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I was reading Macbeth last night and was struck by these lines (written about an executed traitor, but never the less);
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it. He died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he [owned]
As ’twere a careless trifle.
To be a student of one's own mortality, and neither dreading the day nor wishing for it, is a consistent theme in Epicurean texts.
I'm curious what y'all think about this question, "What place do games have in Epicurean philosophy?"
I think that's a very good question, though it may be difficult to answer fully--although I think Don's answer settles the main point.
The Greeks were to a remarkable extent a gaming civilization--so much so that they literally set their calendars by it. They valued their games--Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean, and other local affairs--for some of the same reasons we do; in the first place, because they helped to foster a unified and pan-Hellenic cultural identity. They aided in cultivating good relationships between City States.
In a remarkable passage in Xenophon's Anabasis, a mercenary army of 10,000 free Greeks that has just been marching for months overland across the whole length and breadth of hostile Persia finally reaches safety in the Greek colonies on the coast of the Black Sea, and they celebrate their immense good fortune by playing games! Extraordinary! I think if it were me I would have collapsed in a chair and not stirred for three months. The ended a forced march across difficult and dangerous terrain by celebrating with foot races, wrestling, discus and javelin.
So what did Epicurus think about all of this? On the question of Epicurus' alleged rejection of Greek culture Norman DeWitt has this to say;
This Platonic program consisted of music and gymnastic, inherited
from the Athenian past; of rhetoric, which had been introduced by the
sophists; and of dialectic and mathematics, especially geometry, which
were the addition of Plato himself.
Toward every component of this prevailing education the attitude of
Epicurus was determined by the nature of the objective adopted for his
own program. This objective was not the production of a good citizen
but a happy and contented man. For practical purposes this happiness
was defined as health of mind and health of body. The famous prayer
for mens Sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body,” recom¬
mended by Juvenal, is genuine Epicureanism.
This being the case, there was no reason for rejecting physical training,
and approval of it was the easier not only because the laws required
it — and Epicurus recommended obedience to the laws — but also for the
reason that the amateur athlete and the citizen soldier were being
replaced by the professional athlete and the professional soldier. Thus
the rigors of the required exercises could be relaxed.
As for music, there need be little doubt that the approval of Epicurus
was enthusiastic. His own capacity for appreciating good music seems to
have been keen. It is told of him that he would arise early in the morning
and trudge to the theater to enjoy the performance
And then are there the tabletop games of Ancient Greece, most of which were distinguished by the common feature of gambling on chance. I suspect that Epicurus would have cautioned against gambling, though of course I don't know that.
In any case, playing a game for the game's own sake is a very human pasttime, enjoyed among friends, and yielding pleasure--and for those reasons is very much worth doing. Play like the Greeks!
DeWitt can be intentionally classicizing in his prose, as here in his description of Canada:
Since he published this article in The Classical Weekly his intended readers cannot have failed to notice the allusion. It is to Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico, "Of the War in Gaul":
All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.
What exactly did he mean to convey by this? Perhaps that Canada and its partially French (i.e. Gallic) heritage stand in relation to a southern empire governed as a republic, and that both province and empire are removed from the real seat of culture--for Rome, Greece; for North America, Europe.
The University of Toronto from which he writes is then a frontier outpost of Classical studies with only a nominal connection to the old ways, and has a decision to make about its future. Much like the New England of the preceding century--the New England of Emerson and Thoreau and their classically trained fellows.
Are the Latin translations varying dramatically such as modern translations of Lucretius into English do, or do they tend to be largely latin word for latin word consistent?
That's a good question that I don't have an answer to. In one of Poggio's letters to Niccolo Niccoli, the writer apologizes for his style--he was stuck in England reading Ecclesiastical Latin and did not, at the time, have access to the high Classical Latin of Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, Virgil, etc. So a Poggio or a Niccoli at the height of their powers would have attempted as far as possible to consciously imitate the style of the Late Republic, while many of their contemporaries will have written in a less polished register. This difference would affect everything from grammar and sentence structure to diction and spelling.
Montaigne, whose native language was Latin due to an unusual upbringing, complained that the Latin of the Renaissance had fallen so far below that of its antecedents.
When I consider this, reiicit, pascit, inhians, molli, fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and this noble circumfusa, mother of gentle infusus, I am vexed at these small points and verball allusions, which since have sprung up. To those well-meaning [ancient] people there needed no sharpe encounter or witty equivocation: their speech is altogether full and massie, with a naturall and constant vigor: they are all epigram, not only taile, but head, stomacke, and feet. There is nothing forced, nothing wrested, nothing limping; all marcheth with like tenour.
He was referring to this passage from Lucretius:
-----belli fera munera Mavors
Armipotens regit, in gremium qui saepe tuum se
Reiicit, aeterno devinctus vulnere amoris:
Pascit amore aridos inhians in te Dea visus,
Eque tuo endet resupini spiritus ore:
Hunc tu Diva tuo recubantem corpore sancto
Circumfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas
Funde.
Mars, mighty arm'd, rules the fierce feats of armes,
Yet often casts himselfe into thine armes,
Oblig'd thereto by endlesse wounds of love,
Gaping on thee feeds greedy sight with love,
His breath hangs at thy mouth who upward lies,
Goddesse thou circling him, while he so lies,
With thy celestiall body, speeches sweet
Montaigne continues:
This is not a soft quaint eloquence, and only without offence; it is sinnowie, materiall, and solid; not so much delighting, as filling and ravishing, and ravisheth most the strongest wits, the wittiest conceits. When I behold these gallant formes of expressing, so lively, so nimble, so deepe, I say not this is to speake well, but to think well.
Translated into English by John Florio, 1603.
Yeah, the transmission of Greek texts from the Arab world back into Europe where Latin was the lingua franca of the educated meant that there was a great desire to translate Greek into Latin.
The great printer and book maker Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 to 1515) wrote that part of his goal was to "inundate the reading public with Greek" and not settle for Latin translation. He felt that too many people were relying on Latin translations.
Regarding suavity, Lucretius uses it in reference to 'sweet flowers'.
tibi suavis daedala tellus summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.
My rough translation:
"For you the clever Earth sends forth sweet flowers, for you laugh the waves of the sea, and the calm sky shines with diffuse light."
It was Pietro Redondi who put forward the thesis that atomism was at the center of the Galileo Trial because of its inherent challenge to the Eucharist. As I said, it is a very controversial claim. It is known that Galileo got into trouble with the Jesuits over atomism before his trial.
Good questions! I usually quote Johnston because it's easy to search for key-words and copy/paste. Perseus is a great resource but the chunks of text are often too small and it can be difficult to select text on mobile (although there are workarounds).
I also find Stallings to be a bit distracting, but some people are drawn to her style. My favorite verse translation is Rolfe Humphries, but he admits in his introduction that his focus was to capture the flavor of the poem rather than a literal rendition, which I think he succeeds at.
My best general advice for reading Lucretius is that contextualizing the poem can stave off boredom--we're so familiar with the idea that the earth is extremely old, that the universe is incomprehensibly large and ancient, that matter is made of little particles, that other worlds might potentially harbor life, and that nature is capable of sustaining a vacuum that reading about them in an old poem can seem rather dull. But if keep in mind how revolutionary these ideas really were, I think we can still capture a little bit of the magic.
I agree with your interpretation, Eric, and that's also what I get out of the letter I quoted above re: Shelley.
Although as it happens, Shelley was expelled from University College, Oxford, for disseminating a tract he wrote called "They Necessity of Atheism", by which he actually meant Deism.
Edit; we've been talking a lot lately about the Areopagus in Athens and it's relationship with Parrhesia, candor or frank speech. John Milton chose it for the title of his own tract, a defense of free expression called Areopagitica.
epicureanfriends.com/wcf/attachment/3991/
Yes, that's this one. All three have the forest fire as an important motif.
The above translation is from Ian Johnston.
Piero di Cosimo, A Hunting Scene, c. 1500
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
This picture and its companion (also in The Met's collection) reimagine the early history of humankind and are among the most singular works of the Renaissance. Their inspiration was the fifth book of De Rerum Natura by the Epicurean poet and philosopher Lucretius (ca. 99–55 B.C.). A manuscript of Lucretius’s work was discovered in 1417 and published in Florence in 1471–73. Lucretius believed that the workings of the world can be accounted for by natural rather than divine causes, and he put forward a vision of the history of primitive humanity and the advent of civilization that was much discussed in Renaissance Florence—and beyond.
And so now,
in what remains, my train of argument
has now brought me to this point, where I must
set down an explanation how the world
is a mortal substance and was born,
how a collection of materials
established earth, heaven, sea, stars, sun,
and the moon’s globe, then what living creatures
sprang from earth, as well as those never born
at any time, how the human race began
to employ among themselves various words
by giving names to things, and ways in which
that fear of gods slid into human hearts,
which preserves sacred places on earth’s sphere—
shrines, lakes, groves, altars, images of gods.
...
They could not look toward the common good
and did not know how to make for themselves
any laws or customs. A man would take
whatever prize fortune might throw his way,
with each one trained to look out for himself
and get by on his own. And in the woods,
Venus would join bodies in sexual acts,
for each woman was either overwhelmed
by mutual lust, or by the violent force
and reckless passion of the man, or else
by some reward—acorns, or strawberries,
or fine pears. And trusting in the power
of their hands and feet, which was amazing,
they went after wild beasts in the forest
by throwing rocks and with large, heavy clubs.
They brought down many, but there were a few
they avoided in their hiding places.
...
And just in case, while dealing with these things,
you are perhaps quietly wondering,
it was lighting which first carried fire down
to mortal men on earth—with that all heat
from flames is generated. For we see
many things ignite and burn up when struck
by fire from heaven, once the bolt transmits
its heat. Then, too, when a tree with branches
is lashed by winds, sways back and forth, presses
and rubs the branches of another tree,
the violent force of rubbing brings out fire,
and while trunk and branches chafe each other,
sometimes the flaming heat of fire ignites.
Either of these two could have provided
fire to mortal men. And then sun taught them
to cook their food, using the heat of flames
to soften it, because out in the fields
they would see many objects getting soft
once beaten by sun’s heat and lashing rays.
The Return from the Hunt, also at the Met.
That is a very interesting take, Pacatus! Certainly one I'd not heard before.
What it turned into in my Catholic High School religion class was a nun very eager to share with us the manifold dangers of masturbation...
I wonder what you think about the next sentence--all is permitted.
You mean the one I was trying to avoid? 😅
Of course it too deserves a response. In a letter of Horace Smith to Cyrus Redding, dated 1822, the author has this to say in reference to the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley;
Though Shelley is my most particular friend, I regret the imprudence of his early publications on more points than one, but as I know him to possess the most exalted virtues, and find in others who promulgate the most startling theories, most amiable traits, I learn to be liberal towards abstract speculations, which not exercising any baneful influence on their author’s lives, are still less likely to corrupt others. Truth is great, and will prevail—that is my motto, and I would, therefore, leave everything unshackled—what is true will stand, and what is false ought to fall, whatever be the consequences. Ought we not to feel ashamed that Lucretius could publish his book in the teeth of an established religion, while martyrs are groaning in perpetual imprisonment, for expressing a conscientious dissent from Christianity?
If by "all is permitted" we mean something like "leave everything unshackled" in its above usage, then I am fully on board. St. Augustine wrote that the church permitting the spread of heresy was like the state allowing the sale of poison bread. Aquinas in his Summa Theologica preferred the metaphor of counterfeit money, and in either case the result is the same--the punishment for counterfeiting was mutilation or death, and Dante has King Philip IV of France tortured in hell for adulterating the coinage.
By contrast, what I find in Epicurus is a thinker for whom questions of justice and morality are approached with measure and care, as in Vatican Saying 51:
I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will, provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by one or more of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm.
Set aside Epicurus' final advice here; the point is that in lieu of a stark prohibition, and without any threat of torture or death, he simply leads the coorespondant to examine carefully the consequences of a given course of action, in the particular context in which he finds himself. In another time and place, law and custom might be different. The crime of Onan in the book of Genesis was failing to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law; such a proscription would be unthinkable and grotesque in our age.
Of the 10 commandments, only three are current law; prohibitions against murder, theft, and perjury.
Should literally everything be permitted by law? No, I don't think so. I can't imagine Epicurus did either. But the sope and compass of personal liberty should far exceed the scope of what is forbidden.
The following scene from Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons" catches the flavor of what I mean to convey;
Thank you, HsiehKW, that is a very thorough response and I will have to read it again more carefully tomorrow!
In response to your last paragraph, I agree that plants are not cognitive; I cite them merely in a thought experiment, in order to outline the operation of prolepsis as non-cognitive. The inclusion of prolepsis in the Canon seemed to require a process linked to sensation and rooted in physiology, which I tried to take as nearly as I could to its hypothetical extreme.
Your division of prolepsis into two adaptive orders is particularly interesting to me. As I said, I will return for a more careful reading!
Thank you again!
To me, what really distinguishes DeWitt from other commentators is that he seems to have devoted almost his entire professional writing career to the study and exposition of Epicurean philosophy exclusively.
It's beside your main point, but what I'm finding in my research is that his academic interest in Epicureanism may stem from later in his career than I realized. There is, first, his dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago; a study of the erotic in "The Dido Episode in the Aeneid of Virgil", 1907. He surveys the literature of Greece and Rome in laying the groundwork for his thesis, but one figure is curiously absent: Lucretius.
Excluding the above, his next six publications (1912-1924) are all on Virgil. Then an article on litigation and Cicero, followed by two history textbooks (1927 and 1934) for the curriculum in Canada.
After these, a course correction; at the age of 59, in an essay entitled "Parresiastic Poems of Horace" (1935), he writes on παρρησία (parrhesia, frankness of speech) as an unique virtue of Epicureanism. After this, essays on Epicurean Gratitude and Epicurean Kinetics ('37 and '41). Then a detour with his son through a cooperative translation of Demosthenes (1949), and right back to Epicureanism.
In 1954, Epicurus and his Philosophy and St. Paul and Epicurus are both published; it seems likely enough to me that he spent more than five years on these two texts, and may have worked on them while coordinating the translation of Demosthenes with his son.
One last thing at the very end of his life--an essay on daily life in Rome called "Vesta Unveiled", as part of a collection of essays published in honor of Berthold Ullman, a Classicist who earned his Ph.D at Chicago a year after DeWitt.
So most of the last twenty years of his life were devoted to the study of Epicureanism, most of his early career to Virgil.
Introduction
I have had some success in tracing the early life of prof. Norman Wentworth Dewitt, born September 18, 1876 in the small hamlet of Tweedside, Ontario, on the Niagara Peninsula. An early ancestor was Nicholas de Witt, born 1594 in East Frisia. Nicholas was a Doctor, and in that capacity is alleged to have accompanied Henry Hudson in his exploration of the Hudson River as Ship's Doctor on the Half-Moon.
Nicholas de Witt had a son Tjerck Claeszen de Witt, who emigrated without his father to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, on Manhattan, in what is now New York. There he died in 1700. I am on the point of confirming that his descendants were Loyalists during the American Revolution, and during or after the War they removed themselves to Upper Canada (so named because it lies around the upper reaches of the Saint Lawrence River which empties out of Lake Ontario and runs northeast to the sea).
According to the magisterial genealogy compiled by Vona Smith, née DeWitt, called Tierck Clafsen DeWitt and Descendants of His Son Luycas DeWitt, published 2004, Norman DeWitt's father Hiram was born into the 11th generation of that line in 1830 at Saltfleet, a Township in Hamilton, Ontario.
Hiram DeWitt, his father John, and his brothers John Jr. and Joseph owned contiguous or at least approximate farms in the area of Tweedside, as shown on this undated Township and Concession Map:
https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/Images/Maps/TownshipMaps/wen-m-saltfleet.jpg
Tweedside appears in the southeast corner, and Hiram's farm--Norman DeWitt's boyhood home--was two blocks west of the Post Office and a block and a half west of the Methodist church, both of which fronted on Mud Street.
The Methodist Church in Tweedside was a simple red brick affair, first built in 1874 two years before Norman DeWitt was born, and then rebuilt in 1897. This rebuilt church was still standing in the first decade of the 21st century. I have a here a recommendation from 2002 either to lease the church, to renovate it, or to demolish the dilapidated structure. In any case the church was demolished, though I cannot determine precisely when this happened; the cemetery is still in use.
Today only the foundation remains;
Our young scholar will, no doubt, have scaled those steps in his youth.
The land all around is farm country, and nothing else of old Tweedside remains. 4 miles (6km) to the north was the line of the Great Western Railway bisecting the coastal town of Winona along the south shore of Lake Ontario. The journey from Tweedside to Winona would require crossing the Niagara Escarpment, a massive geological landform running in a great arc from New York state to Wisconsin. The road shown on the Saltfleet township map above contains two switchbacks.
40 miles (~60 km) to the east on the Great Western lay Niagara Falls, and the border crossing to the United States by way of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge--"the first working suspension railway bridge in history". This bridge was, to the credit of John Augustus Roebling, an incredible achievement.
American engineers regard the Suspension Bridge as a major achievement of efficiency. In a fledgling country where resources—material and financial—were limited, they had to make do with whatever was available. This goal was espoused by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which opined, "That is the best engineering, not which makes the most splendid, or even the most perfect work, but that which makes a work that answers the purpose well, at the least cost." Roebling had built a bridge that rivaled grander bridges of leading European nations at a much lower cost.
An advertisement for the bridge and the falls, dating to 1876, the year DeWitt was born. It's difficult to imagine now looking at a satellite view of Tweedside 40 miles west, but this was an energetic and industrious age for the two countries. Going west from the small town of Winona, the Great Western Railway followed the lake to the port city of Hamilton and the main railyard. From Hamilton, the line forked--west, deeper into the country before crossing the border again at Detroit--or northeast, and on to the great city of Toronto.
Of Norman DeWitt's early education I can give no account. His mother Margaret emigrated from Ireland and was orphaned at the age of 5. She was raised in the family of Tweedsider Thomas MulHolland, and was married to Hiram DeWitt in 1868. However it happened, it strikes me as likely that in the autumn of 1894, at the age of 17, Norman Wentworth Dewitt and his luggage must have boarded a passenger steam train on the Great Western Railway, bound for Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
More to come!
In light of this recent thread I have decided to give another listen to this episode, and am slowly developing a better understanding of what is going on with the word 'cognition'. Dr. Glidden expressly contrasts the cognitive with the physiological. In humans it's difficult to demarcate these two faculties, in part because they are very intertwined.
But taking a lower order of life like the spider plant on my balcony, I can make several observations. Does it experience sensation? I suspect so. My balcony faces northeast, and that is the direction sunlight comes from. Not direct sunlight--my spider plant will never "see" the sun where it sits, but enough filters through by reflection and refraction for the plant to make do.
And here's the thing; when the spider plant sends forth a new shoot, it tends invariable toward the light. In a phenomenon called Heliotropism, some plants will actually track the sun from east to west throughout the day. No brain, no thought or cognition, no language--and yet the plant senses light and heat and responds to stimuli with primitive cellular motor function. The process, from beginning to end, is physiological.
What about prolepsis? In the well-known and charismatic Venus Fly-Trap, it is an electrical impulse passed from the trigger hairs on each of the lobes that 'tells' the midrib of the plant to close the trap. The process again is physiological and noncognitive. Too physiological? Maybe. It could be argued that a merely physical process, like gently tapping the keys on a piano, is too noncognitive to really count as pattern recognition. After all, that last word is "re-cognition".
But if you look at plants on the cellular level, what you will observe is the faculty of these cells to recognize patterns associated with perceived threats and dangers--a faculty that allows the cells to respond to the threat and mitigate the damage.
The threat in this case is microbes, and it is an immune response that the pattern recognition triggers. To quote Wikipedia;
Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) play a crucial role in the proper function of the innate immune system. PRRs are germline-encoded host sensors, which detect molecules typical for the pathogens. They are proteins expressed, mainly, by cells of the innate immune system, such as dendritic cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils and epithelial cells, to identify two classes of molecules: pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), which are associated with microbial pathogens, and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), which are associated with components of host's cells that are released during cell damage or death.
If a molecule with the pattern of a threat bumbs up against a PRR, the host organism's cells will initiate the immune response. But here's the thing; just as it's possible to mimic the pattern of a fly by triggering the hairs of a venus fly-trap, it would be possible for a molecule to trip a PRR by having the pattern of a microbe without actually being one.
Do we consider this a primitive form of prolepsis? Let's review the components:
I think I would call this a kind of prolepsis.
One further consideration. Does prolepsis lie? Can it be wrong? It depends on what we mean by 'wrong'. I might define prolepsis--sensation->pattern->response--as an "anticipation made noncognitively in advance of more complete information". It's certainly true that the stimulus whose pattern we recognize will very often turn out to be caused by something else. A stick, not a snake. A feather, not a fly. A fructose molecule, not a dangerous microbe.
But was the pattern recognition ITSELF a lie? I think not. A curvy stick does have the same pattern as a snake to the sense of vision. My opinion is that prolepsis is true to the cause because the cause IS the pattern. The stick-ness or snake-ness of the stick or snake is something we grasp cognitively and express and understand using language. But the pattern is the pattern--evaluating whether it's been rightly identified in the light of future evidence or further knowledge is quite beside the point. That process is cognitive--this process is physiological.
So that's where I find myself right now.
I don't have any familiarity with this, perhaps we should make a table for the four 'e's so we have a better sense of what we're looking at. I'll read up more on the subject. At a glance I think I agree with the embodied part, if I understand it rightly. I haven't looked at the other three yet. Happy twentieth!
