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corpse. Sentience brings this out: it is the product of the mutually dependent soul and body, for the soul
needs the body to exist as the soul of a sentient agent, and the body needs the soul to exist as the body of a
sentient agent.
Why does Epicurus have such a struggle to express this? The problems are due largely to his clinging to
the inappro-
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priate conception of body and soul as vessel and contents.[83] Epicurus often states a thesis in unnecessarily
and sometimes misleadingly polemical and crude form; when we examine the thesis we find the crude
formulations fail to do it justice. We can only put this down to an imperfect fit between Epicurus'
philosophical activity and his pedagogical approach. The latter sometimes requires shock tactics to shake
people out of their set views and prejudices. If and when they get involved in studying Epicurean philosophy,
they may find that the initially controversial appearance was misleading; but by that time it will probably no
longer matter, at least to the convinced Epicurean. Sometimes, however, Epicurus' cruder statements turn
out to make trouble for his more sophisticated thoughts.[84]
What brings out the closeness of the soul-body relation is sentience, which characterizes the irrational
soul. We find elsewhere, however, that the Epicureans tend to contrast soul and body, and that when they
do they have a different contrast in mind, namely, that between the body plus the irrational soul on the one
hand and the rational soul on the other. "The pains of the soul," for example, "are worse than those of the
body; for the flesh suffers only for the present moment, but the soul for past, present, and future. Similarly,
the pleasures of the soul are greater."[85] Here "the body" clearly refers to the sentient body, closely linked
to the irrational soul, and "the soul" clearly refers to the rational soul.
Further, many themes in Epicurean ethics stress not only this distinction, but the superiority of the soul,
which by drawing on past, present, and future experiences can more than counterbalance what happens to
the body. The star example here is Epicurus' dying letter to his friends, where he says that his present
agonizing pains are more than counterbalanced
[83] Diano (1974, 146ff.) suggests that this may be an inheritance from Democritus, who calls the body a
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skenos (frags. A152, B37, B223 DK).
[84] This is particularly the case with his account of pleasure, where his crude and shocking slogans are
quite misleading.
[85] D. L. 10. 137.
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by the joy in his soul from memories of philosophical activity.[86] Epicureans from Polystratus to Lucretius
tirelessly urge on us that only the rational activity of philosophy will make us happy, for we need the
exercise of the rational soul in order to organize our lives and make sense of the products of the irrational
soul.
There is potentially a tension here. For Epicurus it is crucial that I think of my soul as something
dependent for its existence and functioning on the existence and functioning of my body. He has shown this
for the irrational soul, the source of sentience. But, given the stress on the importance of our identifying
with the rational soul, and the contrast between the rational soul on the one hand and the body with the
irrational soul on the other, the question is bound to arise whether Epicurus has adequately shown that the
soul as a whole is indissolubly linked with the body. It could be objected, of course, that all he needs to
show is that the sentient, irrational soul is indissolubly linked to the body, and the rational soul in turn
indissolubly linked to the irrational soul; if the soul's unity is weak anyway, we would not expect an
argument to show directly that the rational soul was linked indissolubly to the workings of the body. But,
while that is arguably what Epicurus needs, we do not find explicitly either any acknowledgment that this is
what is to be shown or any arguments to show it.
f) Survival
A famous and fundamental Epicurean teaching is that "death is nothing to us; for what is broken up has no
sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us."[87] At greater length:
Get used to the idea that death is nothing to us, since every good and evil lies in sensation, and death is the deprivation of
sensation. . . . So death, the most fearful of all evils, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is
[86] D. L. 10. 22.
[87] Kuria doxai 2.
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not present, and when death is present, then we are not. It is therefore nothing to the living, nor to the dead; for the former it
is not, and the latter are no longer. (Epicurus Ep. Men. 124 25)
Lucretius puts this point forcefully: what happens after I am dead will be of no concern to me, since
there will be no me, just as the Punic Wars were of no concern to me when they happened, since there was
then no me to be concerned. "And even if the nature of the rational soul and the power of the irrational soul
go on having sensation after being torn from our body, still it is nothing to us, who are made into one united
compound by the mating and marriage of body and soul."[88] It is possible, he adds, that in the past my
soul and body atoms came together in just the way they do now; but any such past union was not me . I
could not be around before the conception which brought me into being as an ensouled body, and in the
same way I cannot be around after the death that breaks up the mutually dependent functioning of soul and
body. So what happens after my death is like what happened before my birth nothing to me.
The argument has raised controversy, ancient and modern. The important point here is the need for the
premise that all good and evil lie in sensation. For sensation is, of course, characteristic of the irrational
soul; and we have seen that in sentience the body and irrational soul are indeed mutually dependent. But
the claim that for us all good and evil lie in sentience seems to neglect the role of the rational soul. This
comes out in at least two ways. It is because of the activity of the rational soul that we are able to identify
our good with projects whose content goes beyond our own personal pleasures, and which may be fulfilled
only after our death. Epicurus himself stresses the value of friendship, and concern for friends and their
activities for their own sake. But this will involve an agent in perfectly rational concern for projects and
activities whose fruition does not depend on her being alive.
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