Episode 171 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 24 - Chapter 11 - Soul, Sensation, and Mind 01
Date: 04/27/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3026-episode-171-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-24-chapter-11-soul-sensation-and-mi/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 171 opens Chapter 11, “Soul, Sensation, and Mind,” with a brief acknowledgment of Don’s recent paper and short video on the location of the Garden of Epicurus in Athens — which was on the Dipylon Road, actually closer to the center of Athens than Plato’s Academy, and accessible to all Athenian citizens. The lathē biōsas (“live unknown”) injunction, attributed to Epicurus by Plutarch, is revisited: there are no known hermit Epicureans; every documented Epicurean participated in some form in society. The transition from Chapter 10 is framed: having established that humans have some degree of agency, Chapter 11 asks what the “we” is — what is the soul, sensation, and mind? DeWitt opens by noting that Epicurean conclusions about the soul must be reached through deductive reasoning from observable facts, since the soul cannot be directly sensed. Everything is atoms or void; void has no properties; therefore the soul is also composed of atoms. Don draws on David Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom to identify the “unnamed” fourth element of the soul in Lucretius with the Greek verb dididōmi (transmitting/distributing motions through the body) — not an opening to the supernatural, but a particularly fine and mobile set of atoms. Cassius emphasizes that nothing in Epicurean philosophy should be read as opening the door to non-material soul elements. The second subdivision, “Body as a Vessel,” uses Lucretius Book 6’s opening metaphor of the corrupted vessel. Don objects to the vessel metaphor as potentially introducing Cartesian dualism — better to think of body and soul as systēma (Epicurus’s own word in Diogenes Laertius 10.66): an integrated system, not a container and its contents, like sand mixed into clay rather than water in a jar. The section is enlivened by Joshua’s account of Dante’s Inferno, where Epicureans occupy the sixth circle of heresy in lidless coffins: at Judgment Day the lids will close, and Epicureans will spend eternity experiencing nothing — trapped body and soul together — as punishment for claiming the soul dies with the body. In “Co-Sensitivity of Soul and Body,” Don identifies Epicurus’s term systēma and notes DeWitt’s observation that Epicurus differed from Democritus in positing fewer soul atoms relative to body atoms (rather than alternating), leading Don to propose the “scaffolding” image: the body as scaffolding for soul atoms to move between. Joshua discusses why the ancients located reason in the chest rather than the brain — the visceral experience of emotion in the chest and abdomen is more palpable than any felt activity in the brain — and notes that the Alexandrian physicians’ vivisection experiments eventually correctly identified the brain. In “Rational and Irrational Soul,” Cassius reads DeWitt’s key point from p. 203: “Every argument for the mortality of the soul is an argument for the mortality of the mind; it’s inconceivable to think of an incorporeal rational soul as Plato and Aristotle did.” Don surveys the Greek and Latin vocabulary: psychē (ψυχή) covers both “soul” and “mind”; Lucretius uses anima (the life-giving principle shared by all living beings) and animus (the rational part with will and drive) in distinct but sometimes interchangeable ways. The “Workings of Sensation” section establishes that Epicurus wrote On Touch as the foundational account of how sensation works — all sensation is atoms impinging on atoms. The summary of vision and hearing: “the stream of images (eidōla) discharged at high velocity by the external object impinges on the eye causing a pressure; this in turn acts as a stimulus recognized by the intelligence, which itself consists of the most mobile and sensitive atoms.” Don recalls Dr. Glidden’s key point from the earlier interview: “all sensations are true to their cause” — there is an external reality that touches us; it does not mean sensations are infallible reports of the thing itself. In “Mind as a Super Sense,” DeWitt explains that the mind can receive fine-particle images (eidōla) directly, not only through the five senses — which is how we form ideas of the gods and how memory and dreams operate. The danger is that when the regular senses are most at rest (as in sleep), the mind generates centaurs and other false composite images unchecked. “Emotional Impulses” and “Motor Impulses” follow: emotions begin in the breast where the finest atoms are concentrated and communicate themselves outward to blood, flesh, and bones. For motor impulses, Cassius reads DeWitt’s striking point that even an act of volition requires an external cause — the mind must first receive an image of itself performing the action before it can initiate it. Cassius notes this creates an infinite regress of patterns; Joshua adds the evidence of feral children — raised among animals and unable to walk upright or use language, because every action is patterned on what is observed. The chapter summary section addresses DeWitt’s use of “psychosomatic” to describe the unity of body and soul — Don objects that the word carries universally negative connotations in modern English, though DeWitt uses it simply to mean body-mind unity. Joshua’s tangent on Alexandria connects the discussion to the “Street of the Soma” (where Alexander’s body/sarcophagus was kept by Ptolemy as the city’s crown jewel) alongside the Library, representing the body and mind of the city respectively. On p. 212, Cassius asks Don about the epibolai tēs dianoias (“fantastic perceptions of the intelligence”) — the fourth potential leg of the canon — and Don reviews the debate: some connect it closely to prolepsis (pattern recognition); some argue it was an earlier concept Epicurus later expanded into prolepsis; DeWitt’s own view is that these perceptions do not rank as criteria because they are not subject to correction by the conscious rational mind. The “witnesses and judge” analogy is discussed: sensations, anticipations, and feelings are witnesses that merely register stimulus; the rational mind is the judge who synthesizes them into verdicts. Cassius reads Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Peter Carr: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” Don adds the modern observation that “we are not thinking beings who feel — humans are feeling beings who on occasion think,” which Cassius endorses as directly aligned with Epicurus’s own approach. The chapter closes with DeWitt’s point that while Gassendi derived from Epicurus the doctrine “there is nothing in the intellect which has not been in the senses,” leading to John Locke and modern empiricism, Epicurus himself was not an empiricist but an intuitionist: his description of the infant mind was “not a blank tablet but already laced with the faint outlines of ideas that should gradually acquire definition in pace with experience, instruction, and reflection.” Next week: Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism” — the practical application of pleasure that the previous eleven chapters have been building toward.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius: Welcome to Episode 171 of Lucretius Today. We are now starting a new chapter in our progression through the book — Chapter 11, entitled “Soul, Sensation, and Mind.” But before we get into that, we have with us Don, who’s one of our regular podcasters, and we wanted to remark that Don has recently produced a discussion and a short video which we’ve posted to YouTube of the location of the Garden of Epicurus in Athens.
Don: I’ll just say that I’m glad that everybody seems to have enjoyed the paper and the short presentation I did, and I look forward to hearing everybody’s feedback on it as well. It’s a work in progress and always able to be fine-tuned.
Cassius: Thanks for all that work, Don. Because what we’re trying to do with EpicureanFriends.com and the time that we spend together talking about Epicurus is not just scholarship for the sake of scholarship, but looking at facts from the ancient world — things that aren’t talked about a lot — to see what they might mean for the way we apply Epicurean philosophy. It’s certainly one of the major controversies within the Epicurean world as to how much engagement with the rest of society Epicurus was advocating. Some people get this impression that Epicurean communities were set apart almost like hermits or monks in some secluded regions. But when you really dive into the facts of where the Garden of Epicurus was, it was actually closer to the center of Athens than was Plato’s Academy, and there’s no reason to think that it was something that the citizens of Athens during that time would have had any trouble getting to or participating in at all. I always come back to the fact that Diogenes of Oinoanda posted the giant wall in the middle of the marketplace in the public stoa. So those two words of lathē biōsas — “live unknown” — have been blown all out of proportion, I believe. And they come from Plutarch, if I’m not mistaken, without a lot of context other than just general criticism that Plutarch had about Epicurus in terms of suggesting that people not participate in politics, which was a problem for Plutarch. But frankly, when you start listing major Epicureans through history — whether it’s Atticus, Diogenes of Oinoanda, or Philodemus, almost anybody — there’s no example of a hermit Epicurean, no example of anybody going off into the mountains and living by themselves. Every one of the Epicureans we know about participated in society.
Don: Exactly. Well put.
Cassius: So getting back to today’s episode, Chapter 11. We’ve just finished a discussion of the new freedom, which introduces the topic that Epicurus was an opponent of what we might consider today to be hard determinism. And so we’re moving now into a chapter of — okay, if we are not totally determined, and we have some amount of agency over what we do, what’s the “we” in that sentence? Soul, sensation, and mind. Epicurus doesn’t give a tremendous amount of detail. He’s not a doctor, he’s not attempting to dissect people and look at nerves or anything like that. But he does have a significant amount to say about the way this phenomenon — that we variously call the soul, or the mind, or the intelligence, or to some extent even sensation itself — this faculty of awareness that we have — where does it come from, and what do we know about how it operates, and what conclusions can we draw from that about how best to live? DeWitt starts out Chapter 11 by making the point primarily that, as with the fundamentals of physics, these fundamentals of psychology are derived from observation of things that are seen, but using deductive reasoning from those facts to make conclusions or reach opinions about things that are not seen. We don’t see the soul, we don’t have the ability to touch the soul, and yet we have this idea, this feeling that we do have an awareness of some kind. And DeWitt starts out the chapter by setting the stage for how this discussion has to come through deductive reasoning based on the observations of things that we do see. DeWitt makes the point that Aristotle and others had an idea that there were four elements that would have composed everything, and DeWitt says that Lucretius can be misleading here too because he talks about an unnamed atom being a key part of the soul. But the basic idea is that where everything is made up of either atoms or void, you take that to its logical conclusion — everything is either atom or void. The void we know has no ability to do anything; it has no property other than giving space to atoms to move in. And so the conclusion would be that the soul, or sensation, or mind, or whatever it is we’re talking about, is also composed of atoms.
Don: I found it interesting, whenever you mentioned the nameless element of the soul that DeWitt brings up there, that I was looking at my copy of David Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, and interestingly enough what he says about that part in Lucretius where he talks about the nameless section of the spirit transmitting motions through the body — he quotes the Latin, sensiferos motus quae prima didit per artus — and Sedley draws attention to the verb didit there, which is actually similar to the Greek word dididōmi, which is talked about as something that transmits things or moves things around. So the nameless part of the soul could very well be that part that actually moves things around within the body as fast as they do. That element is the part of the soul that keeps those atoms moving around and leads to sensation and that sort of thing. So it’s not a direct one-to-one similarity, but it’s enough that it’s like — this might actually make sense, that it’s that part of the soul that transmits motions and leads to sensation.
Cassius: I remember when I first read Lucretius and came across that section about the nameless type of atom, at least with my background there was a tendency to say, “Okay, well, now here is Lucretius opening the door for some kind of weirdness that some people will attempt to read as non-physical, non-material, potentially supernatural.” And I think to the extent that this is what DeWitt is doing — calling attention to it — I think DeWitt’s probably right that Lucretius is not intending to go in that direction and should not be read in that direction. There’s nothing in Epicurean philosophy about anything being made up of anything other than atoms and void. So whether it’s a different name, whether it’s just particularly small, particularly less weight, some particular configuration, that’s one thing. But it’s not anything that is spiritual or intended to open the door for another dimension of spirituality.
Don: Yeah, and that’s a really good point to hammer home right there. This is not some sort of spiritual supernatural thing — it’s still very much in the realm of atoms and void.
Cassius: The second subdivision of Chapter 11 is “Body as a Vessel,” and there are probably a number of references to that analogy, but the primary one is at the beginning of Book 6 of Lucretius, where he talks about the vessel being corrupted and unable to be filled, and that Epicurus showed the way to correct that condition. Really, the “body as a vessel” means that whatever the spirit is — the mind, the intelligence — is not something that has a physical ability to stand on its own. It has to be kept within the bounds of other physical objects or will dissipate. Now, that of course gets into the issue of the impossibility of there being life or consciousness after death. But at this particular point in the discussion, the main issue is just that the body constitutes what amounts to a vessel. The two are inseparable, the two are contiguous with each other — they are one organism.
Don: So that’s where I really had a problem with the whole analogy of the body as a vessel. Because it seems to me that Epicurus talks about it not as the body enclosing the spirit, but that the body and the spirit are just one thing. I sort of thought about it as more like: if you mix sand and clay, the sand is going to become part of the clay and they’re inextricably woven together. It’s not like you can take the sand out of the clay. Because as soon as you say that the body is a vessel for the spirit or the soul or whatever you want to say, you introduce that element of the possibility of the supernatural — “oh well, if the spirit is separate from the body but contained in the body, that really sets up a dangerous precedent.” And then it’s easily argued, “well, if the body is just a vessel, that spirit could live outside the body.” That whole integration is what I think Epicurus really gets at. It’s not just enclosed in the body; it’s inextricably linked with the body. And when the body dies, the spirit dissipates as well, because if one can’t exist without the other.
Cassius: It’s another dangerous issue that people who are conditioned by religion in another direction could easily be misled by. The mind is a part of the vessel just like the vessel is a part of the mind.
Don: Exactly, exactly. If you want to think of it in a biological analogy — the spirit or force of the atoms that animate the body are sort of like another — you’ve got your brain, your kidneys, and your mind, and they all have to work together to actually create a living being. That whole vessel analogy reminds me of the Gnostic Christians — the soul has to be freed from this corrupted body, and that sort of thing.
Cassius: Yeah, the important part seems to be — DeWitt quotes Epicurus as saying: “For it is impossible to think of it as experiencing sensation when not in this combination, and as being capable of these reactions when the parts that envelop and contain it — within which it is now, and which are characterized by these reactions — are no longer as they are now.” And then DeWitt closes that section by talking about Dante’s Inferno and the lidless coffins.
Joshua: Yeah, I know a little bit about it. So in Dante’s Inferno, when Virgil is leading Dante on a tour of the underworld, they come to the sixth circle, which is the circle of heresy. Most of the other classical figures — Socrates and Aristotle and Plato — they’re sort of milling around at the gates of hell, because they weren’t Christians but they were also “good pagans.” Epicurus was not, to Dante and the church he was writing for, a good pagan. So he’s in the sixth circle of hell — the circle of heresy — and because of his claim that the soul dies when the body dies and that there’s no life after death, his punishment is: they come to that scene and they see these coffins with bodies in them, but the lids are thrown off and the people in the coffins appear to be dead. And the claim made then is that at Judgment Day, the coffins will close, and then the Epicureans will all wake up — but they’ll be trapped in these coffins for all eternity, their soul and their body together trapped within the coffin.
Don: Yeah, they’ll wake up as soon as the lid closes. And this is kind of the punishment for denying that you experience anything after you die — you will have an eternity of experience of what is essentially nothing, because it’s just you trapped in a coffin forever and ever.
Joshua: Well, it sort of gives us a good perspective on what Dante and his contemporaries thought of the Epicureans. And one more thing on this body-as-a-vessel issue: most of the ancients thought that the soul resided somewhere in the chest. And of course, anyone who has had the experience of seeing inside a human chest cavity will notice there is a vessel in there — that’s what the heart is. It wasn’t until the Alexandrian physicians started doing vivisection on condemned prisoners that they actually described and noted the characteristics of the circulatory system, and it was then that they correctly identified the brain as the source of the human mind.
Cassius: Oh, that’s fascinating. The next section is entitled “Co-Sensitivity of Soul and Body,” and I believe he’s discussing there whether there are atoms of soul mixed together with the atoms of the body — kind of like what Don was mentioning earlier.
Don: Yeah, I actually wanted to check the citation there for Diogenes Laertius section 66 in Book 10, and I looked up the word that Epicurus uses whenever he talks about the whole — and it’s actually systēma, which is connected directly to our word “system.” The LSJ dictionary gives a definition of that word as “the whole compounded of several parts or members, a system.” And they even quote Aristotle and Epicurus for the meaning of “the composite whole of soul and body.” So it is a system, it’s a compounded whole, two things that are inextricably linked together. I think that’s a good way to think of it — a person is composed of soul and body, but it’s not the fact that one is a vessel for the other; it’s that they are inextricably linked.
Cassius: DeWitt points out that we learn from Lucretius that Epicurus differed from the Democriteans in how those soul atoms are arranged — Democritus apparently had taught that the atoms of soul alternated with atoms of the body, and Epicurus is indicating that there is a significantly fewer number of soul atoms than body atoms. I’m not sure what difference that makes. Does anybody have an impression on that?
Don: This might be way out of left field, but it almost sounds like the body is not so much a vessel as a kind of scaffolding for the soul atoms — they’ve got to run back and forth between.
Cassius: That’s good. Yeah, I like that. Yeah — with the scaffolding itself not having any sense of awareness or even potentially sensation. It’s just a husk.
Don: And I want to bring up what Joshua brought up about the idea of the heart. You know, when you open the chest, there is a vessel in there, and I think it makes some sort of intuitive sense to think that the rational part was in the chest — because it all goes back to where you feel emotion. The whole idea of heartbreak, and if you’re tense about something you feel a tightness in your chest, you have these visceral reactions to different emotions in that part of your body — whether it’s your chest or your abdomen, or you get an upset stomach whenever you have stage fright. But it at least makes intuitive sense. A lot of times these things are just dismissed as “oh, they thought the brain was in the chest, and they thought the sun was the size of a dime.” If you look a little bit closer, you can at least see where they’re coming from.
Joshua: Yeah, because you don’t feel activity in the brain really. Unless you have a hemorrhage or something.
Don: Yeah, good point — if it’s functioning normally, it’s processing and receiving and doing all that but it’s not getting the adrenaline rush like you get in the chest. And like you said, in the stomach, or in the sacrum — all these other emotions seem to have their seat.
Cassius: Okay. You’ve just been talking about the different parts of the body where potentially different sections of awareness can be seated, whether it’s the brain or the heart or whatever. DeWitt’s next section is entitled “Rational and Irrational Soul,” and the point here — let me just read this on page 203: “As Lucretius warns his readers, every argument for the mortality of the soul is an argument for the mortality of the mind. It is inconceivable to think of an incorporeal rational soul as Plato and Aristotle did, because the faculty of reason is only a contingent capacity of an ordered body of atoms contained within the limits of the living corporeal vessel.” I don’t know whether Plato and Aristotle were suggesting that the rational part of the soul might be different in kind or nature than the irrational part, but it sounds like Epicurus is arguing that there’s basically one type of soul.
Don: It seems to me that mostly the word that’s used for “mind” or “soul” — that should be translated as “mind” or “soul” — is psychē (ψυχή), and so that word in Greek is the one that seems to be used in the original texts, where people will variously translate it as “mind” or “soul” depending on their particular disposition and how they want to imbue that with some connotation.
Cassius: I was looking this up this morning, and it seems to me that Lucretius will use the Latin words animus and anima as two different aspects of the soul. From what I can see, they’re sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes more technically. But at its root it looks like anima is the part of the person that gives the life — the spirit, the basic underlying ability to live — and that’s shared among all living beings. Whereas animus is the part that is the rational part, that has will and drive and makes people do things over and above the fact of just living. So it looks like there’s maybe some slicing and dicing that can be done in Latin that isn’t necessarily always done in the Greek, and that’s where maybe some of the different ideas come from. And DeWitt here has previously in the book quoted Virgil when he says mens sana in corpore sano — “a sound mind and a sound body” — which DeWitt thinks is pure Epicureanism.
Cassius: I think we’re still in the context that whether we’re talking about mind, soul, intelligence, or any other type of word like that, we’re talking about what we would consider to be an emergent quality of the atoms themselves — not something that exists separately. Perhaps that is the most important issue here. No matter how we look at it, no matter how we slice and dice it, we never come up with a separate entity that is divisible from the atoms of the physical body.
Don: Definitely, yeah.
Cassius: And so the next subsection is titled “The Workings of Sensation,” and DeWitt then tackles vision and hearing. Again, the key issue is going to be that we’re attempting to articulate a theory of how everything works through material means, and that the sensations are not separate from that. There’s a physical basis for vision, there’s a physical basis for hearing, a physical basis for all of what we consider to be the five senses.
Don: I think you’re spot-on with hitting the point that everything is material. I see DeWitt brings up the fact that Epicurus wrote a book called On Touch, which is sort of the basic idea of how everything works — even sensation — that it’s atoms impinging on other atoms. And that actually kind of serves as a preface for this sentence, which I think summarizes most of what he’s talking about here: “The stream of images, or eidōla, discharged at a high velocity by the external object impinges on the eye causing a pressure; this in turn acts as a stimulus; the stimulus is recognized by the intelligence, which is itself of course of a material nature, consisting of the most mobile and sensitive of all atoms.” That’s kind of the summary of the process. And this goes back to the whole idea that all sensations are true. I think it was Dr. Glidden who talked about the idea that what it means is that all sensations are true to the fact that there’s an external reality that impinges on our sensations. So it doesn’t mean that they are true in the sense of valid in the way we sometimes think of truth — but that there’s an external reality that touches us in some way and leads to sensations from the outside world.
Cassius: True to the cause.
Don: True to the cause — thank you very much, yes. And by the way, we’re probably remiss in not mentioning those two articles from Glidden that are on the EpicureanFriends.com file base, and of course the interview we did with him. We’ll probably have to put that stuff in the show notes, because that’s going to be a much more thorough account of all of this. We’re going through this pretty quickly today.
Cassius: Exactly. And it all comes back into the prolepses and that sort of thing, so I think bringing him into the conversation here, it’ll behoove everybody to go back and review those. I think the reason too that DeWitt here is stressing vision and hearing is: as Don mentioned, Epicurus had a book On Touch — it’s pretty easy to see how tasting, touching, and smelling are going to be related to physical connections. But with hearing and especially with vision, it’s more difficult to understand how something at a long distance away from you is affecting you. DeWitt points out that Epicurus comes down on a position different both from Plato and from Democritus in terms of how vision and hearing also work — and again, the basic point is that vision and hearing also have a physical basis for them. They’re not supernatural or some other dimension.
Cassius: Probably the next subsection of significant interest is “Mind as a Super Sense.” This is part of the controversial and difficult issue of images in Epicurean philosophy, but the basic point is that Epicurus thought that to a significant degree — or maybe even totally — your thoughts are affected by stimulus from the outside, and that stimulus includes not only the five senses but also this ability to detect films, images, specters — depending on the word you like to use to discuss it. He sees the mind as able to some extent interact with reality on its own. That’s certainly not the way we would think of thinking, memory, and things like that now. But it fits directly into that whole idea of touch — that everything that we do is an impingement of the outside world on our minds and bodies, and the mind is just another receiving engine for the fine particles that come through and impinge on it. So according to Epicurus, even our memories have to do with touch, with external stimuli coming into the mind. So it’s at least logically consistent with his theory.
Joshua: Yeah. And the corollary with that idea of the mind as a super sense is that when the other senses are most at rest, the mind is most engaged with these more direct — well, actually more direct in the sense of impinging directly on the soul rather than on the eyes first — and the danger in that, or what they regarded as a danger, is that it can be misled. Because this is how we come up with ideas like centaurs. The waking mind, in command of the total experience, knows that no such thing as centaurs exists. But in dreams, the mind just generates weird images and almost storylines — stuff that isn’t real.
Cassius: Yeah, I guess you’re right — if it’s shut off from the external stimuli from the regular five senses, your mind basically has a party and generates these images. That does pose a problem, because this is also one of the ways we’re supposed to be able to know about the nature of the gods. And DeWitt said earlier in this chapter — we skipped over it — but he said that Lucretius’s seventh book, that was promised but never written, was going to be on the gods. So we’re lacking source material on this subject. But it’s this issue of the mind as the super sense that is part of how we’re supposed to know that they exist and what they’re like, and how do we take these ideas and map them onto our now better understanding of how the mind works.
Cassius: I would say there are probably through this connection that Epicurus is really looking at the physical basis of everything. I know in my own thinking about these issues, sometimes it’s just very easy to blend over into some semi-spiritual, semi-non-corporeal functioning, which I think Epicurus is rejecting in every sense. And so if you think about all the things going on in your mind and yet realize that you have to connect them with physical motions of atoms within the void, it’s very challenging — but ultimately that’s the conclusion that you draw, that everything going on in your mind does have a physical basis to it, a material basis. No matter how exotic or emotional or abstract it might seem to be as you’re experiencing it, there’s a physical basis for what’s going on.
Don: Right, yeah. And that’s exactly the position that some of the modern philosophers and psychologists and neuroscientists come to. It goes back to that whole discussion — I’m not going to open up that can of worms again — but the whole discussion of free will, that we don’t really have free will in the particular sense that people think about it, because everything is just a material process governed by physical laws. Which is not to say that nihilism or atomic reductionism, as David Sedley talks about in his article, are the logical conclusion. There’s a reality at the atomic level; there’s a reality at the level that we live. And neither one of those has a monopoly on truth. I think I’m beginning to quote David Sedley’s section now because that struck me as a really good way of looking at everything.
Cassius: There are certainly worse people you can quote. Just because your processes of mind may be material, that doesn’t mean that they’re unworthy or ignoble or worth throwing away or not valuing.
Don: Guys, is it really any different than saying they’re divine, in a sense? It’s just a word, it’s a description of what happens at a basic level, and yet it’s just the starting point of your analysis — just like saying it might be divine. You can take an attitude of religious awe if you wish to, but there’s no reason to be less in awe of the material basis of everything.
Cassius: Well put. Yeah, well put. It’s a good source of awe. Okay, the next subsection is entitled “Emotional Impulses,” followed very quickly by “Motor Impulses,” and then the final subsection is called “Mind,” where DeWitt sort of summarizes everything together. But let’s talk first about emotional and motor impulses. I wonder if we could just start with this sentence: “Let us presume that the emotion is the most powerful imaginable, which to Epicurus was the fear of losing one’s life or the joy of escaping destruction. The commotion begins deep in the breast where the finest and most mobile atoms are congregated; it communicates itself in turn to the atoms of heat, wind, and air; next the blood feels the turmoil; the flesh is convulsed; and last of all the distress is registered in the bones and marrow.” That’s a rather overall way of putting it, maybe, but the idea being that emotions start inward but then affect things around you, including your own body. When you are afraid, maybe your hands start to shake — you have a number of somatic bodily effects that come from an emotion. Just like how everything that happens in the mind has a cause in nature, things that start in the mind like emotional impulses also have effects on nature in turn and on the body.
Joshua: If I remember correctly, Lucretius uses the example of the horse gathering steam in order to launch out from the gate at a race — and I thought that was an example of this analogizing of the issue of how an impulse deep within the body communicates itself to the rest of the body and action results.
Cassius: Well, he does get next into motor impulses, and that’s the section in which he discusses the idea of whether volition or free will, in the absence of anything external, can really cause new motion. He says: “It might then have been thought that volition, being one of these contingent capacities, should have ranked as an adequate cause for the inception of all bodily movements. Such was not the case. Even for an act of volition, an external cause must be found.” And this is where we get into the idea of whether a creator could make a world without having a pattern. And he says: “Before the human being makes the decision to walk, his mind must receive a stimulus from the impact of images of himself in the act of walking.” So that’s a bit convoluted but almost reducible to the idea of “monkey see, monkey do.”
Don: There you go — I guess in a very abstract way.
Joshua: When you relate it back to the issue of the gods not being able to have created a universe without a pattern, you do have almost this infinite regress — everything that does happen certainly has some antecedent in what came before. Nothing comes from nothing, so to speak. Everything comes from something previously. And even though we have the Swerve and the ability to make some decisions ourselves, that doesn’t discount the impact of things that happen beforehand. And one of the ways that psychologists will study issues like this one is by looking at the stories of feral children — the heartbreaking stories of children that were abandoned and neglected and were essentially raised among animals. Because everything they do is patterned on what they see — they walk on all fours and snarl and growl, and they don’t have language because of course language is learned. So that’s probably the best evidence I can give on that point.
Cassius: Okay, and all of this feeds into the final subsection of this chapter, entitled “Mind.” It starts with the paragraph: “It is now possible to summarize the psychology of Epicurus and to describe with more precision and detail his teachings concerning the mind and its activities. The human being consists of body and soul, both alike corporeal by nature; the two are born at the same time and grow and decline in pace with one another; they are coterminous and co-sensitive; they function as a unit; and reactions are psychosomatic.” I think that’s probably a pretty good summary of what he’s been talking about. Does anybody have a comment on that so far?
Don: No, I would agree. I think it’s a pretty good summary. I sometimes get hung up on DeWitt’s idiosyncratic use of the word “psychosomatic.” It has such a negative connotation in general conversation. I get the fact that what he’s trying to do there is put together the psycho-mind part and the somatic-body part and try to say that they work together as a whole, as a system — which is fine. But I just get hung up on that word “psychosomatic.” I always think of psychosomatic illnesses, that people don’t actually have — that sort of thing. So I think it seems to be an idiosyncratic use of the word. Like, they’re “just faking it,” right?
Cassius: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. And psychosomatic illnesses can provide people just as much pain as actual diseases and afflictions too. But my understanding at least is that he’s using the word in the mind-body-system sense, and not in the way that we sometimes — or almost always — think of it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “psychosomatic” without the word “illness” right after it. Those two go together inseparably. But DeWitt is just using it to show the unity of body and mind, and he’s not implying anything negative at all — he’s simply saying that they’re a unit.
Joshua: This is a tangent, but I find it interesting. In ancient Alexandria, sort of the centerpiece of the new city was the body of Alexander himself. Ptolemy — who had taken control of Egypt and established himself as a new pharaoh — had sent orders to waylay the caravan that was carrying Alexander’s body back to Macedon, and had it diverted to Egypt. And so this grand sarcophagus became sort of the centerpiece, the crown jewel of the new city. And it was on a street called the Street of the Soma — the Street of the Body. But the other centerpiece of the city was, of course, the Library — the sort of the mind of the city. And in many ways, the crowning achievement of the city. So this issue of how the mind relates to the body — and most thinkers throughout history ultimately seem to come down on almost a Cartesian view — it’s certainly one of the more interesting questions to take away from all of this.
Don: Yeah, I definitely agree with you that the whole idea of having that soul or spirit or “mind” being able to exist outside the body is one of the reasons that we do have more Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy preserved from the ancient world — because the Christian copyists were like, “Yo, this is pagan, but I suppose we can keep this in because we can rationalize it — this is like a precursor to what we know is the truth.” And this Epicurus guy — “well, I don’t think so, but we’re going to be lucky if we keep him around for anything.” So yeah, that’s why those guys are hanging around the gates of hell and Epicurus is in the sixth circle trapped in a coffin.
Cassius: Don, especially the first paragraph on page 212 — it does turn on some Greek wording and translations. Do you see that paragraph? Do you have a comment on that?
Don: Let me just read this on the fly here. So DeWitt’s paragraph at the top of the page there is that “the sensations are irrational and merely register a stimulus, a kinesis. It is the quick and automatic mind that, with the aid of memory, registers a recognition and says ‘this is honey.’ It is likewise the mind that makes the generalization ‘honey is sweet.’ These are ‘fantastic perceptions of the intelligence’ — they do not possess the rank of criteria because they are not a direct contact between mind and matter, but are rather the result of a process or operation. ‘Fantastic’ means ‘immediate.’” So those “fantastic perceptions of the intelligence” are those epibolai tēs dianoias that have been brought up — I think Dr. Glidden brought it up — and it seems to me that the prolepsis and the epibolai tēs dianoias are, if not synonymous, at least tightly connected. And it seemed to me that there is some hair-splitting going on whenever people talk about a “fourth leg of the canon.” I’ve also seen it argued that the epibolai were an earlier concept of Epicurus’s and then he later decided that he wanted to expand that into the idea of the prolepsis. But I think it all basically comes back to talking about the prolepses — where we recognize patterns in nature, where if our senses register something and then it’s matched up with the prolepses — “oh, you know, honey” — and we have also then the prolepses of what “sweet” means, and then our minds put those two things together, and that’s where the rational part of it comes in.
Joshua: Agree or disagree — the clock is running. Are we in debate club now or what? I know we have four pages left. To answer your question, Cassius, he says “these provisions, however, do not rank as criteria, being subject to no correction by the conscious rational mind.” If you said that they don’t rank as criteria, then you would be saying that these images are not the same thing as a prolepsis — I think that would be your conclusion.
Don: In other words, some people do seem to argue that the third leg of the canon — this whole issue of prolepses, anticipations, preconceptions — is a description of this image process. I really hate the word — he refers to them here as “vagrant idols.”
Joshua: “Vagrant idols” — exactly. Yeah, it sounds like statues of the Buddha begging on the street. But the idea there, again with the centaur, is that just because you dreamed something, that doesn’t mean that that thing is actually a real thing out there in nature.
Don: Exactly. That’s how I would take it.
Cassius: I actually think that this last section is easier to read than the earlier part of the chapter. I find his analogy of the canon serving — of the witnesses and the judge presiding in court — kind of interesting. But again, I think it sets up a dichotomy between the body and the mind or soul as something that stands off apart from everything else, and I’m not sure whether it’s helpful to think about where Epicurus was actually going. You called the canon the judge; well, you said the role of the sensations, anticipations, and feelings is that of witnesses?
Joshua: Oh, I’m sorry — witnesses. That would go to the point: these are witnesses who are not giving opinions of their own, but it’s the judge who has to reach the opinion. And the judge is our volitional mind.
Cassius: That’s a pretty important point. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the role of the canon, and one of our themes today may be the misuse of words. I know that my first reaction to the word “canon” is that it’s some kind of a Bible — it’s the truth itself. And I think DeWitt is probably correct in hitting that the canon is not a final opinion of truth, but it is the ruler or the method of measuring that allows you to conclude what the truth is. And to go in there about the paragraph — so the senses, anticipations, and feelings are witnesses, and then you have the rational mind being the judge. And to take that analogy to its natural conclusion, witnesses don’t necessarily have a stake in the game of the outcome of the trial. The judge is the one that’s going to be the final arbiter of what actually goes on. They’re providing evidence, and then it’s sorted out by the rest of the process. And probably another useful part of that analogy from my own background would be the issue that just because a judge and a jury reach a particular conclusion doesn’t mean it’s really true in the great scheme of things. Judges and juries and trials reach conclusions that we later on conclude are incorrect all the time. And I think that’s the distinction worth making — some people think that we’ve basically got a religion going on here, where there’s some ability to connect with an inherent source of truth out there in the universe which is always the same. And I don’t think Epicurus offers that at all. He says that’s impossible. But what you do have to do, with the abilities that you do have, is to reach your own opinions about what is true. He’s not offering you a connection to some other dimension of absolute ideal forms, like Plato would be doing, or a connection to an all-powerful omnipotent omniscient god like religion does. He’s simply telling you that this is what nature has provided to you — do the best with it you can.
Cassius: Right. So with that in mind, we can reread this quote from Thomas Jefferson that I’ve quoted before on the podcast, where he says — this is from the letter to Peter Carr: “Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” Let me repeat: you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything because any other person or description of person have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but the uprightness of the decision. The point there being, I would say, that Jefferson is setting up that even if you want to look at a divine standard of conduct, surely a god who is the ultimate source of everything would approve of the person who’s doing the best he can — not the person who just gives the right answer because he’s read it out of a book.
Joshua: I picked this up, Cassius, because you just said something like “we’re not trying to start a religion about some of these issues.” Some people will seem to do that with reason — like reason is in itself the only faculty that is always true when I’m using it and worthy of admiration in that respect. But like you said, reason in her seat as a tribunal is not infallible. And the senses — Jefferson says here, “call to her tribunal every fact and every opinion” — that’s kind of where the sensations fit into this. I think it’s an interesting quote, and I don’t quite want to let it go just because of some of the problems around the word “reason.”
Don: Yeah, I agree, that was spot-on. I think Joshua brings up a good point about reason being sometimes amplified to the nth degree — I mean, it did have an entire age named after it, so the “Age of Reason” is in history. But I think one of the quotes that I’ve heard recently — I need to track down who actually said it — they said that “we are not thinking beings that feel; humans are feeling beings who on occasion think.” So the ability to use both your emotions and your feelings in decision-making, in addition to your rational mind, has been demonstrated even in modern psychology and some other research that’s been done. It’s so important to pay attention to your intuitions and that sort of thing — and not to be ruled entirely by them. And I think that’s sort of what Epicurus is saying as well: that you need to use all of your faculties, and some of your faculties are your feelings and emotions and your immediate gut reactions to things.
Cassius: Don, that is such an important point, given certain cultural issues that we’re living with today that I’m not going to go into. But the feelings are very important and part of what makes us human.
Don: Exactly. And I really like that quote — that we are feeling beings that sometimes think.
Cassius: Yeah, I thought that was spot-on. Okay, so I don’t know whether we’re ready to end the chapter here yet, but I do find the last paragraph interesting. He’s talking here about whether everything in the mind exists from a starting point of sensation outside the mind. And he said that this understanding of Epicurus’s teaching gave rise to Gassendi’s doctrine that “there is nothing in the intellect which has not been in the senses,” and that this in turn was a starting point for John Locke and modern empiricism. But just going along with what Don said a minute ago — Epicurus was not himself an empiricist but rather an intuitionist. There are other faculties than just sensation that we use to gain knowledge about the world and to make decisions. And he describes it this way: “The mind of the infant was to his thinking not a blank tablet but already laced with the faint outlines of ideas that should gradually acquire definition in pace with experience, instruction, and reflection.”
Don: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that, and it seems to me that all the research I’ve seen on babies and toddlers and what they’re capable of is right in line with what DeWitt is saying there about Epicurus.
Cassius: Okay, looks like we’ve reached the end of the chapter. So at this point let’s go ahead and do closing thoughts for today. Martin, any closing comments?
Martin: I have nothing. Sorry.
Cassius: Okay, no problem. Callistheni?
Callistheni: I have nothing to add. Thank you.
Don: Yeah, I think this is a fascinating topic and it really gets into again the use of words and the translations of words, and how we come to understand ideas like soul and spirit and sensation — all those sorts of things are such a loaded concept in some ways. And it’s really good to delve in and really look at what Epicurus is saying, and to really keep in mind the idea that it’s all material processes — atoms and void moving in the body — and that the body and the spirit are not two separate things, but are so inextricably linked together that there’s no way that one can exist without the other. I think it’s an important point to drive home. So this was an interesting discussion to have.
Joshua: Yeah, we went through this chapter much more quickly than we normally do. But in some ways it does help to set things in their proper relation to one another to do it that way. And I guess I have to now say — Callistheni, you’ve been very patient with us — but we are finally next week getting into what for many people is the main event, which is Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism.” Now that we’ve worked out the tools of precision and the study of nature and an understanding of free will and issues relating to mind and the relationship between mind and body, he has spent — I guess eleven chapters now — setting the stage, in my view, for this coming chapter on the pursuit of pleasure. That’s going to be very interesting. And I hope we’ve done a good job over the past several months getting ready for it.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I would agree with that. And I would approach the closing the same way: this is going to sound almost like the opening of the next chapter, because we’re talking about looking forward to the details of the topics that most people associate with Epicurus. But by providing the foundation that we’ve been going through, hopefully someone who is aware of all this will not be nearly as tempted to stray off into interpretations of pleasure or pain or any of these other issues — as DeWitt calls it, “hedonism” — that cause so much trouble and end up distracting you from the heart of where Epicurus is going. Because we’re not going to be talking about the pleasures of supernatural intervention or the pleasures of contemplating the omniscience of God or the pleasures of contemplating all sorts of dissolution and depravity that people might think Epicurus is associated with. We know that because of the background of where we stand in the universe, where we stand in terms of how the mind operates, whether we have any free will, how the senses operate — things that we’ve been discussing for week after week here. This episode is the 24th of our episodes as we’ve gone through this book. And as we get to Part 25 next week, we’ll finally get to those practical applications that people are looking for. But it will be colored by what we have done before — it will not be something that we’re just starting from scratch, jumping into the middle of a discussion of pleasure without having any frame of reference at all. It’s these past episodes that provide us the frame of reference to have an understandable and coherent theory of how pleasure operates. Okay, so with that, why don’t we close for today. Thank you again, Don, for joining us — you’re always welcome. Thanks Callistheni, Martin, Joshua, and to our listeners for the time you take in listening to this. Please drop by the forum and let us know your thoughts, any questions, comments, or suggestions that you have, and we’ll try to incorporate them in future episodes. So with that, we’ll be back in a week. Thanks, and see you then. Bye.