Happy Twentieth! We see the harms of willful ignorance everywhere these days. It’s easier for some philosophically-lazy souls to make truth a filthy thing than to embrace candor. Truths are seen as inconvenient, and honesty is not their main virtue. Truth requires a bit of discipline. Standards must be set, faculties must be used. To believe that our will is more mighty than nature is the thinking of sorcerers and wizards. This is an ancient problem. It’s not new. Against this backdrop, Epicurus taught that we should navigate these waters with the help of the canon of nature: an empirical, pragmatic standard of truth.
The problem of willful ignorance is exacerbated by the opportunism of those who stand to benefit from it. The events in Russia continue to shed light on the societal problems created by propaganda and misinformation. We have seen how public health has been greatly affected by misinformation in recent years. During the pandemic, we naturally wanted to educate people (particularly those we care about) in the hopes of maximizing their survival chances. The medicine for what I will call post-truth syndrome lies in the healing words of philosophy. The ancient Epicurean Guides wrote this into their social contract:
If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those judgments which you pronounce false. – Principal Doctrine 23
The video Aleksandr Dugin: ‘We have our special Russian truth’ caught my attention as I was educating myself about Russian propaganda, and trying to figure out the reasons why Russia continues to fall into extreme levels of authoritarianism. Putin’s Russia today is not too different from the Tsar’s regime from over 100 years ago, which inspired the most notorious revolution of the 20th Century. Yet today, Russia has little to show for all the sacrifices of its previous revolutions. I believe this has to do with the population’s propensity to fall for propaganda, and with the lack of free speech and the lack of a variety of narratives.
Dugin is one of Putin’s “philosophers”, a post-modern post-truth charlatan, and a great case study for identifying pseudo-philosophers. For the purposes of educating ourselves as Epicureans, Dugin is useful for understanding the importance of the canon–the Epicurean name for the pragmatic, empirical standard of truth which helps us to separate that which is clear and evident from that which is not, as instructed in Principal Doctrine 24. To us, this standard includes the faculties of pleasure-aversion, and the five senses.
Dugin is a post-modern extremist who argues that all “truths” are relative, and therefore the lies of Russian propaganda are dignified as “special Russian truths”. If this was a legitimate philosophical claim, it would be the case that water is NOT in fact made up of oxygen and hydrogen molecules (at least not in Russia, because they have “special” truths there). If all relative truths deserved the label “truth”, this would imply that there are no falsehoods, or that there is no possibility of falsehood and error, which is obviously a mistaken conclusion.
Those making this declaration that all truths are relative and, therefore, valid (even if mutually contradictory), have given up on any kind of standard of truth, and so have no filter by which to discern truth from untruth, and no way to protect themselves from error. We are not the first Epicureans to note the problems that come with the systemic denial of truth, when it presents itself as true philosophy. Diogenes of Oenoanda, in the 2nd Century CE, wrote this on his Wall Inscription:
Now Aristotle and those who hold the same Peripatetic views as Aristotle say that nothing is scientifically knowable, because things are continually in flux and, on account of the rapidity of the flux, evade our apprehension.
We on the other hand acknowledge their flux, but not its being so rapid that the nature of each thing is at no time apprehensible by sense-perception. And indeed, in no way would the upholders of the view under discussion have been able to say and this is just what they do maintain that at one time this is white and this black, while at another time neither this is white nor that black, if they had not had previous knowledge of the nature of both white and black.
Again, elsewhere in his Wall Inscription, Diogenes of Oenoanda says:
The Socratics say that pursuing natural science and busying oneself with investigation of celestial phenomena is superfluous and unprofitable, and they do not even deign to concern themselves with such matters. Others do not explicitly stigmatise natural science as unnecessary, being ashamed to acknowledge this, but use another means of discarding it. For, when they assert that things are inapprehensible, what else are they saying than that there is no need for us to pursue natural science? After all, who will choose to seek what he can never find?
Out method of multiple explanations does allow for a variety of interpretations of the evidence of nature, but it does not allow for infinite varieties of “truth”. To dignify all claims as “truths” (even if relative ones) and to engage in this extremist (ideologically-inspired, propaganda-inspired) form of relativism–with no anchor whatsoever in the study of nature–is no different from saying that there are no truths. The word truth has lost all value and utility. “Truths” in this scheme are, in actuality, the opposite of truth claims. It’s a cynical and radically-skeptical outlook in life. It’s also impractical, except for the power-hungry.
What does this do to science, which is predicated on building knowledge on top of previously established and clear knowledge? If there are no empirical or pragmatic standards to call something a “truth”, can anything at all be established scientifically, as a working theory with concrete pragmatic repercussions? Dugin’s cynicism, if sincere, is impractical. If insincere (which is the most likely case, in my opinion), then it’s cynical and nihilistic at its core, in addition to impractical.
Modern attempts to (sincerely or not) uphold this post-modern epistemology in the service of authoritarian ideology result, as we see, in the idiotic and fanatical defense of propaganda, and we are seeing how profoundly dangerous this is to democracy and to the rule of law. It also empowers evil and corrupt leaders (like Putin) in their inability to discern the limits of nature and other important Truths, so that their megalomania and their harmful demagoguery is never checked.
In contrast, Epicurus wants us to awaken our faculties. When we learn to use the canonical faculties that nature bestowed us with, we become emancipated from the need for propaganda, for priests, for demagogues, for logicians, for peddlers of false truths and pseudo-philosophies, and we learn to reason for ourselves, using our eyes, our ears, our touch, our pleasure faculty, and always diligently inferring about the non-evident based on that which is evident in order to avoid error.
If you’d like to learn more about the Epicurean canon, I would recommend you read the middle portion of Liber Qvartvs (the Fourth Book) of Lucretius’ De rerum natura.
Further Reading:
The Epicurean Canon in La Mettrie
