LISTEN. Today in Happiness it's "Material Minds"--Epicureans believe in them--and "Religion and Superstition"--they don't. They don't, that is, believe in the supernatural sorts of religion that sponsor fear-mongering superstition. "The only incorporeal entity for the Epicureans was the void," in which nothing we'd call spiritual or soulful is apt to root... excepting, of course, our natural selves. "The mind grows up with the body," and departs with it. The entire interest and importance of life must find its place in the interim.This may surprise or even shock the sensibilities of those who've been trained in the dualist mind-body tradition so favored for so long in the western philosophical tradition, but a corporeal notion of soul is actually "more appealing" than the strange specter of a "puppet-like" immaterial soul pulling our strings. The invasive alien-homunculus hypothesis is quite creepy, when you think about it.
[Before class, btw, there's another opportunity to participate in a public reading of the Constitution, in front of the Bragg Building. Yesterday's was kinda ruined by that fire-and-brimstone hellmonger who took up residence in front of Honors and forced us inside. But I did still get to read the 8th amendment and condemn cruel and unusual punishment. Time in the company of crazed fundy preachers counts as that, in my book.
Do any of us want to launch this season's Happiness Hour after class? Or is it still unwise to congregate in public places? If we do, it needs to be out on the patio.]
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If I'm understanding this correctly, the common Epicurean would have believed that our "soul" or "the self" resides in a sort of physical sect of our brain? Or, would they just explain it to be a product of the functions that take place in our physical brain (i.e. an organized firing off of neurons) that is responsible for what makes us, us.
ReplyDeleteIf the latter, then consider me on board.
More the latter. Soul doesn't "reside" like an interloper or visitor, and doesn't have an independent pre- or post-corporeal existence. It's just a name for the process of thought and awareness we call selfhood.
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