Episode 163 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 17 - Chapter 8 - Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings 04
Date: 02/28/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2918-episode-163-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-17-chapter-8-sensations-anticipatio/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode marks the return of Joshua after his absence in Episode 162, and features Don from Ohio as a returning guest, with Cassius calling it the “full powerhouse” needed for the complex topic of Epicurean anticipations (prolepsis). Cassius opens by stepping back to examine the nature of the Epicurean canon of truth itself — that “canon” means a measure or standard, not content, just as a straight edge is not the wall it measures — and observes that the Greek word for truth in the Epicurean texts, aletheia, means “reality as opposed to appearance,” positioning the Epicurean canon as access to reality rather than a veil over it. Joshua locates this word in Diogenes Laertius’s discussion of the canon, and Cassius finds the relevant passage in the Letter to Herodotus stating that “the fact of a perception confirms the truth of the sensations” — meaning it is repeated perception, not any higher authority, that confirms the senses as reliable. The discussion moves to Diogenes Laertius section 33, where Cassius reads the horse-recognition passage, substituting “preconception” for Bailey’s misleading translation “concept”; Joshua notes that Bailey’s flattening of prolepsis to mere “concept” buries the subtlety of what is at stake. Don then advances the episode’s central model: prolepsis is the mind’s faculty for discerning coherent patterns from raw sensory input — analogous to pixels coalescing into recognizable forms as one steps back from a screen, or a pair of binoculars coming into focus — and this pattern-recognition is pre-linguistic and pre-rational, with language arriving much later as labels applied to already-recognized patterns. Cassius presses Don on the distinction between assembled recognition (Diogenes Laertius’s model of recalled stored images) and innate faculty (Velleius’s model of an engraved preconception), and on how abstract concepts like justice and divinity fit this framework; research on infant fairness responses and toddler face-recognition is cited as modern corroboration for a pre-rational faculty. The episode then works through Velleius’s speech in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, arguing from universal consensus for an innate prolepsis of the gods, to which Joshua responds with measured skepticism, while Don observes a striking parallel in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18–21) — though Cassius notes that Epicurus would never have added “people are without excuse.” Don reads his own translation of Letter to Menoikeus section 123, clarifying that folk religious beliefs “are not prolepseis but rather the judgments of the hoi polloi concerning the gods, which are false hasty assumptions” — distinguishing the legitimate prolepsis of divine blessedness and incorruptibility from false opinions layered on top. A highlight of the episode is the reading of recent correspondence from scholar David Glidden, who over twenty years developed a “mechanistic, non-cognitive pattern recognition” model of prolepsis — not dependent on Cartesian-Platonic consciousness — that was “pilloried by scholars but embraced by biologists, linguists, and neurologists”; Joshua responds with his “principle of the cockroach” (if you can’t explain it in terms applicable to lower animals, it doesn’t hold), and Cassius notes the modern parallel in research on the brain as a prediction engine. DeWitt’s “Later Evidences” section (p. 148) explains how the Stoics appropriated and diluted prolepsis into a generic concept-term, and Cassius notes its pre-Epicurean rhetorical meaning: the anticipation of an interlocutor’s counter-argument. Joshua closes by explaining Cartesian dualism as what Glidden’s physicalist model was designed to overcome, connecting this to Epicurus’s own view that the mind is physical and inextricably linked to the body.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 163. We are still in the middle of chapter 8 of Norman DeWitt’s book, in the section on anticipations. Last week in episode 162, Joshua was not with us, but this week we have Joshua back and we have Don, so we’re going to bring our full powerhouse of podcasters to this topic — which deserves it, because it is a very complicated thing to talk about, and there are almost as many different opinions about what anticipations are as there are commentators who write about it. Hopefully today we’ll bring you an introduction to the general positions that people take so that you can study into it yourself and come up with what you think is most likely to be the truth.
Before we get back into the anticipations, I think it would be helpful to step back and remind everybody what we’re talking about in terms of where the anticipations fit in Epicurean philosophy. What we’re talking about is the Epicurean canon of truth. Both “canon” and “truth” can be interpreted in many different ways. When you think about the word “canon,” it’s a measure or a standard — not the content itself. When you’re building a wall, you have stones to work with and measuring tools to help you assemble it in a straight and true direction. DeWitt emphasizes that you should never confuse the straight edge used to assemble the wall with the stones themselves. “Truth” — as Pontius Pilate asks, “what is truth?” — is a very complicated issue. In this context, “canon” is best translated as “measure” or “standard.” It’s not truth itself we’re talking about; apparently it’s how to measure truth, what you measure truth with — something besides the truth itself.
If you’ve got a four-legged animal with a long neck and a long tail with hooks in front of you, the eyes are not identifying that for you as a horse. The eyes are providing data to your mind, which your mind processes and concludes — as part of a separate process — that what you’re seeing is a horse. Tell me if you guys agree or disagree with that, or have a better way to explain what a standard of truth would be.
Don:
I’ll jump right into the deep end here, I suppose. I think one of the things Epicurus is trying to get across with this whole idea of the canon is that there is an external world that exists outside of ourselves. We can have access to that world through our sensations, our anticipations, and our feelings. I think that was one of the things he was establishing — because he was fighting against the whole idea of Plato and his ideal forms, and that we only see a reflection of what’s real, and that what is actually experienced is not really real. We have to access the ideal forms. I think Epicurus’s canon was a way to say: no, there’s an external world out there, we have access to it, and there’s nothing behind it that we have to understand first before we can understand, quote unquote, the truth.
Cassius:
Don, I think everything you said is exactly correct. I don’t know that it takes us as far as we need to go, though, because clearly Epicurus was living in a world where what you’ve described — Plato’s cave analogy — was the dominant way of looking at things. Plato was saying that the senses cannot provide you the truth. But if we really try to dig further into that allegation: what is it that the senses do provide? Through the senses you can eventually come to the truth, but are the truth and the senses the same thing? Is the data or stimulus that comes from the eye — is the eye reporting to you that what you’re seeing is a horse? You’re using the eyes, but is it the eye that makes the judgment that what you see is a horse?
Don:
Oh, no, no, no. The eye is merely a way for the images to impact your anticipations, and then it moves on from there. So the eye itself — the sensations themselves — do not do the identification of what you’re looking at, whether it’s a horse or justice or the gods.
Cassius:
Right. I think it’s pretty clear in what Epicurus has written, and in what Diogenes Laertius has written, that error — the opinion that turns out to be either true or false — is not a part of the sense of sight. The stimulations received through the eyes, the nose, the ears: those stimulations are not themselves true or false. They’re taken by the brain or the mind and evaluated so as to produce an opinion, which is either true or false. It is not the fault of the eyes or the ears or the sense of touch if the animal in front of us turns out to be an elephant instead of a horse. It’s in our minds that we make that judgment as to what the animal is.
Don:
With the understanding, Cassius, that it is not the eyes or the sight that have a memory of any previous observations — that’s all happening in the brain.
Cassius:
Absolutely. But does the mind ever appeal to anything other than the repetition of the sight through the eyes in order to judge whether the oar is straight or not? I think basically where you end up is that your conclusion as to what is true is validated through repeated observation through the senses — you get closer to the tower and repeatedly observe the same thing, you test the oar by taking it out of the water from different perspectives, and gradually all the observations converge on one conclusion. I believe there is a straightforward sentence somewhere in the Letter to Herodotus that expresses that.
Joshua:
I do want to say I looked up here in Diogenes Laertius, where the quotes about the canon are, and the word used for truth is aletheia, which I find interesting — the LSJ dictionary says it means “truth, reality, as opposed to appearance.” I think that’s an interesting way to state it. The Epicurean canon is our connection to reality as opposed to appearance — which was sort of the way Plato put it, that we’re only seeing appearances, whereas Epicurus is saying we’re actually seeing reality.
Cassius:
I believe I found the relevant passage. Here in the Letter to Herodotus — it’s section 50 in Diogenes Laertius — it reads: “Nor is there anything which can refute the sensations: for a similar sensation cannot refute a similar because it is equivalent in validity; nor a dissimilar a dissimilar, for the objects of which they are the criteria are not the same; nor again can reason, for all reason is dependent upon sensations; nor can one sensation refute another, for we attend to them all alike.” And here’s the key sentence: “the fact of a perception confirms the truth of the sensations.” When I’ve checked that in the past, what it boils down to is that repeatedly perceiving something over and over is what confirms the truth of the sensations.
Joshua:
Looking at the Perseus text, Hicks translates it as “the reality of separate perceptions guarantees the truth of our senses.” And if you continue on into section 33, Bailey translates the concept they speak of as “an apprehension or right opinion or thought or general idea stored in the mind.” I just can’t let that go by — Bailey collapses this whole concept of prolepsis, preconception, anticipation, and just decides to call it a concept, which in my view totally buries the subtlety and significance of what’s going on here.
Cassius:
Exactly — and that’s one of the big controversies. Commentators like Bailey are telling you that an anticipation is in fact a concept. I’ve never understood how you can have a concept without having thought about something a lot and come to an opinion and a conclusion about what the concept means. The important part is that there is no opinion injected into it. The components of the canon are always described as pre-rational — reason acts upon them, builds upon them — but the canon itself needs to be connected to reality, not divorced from our senses and our feelings. Just like a yardstick: you couldn’t describe it as having reason or making decisions. It’s just a yardstick.
Joshua:
That’s a really good analogy. And in fact — in Trafalgar Square in London there’s a plaque, I think by the portrait gallery, with imperial measurements cast into bronze. The reason it’s there rather than in Parliament is because Parliament burned down in 1834. They had it cast in bronze and placed in three different locations in London, because it was so important to have this standard available — they couldn’t keep it in one place, having already seen what happens when you do that. Redundancy — like saving a file in disparate locations so there’s always one available.
Cassius:
Now for the challenge of which direction to go next. Everybody does basically the same thing: go first to Diogenes Laertius, because he appears to give us a clear explanation of what anticipations are, then compare that to what Velleius says in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and find significant differences. But just about everybody finds reason to criticize Diogenes Laertius. He put together an enormously important work, but commentators note that he was living in the 200s or 300s AD — writing to people already familiar with Aristotle, Plato, the pre-Socratics, and all the development done through Stoicism and Platonism in the intervening centuries. So it’s very easy to become anachronistic and apply standards of 300 AD that might not have been in the mind of Epicurus when he was writing.
Don:
And I remember reading that whenever Diogenes Laertius uses the word catalepsis — which comes into section 33 — that’s actually more of a Stoic term. He may be explaining an Epicurean concept using Stoic terminology that was more prevalent in his time. Which is exactly what you were saying about being anachronistic.
Cassius:
Exactly. The Stoics really focused on the world of logic and what’s going on in the mind, and their terminology became the standard. You can use a word in a Stoic sense that might be the same word Epicurus used, but he would have meant it in a very different way.
Don:
Wasn’t Epicurus the first one to use the word prolepsis in the way that he used it?
Cassius:
Yes, exactly that. It was an innovation of his to use the term in that way. And Emily Austin in our interview with her said that Epicurus’s writings tend to be very technical — he coins words for concepts he’s trying to get across — and that’s one of the difficulties in even translating him from the Greek.
So here is section 33 of Diogenes Laertius. I’ll go ahead and substitute “preconception” wherever Bailey says “concept”:
“The preconception they speak of as an apprehension or right opinion or thought or general idea stored within the mind — that is to say, a recollection of what has often been presented from without; as for instance, ‘such and such a thing is a man.’ For the moment the word ‘man’ is spoken, immediately by means of the preconception his form too is thought of, as the senses give us the information. Therefore the first signification of every name is immediate and clear evidence, and we would not look for the object of our search unless we had first known it. For instance: we ask, ‘Is that standing over there a horse or a cow?’ To do this we must know by means of a preconception the shape of a horse or a cow. Otherwise we could not have named them unless we previously knew their appearance by means of a preconception.”
So the preconceptions are clear and immediate evidence. I always say that to me this seems to be describing the reasoning process of once you’ve grown up long enough to have seen a couple of horses, your mind prepares a picture of what it means to be a horse, and the next time you see an animal that looks like that you remember that prior picture and conclude it’s a horse too. Everybody would accept that process occurs in the human mind. The question is whether that is a complete description, and whether it even fits within a canon of truth that is supposed to be non-rational.
Don:
I think what I find interesting is that commentators seem to say that the words come first and then they refer to other things, whereas other people say the preconceptions come first and language grows out of that. The latter makes more sense to me from an Epicurean standpoint, because if it’s part of the canon, the preconceptions have to have that pre-rational component.
I’ll throw my cards on the table here. In my mind, what happens is: we have the sensations — sensations are just raw data coming in, like pixels on a screen. The prolepsis is our ability to discern patterns in that sensory input. Over time, if similar configurations of input coalesce — if we’re repeatedly impacted with images of a horse — we see that this pattern is a separate part of reality. There’s a pattern here that corresponds to something. Then if we’re instructed later in life and acquire language, it’s like: “oh, with that pattern you see, we’re going to refer to it as a horse.” Whether you call it a horse or equus or any other word in your language — that group of sounds conforms to the pattern you’re seeing in reality. So the words grow out of the patterns, not the other way around.
Cassius:
So what part of what you’ve just described is the anticipation? If somebody asked you to give an example of an anticipation, what part of what you’ve just said qualifies?
Don:
I think the anticipation is the ability of the mind — whatever you want to call it — to recognize a distinct pattern in reality. Going back to babies when they’re first born: they’re looking around and can’t really see very well, but as they mature — in a matter of days, weeks, months — they begin to discern specific patterns as separate things in their reality. They can see faces. Research shows that babies can recognize human faces within days of being born, because the human face is going to provide pleasure and pain and so you want to be able to recognize it. But babies can’t put words to a face; they recognize the pattern itself. I think that recognition of a pattern as distinct from other things in their world is what a prolepsis is — that ability to recognize patterns as discrete. Looking at a cactus, a tomato, a banana, a tea kettle — those are all several separate things. Recognizing those patterns as discrete, I think, is the faculty of anticipation.
Cassius:
Don, before we go to Joshua or anybody else — you’ve used the word “recognize” a couple of times. Plato was saying that there’s a world of ideal forms out there, and that the process of knowledge is a process of remembering or recognizing things that already exist in another dimension — these patterns or ideal forms existed before we did. When you say you “recognize” a pattern, we often think of “oh, I’ve seen that before, it already exists.” But when you’re a baby, when you’re growing up, you haven’t seen these things before. So where does that pattern come from? Are you assembling it yourself, and is that assembly what it means to have an anticipation?
Don:
I think it’s just a matter of: the sensory inputs are like pixels on a screen, and the individual pixels pick up whether it’s going to be red or green or blue or whatever. If we step back a little from the screen, we can see that these particular pixels seem to hold together in relation to the background — there’s a pattern there I’m recognizing just from the sheer fact that there are different colors, a different arrangement, something that holds together. There’s nothing like recollecting an ideal form — it’s just that these particular pixels seem to be separate from those other pixels by virtue of their color, their shape, their holding together as a thing. And over time, as that particular pattern is repeated, it’s like: “I’ve seen this pattern before.” No ideal forms at play — just the continued experience of the environment, with sensations impinging on the senses, and over time you become more refined in your ability to recognize individual patterns.
And then as you get older and acquire language, individual components of that pattern get picked out. First there’s a face — babies can’t put words to it — but they recognize the pattern itself. Then as time goes on, they’re reinforced by their parents: “no, that’s not a dog, that’s a cat.” So language comes way down the line. I still think some commentators want to say that language imposes itself on these anticipations, or makes the patterns visible, and I don’t think that’s right at all.
Cassius:
A good analogy might be optical character recognition on a computer. When you scan in a document, the computer takes the data from the scan and compares it to sample characters already stored in its memory — the pattern it recognizes is compared against an existing pattern. Diogenes Laertius says you see a series of horses, prepare a pattern of a horse in your mind, and compare future observations against that. But is that what we’re talking about? Is the anticipation something that occurs before you get to that process?
Don:
The thing about optical character recognition is that the more data you load in — thousands and thousands of pages — the better it becomes at recognition. It’s the same way with babies: they don’t recognize distinct things in their environment right away, because they haven’t had any experience yet. But over time, if the same pattern keeps showing up, it reinforces what they’ve seen before. No ideal forms — just the continued experience of their environment, with sensations coming in and being assembled into patterns. And as more information accumulates, you become more refined in your ability to recognize individual patterns.
Cassius:
I apologize to the other podcasters for going on so long without getting you in. Joshua, Martin, Callistheni — talk me down. Joshua, come on.
Joshua:
I don’t know if I’m capable of doing that, but one thing that occurs to me is that while patterns don’t exist in an ideal realm of forms, they do exist in the mind as a kind of recognition — and they also do exist in nature. A horse looks like a horse looks like a horse because horses share a huge amount of the same DNA. The error, insofar as error creeps in, comes when Greek soldiers go to Africa or wherever, see a hippopotamus in a river, and bring back the word hippopotamus — literally “river horse.” They used pattern recognition to describe it as a horse, but it isn’t.
Don:
That’s kind of like a toddler who learns one word — “dog” — and then almost any four-legged animal they see becomes a dog. They look at a horse and call it a dog, look at a cat and call it a dog. Then as time goes on they refine their pattern recognition, reinforced by their parents: “no, that’s not a dog, that’s a cat.” So language comes way down the line. I still see commentators trying to say that the ability to have language is what makes the prolepsis, and I don’t think that’s right at all.
Cassius:
Let me extend the conversation to another point. It’s one thing to discuss dogs and cats and horses. It seems to be a much more significant layer of complexity to talk about abstract ideas. That leads us to the examples in which Epicurus apparently discusses this concept — and he seems to do so in only a limited number of situations: in regard to the gods, in regard to justice, and in regard to time, with that third one being that there is no anticipation of time that we should be referring to when thinking about how long something lasts. Those seem to be the full list of what people think Epicurus himself discussed. In terms of justice — would anyone suggest that we are born with a conclusion about what is just in a particular situation?
Don:
I always go back to the research done on babies and toddlers and their ability to sense fair play and fairness. I think it’s directly related to the idea of an anticipation of justice. They are able to discern, at an extremely young age, whether a puppet is getting treated fairly or not — that dovetails directly into the idea of a prolepsis of justice. And that’s what I find interesting about anticipations: to see how they’re not only understood in the ancient texts but also whether there are parallels in modern research into consciousness and the mind. I personally see a lot of those parallels. The anticipation of justice is that from a very young age we’re able to discern whether something seems fair or not — which is not the same as saying Hammurabi’s Code is inscribed in our hearts at birth.
Joshua:
When Cassius uses the word “conclusion” — that’s not quite right. It’s not a conclusion about justice that children have; it presents on a more emotional or even visceral level than that. It’s not something that could be expressed very clearly even by the people who feel it when they’re young. When we get older we use all kinds of words to describe what we think of when we think of justice, but in newborns — and even in some higher level animals — this prolepsis of justice presents more as a feeling of fairness.
Cassius:
Yes — and you even posted on the forum, Don, about the research with chimpanzees or monkeys where one got celery and one got fruit, and they basically threw the celery back once the other monkey started getting fruit.
Don:
Yeah, nobody likes celery. And every time we come back to that example I wonder: what you’re really saying is that the child or the animal has a reaction to the fairness or unfairness — they like one arrangement but don’t like another. It’s hard for me to separate that from the feeling of pleasure and pain.
Cassius:
Exactly — is it the feeling of pleasure and pain giving the opinion about justice, or is it some type of more abstract pattern that then feeds into the feeling of pleasure and pain on which you evaluate it? They definitely have to work together, don’t they?
Don:
I think they definitely have to work together. Any time you have a standard, you have a list of criteria — if you have this, this, and this, then this is going to be the result. I think the parts of the canon are probably distinct faculties or distinct components, but they all have to hold together — like the three legs of a stool.
Cassius:
Let me go further now and bring us up to the Velleius material, which everybody compares against what we’ve been talking about from Diogenes Laertius. Remember, Cicero is presumably drawing on Epicurean texts of his time — written at least a hundred, maybe two hundred or more years before Diogenes Laertius. The period this is written in is closer to Epicurus. Here is the core passage, where Velleius says in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods:
“Anyone pondering the baseless and irrational character of these doctrines — of the Stoics, the Platonists — ought to regard Epicurus with reverence and to rank him as one of the very gods about whom we are inquiring, for he alone perceived first that the gods exist, because nature herself has imprinted a conception of them on the minds of all mankind. For what nature, or what tribe of men, is there but possesses, untaught, some preconception of the gods? Such notions Epicurus designates by the word prolepsis — that is, a sort of preconceived mental picture of a thing, without which nothing can be understood or investigated or discussed.”
And further: “You see therefore that the foundation for our inquiry has been well and truly laid; for the belief in the gods has not been established by authority, custom, or law, but rests on the unanimous and abiding consensus of mankind; their existence is therefore a necessary inference, since we possess an instinctive or rather an innate concept of them. A belief which all men by nature share must necessarily be true; therefore it must be admitted that the gods exist. We have then a preconception of such a nature that we believe the gods to be blessed and immortal. For nature, which bestowed upon us an idea of the gods themselves, also engraved on our minds the belief that they are eternal and blessed.”
Joshua:
I think what you’re probably picking up on here, Cassius, is that this is not the most defensible position that Epicurus has ever articulated — certainly not in my own view. Montaigne held basically the same position; he said atheism was monstrous and unnatural. Taking the issue seriously: the fundamental argument is that you look to the person to your left, you look to the person to your right — they all seem to have this fundamental belief in the gods. How is it that a whole population of people can come to believe in the gods if in fact the gods don’t exist? And if they do exist, how do we have any knowledge of their existence? It doesn’t come through the senses, it doesn’t come through the feelings — so from an Epicurean point of view, it would have to come through the anticipations.
Cassius:
You said a lot right there. And just like we were talking about Diogenes Laertius potentially not being the greatest authority, we also have to consider that this Velleius material is somehow filtered through Cicero, or has been changed since the time of Epicurus himself. I always take the position that I’m not going to accept any position about Epicurus that doesn’t reconcile with the original core positions he took — like in the Letter to Herodotus or the Letter to Menoikeus. When Velleius gets into very specific speculations about how the gods look like humans and even speak Greek, I would be extremely reluctant to accept those as good core Epicurean theory. But if you go back to the idea of the canon of truth as a measure and not content, it’s probably possible to conclude that the only real preconception we’re talking about here is that the gods are blessed and essentially incorruptible — and that’s it.
Don:
I want to throw a fly in the ointment here, because I found this the other day and found it fascinating. There is a section in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that really struck me. Romans 1, verses 18 and following: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” That just seems eerily the same as “everybody has a prolepsis of the gods and everybody believes the gods exist.” I just found it an odd parallel.
Cassius:
Don, there’s a very important distinction though — because Epicurus would never have ended it with “people are without excuse.”
Don:
Exactly. What Epicurus says about the gods is that it’s not impious to not believe in the gods — it’s impious to believe about the gods anything that is foreign to their nature. Which is a much more sensible and hopeful point of view.
Cassius:
Right. Don, especially since you’ve gone through the Letter to Menoikeus so closely — can you tell us that part at the opening where Epicurus talks about these beliefs about the gods not being true anticipations but false opinions? Can you parse that language about whether he’s really talking about anticipations and how he phrases it?
Don:
I’ll use my own translation, since that’s what I have pulled up here. This is section 123 of the Letter to Menoikeus:
“First, believe that the god is a blessed and imperishable thing, as in the common general understanding of the god. Believe everything about which a god is able to reserve its own imperishability and blessedness for itself. Do not attribute anything foreign to its incorruptibility or incongruous with the blessedness of the god. Gods exist, and the knowledge of them is manifest to the mind’s eye. The gods do not exist in the way that the hoi polloi believe them to, because they do not perceive what maintains the gods. One is not impious who does not take up the gods of the hoi polloi — but the one who attributes the beliefs of the hoi polloi to the gods. For what they believe are not prolepseis, but rather the judgments of the hoi polloi concerning the gods, which are false hasty assumptions.”
I like that phrasing — “hoi polloi” — so I left it in there. The hoi polloi believe the greatest evils are brought to the wicked from the gods, and the greatest aid to the good — basically believing the gods bestow blessings and punishments. That’s not part of the prolepsis Epicurus is talking about. The prolepsis is about imperishability and blessedness — and anything added on top of that is a false opinion.
Cassius:
That’s always been confusing to me too. He’s saying their opinions are not prolepseis — does that mean they’re not prolepseis because they’re false opinions, or because they’re simply not prolepseis at all?
Don:
I think the latter. They’re false opinions because they’re beliefs layered on top of — rather than, the prolepsis itself. The prolepsis of the gods seems to be this: that there is a blessed and imperishable world. Anything added on top of that is a false opinion. I don’t think you can say the prolepsis itself is false. To go back to what I was saying before, the prolepsis is the pattern that we recognize in the real world — and then anything added on top is the opinion-formation process, which is where error can enter.
Cassius:
Now let me go back for a minute. Several of us have recently come into contact with some of the writings of David Glidden about anticipations, and one of the things I’ve been reading about the direction he was — and hopefully still is — going is that it would be important to think of everything as a naturalistic phenomenon. Not that by talking about words we’re creating something floating in the air somewhere. I can see the possibility that a prolepsis is a particular snapshot of a received image in our mind that then has to be processed into an opinion.
Joshua:
That’s even one of the interesting things I’ve seen — the manuscript tradition apparently has the images flowing to the gods, and some have interpreted that and said “well, that can’t be right, so it has to be from the gods.” But from what I understand, the actual earliest manuscript tradition says that the images flow to the gods — which is where Sedley and some of the others get the idea that we create images of the gods, or that we’re the ones actually preserving the gods’ incorruptibility. That’s a whole other conversation, but when you mentioned the naturalistic approach I wanted to throw that in there.
Don:
That is fascinating, because it seems clear that the Epicureans were saying the gods exist — and yet Epicurus says it clearly in the Letter to Menoikeus. It’s basically a two-word statement: “gods exist.” Very blunt. But the specific point about the images flowing to the gods as opposed to from them is apparently well established in the text, and yet it’s so counterintuitive to what we would expect.
Cassius:
Let me ask the classic example question. The classic example in Epicurean philosophy was the square tower that looks round from far away. What part of that process does the prolepsis become involved? You’ve got the senses taking in the light reflected from the tower — then presumably the prolepsis gets involved there. Is it the prolepsis that makes the mistake about whether the tower is round or square, or is it just the prolepsis that recognizes it as a tower?
Don:
I would say it’s just the prolepsis that recognizes it as a structure — or as a tower once you’re closer. The sensory data is coming in from the outside world. You’ve seen structures in the past. So you can recognize the pattern. As you get closer — oh, it looks like a tower. Closer still — oh, it’s a square tower, not a round tower. That’s the ability to fine-tune.
The analogy that just came to me: it’s like a pair of binoculars that, if not focused right, you’re just going to see a blurry field of blue and gray and green. If you start to focus them a little, you can see: “oh, there is a structure in the distance.” You fine-tune it more — “oh, that’s a square tower.” But it’s through the repeated experiences of seeing structures and towers and round towers and square towers, ingrained in your mind as distinct patterns, that you can then put a label on it, backfilling and saying “that’s a tower, that’s a square tower.” The prolepsis is the ability to discern that pattern from the background of all the other sensory data coming in — to set apart the fact that this pattern is a discrete thing in reality.
And even like an old television, if you’re sitting right up next to the screen with all the red, blue, and green pixels, you can’t discern a pattern until you pull back farther, and then these things coalesce into a face, into a house. Through repeated impinging of your senses with that data over time, those things become discernible patterns — a discrete packet that is a distinct thing in the world.
Joshua:
I like what you said, Don, about the prolepsis being what lifts something out of the background as a distinct thing. And interestingly, you can almost test this — because there are certain types of blindness that have been cured, and what they notice about people who gain sight for the first time later in life, rather than right when they’re born, is that the way they see things tends to be far more two-dimensional than the way people see things who have had sight their whole lives. So it’s interesting that the prolepsis seems to have this ability, but it’s not innate as a fully-formed concept — it’s a faculty, like the senses, that develops over time.
Cassius:
Right, right. Let me try to eventually bring us down to a conclusion on a halfway normal length by going to page 148 of DeWitt, where he has a section entitled “Later Evidences.” He says:
“The word prolepsis, once launched by Epicurus as a technical term, was taken over by the Stoics, who cribbed freely from the sect they vilified. It still enjoyed vogue in Cicero’s time, but the sharp edges of the original idea had suffered attrition through careless handling. The Stoics had developed the study of formal logic, and one ingredient of this was the general concept. This denotes the essential attributes of the subject under examination; and if the thinker be not too meticulous about his categories, it is permissible to speak of the general concept of either justice or an ox. Then by familiar semantic shift it became possible to speak of the prolepsis of an ox, just as people call a lighting fixture a chandelier even if candles have been replaced by gas or electricity. As Epicurus employed the term, however, it was no more possible to have a prolepsis of an ox than of a duck-billed platypus or a caterpillar tractor. The pre-existence of the idea in advance of experience was essential.”
I’m not sure that really clarifies anything, but it does begin to bring home that the terminology of formal logic — especially as developed through the Stoics — became so central to philosophical discussion in the years after Epicurus that it’s very difficult to sort out what Epicurus was saying versus what we’ve come to understand as just the general concept. The Stoics used not just a similar but an identical term, and the words carry so many different meanings that it’s important not to get wedded to a Stoic understanding of prolepsis and fail to understand what Epicurus was saying.
That’s one of the things about the David Glidden material that has appealed to me. It seems to me that Glidden focuses on that problem, says you should be very skeptical not only of Diogenes Laertius but also of Velleius, and try to go back to what Epicurus most likely would have been saying given his physics and the way he thought the body and nature worked — that all of this may be much more mechanistic and naturalistic. Don, we have some correspondence from him — could you summarize the point he made about where he was going?
Don:
I don’t have that message up here right now. Did you want me to bring it up and take a look at it? If you don’t mind, I think we can do it very quick. Hold on one second, let me just go ahead…
Cassius:
While Don has got the gears spinning over there — one thing we haven’t talked about yet today is that Epicurus originated this new understanding of the word prolepsis, but the word was already in current use before he appropriated it for his own philosophical needs. In rhetoric, prolepsis was the ability of a speaker in a debate to anticipate the counter-argument that his interlocutor was going to raise in response to what he had just said. So “anticipation” in the sense of getting there first — preempting objections — was already embedded in the term before Epicurus gave it his new technical sense.
Don:
And looking at the LSJ definition of prolepsis, the first definition given is “preconception, mental picture or scheme into which experience is fitted,” which I think is interesting — it seems to me we always have to keep in mind that the prolepsis, the anticipation, comes before, and that whole idea of coming before is important for emphasis, especially for those who seem to think that language imposes itself on these anticipations rather than the other way around.
I did find the email. Dr. Glidden was kind enough to respond when I had contacted him about our interest in his work. He says: “Over a period of 20 years, I had offered a model of Epicurean psychology and epistemology that was entirely mechanistic and did not elevate human nature over other advanced animals. That human beings could, for Epicureans, be devoid of Platonic-Cartesian consciousness seemed inconceivable to my colleagues at the time.”
Joshua:
That’s a gold star from me — because what I often talk about is what I call the principle of the cockroach. If you can’t explain it in terms that are also applicable to lower orders of animals, then it probably doesn’t really hold.
Cassius:
Let me continue with another part of what Dr. Glidden wrote. He says: “At the time of its publication, it was readily dismissed by most scholars working in Hellenistic philosophy. The idea of non-cognitive pattern recognition for human beings or animals seemed incoherent to these other scholars — yet it had an ancient pedigree in Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ biological writings on animals, and it had strong contemporary support as an account of physiological perception in animals. I felt my scholarly colleagues were trapped in a Cartesian presumption of human thought and perception that led them to dismiss Epicurean views or else to humanize them. Subsequently, I published ‘Epicurean Thought’ as a general model of the human mind, according to the Epicureans, that did not require a ghost in the machine, as it were. That, too, was pilloried by scholars but embraced by biologists, linguists, and neurologists. I thought that scholars, largely ignorant of advanced vertebrate physiology, were unable to appreciate a model of the mind that did not presume Cartesian-Platonic consciousness. So I went on to work on other topics.”
Well, we’re back on that same topic, Mr. Glidden — and I hope we can get Dr. Glidden to give us more information. We’re looking for his article. And I do want to bring up that I think it’s interesting to see not only what the ancient texts are saying but also the parallel track of modern research into the brain and consciousness, where the idea of the brain as a prediction engine has direct parallels to how anticipations function. It’s not saying that Epicurus had access to functional MRIs, but his intuition into how the world works is still uncannily modern — as Emily Austin also brought up when we had her on the podcast. All of this in the context that Epicurus believed this is the only world we have, there is no supernatural universe, and that if we’re going to live happily according to nature we need to understand how it works — including how the mind assembles ideas and works with them.
Cassius:
So probably now we’re at a good point to bring today to a conclusion. Callistheni, any thoughts from you today?
Callistheni:
Oh no, I have nothing to add. Thank you.
Cassius:
Martin?
Martin:
Nothing to add for me either.
Joshua:
I’m really glad we had Don on today. I feel like this would have been a totally different and far more inept conversation without him, so thank you for being here for that. My only concern, having read that bit from Dr. Glidden: he mentions a Cartesian view of things, and given the nature of our podcast it’s possible we should explain what he means by that. Cartesian dualism is the idea that the body is one thing and the mind is another, and that the rules by which the mind operates are very different from the rules of physical reality. So when Glidden pushes for a mechanistic or physicalist approach to cognitive and psychological ideas, I think that’s very promising — and it tracks closely to what Epicurus was doing himself, because Epicurus thought that the mind was made of body. In essence it was physical in nature and inextricably linked to the body itself.
Don:
Well, thank you for the kind words, Joshua. I hope I didn’t just bring a toolbox full of monkey wrenches to the conversation today. But it is a fascinating conversation, and I think the fact that there is so much difference of opinion makes it both aggravating and interesting to dig into. I’m looking forward to seeing where the conversation goes from here. Using DeWitt as the sort of unifying component of the conversation is a good idea — it allows all these different ideas to come up.
Cassius:
Don, you’re right. I really appreciate your being with us today, and everybody who has participated here on the podcast. As we conclude: the differences of opinion, while certainly there, do not undercut the general important core of what Epicurus was developing and identifying for us — the fact that the mind can operate in a totally natural way, without influence from supernatural beings, without fate telling us that we have to do everything in blind obedience to either the gods or to something that was started from the beginning of the world. The way that we think is a critically important part of the overall scheme of how we live. So while we don’t know exactly what’s involved in the details of his theory of prolepsis, hopefully we’ll find some more scrolls and other writings at some point that give us more information. But we have plenty to assemble at least that basic background: that there is more going on than supernatural intervention, that there is a very natural way of understanding the way humans think, that we can make a science of this and learn and study and improve the results of our thinking — all towards the goal of living more happily and successfully.
We’ll come back next week and continue on in chapter 8. Thank you for your time today. Drop by the forum, give us any comments you have, and we’ll incorporate them in our future episodes. Thanks, and see you next week.