Episode 162 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 16 - Chapter 8 - Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings 03
Date: 02/21/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2895-episode-162-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-16-chapter-8-sensations-anticipatio/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 162 presents an abbreviated introduction to the subsection on Anticipations in Chapter 8 of DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy, recorded without Joshua who was absent this week. Cassius opens by reading DeWitt’s opening definition: the second criterion of truth is the prolepsis or anticipation, described as an innate faculty illustrated by the example of the gods — one cannot think of the gods as being in need of anything, because the idea universal among all humans is that their happiness is perfect. Cassius distinguishes the two major textual sources for understanding anticipations: Diogenes Laertius (whose account focuses on concept-formation from repeated sensory experience, and whom Cyril Bailey follows by simply translating prolepsis as “concept”), and Velleius the Epicurean speaker in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (whose account emphasizes an innate, intuitive disposition to certain ideas — like divinity — that precedes any personal sensory experience). He notes a recent article by scholar Voula Tsouna, “Epicurean Preconceptions,” as a valuable source. The Diogenes Laertius passage is read at length: “by preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion or a universal idea stored in the mind — a recollection of an external object often presented. Such and such a thing is a man, for no sooner is the word man uttered than we think of his shape by an act of preconception in which the senses take the lead.” Cassius explains that scholars tend to divide: those who follow Diogenes Laertius treat anticipations as a description of conceptual reasoning built from experience; those who follow Velleius treat anticipations as something genuinely innate, a biological preconditioning that enables concept-formation in the first place. Cassius himself argues for the DeWitt/Velleius view on grounds that it better accounts for abstract concepts (justice, divinity) that cannot be built solely from experience. The practical stakes are spelled out: the blank-slate position (Aristotle/Locke) leads to the view that nurture is everything and willpower can control all thought; the Epicurean position that we are born with operational faculties and dispositions leads to a mixed nature-and-nurture understanding with significant implications for how we view personal change and social interaction. Martin contributes a brief dissent on whether comparing abstract understandings constitutes an anticipation — Cassius says no (opinion-laden processes cannot serve as criteria of truth); Martin says yes (the scarcity of texts requires casting a wide net). Callistheni raises the raccoon-or-cat-in-the-dark example: is the process of trying to identify an unseen animal what anticipations are? Cassius responds that this is part of the picture (using stored concepts from past experience as Diogenes Laertius describes) but probably not the deepest level — DeWitt’s point is that the prior question is what enables the original assembling of “cat” from first encounters, which is where anticipations do their work. Cassius reads dictionary definitions of “notion” to illustrate how many different senses cluster around this one word and how the mind instantly selects the right meaning — suggesting something more than just accumulated experience is at work. Three clear Epicurean examples of anticipations are identified: divinity, justice, and (in the negative) time — notably all abstract ideas, not concrete perceptual objects. The episode closes with DeWitt page 143 on elephants: Pliny ascribes to elephants a kind of divination of justice, pride, honesty, prudence, equity, and even religion — all falling squarely into the category of abstract notions where anticipations belong. DeWitt’s note on translation is quoted: prolepsis was correctly rendered by Cicero as anticipatio or praenotio, and less precisely but intelligibly by the elder Pliny as divinatio; it is wrongly rendered as “concept” by those who confuse the general concept of an ox with the abstract idea of justice.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius: Welcome to Episode 162 of Lucretius Today. Our goal for today was to begin the discussion of the subsection entitled “Anticipations” in Chapter 8, but unfortunately Joshua is not with us, so we’re going to do a very abbreviated introduction for just a few minutes.
The first thing DeWitt says is this: “The second criterion of truth is the prolepsis or anticipation, such as the innate sense of justice. Between sensations and anticipation there is an obvious bridge of connection. The innate capacity to distinguish color is an anticipation of experience, no less than the innate capacity to distinguish between justice and injustice. The difference is that color sense is part of the individual’s preconditioning for life in his physical environment and emerges early in childhood, while the sense of justice is part of the preconditioning for life in the social environment and emerges later, developing in pace with experience, instruction, and reflection. How the anticipations function as a criterion of truth may be seen in the case of the gods. It is impossible to think of them as in need of anything, for example, because according to the idea universal among men, their happiness is perfect.”
We’ll reserve the detail for next week. But we can talk for a few minutes about the different sources of information on this topic and some really important articles that someone who’s digging into it would want to investigate.
The section on anticipations in DeWitt starts on page 142, and we’ll be using that as the guide as we discuss it. But there are many, many different articles out there on anticipations. One of the most important, most recent, and best of which is called “Epicurean Preconceptions” by Voula Tsouna.
What we’ll find — both Tsouna does this and DeWitt does — is to contrast a couple of different major sources of information on anticipations. The first is Diogenes Laertius, where he has a paragraph on what anticipations are about. And then there’s a section in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, in which he has an Epicurean speaker that he calls Velleius, talking about how anticipations are involved in the conception that he alleges all men have about the nature of divinity. There’s also reference in Epicurus’s letters and in the Principal Doctrines about words that come close to this issue without sometimes being anticipations themselves. And also there’s discussion in Lucretius, in which there is no specific section devoted to anticipations, but there are numerous references which can easily be interpreted to apply to the topic.
The starting point of most discussion of anticipations comes in Diogenes Laertius. Before he gets into the Letter to Herodotus, the Letter to Pythocles, or any of the other major letters, Diogenes says this:
“Now in the canon, Epicurus affirms that our sensations and preconceptions and our feelings are the standard of truth. The Epicureans generally make perceptions of mental impressions to be also standards. His own statements are to be found in the summary addressed to Herodotus and in the Principal Doctrines.” That’s an interesting comment right there because he’s specifically pointing us to Herodotus and the Principal Doctrines for Epicurus’s own views. Then continuing on: “Every sensation, he says, is devoid of reason and incapable of memory, for neither is it self-caused nor regarded as having an external cause. Can it add anything there to or take anything therefrom?” And skipping over several passages, this is the key part:
“By preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion or a universal idea stored in the mind — that is, a recollection of an external object often presented. Such and such a thing is a man, for no sooner is the word man uttered than we think of his shape by an act of preconception in which the senses take the lead. Thus the object primarily denoted by every term is then plain and clear. And we should never have started an investigation unless we had known what it was that we were in search of. For example, the object standing yonder is a horse or a cow. Before making this judgment, we must at some time or other have known by preconception the shape of a horse or a cow. They should not have given anything a name if they had not first learnt its form by way of preconception. It follows then that preconceptions are clear.”
And then he continues on with material that’s in the Principal Doctrines about whether something is clear or not: “The object of a judgment is derived from something previously clear by reference to which we frame the proposition, e.g., how do we know that this is a man? And they also call conception or assumption and declare it to be true and false, for it is true if it is subsequently confirmed or if it is not contradicted by evidence, and false if it is not subsequently confirmed or is contradicted by evidence. Hence the introduction of the phrase ‘that which awaits confirmation’ — e.g., to wait and get close to the tower and then learn what it looks like at close quarters.”
Just for reference, I’ve been reading that from the Epicurus.net page, and there are many different translations of that. In what I’ve just read, the translator has used the words “anticipation” or “preconception” or “prolepsis.” Cyril Bailey, one of the major translators of Epicurus, predominantly just uses the word “concept” in this section — not “pre-concept,” just “concept.” So the general subject that we’re talking about is related to the issue of concepts. What is a concept? Is a concept an anticipation? Is an anticipation something that feeds into concepts? How are concepts used? There are many different issues involved in the topic that are going to be difficult to separate out.
And it would be very difficult to come away from all this reading with a very firm conclusion that one position is right and one is wrong. Because there’s a wide divergence: if you focus on Velleius’s interpretation of anticipations and how it relates to gods, you come up with a much more innate or intuitive — that’s the word DeWitt generally uses — you come up with a much more intuitive or automatic process that is feeding into conceptual reasoning. If you focus on what Diogenes Laertius has said, you can end up like Cyril Bailey and basically just say this is a description of conceptual reasoning that occurs in the mind, and that’s basically it.
So what you’ll find is that writers who take one position or the other about the nature of anticipations will tend to either accept Diogenes Laertius and downplay Velleius, or they will accept Cicero’s Velleius and downplay Diogenes Laertius. And so you take sides between those two at the very beginning, and then most people go over to Lucretius and other sources looking for evidence that would support their particular position. But in the end, we just don’t have a lot of clear statement from Epicurus himself that would allow us to be really firm in our conclusion about what anticipations are. And it’s my view that it’s better to wait and make some preliminary observations about what anticipations are and how they must work — given the other aspects of Epicurean philosophy that we do have a stronger footing in — and then go forward with a little bit looser interpretation of what anticipations may be.
When we move into the issue of thought and how we think and how we construct our ideas and how we use our ideas, it’s a lot more complex and harder to take a position on. Maybe the analogy would be this is more like the issue of looking up at the sky and realizing you can’t really get close to it — it’s harder to be as firm about what the mind is actually doing with things.
But Epicurus needed a theory to explain the workings of the mind, just as he has a theory of atoms and void that explains the physical workings of the universe. I think there’s an analogy there: what we’re working towards with anticipations is filling in the gaps of how the mind is processing the information that the external senses are giving to it and then applying that information to our experiences in life.
In our discussions of anticipations in the past on the forum, many of us have concluded that there’s something going on here in relation to pattern recognition. That regardless of whether you start and stop with Diogenes Laertius or not, there clearly is an influence of exposure to something. Your mind is doing something with that exposure and then processing it into how it thinks and reacts in the future. It would appear that the ability to recognize patterns and then manipulate those patterns and use that information in future thinking is very likely to be a significant part of this process.
Is this purely an explanatory consideration to understand the nature of the mind, or is there any kind of practical application in it? There I think there are huge practical applications, because this gets back into what we were talking about over the last several weeks about blank slate versus whether you’re born with any kind of innate dispositions. If you follow the Aristotelian blank slate theory and you say that everything in your mind is a result of your experiences, then you would be drawn more to a conclusion that you have a greater ability to control all of your thoughts and change all of your thoughts. There’s the debate framed in terms of nature versus nurture. The blank slate theory of Aristotle would lead you in a direction that nurture — the way you’re educated, the way you’re brought up — is 100% of the way that you end up. As opposed to nature: people who take the position that you are born with innate dispositions that not only lead you to feel pleasure in particular ways and pain in particular ways or see colors in particular ways, but also dispose you to eventually think in particular ways.
So that is a tremendously important question of nature versus nurture. And you can contrast it also with what Plato was saying — that the true reality is outside the cave, and that understanding things is a process of recollection of what you used to know in a prior life before you were born, or some ability to come into contact with a true world different from this one. I think it has many practical implications of how much you should expect to be able to control your own thoughts. Are you solely self-programmable? Did you program yourself through your own experiences from the moment you were born? Or were you born with intuitions or predispositions or instincts? Were you born like a beaver to live in a particular way, just like beavers are born to build dams, just like migratory birds might be programmed to migrate in particular ways?
Do the patterns of life that are observable in less sophisticated life forms — do those patterns exist there, and then all of a sudden cease to exist when you go up the evolutionary scale to human beings? Do humans have any kind of intuitive faculties, dispositions of thought at all? And of course we try to stay away from politics in this podcast, but it clearly has implications in terms of your interactions with other people — whether you think that they are somehow predisposed at birth to operate in particular ways or whether they’re not.
I think the current understanding is that it’s a mix of both nature and nurture working together. So it’s not an either/or kind of thing as far as what the current understanding is.
Cassius: And I would say that that is consistent with Epicurus’s view. He certainly is not saying that your experiences in life have no impact on you, but he’s saying that there are some things that need to be explored and understood. My experience in reading is that the more radical position is taken by the blank-slate people, by the Aristotelian view — because to me it’s just obviously not true that you are born in the same way as a blank piece of paper. Just as your eyes and ears and the rest of your body operate in particular ways, you’re born with dispositions in every aspect of your life — that seems to me to be an obvious position. John Locke’s Aristotelian blank slate theory seems very difficult to maintain.
So again looking back at what Epicurus would have been dealing with: if he was dealing with Aristotle taking a blank slate position, and he’s dealing with Plato taking the position that there’s a true world beyond this one in which you’re trying to commune with the gods — and that your senses are trying to trick you and can never give you any answers — then he needed to come up with another theory of how the mind operates that rejects both of those alternatives. And I think what we’re going to find is that this is Epicurus’s application of his scientific method to the issue of thought. It probably relates also to the issue of language that is discussed at some length in Lucretius — the question of how people come up with words. Is there really a difference between a word and a concept? Which is where Epicurus is talking in the Letter to Herodotus about making sure that your words are clear so that you don’t keep on defining things to infinity.
So it really does have lots of practical application. Again there’s your biblical story of the Tower of Babel and where languages were confounded among all the people, whether it was God who instituted languages in the first place — questions like that do have implications that we really don’t spend as much time talking about as we probably should.
The issue of concept formation and the processing of information into intelligent discussion and communication — this question of anticipations and concept formation — is probably related to issues that are involved in artificial intelligence or intelligence of any kind. How do you take information and process it into a thought process, or something we would recognize as intelligence? For example, our eyes see some shape and color and size and brightness in front of us, but the eye doesn’t know what this computer screen is that we’re looking at. It’s only in our minds that we can take this information that our eyes are presenting to us and realize that it’s a computer screen, that the words on the screen are something that we should pay attention to and that we can use to construct all sorts of elaborate thoughts. The eyes don’t give us that ability. The senses don’t give us that ability. So what does give us that ability? The first time a baby looks at a computer screen, having never seen one before — how does the baby come to understand how it’s used? Is it purely a mechanical, random, chaotic construction of data that’s in front of it, or does the mind have some disposition to recognize patterns and begin to pull those together into something that’s comprehensible to us?
Aren’t there discussions out there that a baby recognizes human faces first, that there’s something special about human faces in the way that we recognize them? Yes, I think Joshua talked about that. I think that’s what Epicurus is talking about in the issue of anticipations — the distinction that DeWitt does make. You see several horses — animals we would describe as horses — in front of you, and you basically begin to put together the concept of a horse. You’ve got the stimulation of the eyes seeing over time several different objects, so you can conceive of the possibility that the mind has almost a mechanical ability to lay pictures over each other and begin to assemble a single picture out of these many different pictures. The disposition to do that in the first place is probably related to anticipations, but how quickly you do it, what issues about a horse you conclude are key to the concept of a horse and so forth — that’s a very sophisticated process that people can differ on and have different opinions on. And in the future when you’re applying that standard you can make mistakes as you look at an animal and decide whether or not it fits your pattern.
But even more complicated than looking at horses and coming up with the concept of the horse is what about all these concepts and words that are floating around in your mind that are not attached to something you’re looking at or touching or tasting at a particular moment? Would it be considered an anticipation if, for instance, I thought I understood everything that DeWitt says about what anticipations are, and then I compare that to either something that somebody else says, or even to what ChatGPT says — is that considered an anticipation? The knowledge that I have, the thoughts I have of something, the definition of something? I’d like to hear if Martin has an opinion about that. I’m going to say the answer is no, but Martin, what do you think?
Martin: I would answer yes.
Cassius: Okay, go ahead, explain your yes, and then I’ll explain my no.
Martin: Well, we don’t have that many texts, so if you really want to account for everything you really need to have a wide net for the anticipations to include these things.
Cassius: Okay. And let me explain when I said I was going to say no and you said yes. I think this is a good example of something that would depend on whether you follow the Diogenes Laertius example or whether you would follow the Velleius example. Because the Diogenes Laertius example — looking at men and coming up with the idea of man, looking at horses and coming up with the idea of horses — that’s pretty easy to understand and it could be applied to all sorts of thought processes. But the question is whether, for example, your understanding of what DeWitt’s interpretation of anticipations is — that’s a passage of sentences, a conceptual explanation. Once you form an explanation in your mind of anything, is that a criterion of truth in the same sense that the eye and the ear is producing data that has no opinion in it and is just produced because it’s there?
Or is the understanding that DeWitt has, or the understanding that you have, a process of conscious thinking in which your opinion is totally involved? It’s your opinion of what DeWitt said. When you compare two opinions, is that something that’s involved in an automatic process given to you by nature which you can consider to be a criterion of truth? Or is that the equivalent of doing a crossword puzzle on a piece of paper where you’re putting words down here, putting words down there, and just comparing the two?
If you see where I’m going: if anticipations are a criterion of truth, does an anticipation have an opinion within it? An argument can be made from especially the Velleius material that anticipations are not supposed to be something which you’ve created in your own mind incorporating your own opinion. In other words, if your opinion is that all zebras are black and white, is that a criterion of truth? Is your definition of zebra a criterion of truth, or is that just part of your conceptual reasoning processes that can be right or wrong and have nothing to do with what nature tells you?
Callistheni: Could it be the difference between levels of complexity? So when you understand an object like a cat or a dog, your mind is kind of automatically connecting with something there — that’s a very basic level, versus something like comparing your own understanding of what DeWitt means about anticipations versus what somebody else says they think. That’s like very complex thinking in comparison.
Cassius: Yeah, certainly it is hugely different in terms of complexity. Is complexity sufficient to be a dividing line between a criterion of truth and something that’s not a criterion of truth? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that’s part of the question that you have to ask. If criteria of truth are supposed to be things that function automatically and without injection of opinion from you — and in saying that, I’m not saying that just because it’s a matter of opinion, just because it’s a matter of thinking about things in which you can be right or wrong, there’s anything wrong about that. It’s an important process that everybody would recognize has to happen. But your criteria of truth are supposed to be something by which you test your thoughts and your opinions. If you’ve allowed your opinion to serve as a criterion of truth, then you’ve got a feedback loop — a self-reinforcing error — where you no longer have the ability to distinguish between right and wrong because your own opinion you’re considering to be absolutely true.
Callistheni: So let’s say it’s dark outside and you hear some noises, and you look out the window and you can’t tell what kind of animal you’re looking at — it could be a cat, it could be a raccoon. Of course raccoons are bigger than cats, but is this what anticipations are — how we understand objects — so that if we got a flashlight and shined it out the window to try to see what was going on, then we saw more information, we could then decide, “Oh it’s a raccoon” or “Oh it’s a cat”?
Cassius: That is one of the ultimate questions, Callistheni, which I think is not clear. If you follow Diogenes Laertius’s description you would say yes, that is what anticipations are all about. However, is that the entire story? And where in the world does Velleius get his ideas about anticipations from? Because he’s very clear: “As for myself, in terms of gods — how many gods have I seen in my life?” I would say that answer is very close to zero. But Velleius is saying that even though I have not seen any gods, I was born with an innate disposition or anticipation of divinity — to understand gods as being perfect beings which neither experience pain nor inflict pain on other people.
Diogenes Laertius is clearly focusing on experiences that you’ve had after you were born and things that you come into contact with. So you’ve come into contact with raccoons and cats in the past, all sorts of animals, and when you’re looking outside in the dark and you don’t know what’s there, you’re checking your memories and your concepts and you’re attempting to — yes, you would use the word anticipate, you’re trying to guess, you’re trying to guesstimate, you’re trying to speculate about what’s really there even though you can’t see it in detail. Is that related to anticipations? I would say certainly it’s related to it, but is that the entire question of anticipations?
Because maybe anticipations were active back when you first saw the first cat or the first raccoon, having never seen one before. Maybe there’s something going on in your mind that disposes you to bring these pictures of different types of animals and put the word “cat” associated with it, and these other animals you associate the word “raccoon” — and maybe that’s where the anticipation process is taking place at a more fundamental level. Because what DeWitt ends up arguing is that if you follow Diogenes Laertius and simply say “I’ve seen three cats in my life, I now have a picture of a cat” — DeWitt says sure, that’s a process that happens, nobody’s questioning that. But that’s not the entire picture, would be DeWitt’s point of view. From Velleius’s argument, you might not have ever come up with the idea of cat if you did not have this faculty of anticipations which led you to assemble these pictures in the first place into a conception of a cat.
And I want to stress too that DeWitt hits this point real hard: talking about cats and dogs and raccoons is difficult enough. But talking about capitalism or communism or socialism or all these abstract ideas is much more complicated. Cats and dogs — lots of people go through life never worrying about this question we’re talking about right now of anticipations and so forth. But we have gotten to this point of talking about it as a result of a long series of past studies and interests and things that we’ve pursued. And I think that’s where DeWitt points to Velleius, and where Velleius is saying something different from what Diogenes Laertius is saying: there’s something you’re born with before you’re exposed to these individual instances that leads you to assemble new instances as they occur into something that becomes an understanding in your mind. But if you did not have this faculty of organizing and pattern recognition in the first place, you would never have gotten to that point.
But again, all of that’s speculation, because we don’t have a text from Epicurus himself that really explains exactly what he meant by it.
Again, one of DeWitt’s arguments is that Epicurus was looking for a faculty of truth. Obviously nature gave us our eyes and ears, ability to touch and smell and taste, that give us the ability to interact with the external world. DeWitt says that Epicurus was thinking: if nature gave us that faculty to interact with concrete things outside, did not nature also give us a faculty of thinking that disposes us to process thoughts in particular ways?
One of the words that Lucretius uses is notio — notion. What does the word “notion” mean? When you say you have a notion of something, you’re hinting that you’re not really sure of what’s there, but you are beginning to put pieces of evidence together that lead you to speculate in a particular direction. I looked it up. The definitions include: “a conception of or belief about something” — “children have different notions about the roles of their parents” is given as an example. The synonyms listed are: idea, belief, concept, conception, conviction, opinion, view, thought, impression, image, perception, mental picture, assumption, presumption, hypothesis, theory, supposition, feeling, funny feeling, suspicion, sneaking suspicion, hunch, understanding, awareness, knowledge, clue, inkling, the foggiest idea. Then a second definition: “an impulse or desire, especially one of a whimsical kind” — “she had a notion to call her friend at work” — synonyms: impulse, inclination, whim, desire, wish, fancy, caprice, whimsy. That’s probably point number one that’s most relevant.
Well, that’s a good example of just how words have so many different meanings, and it depends on the context in which the word is used as to exactly which meaning is appropriate. I’m sure that the Greeks and the Romans themselves had as many different definitions and uses of these words as we do. And probably just making that observation is related to our subject: with so many different connotations or implications of particular words, how do you know which one applies? How do you reach the conclusion as to the proper application of a particular word in a particular circumstance? It happens instantaneously in our minds in a way that we really can’t even explain. And to me, that’s why I do agree with the direction that DeWitt goes in here, because what we’re talking about is something that’s much more complicated than “I’ve seen five cats, and now in my mind I’ve put together a picture of a cat.” There’s an awful lot going on that’s not captured by that description of the process.
Callistheni: So when you were reading the three possible definitions of the word “notion,” would it be considered that the anticipations is my ability to determine which is the correct definition in this discussion? Would that be a preconception or an anticipation?
Cassius: Of course I don’t know the answer to that, but I would say that you’re going in the right direction. One thing that seems to me to be clear is that a conception is one thing, but a preconception or an anticipation or a prolepsis has got to be something else. Once you’ve formed a conception or a definition in your mind of a particular thing, then you can take that definition and use it — just like when we talk with Martin about axioms and theorems. You’ve got a set definition that has a particular set of qualities that go along with it, that you can then take and manipulate later on and use for many different important purposes. But how you get to that definition, how you choose what is essential and what is not — that seems to me to be a much more difficult and complicated and basically a different question.
A concept is one thing. The process of arriving at a concept is very different. Again, just like when you see something in front of you: the recognition of what it is does not take place in the eye. The eye is giving you the information that you have to have in order to form a recognition, but the eye is not producing the recognition. Something else is going on in the brain — a process of recognition and a process of assembling the concepts in the first place. And I believe that that’s what we’re talking about with anticipations.
What I was about to say a moment ago was that there are a few examples of the use of this term in Epicurus. One of them is a statement that there is an innate anticipation of justice — somehow justice involves anticipations in a unique kind of way. Also divinity: this issue of the gods somehow especially is cited in the text as being a special type of anticipation, where Epicurus talks about how the anticipations of the many about the gods are wrong. That’s an important thing to observe too: apparently what you do with an anticipation doesn’t mean that it’s going to be right. Just like your sight could be producing a distorted picture, it doesn’t tell you whether the tower is round or not. Maybe an anticipation doesn’t tell you whether the idea is true or not. Maybe the anticipation is something that leads into the formation of an idea, just like the sight is something that leads into the formation of the idea of a tower. That doesn’t really help tell us what an anticipation really is, but it tells us the areas in which Epicurus is talking about it.
Divinity is clearly one, justice is clearly one, and I think there’s a third. This one’s a little harder because it’s in the negative. I believe it’s said in the Letter to Herodotus that there is not an anticipation as to time. So the only real clear three examples in Epicurus are references to gods, justice, and time — which DeWitt points out are very abstract issues. It’s almost like this is a faculty that leads us to form abstract ideas, not the ideas themselves necessarily. Just like what we get from the eye doesn’t give us the picture in our mind of a computer screen.
Unfortunately, this is a very complicated subject that we just don’t have enough text to be as clear on as we would like. While we need to stay with the major applications or implications of it — one of the biggest being that Epicurus did not believe in a blank slate, that he believed you’re born with some kind of ability to do some kind of pattern recognition or concept formation that is not divine, not random, not subject to the problems that the Aristotelian or Platonic or pure religious views would have — that’s probably far enough for us to proceed today.
But it would make sense to give a little bit more of what DeWitt has said here. Page 143 of his book:
“It is highly probable that Epicurus allowed even to certain animals — especially elephants — the possession of these embryonic anticipations of social virtues. The tendency of the day was to have recourse to the study of irrational creatures in order to learn the teachings of nature. It should be recalled too that not only was Epicurus very eager to have information of Pyrrho who had been to India — the elder Pliny, who quotes three of the above writers, ascribes to elephants a sort of divination of justice, an excellent equivalent of the Epicurean anticipation. Pliny also ascribes to elephants the possession of pride, honesty, prudence, equity, and even religion. All of these fall squarely into the category of abstract notions where the anticipations belong. The term prolepsis was correctly rendered by Cicero as anticipatio or praenotio and less precisely, though intelligently, by the elder Pliny as divinatio. It is wrongly rendered as ‘concept’ by those who confuse the general concept of such things as an ox with the abstract idea of justice. One scholar prefers ‘preconception,’ but perhaps ‘pre-concept’ would be preferable. It seems most advantageous, however, to adhere to ‘anticipation’ because this is the meaning of the Greek word prolepsis.”
Okay, well there we’ll stop for the day. Hopefully we’ll have Joshua back with us next week, and we’ll dig into the details of anticipations and how they’re used and the implications for us today. So thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.