Epicurus / Lecture5
.docCultural and Ethical Values: Lectures Week Five
Epircurus on Happiness and the Fear of Death
The classical period of Greek philosophy is usually called the Hellenic period, in contrast to the period immediately after, which is called the Hellenistic period. The Hellenistic period begins with the death of Alexander the Great (323BCE) and reaches until the early Christian era. In philosophy, it marks the period from the death of Aristotle to the beginnings of Christianity. Aristotle’s school (the Lyceum) and Plato’s school (the Academy) both continued to flourish during this period, but two novel philosophies came to dominate the period: Epicureanism and Stoicism. We are going to examine the philosophy of Epicurus.
The ethics of the Epicureans and the Stoics differ markedly both from each other and from both Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies. They are sometimes called ‘survival ethics’; and this reflects the fact that, in contrast to Hellenic philosophy, they emphasise the possibility of living a good life in the midst of a hostile and unpredictable environment. The Hellenistic period is characterised by the collapse of the city-state or polis as the fundamental structure of Greek politics and culture. Hellenic ethics – the ethics of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – appears to articulate and refine the idea of a good life as it would be lived within the Greek polis. In the much more cosmopolitan and politically unstable environment of Greece after the death of Alexander, however, the appeal of this vision inevitably waned.
Epicureanism is a philosophy named after its founder Epicurus (341-271 BCE); who began a philosophical community in Athens called the Garden, where Epicureans sought the ideal Epicurean life: a life of tranquility through philosophical discourse, political disengagement and a kind of cult of friendship. The Garden flourished for something like 500 years.
Epicurus wrote voluminously on many topics, but very little has survived. Three letters remain: one on Astronomy, one on Physics, and one – the Letter to Menoeceus – the most important, on Ethics. A collection of ethical maxims – the Principal Doctrines – also survives. You will find links to both the Principal Doctrines and the Letter to Menoeceus on the Lecture Page of the Course Website. Much of what we know about Epicurean philosophy, especially Epicurean natural philosophy, comes from a long poem by the Roman poet Lucretius – De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).
Epicurus advanced an ethics of Hedonism; the one true and proper goal of life is the pursuit of pleasure. But this is not at all what it may at first seem. Epicurus’s hedonism is what is usually called ‘negative hedonism’. To see the point of this consider a strongly contrasting case: that of the earlier Greek philosopher and hedonist, Aristippus (435-355 BCE). Aristippus was a student of Socrates, and founded a school in his home town of Cyrene (a Greek colony in North Africa) whose followers were called ‘Cyrenaics’. The Cyrenaics held that the one proper goal of life was the pursuit of pleasure: the most pleasure in the most intense form that is possible for us, particularly the sensual pleasures of good food, fine wine and sex. Nothing survives of Aristippus’s writings, but we have some idea of his philosophy from ancient commentators. Aristippus appears to have held the view that immediate gratification is wiser than calculated prudent behaviour. When asked about the painful consequences of his advice, he is supposed to have said that a wise person should never forego certain pleasures of the present for uncertain, merely possible, pains of the future. The only restraint on the pursuit of pleasure that Aristippus appears to have endorsed, is restraint in the interests of increasing our capacity to experience more and more intense pleasures. Aristippus had the reputation of being willing to do anything for pleasure, including wearing women’s clothes and dancing for King Dionysius of Syracuse (he was reputedly called “the king’s poodle”).
The Epicureans could hardly more different of attitude to the Cyrenaics. According to negative hedonism: pleasure is of value because of its role in eliminating pain:
…the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and, when once we have attained all this, the tempest of the soul is laid … When we are pained because of the absence of pleasure, then, and then only, do we feel the need of pleasure. Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life.
Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus
The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.
Epicurus Principal Doctrines 3
It seems, then, that Epicurus held that the removal of all pain was the greatest pleasure (distinct from the most intense or sensuous pleasure). Pleasure is not a positive quantity that we can have more and more of. It is not an ornament or possession. In the Principal Doctrines, Epicurus writes:
Bodily pleasure does not increase when the pain of want has been removed; after that it only admits of variation.
Epicurus Principal Doctrines 18
This leads Epicurus to hold that we can’t distinguish a happy life from an unhappy one by measuring the amount of pleasure in it. A life of pleasure is to be judged its quality – by the preponderance of pleasure in it, i.e. by the absence of pain in it – not by the quantity.
Unlimited time and limited time afford an equal amount of pleasure, if we measure the limits of that pleasure by reason.
The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Never the less, the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.
He who understands the limits of life knows that it is easy to obtain that which removes the pain of want and makes the whole of life complete and perfect. Thus he has no longer any need of things which involve struggle.
Epicurus Principal Doctrines 19, 20 & 21
The key to this good life – a life free of mental and physical pain – is simplicity. This increases our chances of attaining the tranquility Epicureans are after and also makes us less dependent on fortune and the influence of others. Epicurus distinguishes three kinds of desire. First he distinguishes between natural desires and unnatural desires. Natural desires are those that arise from our nature alone, without the influence of social convention, culture or fashion. Thus desires for food, sex, companionship and security are natural; desires for wealth and fame are unnatural. Natural desires are further distinguished between those that are necessary and those that are unnecessary. Necessary, natural, desires are those whose dissatisfaction yields pain. A desire for food is natural and necessary. Some natural desires are unnecessary: no pain results from a failure to satisfy them. The desire for exotic foods, fancy clothes, and sex are unnecessary, though natural, desires. A wise person, thinks Epicurus, reduces their desires to the natural and the necessary, thus maximising their capacity to move through life with a perfect tranquility of mind and generally an absence of mental and physical pain.
Epicurean philosophy is remarkably modern in some ways: it is robustly materialistic and insists upon annihilation of the person at death. Although Epicurus was happy to acknowledge the existence of the Gods, he thought them perfect and self-sufficient and not at all concerned with human affairs. Gods are blessed and indestructible beings, and Epicurus writes of them:
A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is free from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness.
Epicurus Principal Doctrine 1
Thus Epicurus believes that fear of the Gods is irrational. Fear of the Gods, of our fate in the underworld after death, along with our fear of death itself, are some of the main sources of mental pain or anguish for people. Thus Epicurean philosophy seeks to remove these sources of mental pain. Given the thesis of personal annihilation at death, Epicurus argues that death should be of no concern to us. In what is probably the most famous of Epicurus’s sayings to come down to us, he writes:
Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
Epicurus Letter to Meneoceus
Epicurean arguments about rational attitudes to death have dominated western philosophical discussion of the subject, and continue to do so today. The argument goes like this. If it is rational to fear death, this must be because there is something terrible about being dead. But death is nothing to us because we are not around any more for it to be something to us, so death cannot be terrible. Therefore it is irrational to fear death. The argument, needless to say, is highly controversial. It is considerably strengthened, however, when we consider the negative hedonistic presupposition of Epicureanism. If the experience of pain is the only evil we can encounter, and we do not think of life merely as an opportunity to accumulate pleasurable experiences, then non-existence cannot harm. It does not entail suffering and although it deprives us of the opportunity to accumulate greater pleasures, this is not the loss of something valuable. According to Epicurus, the good life does not consist in accumulation of pleasure, (or happiness, or virtue, etc.).
Lucretius, the Roman poet and expositor of Epicurean philosophy, introduced another argument against the fear of death. It is called the “Symmetry Argument”. In his great poem De rerum natura (Book 3 832-42) Lucretius asks us to think of the time before we were born. It is not a gloomy or fearful state of the world. We do not find anything terrible in the time before we were born, so why think there will be anything terrible about the time after our death? Another way of developing the thought is this. If we fear missing out on having more and more pleasure – which postponement of death would bring – then why do we not regret having been born earlier? Epicurus has a ready answer. We do not regret having been born earlier because we do not measure the good of our lives in terms of the amount of pleasure it contains, but in terms of the quality of our lives: the preponderance of pleasure over pain.
What is the role of virtue in Epicurean philosophy? Epicureans recognised the centrality of the virtues to the pursuit of a good life: prudence (practical wisdom or phronesis), justice, temperance, and so on. This may seem to resemble views of the great Hellenic philosophers – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – however the crucial difference is this. Aristotle, for instance, thought of the virtues as constitutive of the good life; eudaimonia, he claimed, just is a life of virtuous activity and the pleasure that that yields; to live a happy (eudaimonic) human life in part just is to live a virtuous one. Epicurus thought of the virtues more instrumentally. They are not good in themselves, they are only good because of their tendency to yield a pleasant life, where the pleasantness of a life can be defined quite independently of a virtuous life (it is a life of true pleasure: tranquility and absence of pain).
The virtue of justice illustrates the instrumental character of Epicurean conceptions of the virtues. Justice, according to Epicurus, is purely a matter of expediency; a matter of preventing harm. A justice system is like a contract people make with each other to ensure their security. Consider these claims from the Principal Doctrines:
Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.
There never was an absolute justice, but only an agreement made in reciprocal intercourse in whatever localities now and again from time to time, providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
Injustice is not in itself evil, but only in its consequence, viz. the terror which is excited by apprehension that those appointed to punish such offences will discover the injustice.
It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.
Epicurus Principal Doctrines 31, 33, 34 & 35
Here we see the instrumental nature of Epicurus’s conception of the virtues in full force. The virtue of justice is simply a means of preventing harm; it is not a good in itself; and there are various ways in which it may accomplish its end, ways that vary from time to time and place to place. If a person commits an unjust act, they have not done themselves an intrinsic evil (as Socrates would have insisted); they have merely laid themselves open to the fear being caught and the pain of punishment.