What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt III of IV

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Last time we finished up with the example that if you get ‘angry’ about your mom complaining about your driving, the Stoic view would be that you are misunderstanding the situation. You are choosing to believe you were slighted or violated by your mom’s comments, even though in reality, given that moms are supposed to care deeply about their children’s safety, you should expect such comments. It’s part of the parent-child relationship. And if you understand that, then it should eliminate the idea that you’re somehow being hurt by the comments. So you can and should choose to stop being angry. And when you do so, you will cease to be angry.

Epictetus goes even further than that in §42 of Enchiridion when he recommends that when a person “treats you ill or speaks ill of you” we should be ‘mild in temper” and say to ourselves “it seemed so to him”. The idea being that their opinion of you can’t hurt you unless you decide it is really a hurt and that in cases where they really are wrong about you they are the ones who get hurt because they are deceived and it’s bad to believe false things.

This can probably be summed up by the later Christian idea of “turning the other cheek”. You won’t find recommendations like that from the line of thought extending through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius (which I’ve been calling P-A-L).

In fact, in the very first chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle hits on a key problem with the idea of the weight of relationships in ethics. He advises that you can’t judge whether a person’s life was virtuous or happy until they have passed away because there is so much unpredictable stuff that can happen that could ruin the life or the person. Like a parent losing a child: A vivid example of this is in the classic movie Ordinary People.

The underlying idea here is that specifically because of the intimate, fundamentally important relationship you have with your family, your emotional well being is not totally in your hands. To form those types of bonds and gain all that they can give you requires being vulnerable to the possibility of ruin. And the kicker is, as the heading above indicates about me, we can all be described by quite a few different relationships, we all wear many hats. And each of them works to change our frame of reference.

The Stoics refuse to accept this, and to me this is unrealistic for all but the most terribly isolated people. It’s hard to imagine a world where you aren’t ever supposed to take it seriously when e.g., your lover, employer, a rival, etc, expresses a highly negative opinion of you or your behavior, or when a close friend dies.

Patience and control

§10 reinforces the point made in §1 that we must be clear on the difference between what is truly controllable and what is not. It explains that you must look to yourself and see what abilities you have that can deal with things that happen to you. So if you have to deal with someone being really vulgar, though you can’t control them, you do have the power to be patient. So you must train yourself to know that you always have a faculty to deal with that which is not directly in your power to control. Religious folk might note this sounds like the saying that “god never closes a door without opening a window”. This is good advice, but according to P-A-L they are neglecting the fact that emotions are just as effective a tool, and in many situations they are much better. As I’ve said, the Stoic starting point that what is in our control (our minds) matters greatly and what is out of our control (our bodies, others) does not matter is dangerous. And it’s hard to take. But Epictetus himself is inconsistent on it.

The only thing that matters is your mind, so do what’s right no matter what…sort of.

In §35 Epictetus asks rhetorically, “If you’re action is wrong, avoid doing it all together, but if it is right, why do you fear those who will rebuke you wrongly?” That’s honorable, and it’s consistent with the other major claims we’ve looked at. But it turns out that it’s really complicated to see what that means when you’re dealing with others. For example, at §33 Epictetus says we should “refuse the entertainment of strangers and the vulgar” because if you don’t you will “share the stain of any comrade” – even if you are both actually ‘clean’. On one hand this makes sense, people do judge you by the company you keep. But why should a Stoic care? Say that you are a Stoic spending time with someone with a bad reputation, or who is otherwise considered undesirable, but you are yourself faultless. Earlier the recommendation was to ignore people who say bad things about you. So why does it matter now that there is a social cost – getting a stain – for hanging out with people, even friends, who some people don’t like? Shouldn’t he say that it’s completely irrelevant whether you suffer socially for befriending ‘stained’ people? In the same section.

Then in §36 Epictetus says that “if you want to maintain social decencies, it is worthless to do things like taking the larger portion at a banquet, even though it is worthwhile for your body. You should remember to maintain your self-respect before your host”. I guess you could argue he’s not saying you should maintain social decencies. But the fact that it’s not a very long book and he still thought to include this advice says something. But where’s the virtue in starving rather than maybe seeming immodest to your host? After all in §30 he says that “every living creature has a natural tendency to avoid and shun what seems harmful and all that causes it, and to pursue and admire what is helpful and all that causes it”.

Supposedly, for a Stoic neither being punished nor being poorly thought of is ever a reason to do a bad action or to avoid a good action. So the only reason a Stoic could have for following the advice in §33 would be if there was reason to avoid a right action because of the impressions you might cause in other people. But that doesn’t make sense. Are Stoics expected to live their lives trying not to give strangers bad impressions by consciously avoiding friends who are stained – even wrongly stained?

He’s already insisted that anything that is not in our power does not matter at all. And I’m sorry but you can’t say with a straight face that we can control how a third party feels about our friends – or even ourselves. We can control how we present ourselves to people, but what goes on in other people’s heads, and by what measures and prejudices they judge us, are largely a mystery. Seriously trying to be inoffensive to strangers would lead to paralysis or obsequiousness (which many find offensive).

The principle of charity suggests that there’s a way to mesh A) “things that you don’t control don’t matter” with B) “always do what’s right no matter what”, C) “let it slide when people insult you”, D) “don’t bore people”, E) “don’t seem greedy to people” and F) “avoid social stain”. I just don’t see it. To me, you can’t get the social rules like C-F without dropping or editing A or B.

Emotions cause problems for Stoicism that they don’t for P-A-L 

So now we have a good understanding of the Stoic idea that emotions are judgments. And we see that they make it pretty clear that emotions are bad judgments that need to be eliminated. Now here’s the thing. The P-A-L account does not want to do away with emotions; it says that correct emotions are a big key to human happiness. And a fundamental support for that is this idea that humans are social animals, for whom interpersonal relationships matter deeply. Put simply, the P-A-L account says that emotions are a major faculty for social animals to coexist successfully, for individuals to properly relate to their groups. One explanation for the Stoic dismissal of emotions might be that Stoicism really is an ethical theory for ‘radical’ individuals. But that’s not it. Eight of the fifty-two sections of the Enchiridion discuss the social aspects of being a Stoic and analyzing these sections shows the real issue. Stoicism has a huge problem with properly explaining morality in social situations because their theory of emotions kills them.

We’ll have one more post on the Stoics and then it’s on to the modern world.

The Modern World: Brought to you in part by René Descartes

What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt II

Introduction

As I mentioned in the first post on Stoicism, the famous Stoic Epictetus wrote a very influential guide on how to be a Stoic called Enchiridion. The title translates to “the Handbook” or “the Manual”, and Epictetus certainly had the expertise to write it. So that makes it an excellent place to get a good grasp on Stoicism in practice and away from more “academic” debates.

I’m briefly bringing up the idea of the difference between Stoicism in practice and theoretical Stoicism for a couple of reasons. First, I’m trying to be as generous as possible to the philosophy. Many great, intelligent individuals, people who have really had interesting and good lives, counted themselves as Stoics. That says something to me. So there’s a lot about Stoicism in practice that I want to applaud, and I’ll try to be clear about that.

But I’m here to attack, and one of the first things I noted in studying Stoicism with a focus on the emotions was how blatantly Stoic psychology deviates from earlier theory. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and many others were all in basic agreement that the emotions were things that happen to us, that they are a major source of human action, and that virtue consists in properly acting on them. They even argued that acting emotionally is often good and proper.

But not the Stoics. They didn’t believe that things that happen to us could directly cause us to act. Instead, they argued that "what disturbs men’s minds is not events, but their judgments on events… so when we are hindered, or disturbed, or distressed we should never lay the blame on anyone but ourselves, on our own judgments”.

That basically means that for the Stoics, emotions are nothing but negative choices, the willful act of subverting or undermining yourself. Before explaining how they got there, let me point out that when Stoicism was first being developed by Zeno and then even further by a man named Chrysippus, many thinkers felt they were being so blatantly anti-Platonic and anti-Aristotelian that they were disagreeing with them and others just for the sake of having their own school of thought. We’ll never know if that’s true, but I admit that something like that seems right to me.

Chrysippus, the "second founder" of Stoicism

Foundation: Section 1 of Enchiridion

Enough about that, though, let’s get on with our study of the Stoicism and the emotions. The Enchiridion begins with a hugely important, incredibly influential pair of closely related claims. Epictetus writes that “everything is our own doing, our thoughts, our impulse to act, and our will to get or avoid things, etc, are completely within our power to control”. I genuinely like how life-affirming that idea is. But its not just a life-affirming aphorism, its part of a major, fundamental claim for the whole of Stoic psychology. And its directly followed by the claim that “our bodies are not under our control”.

This is huge. It’s radical. I take them to be the first psychologists who ever argued for this fundamental disconnect between what the mind and body are and what they do. As I’ve argued, this idea is not present in prior psychological theories. But it is present in a whole lot of philosophies afterward. The most important and influential person to accept this disconnect was Descartes.

Look, if you’re like most people, its likely that you (unlike I) believe there is a fundamental difference between ‘your soul’ and ‘your body’. And you probably do for religious reasons. But religion or metaphysics is not the point here. For all I care, let there be such a thing as an incorporeal soul.

The problem is what happens when you insist that the human brain/mind is wholly distinct from the human body, and that one is everything good and valuable about you and the other is everything bad and worthless about you. This belief ignored the best empirical science of their time and the Stoics had the benefit of studying the psychological and ethical theories of Plato,  Aristotle and Lucretius, none of which accept the Stoic disconnect, and in fact, reject such thinking.

In rejecting the P-A-L account of mind and emotions, the Stoics turn to a wholly ungrounded theory absolutely committed to the primacy of the ‘purely rational’ intellect. The main underlying thesis of the Enchiridion, fundamental to Stoicism when it was written, was already totally at odds with basically all thought on the emotions since Homer.

As the Enchiridion makes clear, for Stoicism, in theory and in practice, you are your mind. And having emotions is choosing to cloud yourself, to mislead yourself with incorrect judgments. You, your rational mind – and not your body – are the only thing in the world that can harm you because you are only harmed when you think yourself harmed. Its all in the first section of the book.

And as I’ll explain, this fundamental disconnect between the mind as ‘our own doing” and the body as “not our own doing” leads them inexorably  to conclusions that create insolvable problems regarding what to say about the emotions and emotional actions. Ethics is in large part about human relations. And Stoicism in practice is supposed to guide you to a happy, virtuous life. Unfortunately, what the Stoics think about emotions will make it pretty plain that their philosophy contains a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved without question-begging or rejiggering the account of emotions (which we call ad hoc revision).

A bit more on emotions as judgments

The Enchiridion leaves no doubt that emotions are identified as judgments. At §16 for example, Epictetus suggests that if we see someone crying in sorrow we ought to remember that what distresses him is not the event (e.g. his child dying), because that does not distress another, but his judgment on the event. The idea is that because a complete stranger would not feel as badly as a child’s parent when the child died, this proves that the real problem here is not the child dying but the parent’s decision that the child dying was a terrible thing. No matter the situation, your judgment is the reason you get distressed and any sorrow you feel is simply from the judgment. Of course this does not follow logically, and experience tells us otherwise, but that’s what they’re selling.

Yet just a few pages later, in §30, Epictetus introduces an idea in great tension with this belief.  There he advises us that you can only discover what to judge people on, you can only discover what you should expect from people, when you understand the relation between that type of person (parent, sibling, employer, etc) and you. His idea is that if you only expect your mother to act the way mothers do, and to see the world through the eyes of a mother, then you will not be disturbed by the way your mother acts towards you.

So, for example, if you think your mom is always on your case about how fast you drive and you get offended and get angry, all that’s happened is that you have failed to understand the situation, you made a bad judgment. When you see that your mom’s comments are made out of care, you will cease to be insulted and realize you’re not hurt. Now, wouldn’t the parent who lost her child have a reasonable expectation about their child’s life-long relation to them? Would that relation have a major influence on the person?

Let’s pick up with that thought next week.

How to Understand The Epicureans on Emotion, Part II of II

As I explained in the last post, Epicureans believe that we all have a fundamental desire to pursue pleasure, and that to fulfill this desire, we'll actually sometimes have to avoid some pleasures. Specifically, we need to avoid pain-creating pleasures (e.g. doing hard drugs) and even pursue pleasure-creating pains (e.g. taking awful-tasting medicine).

That's certainly a tough lesson for many to learn, but it has the ring of truth to it, and, at least in my case, experience says it's often true. Perhaps you're one of the lucky ones who think all this is rather obvious and that there's not much to see here. Either way, lets look a little deeper because there's plenty more to see.

Do we really ALWAYS act to avoid pain and fear / to get pleasure?

Taking the claim that we always act to seek pleasure / avoid pain at face value may seem at times brilliantly simply and at other times a cliché or an uninformative tautology.

Consider the following:

1. Pleasure is the avoidance of pain

2. All action is to avoid pain

3. If its true that when our desires are eliminated, we do not act, then when we eliminate pain, we do not act until there is another possibility of removing pain.

That is, it appears what we're agreeing to is that when we succeed in eliminating pain, we cease to have desires, and so we cease to have any reason to act, so we don't act.

Does that have the ring of truth or sound like a tautology? Hardly. Its actually a strange thing to consider. I mean, I can imagine you could argue that someone in a drunk stupor, high on drugs, having just achieved orgasm or having completed a delicious meal could be 'sated' in such a way as to have no desire to do anything.

Homer, having achieved the absence of pain, ceases to act

For a time. Specifically, until some other 'pain' interferes with our state of repose.  But then all we really seem to have learned is that we'll always be hungry and that the effort to satisfy certain hungers will pay off longer or better than others. But Plato and Aristotle already made that very clear.

So what in the world are we really saying in agreeing with the 'obvious' truths that pleasure is the absence of pain and all action is to avoid pain?

What's really happening here?

Ask yourself this - what actually happens when you, by luck or by careful planning, act in a way that truly maximizes your pleasure?

The first thing that occurs to me in asking myself that is that in such cases its highly likely that it involved a lot more than a stroke of luck, my brain - more or less consciously - was deeply involved. And the more such 'maximized pleasure' moments one has, the more likely it is that more than just luck was involved.

So the first thing I'd feel good about concluding is that some of the times that I really maximize my pleasure require a bit of thought. But I also have to accept that other times its more the case that I fell back on some training - which may have required thought in the past, but little now.

For example, the goal of having a tasty snack is a simple, good goal. It doesn't require a whole lot of thinking. But in fulfilling it you do have to have the implicit awareness that not everything that looks tasty is tasty.

So when reaching into the cookie jar for some Oreos, you might recall the time you accidentally got some nasty off-brand cookie and so double check what you pulled out this time. That would be 'goal awareness' plus 'realizing' or 'knowing' that looks can be deceiving.

The epicurean maxims we've been discussing can handle this. And actually, thats nice - in a way they are saying we can judge without deliberating. That's a good thing, and its in agreement with P-A-L. But there's going to be a few problems.

Let's quickly note that Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and Epicurus all basically agree on some key points:

1. Every action is done for the sake of getting to some ultimate end. Depending on who you ask, that the ultimate goal could be said to be accumulating wealth, political power, sexual conquests, or perhaps a life of the mind.

2. But as far as the philosophers I noted above, they're all pretty much in agreement that the ultimate end isn't really any one of those things but rather happiness. A major caveat - each one of the philosophers mentioned has subtle and interesting differences in just what happinessis.

3. They do, however, stand in agreement that achieving happiness is mostly up to us and requires us to be virtuous. But that means that they also agree that being happy requires some level of control over our desires.

The issue, as I tried to make plain at the beginning of this project, is that its going to take a solid understanding of human psychology to determine  what makes humans happy in general, and what will make you happy.

Not a rhetorical question: Just how far does 'all action is for the avoidance of pain' go in that direction?

Identifying the Problems Epicureanism has with Emotion

Epicurus strikes out from this basic agreement with P-A-L do to his thoughts on how to deal with the fact that we sometimes choose to act in ways that do not give us what we seek, pleasure, but instead give us the opposite.

Epicurus thinks that when we act so that we end up in real pain, its caused by both chosen/conscious actions and by reflexive actions,including emotion-driven actions, even though we never intend for this to happen.

Remember, we always seek pleasure, we always act to get pleasure. When the emotions sometimes lead you to pain, they make you wrong about the outcome your actions will lead to.

That is, emotions cause you to think improperly, to be mistaken about the facts of the matter, and so to incorrectly choose what will bring you pleasure. Not only that, acting emotionally is sometimes choosing to act in ways that do not give us what we seek, but instead give us the opposite.

As such, emotions need to be eliminated. They're just too dangerous. And they, on the surface at least, contradict a major Epicurean tenet - that we always act to pursue pleasure.

Rhetorical question: Is happiness an emotion or isn't it?

Let's be clear - Epicurus thinks that when we fail to achieve pleasure, we chose to act for pleasure but were wrong about what we thought we'd achieve. After all, we to some extent  always chose to act.  Similarly, Epicurus also believes that even more or less unchosen acts that lead to real pain (not pleasure-creating pains) are the opposite of what we 'wanted' to achieve.

That is, whether or not we are acting in 'full choice', or acting 'instinctively' or 'reflexively', act that induce real pain are errors. And we definitely want to be conscious of what motivates our chosen actions, as this will help avoid future errors. So he counsels that we hone our abilities to control 'instinctual' or 'reflexive' acts taken to avoid pain.

But are we ever going to consistently get what we want - no pain or fear - by listening to Epicurus' advice that only the proper pursuit of necessary desires will ensure our desires are truly fulfilled?  That is, can we and should we act exclusively and correctly for the repose of the mind and body and nothing more? That's certainly the prescription.He encapsulates all this when he says “the pleasant life comes from searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions (like many emotions), to which are due the greatest disturbances of the spirit”.

Conclusion

Alright, I've been slow-playing my criticisms of Epicurus' take on the emotions and how they influence his moral philosophy but its time to play my hand.

The emotions are real trouble for Epicurus' theory for the simple reason that a person's success at understanding and controlling the emotions will determine how good an epicurean she will be.

Epicurus agrees with Plato and Aristotle that in some situations, certain emotions will prove exceedingly difficult to avoid. At its core Epicureanism is advising us that only a small subset of our desires - the natural and necessary - is at all necessary for and conducive to happiness. That's why Epicurus insists we understand the types of desires. Knowing what's what will allow you to act in a way so as to have and maintain a healthy body and a mind free of disturbance. And because of the fact unmodulated or ungoverned emotions can work powerfully against this goal, he wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater and eliminate emotions.

The problem for Epicureanism as a guiding moral philosophy, what leads it to this conclusion, stems from the fact that for most people who might try to be epicureans precious little of what we do is a result of conscious deliberation. And thus to make it work we're going to have to find some way to train ourselves to act appropriately in cases where we're not consciously considering the true nature of the desire we're dealing with. But how is this training supposed to work? How do you raise a child this way and how do you reverse-engineer it in a mature adult?

I'll remind you one last time that according to Epicureanism, young or old, educated or ignorant, we always act to achieve happiness or pleasure, to avoid pain or fear. But just what does that mean when we in fact do not often consciously think about our actions and what is really motivating our desires?

It means that we often get tricked. It means that in order for most of us to really be happy, somehow we must both consciously and non-consciously avoid errors in determining what is actually best for us, what we really need to do and what only seems necessary.  We need some mechanism or mechanisms to make sure we only pursue the absolutely necessary desires, no matter our level of conscious attention. Unfortunately, Epicurus refuses to accept what Plato, Aristole and Lucretius did - the emotions can be just such mechanisms.

In order for normal people like us to succeed as epicureans given our limitations in concentration, we need to be trained. This is not news, and in fact, as you no doubt have noticed society does do a lot of training through the mores it passes along. So does organized religion. For example, until quite recently, society trained homosexuals to repress their sexuality, at the cost of tremendous stress and unhappiness. Many religions still do.  And more positively, traditional sexual expectations for heterosexuals, though also stressful, perhapsworked to lower infidelity in marriage and by extention lowered the rate of divorce, arguably providing better homes for young children.

But how do such mores work? The way they are passed on, usually in childhood, makes it pretty clear they are not appealing to our rational faculty. We don't get logical or philosophical arguements for the rules of society or religion. Instead it seems clear that the emotions, including pride, fear, shame, anger and the need for love are deeply involved. Much more than involved.

In reality, we know it to be true from experience - it just makes sense - that properly calibrated emotional responses to situations are exactlythe efficient, practical, successful mechanisms by which we can increase the likelihood that we can have the well-trained character that would help us approach the goal of desiring only what is truly going to make us happy.

However, Epicureanism not only discourages this, it flatly claims that strong emotions are to be completely eliminated and generally speaking, all emotions should be eradicated. Even though Epicurus had the benefit of studying Aristotle's thinking on the matter which fleshes out convincingly the idea that in some cases its highly desireable,correct even, for you to strongly feel specific emotions.

As I think Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius made plain, and as I'll explain in greater detail later, the emotions are exactly the sort of thing to strongly influence you to act quickly and assertively to achieve a desire you're body thinks is necessary. Its unquestionable that to perform this service they need a significant level of monitoring. I argued that this insight is at the core of Plato's psychology. Epicurus, to his discredit, misses this point.

For him, the emotions are so powerful and damaging that they simply offer too much of a chance for error and so simply offer too much likelihood for pain. And the successful 'emotion-controller' would have to be already nearly perfect in character not to succumb to negative impulses. Thus Epicurus says we need to eliminate them.

But this is an unrealistic goal, and given the tremendous force for good education and action that the emotions in fact can be, its an unworthy goal.

The emotions are not a problem to be avoided, or a rough patch to be smoothed. They are an integral part of our organism that needs to be enhanced.

The Last Words on Lucretius

Intro

As I said earlier, Lucretius thinks the mind controls cognition and the particles it is made up of are localized in the chest. On the other hand, anima, the vital spirit, is everywhere else in the body but the mid breast. Vital spirit’s particles move to the sway of mind particles and give the body sensation; thanks to vital spirit “even the teeth share in sensation”. Keep that in mind as we talk below about "registering" and "bodily awareness".
The View from 10,000 Feet
Echoing Plato’s analogy of the psyche with a country, where the rational part is the leaders and the spirited part is the military,

Basically like this, but I see courage as an example of the broader concept "spiritedness"

Lucretius says that while mind rules, vital spirit is the “body’s guard and cause of health”. It’s a safety mechanism to protect your flesh. In fact, vital spirit and flesh “twine together with common roots” and he thinks trying to tear them apart would be all but impossible, like taking separating the scent out of curry. He also describes it as being so thin and light, so sensitive, that even thoughts can make it move.
Getting Our Hands Dirty
Now that we have the basics on what mind and vital spirit, animus and anima, are, its time to get down to brass tacks. We’ve noted that Lucretius is a strict physicalist, believing that everything that exists is made out of physical particles. And he thinks that mind and spirit are one and the same thing, yet that mind is cognitive and spirit is not. But why should the same substance be able to act so differently?
Isn’t that paradoxical, or worse, impossible? Well, to avoid that conclusion he’s going to need to give us a satisfactory explanation for this apparent strangeness.
The reason, he says, why they can be the same “stuff” but act so differently is that while the mind is affected the same way as the body, vital spirit is “not one and simple”. What he means is that there are different properties to mind and spirit, they are not pure and simple like, say, hydrogen, carbon or iron. Instead mind and spirit are two subtypes of the same basic type of stuff, an “uber-soul” material, vital spirit. And vital spirit is not a basic element either. It’s a mixture of some sort, like water or soda.
We don’t need to go into the actual physical stuff he thinks make up vital spirit, the mind and spirit because its just not even close to being right as far as what we know to be the components of the nervous system. How could it have been, it would be about 1,500 years before the microscope was invented,

Seawater maginfied 25x

and roughly another 360 before the Electroencephalograph (EEG,  the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) became widely available.

EEGs measure the activity of neurons

But if you’re interested in knowing more, contact me and I’ll send you my fairly detailed discussion of it from my dissertation.
Whatever physical bits it is actually made of, in practice this vital spirit is basically what we’d call “bodily awareness”, the mechanism that allows us to do things like avoid running into people walking past us the other way even by the slimmest of margins. And as I’ve said before, given the way he describes them it’s fair to think of its components, animus and anima, as what we’d say are aspects of our overall nervous system.
So to put a bow on it, he is saying that the best explanation for our capabilities is that there is a physical system spread throughout the body that is responsive to outside stimuli, and that is directly connected to a centralized core, made of the same material. This core component uses in various ways the input to guide the actions/responses of the whole being. This centralized material, when activated by the spread-out system, is able to think and feel to varying degrees. Or as we’d say today, the nervous system allows for or creates the initial conditions for basic things like reflexes but also for our ability to measure and judge, and our ability for abstract thought.
Let’s be clear: Lucretius does not think that the chest-brain-stuff (animus) simply takes in data from the anima, stops the flow and considers the data, then sends commands to a body that is silently waiting. Instead the components that make up vital spirit allow for duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body. It allows for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement - he explains that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the spirit, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. But this duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff.
Yet its interesting to note and accept with Lucretius that our bodies register a lot more info than we ever actually register consciously. Think of micro-facial expressions, gut reactions, goose bumps, mosquito bites, or even navigating foot traffic on a busy sidewalk. These are all clearly things the body “notes” – or as I will put it sometimes, registers – even though you as a thinking person aren’t aware. And common sense tells us he’s right: not only are we not conscious of things such as mosquitoes biting us, we have no feeling whatsoever of things such as radiation, yet clearly our body registers it, sadly, to very poor results.
Emotion
Lucretius thinks that emotions are qualities of both animus and anima; they both process and communicate information, and so they can’t be irrational. But its hard for him to call them rational too. He’s convinced that emotions are felt physically in the heart and concludes in part from this that the mid-region of the breast is the seat of intellect and mind. But just because they are felt there doesn’t mean they are only felt there. In fact, he believes that there is more than one kind of emotion; one more or less purely mental (but of course physical) and “spirit-based” or “visceral” emotion that is much deeper and stronger but of course still “cognitive”.
On Lucretius’ account, due to the interactions of the physical particles that make up vital spirit, the mind emotes in an interesting way. Basically, anyone in an emotionally charged situation, anyone emotionally agitated, ends up at whatever emotion they end up at (or calm) by going through a progression from the burn of anger, to the chill of fright, and eventually back to calmness, as the duplex communication between the mind and spirit continues.  Whether true or not, given the importance that anger and fear responses have to survival this makes some sense.  These emotions are utterly important to our survival. The problem of course is that they can sometimes be a little antiquated and therefore lead us to misunderstand what our best reactions to a perceived stress should be.
The idea is that for some emotions, say fear for instance, up to a certain threshold only the mind is “emoting”, but there is a tipping point where the vital spirit is roused. As such, the chest-brain area is usually the part handling (and ‘showing” fears, but after a point the whole spirit system gets involved and you see other behaviors related to fear.
He also explains that while vital spirit moves to the “sway” of the mind, it does not always follow mind’s influence. At least sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it does, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on what beliefs are followed. When incoherent or mistaken beliefs are followed, we get bad desires and bad results. When correct beliefs are followed we get good desire and satisfaction. So to the extent an emotion keeps you from making a smart choice, or makes you feel like doing something stupid, or counter-productive, they would seem to be irrational, yet the real thing to blame here is not that system, its job is to protect your body, and its perceiving a threat!

A very basic kind of fear

But the animus! It’s the job of the animus to be rational, to oversee things. If the mind doesn’t do its job the times when it is within its power to do so, then the cause must be a physiological limitation, stupidity, laziness, or bad character. Nothing about emotions, or mind, or spirit makes it have to be that emotions and emotional responses have to be irrational or bad.
Conclusion
So we’ve seen Lucretius follow Plato and Aristotle very closely in some fundamentally important respects: 1) He’s keenly sensitive to the impact the emotions can have on other thoughts and on actions; 2) He believes there are two types of emotions; one more or less purely ‘mental’ and one ‘spirit-based’; more visceral and deeply felt, but still cognitive. (Of course both are still purely physical.) While some, say an existential dread, are cases where the mind is by and large the only part emoting, there may be a threshold past which the vital spirit is roused. Similarly, there can be emotions, say fear of a predator, that are more basic and active at the level of the spirit, but past a certain point the rest of the spirit system, the mind, may get involved; 3) he believes in duplex communication between the ‘mind’ and the body, and that 4) the mind and the body are both physical. In sum, he’s in basic agreement with Plato and Aristotle’s insights on ethics and psychology. At the very least nothing they said is directly contradicted by Lucretius.
The improvement Lucretius makes is that he not only understands that there must be a physiological explanation to all this, he tries to explain it. At length. And with some very imaginative, even penetrating insights. In fact, it was absolutely state-of-the-art science for 55 B.C. In fact, it was pretty state-of-the-art for a lot longer than that!
Combining the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius on the emotions, the mind, and ethics, we can see a pretty well worked out, defensible position. I call it the P-A-L account, and I call the theory of emotions in the P-A-L account the “pluralist account” of emotions. That’s in comparison to the visceral account, first developed by Homer, and the third candidate-account, which we're about to start discussing, cognitivism.
Review and Preview
We have a “scientific” (physiologically centered), state-of-the-art for its time explanation of how the mind and body are  parts of a functioning system, how they interact and impact each other, and what thinking and the emotions are. And it all fits in just fine with the psychological and ethical insights of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, I think this P-A-L account is so defensible that I try to update it to current state of the art science in the final chapter of my dissertation, and that updated version is my own belief about how the emotions work in ethics.
Unfortunately, This P-A-L account didn’t exactly set the world on fire at the time. Not long after it was all put into place the Stoics came along and did every thing they could to bury it alive. The fact that I had to write this dissertation at all gives you a good idea of how successful they were. Unfortunately for us.
But before we get to them we have to look at the Epicureans, who have their own strengths and weaknesses to examine.

We'll have to see what you think after the next handful of posts!

Lucretius' Conception of Mind

A Recap and a Rolling Start

As I said last time, Lucretius believes that when the mind is pushed-upon a wave of particles sets in motion, stirring the will. If you read my posts on Plato this should remind you of Plato's similar claims on how the outside world impinges upon the mind and body.

But to "stir the will" has to be explained in physical terms too, and Lucretius comes up with a theoretical physical system called "vital spirit" to do so. More on that later but for now we'll note that the physical substance vital spirit is diffused throughout out the body.

Whatever you call the stuff that moves the body around, the real trick is explaining the interconnectedness of the body and mind, of will and physical action, in a thoroughly materialist, physiologically centered manner. And a good, useful explanation will allow us to understand what it means for the mind to see and understand anything at all. Unless you're up to date on current neurophysiology, this is a pretty tall task.

So yeah, Lucretius has to be pretty bright to come up with such a system nearly 2000 years ago.

But enough back-slapping.

Isn't Physical "Soul" a cop-out?

On Lucretius' account every living thing is replete with "soul", which is completely material, just as much as your foot, ear and every other part of your body. (So don't you who believe in immaterial souls try to hijack this, and don't those of you who eschew such talk get upset!). Material soul is not a cop-out, but I'm going to tell you right now the concept gets pretty hairy so we're going take it nice and slow.

Lucretius actually uses two terms that can be translated into English as "soul": anima, which, for you religious types, is the one traditionally equated with what you mean by soul, and animus, a newer (relatively!) term he uses to make a very novel distinction.

Most simply put, in Lucretius' theory its the difference between the irrational and the rational mind. But even this is hiding some serious complexity. Both the "irrational" anima and the "rational" animus are part of (or two types of) the same stuff, vital spirit. Vital spirit is an admixture of various physical elements and, as I said above, is distributed throughout the body. We'll see that actually it works in a way similar to the central and sympathetic nervous systems. First lets focus on the part of all this that is most accessible to us, the animus, the rational part, what Plato and Aristotle called the psyche.

Animus or Psyche, its the Mind for Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius

For Lucretius, the animus, the rational part of the vital spirit, is responsible for all higher cognitive functions, things like abstract thought and planning ahead. So an able translation of animus is "mind', with all its implications of higher order thought and moral understanding. Lucretius at times also calls it "intellect", "head", "guiding principle" and "dominant force".

As funny as it may seem, Lucretius believed, (like many of his contemporaries, Aristotle and Homer) that mind is located in the middle of the breast. It will be very useful to keep that in mind so you can picture how he can talk about "thinking" in your chest, which will help you to better understand him overall. But let me say it again - like the rest of the vital spirit - mind is composed of matter.

A Primer on Mental Activity

Lucretius makes it clear that vital spirit causes sensibility in us, which allows the mind to have experience. And in order for action to occur, the mind must "judge" the benefits/merits of the results of an action. But this does not have to be done consciously. Just as important, the mind is not a 2-way transmitter (e.g., a walkie talkie) that, for example, "feels" a bug crawling on the skin and then tells the hand to squash it.

NO:

Think about why he is right that this doesn't make sense. If the mind were like a walkie-talkie, by definition only one end at a time can communicate. So if you had a bug on your leg, what would have to happen for you to get rid of it?

First, the body would feel the pressure on your flesh. For your mind to "know it" too would require one of four things:
1) Luckily, at the same moment when the body felt the pressure, the mind happened to not communicating out any messages and so able to receive transmission,
2) The body would not only feel the pressure on the skin, but also "knows" that the mind should stop transmitting and could force it to by accompanying important messages with a message such as "over" to tell the brain to start talking,
3) The body itself would just "know" how to stop the bug (like a reflex),
4) The body is constantly transmitting messages whether or not the mind is in a position to hear them, and sometimes the brain listens in for whatever reason.

However plausible you find any of these explanations, they raise more questions than they answer. Instead, Lucretius, like Plato and Aristotle, thinks there is a special, interactive and reciprocal communication between the body and the mind (and the emotions), a process I will continue to refer to as duplex communication. The mind and the body are both duplex transmitters, such as cellular phones, which allow two constantly running communications to both be understood by their targets.

YES:

For Lucretius, Plato and Aristole, how the mind and body interact

More Details on Mind and Thought

According to Lucretius, mind is able to represent events to itself much faster than they actually occur or would happen. For example, if in real life, if Tim Lincecum throws his two-seam fastball 90 miles per hour, the hitter has .46 seconds to swing at it. Go ahead and imagine that now.

Big Time Timmy Jim

However long you took to visualize it, says Lucretius, it was quite a bit faster than .46 seconds. Another example of the relative speed of mind is how long it takes for the mind to "think ahead", as when you get a joke before its completed. (Here's an article on thought-speed).

I'll get into it more in the next post, but this also relates to something that will be very important to the P-A-L theory (when I finally flesh it out!). Not only is Lucretius really big on how fast mental representation is, he also makes it pretty clear that for the mind to "see" doesn't require deliberation. As he puts it, "within one moment of our sensation, many tinier moments are hidden whose existence reason discovers". And what he means by "discovers" is that the contents of our mental pictures are full of information "right there" and only need to be picked up or picked out. Yet we also superimpose assumptions on the information we process with our minds, so that things not "perceived by the senses" seem to us just like sense perceptions.

But what of it? Well it means that for Lucretius some (maybe even most) things are understood by the senses and not just "passively received" by them. And that means that a lot of what you might call "analysis" or "judging" doesn't require conscious deliberation. And as far as ethics goes, it also means that he is in agreement with Epicurus' saying that in a way we choose to engage in poor or irrational behavior because we often have a strong will to impose questionable - or even flat out wrong - interpretations on the things we see and hear.

We'll come back next time to look at the anima and more fully understand vital spirit.

 

Introducing Lucretius

Introduction

I think that the Roman poet Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) is the most underrated philosopher of the ancient world. There, I said it.



So far as we know, he only created one work, De Rerum Natura, which is usually translated as On the Nature of Things. As the title suggests, it attempts to explain the universe, including the workings of the human mind. In poetic form. In Latin. And you've probably never heard of it. I hadn't heard of it myself until about halfway through grad school, and I didn't read it all until I was working on my dissertation. But the point is, it is without question the best piece work ever put out by any thinker who has ever called himself an Epicurean.

You might think it funny, then, that I group him with Plato and Aristotle and not in my treatment (soon to come) of Epicureanism. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1) I think Epicureanism, generally speaking, is quite close to Platonism and Aristotelianism when it comes to ethics; 2) I think Lucretius differs from orthodox Epicureanism in ways that allow him to be read as a "physicalist" "scientific" or "materialist" continuation of the psychological and ethical ideas I've discussed in Plato and Aristotle. I don't want to put too fine a point on that, in the end I don't need to convince anyone that Lucretius was secretly a Platonist or an Aristotelian and not an Epicurean. I just need to explain to you how Lucretius can fairly be read as usefully and consistently continuing what they started regarding how the mind works and how that feeds into ethics. I do this not only because it strikes me as correct, but in building out the argument of my thesis, I thought it useful and even important to show how the Plato-Aristotle view of the mind might look in a more "scientific" setting.

The First thing You Need to Know about Lucretius

Lucretius, as is true of any Epicurean, was a materialist. And he was an amazingly thorough materialist, even by their standards. I'm going explain that and then I hope you'll see why I'm going to switch to "physicalist" for the rest of my discussion of him.

The main point of materialism is that everything is made out of actual physical stuff. There are no ghosts, souls, or anything else of the kind unless you can explain how they are made out of physical particles. And everything that happens in the world happens to stuff. In On the Nature of Things Lucretius sets out to explain how this all might work, with the best science of his time. An example of how very thorough he was - He argues that seeing is literally taking in atoms, in the ‘shape’ of the object one sees, which then physically impinge upon the mind.

Next time, we'll delve into Lucretius' conception of the mind.

Introducing Aristotle on the Emotions

Recap and Intro
Plato has given us a structure for thinking about what the emotions are, how they develop and how they relate to our overall thinking ability. Now we’ll turn to Plato’s famous student, Aristotle, to  really flesh out how the emotions create and color our thoughts and behaviors, as well as how they relate to good and bad people and actions.
Looking ahead, we’ll finish setting up the P-A-L theory by learning about  Lucretius’ take on the emotions. Once done we’ll see that the combined work of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius form an internally coherent,  empirically friendly, pluralist approach to understanding the mind and emotions and how they relate to ethics. Thus we’ll have seen that there was such a thing  as a pluralist theory of the emotions with an attached ethical theory available before the cognitivist and visceral theories that began to be put forward in the 17th century.
Aristotle
You’ve probably heard of Aristotle before so just like with Plato, I’ll not spend too much time on introducing you to him. And the above hyper link should help anyone who doesn’t have a good idea of who he is. But I will say that I agree with most philosophers in placing him behind only Plato in the list of the greatest philosophers of all time.  Aristotle deserves all the fame that he has and his influence on Western society, like that of Plato’s, is  incalculable.

Aristotle with Alexander the Great

Aristotle thought long and hard about the nature of thinking and wrote what in my opinion is the single best book on ethics ever written, the Nicomachean Ethics (the title is supposedly from the name of his son, Nicomachus, but we can’t be sure.) Its one of my all-time favorite books and has had a major influence on my life.
In that book and in the nearly as valuable and famous Rhetoric, Aristotle gives us a thorough, practical account of the emotions and how they affect moral actions and choices, which is the core of the powerful ethical theory, friendly to empirical research without being wedded to bad science that is the P-A-L account.
Like Plato, Aristotle thinks there is a special, interactive and reciprocal communication between the body, the “mind” (or “cognition in general”) and the emotions, a process I will continue to refer to as “duplex communication”. However, he took Plato’s overarching theory and fleshed it in an even more empirically-friendly manner with ideas and observations that really appeal to common sense.
Aristotle goes on at length to explain how the feeling aspect of emotions stem from and relate to human cognitive capacity and how emotions, feelings and cognition (remember I’ve used this to mean thinking like we do when playing chess or doing algebra) work together.
At the very core of the theory of emotions he comes up with is the idea that there are two types of emotion-based actions that go along with two basic emotion types: 1) some emotionally charged actions are much more cognitive than others and therefore we can say these actions are voluntary; 2) some emotionally charged actions are so fast and intense that stopping them is virtually impossible and therefore these actions are counter-voluntary.  This fits in well with the Platonic framework we discussed before: Putting Aristotle’s thoughts into Plato’s words we can say that voluntary emotional acts are instantiated by the interplay between the psyche and thymos and involuntary acts are of the animalistic appetitive instinct.
The core ethical lesson can be grasped by an analogy: If you could have stopped or ignored a destructive appetite but didn’t, you’ve acted wrongly. And by the same token, if  you could have stopped and reconsidered a destructive emotion and doing so would have let you redirect it or it would have dissipated, but instead you failed to re-think it and it led to a bad result, you have acted wrongly.
Understanding how all this is true and how it works requires us to discuss a few concepts Plato and Homer didn’t bring up specifically: Deliberation,  Impulsiveness, Weakness, Voluntary Action and Counter Voluntary Action. Each of these builds up or explains some basic ethical premises and will help us answer myriad ethical problems. Let’s go ahead and get the first one done and in the next post we’ll take on the difference between Voluntary and Counter-voluntary action.

Deliberation

Aristotle notes that while other animals     seem merely to respond to natural desires such as for food or sex, humans are capable of deliberating about our actions. This ability to deliberate is what allows a being to originate their actions. Even if we often don’t deliberate before acting, we can do so and doing so makes us true agents.
This immediately brings to mind the questions of why it is that we sometimes do not, if we ever cannot, and why. When we do, we deliberate in order to achieve our goals. We do not deliberate about goals themselves  or about particular objects (e.g. that I must convert my dissertation into a blog), nor do we deliberate about “particular” things that our senses show us, (e.g. that I just ate Chinese food).
Deliberating is investigating,inquiring, calculating in relation to a specific end, a specific outcome that is not impossible to obtain. It is unimportant whether a thing tends to end up a certain way, if it could be different then we can deliberate about it. We get motivated to deliberate from our desire to accomplish our goal. When deliberation is done, a decision is made and the agent exercises their desire.
So, for example, take the existence of this blog. I didn’t deliberate about whether I should have a goal, or whether blogs exist or whether my dissertation was accepted by CUNY’s faculty, these are all facts. And I didn’t deliberate about whether or not my laptop is a laptop or whether the blog hosting site will save my work – I can see these things are true. But I had a desire to publicize and share my work. The question is how best to accomplish this goal. My mind immediately set upon the problem and I investigated blog sites, calculated how much time I could give to the project and roughly how long it would take to complete, and studied my work to see how I could change the language to make my findings more easily understood. I decided on a plan and I began to implement it.  Now I’ll begin deliberation on how to formulate the next post on voluntary and counter-voluntary actions.

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