All too Human

Epicureanism, in a strict sense, the philosophy taught by Epicurus (341–270 bce). In a broad sense, it is a system of ethics embracing every conception or form of life that can be traced to the principles of his philosophy. In ancient polemics, as often since, the term was employed with an even more generic (and clearly erroneous) meaning as the equivalent of hedonism, the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the chief good. In popular parlance, Epicureanism thus means devotion to pleasure, comfort, and high living, with a certain nicety of style.

The nature of Epicureanism

Several fundamental concepts characterize the philosophy of Epicurus. In physics, these are atomism, a mechanical conception of causality, limited, however, by the idea of a spontaneous motion, or “swerve,” of the atoms, which interrupts the necessary effect of a cause; the infinity of the universe and the equilibrium of all forces that circularly enclose its phenomena; and the existence of gods conceived as beatified and immortal natures completely extraneous to happenings in the world. In ethics, the basic concepts are the identification of good with pleasure and of the supreme good and ultimate end with the absence of pain from the body and the soul—a limit beyond which pleasure does not grow but changes; the reduction of every human relation to the principle of utility, which finds its highest expression in friendship, in which it is at the same time surmounted; and, in accordance with this end, the limitation of all desire and the practice of the virtues, from which pleasure is inseparable, and a withdrawn and quiet life.
In principle, Epicurus’s ethic of pleasure is the exact opposite of the Stoic’s ethic of duty. The consequences, however, are the same: in the end, the Epicurean is forced to live with the same temperance and justice as the Stoic. Of utmost importance, however, is one point of divergence: the walls of the Stoic’s city are those of the world, and its law is that of reason; the limits of the Epicurean’s city are those of a garden, and the law is that of friendship. Though this garden can also reach the boundaries of earth, its centre is always an individual.

History of Epicureanism

Epicurus’s predecessors were in physics Leucippus and Democritus and in ethics Antiphon Sophista, Aristippus of Cyrene, and Eudoxus of Cnidus, a geometer and astronomer. Epicurus differed from all of these in his systematic spirit and in the unity that he tried to give to every part of philosophy. In this respect, he was greatly influenced by the philosophy and teachings of Aristotle—taking over the essentials of his doctrines and pursuing the problems that he posed.

Epicurus’s teachings

In 306 bce, Epicurus established his school at Athens in his garden, from which it came to be known as The Garden.

His works

In accordance with the goal that he assigned to philosophy, Epicurus’s teaching had a dogmatic character, in substance if not in form. He called his treatises dialogismoi, or “conversations.” Since the utility of the doctrines lay in their application, he summarized them in stoicheia, or “elementary propositions,” to be memorized. In this respect, Epicurus was the inventor of the catechetical method. The number of works produced by Epicurus and his disciples reveals an impressive theoretical activity. But no less important was the practical action in living by the virtues taught by him and in honouring the obligations of reciprocal help in the name of friendship. In these endeavours, continuous assistance was rendered by Epicurus himself, who, even when old and ill, was occupied in writing letters of admonishment, guidance, and comfort—everywhere announcing his gospel of peace and, under the name of pleasure, inviting to love.

Doctrine of Epicurus

Philosophy was, for Epicurus, the art of living, and it aimed at the same time both to assure happiness and to supply means to achieve it. As for science, Epicurus was concerned only with the practical end in view. If possible, he would have done without it. “If we were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death,” he wrote, “and also by our failure to grasp the limits of pain and desires, we should have no need of natural science.” But this science requires a principle that guarantees its possibilities and its certainty and a method of constructing it. This principle and this method are the object of the On the Criterion, or Canon. Since he made the Canon an integral introduction to the Physics, however, his philosophy falls into two parts, the Physics and the Ethics.
The Canon held that all sensations and representations are true and serve as criteria. The same holds for pleasure and pain, the basic feelings to which all others can be traced. Also true, and included among the criteria, are what may be called concepts (prolēpsis), which consist of “a recollection of what has often been presented from without …” Therefore, one must always cling to that “which was originally thought” in relation to every single “term” and which constitutes its background. Since the truth attested by each of the criteria is reflected in the phainomena, one must cling to these, employing them as “signs,” and must “conjecture” whatever “does not appear.” With the use of signs and conjecture, however, the level of judgment is reached, and thought is well advanced into that sphere in which error is possible, a state that begins as soon as single terms are tied into a proposition. Error, which consists of what “our judgment adds” to the evidence, can be of two types, one relative to what is not an object of experience, the other relative to what is such an object but for which the evidence is dubious. Each type has its own method of proof. Following the principles and methods of the Canon, Epicurus arrived at an atomism that, like that of the ancient naturalist Democritus, taught that the atoms, the void space in which they move, and the worlds are all infinite. But in contrast to Democritus, who had followed the deductive route of the intellect, considering the knowledge of the senses to be spurious, Epicurus, following an inductive route, assigned truth to sensation and reduced the intellect to it. On the basis of the totality of problems as Aristotle posed them in his Physics, Epicurus modified entirely the mechanical theory of causes and of motion found in Democritus and added the concept of a natural necessity, which he called nature, and that of free causality, which alone could explain the freedom of motion of humans and animals. For this purpose he distinguished three forms of motion in the atoms: a natural one of falling in a straight line, owing to their weight; a forced one due to impacts; and a free motion of declination, or swerving from a straight line. Secondly, he made finite the number of forms of the atoms in order to limit the number of sensible qualities, since each form begets a distinctive quality, and he taught a mathematical as well as a physical atomism. Lest an infinity of sensible qualities be generated, however, by an infinity of aggregations (if not of atomic kinds), Epicurus developed, from just this concept of infinity, the law of universal equilibrium of all the forces, or “isonomy.” Upon it, enclosing the events in a circle, he founded a theory of cyclic returns.
As part of his Physics, Epicurus’s psychology held that the soul must be a body. It is made of very thin atoms of four different species—motile, quiescent, igneous, and ethereal—the last, thinnest and the most mobile of all, serving to explain sensitivity and thought. Thus constituted, the soul is, from another perspective, bipartite: in part distributed throughout the entire body and in part collected in the chest. The first part is the locus of sensations and of the physical affects of pain and pleasure; the second (entirely dissociated from the first) is the psychē par excellence—the seat of thought, emotions, and will. Thought is due not to the transmission of sense motion but to the perception of images constituted by films that continuously issue from all bodies and, retaining their form, arrive at the psychē through the pores. The full autonomy and freedom of the psychē is assured, as, with an act of apprehension, it seizes at every moment the images it needs, meanwhile remaining master of its own feelings.
The object of ethics is to determine the end and the means necessary to reach it. Taking his cue from experience, Epicurus looked to the animal kingdom for his answer. He concluded that the chief end is pleasure. He distinguished two kinds—a “kinetic” pleasure of sense and a “static” pleasure, consisting in the absence of pain—and taught that the pleasure of sense is good, though it is not good merely as motion but rather as a motion favourable to the nature of the receiving sense organ. In essence, pleasure is the equilibrium of the being with itself, existing wherever there is no pain.
Epicurus concluded that “freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind” is the ultimate aim of a happy life. The damages and the advantages following the realization of any desire must be measured in a calculus in which even pain must be faced with courage if the consequent pleasure will be of longer duration.
Having thus given order to his life, however, the wise person must also provide himself with security. This he achieves in two ways—by reducing his needs to a minimum and withdrawing, far from human competition and from the noise of the world, to “live hidden”; and by adding the private compact of friendship to the public compact from which laws arise. To be sure, friendship stems from utility; but, once born, it is desirable in itself. Epicurus then added that “for love of friendship one has even to put in jeopardy love itself”; for every existence, being alone, needs the other. “To eat and drink without a friend,” he wrote, “is to devour like the lion and the wolf.” Thus, the utility sublimates itself and changes into love. But as every love is intrepid, the wise person, “if his friend is put to torture, suffers as if he himself were there” and, if necessary, “will die for his friend.” Thus, into the bloody world of his time, Epicurus could launch the cry: “Friendship runs dancing through the world bringing to us all the summons to wake and sing its praises.”
If human unhappiness stemmed only from vain desires and worldly dangers, this wisdom, founded upon prudence alone, would suffice. But besides these sources of unhappiness there are two great fears, fear of death and fear of the gods. If science, however, is effective in revealing the bounds of desire and (as already seen) in quelling the fear of the gods, it can also allay the fear of death. Regarding the soul as a body within another body, science envisions it as dissolving when the body dissolves. Death, then, “is nothing to us, so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.” But death is feared not only for what may be waiting in the beyond but also for itself. “I am not afraid of being dead,” said the comic Epicharmus of Cos; “I just do not want to die.” The very idea of not existing instills a fear that Epicurus considered to be the cause of all the passions that pain the soul and disorder human lives. Against it Epicurus argued that if pleasure is perfect within each instant and “infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure,” then all desire of immortality is vain. Thus, Epicurus’s most distinguished pupil, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, could exclaim, “bebiōtai” (“I have lived”), and this would be quite enough. He who has conquered the fear of death can also despise pain, which “if it is long lasting is light, and if it is intense is short” and brings death nearer. The wise person has only to replace the image of pain present in the flesh with that of blessings enjoyed, and he can be happy even “inside the bull of Phalaris.” The most beautiful example was set by Epicurus at the moment of his death:

A happy day is this on which I write to you. …The pains which I feel…could not be greater. But all of this is opposed by the happiness which the soul experiences, remembering our conversations of a bygone time.

The ultimate concentration of all his wisdom is the Tetrapharmacon, preserved by Philodemus: “The gods are not to be feared. Death is not a thing that one must fear. Good is easy to obtain. Evil is easy to tolerate.”

The Epicurean school

Epicurus’s successor in the direction of the Garden was Hermarchus of Mitylene, and he was succeeded in turn by Polystratus, who was the last survivor to have heard Epicurus. Superior to both, however, were Metrodorus and Colotes, against whom a small work by Plutarch was directed. Among the Epicureans of the 2nd century bce, mention must be made of Demetrius of Lacon, of whose works some fragments remain, and Apollodorus, who wrote more than 400 books. Much was also written by his disciple Zeno of Sidon, who was heard by Cicero in 79 bce in Athens. After Zeno, there were Phaedrus, also a teacher of Cicero, who was in Rome in 90 bce, and Patro, the head of the school until 51 bce. Already famous as an epigram writer was Philodemus of Gadara (born 110 bce). In the papyri of Herculaneum, comprising the effects of Philodemus’s library, there are sizable remains of almost all of his numerous works. Epicureanism had already been introduced in Rome, in the 2nd century bce. The first person to spread its doctrines in Latin prose was a certain Amafinius. At the time of Cicero, Epicureanism was in fact the philosophy in vogue; and the number of Romans subscribing to it was, according to Cicero, very large. Among the greatest was Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 95–55 bce), who, in the poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), left an almost complete and amazingly precise exposition of Epicurus’s Physics. The extent to which Epicurus was still popular in the 1st century after Jesus is demonstrated by Seneca, who cited and defended him. To the 2nd century ce belongs Diogenes of Oenoanda, who carved Epicurus’s works on a portico wall. In the same century should perhaps be mentioned Diogenianus, fragments of whose polemic against the Stoic Chrysippus are found in the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea. Also Epicurean, between the 4th and 5th centuries, was the epigrammatist Palladas.

Marcus Tullius Cicero.© AISA—Everett/Shutterstock.com

On account of its dogmatic character and its practical end, the philosophy of Epicurus was not subject to development, except in the polemic and in its application to themes that Epicurus either had treated briefly or had never dealt with at all. To be aware of this, it is sufficient to run through what remains of the representatives of his school and particularly of the works of Philodemus of Gadara. Epicurus’s philosophy remained essentially unchanged. Once truth has been found, it requires no more discussion, particularly when it completely satisfies the end toward which human nature tends. The main thing is to see this end; all of the rest comes by itself, and there is no longer anything to do but follow Epicurus, “liberator” and “saviour,” and to memorize his “oracular words.”

Epicureanism and egoism in modern philosophy

In the Middle Ages Epicurus was known through Cicero and the polemics of the Church Fathers. To be an Epicurean at the time of Dante meant to be one who denied providence and the immortality of the soul. In the 15th century, the notable humanist Lorenzo Valla—following brief hints by Petrarch—wrote, in the dialogue De voluptate (1431; On Pleasure), the first modern defense of the ethics of Epicurus, maintaining that the true good is pleasure and not virtue but concluding that the supreme pleasure is that which awaits humans in heaven, which even the Bible calls paradisum voluptatis. In the 16th century, in terms of attitude and direction of thought, the first two great Epicureans were Michel de Montaigne in France and Francesco Guicciardini in Italy. Epicurean in everything, as human being and as poet, was the early 16th-century classicist Ludovico Ariosto. But not until the 17th-century Provençal abbot Pierre Gassendi was the system of Epicurus to rise again in its entirety—this time, however, by approaching truth through faith. Gassendi in 1649 wrote a commentary on a book by the 3rd-century-ce biographer Diogenes Laërtius. This comment, called the Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (Treatise on Epicurean Philosophy), was issued posthumously at The Hague 10 years later. At the same time, in England, Thomas Hobbes, a friend of Gassendi, took up again the theory of pleasure and interpreted it in a dynamic sense, which was therefore closer to the doctrine of the ancient Cyrenaics. Starting from the premise that, in the natural state, “man is a wolf to man,” he concluded that peace, without which there is no happiness, cannot be guaranteed by anything but force, and that this force must be relinquished, by common agreement, to the power of only one.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the European nation in which Epicureanism was most active was France, where its representatives were called libertines, among them moralists such as François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Charles de Saint-Évremonde; scientists such as Julien de La Mettrie, who believed that humans could be explained as machines, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who reduced the ethic of the useful to a form of experimental science but who put public above private well-being, and Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, who gave particular importance to the physics of the atoms. The purely sensate conception of knowledge had its most thoroughgoing theoretician in Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. In England, Adam Smith, developing the ethical concepts of David Hume (founded on sympathy), surmounted the egoism that is the basis of every act by using the principle of the impartial observer invoked to sympathize with one or another of the antagonists. After him, the jurist Jeremy Bentham, eliminating sympathy, reduced ethics to the pure calculus of the useful, which—in an entirely Epicurean formula—he defined as a “moral arithmetic.” In the Epicurean stream lay also the utilitarianism of the 19th century, of which the greatest representative was John Stuart Mill.

Epicureanism in later philosophy

In the 19th century, the interpretation of pleasure as a psychic principle of action was initiated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics, and developed toward the end of the century by Sigmund Freud on the psychoanalytic level of the unconscious. Epicureanism and egocentric hedonism had few faithful representatives among 20th-century philosophers, though the viewpoint remained as a residue in some strains of popular thinking.

Criticism and evaluation

In the first half of the 17th century, at a time when Gassendi was reviving atomistic Epicureanism, René Descartes, often called the founder of modern philosophy, offered arguments that tended to undercut atomism. Reality is a plenum, he held, a complete fullness; there can be no such thing as a vacuous region, or the void of atomism. Since matter is nothing but spatial extension, its only true properties are geometrical and dynamic. Because extension is everywhere, motion occurs not as a passage through emptiness, as Epicurus supposed, but as vortices, or “whirlpools,” in which every motion sets up a broad area of movement extending indefinitely around itself.
Close to the heart of Epicureanism is the principle, which occurred also in Democritus, that denies that something can come from or be rooted in nothing. In a poem composed by an ancient monist, Parmenides of Elea (born c. 515 bce), this principle had been expressed in the two formulas: “Being cannot be Non-Being,” and “Non-Being must be Non-Being.” Though Epicurus had faithfully adhered to this principle almost throughout his system, he has been criticized for abandoning it at one point—in the swerves that he attributed to occasional atoms that take them aside from their normal paths. Epicurus abandoned the principle at this point in order to avoid espousing a physics that was inconsistent with the autonomy that he observed in the physical behaviour of humans and animals. But to his Stoic critics, the swerves of the atoms were a scandal, since they implied that an event can occur without a cause. It has seldom been noted, however, that the swerve is merely a special case—a transposition into atomistic terms—of Aristotle’s theory of accidents (i.e., of properties that are not essential to the substances in which they occur), inasmuch as an accident, too, as Aristotle himself had stated (Metaphysics I 3), is without a cause. Moreover, a similar view was seriously advanced in the 19th century under the name of tychism by Charles Sanders Peirce, a logician and philosopher of science.
To the Stoic charge that Epicurus lacked a doctrine of providence (since he viewed the gods as being lazy), Epicurus answered that “mythical gods are preferable to the fate” posited by the Stoics. It has been suggested that he might equally well have added that the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle’s theology was hardly less lazy than Epicurus’s gods.
The effort of Epicurus to reduce the good to pleasure reflects the only criterion to which he would entrust himself, the “evidence of those passions immediately present,” which give humans the word of nature. In the argument of psychological hedonism, here implied, the Epicurean holds that human beings as a matter of fact do take satisfaction in pleasure and decry pain, and he argues then to an egoistic ethical hedonism that identifies the (objective) good with pleasure. Most moralists, however, have felt that a thoroughgoing psychological hedonism cannot be defended; that desire is often, as a matter of fact, directed toward an object with no thought at all about the pleasure that it will bring; that a mother’s impulse to save her young from danger is more fundamental than any pleasure involved (which usually comes only afterward); that the tendency of a child to imitate his parents can be, in fact, quite painful; and that, as 19th-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick argued in what he called the “hedonistic paradox,” one of the most ineffective ways to achieve pleasure is to deliberately seek it out.

**Sidgwick, Henry**Henry Sidgwick.BBC Hulton Picture Library

Some scholars have even argued that an Epicurean egoistic hedonism, however foresighted it may be, must logically be self-defeating. If the view is universalized, the egoist must advocate the maximization of his enemy’s pleasure as well as of his own, which can lead to actions painful to himself. In consequence, the entire branch of ethics that covers the advising or judging of other agents is banned from consideration, and it may be questioned whether such a view can comprise an ethic at all.
On the other hand, it has been argued that humans are subject to antinomies, or contradictions, that no system can escape; there are dimensions in human nature that transcend the rational level. Thus, whatever its rational credentials may be, Epicureanism, as an attitude toward life that was theorized in its purest form by Epicurus, nonetheless remains one of the important forms that human behaviour has often assumed; and, at its best, it has achieved a type of asceticism that, even in retirement and solitude, does not negate company but welcomes it, finding the purest joys of life in the unique richness of human encounters.