Episode 243 - From "All Sensations Are True" to Reasoning By Similarity and Analogy

Welcome to Episode 243 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 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 each of our podcast episodes.

Today, we're continuing in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods. We're in Book One, and to summarize where we are at this point, last week our episode was devoted to the relationship between the word "truth" and the Epicurean system. We spent a lot of time talking about the classic formulation that all sensations are true and how difficult that can be to understand, accept, and discuss. In our discussions after the episode, it was pointed out that it is very easy to fall into being inaccurate, even when attempting to emphasize that the eyes do not tell us what it is we're looking at, that the eyes don't have concepts of their own, and that the identification of something does not occur in the eye but in the brain.

It's still very easy to fall into the habit of saying that what the eyes provide to us is light, color, shading, shapes, or something like that. It's worth mentioning as we go forward that even when you use words like that, you're talking about conceptual issues that the eyes don't know anything whatsoever about. The bottom line is that when we say there’s no truth or falsity in the eyes, we're always talking about a special meaning of the word "true" because when Epicurus says all sensations are true, he certainly means something. The best explanation is that he means all sensations are true in the sense of being honestly reported—that they do not inject their own memory oropinion, that they don't process the information they receive and transmit to the mind; they just transmit it without comment of their own.

So, all sensations are true in that sense, even though the sensations themselves are never true or false in the sense of being true to the conceptual understanding or explanation of what they're seeing—that's the realm of opinion. Opinions are true or false, but the raw processing of the senses, whether it's the eyes, the ears, or any other sense, are not concepts that are true and false; they’re just input that goes into the mind, where opinions are formed that are eventually true or false. But the input is always accepted as it is. Even though you think when you're looking at a tower up close that it is square, but when you look at the tower from a distance it is round, that understanding of round and square is not in the eyes; it is in the mind. The eyes are simply relaying data as they receive it to the mind.

So, that’s what we talked a lot about last week, and the upshot of that analysis is that all thought processes are based on the senses because the thought processes are not a direct connection to reality themselves—it is the senses that are our connection with reality. This leads in a number of different directions, several of which were covered in an article by Professor David Sedley entitled "Epicurean Theories of Knowledge." We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this week.

Dr. Sedley goes into several aspects of the background of Epicurus's views of knowledge that are relevant to what we're discussing. Here’s what David Sedley had to say:

"During the 260s BC, Arcesilaus succeeded to the headship of the Academy, and under his influence, the formerly doctrinal Platonist school veered away from dogma, instead adopting towards rival schools an essentially critical dialectical stance. It seems to have been during that early phase of the skeptical New Academy that Colotes, who had been an intimate of Epicurus, wrote his treatise entitled The Impossibility of Life Itself According to the Other Philosophers. None of Colotes's chosen targets—Democritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Socrates, Melissus, Plato, Stilpo, the Cynics, and Arcesilaus—were criticized for their ethical positions as one might have predicted, but entirely for the support that their epistemology and metaphysics allegedly lent to skepticism and specifically to skepticism about human cognitive access to physical reality. The last target attacked by Colotes, though anonymous, is unerringly recognized by Plutarch as the New Academy of Arcesilaus, presented as advocating universal suspension of judgment."

Dr. Sedley raises several points in his article, the first of which we've talked about several times—about ontological arguments. Dr. Sedley says:

"He resourcefully points out that the mere existence of an ontological difference between two categories does not entail that one or the other of them will fall short of reality."

Dr. Sedley was pointing out that the Epicureans were attacking this idea that you could simply rely on word constructions to have contact with reality without the senses being involved.

Another aspect that Dr. Sedley mentions is that there was a Rhodian Epicurean by the name of Democritus who responded to an argument about whether seeing double, for example when you put your fingers up to the edges of your eyes and press to one side or the other and alter your vision, is an example of something that shows a fallacy of the senses. Dr. Sedley gives the argument this way:

"To judge from the way Cicero expressed it, the debate ran more or less as follows:"

1. Epicurus insists on the truth of all sense perceptions. If a single case of a false sense perception were found, trust in the senses would collapse. But in fact, the eye simply registers with unfailing accuracy the visual data reaching it. In all alleged cases of optical illusion, the error lies in the mind's misinterpretation or overinterpretation of that visual data.

Now, what I've just read there as Dr. Sedley’s Point One is a very good statement of the essential point that we've been making: the eye simply registers with unfailing accuracy the visual data reaching it.

1. Critics from the New Academy responded with the counterexample of an eye squeezed out of shape and as a result falsely seeing a single flame in a lamp as two flames. Here, what appears to the eye is visual data, but not in the form in which it first reached the eye. How can the Epicurean say that this appearance is true when it is not even true to the visual data that arrived at the eyes?

And then Dr. Sedley said this was the Epicurean response from Timasagorus:

"Timasagoras replied on behalf of the Epicurean that never when he has squeezed his eye while looking at a lamp have there appeared to him to be two flames. This supports the Epicurean thesis that falsehood is always located in the added opinion, not in the eyes themselves."

Dr. Sedley says:

"Does Timasagorus mean that the situation described—the bare visual appearance—has never even momentarily looked to him like two flames? Or does he mean that he has never been misled into thinking that there were actually two flames? Cicero seems to understand this latter point—that what Democritus is arguing is that you’ve never been misled into thinking there were actually two flames. But Dr. Sedley says that on either understanding, Timosagorus’s reply would disqualify the Academic example from counting as a genuine optical illusion at all, and it therefore blocks it from being used as a single counterexample that would destroy the Epicurean reliance on senses as always true."

So, we won’t go further into that, but that’s an example of how Epicurus is going to firmly be of the position that your opinion about what you're seeing is always in the mind, and it is not an error of the eyes for you to reach a false conclusion. That becomes essential to this argument because that’s where Plato and others want to argue that, "Well, the senses cannot be relied upon, so we have to look to logic, or geometry, or divine revelation for some other contact with reality."

And probably even more relevant to our discussion today, Dr. Sedley talks about Philodemus's discussion of sign references in the book titled On Signs or On Methods of Inference, depending on how you want to translate the title that’s assigned to it. Dr. Sedley says:

"Arguably the most important contribution to the history of philosophy to emerge from the wreckage of Philodemus's library is to be found in his own treatise on sign inferences. Seemingly intended for school use rather than for publication, it was his record of an otherwise unknown debate about scientific method that is likely to have taken place around the beginning of the 1st Century BC in Athens. In it, Philodemus summarizes how their teacher Zeno of Sidon and likewise the eminent contemporary Demetrius of Laconia had defended their theory of scientific inference. The favored Epicurean method is the similarity method, while the opponents advocate instead the deductive elimination method. These opponents were almost certainly the Stoics."

The similarity method is subdivided into two parts. The first is based on direct similarity, as is well exemplified by inductive inference—the standard example being inference from the exceptionless mortality of human beings in our experience to the universal mortality of all human beings, including those outside our experience. The second type of similarity method is based on analogy rather than direct similarity, the analogy normally taking the form of an inference from the macroscopic to the microscopic. For instance, since macroscopic motion depends on empty space, motion at the microscopic level of atoms also does so. Both species of the method constitute Epicurean procedures for the use of signs, that is, for the scientific discovery of unobserved truths by inference from directly observable evidence.

And that’s worth emphasizing before we go forward in our text because this is the type of argument that the Epicureans are pursuing. They’re saying, "Look at what we can observe, and we can take the position soundly that the things we’ve not yet observed are directly similar—in other words, directly operating in the same way—as those things we can observe for ourselves. Or, by analogy, they may not be operating in exactly the same way as the things we see, but they are operating in a way analogous to the things that we do see."

For example, the classic case of atoms is that we’ve never seen or touched or had any direct observation of an atom. We are inferring our knowledge of the atoms from those things that we do see. The example David Sedley gives here is that just as we see that in our own experience, bodies cannot move unless they have space to move through—if they’re tightly packed, they can’t move at all—we can infer by analogy that at the atomic level, there must also be space that allows the atoms to move within.

So, that’s the type of reasoning that the Epicureans are using, to be distinguished from what the Stoics are alleging—that the signs you should be talking about are symbolic, like A + B = C, and the use of other types of symbolism to conclude that by logical necessity, certain things must happen. Again, as we talked about last week, Epicurus is not willing to admit by logical necessity that Metrodorus must either be alive or dead tomorrow. He is going to base his conclusions not on logical necessity but on the experience that we have through our senses, and he’s always going to go back to those experiences and not reach the conclusion that there is some symbolic syllogistic means of reaching correct conclusions without ultimate reference back to the senses.

This is all going to be directly applicable when we start talking again in a few minutes about quasi-blood and quasi-bodies. And here’s a particularly important statement Dr. Sedley makes:

"Remarkably, the Epicurean side in the debate seems fully prepared to accept the a priori elimination criterion of Stoicism as correct and to retain it alongside the similarity criterion rejected by the Stoics. The Epicurean strategy is not to reject the Stoic inferential criterion but to minimize its role in sign inference. The Stoic quest for a purely deductive scientific method is doomed to failure, the Epicureans allege, since even the a priori elimination method cannot avoid relying on premises established by the empirical similarity method. True, the Epicureans say, the sign inference 'since there is motion, there is void' goes through trivially by the elimination method because, according to them, if void is eliminated, motion is thereby co-eliminated. But the Epicurean position is that the natural and universal generalization about motion is one we have learned in the first place by empirical generalization over a vast range of experiences where, without exception, motion is observed to take place only where there is room for it to do so."

This Epicurean strategy exhibits the empiricism that had always been the school’s epistemological hallmark and which is here taken to underwrite all necessary truths—even apparently a priori truths are in reality generalizations from experience. Thus, the same inductive methodology is pushed even into the realm of mathematics. From the fact that every 4x4 square in our world has an area numerically equal to its perimeter, we may correctly infer that the same is true of 4x4 squares in all other worlds too.

Okay, I’m going to stop there and bring us back up for air, but the point being made there is pretty clear and can be stated in a way that is more generally hospitable to syllogistic logic than Epicurus is generally given credit for. Because what is being pressed here is that syllogistic logic, when it is correct, does not work because of the assignment of symbols detached from reality but works only because your starting points in the first place, even before you assign symbols to them, have been gathered through generalizations from experience.

The ultimate point is really very simple: you’re always starting back at the senses before you can reason about anything. Just as Lucretius says, reason itself would fall to the ground unless the senses are true—nothing makes sense unless it can be established through the senses.

Joshua: I think the main takeaway from everything that you’ve been saying, Cassius, is that it’s the aim of both the Platonists and the Stoics to undermine our understanding of things in nature, of things that are true, things that exist. In the first point you raised, they’re trying to pit relatives against objects that exist in nature. Colotes asked the question:

"Do you think, on the basis of the foregoing argument, that someone would not suffer the troubles which I mentioned, but rather would make it convincing that fair, foul, and all other matters of belief are falsely believed in just because, unlike gold and similar things, they are not the same everywhere?"

So, what we have here from the Academy side is establishing a dichotomy between something like gold, which is the same no matter where it is in nature or in the cosmos, and things like "fair" and "foul," which are subject to human preference and human opinion. The argument he’s trying to make there is that one of these things has a real existence and one of them does not, or that the belief that something is fair or beautiful is a false belief because it varies from person to person.

And I see that with most of what you mentioned here, we're dealing with this approach that views the object of philosophy as unsettling our understanding of nature rather than creating a better foundation for that understanding. In the last point you mentioned, which was this issue of analogy, I want to quote from Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate, and this will connect back to what we're going to be talking about in the text today.

Lorenzo Valla starts out this way:

"According to my Epicurus, however, nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term living being, he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this, I agree: they eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we; they engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything. Finally, they die, and we die, both of us completely. But we shall have no knowledge of this when we have departed from this life. Therefore, for as long as possible—would that it were longer—let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life. As much as we can—and we can do much—let us most generously gratify our eyes, ears, palates, nostrils, hands, feet, and other parts, which I hope you will do even without my encouragement."

What we see in this particular text is that he's using some of the methods, Cassius, that you were just describing—the method of similarity and analogy, for example, and connecting the experience of humans with the experience of other living beings. What we're going to find as we get into the text for today is that this approach has its own difficulties when it comes to the nature of the gods.

Epicurus, in the Letter to Menoeceus, says that the gods are zōē—living beings—much in the same way that Lorenzo Valla, in his book On Pleasure, says that Epicurus included in the term "living being" mankind just as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. The challenge that Cotta is going to make as we go forward is: "Why, Epicurus, do you suggest, and what do you mean when you suggest that the gods are living beings who have not a body, but something like a body, and not blood, but something like blood?" This is going to be a major focus of his attack going forward.

One of the problems with this attack, and now our response to it, is that this appears to be the only source for this particular view in Epicurean philosophy. We don't have what Epicurus wrote on the subject; Lucretius doesn't mention it, and so we're relying on Cicero both as a transmitter and as a critic.

Cassius: Joshua, thank you for what you've just said because I think you've done a better job of explaining something really important than I did in the initial discussion. Before we move on, I'd like to stay with that for just a moment because if we can bring greater clarity to this, I think we've accomplished a lot.

When you went through the first argument that David Sedley brought up and you were discussing the difference between relative qualities versus bodies that exist in nature, this goes to the heart of a lot of these arguments. The skeptics are arguing that because we perceive differences in our sense perception—in terms of seeing the tower as round versus square, for example—because these differences are perceived by the senses, we really cannot consider any one perception of a tower to be real. They’re arguing that what we should consider to be real is the idea that we can only get to with words and with logical analysis of what a tower really is.

DeWitt says that one of the main problems that Epicurus had with Plato was that he considered Plato to be a skeptic. Well, Plato himself was not nearly so skeptical, it seems, as some of his later followers became, including Arcesilaus. Sedley says:

"Plato had indeed never intended by this contrast between minerals and values to impugn the reality of the latter any more than he meant to infer from the relativity of large and small to their unreality. On the contrary, he had presented an exhaustive division of beings into absolute and relative—a scheme which became formal academic doctrine under Xenocrates."

The point being what Sedley talks about in the article we referenced last week: that there are truths at multiple levels, and that the truth at the macroscopic level does not mean that there are no truths at the microscopic level, and vice versa. Both aspects of reality should be considered real, and we can acknowledge that the tower appears round versus square as an aspect of reality at the same time that we can acknowledge that our idea of a tower is also a real aspect of reality. The one aspect of reality does not invalidate the other aspect of reality.

Which I think is going to lead us to the conclusion that the acknowledgment that saying a god has a quasi-body or quasi-blood is not inconsistent with the idea that a god has reality. The argument from similarity that is being used by Philodemus in On Signs and by Valla as to the nature of the gods is not rendered invalid by Velleius's or Epicurus's inability to state with exact specificity what the nature of the body or the blood really is. As Lucretius said, and we referenced last week, we may not understand why the tower appears round at a distance but square up close, but even failing our understanding of the mechanism of why it appears differently, we do not as a result of that consider the senses less real. We consider what the eyes tell us as just as real as our knowledge that we develop from experimentation and observation, whether the tower is in fact round or square.

I think this gets us into something we were discussing during the week, which is the difference between objective and subjective truth. Going by Sedley and Colotes here, what the later philosophers of the Academy were saying was, "If you think a diamond is beautiful, either your opinion that the diamond is beautiful is false, or the diamond doesn't exist in reality—one of those things has to be true." But we could put a different lens on this by saying, "No, the diamond does exist in reality; the opinion that the diamond is beautiful is just that—it’s an opinion." But it gets even more ludicrous when they say things like, "If you think that a diamond is more transparent than a ruby, either that is false, or the diamond doesn't exist." That seems to be the contrast here, and to me, it just shows the level to which these other thinkers in the ancient world were going to, in the words of Lucretius, "muddle your estate." They’re just sowing confusion on these subjects. There's no reason to say that both of these things can't be true: a diamond can be more transparent than another stone, and it can also exist in reality—both of those things can be true.

Now, it’s not an opinion to say that a diamond is more transparent than granite; it is an opinion to say that a diamond is more beautiful than granite. But in either case, neither of these statements about the relative quality of two different objects invalidates the existence of one or both of the objects. The granite is real; the diamond is real. The relative transparency between the two is a fact of nature and can be measured. And the opinion that one is more beautiful than the other is subjectively true because beauty rests on opinion.

The statement that something is beautiful would certainly be an opinion. I can see somebody saying that the reaction to something as being beautiful is a feeling of pleasure, perhaps. I do think that ultimately the Epicurean position is sound here. Like the last thing you said, Joshua, ultimately, even if we're not yet at the point where we're totally comfortable with the way we're articulating something, we can get a grasp of the bigger picture: that something's going on here with these radical skeptics, that they are attempting to muddle the water, and it’s not necessarily because they've just reached some objectively rational conclusion that we are wise and know that the senses are not reliable and so therefore we are able to tell you through divine revelation and through geometry that there is something that you should go further and look to instead of the senses. It’s not that they have some objective wisdom that we don't have. I would submit that it’s very clear that, as implied with the word "muddle," there is an intention here to obscure and enhance the difficulty with the goal of attempting to dissuade you from having confidence in the senses.

Lucretius says that in a number of ways in his poem, and that’s probably one of the ultimate takeaways from this whole discussion. In the end, the background of what Cotta is arguing here—he's attempting to slash and burn the position that the gods have something similar to a body and something similar to blood. He's trying to say that that argument is ridiculous. But in the end, what truth does Cotta have to substitute for that? He has none. He's not taking a position on anything himself.

He's just saying you can't take a position, and when you see through to the result, you realize, as Lucretius is saying, that these guys are spinning these arguments—keeping people mesmerized in confusion rather than leading them to a clear result. If they had a clear result to offer and proof to back it up, then I would submit that the Epicureans would have been the first to go along with their proof and their reasoning. But they have reasoning without the proof of sensations to ground it on, and that's where Epicurus and the Epicureans are continuously insisting that you have to have the proof through the senses to start with. I think that's a position that ultimately makes a lot of sense and is the most persuasive here.

Every time we think about it, I can tell that you're, Joshua, improving your ability to articulate this. I'm not sure I'm getting much better over time, but there is a really, really important point here, and it's really not that complicated a point. It’s difficult for us, who are wrapped up in all of the skepticism, to see out of, but in the end, it comes down to this: if you don't have sensations to ground your logic on, you've got nothing.

Joshua: Exactly, yeah. And I think if you look at other schools in the ancient world, like the Eleatic school of Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, they aren't necessarily reaching for a skeptical approach, but by ignoring the evidence of the senses, they are at least entertaining ideas that are as ridiculous as what we're reading here, right? The idea that if Achilles and a tortoise are in a foot race and the tortoise is given any amount of a head start, the tortoise will ultimately win the foot race because before Achilles gets halfway to the tortoise, the tortoise will have moved a little bit further. Then Achilles will have to go halfway again to the tortoise, but by the time he has done that, the tortoise will have moved a little bit more. If you had measured the pace of a tortoise and measured the pace of a swift runner using sensation, you would know obviously that the runner would overtake the tortoise.

So, I think there's a real approach here in Greek philosophy to take things to these extremes, and maybe there's value in that in some instances—Zeno's paradoxes are certainly still discussed today—but you can't build a philosophy that helps you live better, more happily, and more wisely by founding it on these paradoxes, on the idea that a tortoise is going to outrun swift-footed Achilles, as Homer puts it, if the tortoise is given any head start. It’s like they’re trying to push things to the absolute limit so they can find the breaking point, and again, maybe that has value, but it does nothing for the health of the soul. And that's Epicurus’s whole approach: What good is a philosophy that does nothing for the health of the soul?

Cassius: That’s right. You're reminding me of the example we also discussed recently of Alexander the Oracle Monger. Do we really believe that Alexander or people like him are committed to their positions because they're sincere about the accuracy of their conclusions? When Lucian points out in his Alexander the Oracle Monger essay that what was needed is an Epicurus or Metrodorus—somebody who was absolutely sure that, even though the particular sleight of hand that Alexander was presenting through his snake might not be known at the moment, they would be absolutely confident that there was some explanation for this that was not supernatural. The snake was not a god; the snake was not able to predict the future.

And that’s really where we come down here—to have the type of confidence that, even though you can’t explain at this moment exactly what type of blood a god would have, you know absolutely, totally, and with the greatest of conviction that whatever mechanism might be going on within a god to keep it alive forever, it is natural, and it is not supernatural. It does not justify Alexander requiring you to pay a toll to get a prediction about the future or some religion requiring you to go through all of their required procedures to get into heaven—all the different things that supernatural religion and these esoteric philosophers advocate as them having some key to the universe that's not available to everybody else.

The upshot of all this discussion of analyzing inference through the senses and the inadequacies of logical syllogisms on their own comes down to that kind of real-world confidence that an Epicurus or Metrodorus would have in the face of a poser like Alexander the Oracle Monger: that an explanation does exist, and if you have enough time, enough ability, and enough evidence over the years, you'll eventually understand it. It's not going to be found to be supernatural. It does not invalidate your ability to live a happy life in the here and now, and it's not a cause of some panic, concern, or anxiety that your ability to live happily is ultimately outside of your control—which is where all these other guys end up.

Joshua: Right, and Cotta starts off sort of where you just were, Cassius, talking about Alexander the Oracle Monger. Cotta, in Section 26, starts off this way:

"It seems an unaccountable thing how one soothsayer can refrain from laughing when he sees another. It is yet a greater wonder that you Epicureans can refrain from laughing among yourselves. It is no body, but something like body. I could understand this if it were applied to statues made of wax or clay, but in regard to the deity, I am not able to discover what is meant by a quasi-body or quasi-blood, nor indeed are you, Velleius, though you will not confess so much. For those precepts are delivered to you as dictates which Epicurus carelessly blundered out, for he boasted, as we see in his writings, that he had no instructor, which I could easily believe without his public declaration of it for the same reason that I could believe the master of a very bad edifice if he were to boast that he had no architect but himself."

Cotta is laying on the insults richly and thickly here, but let's take for a moment this issue, because he's going to go on and on about this. You mentioned, Cassius, that this problem of "not blood, but something like blood, and not body, but something like body"—he’s going to continue this even into Section 27, and there’s more to go here in Section 26.

The first thing I want to say about this is that, to my knowledge—and I'll have to confer with Brian because he's doing good work on the Usener material, the fragments of Epicurus—but this is really the only source for the transmission of this idea, and it comes from a very hostile critic of Epicureanism in Cicero. So it's possible we're not going to be able to make head or tails of what he's saying here.

I do want to mention a few approaches, and I'll start with Norman DeWitt. From his book Epicurus and His Philosophy, he writes on page 261:

"It is not on record whether Epicurus used logical grounds for denying flesh and blood to the bodies of the gods. We are informed that he wrote of them as having a sort of blood and a sort of body lacking solidity, such as characterizes ordinary bodies. It is quite possible that he was rationalizing a tradition represented by Homer, who also denied blood to the bodies of the gods. Instead of blood, there was in their veins a liquid called ichor, which in later Greek signified the straw-colored residue of blood called serum. As for the unsubstantial nature of the divine body, this was only what the general belief of the Greeks assumed to be true. As already mentioned, Epicurus preferred to follow tradition where permissible and was not bent upon introducing new gods, which was an indictable offense, but aimed rather to rationalize existing belief and recall his countrymen to true piety."

So, DeWitt is holding the position here that when Epicurus talks about the gods having something like body but not body, something like blood but not blood, that he is tapping into a literary and cultural tradition dating back to Homer, who describes gods as subsisting on nectar and ambrosia, and that it’s ichor and not blood that flows through their veins, and that this ichor is fatal to any human that should consume it or maybe be touched by it—I can't remember.

Another approach is the approach that Tim O'Keefe takes in a paper called Epicurus's Garden: Physics and Epistemology, published in The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy (2013). This is the approach that Tim O'Keefe takes to the question of quasi-blood and quasi-body. He says:

"As noted above, Cicero is deeply hostile to Epicureanism, so he can often be uncharitable in his interpretation and criticisms. Nonetheless, in this case, his report can be trusted. Cicero wrote his philosophical dialogues in order to bequeath to his countrymen in Latin the arguments of prominent philosophical schools—the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptical Academy—on topics such as fate, ethics, and the gods, and he customarily used the handbook of the various schools themselves in presenting their views. It is evident that Cicero was doing that here. He faithfully reports that the gods have only quasi-body and quasi-blood but has his Epicurean spokesman Velleius admit that he isn't expounding the doctrine clearly, reflecting Cicero's own incomprehension. Later in the dialogue, he has the academic spokesman Cotta attack the doctrine as not merely obscure but as nonsensical flimflam."

And then Tim O'Keefe presents his argument for this issue of quasi-blood and quasi-body:

"But if the gods are just idealizations of the most blessed life for us, the obscure doctrine makes sense as an answer to the question of whether the gods have bodies. To say that they do in the same way as we do would be mistaken. As Velleius later says, the gods don't have the same sort of solidity or numerical distinction as concrete bodies like you and I."

I think, Cassius, we encountered the word stereia earlier in this text, which had something to do with this issue of solidity. O'Keefe continues:

"But to say that they are bodyless would be misleading, suggesting that the gods are incorporeal, disembodied intelligences such as Plato's Craftsman in the Timaeus. As idealizations of the best human life, our idea of the gods is an idea of a being with body, blood, and human appearance. And if the gods are ideas, this would also make sense of the reports that the gods’ substance is tenuous, since according to the Epicureans, our minds and our ideas are both atomic, but neither is solid. The mind is a fine-structured and flimsy body diffused throughout the rest of the body, and both images and ideas are delicate."

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So, Tim O’Keefe here is taking the view that the blood and body of the gods is actually evidence that Epicurus was taking the idealist view of the gods, as opposed to the realist view—that they don't exist in nature but exist in our minds as idealizations of the best possible life, the life that we as humans and as Epicureans should strive for. Do you have thoughts on that, Cassius, before I go forward?

Cassius: Nothing that’s going to advance it further than what we've previously discussed. There are many theories about that, and I’ve never found any of them to be exclusively persuasive to me. In fact, I don't know that I think there’s necessarily a conflict between saying that gods can be both ideals and can exist in real particulars as well. So, we’ve discussed that many times, and I’m not sure I have anything new to add at the moment, but clearly, that’s one of the issues we’re discussing here—the relationship between ideas and real things.

Perhaps one of the conclusions we ought to be coming to is that both of them can have reality. Just because something is an idea does not mean that there are not real particular examples of it, and because there are real particular examples does not mean that on a different level we don’t perceive ideas as real. It’s a very complicated subject, but among the choices that we’re being presented with here, and in real life, we come back to the Epicurean argument that there is some kind of existence to the gods and that they have quasi-bodies and quasi-blood that give them some reality.

We may not find that particularly satisfactory, but the opposite—the position being advocated by Cotta, the Platonist—is that a god is a disembodied mind, purely non-physical, without physical reality. If you have to choose between which of those two is most persuasive, I’ll go with quasi-blood and quasi-body any day of the week.

Joshua: Yeah, and Norman DeWitt connects this to Greek culture, and I’m wondering if there’s something more there as well.

Cassius: Well, the Greeks had some interesting ideas, principally before, I think it was, Galen—one of the great doctors of antiquity who had the luxury of living in Alexandria in Egypt at a time when the vivisection of live condemned prisoners was allowed. This was a horrific practice, but it did allow him a glimpse into the human body while it was still functioning, and so they had a much better understanding of the circulatory system in Galen’s time and in his circle than they did elsewhere in Greek culture, where it was sometimes thought that it wasn’t blood that flowed through the veins—that the blood was in the flesh, and it was air that you breathe in. The air goes through the lungs and into the veins and arteries, and that air is conducted throughout the system, and that’s what’s in the veins.

Then there’s this other idea that may have something to do with it as well—the idea that the seat of the mind in classical culture was in the heart rather than in the brain. The heart obviously, even to the most benighted of the ancients, clearly has a connection with blood because when it’s pumping faster, the veins are expanded, and so forth. So, I don’t know—I think this would be an interesting field of study, but I haven’t done the work to do it, so I don’t have much more to say on that.

We do need to bring today’s episode to a conclusion, so let’s go ahead and do that. During today’s podcast, it occurred to me how there’s this push and pull, or kind of almost a battle, between the material world and the spiritual world. Some of the things that you were talking about just kind of brought that to mind—that what’s really going on here with Epicurean philosophy, when we take the focus as being the material world, we’re asserting that this is the primary thing. But it’s even more than just a primary thing—we’re asserting that there isn’t some kind of mysterious, unknowable substance that permeates everything and that is kind of running the show, so to speak.

So, thinking now about what exists among people’s beliefs—some people believe that God is in control of everything and that there are supernatural forces, but at the same time, they have the modern scientific understanding of things, so they’re kind of holding on to two things at the same time. But with Epicurean philosophy, we’re saying, "Now wait a minute—everything is material; there’s not some mysterious power that is lurking and observing." And it’s really a big transformation, and clearly, we haven’t really accomplished that in modern times. We’re still under this sense that there is a god that is involved with human beings. I’m not saying everybody believes that, because there is a certain percentage that does believe in a purely materialist understanding of the world. But I guess I just wanted to say that when I listen to you guys talking, it brings up certain ideas. We are in a material, physical world that we are then able to see where we have control over that, and so that’s really an empowering thing.

Joshua: Yeah, I think it’s very important to keep a sense of the larger picture here. Even though we’re dealing heavily with the skeptic view of things and the assertion that knowledge is impossible and we can’t really know anything for sure, Epicurus in the ancient world is not fighting a single-front war—he’s not fighting a two-front war or a three-front war; it’s more like a seven- or eight-front war. So, skepticism, of course, is a problem, but so is the view that the gods are in control of everything in this world and that you will be judged and punished after you die or punished in this world before you die.

I think it’s very important to keep all of this in mind, and of course, Cotta, as a priest in the Roman Republic, even though he claims not to have knowledge of any of this stuff, is nevertheless performing the sacrifices and taking the hard-won pay of the citizens into the coffers of the temples. So, we shouldn’t lose sight of this—it’s important.

Cassius: Joshua, I think you’re exactly right, and Kalosyni, your point was excellent. It’s really helpful here at the end of the episode as well to bring it back to why we’re having this discussion. We’re not just here to debate skepticism or the details of what they were saying in 50 BC. It is very much the same question that we wrestle with today, and the examples that you gave, Kalosyni, show that we’re wrestling with those questions today because we have never succeeded in resolving these questions from Epicurus’s time and the time of Cicero.

It’s only when you get clarity on these ultimate questions that you’re going to be able to take a position of confidence about whether the supernatural gods really exist and whether you’re doomed to heaven or hell and issues like that. What Epicurus was striving toward was an integrated view of how perception and sensation relate to the opinions that we form based on them, and how we can use reason and indeed logic to have confidence in our opinions. Unless you get an integrated view of all these issues and how they work together, you’re just going to constantly go round and round and round in confusion, as we continue to do in the modern world.

Okay, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion? As always, we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any other topic relating to Epicurus. Thanks for your time today—we’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.