Episode 166 - Lucretius Today Interviews Dr. David Glidden on "Epicurean Prolepsis"
Date: 03/21/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2956-episode-166-the-lucretius-today-podcast-interviews-dr-david-glidden-on-epicurean/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode features an extended interview with Dr. David Glidden, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at UC Riverside, whose 1985 article “Epicurean Prolepsis” in Oxford Studies in Classical Philosophy and subsequent “Epicurean Thought” are among the most distinctive treatments of Epicurean anticipations available. Glidden describes his path to Epicurus: starting in German graduate school working on Plato’s unwritten teachings, he was drawn instead to Epicurean materialism — a topic nobody was working on for a dissertation at the time — and found deep affinities between Epicurean garden communities, classical Buddhism (which, like Epicureanism, denied an afterlife), and the Benedictine monastic life he himself had considered entering. He spent twenty years working methodically on Epicurus, years in which his materialist, non-Cartesian reading of prolepsis was largely rejected by classicists — but, he notes with satisfaction, was regularly taught at Harvard Medical School as a model of human nature compatible with neurology. The central contribution of the interview is Glidden’s account of prolepsis as fallible, non-cognitive pattern recognition shared by all animals (and perhaps plants), entirely distinct from conceptual recognition tied to language and consciousness. He traces this back to Aristotle’s physiological account of perception — waves of light striking the eye, producing a pattern against the retina — which Epicurus developed into a thoroughgoing mechanism: the senses are always “true to their cause” (direct realism in a causal sense), while prolepsis represents the sensory organism’s projection of what is going to happen next based on partial information — reliable but not infallible. The Stoics hijacked the term prolepsis and redefined it as conceptual recognition requiring language and consciousness, which made Epicurus look inconsistent and inaccessible to scholars trapped in Cartesian-Platonic assumptions about mind. Glidden explains why Epicurus rejected dialectical logic through his theory of language as an anthropological phenomenon: unlike Plato’s assumed “language of thought” underlying all natural languages, Epicurus held that words are defined through the habits of different tribes and cultures — a multiculturalist position that made logic’s demand for a universal formalized language a fantasy, and made “empty beliefs” (kenai doxai) the primary danger to peace of mind rather than logical inconsistency. On the prolepsis of the gods, Glidden gives a mechanical reading: Epicurus wanted to explain a real cultural phenomenon — vivid dreams experienced as divine communication — through effluences of atoms striking the brain during sleep. On prolepsis of justice, Glidden points to the visceral animal response to unequal treatment (pets receiving treats unequally; chimpanzee colonies) as the pre-linguistic substrate of the concept, noting that humans often “know something is cruel viscerally but try to talk ourselves out of it intellectually.” Don probes the relation between Epicurean prolepsis and the modern brain-as-prediction-engine model; Glidden endorses the parallel fully. Joshua quotes the Lucretius Book 2 passage about the cow searching for her sacrificed calf as an example of Glidden’s core theme — that the distinctions between humans and other animals are real but not so great as to preclude recognizing similar patterns of response to the world. Glidden recommends Mark Twain’s What is Man? (1906) as a mechanical account of human nature drawing on Epicurean-influenced 18th-century French philosophy, and Willard Van Orman Quine’s Word and Object (1960) for the untranslatability of natural languages.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 166 of Lucretius Today. Today we are very pleased to bring you a very special interview with Dr. David Glidden, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Glidden has written numerous articles of interest to fans of Epicurus, including “Epicurean Prolepsis” in the 1985 Oxford Studies in Classical Philosophy, “Epicurean Thinking,” and in addition many others related to Epicurus which we encourage our listeners to seek out. Epicurean prolepsis — or anticipations or preconceptions, or whatever you prefer as the best word for the topic — is one of the three legs of the Epicurean canon, but one of the most difficult subjects for many people to understand as they study Epicurus. We think you’re really going to enjoy hearing Dr. Glidden’s unique and challenging take on the subject, and we think it’s going to prompt many of us to take a new look at what the standard commentators — even Diogenes Laertius himself — have had to say about the subject in the past. Dr. Glidden has generously allowed us to call him David. David, we don’t know much about you other than what we have read in your articles about Epicurus. What do you think would be appropriate for our listeners to hear to introduce you to our audience?
David Glidden:
Well gosh, I got interested in Epicurus in graduate school because I had gone to Germany to study a different topic on a dissertation on Plato’s unwritten teachings — there’s a tradition about that. But I found I was more attracted to pursuing the notion of Epicurean materialism, and at that point I don’t think anyone was writing in philosophy on that as a dissertation topic for many years. So I got interested in that. I’m basically a philosopher-slash-philologist, so I occasionally taught classics courses when I was teaching. I taught at the University of California at Riverside for a long time, but I also taught occasionally at UCLA, UCSD, and Irvine whenever they needed someone with my expertise to teach their graduate students.
But basically I’m also interested in living a good life and living in community. One thing I’m struck by — you started with Norman Wentworth DeWitt’s old book, which was not really a scholarly book, but he had lots of insights. And one of the things I liked about him was he pointed out that Epicurean garden communities became a kind of model for Benedictine communities, and that he saw the core of Epicureanism as a group of people living together, away from the rest of the world, trying to find peace of mind. And I think that’s also what attracted me later to classical Buddhism. They say in Buddhism there are ten thousand dharma doors, ten thousand variants of what Buddhism is. Sometimes Buddhism involves reincarnation, but classical Buddhism did not. When you die, you die — but your spirit may live on in terms of those you’ve influenced. And so that’s very true of Epicurus’s spirit living on, and why Lucretius can almost deify him in his poem. So there was a certain affinity for Epicureanism and then Buddhism and a way of life which leads to living in the present moment and living without fear that influenced me. At one point I had planned to become a Benedictine monk. So I understood what Norman Wentworth DeWitt was talking about, about living in community. And that’s true of Buddhism as well.
I think one of the things that’s challenging about Epicurus is we tend to focus as heavily on the metaphysics and epistemology as on the ethics. But Epicurus says over and over again in his public writings — these letters — that the main point of his enterprise is for Epicurus and his community to live lives free from anxiety and stress and to find peace of mind with each other. It involves living in a community where you know the people you’re living with and you care for each other. He says at some point in several occasions that if atomism doesn’t do that for you, then give it up and do something else — find a different metaphysics. So he’s really totally focused on quality of life and what it is to be a good person.
What makes Epicurus different from the Stoics is that for Epicurus, he doesn’t really try to intervene in the larger world. He’s very apolitical — he lives in his garden communities well away from the interference of politics, so people could find a haven for themselves in a kind of commune life which, through working and living together, would give them peace of mind. But they live in community without trying to engage in the world community, even though Christianity, Buddhism, and Stoicism all try to engage in that larger community.
I spent twenty years — it’s a long time ago now — working on Epicurus very methodically and very rigorously. And I admire your patience in going through these letters, because if you’re a Greek philologist as I’ve also been, the letters are extraordinarily challenging — nearly every word is open to a different interpretation; he’s using words differently; and so dozens of scholars have come up with different readings.
What interested me over the years was that when you confront a philosophy which does not believe in a Platonic soul and does not believe in the mysteries of spirituality as later developed in Plato and others, it’s hard to fathom it. When I was working on Epicurus, philosophy of mind at Princeton and other institutions was just evolving to identify the mind with neurology — they were just beginning to do that — so people who were interested in the mind in the way Descartes was, who saw a soul in the body as a different function from the brain, they found it difficult to understand Epicurus and easy to dismiss him. What interested me was that Epicurus had the great insight into the physical nature of human beings and all other critters, and he did not try to elevate human beings above other animals. That turned out to be the wave of the future — the insight of modern science — although it’s an insight that’s hard for people to grasp. So they often reinterpreted Epicurus to project back into him a notion of consciousness like a Platonic soul or a Stoic soul, where a reasoned being is separate from the neurology of that person. That struck me as wrong because I didn’t agree with that view and I could see how people could misinterpret Epicurus.
So my twenty years of articles on Epicurus were met with a great deal of confrontation and disagreement. My only success was that my work on Epicurus was often taught at a medical school at Harvard as a model of human nature compatible with what they were doing in neurology. That was some satisfaction. But it’s funny that it takes about thirty-five years for people to catch up — and we’re now much more appreciative of the subtleties of neurology and how it affects our personalities. And so Epicureanism works well. That’s why I got interested in it.
Don:
Yeah, exactly. The reason your papers came to our attention were the ones on prolepsis. I’ve found, for myself and a couple of other people on the forum, some parallels between Epicurean prolepsis and the modern idea of the brain as a prediction engine. It would take too long to react to things if we just waited for our sensory input to actually govern our actions — whereas the current research seems to be that the brain sets up an image of the world over time and compares incoming sensory input to what it already has in store, and reacts on that. The classic example is that if you’re walking in the woods and you see a long skinny thing on the ground, you may automatically jump away thinking it’s a snake, whereas if you look closer you see it’s a stick. The whole idea of the brain as a prediction engine, and the parallel with Epicurean prolepsis, has been rolling around in my mind. Do you see parallels between that modern research and the Epicurean mechanistic worldview?
David Glidden:
Thanks for asking that, because Epicurus and the Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus — Sextus working in the 2nd century of our era — made a lot of use through his predecessors of Epicurean arguments. The Stoics took the word prolepsis and stole it, and used it in a very different way, as conceptual recognition. When I was in graduate school, the idea was: to recognize something is to have the idea or concept of that thing — otherwise you don’t recognize it.
I grew up in farming country, and I began to respect the ability of animals — cows, pigs, pheasants if I was hunting them — to figure out who I was and what to do and how to respond. The pheasants learned never to fly, because no hunter shoots a bird on the ground — so they just ran ahead of me. But the thing was: the Stoics, and modern philosophy until fairly recently, thought that to see something and recognize it as a kind of thing requires having a concept of that kind, which means you have to have language, thought, consciousness, and so forth. But anyone who works with animals recognizes that animals recognize things as kinds even if we don’t want to say they have definitional concepts, because they don’t have language. My dog would always distinguish dogs from non-dogs. We have coyotes here, so occasionally walking my dog, he’d always wag or bark at other dogs — but when he saw coyotes, he realized this was something to be afraid of, and stuck close to me. He recognized they were different.
And animals do that and have to do it quickly — they can’t reassemble all their different sense data because they’ll get killed. So pattern recognition is essential, and it’s essential with bees and with ants and the entire animal kingdom, and apparently it’s true of plants too — recognizing where food is, which direction roots should grow. Now that doesn’t mean they have a conscious “I think I’ll go over there.” They’re not human minds the way we are because we have language. But it was really important to recognize pattern recognition as a non-cognitive device — which could be wrong — which we share with all animals. It was ingenious of Epicurus to see this. But what offended most people was that we are supposed to be different from the animals — we’re Adam, we name the animals, we’re in charge of them. When people started working in primate research, this caused problems because primates could do lots of things humans can do. I wrote a paper once about a parrot that could use language in my Epicurean semantics paper.
I wrote about neurodiversity too — people on the autism spectrum are different because their neural structures are different. So instead of trying to say “why aren’t they like us,” the question is to try to understand who they are and how they are that way. And that means that even within humanity, within any one primate species, everything is different. The Epicureans hit on that. Pattern recognition has been an important device for refiguring what it is to have a mind, and it thereby liberates us to think of dolphins, orcas, primates, dogs, bees, even nematodes as having the ability to do this — or snails, which some of my colleagues work on — in a way that takes us out of our anthropomorphism.
It has been extremely frustrating when I first came out of graduate school to have people say “well, that doesn’t make sense, Epicureans are sort of fools or didn’t know what they were doing.” Occasionally someone with the great leaders of my field working on Epicurus were not materialists or didn’t understand philosophical materialism as I had, because I was lucky enough to have teachers like Richard Rorty teaching me this. But I sensed the controversies that Epicurus himself faced — why he went to his garden — because he was running against the whole tradition of Roman and Athenian philosophy. There was nothing like it.
I’ll mention too — in the 17th century, Gassendi, who’s a Catholic bishop and also a devoted Catholic, starts reading Epicurus and Lucretius — Lucretius was a forbidden writer — and starts dismantling Aristotelianism with the wisdom of a completely material world, a world where there’s no spirit of life like the pneuma that the Stoics and Aristotle seized upon. Then Boyle comes around and starts doing his corpuscular hypotheses about the nature of reality — that avoided him from being in danger for heresy. Epicureanism makes it into England through translations which are largely represented as someone else’s new view, to protect them. And so mechanical views of nature start developing. But there was always this resistance, until the late half of the 20th century, for a thoroughgoing materialism.
Cassius:
That’s great. This is going to be extremely challenging because everything you’ve just said would lead us off into an hour-long discussion of the many fascinating topics you’ve just mentioned. Let me ask: we found out about you because of your articles on Epicurean prolepsis and Epicurean thought, and we have a lot of listeners who are relatively new to Epicurus, new to philosophy in general, and they don’t understand the larger picture of where prolepsis fits into Epicurean philosophy. In other words, we talk about Epicurus’s so-called canon of truth and we say it has three legs — the five senses (everybody understands that), the feeling of pleasure and pain (everybody understands that) — and then we say the third leg is the prolepsis or anticipations, and we get a blank stare because nobody has a real understanding of what that meant as a test of truth. If we could backtrack: can you help us go back and look at what problem was Epicurus trying to solve in coming up with prolepsis? And of course we read different articles from different people and everybody’s got a different opinion about what prolepsis means. Your explanation interests me far more than anyone else’s, because as you’ve said, you’re not going with the Stoic flow in terms of seeing the conceptualization process as all there is to prolepsis. So could you help us, at a sort of introductory level — what was Epicurus doing in regard to this canon of truth and how does prolepsis fit into it?
David Glidden:
Great topic. Let’s say you’re a materialist. You think all that exists are atoms in motion in the void. You’re a combination of atoms. Things are affecting your body through your senses, eyes, and so forth. How do you then gain understanding of what’s happening to you? The first way you’d go about doing this — you wouldn’t be interested in the psychology of ideas. You’d be interested in physiology. Now Epicurus borrowed heavily from Aristotle, who was also interested in the physiology of perception and how senses affect the body. Aristotle made mistakes — for instance, he thought the lens of the eyeball was a stopper to keep the vitreous liquid from flowing out, he didn’t know about lenses. But what he did know was that particles, waves of light, hit the eye like a pebble in a pond, and that pond then repeats that rhythm in the vitreous liquid of the eye, which then produces a pattern against the retina, which produces the sensation of seeing color. And that was a completely physiological account of how perception works, independent of the ideas we have that we “see through language.” Epicurus ran with that.
So Epicurus is primarily interested in the physiology — and this comes through in Lucretius especially — of how, if the outside world is bombarding us, we can then respond to it and live and survive. So how is it that we know what’s happening outside of us? He argued that our senses will never lie to us. Now in philosophy that’s called “direct realism.” But what he meant by it is that there’s a causal mechanism which methodically hits us in such a way that what we experience is true to that causal mechanism. That’s why we see things strangely at a distance: the pixelization of light — which we now know because of computers, but people who worked with lenses knew earlier — causes us to see a tower as round at a distance. When the sun is going down, gradually it seems to change shape because of the effect of the light on us. What’s happening is what we’re seeing is true to the cause. The cause may not be the way we’re conceiving it to be, but it’s an attempt to explain the physiology of perception.
Now, the trouble for Aristotle — and later for Descartes — was: is there then a little homunculus, a little person in the mind translating those impulses and saying “you’re looking at an elephant”? That’s essentially what Descartes does. In his original works, his Discourse on Method is an introduction to a book on optics — Descartes was interested in the physiology of perception, like Aristotle. But at one point, Descartes says: “and then we get to human minds, which then interpret what’s happening.”
What made Epicurus interested in perception and the truth of perceptions was his interest in the causation of sensory effects on our body from information from the outside — information meaning data, not interpreted. Pattern recognition is to grasp something in anticipation of what the rest is going to be. We couldn’t survive as animals if we couldn’t do that. But we can also make mistakes.
So our feelings — pathē in Greek, meaning what you are undergoing — and our perceptions through our perceptual organs — what’s happening to us via those organs — they’re always going to be true to their cause. But prolepses are guesses made by the sensory organism about what’s going to happen next. And as a consequence, they can be wrong. So this was an entirely neat, coherent theory of how a physiology of perception works, with the important innovation that we have to act on limited information. And so we anticipate — through experience, through many times being exposed to seeing dogs — that that’s a dog and not a coyote. So I’m going to go over and try and pet it, which I wouldn’t do with a coyote.
You could see how this, to the Stoic world, got quickly turned around into a Platonic idea system — a little interpreter in the mind looking at all this stuff and coming up with a mental analysis. For them, the prolepses became concepts of kinds, natural kinds, the way Aristotle or Plato had developed. I’ll mention — when Disneyland started, there was a Disney program every Sunday night, and they had a film about the mind, where a person sat in a room inside the human brain, answering phones, getting all this information and then responding. That was the faulty, or misleadingly simplified, view of the human mind that dominated from Plato onwards, with the exception of the Epicureans. So the Epicureans were offering a different kind of alternative, borrowed with a great deal of vocabulary from Aristotle’s account of the physiology of perception.
A bunch of us on the West Coast were working on Aristotle’s theory of perception for several years out of a Stanford-Berkeley seminar. I wrote it up and went to an East Coast seminar, and people were horrified about what we were doing on the West Coast — we were talking about the physiology of perception rather than ideas. There’s an enormous gap when people have to move from thinking about the mind and its ideas to thinking about the neurology of pattern recognition, why animals behave the way they do, why neuroatypical people behave the way they do. It’s not surprising that prolepsis got reinterpreted in different ways.
But otherwise, it’s a very simple thing: animals have senses bombarding them, they’re responding to those senses, they need to get a thorough understanding — is that a snake or a stick? But if they wait and get too close to a rattlesnake, that’ll be the last recognition they’ll have. And so prolepsis is an ability to recognize patterns. Fish do this all the time, and you fool them with bait — a shiny metal lure works, even though it’s not a fish at all. But they make mistakes.
So the thing to bear in mind about Epicurean criteria is that the senses are reliable. The pathē, what is physically affecting our feelings, is reliable. And then they also talk about the atomic images we receive in our brain — they’re true to their causes from the outside. But the prolepses, although part of our criteria, are not criteria of truth; they’re criteria of tentative guesswork about the world — only it’s not intellectual guesswork, it’s anticipating, for instance, what the person is going to say next. I mentioned that I sometimes speak slowly and stutter, so people were always trying to complete what I said when I was little. And as you get older, you read newspapers and see a few letters and think it means a different word than it is — your brain starts making errors of pattern recognition the way it wouldn’t have earlier, because your attentiveness is decreasing.
Cassius:
Thank you. Now — one thing people read in Diogenes Laertius is that Epicurus rejected dialectical logic, and there seems to be a controversy between Epicurus and the Platonists — made even worse by the Stoics — about the role of logic. We try to be very careful in our discussions because Epicurus says reason is a very important thing for living life properly as well. But people get confused: how can Epicurus endorse reason but reject dialectical logic? Can you help our listeners get a general grasp of what that controversy is all about?
David Glidden:
Good question. At the time of Epicurus, Aristotle developed his form of logic. The Stoics developed propositional logic. Plato had emphasized the importance of dialectical reasoning, but he did not formalize it the way Aristotle did. And these are attempts to analyze all speech for its reasonability. Why would the Epicureans oppose it? Well, in part the Epicureans were more oriented around the senses, and being oriented around the senses, they’re not so interested in elaborate mental constructs. So they have a sort of initial prejudice: just get the data, find out what the senses are telling you, and you’ll be content with life — rather than spend your time analyzing sentences instead of the senses, and try to see how they follow from each other. That, I thought, was the initial reason.
But then I started working on Epicurean semantics and Epicurean theory of language — and you see some references in the literature about this. Epicurus suggests that different peoples have different ways of using words. Now, in Plato, there’s a kind of “language of thought” from which all other languages are translated. For Epicurus, he’s what you might call a multiculturalist. He’s living in a world with all these different languages — Greek merchants would understand more languages than intellectuals — and Latin is coming in, and there are dozens of other languages. And Epicurus argued that words are defined through the habits of tribes and cultures — through the ethnae, the customs — and so they’re going to be different ways of talking, and when you get different ways of talking, you’re going to get different ways of analyzing what’s being said, because the language terms are going to be different.
So I began to appreciate Epicurean semantics. One problem with human beings, from an anthropological standpoint, is that we approach the world with empty beliefs — beliefs which go beyond what our senses confirm. And we have different ways of expressing these beliefs in different natural languages, so it’s hard for us to communicate with each other — like the Tower of Babel. And I think for the Epicureans, just trying to understand what someone was saying in a different natural language was enough of a challenge, rather than attempting to formalize all of those things in a common analysis. Because the common analysis assumes there’s an original language of thought from which all languages are translated, so that you and I can think the same thought even though we speak different languages. And the Epicureans didn’t believe that. They saw language as an anthropological phenomenon, producing all sorts of wild beliefs that all of us have by exceeding what our senses present us with.
Epicurus uses his words in unusual ways — writing a couple of hundred years after Plato, it would be as if you’re trying to use 21st-century language to understand 17th-century language. Words change their meanings. And the Stoics after him then used words differently as well, in part by going back to earlier usages that Plato had done. Logic was designed to produce a logically perfect language where we’d have complete clarity about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it regardless of language. And it’s a human condition that that won’t happen — we never have complete clarity as we go from one natural language to another.
When I studied in Germany, people were studying Frege and they were saying that the American Frege is different from the German Frege — American scholars using English were translating German words in a different way than Frege was actually writing in German. And so Epicurus fed into this notion of anthropological diversity — different languages, different patterns of speaking. Yes, logic can help with any one natural language if you look for fallacies or faulty reasoning. But logic is a nice thing you can do with a controlled natural language where all the terms are fully known, and we don’t have natural languages like that. So I think that’s why he found it a waste of time. But to even say that would be the hugest offense to Stoics and Aristotle, because they thought Greek was the only language for philosophy.
The philosopher Herder at the end of the 18th century began to think that we don’t have a language of thought — we just have language. And so our language varies from culture to culture. It’s hard for us to understand each other because we basically understand things by trying to estimate what something means in our own language, not the language of birth.
Don:
I find that explanation about the different languages fascinating. Whenever I try to translate anything from ancient Greek, I’ll always give at least two or three words in English to try to get the nuances across to people, because there are so many Greek words that have multiple meanings or multiple nuances that just don’t come out if you pick one single English word.
David Glidden:
I hope you’ve not been overburdened reading some of my articles, because you see there’s a lot of Greek in those. I didn’t buy into translating as adequate — I got that lesson from a wonderful Greek teacher of mine at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, who told me that all translation is mistaken, because you have to enter into the other mind. That makes a real challenge when dealing with ancient Greek and Latin of that era. The Greek was dynamic; its words kept changing, like English does too. And then there’s the illusion that a Google translator will give you a perfect understanding of other words. My children are Chinese, and their ability to tell me which tones make a big difference entirely in what you’re saying — and I’m tone deaf — so I could say “I want to go to the bathroom” and say something else entirely.
Cassius:
I did want to get your take on one thing: whenever we talk about pattern recognition and the differences between dogs and coyotes and square towers and round towers, I can wrap my brain around that. But one of the things that comes into my mind, and that some people on the forum have discussed, is whenever we start talking about a prolepsis of the gods or a prolepsis of justice. How do you see that — how can you have prolepses of those sorts of conceptual things as opposed to physical items in the real world?
David Glidden:
Well, Epicurus is in an awkward position. He doesn’t really acknowledge the standard gods of Olympus, but he does acknowledge that we have dreams. And one way to go with dreams is that they are thoughts we have which are being recombined all the time — entirely internal. But Epicurus is living in a world where people would have what they took as divination — unusual dreams which would come and strike them as if a god was communicating with them. So Epicurus wanted to respond to that as a phenomenon. He wanted to acknowledge that there seems to be evidence of something hitting us from the outside. So he gave an analysis: he wanted to say — yes, these experiences are probably because there are these groups of atoms, which we call gods, sending off effluences. And at night, all your senses shut down — they strike you in your brain. And so you say, “Zeus tells me to sacrifice,” or “I should come with gold to the temple of Apollo at Delphi.” He was trying to explain a cultural phenomenon.
The bad view of that would be that there’s an ability of the mind to understand the world directly in concepts, independent of senses. That would be totally unacceptable for Epicurus, although many people wanted to see Epicurus as giving in to this conceptual recognition. Gassendi, in some of his interpretations of Epicurus, tries to introduce concepts as well as prolepses to provide a kind of Stoic avenue for mental ideas — because Gassendi was still torn between a mechanistic view and a Christian or Platonic view. I once had a wonderful first edition of Lucretius by Lambinus, which I finally gave away to the Huntington Library. And it was wonderful to read Lambinus trying to deal with Lucretius in a Stoic and Christian world — he says clearly these are fantasia, ideas, because they wanted to admire Epicurus and make him look not like a fool, and they didn’t want to get accused of heresy. So they try to twist these things back into a Stoic notion of prolepsis as concepts.
The problem is you can’t have both. You can’t have patterns which are non-cognitive versus patterns which are conceptual. If you have patterns which are conceptual, you’re going to have to say all animals are unable to respond to patterns, since they lack language. If you’re going to have non-cognitive patterns, you’re going to have to say that even human beings, at the level of pre-linguistic recognition, are operating before any word is attached to them. And so this is a dilemma — you could see how people went one way or the other on it. But my interpretation was that for Epicurus it was fallible pattern recognition, whereas for most everybody the Stoic interpretation of prolepsis showed that Epicurus was inconsistent, that he wasn’t a thoroughgoing mechanist. Because until really the end of the 20th century, a thoroughgoing mechanism was considered impossible nonsense.
If you ever want to read something really fun, get Mark Twain’s essay What is Man? — which is a mechanical account of human nature based on evolutions from Epicureanism by 18th-century philosophers in France. He meant it seriously. It’s a dialogue he wrote, and you can get it as part of a collection of essays called What is Man? off Amazon. It’s worth reading because it’ll give you a flavor for an Epicurean kind of solution at the beginning of the 20th century — 1906, by Mark Twain.
Cassius:
We will definitely be finding a link to that for the show notes for this one. David, I have a feeling that what you’ve just been saying is so fascinating that we better hit it as hard as we possibly can. And I’m almost restating what I asked you before: one of the Principal Doctrines says that the wise man is going to conduct his life through reason. And yet what I’ve just heard you saying almost sounds to me like Epicurus was rejecting concepts or conceptual reasoning or conceptual logic. Can you explain that just a little bit further?
David Glidden:
Well, two things. First, Diogenes Laertius is not a good historian of philosophy, and some of the passages he used were recopied by copyists who were trying to constantly correct Epicurus — to make him more compatible with the conceptualism of Plato, the Stoics, and Aristotle, because they liked Epicurus and wanted to make him look good.
At the same time, Epicurus wanted us to use our reason and use our minds — but what he meant by that was not to have empty beliefs, or kenai doxai — empty utterances which don’t connect to reality. He’s constantly worried about the shibboleth of philosophy — as if there’s something to be feared about the gods in particular, that if I don’t make proper worship of Zeus I will be punished, and I should have fear about the future. And the Buddhists say, don’t fear the future because it’s not the present. Epicurus is saying pretty much the same thing. But we use our minds, and our concepts are precipitates in thought of the words we use. Try to think without words at all — you can’t do it. Epicurus figured this out. But he wanted us to sort out that the vast majority of our beliefs are false and empty.
People believed in all sorts of things — the misery of the gods, so many gods in ancient Greece and Rome — so many of them had to be worshipped, and if something happened to you, you had offended a god, and then you had to be punished for it. The anxiety level must have been enormous. And then there are diseases, wars, you can be made a slave any day if an army comes in. Life was not pleasant in ancient Greece and Rome. Lucretius really savors this beautifully in his anthropological books — Books 5 and 6 — about what life is like. Life is miserable, it’s suffering. So how are you going to find peace of mind? Well, you form a community of friends who think alike, who recognize a mechanical world. You grow your own food, you don’t eat elaborate meals, you eat cheese, you befriend one another, care for one another as the world’s falling apart. And if you do that, you can find some peace of mind. Then when you’re dying and suffering — and people of my age know this very well — you have memories to go back to of being loved and loving others, of peace of mind, of happiness, and this will soothe your atoms and calm your soul.
Cassius:
It seems important to me, David, to recognize that for Epicurus, this world that has suffering in it also applies to animals. Lucretius has a beautiful and very moving passage in his second book about a cow, a mother cow, whose calf has been sacrificed at an altar. And she has all the appearances of being worried and anxious and frankly miserable for the loss of her calf. She goes to the pasture, she goes to the woods looking for her child. She goes to the stall where her child slept, doesn’t find the calf there. Even seeing the calves of other cows does nothing to ameliorate her grief.
Joshua:
So it connects with something that is perhaps the most engaging thing for me in reading your papers — this idea that the distinctions between humans and other animals, and between humans and other humans, do exist. But they’re not so great that we can’t recognize similar patterns in the way that they approach the world as to the way that we approach the world. That’s my favorite part of everything I’ve read in what you had to say, and it’s reflected here in Book 2 of Lucretius.
David Glidden:
Well, Josh, it’s a favorite passage of mine, and that’s why I really love Lucretius. He also has some consolation — the famous passage of consolation, at least to me — was that at the sound of mourning as people cry as a loved one dies, there are other sounds of babies crying as they’re born. And so life goes on — not our lives, but life goes on. And I think there are parts of Lucretius where he’s sort of like a misanthrope, but he captures compassion, because if we suffer, we know that other animals suffer too and other human beings do. And we want them not to suffer as well. That’s our only message: don’t suffer. And we can only do that in a limited way because the world is out of control for Epicurus. So he goes off into the countryside, into his gardens and these different Epicurean communities — like Diogenes of Oinoanda and his community. They were just trying to find a way of living without pain, without suffering, and knowing how to compensate for that. And that means we don’t want to take pleasure at someone else’s painful expense; we’re compassionate. And that means — which was totally off the wall for most of the ancients — we’re compassionate toward animals, we’re compassionate toward slaves, we’re compassionate to those who are oppressed.
How do we deal with the suffering that exists? For some people: we hope there’ll be another world to go to. The Hindu versions of Buddhism have that, but the classical Buddhism didn’t. And in early Christianity, the view was that Jesus had been resurrected, but it wasn’t commonly held that we all would be. But it was a hope that there’d be another world which would be better than the one we’re suffering in, and that quickly entered into Christian thought. One of my favorite poems captures this — a Middle English poem, a lullaby a mother would sing to her child: “Lully, lullay, lully lullay — with sorrow comes he in this world, and with sorrow there shall go.” The idea was: there’s got to be some other place where we’ll find happiness, freedom from pain. And for the Epicureans, honestly, there isn’t. So you have to find it now, and you have to be compassionate to everyone that you can be.
Don:
He says too that you will sometimes have to choose a particular pain to get a more pleasurable life in the end. But what you’re saying about suffering is absolutely right, because he says that there might be pain, but you don’t necessarily have to have the anxiety and the stress that goes along with it. You may suffer something, but you don’t have to be stressed about it.
David Glidden:
Right — I have to go to the dentist! In fact, one of my students, oddly enough, took Epicurus from me, then became a psychologist and a therapist. She works with people fearing dental pain. A lot of the pains that we fear are made worse. Physical pain — you break your leg, it really hurts. But we human beings make it worse by dwelling on it, fearing it. One of my favorite philosophers is Montaigne. But Montaigne lived a lot of his life afraid that he would get kidney stones, because his father did. And sure enough, he gets kidney stones. And then he realizes he’d spent more time worrying about it. It’s terribly painful. But he made it so much worse by worrying about it for thirty years before it happened.
Cassius:
Speaking of concern — I want to be concerned about David’s time today. Let me ask one more question that I had really high on the list. When we talk about prolepsis and pattern recognition, we often get the question: to what extent is this pattern recognition inherited? Are we born with the ability to recognize any particular patterns? Or is it all developed after we are born?
David Glidden:
Well, it’s again the two versions. For one version, pattern recognition is a kind of behavioral, neurologically learned ability to anticipate the next thing. For the other, it’s a concept or primary idea. Take the example of a spider in a web. The spider knows when wind is stirring the web — it won’t go out from its central haven to go for a wild wind chase. But when a fly is in the web, it will quickly go out, stun the fly, spin it up, and bring it back. So spiders are able to anticipate which patterns. They’re also able by nature to form webs. How they learn to do this is a combination of what their neurological structure is made of — a little bit of their genetic structure — and then their ability to learn how to use it in nature. But those go together and take different forms in different species.
For human beings — because we’re language users — we sometimes have two kinds of recognitions going on: the neurological pattern recognition, and then the conceptual classification system. They work sometimes in tandem — ideally — but they often don’t, because the concepts are malformed. That confuses us about how to act.
Do you see the spider’s web building or the beaver’s dam building as being related to the prolepsis mechanism?
Don:
Yes — I do think there has to be certain anticipation of what to do next in those cases.
David Glidden:
Right. And the pattern recognitions are not “true” for the Epicureans. They’re reliable, but they can be false. The senses are always true to their cause for the Epicureans. But prolepsis involves the senses getting partial information and projecting what’s going to happen next. Not intellectually, but almost neurologically.
Do I see a genetic transmission of pattern recognition from one generation to another, as with spiders and webs? I think there have to be such structures in human brains as well as other animal brains, and they will vary. What makes human beings especially challenging is that in addition to pattern recognitions which are neurological, we also have conceptual recognitions put on top of them. I once gave a paper in Italy about a case — a woman in the news whose fundamentalist family had kept her confined to her room. She was finally liberated and various neurologists tried to work with her. She knew very little language and had limited experience of the world. They eventually got her to use words the way parrots can — but they never got her to use concepts conceptually. Her brain was too damaged at that point. And parallel to that, there were also neurological limitations — she couldn’t see clearly beyond a certain distance — which is parallel with people who were blind at birth and acquire sight later on, whose ability to see certain patterns is limited because the neurological parts of the brain had to develop and were too late to develop them.
So there’s neurological development which happens when you’re born and as you grow, and that’s true of all animals — probably in insects too. Those patterns get more sophisticated as you learn. Bees are interesting because they have certain patterns they respond to, but they have to learn the dance as it were from the hive. So gradually there’s social interaction that helps articulate or develop these skills. So prolepses can be improved by socialization — in bees, animals, and humans — and prolepses can be developed or inhibited by social deprivation.
Cassius:
Okay, we cannot conclude without asking your view of what Velleius says about everyone being born with a prolepsis of divinity or the gods in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. How do you interpret that — and are those images flowing from us to the gods, or from the gods to us?
David Glidden:
Well, I think for Epicurus this was mechanical and explains certain phenomena we have. People lived in an age where they had unusual dreams. We’ve all had unusual dreams, and it seems so vivid that something’s coming from the outside telling you this. We hear a voice, we see something. This is part of the way our brain works, especially if it’s in between sleeping and waking. So for the Epicureans, this is neurological patterns of atoms — patterned atoms in space hitting us and our responding to them.
For the time Cicero was living, prolepsis is often confused with a Stoic concept. Cicero is usually pretty good about that, but every now and then he cheats — he takes a Stoic interpretation of Epicurus in order to put Epicurus down, and I’ve caught him doing that a few times. For the Stoics and people like them living at the time of Cicero, with prolepsis in the common vocabulary, we’re going to see everyone has a concept of the gods — meaning a conceptual understanding of the gods — anthropologically for Epicurus.
Xenophanes once said — the Greek pre-Socratic — that if the cows had gods, the gods would look like cows. So Lucretius understands that, and Epicurus understood the anthropology of why we select the gods we do. Except the mistake we make is we think that those ancient Olympians care about us, which they don’t — we’re just getting random broadcasts, as it were, from them.
Now, you have to be careful reading this because our natural tendency is to think of cognitive patterns. And we have to acknowledge that yes, cognitive patterns exist — but for Epicurus, cognitive patterns are what language does: class terms, “horse, dog, fish.” But we also have pattern recognition of “horse, dog, fish” which doesn’t involve words and concepts. Socializing of creatures makes it more complicated — we’re social animals, like ants and bees and pods of whales. And they may actually develop enough language to produce what we would call linguistic pattern recognition. There are rumors that certain pods of orcas can recognize an enemy and produce a sound that communicates “enemy” to members of their pod who speak the same language — but that wouldn’t be understandable to a shark. So the two can easily get confused.
Joshua:
I will say one of the things I find really interesting from what you’ve been saying, David, is that when it comes to the canon — the famous statement that “all sensations are true” — I sort of blend that in with the prolepsis. But I think it’s really important what you’ve been saying: while sensations are true to their cause, the prolepsis is not necessarily infallible. I think just that single point has been very helpful for me to wrap my brain around.
David Glidden:
Yes — Epicurus in a reliable source does not say that all prolepses are true. It’s been misinterpreted that way. The images that affect us from the outside — they’re true to the cause. That’s a physiological claim. Prolepses involve the senses getting partial information and then projecting what’s going to happen next — not intellectually, but almost neurologically. And it was important to figure that out.
Cassius:
One more thing, since you did a really wonderful job of talking about the prolepsis of the gods a little while ago — I wonder if you would address the idea that we can have a prolepsis of justice or of fair play. If you have a sort of a way that pattern recognition and justice can be seen as related, that we have a prolepsis of that?
David Glidden:
Yes. If you have pets and you give one pet some treats and don’t give them to the other, the pet that’s not getting those treats feels mistreated. Now that’s a prolepsis of equality — justice in Greece often meant equality, dikaiosynē — balanced, everything balanced. And so you can have a notion of justice learned phenomenologically from seeing creatures treated differently in animal groups. Some animals are treated better than others in a group, and that produces irritation in the animals being treated less well. Chimpanzee colonies, primate colonies — treat them all well or some bad response will happen. So I think there can be a prolepsis of natural justice. But it’s a mistake to think of it as already being a theory of justice — I don’t think that’s what it means.
The prolepsis of human experience is that we know what war is, and we know what injustice is, and we know what cruelty is — and we know this both viscerally and also linguistically. And there are cases where we know it viscerally but try to talk ourselves out of it intellectually. Our various bones and sinews know that something is cruel — when our whole body knows that that’s what it is.
Cassius:
Well put. Well, thank you very much for that. Now I’ve enjoyed speaking with you. I hope I haven’t worn out our welcome totally with you today.
David Glidden:
I hope I haven’t talked too much and I hope I haven’t digressed too much. Do get a copy of Mark Twain’s What is Man? — you’ll enjoy that. And if you’re interested in the problem of language and translation, there’s a great philosophy book to read by Willard Van Orman Quine, written in 1960, called Word and Object, in which he talks about the untranslatability of languages across natural languages. It’ll show you the sort of thing I think Epicurus was thinking about. Thank you for forming this group. I wish you well, and thank you for being interested in work I wrote forty years ago and making me feel younger than I am.
Cassius:
David, thank you again for joining us on this. We’re going to get it out on the internet for the benefit of people coming along in the future who hopefully can learn something from you. It’s such a challenging and confusing subject. Thank you for all of your time today, and we hope to continue to be in touch with you. If there’s ever anything we can do for you, please let us know.
David Glidden:
Thank you. I think it’s admirable you have this group, and may you prosper — as they say.
Cassius:
Okay, all right. Thank you very much again, Dr. Glidden, for all of your assistance, and we’ll be back soon for another episode of Lucretius Today. Thank you very much.