Cameades

Chapter 41

Cameades

G.S. Bowe

‘Give me a draught of honeyed wine.’

Carneades was from Cyrene, a beautiful place near what is now Shahat in Libya. He was born c. 214 BC and committed suicide by drinking poison in 129 Be. The quotation above is what he is reported to have said in requesting the poison. He was apparently inspired to drink poison upon hearing that the Stoic philosopher Antipater of Tarsus, successor of Diogenes of Babylon, had done the same.

Carneades seems to have been something of a scraggly fellow, neglecting his personal appearance because of devotion to study. Perhaps because of this he declined invitations to dine out; he seems to have a love interest however, for Diogenes Laertius reports that he expelled a student from the Academy for being too close to one of his concubines. (Of course, we must always be careful in trusting

Diogenes’ reports because much of what he writes is more akin to gossip than to history.) While reporting very little of Carneades’ philosophy, he does take the time to remark on the length of Carneades’ fingernails, and the fact that he died during an eclipse of the moon. Diogenes also tells us that Carneades suffered from night blindness, wrote letters to the King of Cappadocia, and that he was a brilliant orator and debater.

Carneades continued the tradition of skepticism which Arcesilaus had introduced in the Academy of Athens. Arcesilaus (316-242 Be) of Pitane (modem day Candarli, Turkey, not far from Izrnir (Smyrna)) is usually called the founder of the Middle Academy, whereas Carneades himself marks the beginning of the New Academy.

Carneades was considered the most important Greek philosopher of the 2nd century BC, and his reputation at that time was such that it is said that teachers of rhetoric in Athens would cancel their classes to go and hear him lecture. He was sent as part of an ambassadorial embassy to Rome by the Athenian government in 156/5 BC, along with the leading Stoic and Cynic Philosophers of the day (Diogenes of Babylon and Critolaus). The philosophical envoy caused quite a stir, and the Roman Forum was filled with an audience anxious to catch a glimpse of Greece’s finest thinkers. Carneades gave two lectures on two different days. In the first lecture he praised justice with much pomp and circumstance. In the second he argued against the possibility of human knowledge, and refuted

everything he had said about justice in the previous lecture. The point of the two lectures is not to make fun of justice but rather to show how it is possible to be wrong about it, and hence there is an

exhortation to be wary of dogmatism. (The Roman Cato the Elder, concerned about the effect of Greek philosophy and literature on the youth generally, had the Greek envoy expelled from Rome as

undesirable nonetheless). The concern against dogmatism extends further. Carneades argued against the Stoic conception of the gods, not because he was an atheist, but in order to show that the Stoics were dogmatic about something which they really had not established philosophically. In the same way Carneades would attack the possibility of finding what all of Hellenistic philosophy was after–the

or highest good. Carneades made an itinerary of all the candidates for the

summum bonum summum

, i.e. happiness, love, pleasure etc., and went on to refute each possibility, not out of some kind of

bonum

pessimism, but to reveal the limitations of our knowledge as an antidote to dogmatism.

Carneades’ most lasting impact was in the field of epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Because Carneades left nothing in writing, we have to piece together what he thought from later Latin sources, such as Cicero and Sextus Empiricus. This is at best third hand, because these authors depend on the writings of Carneades’ student and successor as head of the Academy, Clitomachus, but Clitomachus is

known to have confessed that he was uncertain regarding what Carneades really thought. Because Carneades used to argue both sides of an argument in order to combat a dogmatic commitment to one of two possible philosophical positions, it was not always clear what he himself believed to be the case. One is tempted to say that Carneades believed nothing, but it would be better to say that Carneades thought nothing could be known with absolute certainty, but that at the same time, we can be more or less convinced by certain things and take them to be reasonably true. Perhaps because of his approach to philosophy, and our reliance on third hand knowledge, our understanding of Carneades is somewhat unclear. Translation from Greek to Latin itself causes problems. For example, Carneades seems to have talked about whether sense impressions are convincing. Cicero translates the Greek word for convincing (pithanon) into Latin as probabile (which from probare should mean ‘acceptable’). Unfortunately this seems to suggest that Carneades endorsed a theory of ‘probabilism’, the idea that we work out the probability of something being true or false. This seems inconsistent with the rest of what we know about Carneades, and is probably not what he really meant. In order to get closer to what he really did mean, it is useful to see what Carneades was reacting to.

Carneades is usually taken as reacting to Stoic epistemology and sometimes to the epistemology of the Epicureans. Here I will talk only about his reaction to the Stoics. Most Greek philosophers are wary of information that comes to us from the five senses because this information (sense impressions) can deceive us. For example, a straight stick can appear bent if half immersed in water, or a large building can look very small when far away. The Stoic epistemology suggests that we deal with the unreliable sense organs by advocating a procedure by which we make rational decisions about the sense

impressions which are ‘presented’ to the mind. We examine, mentally, these sense impressions, and give rational assent to the ones that are true based on this examination of the sense impressions. Arcesilaus had argued that no sense impressions are reliable foundations for knowledge, which led to the more refined Stoic position of Chrysippus. It is usually to Chrysippus that Carneades is thought to be responding. Indeed Diogenes tells us that Carneades was fond of saying, ‘Without Chrysippus where should I have been?’ (D.L. IV.62).

Carneades reaction to Chrysippus’ theory of rational assent was to suggest that for any such presentation that appears to be true, we can imagine an equally ‘convincing’ sense impression that is false–in other words there is always the possibility that sense expressions can deceive us regarding what they truly represent. For example, dreams can be so realistic that we mistake them for reality. No

amount of examination can guarantee their falsity. Of course, if upon waking we realize that what we had dreamt could not really have happened, we can determine by examination that the dream is false, but then we have to rely on other sense impressions to determine the coherence of the dream with the rest of what is going on in our lives. But those sense expressions also require, on the Stoic account, the kind of assent that our inability to trust sense expressions calls into question in the first place, and hence the whole process of examination is flawed. The end result of this kind of reasoning is that there is never a place for rational assent in determining truth or falsity. All that we have to go on, according to

Carneades, is whether or not sense impressions are convincing. The fact that they are convincing does not guarantee that they are a true depiction of reality–we can never say yes or no to them regarding whether they are true–in short there is no possibility of rational assent, only sense impressions that are more or less convincing.

Skeptics, in the broadest sense, see limitations regarding how we can know what we think we know, and argue for a suspension of judgment about what we know. At first glance this seems to raise

problems for living; if I do not know that the bread in front of me is really bread, how can I eat it

without fear of poisoning myself? How do I know that I do not know that the bread in front of me might not be real. And so on. Because Carneades’ own approach to skepticism led him to accept certain things as convincing enough to accept, he is perhaps saved from such objections. His real interest is probably more about rejecting dogmatically held philosophical positions, and in the case of epistemology the Stoic dogmatism about how to obtain correct rational assent regarding sense impressions. Once we see this, we can also see how a convincing set of sense impressions can guide our lives without a dogmatic theory of rational assent, or a way of working out whether to give assent to sense impressions or not. In

short, because Carneades thinks that rational assent is impossible, because there are no good criteria by which to judge it, he must say that we live our lives without it–convincing sense impressions are all we have to go on, but they service us quite well in most cases.

Carneades also offered opinions on Stoic and Epicurean debates about fate. The Stoics believed in a kind of determinism that depends on a belief that every event is caused by a previous event; because everything we do is caused by some preceding event, everything that we will do in the future is already determined. In order to get around this, the Epicureans introduced a theory of random ‘swerving’ atoms. Because these atoms were indeterminate, it was possible to suggest that the series of causes and effects generated by these atoms was also impossible to determine. This ‘indeterminacy’ preserves free will because not every action is the result of predetermined steps. Carneades seems to have suggested that the Epicureans did not need this strange physics, and said that while all actions require a preceding cause, we ourselves, by our free thought, can be the cause of our own actions, and hence all of our actions are not determined.

References and Suggestions for Further Reading

Algra, K., I. Bames, I. Mansfeld and M. Schofield. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Cicero. Academica. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Loeb Classical Library. Heinemann, 1972. Hankinson, R.J. The Skeptics. London: Routledge, 1995.

Plutarch. Life of Cato the Elder in Lives. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Sextus Empiricus. Against the Mathematicians and Against the Academics. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933.