Notes on “Epicurean Prolepsis” by David K. Glidden

Summary

Long essay about the various problems and contradictions present in the study of the term prolepsis in Greek philosophy. Part of the issue, for Glidden, is that the Stoic understanding of the term is the more widely discussed and that many of the commentators on Epicurus’s understanding of the concept are themselves Stoics. Thus, most of the understanding of prolepsis figures to be colored by Stoicism.

Despite this, Glidden does his best to come away with a better or more nuanced understanding of the difference between Stoic and Epicurean prolepsis. Essentially, it hinges on epistemology: for the Stoics, our knowledge of the world is fundamentally limited to what we know; for the Epicureans, what we know of the world is created through our interaction with it (in that our cognitive apparatuses are created through interaction with the world).

Quotes

• “In the first place all our sources agree that in addition to the physiological activities of thinking the mind itself is sensitive to flows of atomic eidola impinging upon it and which it can singly perceive … Furthermore, both Lucretius and Diogenes of Oenanda distinguish this kind of perception, which they say is the stuff dreams are made of, from the apprehension of solid bodies perceived by the other sense faculties .. The telling characteristic of such fantastic vision is that the mind selects out and composes the sequence of atomic images it singly perceives .. so as to tell a story” (188).
• “The Epicurean gods, like dream figures, lack the properties of solid objects, having only semblances of such features, and they enjoy human form, because that is the shape the mind is looking for” (189).
• “According to the Epicureans there is a constant and systematic flow of atomic images, called eidola or simulacra, which assault the sense organs and constitute perception. In the case of vision the eye responds to a sequence of such imprintings so that the perceiver sees something. But when the mind itself responds to the impact of a single atomic image upon a single occasion, the result is an individual epibole tes dianoias. It is this susceptibility of the mind to any one piece of an infinte amount of atomic particles bombarding it that Cotta finds so ludicrous about the so-called Epicurean perception of the gods” (190).
• “But note that although the dreaming mind recognizes what it expects to see, such recognitions are nothing like what we would call representational preconceptions. The recognitions of our dreams are not effected by acts of rationality (indeed the dreamer is asleep), but rather they are the manifestation of habit. For this reason, Lucretius says, the habits of our daily lives carry over into the dreams we have. And for this same reason horses dream of races and dogs of chases. What the mind is intent upon, the mind perceives in dreams, but what the mind dreams does not enjoy the authority of reason” (192).
• “Given the infinite amount of atomic particles incessantly bombarding the mind, attentive habits could be acquired in short order, but it may not be the case the prolepseis are as easily acquired as other mental visions” (193).
• “Repeated experiences of mental visions must first become associated together to yield visions of a general sort concerning what it is to be a god” (194).
• “It seems, that Epicurean prolepseis are a kind of epibole tes dianoias, distinguished from other mental visions by their generic content” (194).
• “The Stoic and Academic detractors, speaking through Cicero’s Cotta, lodge the familiar complaint that these habits of the mind are not something nature forces the mind to see, but rather something the mind willfully manufactures out of prejudice, beliefs and reasoning” (194).
• “Cicero says that the mind, which is both itself the source of perception and itself perceptive, arranges some sensory experiences by their similarities and in doing so brings about what the Greeks sometimes call concepts or sometimes prolepseis” (197).
• ” ... suggesting that the mind can process and generalize upon the information received by the other sense orgrans, in addition to the specific information to which it is itself sensitive” (197).
• “By the activities we are engaged in, by the lives we live, we become selective about what it is we notice, but what it is we notice is always some portion of the way the world is” (200).
• “So it would seem that prolepseis label states of the world, not states of mind” (201).
• ”Prolepseis are to be distinguished from opinions in much the same way that perceptual experience is different from reasoned speculation about the significance of that experience” (202).
• “To make this defence impregnable the Epicureans went on to insist that anything we can imagine owes its character to a real existence—namely, the shape of some atomic construct striking the mind” (204).
• “Once a prolepsis has been established by experience, it can then anticipate what it is the mind is about to see, and a particular perceptual act comes to take on a wider significance. Upon seeing the back of Simmias’ cloak, we see that it is Simmias wearing it, or we take a certain fantastic vision to be that of a god who is blessed and eternal” (205).
• ” ... the mind comes to each new experience trained in habits of recognition to search out the familiar” (206).
• ” ... there is no prolepsis for time” (210).
• ” ... there is no persistent natural condition underlying what it is we call time” (210).
• “Unlike other sumptomata which give rise to our prolepseis of them, there is no distinctive sense of time over and above our specific individual experiences of one thing or another” (210).
• “That is not Epicurus’ concern, who simply maintains that how we know follows upon what there is, rather than the other way around” (212).
• “We can and do recognize a man on a horse leading a dog, without first having among ourselves agreed upon conceptions of what it is to be a man or a horse or a dog. And dogs and horses can do this too. We humans can also recognize a ware when we see one or poverty or justice, because we are familiar with the symptoms among ourselves. What we care to think about such human conditions, Epicurus suggests, is altogether a different matter” (213).