Happy Eikas! Studying the Canon

Happy Twentieth to Epicureans everywhere and I hope you’re enjoying Pride Month! The Seikilos Song (or Seikilos Epitaph, which we utilize in the videos in our SoFE YouTube channel) is a Second Century CE musical composition–the first in history–which was etched in stone in Greek with an Epicurean theme: “I am a stone reflection; Seikilos placed me here as a long-lasting symbol of undying remembrance. As long as you live, shine forth. Do not grieve at all. Life exists for a short while. Time takes its course.” This was found inside a tomb, and so is a memorial to someone who passed. The verses remind us of a rephrasing of Vatican Saying 14.

Aeon has published Philosophy’s defence of pleasure. Voula Tsouna’s Issues in Epicurean philosophy of mind and science video series (in two parts) was recently published on YouTube:

1: The Epicurean notion of επιβολή

2: The method of multiple explanations

These discussions (which offer a rare opportunity for students to get in-depth insights into aspects of the Epicurean Canon) led some of us to the essay titled Epicurean Preconceptions, also by Voula Tsouna, where she says:

the prolēpsis of the gods is the one single preconception that is determined by that innate propensity of the subject, not by the nature of the object that that prolēpsis might be supposed to represent. Viewed in that manner, the latter provides a decisive argument for idealism.

By which she means the second interpretation of the Epicurean gods, which some have unfortunately labelled “the idealist interpretation”, but we at SoFE know as the non-realist interpretation of the gods in order to avoid the confusion that the label “idealist” creates. The founders of EP accepted the original, realist or atomist interpretation of the Epicurean gods as eternal sentient beings, as super-evolved extraterrestrial animals who live in never-ending bliss. This second, later interpretation posits that these gods are merely mental constructs that have an ethical utility for us.

Always pay close attention to the power of empirical thinking.

– Epicurus of Samos

The Canon, our system of epistemology, is one of the three components of the wisdom tradition of Epicurean philosophy (the other two are the physics and the ethics). Since the most ripened, sweetest fruits of philosophy are in the ethics, people often get acquainted with that first and many people never delve into the canon. They enjoy the fruits and they neglect the roots of the Epicurean system. A good explanation of aspects of the Canon can be found in Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus & His Philosophy. There are also passages of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things which give useful details on how the Canon is to be used. In the Principal Doctrines, the Canonics comprise the section made up of PDs 21-25.

Why was the Canon so revered that it was known as “the book that fell from heaven”? PD 25 gives us an idea: not only does it protect us from superstition and false beliefs, but it also allows us to be authentic. There’s the concern that “your thoughts and your actions will not be in harmony” if you fail to pursue the goal of your own nature, which is informed by the pleasure faculty. But this is also true of the other sets of faculties: if you have to lie about what your eyes are reporting, or what your ears are reporting, in order to maintain some supernatural doctrine, or to uphold a view that has no empirical foundation, you will feel like you’re betraying yourself. If you do this for the sake of government, arbitrary authority, or to please someone who has power over you, you will likely feel like you’re living under stupefying tyranny. The Canon, the standard of nature, is a tool that helps us to remain firmly grounded in nature, and to reason freely and effectively. It’s our connection with reality, and it remains healthy and enjoyable thanks to its inclusion of the pleasures. It’s practical, useful, and liberating. Epicurus applied empirical thinking in all realms, even concerning actions, as Philodemus reports:

We think empirically concerning the actions based on the results observed from any course of action.

Concerning theories that do not seem to have empirical basis, they can be destroyed if they are false (whether rational or not), either if some other theoretical view based on it is false, or if when we establish a link with the action, this proves to be disadvantageous.

If any of these things happen, it will be easy to conclude that theoretical arguments are false.

Below are a few key points on the canonics.

The Tripod

The Canon is known as a tripod because it stands on three sets of faculties that nature gives us as our direct, immediate connection with reality: the five senses (hearing, vision, smell, touch, and taste), the pleasure-pain faculty (the hedonic tone) which tells us what is choice-worthy in our environment and what is avoidance-worthy, and the anticipations (prolepsis) which facilitate the formation of ideas and the function of language and memory. They are all founded on unmediated, empirical attestations that we get directly from nature.

Epíbole (the subject of one of Tsouna’s discussions above) is the term for focusing of the mind on a particular attestation from nature, and has a role in the development of conceptions based on nature.

Checks and Balances

It was Lucretius, in the fourth book of On the Nature of Things, who gave us the most details (very likely based on the writings of Epicurus himself) on how the Canon works. He said that each faculty has sole jurisdiction over some aspect of our connection with reality: only the eyes can judge what is seen, only the ears what is heard, only the pleasure-pain faculty can judge what is choice-worthy or avoidance-worthy. No faculty may invade the jurisdiction of another faculty, as it concerns attestations that are self-evident only to the relevant faculty and not available to other faculties.

The three sets of faculties offer us raw, unprocessed data from nature that we are to make sense of. This data is unpolluted by opinion, and pre-rational. Together these faculties provide checks and balances to keep us grounded in the study of nature.

Inference by Analogy

In his scroll On Methods of Inference, Philodemus of Gadara delves into the process by which we may infer about the non-evident based on the evident. This is an elaboration of Principal Doctrine 24, which instructs us to always maintain a clear separation between the evident from the non-evident, but this is not always easy. The scroll deals mainly with the specific difficulties faced by people in the pre-scientific era, who had very limited access to data that might confirm many of their theories. It deals with several key objections by enemy schools concerning the challenge of inferring about particular cases when our source of data is universal cases, and vice-versa, and a few other specific difficulties of the Epicurean method, which requires that a clear analogy must be established between the non-evident object of our investigation and the object that is available empirically, which must be analogous and similar enough to the non-evident phenomenon to be a useful comparison.

Epicurus wrote a volume titled “The Canon” which is not extant, so we will never know with certainty how much of his work sought to address these difficulties, but many versions of our method of inference are still utilized by scientists today. How this is done varies by field of knowledge. Unlike the scientific method(s), however, the Epicurean Canon is a philosophical tool, and its utility extends into the realm of ethics.

The Canon as a Prediction Tool

If many of the sayings of Epicurus have proven to be prophetic, it’s thanks to the rigorous application of the Canon (which self-corrects as more data becomes available) and its method of inference. Following the methodology of our School to redefine words according to nature rather than avoid their use, I use the words prediction and prophecy here in their non-superstitious sense. Dictionary.com‘s definition of prophecy includes these two definitions:

the foretelling or prediction of what is to come.
the action, function, or faculty of a prophet.

True and natural prophecy is not a supernatural gift, or the inspiration of some spirit, much less of a “Holy” Spirit. If accurate and natural, prophecy is a prediction based on the study of nature. Einstein won a Nobel Prize because his theory of relativity predicted things that were confirmed by direct observation. Astronomers from ancient times have predicted eclipses and other phenomena based on empirical data gathered for many generations about the movements of heavenly bodies. Meteorologists often make predictions about the weather based on carefully-studied patterns that are observed.

Epicurus similarly announces his Doctrine of Innumerable Worlds in the form of eight inter-related statements proposed in his Epistle to Herodotus, each of which is interesting on its own. NASA has an excellent page on exoplanetary research, the details of which I will not delve into here, other than to say this is exactly what Epicurus predicted: a cosmos with innumerable planets, some similar and others different from our own.

The subject of the innumerable worlds deserves to be addressed separately. The main point I want to make here is that Epicurus’ insights were prophetic, but that he did not need to make any supernatural claims that are insulting to our intelligence concerning the source of his insight, which was not gods, or spirits, or even magic mushrooms, but the study of nature … and that this power to predict reflects the correct utilization of our nature-given Canon.

The Canon is therefore a powerful tool to help us continue Epicurus’ work of developing, progressively and slowly, our natural cosmology based on the study of nature. If we study Epicurean philosophy as a stagnant, irrelevant study of the history of itself with no pragmatic utility, we may conclude that the Canon is merely a book that Epicurus wrote (and that we jokingly say “fell from heaven”) and which is no longer extant. But if we instead USE the Canon as it’s meant to be used, as a powerful tool to systematically apply epilogismos (the faculty of empirical thinking) here and now, in our world, then the Canon is our standard for truth, and our connection with Nature and her guidance, and it’s also potentially a prophetic tool. It helps us to make predictions about the non-evident, based on the available empirical data.

Lucian wrote a comedic work about false prophets in the Second Century, but in truth this is no laughing matter. Supernaturalist prophecy is big business, and it’s also quite degrading and harmful–whether it’s Evangelical Christians who predicted Trump would win a second term, or the Islamic State terrorists who believed they were about to bring about the end of times, or the Pentecostal false prophet who told a barren cousin of mine that she was going to have a girl (my cousin would later have surgery to have her ovaries removed). Prophecy is quite dangerous in the hands of charlatans, but it’s not unlike other words that seem irreparable and hard to redeem. Our method is to rectify words like “soul”, “gods”, even “pleasure” and redefine them as natural terms, rather than avoid their use. Natural philosophy is best served when we rectify the word prophecy according to our methods of study of nature and our prolepsis of the word, the initial attestation of which we find at Dictionary.com:

… from Greek prophḗtēs, equivalent to pro- “before (in time, place, precedence, dignity)” + <-phētēs “speaker,” derivative of phánai “to speak”.

Many things can not be predicted, but for the things that can be predicted, there is a right way of doing so according to nature. The Canon gives us a tangible connection with reality and a reliable method of studying nature, and it also frees us from conventional but dubious or illegitimate authorities (priests, preachers, logicians, etc.), and helps us to independently, using our own faculties, separate true predictions based on the study of nature from false predictions that are not, and which are often produced by charlatans who wish to gain power over people. If we learn to USE the Canon as it’s meant to be used, it gives us confidence and a healthy intellectual rigor, and helps us to expose false prophets, like Lucian did.