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    David Sedley, Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

    Johnathan R. Razorback
    Johnathan R. Razorback
    Admin


    Messages : 19727
    Date d'inscription : 12/08/2013
    Localisation : France

    David Sedley, Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection Empty David Sedley, Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

    Message par Johnathan R. Razorback Dim 25 Juin - 17:07

    https://journals.openedition.org/aitia/7606

    "The key to eliminating oppressive creator gods from our world-view is to appreciate the inevitability that mere atomic accident, operating as it must do on an infinite scale, will somewhere at some time produce worlds like our own, without the need for divine craftsmanship. That in its turn requires us to see, by mental projection, what the infinity of the universe really means, just as, according to Lucretius’s intellectual travelogue, Epicurus has already done.

    The sequence of thought-experiments, arguments and mental exercises by which this vision can be achieved is exemplified at length by Lucretius towards the end of his first book (1.951–1051). For example, we are invited to imagine going to some hypothetical boundary of the universe and throwing a spear past it (1.968–83).

    We have seen Velleius speak of the mind ‘projecting and focusing itself,’ se iniciens et intendens, into infinite space. His Latin is undoubtedly capturing an Epicurean technical term, phantastikē epibolē tēs dianoias, ‘representational projection of the mind,’ which Epicurus himself more than once invokes as part of his methodology.6 Another rendition of the same Greek term occurs in the opening of Lucretius’ argument that beyond our own world there are countless others (2.1044–47):

    For given the infinite amount of space beyond these walls of our world, the mind demands an account of what further things lie there for the intellect to aim to reach with its gaze, and to which the mind’s projection [animi iactus] can free itself and fly.

    Lucretius here uses animi iactus, which I have translated ‘the mind’s projection,’ although an even more literal rendition would have been ‘the throwing of the mind.’ Later he uses a slight variant, animi iniectus. Cicero in the passage quoted earlier speaks of the mind se iniciens . . . et intendens, ‘projecting and focusing itself.’ All of these Latinisations capture the –bol– component of the Greek epibolē, from ballein, to ‘throw.’ Despite the similarity between the two Latin authors, the fact that Cicero offers both iniciens and intendens as translations confirms that he is not simply echoing Lucretius’ Latin, but is seeking to optimize his own rendition of the Greek term epibolē, whose nuances both his Latin words help to capture.

    It is clear that in Epicurean thought this technique of intellectual projection applies especially to the appreciation of temporal and spatial infinity. Take temporal infinity first. Remarkably, the mental operation of grasping it is traced back all the way to primitive mankind, for our distant ancestors’ conception of imperishable gods was already enough to show that they had indulged in some such conceptualisation. Consider first Lucretius’ historical reconstruction of how primitive humans first came to think of the gods as imperishable (5.1169–82):

    For already in those days the races of mortal men used to see with waking mind, and even more so in their sleep, figures of gods, of marvelous appearance and prodigious size. They attributed sensation to them, because they seemed [or ‘were seen’] to move their limbs, and to give utterance with voices of a dignity to match their splendid appearance and great strength. They endowed them with everlasting life, because their appearance was in perpetual supply and the form remained unchanged, and more generally because they supposed that beings with such strength could not easily be overcome by any force. And hence they supposed them to be supremely blessed, because none of them seemed oppressed by fear of death, and also because in their dreams they saw them perform many marvelous acts with no trouble to themselves.

    In close parallel to this, Sextus Empiricus provides a more technical analysis of the same process as described by Lucretius, or at any rate of the central part of it, reporting the Epicurean theory as follows:

    After forming the impression of a long-lived human being, the ancients extended the time to infinite length, joining past and future time to the present, and then, having arrived at the conception of something eternal, said that god is eternal too.

    The important point of methodology is that the process of projection must start from an ordinary act of imagination, roughly as follows:
    – Imagine a very long human lifetime, extending into both past and future.
    – Eliminate the birth and infancy of the imagined person, so that their past life is seen as having had no beginning.
    – Eliminate the future death of the imagined person, so that their future life is seen as having no end.
    – You are now imagining an eternal being, in other words, a god.

    Why did this psychological process ever start ? Even the first step, that of imagining a very long human lifetime, was hardly going to happen by accident. Consider the mechanics of imagination in general. As we learn from Lucretius 4.722–822, the mind is at every moment being bombarded with ultra-fine images (simulacra) of all kinds, and each momentary act of imagination requires its concentrating so as to receive the desired kind of image, while ignoring or discarding countless others. So the first step towards conceiving a divine being will probably have been to picture a mature and healthy adult, by drawing into the mind one of the innumerable available images that really did emanate from one or another such person. To add the notion of a long lifetime our ancestors will have had to focus on a series of selected images showing this same person strong, resilient and more or less unchanged in a wide variety of activities and circumstances. By now they had arrived at the conception of a truly durable individual. They then, finally, eliminated the temporal limits altogether. And now they had the conception of an infinitely extended lifetime—one of the essential characteristics of a god.

    As Lucretius explains, when in our dreams people seem to move and act, as these divine figures did, we are not directly seeing them in motion, but are building up a cinematographic effect from the series of momentary images. We are in effect the choreographers of our own dreams (4.800–806, cf. 768–76):

    When the first image perishes, followed by the birth of another in a different position, the former person seems to have changed his pose . . . The mind itself moreover prepares for, and hopes to see, the sequel to each thing: which is why it comes about . . . Then we add large opinions derived from slender evidence, and lead ourselves into being tricked by an illusion.

    It follows that the epiphanies of gods experienced by our ancestors, especially in their dreams, were not any kind of telepathic contact with extra-cosmic living beings, but products of the dreamers’ imagination, converted into fully immortal beings by the further process elsewhere called mental projection.

    What does this account of primitive religion tell us about the phenomenology of religious belief in more recent stages of civilisation, including Epicurus’ own day? Every human being, according to Epicurus, develops the concept of god, and that means that every human mind goes through some version of this complex series of steps towards picturing what an eternal life must be like. Why does our mind do that ? Evidently because, consciously or unconsciously, it wants to conceive these eternal beings.

    The interpretation of Epicurean theology is a deeply controversial matter. Only a minority of scholars would join me in favouring the ‘idealist’ interpretation, according to which Epicurus’ gods exist as projections of human thought of the kind examined above. On this understanding gods are, as numerous sources testify, made of simulacra, not because these tenuous atomic films are suitable materials for constituting a biologically immortal being, but because simulacra are the very stuff of thought.

    But even ‘realist’ interpreters, who insist on the contrary that the gods exist as biologically everlasting living beings outside the world, may be left by Lucretius’ evidence with little choice but to accept that the ways in which all human beings conceive of imperishable gods continue to be, if not altogether identical, at the very least structurally analogous, to our ancestors’ original projections of thought."

    "I have so far spoken of how conceiving god includes developing the concept of an infinite lifespan. It also includes developing the concept of the second essential characteristic of the divine: supreme blessedness. At 5.1179–82 (quoted above) our ancestors, having conceived these imperishable beings, ‘supposed them to be supremely blessed, because none of them seemed oppressed by fear of death, and also because in their dreams they saw them perform many marvelous acts with no trouble to themselves.’ This arrival at the conception of extreme blessedness is again explicated more technically by Sextus (M 9.45):

    Having conceived of a human being who is happy, blessed and endowed with his full complement of all goods, we [sic] went on to intensify these characteristics, and conceived one who is at the very summit of them as being a god.

    No doubt such ‘intensification’ of familiar human blessedness is another case of mental projection. This time, however, there is no question of expansion to an infinity of goods. Admittedly primitive humans did not understand—what would be discovered only in a later age by Epicurus (Lucretius 6.1–42)—that there is a strict limit to the goods that constitute a happy life, so we might expect them to have mistakenly conceived the gods as enjoying an unlimited number of self-indulgences and luxuries. But Lucretius is clear that our ancestors did not make this mistake, and that instead they correctly associated divine blessedness with sublime lack of fear (cf. 1.44–49 = 6.2.646–51). We must therefore suppose that they were drawing not on their mistaken opinions about how to be happy but on their correct innate moral conceptions. If so, the mental intensification that leads to the idea of divine blessedness is likely to consist, not in the quantitative extension of goods, but in the total elimination of even the most minor irritations from the gods’ lives. This will in fact receive strong confirmation later on, in Lucretius’ Homeric picture of the gods’ trouble-free lives (3.18–24).

    The basic conceptualisation of divine imperishability and happiness, attained by all human beings, has served to introduce Epicurean mental projection, but clearly falls far short of the level of understanding that a philosopher can aspire to achieve thanks to the same kind of cognitive leap.

    In an aphorism preserved in the ‘Vatican’ collection of Epicurean sayings, Epicurus’ leading associate Metrodorus writes as follows to a pupil or colleague named Menecles (SV 10):

    Remember that you, by nature a mortal in receipt of a finite time, have by your discourses about nature ascended to infinity and eternity, and have seen ‘what is, what will be, and what has been.’

    Nature has allotted Menecles a finite time, yet it is by his inquiries into that very same nature that Menecles has transcended his allotted finitude, to the extent of even challenging his own mortality. The intellectual achievement this time is not simply that of conceiving an eternal being, but that of intellectually mastering the nature of eternity, in a way which has enabled to Menecles himself to aspire to godlikeness.

    Now take the understanding of spatial infinity. This involves not merely breaking through the walls of the world—in other words, mentally entering the expanse of space that lies beyond our own heaven—but going on from there to embrace in thought the entire infinity of space and its meaning. To do this, or to do it fully, is not merely to learn the truth of the proposition that the universe is infinite, but to grasp in thought the nature of that infinity and its implications for our own world’s origins. In 1.75 we saw Epicurus returning from his epic voyage with news of ‘what is possible’ (quid possit oriri) and ‘what is impossible’ (quid nequeat). So bald a description of Epicurus’ news is hardly informative as it stands, not surprisingly, since Lucretius has at this point not even started his exposition of Epicurus’ physics. But we can at least safely link ‘what is possible’ to Epicurus’ discovery of the remarkable explanatory power of infinity, as already explained by Cicero’s Velleius: in an infinite universe containing an infinity of atoms every permutation must sometimes somewhere be instantiated through sheer accident, and that is itself enough to guarantee the emergence of worlds just like ours, without any divine creator.

    It seems that the kind of mental breakthrough celebrated in these passages comes in two stages. In the first stage, some concept that lies beyond direct experience is grasped by such devices as the removal of boundaries. You conceive the infinity of the universe by getting rid, first, of visual obstacles like the sky, later of boundaries as such. You conceive divine eternity by removing temporal limits: first the boundaries of a natural life, and eventually all temporal limits."

    "Although as it happens we do not find any explicit examples of a phantastikē epibolē tēs dianoias in Epicurus’ fragments and testimonia, I suggest that we can identify one in Lucretius. I am referring to his brilliant demonstration that atoms lack colour (2.730–841). This requires the characteristic Epicurean strategy of eliminating any apparent counter-evidence to the thesis, and it is for that end that Lucretius writes (2.739–47):

    If perhaps you think that no projection of the mind (animi iniectus) onto such bodies [i.e. colourless atoms] is possible, you are way off track. For given that people blind from birth, who have never seen the light of the sun, have nevertheless since infancy recognised bodies by touch, with no colour accompanying them, you may be sure that bodies unadorned by any hue can also be conceived by our mind. Moreover, whatever we touch in blind darkness, we ourselves perceive it as not steeped in any colour.20

    If something cannot be conceived, even by mental projection, that thing must be eliminated from our ontology. No amount of thought-projection will enable you to conceive, for example, of a moving body reaching two places simultaneously (cf. Ep. Hdt. 47), regardless of its speed. But colourless body is not like that. You may initially think it is inconceivable, but the congenitally blind must be able to conceive it; and once we have appreciated that, we can bridge the gap between their experiences and our own by thinking of our experience of temporarily colourless body, as when we sense things by touch in the dark. Here then, a rigorous process of mental projection succeeds in legitimising an Epicurean conclusion about the invisible, serving as the ultimate test in cases of disputed conceivability. There need be no doubt that Lucretius has as usual taken this argument, including its terminology for mental projection, from the corresponding part of Epicurus’ On Nature."

    "I continue to believe that Lucretius drew his detailed understanding of Epicureanism directly from the revered books On nature bequeathed by the school’s founder, seeing no need to consult lesser Epicurean works written in the two centuries since the founder’s death, and confining his own original contributions to the proems of his six books. Nevertheless, it needs emphasising that the content of his proems is not entirely original and independent. This is not only evident from the obvious fact that it is in the proems, more than anywhere else, that he displays his deep understanding of Epicurean ethics. It is also made clear by the way that in them he shows himself well aware of the school’s consensus about its founder. Epicurus’ pioneering acts of intellectual projection had elevated both him and his philosophical achievement to superhuman status. And Lucretius joins his fellow-Epicureans in celebrating that fact."
    -David Sedley, « Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection », Aitia [En ligne], 10 | 2020, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2020, consulté le 04 août 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/aitia/7606 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/aitia.7606




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    « La question n’est pas de constater que les gens vivent plus ou moins pauvrement, mais toujours d’une manière qui leur échappe. » -Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation (1961).

    « Rien de grand ne s’est jamais accompli dans le monde sans passion. » -Hegel, La Raison dans l'Histoire.

    « Mais parfois le plus clair regard aime aussi l’ombre. » -Friedrich Hölderlin, "Pain et Vin".


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