Happy Twentieth! Some Thoughts on the Soul

Happy Twentieth to Epicureans everywhere, and Happy World Happiness Day! Today’s Twentieth is peculiar because it is a day set aside to take stock of the things that we have accomplished towards becoming happier, and to take stock of the things that we may yet do towards sculpting a happier version of ourselves. This Twentieth coincides with the spring equinox, and is an auspicious and convenient time for spring cleaning rituals–an opportunity to release and let go of the things that impede our happiness (every variety of bitterness in our hearts, or things that bring back memories that it may be time to let go of) and to make room for the things that will sweeten our lives and bring greater pleasure.

Someone in our Garden of Epicurus group shared a link to the Darwin Award lecture for 2021 with Dr Oliver Scott Curry, “where he explains the co-operation and ‘contracts’ that humans have that create our understanding of morality. It conforms perfectly with what Epicurus was saying over 2000 years ago. Science is finally catching up!“.

The Epicurean Doctrine of the Psyche: On the Nature of the Soul

In antiquity, Epicurean concern for a natural definition of the soul revolved initially around the study of nature, and around the need to reject Platonized, superstitious, and unnatural understandings of the soul. Later, Christianity and other religions employed the Platonized soul in the enforcement of labor, and added new varieties of afterlife fantasies, further alienating mortals from their own souls. We have seen that belief in the decontextualized, supernatural soul has done great damage. I recently shared the passages from Epicurus’ Epistle to Herodotus related to the soul, which relate to an essay I had written years ago titled A Concrete Self. Here, I’d like to unpack some of what the Hegemon teaches in Letter to Herodotus regarding the soul, as this is a difficult subject that remains unclear for many and deserves deeper study among modern Epicureans. Passage 67 of the Letter to Herodotus says:

“There is the further point to be considered, what the incorporeal can be, if according to current usage the term is applied to what can be conceived as self-existent. But it is impossible to conceive anything that is incorporeal as self-existent except empty space. And empty space cannot itself either act or be acted upon, but simply allows a body to move through it. Hence those who call soul incorporeal speak foolishly. For if it were so, it could neither act nor be acted upon. But, as it is, both these properties, you see, plainly belong to soul.

Epicurus explained the existence of a soul–which is corporeal, has observable properties, and is “composed of particles dispersed all over the frame”–and how it can act and be acted upon. This is an interesting choice of words. This means that we observe that sentient beings can be both a subject and an object to others, while inert bodies can only be acted upon, and in this there is a distinction between them. The body of a sentient being endowed with soul is capable of agency (it can act).

The soul (like the body) can act, and can also be acted upon. Power (over others, or under others) is implied in this: the soul exerts power over other souls of sentient beings and over inert bodies, and can be itself subdued by external bodies. This reminds us of the existentialists, and their preoccupation with the gaze (and also speech), which inevitably objectifies others. Sartre’s and De Beauvoir’s preoccupation with inter-subjectivity is a central theme in their ethics.

This idea serves as a link in the chain that goes from the physics to the ethics, as we can see plainly. Morality is born from the acceptance of agency, and also from the complex relations that sentient beings form when their bodies interact. How do we “act upon” other souls? We can help or harm another sentient being. We can oppress, exploit, or save, another being. We can cooperate with other beings. We can choose and avoid. If other beings are capable of communication and agreement with us, we can form covenants not to harm or be harmed, and then justice is born from mutual benefit. This symbiosis is the naturally just, or righteous, way of acting and being acted upon.

This is not to say that “acting upon other bodies and being acted upon” only leads to insights about ethics. The ethics of how we act upon the bodies and souls of others and how other souls act upon our bodies and souls is as natural as ethics gets. But there are epistemological teachings here, as well. The entire passage on the soul in the Letter to Herodotus begins with an appeal to the canon, saying that we know about the corporeal, natural soul from our feelings, prolepsis, and senses (“the surest grounds for belief”).

Epicurean Saying 27 argues that in philosophy, both learning (the acquisition of knowledge) and pleasure happen at the same time. This inserts the pleasures of knowing into the hedonic regimen. To say that knowledge can also be an object that the soul may act upon (own, manage, enjoy) is to say that knowledge is possible, and that the things that are known are real and exist in nature. Other bodies can be known (when their particles hit our eyes, ears, nose, etc.), and in some way what is known is also “acted upon” by the soul. As Sartre discusses, knowing something or someone carries a certain element of power over what is known.

Now, this knowledge creates a certain distance, or at least distinction, between the knower and what is known. Practitioners of the Hindu yoga of philosophy (jñana yoga, or yoga of knowledge) expressed this in terms of the field (prakriti, nature) and the knower of the field (purusha, or soul). This is how nature knows itself. There is a subject: a sentient being with cognitive faculties that enable it to know nature, and there is an object: a field that is passive, it’s known but does not act. However, in the Hindu tradition, it is often asserted–without evidence–that the soul is immortal and unchanging. What we observe is that the knower and the known are both part of nature, and therefore temporary.

Therefore, since we are dogmatists and we accept that knowledge is possible, we consider the act of knowing or learning (and the acts of remembering and forgetting) a way of acting upon. To be a sage, or a scientist, is to be a subject. That which is known is the object. That the soul acts and is acted upon means (among other things) that it can know things and be known.

There is in the Epistle to Herodotus, furthermore, a relation between particle motion and the soul which deserves careful evaluation. This is from passage 64 of the Epistle to Herodotus:

… on the departure of the soul it loses sentience. For it had not this power in itself; but something else, congenital with the body, supplied it to the body: which other thing, through the potentiality actualized in it by means of motion, at once acquired for itself a quality of sentience, and, in virtue of the neighbourhood and interconnexion between them, imparted it to the body also.

Prior to explaining how the body has sentience for as long as there is a soul within it, even if it loses certain non-essential body parts, Epicurus explains that the soul is “something else, congenital with the body”. This is not to say that the soul is Platonic or split from the body: we see that it is clearly physical, embedded into the flesh, and like other bodies in nature it interacts and has chemical and ethical reactions and interactions with other bodies.

However, this distinction between sentient bodies and inert bodies is a “potentiality” actualized by means of motion. In other words, our pragmatic encounter with the soul has to do with the observation that a body will be dead, or inert, without certain kinds of motion that the soul is responsible for (breathing lungs and blood that is circulating throughout the body to bring nutrients to all cells, at the very least). These types of motion are therefore contrasted with the inert behavior of a dead body: the organs go limp, there is no more breath or blood flow, and there are no more electric signals in the neural system. A body may have the potentiality of sentience, but without this “something else, congenital with the body”, which brings certain forms of motion, there is no animation, no sentience. The link between Principal Doctrine 2 (“Death is nothing to us”) and sentience was made plain in a previous essay, where I argued that PD2 is a two-sided doctrine:

The second Principal Doctrine, in positing that “death is nothing to us” because there is no sentience in death, also reveals that life is experienced by us, and defined, as sentience.

And so the study of death from an Epicurean, non-superstitious perspective also necessarily reveals something about life and sentience. Lucretius’ focus on particle motion as providing alternative, non-supernatural explanations for things that were previously accounted for by an appeal to animistic beliefs is really an echo of Epicurus’ Epistle to Herodotus (and perhaps of other sources, now lost to us, where these ideas must have been clarified).

For we cannot think of it as sentient, except it be in this composite whole and moving with these movements.

Here in passage 66, Epicurus appeals to the faculty of prolepsis to remind us that 1. we can’t conceive of a sentient body without motion, and 2. we should not be content with simplistic solutions for the nature of the soul, due to its complexity. All complex phenomena are produced by composite bodies, frequently in interaction with other bodies or with their environment. In other words, to demystify the soul, we need to be prepared to treat it as a difficult subject whose nature will not be revealed easily to us. If we expect easy answers concerning the soul, we will fall back into degrading superstition. Let us more concretely apprehend the nature and physicality of the soul. This is from passage 65:

But the rest of the frame, whether the whole of it survives or only a part, no longer has sensation, when once those atoms have departed, which, however few in number, are required to constitute the nature of soul.

It says here that a certain (not yet known) number of certain kinds of particles are required to constitute the soul. This is a very complex issue to consider. Most scientists today think of death in terms of two phenomena: the cessation of unconscious bodily processes (like breathing and digestion), and the cessation of neural activity (whence we get the idea of “brain-dead” comatose patients). Epicurus gets as close as an ancient man could have gotten to establishing the nature of the soul in terms of a variety of concrete tissue in our bodies responsible for concrete processes. This will require future scientific studies to fully unveil, and will likely inspire many controversies, but on this hinges our full emancipation from the superstitious and degrading ideas we have inherited concerning the soul.

Pleasure and Vitality

Vatican Saying 37 links pleasures (goods) to an experience of vitality and pains (evils) to an experience of weakness in our nature, in our flesh and mind. This is an interesting choice of words, as it reinforces the connection between pleasure and a certain vitality or health in the body and soul which was mentioned by Epicurus himself in his Epistle to Menoeceus, and has also been noted by philosophers like Nietzsche, Michel Onfray, and La Mettrie. This “hedonic vitality” may have been discussed in other sources that are now lost to us, and should be a subject of renewed study, and it may help to explain philosophy as medicinal and linked to health of the body and soul.

It could be argued that the two attributes of the gods (immortality and bliss) are also reflective of a deeply-entrenched conception of the gods (and all moral ideals) as being full of both vitality and pleasure. These ideas may have come from Theodorus the Atheist, who is believed to have inspired much of Epicurean theology.

Conclusion

We have seen a few salient features:

We observe the natural soul–which is physical, composite, and congenital with the body–with our five senses and with our feelings, and we use prolepsis to conceive of the soul. We see sentience in bodies and certain forms of motion that the soul imparts to the body. Without these motions, the body’s life potential is not realized.
The soul acts and is acted upon, and this has physical, epistemic and ethical repercussions.
The soul has flesh: there exist minimum required amounts and types of particles of tissue in the body without which life does not happen. We observe that if one loses a finger, one remains alive, but if one loses (for instance) the heart or certain critical parts of the brain tissue, one dies.

I hope that other Epicureans will continue evaluating these particular ideas further, as the subject of the nature of the soul is an important part of how we emancipate ourselves from forms of superstition that remain popular today, and this teaching on the soul is also a crucial deepening aspect of the second Philodeman Cure (“death is nothing to us”) and the second Principal Doctrine.

Many secular intellectuals have given up on the study of the nature of the soul, leaving it up to religionists to act as blind guides on the subject, perhaps because they do not wish to insult their sensibilities, or perhaps because they do not know how to approach the subject empirically, or do not understand the dangers, the alienation, the superstitions, and the potential terrors that result from Platonizing the soul. We should stand on the shoulders of Epicurus, Lucretius, La Mettrie and other predecessors, and continue their philosophical legacy by insisting–and demonstrating–that the nature of the soul is material, even carnal.

Notice that Epicurus does not over-simplify or add terrors or mystical ideas to the soul that lack an empirical basis. This diligent effort to evaluate the nature of the soul is quite unique in the history of ancient anthropology and philosophy.