Principal Doctrine 24

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Translation

If you arbitrarily reject any one sensory experience and fail to differentiate between an opinion awaiting confirmation and what is already perceived by the senses, feelings, and every intuitive faculty of mind, you will impute trouble to all other sensory experiences, thereby rejecting every criterion. And if you concurrently affirm what awaits confirmation as well as actual sensory experience, you will still blunder, because you will foster equal reasons to doubt the truth and falsehood of everything.

Analysis

In this, more elaborate Doctrine, Epicurus outlines and differentiates in detail the various steps in the process of our understanding the world around us.

Epicurus admonishes that one should not "simply" (without further thought and deliberation) reject one's sense-perceptions in general.

One should, instead, make a crucial distinction, between

A. what is "believed" and is "awaiting" confirmation, i.e. what has been registered by the senses, and now needs to be subjected to the scrutiny of reason before it is pronounced true or false, and

B. what is already "present", i.e. what is plainly evident, and needs no further corroboration past its initial impression on the senses.

One must also factor in such things as

C. the "passions", i.e. the various feelings and sentiments, and

D. every sort of those "imaginary impositions of the mind", i.e. all those layers of intuitive/psychological complexity that the mind imposes on the basic, sensorial experience.

Echoing the previous Principal Doctrine 23, Epicurus warns that if one rejects sense-perceptions in general, and then confuses and/or conflates the above, distinct elements of human experience, one will end up in an unenviable state, where all senses are confounded by "vain belief", because one will have rejected any and all criteria whatsoever.

As an aside, Epicurus goes on to warn that one should also not collectively confirm those sense-perceptions that require such confirmation, as well as those that did not need it to begin with. If one does that, one cannot help but go wrong; the particular logical error in this is that one will have retained one's doubts about those things (item B above) that were self-evident.

This Doctrine is at the same time rich and uneven: it furthers the argument initiated in the previous two Doctrines by sub-classifying what has been perceived by the senses and needs confirmation, pending rational consideration, and what has been perceived but is plainly self-evident, and thus needs nothing else. This much is crucially valuable to an understanding of Epicurean epistemology.

On the other hand, the cursory mention of "feelings" and "imaginings" is left undeveloped. This is almost inevitably so, considering the general tendency of Greek and Hellenistic philosophers to view such things as suspect, inferior, and usually detrimental to the much vaunted workings of the Logos. (By way of one example among many, Marcus Aurelius never missed an opportunity to disparage phantasiai, sternly advocating reason instead.) On the contrary, these very same aspects of the human experience are favored topics among psychologically-minded, modern philosophers.

The final aside is a rather weak appendix, pointing out a technical, logical error that some might commit; perhaps it was meant to round off this Doctrine by restating the opening idea in a different guise. [[Category:Opinion]