Episode 045 - More on The Mortality of the Mind and Soul
Date: 11/21/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1764-episode-forty-five-further-arguments-for-the-mortality-of-the-soul/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 45, a three-person session without Elaine, covers lines 634–740 of Book Three. Charles reads four passages: warriors losing limbs in the heat of battle without noticing the loss; a serpent cut in pieces with each segment still writhing; the argument from memory (if the soul pre-existed the body it would leave traces of that prior life); the food analogy (soul particles dispersed through the body as food is broken down and distributed, losing their original form); and the worm passage (what happens to soul particles when a body is consumed by worms). Cassius summarizes the core logic: anything that can be divided cannot be one immortal, unchanging substance — division is itself change, and what changes cannot be eternal.
The memory argument triggers a long discussion of reincarnation across traditions. Martin recalls that General George Patton documented a belief that he had been a Roman legionary — confirmed by Charles from Wikipedia during the episode. Cassius adds Edgar Cayce, the Bible passage about the blind man (whose disciples’ question implies the possibility of prior-life sin), early church father Origen, and Pythagorean transmigration. Charles attempts Plato’s theory of recollection: according to Plato, before the soul entered the body it knew everything in the world of forms — which Cassius distinguishes from full reincarnation, since it implies one prior existence in an ideal realm rather than a cycle of lives through different bodies.
The worm passage produces more confusion than illumination; Martin notes that Lucretius simply lays out alternatives without committing to one. The conversation drifts into a lively digression about where maggots actually come from in a sealed coffin; Martin explains that flies deposit eggs before sealing and describes the phenomenon of adipocere — the waxy preservation state some bodies form in certain German soils. The episode’s most substantive moment is Cassius’s analysis of the final passage: why would a disembodied soul ever want to enter a body? The Pythagorean/Platonic answer, he argues, is that pleasure is the honey trap — the soul is lured in by sweet experience and imprisoned by desire — and the philosophical goal of those traditions is therefore to divorce oneself from pleasure and return to the pure pre-embodied state. Cassius makes clear his contempt for this view.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 45 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’s 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. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode One for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In today’s episode we’ll cover roughly lines 634 through 740 from Book Three of the Latin text of Lucretius. The topic will be further arguments on the mortality of the soul. Now let’s join the discussion with Charles reading today’s text.
Charles: (reads lines 634–740)
And since the vital sense we perceive is diffused through the body, and we see the whole body animated throughout, if any weapon cuts it in two in the middle of a sudden stroke and divides the parts asunder, the powers of the soul, without doubt, being separated and disunited, will follow the fate of the body. But whatever is cut asunder and falls into parts can have nothing immortal in its nature.
Chariots, we read, armed with scythes and reeking with confused slaughter, would cut off a limb with so quick a force that the divided part that fell off from the body might be seen trembling upon the ground when the mind and heart of the man feel nothing of the pain. So sudden was the wound. His whole soul is so taken up with the heat of action that he pursues the fight and the intended slaughter with the remainder of his body, nor does he imagine that the wheels and mangling hooks have torn off among the horses his left hand, or that he has lost his shield. Another knows nothing that his right hand is lopped off as he scales the wall and presses eagerly forward. Another attempts to rise with one leg while the dying foot moves to the toes as it lies by him upon the ground, and the head cut off, the trunk yet warm, and the heaving preserves the same fierce look in the face, and keeps the eyes open till it has lost all remains of the soul within it.
And so divide with the sword, if you please, into many parts the tail of a long snake, threatening and brandishing his tongue, you’ll see every divided part wiggling with the fresh wound and staining the ground with blood. You’ll perceive the serpent turning his head about to find his divided body and bite up with his teeth from the anguish of the pain he suffers. Shall we say that a proper soul belongs severally to all these parts? By this rule it will follow that the same creature is animated by many souls at the same time. It is plain therefore that the soul before was one and diffused through the whole body, is divided, and consequently they are both mortal because they are both equally divided into many parts.
Further, if the nature of the soul be immortal and is infused into the body when a child is born, why do we remember nothing of the life we left before, nor retain any traces of things done long ago? For if the power of the soul be so utterly changed that all recollection of past actions is entirely gone, this kind of oblivion is, I think, not far removed from death itself. We must needs allow therefore that the soul that was before utterly perished, and that which now is, was newly created. But when the body is completely formed, when we are born and enter within the door of life, if then the vital power of the soul were infused, it would have nothing to do to grow up together with the body and the limbs, and be united with the very blood. But as it were in a cage, it would live entire of itself and so diffuse the faculties of sense all through the body. Again then and again it must be said that the soul is neither without beginning nor exempt from the laws of death, for we cannot conceive that the soul were infused from without into the body could be so nicely and closely united to the several parts of it as the thing itself evidently proves she is. She is indeed so diffused through the veins, the bowels, the nerves and bones, that even the teeth are not without sense — this appears from the acute pain we feel from the chillness of cold water or the grinding of a rough stone when we eat.
The soul therefore being so closely connected with the several parts cannot be supposed to depart whole or deliver herself entire from the bones and nerves and joints of the body. But if you think the soul is infused from without and so spread over all the limbs, she is for this reason still more liable to perish with the body, for a thing that flows through so many passages is dissolved and therefore dies, for she must be thus divided through all the pores. And as the food, when it is distributed through the members and the limbs, loses its first form and takes up another quite different, so the soul, though it enters whole and fresh into the body, yet in passing through its parts are dissolved, because the particles of the soul which now rules and governs the body is produced from that which perished and was dissolved in passing through into the limbs. The nature of the soul therefore is neither without beginning nor free from death and dissolution.
Besides, in a dead body some particles of the soul remain, or they do not. If they do remain and abide in it, you can by no means properly say she is immortal, because she withdrew with her seeds divided and with some of them left behind. But if she retired from the body with all her parts whole, how comes the carcass to breed so many worms and the corrupted bowels, and whence do such abundance of creatures without bones and blood swarm over the bloated limbs? But if you fancy that souls formed from without creep into these worms, and every single worm has a particular soul, nor think it strange that so many thousand should flow together from without to the place from whence one departed, yet it is proper to inquire into and to examine this: whether every particular soul searches into the several seeds of the worms and chooses for itself what seeds are most proper to make itself a body, or whether she enters into a body already formed.
But there is no reason to be given why the soul should build a dwelling for herself and go through such fatigue, especially since, disentangled from matter, she cannot be tormented with diseases, with cold and hunger — for a body only can labor under these calamities, and the soul suffers many such distresses only by conjunction with it. But allow it inconvenient for souls to fashion out bodies for themselves to dwell, yet there is no way possible for them to do this. They do not therefore make up bodies and limbs for themselves, nor are they infused into bodies ready-made, for they could not be so nicely united as to inform every part of the body, nor could the vital motions be mutually carried on between them.
Cassius: Okay, thank you for reading that, Charles. In today’s episode we’re going to be missing Elaine, so it’s going to be Charles and Martin and I as we go through this section, which is largely a continuation of the arguments we saw in the last episode or two — additional arguments why the mind or the soul cannot survive outside of the body after death.
So we have another hundred lines or so of text today, and probably the best way to attack it is just to start with what we have as our first paragraph, which is the opening — the somewhat gory discussion of examples from wartime, when arms and legs get cut off during battle and you find soldiers who do not immediately realize that they’ve lost those members. And of course, maybe a more or less appetizing example might be that of cutting a serpent into parts and noting what happens when that occurs. So let’s talk about that for just a minute to see what we can get out of it.
Probably the serpent example may be the clearest: when you cut a snake into several parts, you’ll find that each part continues to wiggle, at least for a while. And what does that indicate? That something is causing it to wiggle — that whether you’re talking about mind or soul or nervous system or whatever, it apparently is infused through the separate parts separately. And the argument is that if something can be separated like that, then whatever it was before, it’s not some kind of a single immortal substance that cannot be changed, because it obviously has been changed by being divided. Martin, any thoughts on that part yet?
Martin: I mean, you exactly formulated it completely. I would have used different words, but I would have said the same thing. So no difference on that one from me. Yeah, since it is divided, it can’t be that one immortal substance — so that was a nice summary.
Cassius: Yeah. It seems like every episode I’m going to come back to that point. It’s not really a clinical argument — you haven’t really identified what the substance is or decided whether it’s electrical or divine fire or anything else — but you’re making a sort of high-level logical observation and deduction: whatever it was, if you can divide it, anything that can be divided is not the same as it was before. And if you’re suggesting that something has to be unchangeable to be immortal, then whatever you’ve done here, at the very least you’ve got some kind of a change involved. That’s the superficial way that most people would look at the fact that if you can divide something, then it’s not the same as it was before.
I’ve always found the next passage in this argument to be as interesting as almost any other, because I think it’s asking the question: if the soul is immortal and came into the body when the child was born, why do we remember nothing of the life we led before? I think we’ve already seen this argument in the past in earlier books, or else we’re going to see it again, because in another section it’s combined with the question about why don’t we remember the Carthaginians attacking Italy and rampaging through the countryside — we would remember that if we had been there and our souls are just reincarnated from prior people. This seems to be sort of just inserted here in a very brief position without that detail, but it’s probably one of the arguments that sticks out in the philosophy: that it rejects the pre-existence of the soul.
Martin: How do we then address some claims from some kinds of religions, who claim that — for example, through meditations — sometimes Buddhists can recollect what previous incarnations had lived? And you don’t have to be Buddhist to do that, because people in the United States with even simply spiritualist viewpoints will have séances to communicate with the dead and talk about past lives that you can reawaken from. “What were you in a past life?” is kind of a common argument.
Cassius: Charles, you were about to say something. What do you think about that?
Charles: Well, I was actually going to talk about Plato’s idea of recollection.
Cassius: Well, before you go into that, because that may be separate but it’s very important — we ought to talk about it, especially if you know more about it than I do. But how do we meet Martin’s observation that some people say that they do remember their past lives?
Martin: I guess that’s something that each individual has to decide for themselves how credible that is. Even the famous World War II general from the U.S. — there is a claim that he was a reincarnation of past soldiers. I’m not sure whether this is made up in the movie about this general. But for example, when he is in North Africa facing Rommel or Rommel’s successor, then instead of looking at the recent battlefield, he goes to the site of ancient Carthage and then seems to remember how he was a soldier losing on that site at that time.
Cassius: You’re talking about Patton, I believe.
Martin: I believe that’s it. Patton’s a very interesting soldier that I have not really read nearly as much about, but yes. I do believe I’ve read that about Patton, but unfortunately I don’t know much more about it. Charles, do you know anything about that? Are we talking about George Patton?
Cassius: Yes, indeed. George Patton, the tank commander.
Charles: I’m just here on Wikipedia. “Patton was a staunch fatalist and believed in reincarnation. He believed that he might have been a military leader killed in action in Napoleon’s army or a Roman legionary in a previous life.”
Cassius: Yeah, the Roman legionary would be the Carthaginian aspect. I mean, clearly reincarnation has a long history in even Western thought — not just in the Eastern Buddhist traditions, but there were Christian reincarnationists as well, if I remember correctly. There was a period of time I was reading into all that. Some people come at it from the point of view that if there’s justice in life, one of the ways to get justice would be through karma — that one person in a prior life is responsible for their fate in this one.
Martin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’s karma. But this is not backed by the Bible, so I didn’t find any reference to that in the Bible. And the other reference there — the karma goes to the offspring, so…
Cassius: No, I wouldn’t call you wrong, but there is a reference in the Bible that these people point to. I’ve read enough about this that I’ve heard this. There is an episode in the New Testament where the disciples are talking to Jesus, and they come across a blind man. The question from the disciples asked of Jesus is: “Who sinned — this man or his father — that he was born blind?” The way the question is asked clearly implies that the disciples were thinking it possible that this man had sinned in a prior life, causing him to be born blind in this one. And Jesus doesn’t — if I remember correctly the argument these people make — Jesus doesn’t really answer the question directly, and he does not immediately say “No, of course he didn’t sin in a prior life, because prior lives don’t happen.” Jesus’s answer basically ignores that question, which leads these people to argue that Jesus himself accepted the possibility of a prior life. I don’t know what chapter or verse that’s in, but I know that that is a common theme of the reincarnation argument. So again, Martin, I don’t mean to say you’re wrong there, because I know there’s nothing specific about it, but that particular question and answer is used by the reincarnation advocates.
Apparently there were in the early church certain fathers who did believe in reincarnation. I think Origen, if I remember correctly, has been cited as an advocate of reincarnation — perhaps as a means of addressing how God could be so unjust to people, and to say that He evens it out through multiple lives. But it’s certainly not a major part of the Western tradition.
Martin: Yeah, but it’s in contradiction to the Old Testament, because there’s even this saying — I’m not sure whether I get it exactly — but “the fathers ate grapes and the grandchildren get toothache” or something like that. So in the ancient Jewish tradition, as written up in the Old Testament, it is clearly stated that it’s the sins of the forefathers which determined the fate.
Cassius: “The sins of the fathers visited on the sons” — yeah, yeah, yeah. And clearly there are people who would say that goes on too, but affecting your direct lineage isn’t quite the same as you in another life, because it’s inherited, but it’s not the same soul — otherwise it would affect completely different people.
What you’ve raised, Martin, certainly would be part of the argument about whether reincarnation can be reconciled with Christianity or not. But I know there are people who argue that it can. And of course — is it the Pythagoreans, Charles? There were other Greek philosophers who believed in reincarnation as well, and it may be the Pythagoreans. Or maybe Plato himself is held to be a reincarnationist, given his theory of recollection. The theory of recollection seems to be reincarnation in a sense.
And of course, in the midst of all this discussion of cutting up snakes and toes and so forth, this is a good break from that — it’s a reminder that Lucretius was facing people who make many of the same contentions that we run into today and thought it important to deal with them. You could also start talking about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in this, which I guess would pretty much apply here as well — even if the atoms do reassemble themselves into the same position, as long as you simply don’t remember it, you know, it might as well be a totally new soul.
But Charles, did you want to talk more specifically about Plato’s theory of recollection?
Charles: It is hard because there’s a lot of debate about whether or not Plato meant it as allegory. You can say that about a lot of Plato. I am reading about it right now, and I’m just identifying a common trend. And it’s the trend which I think is now more important — between Plato, Pythagoras, even a lot of religions — it’s this belief that the soul is either trapped in the body or held down by the body.
Cassius: Mind-body dualism.
Charles: Mm-hmm. According to Plato, prior to the soul being trapped in the body, it knew everything.
Cassius: Okay, that’s an angle that I was not familiar with. That doesn’t necessarily imply that it had a prior human life. It sounds like that implies some kind of prior existence in another dimension in which it had contact with all sorts of information.
Charles: In the world of forms.
Cassius: Okay, that’s the deal then. You could have a Platonic situation where the soul just existed once — but in the world of forms — and that’s what it’s recalling in the current life. That wouldn’t be reincarnation in the full sense.
Charles: No, I mean this does deviate a bit from reincarnation. I’m just trying to form my thoughts together on it. The idea that the soul existed beforehand — I think that’s what Lucretius is really trying to get at.
Cassius: Well, if you come up with something more specific, just jump in again. We can continue talking. We got three more paragraphs for today’s episode.
The next passage is going back to the issue that if the soul was completely formed when it entered the body, that’s kind of inconsistent with its diffusing through the veins and somehow diffusing through the organs and the rest of the body — to the point where even the teeth have sense — with the analogy being food. You eat food, and then your body basically breaks it down and distributes it throughout the rest of the body. The same chicken you put in your mouth is not the same as the chemicals that end up in the cells of your body. If the soul is doing that same kind of thing — if the soul is entering the body and then dividing itself up among all the pores of the body — then that soul is so changed as to be a very different thing at that point. Which is another argument as to why it’s not the same as it was before, and therefore would not be reasonably free from death itself even if it’s doing the same thing that food is.
Martin, any comment on that one?
Martin: No.
Cassius: Okay. And then the next passage is — it’s always kind of, I don’t want to say I get queasy, but it’s always kind of funny when they start talking about the worms and so forth. This next one seems to be trying to say that the worms are somehow eating the atoms of the soul, and therefore every single worm is eating part of the soul. I’m not really sure exactly what to make of that particular argument.
Charles: Yeah, it was — when I read it out loud, the second time I read it I still had to process it, because immediately he seems unsure of his argument.
Cassius: I don’t know how unsure he is, but he’s unclear to me. Go ahead, Martin.
Martin: He just used several options of what may be the case — he may have a preferred one, but he stays neutral on this one as he writes it. He proposes various alternatives, but all of those alternatives point away from the soul being immortal.
Charles: You can look at different passages — “if you fancy that souls formed from without creep into these worms” — so he’s talking about the worms having a soul of their own. And “you don’t think it’s strange that so many thousands should flow together from outside to the place where one departed” — he’s setting up alternatives for what could be, but all of them point away from the soul being immortal.
Cassius: We could probably look at these last two passages together, because I see that the next one starts with the sentence “There’s no reason to be given why the soul should build a dwelling for itself.” Actually, that last passage to me is more clear and more important than the question of whether thousands of worms have souls of their own. That last one is talking about: why should a soul ever build a dwelling for itself and go through the fatigue basically of life — where you get tormented by disease and cold and hunger — because only the body suffers from those things. So why should the soul, which is floating around and not suffering from those distresses, decide that it wants to go through all that?
And I don’t know that we’re cutting it off in the middle of the argument by stopping here, but that has always seemed to me an important argument. If the soul is living in the world of forms, as Charles was saying before — if the soul knows everything and doesn’t have any of the diseases and pains of life — then why in the world would the soul ever decide to become born in the first place? You pretty much have to construct some kind of religious arguments about God wanting it to happen, or having some outside reason be forced upon the soul — like it’s trapped, like the Pythagoreans say it’s trapped.
And of course, what is it about the body that’s so attractive that would make the soul ever go into it and be trapped in the first place? I presume the ready answer that those guys would have for that is that pleasure is the honey trap — pleasure is the sweet trap that causes all these pains. And if you could once divorce yourself from pleasure, then you can free yourself from the body and free yourself back to the blessed existence you had before your mind was sullied by contact with the body. And of course I hope my tone of voice conveys what I think about that argument. But I think that’s pretty much the issue — why the argument is an important one — because you pretty much have to convince yourself that being combined with the body is a terrible thing and something that it would have been better never to have happened, to get back to that pristine condition of the soul floating around in the air communing with the angels.
Cassius: As I think about what else to say today — looking ahead — we do have it looks like one more episode to go where we continue talking about these arguments about the soul not being immortal, and then we get into the more general arguments about why we should reconcile ourselves to death. But at least for today we’ve had another series of these detailed arguments. We’re getting close to the end of Book Three, aren’t we?
Charles: Yeah, we’re around line 700, and Book Three has 1,090 lines, so we’re maybe two-thirds of the way through. But like I say, the last part of Book Three is very well known and famous for its very general arguments about why death is not to be feared, and those arguments are all extremely interesting and ought to give a lot of food for thought and discussion as we go through them. What we’ve been doing gives us the clinical and physical basis for the argument, but the rest of the book is the kind of thing — I don’t have a lot of plans for my funeral when I die, but it’s the kind of thing you would consider reading at someone’s funeral.
Charles, do you have more specific comment?
Charles: Yeah, I mean, Lucretius presented some arguments and promptly gave some explanations for them and, like you said in your summary at the beginning, it’s just the natural yet large logical conclusion to arrive at. We understand the logic behind it. So aside from the worms part, I can’t think of anything else to add really.
Cassius: Seems like whenever they start talking about worms, that’s one of the areas where they end up with what we would today probably consider a less convincing argument — because I relate that to the issue of when they talk about the rain falling into the ground and worms swinging up as if they came up really mysteriously, when we would not think that’s very mysterious. And I guess the maggots — or whatever we’re talking about here that get involved in dead bodies — are also interesting. Where do maggots that infest a dead body come from? Do they float through the air? Are they already within the body?
Martin: It’s troubling what he was wondering about.
Cassius: Yeah, yeah — Martin, do you know the answer to that?
Charles: And of course flies will deposit them — flies, flies, of course, yes.
Cassius: What? Okay, well — what about when you encase a body in a coffin, where do the maggots come from then?
Martin: No — then it’s not that. The earthworms, they will cut through, they will eventually make it to the rotten wood and then eat the body. But it also depends on the soil. Actually, in some soils in Germany they somehow… what happened is that the bodies form into a kind of waxy state — what we call adipocere — so that means when they are dug out again to make space in the cemetery, the bodies are still whole, preserved in that waxy condition.
Charles: Okay. But it is true also, correct, that — just like we give cats and dogs worm pills — different types of parasites do live within your body all the time. And I guess they can continue on eating the rest of the body after death?
Martin: Is that right? Well, normally nowadays we don’t have worms inside our body. And those worms which we do have as parasites inside — they will die also eventually and not live on the corpse, because they live in a different way. They are different worms, different from the maggots from insects deposited there.
Charles: Well, I knew it would be symbiotic, wouldn’t it?
Martin: How do you mean?
Charles: Like they depend on us and we depend on them for their abilities? I’m probably thinking of something else here — like microbiomes — but that’s not bacteria.
Martin: Some of the bacteria we have inside, they may then take part in the decomposition, but that is then not maggots or worms.
Cassius: This is where I knew we’d be missing Elaine’s expertise today, because of course she could probably explain to us whether internal parasites continue after death or what. But maybe we can ask her about that next week, because we do have one more week of this left to go.
Okay, let’s go ahead. Anybody have any closing thoughts for today?
Charles: I’m probably just going to be thinking about those worms still.
Cassius: I think that apparently the Epicureans were thinking regularly about those worms too, because they come up regularly in the text. Martin, do you have any closing thoughts for today?
Martin: No, no. No first comment.
Cassius: Well, I don’t think that I do either. We should have Elaine back with us next week and we will go through another hundred lines or so of Book Three. So okay, I guess with that we’ll close for the day. We’ll talk next week.
All: Okay. Bye. Thanks. Bye.