Episode 046 - Conclusion of the Presentation that the Mind and Soul Cannot Survive Death
Date: 11/29/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1775-episode-forty-six-conclusion-of-the-argument-that-the-mind-and-soul-cannot-survi/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 46, with Elaine back from last week, covers lines 741–829 of Book Three — the final accumulation of arguments for the soul’s mortality. Martin reads a passage that includes the species-specific soul argument (lions ferocious, foxes crafty, stags fearful — these qualities come from species-specific seeds; if souls moved randomly between species, hawks would fear does and dogs would be philosophers), the absurdity of a flock of immortal souls hovering near mating animals waiting to claim newborns, the regularity argument (trees cannot grow in the sky; fish cannot live in fields; therefore the soul cannot arise or persist outside its proper bodily home), the absurdity of joining a mortal nature to an immortal one, a comparison between the universe’s eternality and the mind’s non-eternality, and the closing image of the mind sickened by disease, disordered by fear, and pierced by the conscience of past crimes.
Martin raises that Dante placed Epicureans in Circle Six of Hell — burning coffins in the City of Dis — as an ironic punishment that confines their souls in precisely the condition they denied was possible. Elaine and Charles confirm the reference; Cassius observes that Lucretius’s audience likely found the hovering-soul passage hilariously absurd. A DNA personality-testing digression arises from the species-specific argument: Cassius describes a commercial DNA analysis he had done that proved accurate for personality traits like risk aversion and empathy. Elaine confirms the underlying science (real genetic clusters, uncertain predictive power, multi-factorial) and compares it to bowel flora research: the effect is not in doubt; the specifics of what to do about it remain unresolved. Elaine also answers the maggot question left over from Episode 045, clarifying that maggots are specifically fly larvae, and Martin adds further detail on adipocere — the waxy preservation state that develops in certain German soils.
The episode closes with a preview of Book Three’s famous final section. Cassius argues that “death is nothing to us” does not mean death is irrelevant but that the state of death is nothingness — no feeling, no existence — and that life’s shortness makes death supremely important to how we live. Elaine proposes that the phrase would communicate more accurately if stated in reverse: “we are nothing at death.” Charles notes that younger generations (Gen Z, millennials) have a blasé attitude toward death in public but retain genuine reservations, and suggests they might be easier to reach with the Epicurean teaching.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 46 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 741 through 829 from Book Three of the Latin text, and the topic will continue to be how the mind and the soul are not able to survive death. Now let’s join today’s discussion with Martin reading the text.
Martin: (reads lines 741–829)
Besides, why does fierce rage affect the sullen breed of lions? Why is craft derived to the fox, and flight to stags from their sires and paternal fear, give wings to all the limbs? Where come other passions of this kind? Why do they belong to all creatures from their tender age and seem born with them? If the peculiar powers of the soul were not produced from peculiar seeds in every particular kind and did not grow up together with the whole body, but were the soul immortal and used to change your body, creatures would be strangely confused in their dispositions and qualities. The fierce dog of a Hyrcanian breed would fly the attack of the horned stag, and the fearful hawk would tremble in the air at the approach of a dove. Man would be void of reason like brutes, and the savage race of beasts might become philosophers. But what is said in this case is supported by false reasoning, that the immortal soul is changed according to the different body it is united with, for what is changed is dissolved and therefore dies. The parts are transposed and vary in their situation. It follows therefore that the principles of which may be dissolved through the limbs and may all perish together with the body.
But they cry that the souls always pass into bodies of the same kind, the souls of men into the bodies of men. Then I would ask why a soul from being wise should become a fool, and a child is not made a perfect scholar, and why a young colt has not the mind of a full-grown horse. If the peculiar powers of the soul were not produced from peculiar seeds in every particular kind, and did they not grow up together with the whole body? They say perhaps that the mind becomes equally weak in a tender body. If so, they must allow the soul to be mortal, because when infused into the body it is so much changed it loses the life and sense it enjoyed before. And why should the powers of the soul desire passionately to grow and attain to a full maturity of age together with the body, if it were not a companion with it from the very beginning? And why is she fond of flying away out of old decaying limbs? Is she afraid of being confined a close prisoner in a rotten body, and lest her old tabernacle worn out by time and age should all crush her to pieces? But no danger can affect a nature that is immortal.
Besides, it is ridiculous to suppose that a flock of souls are already hovering about where the brutes are in the act of lust, and drop their young — that they, immortal as they are, should attend upon perishing bodies, and troops without number hurrying and coming to blows as it were which first should get possession and enter in, unless perhaps they rather choose to agree among themselves that the first come should be first served, and there should be no further dispute about it.
Again, there are no trees in the sky, no clouds can be in the deep sea, nor can fish live in the fields, nor can there be blood in wood, nor moisture in stones. It is fixed and established where everything should grow and subsist. The soul therefore cannot come into being alone without the body, nor can she exist separately without the nerves in the blood. If this could be, the soul of the soul you would rather feel sometimes in the head or shoulders, or even in the very bottom of the feet, or in any other part of the body, and so you would perceive it diffusing itself through the whole body, as water poured into a vessel first covers one part then spreads over the whole. Since therefore there is a proper and determinate place in this body of ours for the mind and soul distinct to be and increase in, we have all the more reason to deny that they can continue or be born without it. And consequently, when the body dies, the soul diffused through the whole body must be allowed to die likewise. And then to join a mortal nature to an immortal and to think that they can agree together and mutually unite in the operations is folly and nonsense.
For what can be conceived more absurd, what can be more impractical in itself, more disagreeing to reason than a mortal nature joined to one eternal and immortal, and so united as to be liable to all the pains and distress of human life?
Besides, whatever is immortal must be so either because it is solid and cannot be affected by blows, so that nothing can pierce it and break through the closed union of its parts — such as the first seeds of matter, as we proved before — or it is eternal and lasts forever because it is free from stroke, as the void is, which is not liable to touch, nor affected by the force of blows. Or lastly, because there is no space anywhere about it into which its broken parts can be dispersed — in this sense the universe is eternal, beyond which there is no place where parts may retire, nor any bodies to fall upon it and dissolve and break it into pieces by mighty blows from without.
But as I said, the nature of the mind is not solid, because there is empty space in all compound beings, nor yet is it void, nor are there wanting bodies forever beating upon it from without, and driving the whole frame of this mind by impetus into utter dissolution, or to distress it any other way with extreme danger. Is there any want of place or space where the seeds of the soul may be dispersed, or where they may be dissolved by any violence whatsoever? The gate of death therefore is not barred against the soul.
But if you think she may rather be pronounced immortal because she is placed secure from things that may destroy her being, or that things opposite to her safety never come near her, or if they do, they are diverted by some cause before you perceive they have done her any signal injury — this is a great mistake and far from the truth. For not to mention how she sickens with the diseases of the body, how something happens that torments her about future events, how she is disordered by fear and vexed by cares, and how the conscience of crimes past many years ago pierces her through — consider the peculiar distraction that affects the mind, how she forgets everything and is overwhelmed by the black waves of lethargy.
Cassius: All right, thank you Martin for reading all of that today for us, appreciate that. If we go back to the beginning, the general argument about referring to lions and foxes and stags and so forth is that there is a transmission of certain characteristics from parent to child in the world of living things.
Elaine: Species-specific.
Cassius: Species-specific, yeah. But on the other hand, the soul itself does not appear to be part of that transmission — or at least not in the sense of it being immortal.
Elaine: No, he’s saying that if it were immortal, I mean, he’s given a counterfactual. He’s saying you can tell that the soul is not immortal because these beings have these species-specific qualities. He says “if the peculiar powers of the soul were not produced from peculiar seeds in every particular kind” — so that’s just a counterfactual, which I think is very effective.
Cassius: Yeah, and then in the middle of the paragraph, he raises the point that if souls were immortal and moving around haphazardly from species to species, then you would see hawks that were afraid, you would see things like that. And then he says that the people who claimed that the souls were immortal answer that by saying, well, souls only pass into bodies of the same kind — souls of men always stay with men — and that’s why you can have consistency. But then that doesn’t make any sense either.
Elaine: If you’re talking about development, because the immature of the species are not the same — the characteristics they were at that time ascribing to soul are different between the young of a species and the mature. So yeah.
Cassius: These are still, again, I’ll say the same types of arguments that are used today, and I think he does a great job of covering all those bases. We should get Martin to say something. Yes, Martin — before we say too much.
Martin: Well, I noticed something here which would be interesting to know whether this is related, because at some time — either already in ancient times by the church fathers, or at least sometime in the medieval age — it was stated that the Epicureans, who were considered actually good people, but just because they wouldn’t believe in the Christian absolute God and because they were attached to pleasure, that their souls would be confined in the coffin to be together with their rotting body. And this is almost like what Lucretius writes here — that the soul would flee the rotting body.
Cassius: Okay, now you’re talking about Dante’s Inferno, right? Elaine and Charles, you can confirm that for me — that the analogy of the soul being confined in the coffin with the rotting body comes from Dante?
Elaine: I am not… I can’t remember that I’ve read it. It wasn’t rotting — no — but they were in the City of Dis, they were confined to burning coffins.
Cassius: Have you read Dante’s Inferno?
Charles: Not in full. This may be in the DeWitt book as well — that this was a particularly harsh punishment near the inner rings of hell, the Epicureans. Circle Six.
Cassius: Okay. Circle Six.
Elaine: Oh yes, which was reserved for heretics.
Cassius: Okay. But that’s what I’m remembering — that there’s exactly what Martin said: that as a particular form of gross punishment, the souls were confined inside the coffin with the rotting bodies to sort of emphasize to the Epicureans that they were wrong about their philosophy. But yeah, I know that’s something that’s out there.
I’ve got to think that Lucretius’s audience was cracking up — just cackling — at this part about the soul being afraid. Like, why is she afraid? If she’s immortal, no harm can come to her.
Elaine: And then this flock that’s hovering about waiting to drop into the newborn beasts. And then — how are they going to figure out who gets to go first?
Cassius: Yes, exactly. This may be the second time — or maybe I’m confused because it’s kind of close to the issue of the laughing human — but I think it may appear more than once. At any rate, this is a very vivid passage.
So this is actually what some people believe now. Some of the New Age people believe that you’re sort of hanging out and you’re picking which body you’re going to be born into. But they don’t ever talk about: what if you got into an argument with another immortal soul, and both of you wanted to be born in the same body? How do you sort that out?
Martin: There are different variants. So the Japanese variant is that the souls are permitted to get into a particular body — so it’s not their choice. It’s something they are somehow divinely arranged to do.
Cassius: Okay, yeah. And they never really fully explain — in the ones where there’s no God managing this and the souls are just doing it themselves — there still has to be somebody who set the rules up, you know. The Christians are going to say God determines it, like they answer everything that way — God is so omnipotent and omniscient and omnipresent that He can just do everything all the time. But the Greeks didn’t have that view of Zeus, that he was always doing everything.
This passage — when Martin was reading it — made me think about how much more we know now about species-specific genetic effects on our behavior. When Lucretius was talking about the sullenness and the craft and the flight and the fear, where those passions come from. We’re a long way from completely understanding all of that, but I did — I used, I’m not going to name the companies — but I had a genetic analysis done several years ago, just kind of out of curiosity, one of those DNA things that tell you where your ancestors might have come from and give you some health information along with it. And I saw one advertised for about $19 that would look at potential COVID risk factors that you might have based on a few genes. Well, along with that, I got this analysis of heritable personality traits. Some of this you’ve got to take with a grain of salt — the science is not quite as good as they like to make out sometimes — but it was pretty dead on for me. Things like risk aversion — I am physically risk averse, they had me on the high end of empathy, I don’t like to see other people in pain, it causes me pain. Several things like that that I thought, oh my gosh, so a lot of this really is in our DNA from the beginning. And I just thought when I looked at that how fascinated Lucretius and Epicurus would have been if they’d gotten to see some of that.
Elaine: I’m not familiar with a DNA test or theory that connects personality traits. That sounds like almost the astrology birth-sign thing. But are you saying there’s a real DNA basis for that?
Elaine: Yeah — it’s that the degree of predictive power of this information is what is uncertain, but it’s not in doubt that there are clusters of certain kinds of behaviors that seem to be more associated with certain genetic variants than others. Well, we don’t know is all the ways the genes interact with each other, because a lot of these things are multi-factorial — it’s not just one gene. And also how epigenetic factors and experiences influence it and all that kind of thing. But there are innate reasons why people are born with certain kinds of temperaments. That is not questionable. That is accepted.
Cassius: If somebody wanted to read into that, is there a title for that field or area of study?
Elaine: You can just type in “DNA personality traits” or “genetic personality trait” and you’ll find it. It’s like with the bowel flora and people talking about how that affects your health. We have enough evidence to think that that’s true. But what we don’t know is what specifically are we looking for? What’s optimal for different people in different circumstances? And what can you eat to produce the bowel flora that makes you the healthiest? That we don’t know. So there’s a lot of people out there promoting very specific diets and things — it’s real shaky. But the fact that there are effects — that’s not shaky.
Cassius: Elaine, the bowel flora reference is the perfect invitation for us to go back for just a second and cover something from last week. We got into a deep and fascinating discussion about the issue of where do the maggots come from that infest a dead body. Because apparently Lucretius was raising the issue because of the effect it has on the soul or mind — if the maggots are eating it, does that mean they’re able to eat different parts of the soul? But what we were actually asking was whether it’s internal parasites that basically eat up the body after it dies.
Elaine: Okay, you’re right — you don’t want to call something a maggot that’s not a maggot. So there’s a whole range of microorganisms that are inside of us and outside of us and in the environment around us — it’s not a sterile environment. So there’s any number of things that don’t have to be just maggots. Maggots are specifically the larval stage of flies.
Cassius: But before you continue — Martin was about to correct what I said.
Martin: Yes. The thing is, I read an article about soils in cemeteries in Germany — especially in South Germany. Somehow the soils got what they called “tired” — that means the worms in there somehow would no longer really decompose the bodies. So what then happened is the internal bacterial processing apparently eventually stopped, and then you get something like a fat wax type of body — what we call adipocere. So that means the body doesn’t really decompose, it just becomes into a waxy state. When they unearth the graves after a couple of decades, in a normal operating soil there would be almost nothing left — maybe a few bones and some teeth — but now they have whole wax bodies there, which they need to dispose of.
Elaine: Yeah, because if you’re in an anaerobic environment, you don’t have any oxygen left. There are organisms that are going to run out of fuel. But they don’t spontaneously appear — they were already there. And maggots would be on you if flies were landing on you.
Cassius: Okay, okay. All right. I’m glad we cleared that up. Anybody who really wants to know the answer to that question can do some additional research. Okay, so where were we on the text for today?
Elaine: I think we covered the part about the souls. Going to the third paragraph?
Cassius: This is similar to prior arguments Lucretius has made — when we look around us, there are no trees in the sky, no clouds in the sea, no fish in the fields, no blood in wood. So you can see that there is a regularity about things, and he uses that to extend it to the idea of the soul. It’s like when he was talking about homoiomery — how there’s no fire in the trees, or no gold in the fish or whatever.
And then in that passage he moves into the second part of it where he gets to the issue of: if the soul goes into the body and diffuses itself within the body, then it changes its nature and it’s not the same as it was. If you do postulate that it came from the outside in some kind of an immortal state, the act of diffusing itself through the body seems to change it so that it would no longer be immortal.
Cassius: And then I love this one: “to join a mortal nature to an immortal and to think that they can agree together and mutually unite in their operations is folly and nonsense.” So that’s just an argument from basic reasonableness, but it also — I’d like to say today — what would the interface be? Where can non-matter — and I mean ruling out energy or anything known — how would it get traction, and how would it interact with the physical universe? That doesn’t make any sense.
Elaine: Inconceivable.
Cassius: It’s inconceivable, yeah. Okay, well unless somebody has more on that — the next one is getting into the issue of — go ahead Charles.
Charles: Time and time again we see Lucretius talk about how something immortal is unchanging, and that’s something I’ve seen only really specifically in this text. So I wonder about the history of that line of thinking.
Cassius: Yeah, that was in the earlier sections of the poem — the argument that if something is changing, that means it has to be susceptible to being dissolved. And I think I’ve made the comment several times that it seems to me an example of his focusing on this issue: if “immortal” is defined as “unchanging ever,” then the very act of changing in any way is going to mean it’s no longer the same as it was before, and therefore no longer by definition immortal.
Charles: Yeah, just a little thought I had because I’m sure it’s bound to show up again.
Cassius: I think it will. Well, the next passage talks about the blows issue again. Oh yes — this is the paragraph that talks about “in this sense the universe is eternal,” and that’s interesting to me. It seems to be a pretty precise definition of the way they consider the universe to be eternal. It’s almost again a sort of definitional version of the word “eternal” — if there’s no place in which any of its parts can move into, and no place that anything can come from the outside to change it, then that would be the way you would consider the universe eternal. If you consider the universe to be the same as everything — and I think that’s the traditional sense — then in that way you would consider the universe to be eternal in the sense that everything cannot by definition change.
And I think that even the astrophysicists who think that the heat death of the universe is the most likely outcome — I mean, the matter is still there, it’s just far apart. It would be inert at that point. There wouldn’t be any life that could emerge under those conditions. Am I understanding that right, Martin?
Martin: Yes, maybe yes, yeah. It’s not just that matter… they’re not saying that matter kind of vanishes. It’s going to be there but it won’t be doing anything. Yeah, it will be mostly nickel and iron — I mean, there is a misleading simplification: it’s actually nickel that will be there in the end — and infrared radiation.
Cassius: Yeah, I’m not saying that matter is going to be there in the same form, but it wouldn’t be just void — it’s not going to turn into a vacuum. And I think it’s interesting — and maybe pretty profound — that he’s analogizing the universe as a whole to the mind in this context. He’s saying we can consider the universe might be eternal even though it’s composed of atoms and void and moving around all the time. But you would certainly not consider the mind to be eternal in the same way, because the mind seems to be something that has a specific place about it and seems to be something that — when blows come in from the outside — disintegrates and dissolves. The dispersal of the mind seems to be something that we can grasp pretty easily: the physical nature of the brain and the mind and our body can easily be dispersed in a way that totally changes how we perceive it. But the universe itself is something that we really don’t perceive as changing in the same way if we define it as everything.
I’m sure that what I’ve just said makes limited sense, but I do think that somebody more articulate than I could probably come up with something pretty profound from this passage.
Cassius: Okay, and then the last passage is the issue of the mind sickening with the diseases of the body, and how the mind can be disordered by fear and cares, and the conscience of crimes past — trauma, trauma, trauma, oh boy. Yeah, past trauma can certainly affect the state of the mind.
When I read this section, I think about the many things that Epicurus said about not doing things that were going to cause you regret later. There are certain things that if you do them you’re always going to regret them — you really can’t take that away — so don’t do that to yourself if you can avoid it.
And just to put this passage in context: this is the last sentence before we move into what I think is the final section of Book Three, because the very next sentence he goes on and repeats Principal Doctrine Two — that death is nothing to us — and he goes from here into the very practical reasons why we shouldn’t be concerned about the fact that we’re going to die. We’ll get into that next week, but this is the very last of his arguments about the soul and the mind not being able to outlive the body.
Cassius: This is definitely one of those sections where I feel out of my element. Do you find it useful, Charles? As a modern-day person, do you feel like the arguments he’s making in here are useful?
Charles: Yes and no. Overall yeah, but there are just some more… like the arguments he’s talking about and the positions that he’s disputing aren’t all that applicable today — they’d be a bit more contemporary to his time. So I think like an example for this section: one that is very useful to say somebody who knows nothing of philosophy — the practical everyday person, as Cassius puts it — the last paragraph or the last section would be very useful in that regard.
Cassius: Charles, you may also have a unique perspective among our panelists here, because you are considerably younger than most of the rest of us, and it sometimes occurs to me that younger people don’t think about death with nearly the sense of urgency that older people do. If you end up with any comments from that perspective, be sure to put those in here too.
Charles: Yeah, I mean, it’s a bit of a generalization, but with Gen Z and even some millennials — just the blasé attitude about death, or that it’s used in a very joking manner often. I would say though that at the end of the day there is definitely some reservations about death, and that the Epicurean attitude that it’s nothing to us isn’t what you’d see — but you probably have an easier time teaching that.
Cassius: We’ll go into that next week with the specific discussion of the “death is nothing to us” passage here in Lucretius, but whenever that comes up I always segment that in my mind. I do not consider that to mean that we should consider death to be irrelevant. In fact I think it’s sort of the reverse — we should think about death as being extremely important to our overall way we live our lives, because our lives are so short and we have to consider that aspect of death. But the phrase, to me, has never been a “I don’t care about that issue” statement. It’s a statement that the state of being dead is a state of nothingness to us — in which we no longer have any feelings and no longer have any existence at all. But clearly, the way it’s phrased, it has that impact of almost — what word would you use — not happy-go-lucky or sarcastic, but it’s kind of a “it’s nothing to me, I don’t care about death.” And I don’t think that’s exactly what is intended to be conveyed.
Elaine — throw something in on that particular point. How do you look at “death is nothing to us”? We’ll go back into it next week in much more detail, but put in anything you’d like.
Elaine: I mean, I really think that it is more “we are nothing at death” — it makes more sense to me stated the opposite way. Because as soon as you say “death is nothing to us,” I think today it sounds like he’s saying we don’t care about it. But it’s really that it is nothingness to us — maybe “we’re not there after death.” Let’s say that. And we’re not there after death, but I do care that it happens. I don’t really like it. I prefer it not to happen, but it does happen.
Martin: Oh, not no, no.
Cassius: Okay, we’ll get into it in much more detail next week as we get into the issues of how we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are going to die whether we like it or not. Okay, well, maybe this is a good place to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. Does anybody have anything they’d like to add before we quit?
Charles: That was a no.
Cassius: Elaine, anything else for today?
Elaine: No.
Cassius: Martin?
Cassius: Okay, well, we’ll be back next week and get really into the heart of “death is nothing to us.” Thanks for today and we’ll be back next week.
All: Okay. Okay. Bye. Thanks everybody.