as some petty philosophers think, then I have no fear that these seers, when they are dead, will have the laugh on me. Again, if we are not going to be immortal, nevertheless, it is desirable for a man to be blotted out at his proper time, for as nature has marked the bounds of everything else, so she has marked the bounds of life.”

So what I'm getting here—and again, Cicero has Cato the Elder, who I’m pretty sure was dead at the time this was produced—Cicero has Cato the Elder give this little speech, but I see this as being part of Cicero's own perspective, and it’s the perspective of quite a few people. He says, “If I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error, which gives me pleasure, to be wrested from me while I live.” In other words, “I don't know if I'm right in my desire for an eternal afterlife, and I may turn out to be wrong, but if I am wrong, I don't want to know that I'm wrong while I'm still living in this vale of tears.”

It's such a markedly different perspective from the one we find in Cotta here in On the Nature of the Gods. In our earlier exploration of Cicero's De Finibus (On Ends), we had Cicero himself giving the counterattack, and perhaps there's something stylistic in this, that when we have a full-fledged academic skeptic who's not willing to say anything for certain except that Epicurus is wrong about everything—that's the only thing he's willing to grant as certain in this world, that Epicurus is wrong—to then go on another work and say, “I don't care if I'm wrong as long as it makes me happy.” I think one of the rewarding features of going through all of these books is we get insight into Cicero himself and how he approaches the subject of philosophy. And let me tell you, it is not with any kind of consistency.

For the Epicurean, we acknowledge that death is the end of our lives, but that doesn't mean that we are not happy while we're living. So, yes, Joshua, Cicero is admitting there that he would rather cling to his belief in an afterlife than accept that no afterlife exists. People accuse Epicurus of selective philosophizing based on wanting to be happy as opposed to determining what is true. I think that's false in Epicurus's case. I think Epicurus considers that he wants to be happy because he has concluded it to be true that there are no supernatural gods and that there is no life after death. But Epicurus is going after the truth, and when we hear Cicero say things like what you just quoted, we have to understand that Cicero is not going to let truth get in his way in opposing what he thinks is the error of Epicurean philosophy. He is going to marshal whatever arguments he can to attempt to make Epicurean arguments look bad, and I think that's what we've seen today in the presentation of Cotta. Cotta has not come to grips with Epicurus's true position. He has proceeded as if Epicurus is making arguments that Epicurus himself did not really make, and there's none more damaging and more false than arguing that Epicurus took his views that gods exist from the fact that a large number of people assert that gods exist.

Epicurus took his positions and checked them all based on the operation of the canonical faculties: the feelings of pleasure and pain, the five senses, and prolepsis. Those are the starting points to which he went back, and those are the foundations from which he concluded that gods are blessed and imperishable. That is a totally different argument than what Cotta is attempting to demolish when Cotta says that such an argument from the common sense of men is not only a weak but a false argument. He would be exactly right to say that the idea that any number of people taking a particular position means that that particular position is correct is a ridiculous argument, but that was not what Epicurus was arguing.

With that, let's close for the day. Thanks for your time. We'll be back next week. See you then. Goodbye.