Researchers of ancient culture widely know that in the Epicurean school of philosophy there is practically no “logic” section. It is replaced by a certain “Canon“, which is a set of recommendations for the proper conduct of the conversation, so that no unnecessary difficulties arise (strictly speaking, logic was developed by Epicureans, especially inductive logic in the school of Philodemus of Gadara, but this does not cancel their general negative attitude to logic, as such). Epicurus, armed with the theory of the sophist Prodicus, advised a clear definition of the meaning of all words, so that no ambivalent interpretations would arise. More precisely, he advised defining the varieties of the same word according to the different contexts; each time the meaning changed, it should be spelled out. The simplest example is the notion of pleasure, which can be bodily, mental, active, and passive; or it can have related words that differ in meaning (pleasure, bliss, joy, etc.). If such a distinction is made, there will be no room for unnecessary sophisms in arguments. Conversely, if this is not done, every other disputant will try to use the same word in different contexts, deliberately creating confusion and false problems (as Cicero, Plutarch or even Aristotle often did). Basic information about this “Canon” can be found in Diogenes of Laertes and in a letter to Herodotus:

“Canonics is an approach to the subject… usually canonics is considered together with physics: canonics is the science of criteria and beginning in their very foundations… Epicureans reject dialectics (rhetoric, logic) as a superfluous science – in physics, they say, it is enough to use words corresponding to the subjects… All subjects were called by their names, which the grammarian Aristophanes considered a reprehensible feature of his script. His clarity was such that even in his essay “On Rhetoric” he did not think it necessary to demand anything but clarity. And in his letters he addresses not “I wish to rejoice”, but “I wish well-being” or “I wish for good”” (c) Laertesian.

So, first of all… it is necessary to understand what is behind the words, so that all our opinions, investigations, perplexities could be reduced to them for discussion, so that in endless explanations they would not remain unexamined and the words would not be empty. In fact, if only we want to reduce to something our researches, perplexities, opinions, it is necessary for us at each word to see its first meaning, which does not need a proof. And then we must cling to sensations in everything, cling to the present momentum of thought or any other criterion, cling to the experiences we undergo, and this will give us the means of judging what is waiting and what is unclear. And once this is settled, we must move on to the consideration of the obscure.

(c) Letter to Herodotus

At first glance, one might say that here the Epicureans are proposing the development of a new, more complex, philosophical language that would remove all ambiguity by creating new concepts for each individual subject. However, this is not the case. On the contrary, it is a question of simplifying and rather using ordinary language. Ambiguities must be resolved, not by creating new terminology (for this is absurd, making language more complicated will only create more problems of understanding), but by first grasping all possible ambiguities, to avoid incorrect syllogisms and sophisms. By the way, of all antique schools the Stoics were the most prominent in creating a new philosophical language (“Newspeak”). Already from here it is almost obvious that because of the principal inter-school conflict, the Epicurean position had to be at least somehow different. And this is indirectly confirmed by the complaints of famous Roman rhetors that the language of Epicurus and his followers was crude and simple, and that in matters of rhetoric the Epicureans were in principle ignorant.

A few excerpts are appropriate here.
Quintilian says (II 17, 15) that he is not at all surprised about Epicurus, “who shunned all teaching, judging from what he wrote against rhetoric”. Believing that rhetoric is “the sophistic science of making speeches and creating proofs” (frg. 49 Us.), Epicurus considered oratory a bad art (cacotechnian, frg. 51 Us.), and if political speech is acceptable, then here “nature itself is what guides speech, not any art” (frg. 55 Us.). Plutarch on this point says (Adv. Col. 33) that: “they write so that we do not oratory.” Moreover, the position on the simplicity and clarity of speech was so strict that Epicurus seems to have claimed the natural origin of language. This was a very precarious position, since language (like logic and mathematics) is generally regarded among empiricists as an instrument artificially created by men to facilitate communication. In the question of the origin of state and law, Epicurus stands on just this ground, defending the theory of the Social Contract (i.e. an “artificial” agreement, although “naturally” created); but in the question of language, he suddenly takes a position close to that of religious thinkers (i.e. a fundamentally “natural” origin). Of course, he means “naturalness” as a result of human interaction with the environment, which occurs as if “by itself,” in all parts of the world in the same way, and precisely because of secondary differences in climate conditions we have differences in the languages of the peoples of the world. But it is still a noticeable dissonance, because Epicureans recognized that language is not created by contracting; and this dissonance is hardly accidental. In our opinion, this is the result of a principled position on the Canon, which required special reservations about the origin of language as well.

Everything seems clear with “Canon”; there is “good” and there is “good” (e.g., good as action and good as character, or good as wealth). But why is logic itself considered superfluous and harmful? Let’s try to figure it out.

Epicurus, following the sophists, accepts the separation between “nature” and “art”. Logic by its very definition is a description of the thinking process, i.e. it is an artificial construction. This thinking process itself appears before its description; this means that already on the substantive level thinking does not need “logic”. Similarly, and more generally accepted, human speech does not need the rules of syntax. Converging thinking (living, real thinking) with its description on drawing paper is as silly as preferring a painted lobster to a bucket of real crayfish.

One could argue that without the creation of the science of philology, we would not have a literary language either, and then everyone would be talking at the vulgar level of the common folk. Or that the study of the laws of nature (physics/chemistry/biology) retains enormous utility, and while nature would work just as well without them, our goal is to use them non-naturally. Even more than that–we can say that these laws have always existed, just have not been discovered and described (so we go into Platonism and are already succumbing to religion). Applied to logic, this means that it can exist unnoticed by us, and in us ourselves; yes, it also retains the right to develop thinking “artificially,” the ability to go beyond its natural limits.

This all sounds good in theory. Only in practice, even after 2000 years, numerous “logicians” cannot reach a consensus on anything beyond the rules of logic themselves (but even here there is no consensus either). If everything worked as it should – people would quickly acquire an equally calibrated mind, thinking according to strict and universal rules of thought. And as a result, all human preferences and avoidances would become about the same. In practice, we do not see this, and never will (even in the separate caste of scientists). Again, in theory it all sounds so good that one can become a smart person after reading just a few textbooks on how to “think correctly. But that never happens in practice. It is an oxymoron to become intelligent by reasoning strictly according to a textbook scheme. As a rule, such schematism is considered a model of the absence of intelligence. If it were possible, the smartest creatures on earth would now be computers; but we all know that this is not the case, and that machines are devoid of intelligence.

There are only two options here:

1. Either logic cannot in principle be an adequate reflection of the essence of thinking (just as kinematics can never fully reflect all the nuances of motion and “merge” with real motion, and a tree drawing can never become a three-dimensional tree with bark texture), and then attempts to reshape reason by its standards = conscious dumbing down.
2. Either logic still hasn’t evolved enough, and when it finally does, machines (even in their current form) will quickly become the smartest creatures in the world.

In any case, modern forms of logic, as deployed, are too enormous to be used in everyday life, and the question concerns only machine consciousness. The first option promises mankind no advantages; and the second would even belittle us before our own creatures. And even with all the cumbersomeness of the modern logical apparatus, if we arm a machine with it – it (at least today) is still stupider than any human who has never held Aristotle or Frege in his hands at all. And then we either have to work with this logic, which is extremely inconvenient; or we have to work with logic in simpler, antique forms, which we are capable of using in our lives. Except that these “old logics” have invariably led, have led, and will continue to lead to empty verbiage, which in practice is still the case today.

Systematic thinking

What is offered instead? Against this easy path, which offers the hope of becoming a genius immediately after mastering a dozen basic laws and a couple of guidebooks (which should already look unreliable), is the demand for systematic thinking. For the mind, as for a parrot’s beak, it is not so important what to hone it against. To become intelligent, to think correctly, can be done in different ways. But all of them, one way or another, will require broad erudition and further systematization of the accumulated facts. The more information from different spheres of life we accumulate, the more often this information contradicts each other. The more we accumulate, the more precisely we understand which contradictions are the most absurd. This “tangle of information” to some extent “calibrates” itself. So Heraclitus was not quite right when he said that knowledge does not teach intelligence. To a certain extent, it does, although, of course, there are differences depending on the basic vector that any given philosopher arms himself with in advance, i.e. depending on his “school,” on the path chosen for further systemic formation.

“Intelligence” has always consisted in man’s being able to put together a system of views out of a “mess” of facts. As the practice of different regions of the world over thousands of years has shown, there are fewer than a dozen such “systems”. People invent them everywhere, just as people everywhere invent stabbing weapons and a roof over their heads. We are not surprised by the universal development of material culture, knowing that all people have the same needs and the same number of limbs. Why should we be surprised that possessors of the same tool (the brain) create the same products (“systems of thought”)? A person with Heraclitus’ approach would be able to call a bearer of almost any of these thought systems “smart” (let us forget that the historical Heraclitus considered almost everyone in the world dumb). And then there is the question of the legitimacy of choosing exactly “that, and not another” system. And the main criterion of their suitability is their consistency under the pressure of more and more new facts from more and more diverse spheres of life.

Incidentally, amateur logicians themselves are also one of the “basic schools,” and they can also create their own systematic philosophy. But this does not mean that they will necessarily be less contradictory; the essence of systematic thinking is precisely that within their system – there will be fewer and fewer contradictions, regardless of the accepted basic postulates. At least this is the case in the simple, initial stages of the history of thinking; for example, in the same ancient Greece. But over time, under the pressure of new facts, all naturally educated “schools” are forced to readjust, responding to new questions. This is where all the weaknesses of each line of thought are revealed.

On Philosophy and Science

From the above, it becomes obvious that these “external” facts, which are the touchstone for philosophical systems, are themselves separate from philosophy. And then the question arises – what is philosophy itself, and what is separated from it? We share the practice developed in the course of history of distinguishing the natural sciences from philosophy (though not entirely). Positivists and Marxists usually conclude from this that only logic or dialectical logic remains in philosophy. Psychology, which is also the offspring of “mind”-has also supposedly found its own “science” (and science, as we know, is not philosophy, yep). Why, then, logic cannot become a science and thereby kill the very notion of philosophy in general is another question. Only in fact, this is a false dilemma, and the title “science” does not solve anything. At one time, communism was also called scientific, and this label can be applied to anything.

So, philosophy works with everything that does not have a strict factual explanation, as well as with the interpretation of the facts obtained. What we call science works with the facts themselves, with their extraction by means of the experimental method. Pure “theorists” within the individual sciences are, in principle, philosophers themselves, but of an extremely limited type (immersed exclusively in their scientific sphere). They are not aware of their kinship with the archetypal traditions of thought, and so they do not fully fit into the chain of professional “philosophers. They do not seek a way out of the deadlock for thought in general (and this deadlock is already in the very fact of the pluralism of systems, while the truth must be unified), but only seek a way out of the deadlocks of their individual science.

In order to get out of the crisis of the history of thought, we need to overcome pluralism, and for this purpose we need to realize it, see all schools, understand their strengths and weaknesses, take a clear position, and test it with criticism. Modern philosophical traditions either take pluralism itself as a given and do not seek any way out; or they do not recognize it at all, and call philosophy – logic and philology (the same concrete sciences as physics). At the present stage, one might even say that philosophy is in such a deep crisis that it hardly exists at all.

That philosophy is not only about reason, and that it affects the way of life, and thus the way of life itself affects reason and the way of thinking, is not the place to say here. But in brief, the basis of philosophy is ethics, the criteria of evaluation for preference and avoidance, the ways of being in society. Human character is a complex concept, and character can be changed. Determining a relatively more correct way of reasoning thus coincides with determining a relatively more correct assessment of one’s place in society and choosing the right strategy for everyday behavior. But we are talking about reasoning here, not about ethics in general, so let’s move on.

So, the most “bad” of the basic postulates create systems (of both reason and ethics) of such poor quality that they simply die under the weight of artificial crutches that have time after time saved the dead system from unsolvable contradictions. And that system is considered preferable, which at all times, in all eras, shows the best consistency with “external” phenomena. The task of correct thinking is to choose the “first among equals” system of thought, and working with it further – to strive to the status of the Universal Man to the best of one’s ability.

Homo Universalis

The question naturally arises here. What else is a “Universal Man” in an era of overabundance of information and narrow specialization in the scientific field? And with it another question – why would an epicurean with a modest goal of a happy life need all this?

The answer to this is basically one – alienation (a Marxist concept). Under conditions in which everything created by man is alienated from man, including both individual objects and concepts of thought; under conditions in which the individual man understands almost nothing of what is created by “man in general,” and when this ignorance puts the real individual man in a subordinate position relative to his own creations – no freedom, no peace of mind, no escape from fear is possible. And the main way to overcome alienation is the knowledge of the entire experience of humanity and the abolition of the strict division of labor. These tasks are partly utopian, but we shall see why only partly.

There is no need to know on which “cultural layer” of the earth Troy was found specifically from the Mycenaean era, and on which layer Troy from Roman times was found. It is enough to know that Troy existed, was described by Homer, and after that rebuilt and continued to exist. There is no need to know all the haplogroups in order to understand how paleogenetics works and why it is needed. Simply put, it is enough to have a broad erudition, even without detailed knowledge of all the minutiae, to be free of all insecurities and to earn the status of Homo Universalis. A superficial knowledge of all the sciences (it is quite achievable, to reduce each science to 2,000 page folios, and later for new generations to master it all in some 10 years) will benefit everyone. It will save all of us from professional cretinism. After all, no one demands that the modern Da Vinci is necessarily the best specialist in every field and its specialties. But to know everything in general terms is quite possible. Every person on earth (with the exception of the disabled) can know the basic principles of the bus in which you are riding, without being particularly burdened. And certainly people of science are capable of it.

And this is what Epicurus writes about in his letter to Herodotus.

Who cannot, Herodotus, carefully study all that we have written about nature and delve into our more lengthy writings, for them I have already compiled an overview of the whole subject, sufficient to keep in mind at least the most important things. I wanted it to help you on important occasions whenever you have to take up the study of nature. And those who have already succeeded in examining the whole should remember the main features of the appearance of the whole subject: the general movement of thought is often necessary to us, but the details are not so often. To these general features we have to refer constantly remembering as much as it is necessary both for the general movement of thought on the object, and for all possible accuracy of details, that is well having learnt and having remembered the most basic features. In fact, the main sign of perfect and complete knowledge is the ability to quickly use the throws of thought, [and this happens when everything] is reduced to simple foundations and words. For whoever cannot, in brief words, cover all that is studied in parts, cannot know the thickness of all that is covered. And so, since such a path is useful to all who have mastered the study of nature, I, who have devoted my constant efforts to the study of nature and achieved the world of life primarily through it, have also compiled for you the following overview, which contains the basics of all the teachings.

So the claims of the Epicureans are simple.

Knowledge, reasonableness, is necessary for “ataraxia” (peace of mind), or, similarly, to overcome alienation. True knowledge is achieved by striving for universality, and in the process of accumulating knowledge, erroneous concepts will themselves be excluded from the “system. The system is based on the theory that, other things being equal, always produces the least failures; and the original set of these theories is given to us by the history of the development of human thought itself. All of these theories arise “naturally,” but only one of them will be closest to the truth. To identify erroneous concepts, “logic” is not necessary (and it is already enough to discard it). In fact, it is either useless to people, or harmful and stultifying. But here it is important to note that when we say that logic is useless, we mean that it is useless only for the use of one’s mind. Logic is more than useful in programming and engineering; it is a tool, just as any other descriptive system of signs (mathematics, languages). All of these are useful, but they are not absolute and all-encompassing. According to the principle of universality itself, all this must be studied (at least in general terms), but one should not expect any panacea for all problems and the easiest way out. The road to correct thinking cannot be too easy, and even if logic can find its complete form, if it can be reduced to a textbook of 200 pages, even such a miracle will not make anyone smart until this “somebody” has processed the same huge body of information that we are talking about.

A private conversation with the average logician is always a conversation about words. A conversation with a person who does not understand analogies, does not understand a sentence if a mistake is made somewhere or a word is mixed up. Being a pedant, he cannot grasp the logic (here it is, the obvious (!) ambiguity of the word “logic”, which would already be tripped over) of his opponent’s presentation of thought. No sane person would call such a biological machine a rational being. Much more reasonable is someone who can understand that “a snowy cold box” most likely implies a freezer or refrigerator, and can quickly obtain clarification with leading questions. But intellectuals from the world of logic are not – they will simply declare that they do not understand what is being said, and will not even try to understand. It is not enough for them to say “most likely. They want absolute accuracy. So such people have only to read David Hume and abandon cognition altogether, playing with numbers for the sake of the game itself, because at least there they will get their coveted accuracy.