Eikas cheers to all! We recently became aware of the book Epicurean Philosophy: An introduction from the “Garden of Athens”, edited / written by Christos Yapijakis, Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos, and others from the Epicurean Gardens in Greece.
The book Epicurus and His Influence on History, by Ben Gazur is available for pre-order. He has, in the past, written the essays An Epicurean Cure and Why Epicurus Matters Today.
This month, Revista Horizonte’s YouTube channel published the lecture “Perspectiva política de la filosofía epicúrea” by Estiven Valencia Marín. This is in Spanish, and the facilitator argues that Epicurean philosophy does not strictly forbid political engagement.
In Mahsa Amini: the new Iphianassa, we discussed that Lucretius opens his poem De rerum natura by giving various reasons for writing the poem, among them the perceived need for a new social contract that was not oppressive because of the corruption of religion. Near the opening, he also mentions that death and the nature of the soul are serious enough threats to human happiness, that they too were reasons for writing his poem.
For what the soul may be they do not know,
Whether ’tis born, or enter in at birth,
And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
Or visit the shadows …
– Lucretius, De rerum natura, Liber Primus
Ergo, clarifying the nature of the soul is one of the intended purposes of De rerum natura. In the third of the six books, after summarizing Books 1 and 2 (verses 31-33), Lucretius introduces Liber Tertivm, the entirety of which (like Philodemus of Gadara’s wonderful scroll “Peri Thanatos” / “On Death”) contains meleta on Principal Doctrine 2, and which deals with both death and the nature of the soul. In fact, there are some parallels with the Philodeman scroll, and around verse 884 we see Lucretian criticism of being angry that one has to die and of worrying about various ways of dying, which is reminiscent of Peri Thanatos. The reason why he chose this particular subject (as per verses 36-93) is that he says that fear of hell and death lead to degrading or fear-based forms of religion, zeal (fanaticism), evil, greed, murder, and the quest for fame and of other vain and empty desires.
In verse 55, Lucretius says that when men are in doubt or in anger, we get to see what they’re made of, because they tend to use “the mask” of religious zeal. This is a profoundly insightful commentary on the nature of religiosity, and applies a Philodeman logic–where we diagnose some neurosis or what he calls “disease of the soul” based on signs.
Will hate of living and beholding light
Take hold on humankind that they inflict
Their own destruction with a gloomy heart-
Forgetful that this fear is font of cares,
This fear the plague upon their sense of shame,
And this that breaks the ties of comradry
And oversets all reverence and faith …For just as children tremble and fear all
In the viewless dark, so even we at times
Dread in the light so many things that be
No whit more fearsome than what children feign,
Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark.
This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
Nor glittering arrows of morning sun disperse,
But only nature’s aspect and her law.
Defining the Natural Soul
Further Reading: The Concrete Self
Lucretius Book 3 – Death of the Soul, and Other Good Things
Epicurus instructs at the opening of his Epistle to Herotodus, that we must first define the object of our investigation, before we begin any discourse. We generally think of the natural soul as the condition of the living flesh that gives us life and sentience. As Epicureans, we are unconcerned with any supernatural or Platonic conception of the soul. Instead, we speak of the nature of the soul, even of the health of the soul, in wholly physical terms. Lucretius defined the soul as part of the body, and connects it with the head or the intellect from where the organism governs itself.
The mind (animus / sometimes translated as soul) which oft we call the intellect (mentem), wherein is seated life’s counsel and regimen, is part no less of man than hand and foot and eyes are parts of one whole breathing creature. – Liber Tertivs, 94-95
In Liber Tertivs, Lucretius is expounding the same theories that Epicurus expounds in his Letter to Herodotus (portions 63-68), and in more detail. To be clear, the soul is physical. Lucretius explains that the soul is mortal (416, 603-614) and that it gets sick and ages with the body (445-491), that wine gets the soul drunk, and that the soul’s diseases can be treated with medicine (510-525). We also learn that the soul has no weight (230), that the five senses are among the soul’s faculties (624-633), and that the first atomists imagined that the atoms of the soul were particularly subtle or tiny because neural activity happens so fast (177-205), and in this he uses the analogy of how water moves faster than honey because it’s less dense.
Must we not grant that mind and soul consist of a corporeal nature? – 167
The Head, the Chest, and the Belly
Mind and soul (animum atque animam), I say, are held conjoined one with other, and form one single nature of themselves; but chief (caput) and regnant through the frame entire is still that counsel which we call the mind, and that cleaves seated in the midmost breast.
“Caput” means “head”, and indicates that the soul is the head of the body. He may have been working with, and translating from, the Greek word “psyche” in his sources.
Lucretius argues (147-160, and again in 395-415) that the mind is stronger than the flesh. This idea of the soul as the head of the body echoes the logic of Principal Doctrine 20, which we also find in the Wall Inscription of Oenoanda.
Emotions in antiquity were associated with the chest, so it’s not surprising that the ancient Epicureans believed the soul was partially in the chest. This is likely based on the process of “reasoning by signs”, and the observation that strong emotions increase the heart rate and that the heart stops beating at the moment of death. In reality, as Lucretius explains elsewhere, the soul or animating power is found embedded throughout the entire bodily frame.
The focus on the chest as seat of the natural soul might be part of the Epicureans’ insistence that man is more than a rational animal, that he has irrational faculties that are just as important as reason. Lucretius mentions some of these non-rational feelings and faculties of the soul (joy, terror, dismay, etc.)
There are many instinctive psychological processes that happen in the belly, and we know that many of the so-called “happiness hormones” are synthesized in the belly as well. Some yoga instructors teach focused exercises for what they call the “solar plexus”. Some (like Osho)–in a manner that may remind some of Metrodorus’ arguments with his brother–insist that we must “befriend the belly”. Current research shows that the belly has enough neurons to constitute a “second brain”.
I do not wish to digress much into Taoism, but I wish to accentuate that one of its founders–Yang Chu, who was hugely influential among the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and many other later thinkers–based his entire philosophy on the body as our ultimate ontology. He is the author of several chapters of the second most important classic in Taoism, the Zhuang Tzu. The lack of a Platonic split between body and soul in Taoism has produced a vibrant philosophy that expresses itself in bodily practices related to preventive health, movement, and martial arts, with no boundary whatsoever between the so-called spiritual world and the body.
In Taoist martial arts and meditative practices, the belly is the focus of attention and breath-work, and considered an important means of grounding an stabilizing oneself. The belly, together with certain dietary practices, are important in other cultures’ regimens of self-care.
Treatments for Fear of Death
The main utility of studying the nature of the physical soul is to produce a theory and practice that works, and that can provide treatments for fear of death. These treatments, for the Epicureans, usually focus on arguments, repetition, placing before the eyes, and other similar techniques.
One such argument from Liber Tertivs (verse 904) consists of comparing death to being asleep. Another one is the symmetry argument, which compares the time after death with the time before birth of which we remember nothing, and so there is nothing to fear.
Other arguments are less therapeutic, and more about giving a more complete account of the nature of death in the context of our inter-existence with the other bodies that make up the cosmos. For instance, Lucretius says (in 970) that one thing grows from another, and since all bodies need the particles of other bodies in order to subsist, therefore we must accept that life is a loan.
Lucretian Reassessment of Myths
A naturalist redefinition of the soul and of death has the domino effect of dismantling much of the vulgar mythology that our ancestors have built around them. Lucretius argues that hell is on Earth, that Tartarus is not a place under the ground but represents fear of the gods and of fate, that Tityus is about the dangers of quick care and vague desire, and that the Sisyphus myth (which we discuss below) is about the tendency to seek power even if it does not add pleasure, which feels as if we were pushing a boulder up a hill.
The bottom line is that there is NO other world or afterlife, and that the only relevance of these myths is found in this world.
The Jar Parable
Although the Punctured Jar parable is treated in Liber Sextvs, in the third book we see that the imagery of the jar is an ongoing theme in Lucretius. Here, the body is compared to a jar that cracks open at the time of death and releases its vitality (verses 434-444). Around verse 793 we read that the mind requires the body as a “vessel”, again refuting the idea that a soul may exist without a host body. That the mind needs the body as a vessel is again mentioned around verse 555:
And just as hand, or eye, or nose, apart,
Severed from us, can neither feel nor be,
But in the least of time is left to rot,
Thus mind alone can never be, without
The body and the man himself, which seems,
As ’twere the vessel of the same- or aught
Whate’er thou’lt feign as yet more closely joined:
Since body cleaves to mind by surest bonds.
It seems like the punctured jar parable was part of a long string of meditations and parables on the physical nature of the soul, which in Liber Sextvs culminates in a salvific teaching.
Around verse 1000, while discussing the myth of Sisyphus, Lucretius makes another reference to the idea of the soul as a jar when he compared Sisyphus’ pushing a stone uphill to the behavior of someone who “feeds forever a thankless heart with good things yet never fills it”.
Here in this life also a Sisyphus
In him who seeketh of the populace
The rods, the axes fell, and evermore
Retires a beaten and a gloomy man.
For to seek after power- an empty name,
Nor given at all- and ever in the search
To endure a world of toil, O this it is
To shove with shoulder up the hill a stone
Which yet comes rolling back from off the top,
And headlong makes for levels of the plain.
Then to be always feeding an ingrate mind,
Filling with good things, satisfying never-
As do the seasons of the year for us,
When they return and bring their progenies
And varied charms, and we are never filled
With the fruits of life- O this, I fancy, ’tis
To pour, like those young virgins in the tale,
Waters into a sieve, unfilled forever.
In the jar metaphor, Lucretius is using poetic imagery as an expedient means to instruct us on the nature of the soul and its need for philosophy, while still employing poetry, parables, and myths. He does not dismiss these cultural devices, but employs them according to the study of nature. In doing this, Lucretius helps to construct a new spirituality, one that is fully physical and consistent with the scientific worldview and with the study of nature, but yet does not reject storytelling, poetry, imagery, parables, etc. In other words, he’s continuing Epicurus’ project of elaborating a complete worldview and cosmology–from the elemental particles all the way to the innumerable worlds–that yet satisfies and cares for the soul and all of its existential needs.
Further Reading:
