The Epicurean Canonical

Epicurus,” says Cicero, “has many very brilliant words; but he hardly cares to remain in agreement with himself.” (6) His philosophy is in fact one of those which proceeds by discrete and separate evidences, each of which is sufficient in itself.

The first part of this philosophy, the canonical, which concerns the criteria or canons of truth, is nothing analogous to Stoic logic; it is only the enumeration of various kinds of evidence: passion or passive affection (πάθος), sensation, prenotion, and a fourth criterion that Diogenes attributes only to the disciples of Epicurus, but which we in fact often see used by the master himself, the glance or intuition of reflection.

The first evidence is that of passion, that is to say of pleasure and pain. Aristippus had also made it a criterion, but in a slightly different sense; for him, only the passive state is perceptible and one cannot know its cause with certainty; for Epicurus, on the contrary, the evidence bears on the cause of the criterion; pleasure necessarily makes known a cause of pleasure, which is agreeable, suffering, a cause of suffering, which is painful (7). In making sensation (in the passive sense of sensible impression) a second criterion of truth, Epicurus also means something quite different from Aristippus: for him, each sensation, a passive state, informs us in a completely sure and certain manner about the active cause which produced it; all sensations are equally true, and objects are exactly as they appear to us; there is no reason to suspect the information they give us, provided only that we stick to it, since, being purely passive and irrational, they cannot add anything to external influence or take anything away from it; and there is no reason to doubt one rather than the other; “to say that a sensation is false would amount to saying that nothing can be perceived” (8). And if one objects to the Epicureans these contradictions of the senses and these illusions which became a common argument of the adversaries of dogmatism, they show how the Error is not in the representation but in a judgment which reason adds to it; a tower is seen round from afar and seen square from near; one is not mistaken in saying that one sees it round, but only in believing that one will continue to see it round, if one approaches it; the contradiction is not between the representations, but between the judgments which one adds to them. A confidence in immediate evidence, accompanied by distrust of everything which reason adds, such is the mark of the doctrine of knowledge of Epicurus.

The constant tactic of his adversaries has been to try to reduce this dogmatism to a subjectivism, limited to immediate impressions; and the Epicureans have always defended themselves from it. This defense seems to be the theme of the treatise of Colotes, an immediate disciple of Epicurus, That it is not possible to live according to the dogmas of other philosophers. In this treatise, known by the refutation of Plutarch (Against Colotes), the Epicurean successively attacks Democritus for having considered sensible knowledge as a bastard knowledge, Parmenides for having denied the multiplicity of things, Empedocles for having denied the reality of differences of nature between things, Socrates for having hesitated on notions as clear as that of man, for example, of which he seeks the definition, Plato for having refused substantiality to sensible things, Stilpon the Megarian for having supported the old eristic thesis that nothing can be said of nothing, the Cyrenaics and Arcesilas who did not admit that our representations could lead us to realities. And Plutarch has no other way of responding than to assimilate the Epicureans to those they wish to refute, drawing from the very texts of Epicurus the admission of the relativity of sensations.

References

6. Tusculanes, V, § 26.
7. Comparer Sextüs, Contre les Mathématiciens, VII, 203, et VII, 291.
8. Cicéron, Premiers Académiques, II, § 101 (Usener, 185, 11).