Episode 039 - The Mind And Spirit Are Not Supernatural But Parts of A Man Just Like The Head and Foot
Date: 10/09/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1705-episode-thirty-nine-the-mind-and-spirit-are-not-supernatural-but-parts-of-a-man/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This four-person episode (Cassius, Martin reading, Charles, and Elaine who joins midway after being muted) begins Book Three in earnest, covering lines 94 onward. The episode opens with a brief catch-up on last week’s text: Charles raises the “divine pleasure” passage from Book Three’s opening, where Lucretius says “a certain divine pleasure spreads round me” in observing how Epicurus laid nature bare. The group reads this as the pleasure of philosophical knowledge and liberation — not religious awe, but the “immortal pleasure” of seeing through myth to the workings of the universe.
Martin then reads the day’s text, which introduces Lucretius’s first major argument about the mind and soul: that they are parts of a person just like the hand, foot, or eyes — not a “harmony” that pervades the whole body as some Greek philosophers held. Lucretius distinguishes two entities: the animus (mind, the governing intelligence, seated in the chest or heart region) and the anima (soul, spread through the whole body). Evidence that the soul is not a harmony includes: you can feel pleasure in one part while another part suffers; the soul partially leaves the body in sleep; amputation of a limb does not kill the soul; and the soul’s departure through breath signals death.
Discussion is wide-ranging and openly exploratory. Elaine, once she joins, proposes a practical parallel: the mind (animus) corresponds to the brain in modern terms, and the soul (anima) spreading through the body corresponds to the nervous system. She raises the emergence question: is consciousness emergent (the mainstream neuroscience position — the nervous system produces consciousness, which is not itself a separate substance) or does Lucretius posit actual particles of a soul-type substance distributed through the body? The group concludes that Lucretius takes the latter position — soul as composed of exceptionally fine, light particles — which is not the modern view, though it is correct in opposing the idea of a pre-existent, supernatural soul. Charles identifies the “harmony” theory through Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: it was the theory of Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus (the Pythagorean/Peripatetic view) that the soul is the harmony of the four bodily elements, comparable to the tuning of a lyre. This connects directly to Simmias’s lyre-harmony argument in Plato’s Phaedo, where Simmias argues that just as the lyre’s harmony perishes when the lyre is destroyed, the soul perishes with the body — and Socrates refutes this on Platonic grounds. Charles also connects the harmony theory to vitalism (élan vital) as a modern analogue.
Martin quietly admits he could not sort out the distinctions clearly enough to contribute. The episode closes with homework for next week: the group will read more about Phaedo and Simmias’s argument, and Charles will post a link to the relevant text in the episode thread on EpicureanFriends.com. The overall expected conclusion — which nobody doubts — is that Lucretius’s target throughout Book Three is the claim that mind/soul/consciousness is supernatural, pre-existent, and survives the body’s death.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 39 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. This week we’re going to be looking at the Latin text of Book Three starting around location 94. We’re going to start the episode with a catch-up from last week where we had a couple of comments remaining that were not discussed, and then Martin is going to read the text for us today.
This is going to be an episode where we’re dealing with some complicated material for most of us for the first time, so this will be a good example of how hopefully it will be helpful to people to listen to other ordinary people like themselves wrestle with ideas in Lucretius that are not exactly familiar to us. It will require that we go back and look at perhaps some Plato and other sources that will help us to understand what it was that Epicurus was facing and the kind of arguments that he had to deal with. Let’s dive into that today and we’ll continue the same topic for the next several weeks. So now let’s join the discussion already in progress.
Charles, do you have particular things you’d like to talk about from last week?
Charles: Not something to add, but there was a section that kind of stuck out for me, at least in the Daniel Brown translation from last week’s text. Do you have it in front of you?
Cassius: I do have it in front of me, yeah.
Charles: The second paragraph from episode 38, the last sentence: “But the wide tracks of hell are nowhere seen, nor does the interposing earth prevent our sight, but we discover what beneath our feet is doing in the space below. And in these pursuits a certain divine pleasure spreads around me, and I stand amazed, that by thy strength of mind all nature every way lies naked to our view.” And I know in that paragraph he was talking about how the concept of atoms and void do away with divine will and intervention and providence. And then he talked very briefly about the nature of the gods, but those last two sentences kind of stuck out as — well, I don’t know, it felt odd compared to everything else he had said. We did not talk about it that much last week.
Cassius: In what way did it strike you as odd? Are you talking about the divine pleasure that he feels in observing these things?
Charles: Now I would jump to the conclusion there that he’s talking about, maybe, a close analogy to where Epicurus talks about how philosophy itself is a pleasure — that certainly knowledge is pleasurable at times, and knowing something that you’re curious about brings great pleasure. Generally that’s how I’d go about it, because how it ends with “and I stand amazed that by my strength of mind all nature every way lies naked to our view” — that through the physics and epistemology and canonics, or generally speaking the philosophy, the nature of things is much more concrete and grounded in reality than leaving everything up to myth and legend.
Cassius: Now I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re touching on either, but to me this touches on the issue of your attitude towards Epicurus and towards Epicurean philosophy — your personal sense of feeling gratitude, feeling appreciation, feeling liberation almost. That this is an accomplishment that is so valuable to you in freeing you, or in removing concerns and fears that you have about death or about gods. I think that’s the direction he’s going. Some people might stumble over the word “divine pleasure,” but the issue is that these are immortal things we’re talking about and discussing — infinity and the issues that are most deep in the background of the universe — and it’s not a mortal pleasure, but an immortal pleasure, I think, is another phrasing that they use in another location.
Charles: Yeah, and I could look at another translation. Is there anything else you’re thinking about that we should discuss? Is it the issue of whether wisdom equates to pleasure? Because that’s kind of an interesting tangent — wisdom for itself is just another virtue and not something that Epicurus would say is worthwhile in itself unless it brings pleasure. And in these cases he’s talking about wisdom that does bring pleasure.
Cassius: Well maybe we should go ahead then to what we have for today’s episode unless you have something further.
Charles: No.
Cassius: Well we’ve got to have somebody to read today. Whenever you’re ready, Martin.
Martin: First then I say, the mind of man, which commonly they call the soul, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is part of man no less than the hand, the foot, the eyes are part of the whole animal. So many of the philosophers heard have fancied that the sense of the mind is not fixed to any particular part, but it is a sort of vital habit of the whole body, which the Greeks called harmony, and from thence flows all our sense, and the mind has no particular place for its abode. As when we say health belongs to the body yet it is no part of the body that is in health, so no particular part, tell us, is a residence of the mind. But in this they seem to be egregiously wrong. For often when some visible part of the body suffers pain, we feel pleasure in some other part of it unseen. And the contrary often happens in its turn: that a man disturbed in mind is perfectly well all over his body, in the same manner as when a man has a gout in his foot, his head at the same time is free from pain.
Besides, when our limbs are given up to soft sleep, and the torpid body lies stretched at length without sense, there is something within that in that varied time is variously affected and receives into itself all the impressions of joy and empty cares that torment the heart. But to convince you that the soul is a part like other limbs, and not as a harmony takes up the whole body — observe first that many members of the body may be cut off, yet often life remains in the rest. And again, the same life when a few certain particles of vital heat fly off and our last breath is blown through the mouth, immediately leaves possession of our veins and bones. And this will give you to understand that all the particles of matter are not of equal consequence to the body, nor do they equally secure our lives. But the particles of our breath and the warm vapour are of principal concern to preserve life to us in all our limbs. This warmth, this vapour therefore resides in the body and leaves our limbs as death makes approaches towards us.
But since the nature of the mind and soul is discovered to be a part of the mind — give these fiddlers their favourite word, harmony, again. Take from the music of the harp, or wheresoever they borrow the name, and apply it to the soul, which then, it seems, had no proper name of its own. However it be, let them take it again. And do you attend what follows.
I say then that the mind and soul are united together, and so joined make up one single nature. But what we call the mind is, as it were, the head, and conducts and governs the whole body, and keeps its fixed residence in the middle region of the heart. Here our passions live, our dread and fear beats here, here our joys make everything serene. Here therefore must be the seed of the mind. The other part, the soul, spreads through the whole body, obeys this mind, and is moved by the knot and impulse of it.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. I’d like to say before we get too far into discussing the details today that I think we’re about to go through a section that has some analogies with where we’ve been in the past — in this sense: when we start talking about the atoms in detail, there are reasons we’re discussing it, and we need to keep those reasons in mind for what they say about the nature of the universe and about whether there’s any supernatural control. We’re not necessarily looking to Lucretius for the latest information on how things really are at the quantum level. We’re trying to get a lesson from the general conclusions he reached, which are probably still generally valid.
So now here we’re going to be talking about the mind and the soul, and we’re discussing his theories of how the mind and the soul operate within the body. We’re probably going to run into the same kinds of problems we did regarding atoms and void. We’re going to find that the way he analyzes it is not the same as we do today, but the conclusions he reaches are probably the most important thing. And I think where he’s going, as we’ll discuss as we go through the details, is just that the mind or the soul — we’re going to have to discuss what those words mean to him and to us — but he’s ultimately making the point that consciousness, the mind, the soul, is not supernatural, but is part of the body, and that it is born with the body, grows with the body, and dies with the body.
Already it’s unclear to me what the best way to approach this is. The Latin would be animus for the governing mind, and there are Greek words involved, including psyche probably. I don’t think we’re going to profit the most by spending all of our time worrying about those details. We need to bring them out to the extent we can, but if somebody wants to really study the details of ancient Greek psychological theory, they’re probably going to need to go to some other sources.
And Elaine is with us today but is having to mute herself right now, but hopefully she’ll be joining us as the episode goes on. To some extent in the past we’ve had sort of a physics expertise to try to reconcile with what Epicurus was saying, and now we have sort of a medical or psychological issue that we’re going to be discussing for a while — and Elaine is particularly well-suited to help us through all that.
So why don’t we go back to the beginning of this. Even in the first sentence, he’s talking about the mind of man which we commonly call the soul. Well, of course, soul has so many religious connotations. We need to immediately separate out whether Lucretius is talking about something supernatural or not — which of course I don’t think he is. And he spends time talking about the Greek theory of harmony. He’s really not saying in these passages that some people argue the soul is supernatural — he’s really talking about the question of whether the soul is a single thing, a harmony that flows through all the parts of our body, or whether our consciousness is somehow confined to particular regions of the body. Which is another hurdle, because we consider consciousness to be seated in the brain — whereas the Epicureans apparently considered this force to be centered in the region of the heart. So we’re going to have to figure out where to begin.
Who wants to make a suggestion as to how we talk about mind versus soul? Don’t everybody talk at once. What do you think, Charles?
Charles: It’s kind of a messy debate, and I’m actually kind of looking ahead through the rest of the paragraph. But oh, man.
Cassius: Well, if we wanted to distill this one down today into a single issue — he is saying that the soul does not exist as a harmony, but that it is seated in a particular area of the body. Now to make sense out of that statement, you’ve got to decide what is the mind, what is the soul, and then what in the world are the Greeks talking about with this harmony?
Charles: Yeah, because I mean all signs point to Pythagoras there.
Cassius: Martin, you have any expertise on harmony and the Greek view of harmony?
Martin: No, no.
Cassius: Well, neither do I. And I’m not sure whether Elaine does or not, but she’s not going to be able to jump in for a few minutes yet, so we’ll just do the best we can in the meantime.
I think you’re right, Charles, that whether it’s Pythagoras, whether it’s — I don’t know who is the person to whom you attribute the music of the spheres and the different concepts that seem to roll around the idea that all of the universe is a symphony and operates with such a divinely inspired motion that it’s all just a harmonious amazing structure — I think there’s at least an aspect of that involved when you start talking about harmony from the Greek point of view. And the implication therefore is that these other Greeks who are thinking about the mind and the soul as being a divine spark or as something divine — they’re refusing to put it in a particular place within the body. They’re considering it to be outside the body, above the body, separate from the body. And Epicurus is going to be arguing, Lucretius is arguing, that the soul or the mind or whatever you want to call this consciousness is a part of the body, no less than the foot or the head or any other part of it.
Elaine: So I don’t — this is Elaine. I don’t know if you can hear noise in the background. Can you hear me?
Cassius: No, no, you’re coming through great.
Elaine: So I just want to say that the first thing that jumps into my mind — speaking physiologically, the way he describes it — it sounds like you could almost say he’s describing the mind the way we would describe the brain, and the soul like the nervous system. Because he says it spreads through the whole body. So that makes you think of the nerves, and then the mind as the brain. I like how he says they are “joined together and so joined to make up one single nature.” It really does sound like the nervous system to me.
Cassius: What about this harmony issue, Elaine? Do you have any thoughts?
Elaine: I don’t know about it, but it sounds like he’s referencing some philosophy that I’m not familiar with.
Cassius: Well, I doubt we can educate ourselves quickly enough today to make complete sense of it.
Charles: I’m only getting a single sentence summary from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations — something like that. You see something there about harmony?
Cassius: You see something there about harmony?
Charles: Yeah. “The Pythagorean theory that the soul is a harmony of the four elements composing the body, and therefore mortal, or nothing at all in the words of Cicero, was ascribed to Aristoxenus and Dicaearchus.” And the theory is comparable to one offered by Simmias in Plato’s Phaedo. And this Aristoxenus was a pupil of Aristotle in the Peripatetic school, who was greatly inspired by Pythagoras.
Cassius: Well, yeah, we could probably just tell a lot about what he’s arguing here. And this is an interesting section here for some discussions we’ve had in the past, especially I remember some discussions with Elaine about feeling pleasure in one part of your body and pain in another. He’s specifically talking about how a man disturbed in mind is perfectly well all over his body, in the same manner as when a man has gout in his foot, his head at the same time is free from pain.
Charles: Yeah, I remember that thread. I pulled it up — it was back in January. Our consensus was that we could feel both at the same time, but there was no third state that came about through the simultaneous feelings of the two. And I think we talked about — I remember the pebble in your shoe as you climb a mountain or whatever, and the pleasure of the view from the summit when you accomplish that despite your body being sore.
Cassius: And of course, in trying to gather what his main point is here, he says he’s going to try to convince us that the soul is a part like other limbs and not a harmony. It’s probably a good opportunity to look at some of the other translations. Go ahead, Elaine.
Elaine: So I found a discussion of Socrates’ arguments on the soul, and there’s the argument from Simmias — the harmony and the lyre argument. The argument would be: the lyre and its strings are matter, material, earthly, composite, and akin to mortality. The harmony is invisible, incorporeal, fair, divine, and abides in the lyre. When the lyre is broken, the harmony perishes even before the lyre. Conclusion: the soul, like the harmony, perishes when the body, like the lyre, ceases to function.
And then Socrates’ response: harmony is not pre-existent to the lyre. Either Simmias’s argument or the pre-existence of the soul is invalid — and since the pre-existence of the soul has already been proved by Socrates, the Simmias lyre-harmony analogy must be invalid.
Cassius: It sounds like Simmias is pretty close to Epicurus in his view there.
Elaine: Yeah, yeah.
Cassius: And I’m not familiar with him. Any of you?
Charles: No, I do not. There’s a section on him in Diogenes Laertius.
Charles: I find — this is Plato’s Socrates — but I find the fourth objection Plato brings to it pretty interesting. “The soul is the ruling principle of the body, but a tuning is governed by the material of the musical instrument. By analogy, that would make the body the ruler of the soul.”
Cassius: It’s hard to tell where that goes, because Plato would not be saying that the body is the ruler of the soul — he’s using that as a reason for why a particular theory is not correct. Is that right, Charles?
Charles: That’s correct. And that must be his argument for why the Simmias tuning analogy is not correct — directly addressing Simmias’s point that the soul is like a tune or harmony of the parts of the body. If the body is destroyed, the tune cannot survive. And that is why Plato’s Socrates brings up that by this analogy the body would have priority over the soul. And why they cannot accept that argument.
Cassius: And I don’t remember if it’s in this section or not, but we’re clearly about to get to it here in Epicurus — because Epicurus is going to talk about how when the body gets sick, the mind gets sick as well. You see examples of that. I think that’s probably not today, but it’ll be soon.
Of course, I don’t know that Epicurus would say that the body rules the soul, but they certainly are together — born together, grow together, die together. He clearly does not like the analogy of a harmony. I took a very simplified approach to that — that he’s joining the soul and mind with the body as opposed to what Daniel Brown translates as “a sort of vital habit of the whole body which the Greeks call harmony.”
Charles: I was thinking more of the obsolete but still somewhat modern concept — the élan vital, basically the sort of arguments of the vitalist philosophies from the late 19th century and early 20th century — where I took “vital habit” into what they described as the vital force, a very abstract principle of living or life that was inherent to every human being. Of course modern science and specifically genetics has sort of proven that wrong, but that’s the view I took about it for simplification — it grounded it for me in a way that made perfect sense. I don’t know if that’s going to apply for anybody else, but…
Elaine: I think that makes sense, Charles. But what I’m also thinking of is — it sounds to me like we’re kind of arguing whether consciousness is emergent. And harmony would be emergent. It sounds like, to me, a property that doesn’t exist by itself free from the body, but is emergent from the actions of the nervous system, the material bodies. And yet he’s arguing that it has actually got its own particles. It sounds to me like Epicurus is arguing a non-emergent hypothesis about consciousness. Am I getting that right?
Cassius: I don’t know whether that is correct or not. I’m not prepared to say you’re wrong, but I’m not prepared to say you’re right either. So much of what we’re talking about is an issue of emergence — that everything is grounded in the particles, but the observations that we see in our world emerge from those particles. I’m thinking that the harmony is an implication that there’s some separateness between — and I don’t consider emergence to be separate from the things it emerges from. I consider that to be a continuum. And I’m thinking that these other Greeks he’s criticizing are saying that the soul actually — in Socrates’ or Plato’s case — pre-existed, or that this harmony they’re talking about could be some kind of supernatural thing that inhabits the body. At least, that’s what I’m trying to keep in mind as the potential distinction.
Elaine: Well, because when you talk about emergence, I think you can have emergent properties that are not the same thing as the particles, but they stem from and are inseparable from the particles. Right? So this is a hard concept to understand. There are two ways they could be talking about harmony. This vital habit could be like a sort of pre-existing template — a characteristic of all the particles — a property of its own that doesn’t only appear once the particles are put together. Some people might say DNA could be a vital habit, right? It’s throughout the body. Without that template we wouldn’t have life — but of course they didn’t know about that in ancient Greece. But the DNA is part of the body and is absolutely the body.
So the question is whether the vital habit predates the body — whether it’s already something that’s sort of a principle in existence, like we talk about laws of physics, a consistent pattern of interactions of material objects — or whether it only shows up secondarily. And I mean there’s actually still debate on that.
Cassius: Well, Elaine, can you clarify which of those theories you’re associating with Epicurus and which with Plato and Socrates?
Elaine: So to me — what he says is “the soul is a part like the other limbs and not as a harmony takes up the whole body.” He is saying that it’s a specific kind of substance. I don’t know if he’s clearly saying it doesn’t come about as a result of the other particles, but it takes up the whole body. Didn’t he see the soul as actually being a particular kind of particle?
Cassius: He sees the soul as composed of — there’s a discussion of a particular type of particle that is associated with the soul as being extremely light and extremely fine, yes. And so it would not have been emergent in that way — what he’s calling soul or consciousness or whatever he means by that.
Elaine: He’s not saying that it’s like the appearance of something — like, a car is emergent from putting together its parts. You’re not going to say that the carburetor is a car. But we put together all the parts and we have a car and it drives. That is how most people see consciousness now in neuroscience: you have to have the parts together and then consciousness is emergent from that. He’s not saying that. He’s saying there’s something spread through the whole body which is the consciousness — that it is a part, like the other limbs, not something that comes from them. And that’s not the mainstream thought today in neuroscience. It would be contrary to it.
So I think this is one of those cases where — it depends on how you look at it. It’s not exactly right. But if you think about it like the nervous system, you can kind of make a case that it is a certain organ in the body. You can kind of rescue it that way, but not completely.
Cassius: We’ve got a lot more detail about all this that we’re going to be coming to over the next couple of episodes. I’m not sure what the right answer is at this moment. And I do think it’s going to be important for us to be thinking about what it means to be an emergent property and so forth. I don’t really have any final position on that.
Martin, do you have anything to correct us at this point?
Martin: No, no. I’m a bit at a loss here. I still couldn’t separate things out, so I’m just listening and trying to put something meaningful into it.
Cassius: Well, a lot of what we accomplished hopefully is to help people think through things with us as we come into contact with these ideas for the first time in many cases. Martin, knowing your physics background — is there anything going through your mind at all that would be of relevance for us to talk about right now?
Martin: No, no. This is the thing. I still couldn’t sort it out, so I couldn’t say anything meaningful to this at the moment.
Cassius: Okay. Maybe also before next week I can do some more reading and find out something about what the specific harmony theory was. And I bet as we go forward we’re going to see more of his arguments and it’s going to give us some more clarity on exactly what he’s distinguishing here.
Charles: Yeah, I wanted to reinforce what Elaine was saying — because there is a known link between the sort of vitalism, like the vital force and the élan vital, with emergent behavior and properties and processes. So there’s definitely a link there in terms of lines of thinking. But because vitalism, like I mentioned earlier with its now obsolete pseudo-scientific nature, it has links to emergentism, but it usually becomes a garbled mess of ambiguity.
Cassius: I know that in my own mind right this second — I don’t know what vitalism means, I don’t know what harmony is intended to address, it’s not even one hundred percent clear to me half the time what is meant by talking about emergent properties. I don’t know precisely what the argument is he’s attempting to go against — I’m presuming it’s some kind of supernatural argument that the soul is supernatural and pre-exists the body and post-dates the death. And I’m almost certain that’s the direction he’s ultimately aiming at, but because the arguments of Plato and Socrates are so foreign to me, I’m not sure that I can at this moment construct anything clear about where he is right now — other than that I have a sense about where he intends to go.
As far as where he is right now — he concludes by saying, “but that the head, as it were, and the lord of the whole body is the reason which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast.” Most of the time when he comes up with something I can understand why he reached that conclusion, but it’s kind of hard for me to understand how they were focusing on the middle of the chest or the heart as the seat of something versus the brain. But they don’t do things without having a good reason for it. There’s got to be something about their reasoning that is not clear to me to explain that.
Elaine: So, Cassius, I think it’s probably because that’s where you most feel things. When we have feelings, it feels like it’s there.
Cassius: Yes, yes.
Charles: I was going to say I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but yeah — that’s something that’s common in a lot of philosophy and in different cultures: that your passions, your feelings, your emotions are all felt in the chest. When you’re really sad you feel it in your heart, and the allegory of heartbreak or whatever.
Elaine: So I think where I would say — just from this passage — is that the idea of a consciousness predetermined before the body exists, he’s rejecting that correctly. But then the other conclusions he comes to about consciousness being tied to a particular particle are not correct. And then I thought about one other thing to consider: just having a nervous system does not mean that there will be consciousness. Think about that — because we’ve got people who are in comas who are unconscious. Just having a nervous system is not enough.
Cassius: Or unconscious in a coma — or what about just being asleep? Are you conscious when you’re asleep?
Elaine: Well, you sort of are. During dreams you’re conscious, but you’re not getting the same sensory input that you do during waking consciousness. And you can be — what we call brain dead — but your nervous system isn’t gone completely. The actual physical structure is still there, it’s just not functioning. So it’s much more complicated than what it looks like. I don’t think anybody today really thinks there’s some kind of mind particle spread through the body — so he went a little too far, as he did in other places.
Cassius: I think he was addressing contemporary arguments and positions that obviously don’t exist today. He’s right to argue against those, and then he went a little further than he had evidence for — which has happened with him before. But he’s correct about what he’s arguing against.
Does anybody doubt the direction he’s ultimately going? Does anybody suspect he’s going in any direction other than the argument that the mind, the body, the soul, the consciousness is a part of the body, and that it is born with the body and dies with the body?
Martin: The upper-level answer — the broadest view — yes. I mean, you know, just the broadest view, yes. And so that would be right. It’s only when he gets down into the nitty-gritty details that he goes a little further than he should. But the overall — yes.
Cassius: I asked that question because some of this is so murky that I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the argument he’s getting into here. Now is there any possibility he’s going in any other direction? Because I don’t think it’s — I think it’s dangerous to consider Lucretius to be science for the sake of science. There’s always a reason why he’s talking about something.
Elaine: Yeah. And it’s not really exactly right — it’s an emergent property, different from a part. And I don’t even know if he has that understanding of what an emergent property can be with regard to this or not. We’ll just have to read more and see whether that comes up. But it really isn’t a part.
Cassius: Well, why don’t we begin to come to an end for today, because we have so much more to factor in. We can just leave it on a cliffhanging note about where he’s eventually going to go with all of this. Does anybody see anything else they’d really like to comment on today before we start to wrap up?
Charles: No, I don’t think so. But I do think we should look further into Simmias’s dialogue there. I think Phaedo was being referenced here — because in the second-to-last paragraph he likens harmony to the music of the harp. It could just be coincidental since the lyre was a common instrument back then, but I do think he was addressing a Platonic or even Pythagorean concept there.
Cassius: Charles, that’s very valuable, I completely agree. Can you put a link in the thread here on this episode 39 so we can find what you’re looking at? Because if there’s a specific exchange in Plato with Socrates talking about the lyre and harmony, that is almost definitely something that Epicurus would have been thinking about — his students would have known about it, and he would have wanted to deal with it directly.
Charles: Yeah, I’ll put it there. And let’s see if I can link it in on Gutenberg or something.
Cassius: Okay. Well, next week we’ll definitely get some more input from Martin on his analysis of the harmony of the soul. I also want to mention that we might also want to learn a bit more about vitalism going forward — because I think we can really link it back to some ancient theories about the soul itself being a unique property of living things. That’s pretty much the topic of this entire book — we’ll be covering this for weeks and weeks.
Charles: I’ll try to dig into that next week and be better prepared myself. Oh man — Simmias is referred to one hundred and ten times in the Phaedo. I don’t even remember — I don’t have an understanding of what the theme of the Phaedo is overall. I know it touches on a certain universe, but what is the Phaedo about?
Elaine: It’s about the immortal nature of the soul.
Cassius: That’s probably one we need to be looking at then. I’ll have to make a point of trying to read that this week — I know I’ve not spent significant time with the Phaedo in the past. It’s one of his more well-known dialogues. I think it was one of the last he wrote as well.
Charles: Well, I know many of our listeners, and us included, are not able to just spend unlimited amounts of time digging into the details of Plato. But this is going to be one where we need to get some kind of a grounding — maybe Wikipedia can help us. It would take hours to read this and understand it.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, we’re just about at our hour mark for today, so let’s go ahead and come to a conclusion. Anybody have anything else to add?
Elaine: I guess I will just add that this is a good example of what readers who are trying to read Lucretius on their own may run into if they don’t have an extensive philosophical background. Sometimes it’s a good idea to stop, slow down, and find out about some of the other sources that Epicurus was responding to — what was actually going on during his time. And this is not the first time that has happened. There’s no problem with that. When those things come up, we don’t have to freak out just because we don’t have a philosophy degree. We can take a minute, go and investigate, and our listeners can do the same thing. So that’s one advantage of presenting this as lay people — a podcast for ordinary people who can read this and not feel intimidated by it. We can make use of Wikipedia. No shame in that.
Cassius: That’s right. That’s a great point.
Cassius: Okay, anything, Martin?
Martin: No, nothing from me.
Cassius: Okay, all right. Well, thanks everybody. Let’s go ahead and adjourn for the day. We’ll be back next week and take it up again. Thanks a lot.
Charles: Thanks.
Elaine: Thank you.
Martin: All right.