Episode 059 - The Uses Of The Body Were Not Designed Before They Arose
Date: 02/27/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1887-episode-fifty-nine-the-uses-of-the-body-were-not-designed-before-they-arose/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four lines 823–906, read by Martin: no limb or organ was made for any particular use — use was found after the part already existed; language, sight, and hearing all came before their conscious purposes; nature taught avoidance of wounds before shields were invented; food replaces the particles the body discharges in motion and breath; the will to move produces an image in the mind, which then strikes the soul dispersed throughout the body, which in turn moves the whole mass forward.
Discussion distinguishes this passage from evolutionary theory proper (Martin: mutation and selection are absent; only anti-creationism is argued here); Elaine connects it to the image theory of the previous episode — if imagination is passive, then desire to move must also work through an externally supplied image; Cassius raises the question of determinism and whether the mind selecting images is consistent with Epicurean free will; Charles reads from La Mettrie’s Man, a Machine echoing the same Lucretian point; and the discussion flags Book Five as the place where natural selection comes in more fully.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 59 of Lucretius Today. I am your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, I’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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 is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 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 this Episode 59, we’ll discuss how the uses of the body were not designed before the body arose, and we will continue to discuss the mind’s use of images. Our text comes from Latin lines 823 through 906 of Book 4. Now let’s join the discussion with Martin reading today’s text.
Martin: But in subjects of this nature, guard yourself to the utmost of your power against that error, that gross mistake, and never believe that those bright orbs, the eyes, were made that we might see; or that our legs were made upright, and thighs fixed upon them, and were supported by feet, that we might walk and take large strides; that our arms were braced with strong sinews, and that our hands hung on both sides, to assist us in those offices that are necessary to the support of life. And whatever constructions they put upon other parts of the body, they are all absurd and against reason. For no member of the body was made for any particular use. But after it was made, each member found out a use proper to itself. For there was no such thing as to see before the eyes were made, nor to speak before the tongue was formed. But the tongue was rather in being before there was speech, and the ears were made long before any sound was heard. In short, all the members, in my opinion, were in being before their particular uses were found. This is so true that to engage in battle, to mangle the limbs, and to stain the body over with blood — these were in being before any shining darts flew through the air. And nature taught us to avoid a wound before the hand learned to oppose a shield in our defense. And so to commit the body to rest was long before the invention of soft beds. And to quench the thirst was practiced before the use of cups. All these things we may believe were invented for common benefit, as they were found proper and convenient for the occasions of life. All things therefore that were in being before the use of them was determined applied themselves afterwards to the office that was most suitable and serviceable to them. Of this kind principally are the senses and members of all bodies. And therefore you are to avoid upon all accounts so much as to think that they were at first formed for any particular design or use. Nor is it wonderful at all that it is the nature of every animal to require meat. I have told you that the train of effluvia are ever flowing from all bodies, but most are discharged from those animals that are most used to motion. Many particles forced from within are carried off by sweat, and many exhale through the mouth when we are fatigued and pant for breath. The body therefore by these discharges becomes very refined, and all nature is falling to pieces which is attended with great pain. Food therefore is taken to prop up the limbs, and being given from time to time it renews the strength and satisfies that gaping desire of eating through the limbs and veins. The cooling drink likewise descends into all the parts that require moisture, and the flowing liquid scatters all that heap of hot particles that set our stomach in a flame and extinguishes them as fire, so that the heat has no longer power to scorch our bowels. And this is panting thirst washed away from our bodies. Thus our craving hunger is satisfied. And now attend and you shall know how it is that we are able to walk when we will, that we have a power to move our limbs as we please, and what it is that trusts the body forward with all its weight. I say then that the images of motion first affect and strike the mind, as we observed before. This makes a will, for we never attempt to do anything before the mind knows what it is we desire to do, and the image of that thing which occurs to the mind must be present before it. And thus the mind, having moved itself so as to resolve to go forward, strikes immediately upon the soul, which is diffused through the whole body, and this is easily done because they are both closely joined together. Then strikes the body, and so the whole bulk by degrees is thrust forward and put into motion. Besides, the body by this means is rarefied, and the air which is ever disposed to move enters the open passages and pierces through the pores in great abundance, and so is dispersed through every minute part of the body. These two therefore — by the soul laboring within and by the air entering from without — the body is moved, as a ship is by oars and wind. Nor is this at all strange that particles so very small should turn about the bulk of all bodies and move so great a mass. For the driving wind, formed of so fine and supple seeds, thrusts forward a large ship with mighty force, and one hand can govern it under full sail by turning one little helm which way it pleases, and an engine with small labor is able by pulleys and wheels to move many bodies a great way.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin, for reading that section today. It’s slightly shorter than the sections we’ve done for the last couple of weeks, but the first passage today — one of the references in Lucretius that appears to reference what we would consider today an evolutionary theory — is one of the more important and interesting ones in the book, and I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to discuss it. Let Martin go first.
Martin: If I had not known about evolutionary theory, and also not about creationism, I wouldn’t really get evolutionary theory out of that. What I understand is that this is definitely against the creationist approach. But what I see in this paragraph is something that is somewhat compatible with evolutionary theory — yet the key things of evolutionary theory itself don’t really show up here.
Cassius: When you say the key parts of evolutionary theory don’t show up, which key parts are you saying are not here?
Martin: First of all, that there are chance changes — mutation — and that there’s selection. Both of those don’t really show up here. I do think there’s another section that talks about nature trying different options.
Cassius: I don’t think we’ve covered that yet. That sounds like Book Five.
Martin: Yeah, it does sound like Book Five. So at least right now…
Cassius: That’s a very interesting point that Martin is raising — that while people today do see this as presaging evolution, it’s really not going there. Which, if it’s not going there, it’s important for us to figure out where it is going and why it’s inserted here. In fact, some commentators talk about this passage as something Lucretius might have inserted during a rewrite because it sort of breaks the flow of some of the other discussion. But it’s obviously a very important one. Go ahead, Elaine.
Elaine: I absolutely agree with Martin. That was my same thought reading this first section — that this is really, even though it doesn’t argue against evolution, it’s not an argument for it either. It doesn’t have anything to do specifically with evolutionary theory. It’s just an argument against creationism and against the idea of design for a purpose. What is it arguing for then? It’s arguing — well, it’s more arguing against. It’s arguing that we weren’t made for the purposes that we are seeing our bodies used for. That the use came about after the physical development of a part. And that’s true. Although the way he phrases it, it’s a little difficult to tell — it reads as if he’s saying “hey, I’ve got this hand here, what can I do with it?” — which is not quite how it is. And if you do put evolutionary theory in with it, then that makes more sense: why some parts persisted and others didn’t is because they were functional in a specific environment. But he almost makes it sound like it was a conscious thing — that we realized we had this stuff and then decided what to do with it. I’m not sure that’s exactly what he means.
Cassius: What about the context of where we are in the discussion of the senses? Is there anything that comes to mind as to why he would have thought to insert this here?
Elaine: Yeah. If you had a God making your eyes, it would be because he knew there were images out there and he wanted this human to be able to see them. But now Lucretius is not saying that the images weren’t there before we could see them. The images were out there — we just couldn’t perceive them without eyes. So even if the images were out there, we couldn’t perceive them. That’s a real important distinction. And for somebody who might not have listened to the last episode — where we were last week was discussing the mind’s direct receipt of images and the mind’s selecting among the images what to focus on. And he goes from that discussion into this discussion about there being no intent behind the formation of the limbs, no intent behind the formation of the eyes. He starts out with the eyes as his first example here. So maybe that’s how he’s linking it to the image discussion.
Martin: One thing I would rather see there is that he has here a theory of the individual’s development — because the baby is born with all these organs and has to figure out how to use them. So it’s more fitting to that one than to evolutionary theory.
Cassius: And the comment was made — we had some recent discussion — that you could fit this maybe into the issue of the anticipations. And as Elaine was talking about last week, the flip-book aspect of how images come at you and you assemble them into something that’s moving. Maybe the assembling of images in the mind is in Lucretius’s back of mind as he’s writing this — there’s a relationship between that process and the process of the limbs coming to have a use over time that they were not born with. Do you want to go ahead to the last part?
Elaine: I think this is a fairly compact passage and we can flip back and forth through all sections of it as we’re talking. So how do I relate to that last section? This is really interesting because Lucretius had to give an explanation for imagination and dreams — how do we come up with this stuff that is not actually in front of us? And he said that it was because there were images we weren’t seeing with our eyes but were penetrating through the skin, and we were perceiving them with our mind rather than the brain itself being creative. So it does make sense that if you thought that, you would not think that you could imagine a motivation to move — because how would you know how you wanted to move in his model if you weren’t presented with an image beforehand? Because we talked last week about memory being more of a pattern-storing rather than an actual image. So he doesn’t have that in his model at all. This has got to come from outside. And the mind is surrounded by all these images of moving — the mind would decide to focus on something moving, and that would give it an understanding of what to do. Really, really fascinating idea. Not how it worked, but cool.
Cassius: Clearly one of the important lines catches my eye right this second: “This makes the will, for we never attempt to do anything before the mind knows what it is we desire to do, and the image of that thing which occurs to the mind must be present before it.” So somehow the mind is thinking — or having a will to move — and the mind happens to pick out of all these images in the air a moving image and says “okay, that’s it, that’s the one, I want to do that.”
Cassius: Charles, you haven’t had much to say so far. Any comments? Jump in at any point. Martin, any thoughts on what Elaine has said?
Martin: I have no first addition to it.
Elaine: So this is interesting to think about — how does that really work? It’s fairly complicated and we know there’s not images coming through the air that are telling us how to move. But we can decide to move when we’re alone with nobody else in the room moving. I have had the experience — and I imagine most of you have — of starting to move before I was aware of choosing to move. Being startled and jumping — I didn’t think “oh I’m going to jump in the air, I’m looking for the image of jumping so I can jump.” You find your feet moving before you have the thought “oh, I’m running from a snake.” But then other times I could be sitting on the couch thinking “I want to walk in the kitchen and get some water” and I’m going to have the experience of thinking about it before I actually move my muscles. So movement can come first or thought can come first.
Martin: For the reason for this: with the conscious part of the brain we decide and we know this before. But if it’s a reflex or an automatism — something the body has been trained to do — that can very well happen before a conscious decision is made to move.
Elaine: Yeah. And that’s the common experience. When you do look at some of the research it gets really wonky. It does appear that at least sometimes we reorder events very quickly but not at the level of conscious awareness, so that they appear to proceed in the correct order. There are some weird studies about hitting a baseball — players will report that they can see the ball all the way through and see it hit the bat. But on closer examination, given the speeds at which things are going, the speed of information getting to the visual cortex, it actually happens after they’ve already hit it in real time. But to them it looked like they saw it. If our perception were not arranged in that way, it would be a very confusing world. We wouldn’t know what to make of it. So we have selected for brains that order things in a way that isn’t confusing.
Cassius: I’m just thinking through the fundamentals of what we’re discussing here, going back to the beginning of the passage. As Martin has pointed out, this is probably not really directed at an evolutionary theory of where we came from, as much as it’s continuing to analyze this process of thinking and acting and living — and whether it’s directed by some ultimate goal. He’s rejecting that there’s an ultimate goal directing the uses of the body. That’s probably the takeaway point of that beginning passage. Just because the hands and arms are good for fighting with shields and so forth, and have all sorts of uses, doesn’t mean that there was a pre-existing use that summoned them into existence to fulfill that purpose. He’s rejecting that purpose-driven argument for life itself.
Elaine: In evolution, if the organism doesn’t survive and reproduce, you’re not going to see more of them. So it has to be fit for the environment, or it’s going to die out, and whatever mutation it is is not going to survive. So it’s not an advance purpose, but survival and reproduction is what evolution is selecting for. So it’s kind of like a purpose — well, that’s the question. Is what I’m describing a purpose?
Cassius: Is it a purpose?
Elaine: It’s not a purpose, but it’s the deciding factor about whether a trait makes it. So it’s close. It’s not like somebody out there deciding. But in function, it works like a purpose. If what you’re concerned about is whether there’s some external entity that has a purpose — definitely not that. But you have to be careful that it’s not that there’s no deciding factor driving what happens. There is — you have to survive and reproduce. So if you were going to claim a purpose for nature, that would have to be it, but it’s not a conscious purpose. It’s just what happens.
Cassius: Maybe you could phrase it as: this is what you observe as the reason why certain things survive and certain things do not. It’s an observation.
Elaine: Yes. It’s an observation, not an explanation by some other entity. It’s just simply that we observe these factors and that explains why certain things survive. And that doesn’t mean there’s any intelligent design by God or by any external force.
Cassius: And I guess there’s a clear analogy between that observation and just thinking about how you walk and do anything else in life — that there are explanations, there are things we can observe about the process of walking and living, but they don’t imply that those things were set in motion as a purpose by a God. Those observations you can make about how things actually work do not contain within them any implication that there’s a higher intelligence or guiding principle.
Elaine: Definitely.
Cassius: So maybe that’s the train of his thought — he’s still focusing on the implications of what we observe and how we observe the senses to operate, that the senses operate the way they operate, and that doesn’t imply they were set in motion by God or by the prime mover.
Elaine: I agree.
Cassius: There’s also a lot of issues here that ought to be thought about in terms of how this relates to determinism. I think we raised that briefly recently, and it’s certainly possible that unless you’re careful, you’re going to fall into the conclusion that everything you do is just driven by whatever images are striking your mind at a particular time — that you’re just a robot run by whatever images are striking you. Right?
Elaine: I think Lucretius is saying the mind is an active participant in selecting which images it’s going to focus on. It’s not thinking of us as creating the images, but it’s thinking of us having a desire to see a certain image, and then out of the ones that are out there, we can perceive whatever image it is with our minds.
Cassius: That’s an important distinction. And in order to understand his theory, I think somebody could question — within the confines of his theory — whether this is inconsistent with his view against determinism. Because if in fact you were to read this as these images controlling every moment of what you’re doing and thinking, you’d have to work pretty hard to fit that into an anti-determinist framework. Except for what you said — the mind is an active participant taking an active role in focusing on which images it chooses to focus on. At least it’s doing that while it’s awake. Maybe it’s not doing that while it’s asleep though.
Elaine: Yeah, and if you’ve got all these images at once, how do you have one coherent image in a dream? If he were here, I’d ask him what his explanation is.
Cassius: And I think memory has to come into this somewhere — that it’s not going to be solely a matter of the images that strike you at a particular moment, but you are at least affected by the images that struck you in the past.
Elaine: Yeah, but he doesn’t say that. We put that in the suspense file because he has not said that you can actually re-see memories, you know, visualize them, rather than having a thought about something that happened. He has made no assertion about the mind being able to actually create the picture.
Cassius: What is a thought, then?
Elaine: He’s separating it in a way that is really hard for us to imagine. If we didn’t have sight, how would we remember an event? We would remember it as the other sensory components — we would kind of recreate those experiences using our sensory cortexes. So he apparently thought about the way the brain works very differently from either how we experience it or how we’re able to understand it currently. It’s a really, really different model, and I don’t think we should gloss over the rather extreme differences. Don’t try to squeeze them into what we have now.
Martin: Yeah, there are a lot of rabbit holes we could go down here that would probably be unproductive but interesting to trace.
Cassius: And for me, it emphasizes not trying to shoehorn some of these things — even where they’re not thought to be now — don’t twiddle with his ideas too much, otherwise you’re going to miss how it is that he was thinking about things, which is really interesting historically even if it’s not quite how it is. Charles, any thoughts yet today?
Charles: No, I’ve been listening to Elaine the whole time. I would say I agree, but still kind of thinking on the evolution train though.
Cassius: Think out loud.
Charles: There is another section, and I think it is in Book Five, where we come back to the formation of society and a pretty clear reference or two to nature attempting many different things and only some of them succeeding. That’s going to be another section that may be even much more clearly related to natural selection and other evolutionary aspects. So it really may be — and I think it’s been difficult for me over the years to think about this particular passage as presaging evolution. It’s just simply talking about that there is no ultimate purpose for the parts of the body or for the eyes or anything else.
Elaine: Well, the part in the second section where it says “nature taught us to avoid a wound before the left hand learned to oppose a shield in our defense” — that’s really not even how evolution works exactly. What happened is — let’s say if you’re going to personify nature — nature rewarded the spontaneous, mutational development of avoiding wounds with reproduction and survival of that trait. So it’s an after-the-fact thing even in a personification of nature, more than nature teaching us to do it.
Cassius: I did think the part about the stomach being on fire was interesting —
Elaine: Keeping the stomach moist! Now we find out why: your stomach is going to catch on fire. And I wonder if he was eating something spicy. Scorching your bowels. Very frightening.
Cassius: Looking at this paragraph, one of the sentences that summarizes it: “Of this kind principally are the senses and members of all bodies. And therefore you are to avoid upon all accounts so much as to think that they were at first formed for any particular design or use.” And he hasn’t really made too much reference to gods in this section. So it’s not exactly like he’s throwing this in as another attack on religion — he’s actually more into the mechanisms of the senses than even refuting the idea of gods.
Elaine: Yeah. But it still reads like partly an argument against creationism.
Cassius: I feel like that’s got to have been part of the intention. I know I’ve seen it observed that this is one of the few references I’ve seen that talks about the will. There’s not a lot of discussion in ancient philosophy of the word “will” or “willpower,” but in this last passage: “this makes the will, for we never attempt to do anything before the mind knows what it is we desire to do.” All three translations we have — let me check Martin Ferguson Smith: “then comes the act of will.” And similarly when Lucretius was talking about the images — did they just arise when we had the will to see them? He said no, they were always there; it’s just that by the act of will, we decided which ones to focus on. That’s another rabbit hole that I’m not prepared to go down and haven’t even looked at the Latin to distinguish it. But I’ll file it away — is there some distinction here in wording between “desire” and “will”? Because I don’t think we’ve generally talked about or seen reference to will in our prior passages.
Elaine: Well, “will” does have a different feel — more like “I am going to do this,” a decisive determination. And so when the mind stirs itself so that it wishes to start and step forward, it straightway strikes the force of soul which is spread abroad in the body. That linking of all this — the images being processed by the mind are then turned around and signals sent throughout the body by the soul or spirit. The way he’s described it is not quite the same because he had it like a sort of particle thing, but it’s similar to the nervous system — the mind and the brain, and then the soul being in the peripheral nervous system — and then the soul goes on and strikes the body. So little by little the whole mass is thrust forward.
Cassius: And in the end, all of it I think is summarized by the desire to produce a theory of non-supernatural functioning of the mind and the body.
Elaine: Yeah, yeah.
Cassius: Okay. Well, maybe we’ve teased out most of what we want to tease out for today. Anybody have other general ideas before we start to close? What about the evolutionary thinking?
Charles: What I was thinking earlier about the evolution was that this all just sounded like a very materialist way of explaining limb function and progression with development. That part about the shield is what set that off — those who use shields are more successful in battle, just like those who use space heaters are more successful in surviving cold Minnesota winters.
Cassius: Unless they set their house on fire.
Elaine: Yeah, as long as we hear the space heater in the background, we know the house is not on fire.
Charles: Oh, also — I mentioned it briefly yesterday — the text from Man, a Machine. There isn’t a whole lot of evolutionary thought written before Darwin, but two of the most striking instances — three if you want to get technical — are La Mettrie and then Lucretius. And here’s a little section from Man, a Machine that’s pretty relevant to this. The excerpt is from a longer sentence: “That the eye is in truth a kind of glass in which the soul can contemplate the image of objects as they are presented to it by these bodies. But that it is not proved that this organ was really made expressly for this contemplation, purposely placed in its socket. And in short, it may well be that Lucretius, the physician Lamy, and all Epicureans both ancient and modern were right when they suggested that the eye sees only because it is formed and placed as it is, and that, given once for all the same rules of motion followed by nature in the generation and development of bodies, this marvelous organ could not have been formed and placed differently.”
Cassius: That’s clearly — go ahead.
Charles: Yeah, he’s not only echoing Lucretius there, but also agreeing with a lot of the materialist explanations behind it. And there’s more elsewhere — when I translated his philosophical reflections on the origins of animals, he talks a bit more about it, but I don’t need to get into that right now.
Cassius: See, the argument that some commentators are making is that this was placed here as an afterthought or on an edit by Lucretius — because it’s almost like there probably was a much more extensively developed section discussing the origin of life and the development of life, and Lucretius decided it’s relevant here to think about that in the context of the senses and whether there is any purpose behind them, without getting into all the detail that maybe he’ll come into later in Book Five. This has just always struck me as one of the sections that could really spur a lot of thought for somebody who had the time and inclination to pursue it — not all of us have either one — but there’s a lot here for somebody who wants to get into it. Okay, let’s begin to close for the day. Martin?
Martin: No, everything said.
Cassius: Charles, do you want to add anything else?
Charles: No, that’s pretty much it. That’s a kind of short, limited section.
Cassius: Elaine, any final thoughts?
Elaine: I think we’ve covered it pretty well.
Cassius: All right. Well, then with that, let’s close for the day, and we’ll be back in another week. Thanks everybody.
Martin: Have a good week.
Elaine: Bye-bye.
Charles: Thanks. Bye.