Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment
Sean Gabb
(This is the text of a lecture given on the 6th September 2007 to the
6/20 Club in London)
Comments may be posted to:
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/pamphlet/epicurus.htm
Abstract
Epicurus (341-270 BC) was, with Plato and Aristotle, one of the three
great philosophers of the ancient world. He developed an integrated
system of ethics and natural philosophy that, he claimed and many
accepted, showed everyone the way to a life of the greatest happiness.
The school that he founded remained open for 798 years after his death.
While it lost place during the last 200 of these years, his philosophy
held until then a wide and often decisive hold on the ancient mind.
The revival of Epicureanism in the 17th century coincided with the
growth of scientific rationalism and classical liberalism. There can be
no doubt these facts are connected. It may, indeed, be argued that the
first was a leading cause of the second two, and that we are now living
in a world shaped, in every worthwhile sense, by the ideas of Epicurus.
Life and Times
Epicurus was born on the 4th February 341 BC on Samos, an island in the
Aegean close by the coast of what is now Turkey. Because he was the son
of colonists from that city, he was called to Athens at the age of 18
for two years of compulsory military service. With this exception, he
devoted his entire life to teaching and writing.[i]
His philosophical education began with Pamphilus, a follower of Plato,
and ended with Nausiphanes, a follower of Democritus. He taught for a
while in the school his father had established on Samos. In 311-10, he
taught at Mytelene on the island of Lesbos. He then taught for a while
at Lampsacus, a city not far from what became Constantinople. He
returned to Athens in 306, where he founded a school known as the
Garden. Here he remained, teaching and writing, until he died from
infected kidney stones in 270 at the age of 71. He died unmarried and
without children.
His life overlaps what modern historians call the Classical and the
Hellenistic periods of ancient history. He was born in a Greece that was
divided, as it always had been, into many city states. None was larger
than an English county. Few had a population of more than 30,000. Each
was or sought to be a universe in itself, claiming the total commitment
of its citizens and acknowledging no higher source of civil or religious
authority. This world was bounded to the east by the decayed but still
significant Persian Empire, and to the north by the rising but still
mostly distant kingdom of Macedon. Rome was a small city state
continually at war with its neighbours in central Italy. It was almost
unknown to the Greeks of the Aegean.
In the year that Epicurus was born, Plato had been dead for six years,
Aristotle was 43 and had another 19 years to live, and Alexander the
Great was 15.
In the year of his death, Alexander had been dead for 53 years, and had
conquered most of the known world, including the Persian Empire, and had
spread Greek dominion and Greek civilisation from Libya to India. Some
city states remained independent, but had now to survive in a world of
giant empires ruled by Greek despots and Greek bureaucracies. The bond
between city and citizen had been at least weakened. It was being
replaced by a heightened sense of individuality, and above this by the
notion of a common Greek nationality - and even by an emerging notion of
a common humanity.
Six years after his death, the Romans began the first of their three
wars with Carthage that would, within another century, leave them as the
dominant power in the Mediterranean.
Relating what people think to what is happening around them is never
easy, and our knowledge of the ancient world is not sufficient to claim
anything with confidence. And the circumstances in which a philosopher
lives have no bearing on the truth of what he writes. But Epicurus lived
through the beginning of an age that was to be unusually favourable to
the spread of his doctrines.
Sources of Information
Before discussing what these doctrines were, however, I need to explain
our sources of information for Epicurus and his school. According to
Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was the most prolific of all the
main ancient philosophers. His total original writings filled 300
papyrus rolls.[ii] If we take one papyrus roll as containing the
equivalent of 30 printed octavo pages, his collected works would fill 30
modern volumes. His longest single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus
rolls, which makes it about as long as Das Kapital.
To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his
followers, both during his life and during the following six centuries
or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they must easily
have filled a library.
Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising
philosophy. There were no hidden teachings - no mysteries too complex
for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory studies in
logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of the Master
could become plain. No one was too old or too young to embrace the
truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even women to the
courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest Greek consistent
with precise expression of his doctrines.[iii] He discouraged his
followers from poetry and rhetoric.
For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there were
the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or inclined, there
was a still substantial abridgement, and then a shorter summary. For the
less attentive or the uneducated, there were collections of very brief
sayings - whole arguments compressed into statements that could be
memorised and repeated.
Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself wrote,
we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings known as the
Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we have the Vatican
Sayings, which is another collection of brief statements, some by
Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, which
summarises his main doctrines and also contains the only extant whole
works already mentioned. We have more of the brief statements and a
partial summary of the whole system inscribed at the expense of another
Diogenes on a wall in Oenanda, a city in what is now northern Turkey.
There are the elaborate refutations of Epicureanism by Cicero and
Plutarch. These inevitably outline and sometimes even quote what they
are attacking. There are hundreds of other references to Epicurus in the
surviving literature of the ancient world. Some of these are useful
sources of information. Some are our only sources of information on
certain points of the philosophy.
During the past few centuries, scholars have been trying to read the
charred papyrus rolls from a library in Herculaneum buried by the
eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Some of these contain works by Philodemus
of Gadara, an Epicurean philosopher of the 1st century BC. Much of this
library remains unexcavated, and most of the rolls recovered have not
really been examined. There are hopes that a complete work by Epicurus
will one day be found here.
Above all else, though, is the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. He was a
Roman poet who died around the year 70 BC. His epic, in which he claims
to restate the physical doctrines of Epicurus, was unfinished at the
time of his death, and it is believed that Cicero himself edited the six
completed books and published the text roughly as it has come down to
us. This is one of the greatest poems ever written, and perhaps the
strangest of all the great poems. It is also the longest explanation in
a friendly source of the physical theories of Epicurus.
Therefore, if anyone tries to say in any detail what Epicurus believed,
he will not be arguing from strong authority. If we compare the writings
of any extant philosopher with the summaries and commentaries, we can
see selective readings and exaggerations and plain misunderstandings.
How much of what Karl Marx really said can be reliably known from the
Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars of the 20th century? Even David Hume,
who wrote very clearly in a very clear language, seems to have been
consistently misunderstood by his 19th century critics. For Epicurus, we
may have reliable information about the main points of his ethics and
his physics. We have almost no discussions of his epistemology of his
philosophy of mind. Anyone who tries writing on these is largely
guessing.
All this being said, enough has survived to make a general account of
the philosophy possible. Epicurus appears to have been a consistent
thinker. Though it may only ever be a guess - unless the archaeologists
in Herculaneum find the literary equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb - we
can with some confidence proceed from what Epicurus did say to what he
might have said. Certainly, we can give a general account of the
philosophy.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Epicurus begins with the question asked by Socrates at the end of the
fifth century - what is the good life? His answer is that the good lies
not in virtue or justice or wisdom - though these are not to be ignored
- but in happiness.
"Pleasure" he writes, "is our first and kindred good. It is the starting
point of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back,
inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good
thing."[iv]
Now we have more than enough of Epicurus to know that he is not arguing
for what are called the self-indulgent pleasures - of eating and
drinking and sex and the like. Aristippus of Cyrene (c435-366 BC), we
are told, had already argued for these. He also claimed that happiness
was the highest good, but went on to claim that happiness lay in the
pursuit of pleasure regardless of convention or the feelings of others
or of the future.
This interpretation was attached to Epicurus in his own lifetime, and
the attachment has been maintained down to the present - so that the
words "Epicure" and "Epicurean" have the meaning of self-indulgent
luxury.
What Epicurus plainly means by happiness is the absence of pain. We are
driven to act by a feeling of discontent. We seek food because we are
hungry. We seek warmth because we are cold. We seek medicine because we
are sick. Once we have acted correctly and removed the cause of
discontent, we are happy.
Turning to his own words, he says:
When we say...that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean
the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are
understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful
misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body
and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of
drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of
fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant
life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice
and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest
tumults take possession of the soul. Of this the beginning and the
greatest good is wisdom. Therefore wisdom is a more precious thing that
even philosophy; from it springs all the other virtues, for it teaches
that we cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and
justly; nor live wisely, honourably and justly without living
pleasantly.[v]
In this scheme, therefore, happiness is to be defined as peace of mind,
or ataraxia. This pursuit of happiness does involve bodily pleasure, but
such pleasure is a means to the greater end of ataraxia. "No pleasure"
he says, "is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain
pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures
themselves."[vi]
His ethics of pleasure can be summarised as:
The pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced. The pain
which produces no pleasure is to be avoided. The pleasure is to be
avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain.
The pain is to be endures which averts a greater pain, or secures a
greater pleasure.[vii]
And so the happy man for Epicurus is one who lives simply within his
means, who seeks only those pleasures which contribute to his long term
peace of mind.
And while hedonism is ultimately a doctrine of selfishness, what
Epicurus had in mind was not a life spent in the pursuit of solitary
happiness. He says: "Of the means which wisdom acquires to ensure
happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is
friendship."[viii]
It may be that we seek friendship for selfish reasons. But friendship is
to be persistently sought and maintained throughout life. Epicurus
himself had an immense capacity for friendship.
A Scandalised Reception
This is a very brief overview of his ethical teachings. Hedonism has
always been a controversial doctrine, so far as it is opposed to the
teachings of the explicitly altruistic philosophies and religious
systems. There are difficulties with hedonism when it comes to the exact
comparison of pleasures. We do not have any of the more detailed works
in which Epicurus might have attempted what Jeremy Bentham later called
a "felicific calculus". But, bearing in mind the difficulties that
Bentham and the 19th century utilitarians found when they tried to move
from principles to details, there is no reason to suppose he was more
successful.
However, it is hard to see anything so scandalous in the pursuit of
happiness through moderation and through friendship that should have
brought on a flood of often hysterical denunciation and
misrepresentation in antiquity that began in his own lifetime and did
not end even with the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean
writings.
The early accusations are very detailed, and are cited by Diogenes
Laertius. Among much else, it is alleged:
That he wrote 50 obscene letters;
That one of his brothers was a pimp;
That his understanding of philosophy was small and his
understanding of life even smaller;
That he put forward as his own the doctrines of Democritus about
atoms and of Aristippus about pleasure;
That in his On Nature Epicurus says the same things over and
over again and writes largely in sheer opposition to others, especially
against his former teacher Nausiphanes;
That he was not a genuine Athenian:
That he vomited twice a day from over-indulgence.[ix]
Three centuries after his death, Plutarch (46-127 AD) wrote against him
in almost hysterical tone. He says:
Epicurus....actually advises a cultivated monarch to put up with
recitals of stratagems and with vulgar buffooneries at his drinking
parties sooner than with the discussion of problems in music and
poetry.[x]
And again:
Colotes himself, for another, while hearing a lecture of
Epicurus on natural philosophy, suddenly cast himself down before him
and embraced his knees; and this is what Epicurus himself writes about
it in a tone of solemn pride: 'You, as one revering my remarks on that
occasion, were seized with a desire, not accounted for by my lecture, to
embrace me by clasping my knees and lay hold of me to the whole extent
of the contact that is customarily established in revering and
supplicating certain personages. You therefore caused me,' he says, 'to
consecrate you in return and demonstrate my reverence.' My word! We
can pardon those who say that they would pay any price to see a painting
of that scene, one kneeling at the feet of the other and embracing his
knees while the other returns the supplication and worship. Yet that
act of homage, though skillfully contrived by Colotes, bore no proper
fruit: he was not proclaimed a Sage. Epicurus merely says: 'Go about
as one immortal in my eyes, and think of me as immortal too.'[xi]
Now, all this and more was said against Epicurus when the whole body of
his writings was still available, and by men who had access to those
writings. It is unlikely, bearing in mind their general ability, that
they were incapable of understanding plain Greek. So what could have
been their motivation for misrepresenting him in defiance of the
evidence, or in repeating personal libels irrelevant to his philosophy?
A possible answer is that they hated his philosophy for other reasons
that they were not able or did not wish fully to discuss.
What does make Epicurus and his philosophy so controversial is one
further piece of advice on the pursuit of happiness. It is impossible to
be happy, he insists, unless we understand the nature of the universe
and our own place within the universe.[xii]
The Maintenance of Social Control
The central problem of almost every society before about 1950 has been
how to reconcile the great majority to distributions of property in
which they are at a disadvantage. Only a minority has even been able to
enjoy secure access to abundant food and good clothing and clean water
and healthcare and education. Whether actually enslaved or formally free
sellers of labour, the majority have always had to look up to a minority
of the rich and often legally privileged. How to keep them quiet?
Force can only ever be part of the answer. The poor have always been the
majority, and sometimes the great majority. Armies of mercenaries to
protect the rich have not always been available, and they have never by
themselves been sufficient to compel obedience on all occasions in every
respect.
Force, therefore, has always been joined by religious terrors. In Egypt,
the king was a god, and the privileged system of which he was the head
was part of a divine order that the common people were enjoined never to
challenge. In the other monarchies of the near east, the king might not
actually be a god. But all the priests taught that he was part of a
divinely ordained order that it was blasphemy to challenge.
In the Greek city states until about a century before the birth of
Epicurus, securing the obedience of the poor had not been a serious
problem. There had been some class conflict, even in Athens. But most
land was occupied by smallholders, and excess population could be
decanted into the colonies of Italy and the western Mediterranean. There
were rich citizens, but they were usually placed under heavy obligations
to contribute to the defence and ornament of their cities.
Then a combination of commercial progress and the disruptions of the war
between Athens and Sparta created a steadily widening gulf between rich
and poor. There was also a growing problem of how to maintain large by
unknown numbers of slaves in peaceful subjection.
The result was a class war that destabilised every Greek state. The sort
of democracy seen in Athens could survive in a society where citizens
were broadly equal. Once a small class of rich and a much larger class
of the poor had emerged, there was a continual tendency for democratic
assemblies to be led by demagogues into policies of levelling that could
be ended only by the rise of a tyrant, who would secure the wealth of
the majority - but who could secure it only so long as the poor could be
terrified into submission. Once they could not be terrified by the
threat of overwhelming force, they would rise up and dispossess the
rich, until a new tyrant could emerge to subdue them again.
Unlike in the monarchies of the near east, no settled order could be
maintained in Greece by religious terrors. During the sixth and fifth
centuries, the Greek mind had experienced the first enlightenment of
which we have record. There had been a growth of philosophy and science
that revealed a world governed by laws that could be uncovered and
understood by the unaided reason.
Now, enlightenments are always dangerous to an established religion. And
the Greek religion was unusually weak as a counterweight to reason. The
Greeks had no conception of a single, omnipotent God the Creator.
Instead, they had a pantheon of supernatural beings who had not created
the world, but were subject to many of its limitations. They were
frequently at war with each other, and so they could be set against each
other by their human worshippers with timely sacrifices and other
bribes. They did not watch continually over human actions, and beyond
the occasional punishment and reward to the living, they had no means of
compelling observance of any code of human conduct.
And so, when the intellectual disturbance of philosophy and science
spilled over into demands for a reconstruction of society in which
property would be equalised, there was no religious establishment with
the authority to stand by the side of the rich.
The Contribution of Plato
This is a problem addressed by Plato in at least two of his works - The
Republic and The Laws. The first is his description of an ideal state,
the second of a state less than ideal but still worth working towards. I
do not claim to be an expert on Plato, though am dubious of many of the
claims made against him. However, his general solution to the problem is
to stop the enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian
oligarchy.
His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of
accountability would have been abolished, together with married life and
the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All other
art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a division of
society into orders at the head of which was to be a class of guardians.
These would strictly control all thought and action.
His workable society would be one in which some property and some
accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be the
same attempt at controlling thought and action.
The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new theology. A
single divine being would take the place of the quarrelling, scandalous
gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The common people could be left
with a purified version of the old cults. But these gods would be
increasingly aligned with the secondary spirits through which the One
God directed His Creation.
People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human
construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or
disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God through
His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be punished by the
state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century, Anaxagoras had been
exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was a ball of glowing rock.
This had been an occasional persecution - indeed, it is hard to think of
other instances. In the Platonic system, there was to be a regular
inquisition that would punish nonconformity with imprisonment or
death.[xiii]
Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a "noble lie" - though
Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a religion that
looks into the most secret places of the mind, and dispenses rewards and
punishments according to what is found there. In the old theology,
Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo had none in the dark. Zeus
had no idea who was thinking what. The Platonic God was just like ours.
No sin against His Wishes could go undetected or unpunished.
And so the people were to be kept in line by fear not quite of hellfire,
but by fear of everything short of that.[xiv]
True Physics
It seems to have been against all this that Epicurus reacted. For Plato,
the world of appearance was a kind of dream, and the real world was
something that only the initiated could begin to understand through
logic and mathematics and perhaps a dash of magic. So far as it existed,
matter was evil, and the universe was strictly bounded in space and
time.
For Epicurus, the world of appearance was the real world. There is a
void, or vacuum, which is infinite in space and time. It has always
existed. It will always exist. It goes on forever and ever. In this void
is an infinite number of atoms. These are very small, and therefore
imperceptible, but indivisible particles of matter. They have always
existed and will always exist. They are all moving through the void at
an incredibly rapid and uniform speed. The world as we see it is based
on combinations of these atoms. Every atom is hooked, and the collision
of atoms will sometimes lead to combinations of atoms into larger
structures, some of which endure and some of which we can eventually
perceive with our senses. All observed changes in the world are the
result of redistributions of the invisible atoms that comprise it.
Though we are not able to see these atoms, we can infer their existence
by looking at the world that our senses can perceive. All events - the
wearing away of a rock by water, for example, or the growth of crystals
or trees - can be fully explained by an atomic hypothesis. Since there
is nothing that cannot be so explained, there is no need of any other
hypotheses. In a surviving explanation of his method, he says:
...[I]n our study of nature we must not conform to empty
assumptions and arbitrary laws, but follow the prompting of the
facts.[xv]
Everything in the universe is made of atoms. We are made of atoms. Our
souls are made of very fine atoms. Our senses work because every other
physical object is continually casting off very thin films of atoms that
represent it exactly as it is. These films strike on our senses and give
us vision and sound. Heat is produced by the vibration of atoms
temporarily trapped in combinations that prevent them from their natural
onward motion.[xvi]
Whether or not anyone can at any moment think of a likely explanation,
all events in the universe can be explained in purely naturalistic
terms. Assuming atoms and motion, no further hypotheses are needed to
explain the world.
Epicurus was not the first to explain the world by an atomic hypothesis.
That was Democritus (460-370 BC). But he seems to have developed the
hypothesis with a consistency and detail that took it far beyond
anything that earlier philosophers had conceived.
Perhaps his most notable innovation is the doctrine of the swerve. There
are two objections to the atomism of Democritus. The first is that if
the atoms are all moving at the same speed and in the same direction,
like drops of rain, there is no reason to suppose they will ever collide
and form larger compounds. The second is that if they are not moving in
the same direction, they will collide, but they will form a universe
locked into an unbreakable sequence of cause and effect. This conflicts
with the observed fact of free will.
And so Epicurus argues that every atom is capable of a very small and
random deviation from its straight motion. This is enough to give an
indeterminacy to the universe that does not conflict with an overall
regularity of motion.
The Physics Developed
It would be easy to diverge from this general overview into a detailed
examination of the physics. This is because Epicurus seems to have been
largely right. We now believe, as he did, that the universe is made of
atoms, and if we do not now talk about motion, we do talk about energy
and force. His physics are an astonishing achievement.
Of course, he was often wrong. He denigrated mathematics. He seems to
have believed that the sun and moon were about the same size as they
appear to us.[xvii] Then there is an apparent defect in his conception
of the atomic movements. Does the universe exist by accident? Or are
their laws of nature beyond the existence and movement of the atoms? The
first is not impossible. An infinite number of atoms in an infinite void
over infinite time will, every so often, come together in an apparently
stable universe. They may also hold together, moving in clusters in ways
that suggest regularity. But this chance combination might be dissolved
at any moment - though, given every sort of infinity, some of these
universes will continue for long periods.
If Epicurus had this first in view, what point in trying to explain
present phenomena in terms of cause and effect? Causality only makes
sense on the assumption that the future will be like the past. If he had
the second in mind, it is worth asking what he thought of the nature of
these laws? Might they not, for example, have had an author? Since
Newton, we have contented ourselves with trying to uncover regularities
of motion and not going beyond these. But the Greeks had a much stronger
teleological sense.
Perhaps these matters were not discussed. Perhaps they were discussed,
but we have no record of them in the surviving discussions. Or perhaps
they have survived, but I have overlooked them. But it does seem to me
that Epicurean physics do not fully discuss the nature of the laws that
they assume.
On the other hand, let me quote two passages from his surviving
writings:
Moreover, there is an infinite number of worlds, some like this
world, others unlike it. For the atoms being infinite in number...are
borne ever further in their course. For the atoms out of which a world
might arise, or by which a world might arise, or by which a world might
be formed, have not all be expended on one world or a finite number of
worlds, whether like or unlike this one. Hence there will be nothing to
hinder an infinity of worlds....
And further, we must not suppose that the worlds have
necessarily one and the same shape. For nobody can prove that in one
sort of world there might not be contained, whereas in another sort of
world there could not possibly be, the seeds out of which animals and
plants arise and the rest of the things we see[xviii]
What we have here is the admission that there may, in the infinite
universe, be other worlds like our own, and these may contain sentient
beings like ourselves. And there may be worlds inconceivably unlike our
own. And there is the claim that living beings arise and develop
according to natural laws. Epicurus would not have been surprised either
by modern physics or by Darwinism.
The Purpose of the Physics
However, while the similarities between Epicurean physics and modern
science are striking, there is one profound difference. For us, the
purpose of science is to give us an understanding of the world that
brings with it the ability to control the world and remake it for our
own convenience. This is our desire, and this has been our achievement
because we have fully developed methods of observation and experiment.
The Greeks had limited means of observation - no microscopes or
telescopes, nor even accurate clocks. Nor had they much conception of
experiment.
Moreover, scientific progress neither was conceived by Epicurus nor
would have been regarded as desirable. He says very emphatically:
If we had never been troubled by celestial and atmospheric
phenomena, nor by fears about death, nor by our ignorance of the limits
of pains and desires, we should have had no need of natural
science.[xix]
He says again:
...[R]emember that, like everything else, knowledge of celestial
phenomena, whether taken along with other things or in isolation, has no
other end in view than peace of mind and firm convictions.[xx]
From Darkness into the Light
The purpose of the 37 volumes of his On Nature is to free us from the
fear of death and therefore from the control of priests and from the
internal fears of the religion that Plato and his followers had in mind.
Epicurus says:
...[W]e must recognise generally that the soul is a corporeal
thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame....
...[T]he rest of the frame, whether the whole of it survives or
only a part, no longer has sensation, when once those atoms have
departed....Moreover, once the whole frame is broken up, the soul is
scattered and has no longer the same powers as before, nor the same
notions; hence it does not possess sentience either.[xxi]
The atoms that comprise the soul are immortal. They are passed on from
being to being like the torch in one of the Athenian foot races. But the
larger structure of atoms that is the soul of any one individual is
itself mortal. Once we are dead, our atoms are recycled. Since there is
nothing but atoms moving in the void, we as individuals are annihilated.
After death, there is nothing; and because of that, death is nothing.
Epicurus says:
Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its
elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensations is
nothing to us.[xxii]
After two thousand years of Christian spiritual hegemony, this may seem
to many of us a gloomy doctrine. For Epicurus and his followers,
however, it was a removal of the greatest barrier to happiness as they
conceived it. That barrier was fear of endless punishment for the
alleged sin of seeking their own happiness in life.
It may be, Lucretius says, that beating down religion is impious and the
entry to a life of crime. Much rather, it is religion which has brought
forth criminal and impious deeds. He lived before the most notable acts
of religious mania. But he was poet enough to know the psychology of
enthusiasm. In Book One of his poem, he produces one of the most
striking of all denunciations of religion. He describes how, at the
beginning of the Trojan War, the priests tell Agamemnon that a good
passage across the Aegean required the sacrifice of his daughter. So a
young girl was dragged to the altar for her throat to be cut by her own
father.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum he concludes - "Such are the evils
to which religion leads"[xxiii]
He says later, in Book Three:
Some wear out their lives for the sake of a statue or a name.
Religion and its resulting fear of death can induce one man to violate
honour, another to break the bonds of friendship, and to overthrow all
natural feeling. It has induced men to betray their country or their
parents for the sake of avoiding hellfire. For just as children tremble
and fear all in the darkness, so we in the light of day often fear what
is no more real. This terror must be dispersed, not by rays of sunshine
nor by the bright shafts of daylight, but by the sight and understanding
of nature.[xxiv]
It is Epicurus, he says, who brought us into this light of
understanding. Do not fear the priests. Do not fear death. Pay no
attention to dreams or omens. These latter have a natural explanation.
The former
Have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are
the result of images that impact on us.[xxv]
Follow the ethical teachings of Epicurus, and be happy.
None of this means, by the way, that Epicurus and his followers were
atheists. They did accept the existence of gods, and were willing
outwardly to conform to whatever cults were established. They only
denied that the gods were immaterial, and that the gods had any interest
in human affairs. Confronted with evidence for any supernatural event,
they were content, as said, with insisting on a natural cause, whether
or not they were able to think of one that convinced.
The Social Contract
But we return to the great question: what of social order? How, without
the terrors of religion, can the many be kept from murdering and
plundering the more fortunate?
The answer, says Epicurus, lies in friendship and in an understanding of
natural justice. This is, he says,
a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming
or being harmed by another.[xxvi]
He says also:
There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only
agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at
various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
We do not have any full explanation of this side of Epicureanism. But it
seems that Epicurus believed a stable and just social order could be
sustained by the self-interest of individuals. Let each person pursue
his own happiness, only refraining from the lives and property of
others, and a natural order of society would emerge - rather as the
collision of atoms in the void had led to the emergence of a vast
self-sustaining universe.
Certainly, we know that he recommended his followers to avoid politics.
This did not mean withdrawal from the world. Bearing in mind the
quantity of his own writings and the missionary zeal of the school he
founded, he was as active in impressing his ideas on the world as Plato
or Aristotle were.
According to Diogenes Laertius, the Epicurean
will take no part in politics....But...he will not withdraw
himself from life....And be will take a suit into court....He will have
regard to his property and to the future.
He will be fond of the country. He will be armed against fortune
and will never give up a friend. He will pay just so much regard to his
reputation as not to be looked down upon. He will take more delight than
other men in public festivals.
....And he will make money, but only by his wisdom, if he should
be in poverty, and he will pay court to a king, if need be. He will be
grateful to anyone when he is corrected.
He will found a school, but not in such a manner as to draw the
crowd after him; and will give readings in public, but only by request.
He will be a dogmatist but not a mere sceptic; and he will be like
himself even when asleep. And he will on occasion die for a
friend.[xxvii]
As said, we do not have much Epicurean writing on this point. As with
the Benthamites, he does not seem to have found any imperative for these
ethical teachings. We may ask, for example, what reason there is against
my killing someone if I can thereby take possession of his property - or
just enjoy the sensation of killing - and if there is no chance of my
being caught. The only answers we have are:
Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is
discovered by your neighbour.[xxviii]
And:
The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is
full of the utmost disturbance.[xxix]
If these are attempts at answering the question, they are feeble
attempts. That the unjust are invariably unhappy is plainly false. As
for the threat of discover, the opportunities for secret crime have
always been everywhere.
Nor does Epicurus take issue with the greatest injustice of ancient
society. He admitted slaves to his school. He encouraged kindness to
slaves. But he does not seem ever to have questioned the morality of or
the need for slavery.
But, these reservations being granted, what we seem to have in the
complete system of Epicurus is something remarkably similar to modern
classical liberalism. While respecting the equal rights of others, we
should pursue our own happiness in life. We can do so sure that we exist
in a universe governed by knowable and impersonal laws that are not
hostile to the pursuit of such happiness.
Popularity and the Response of the Intellectuals
It is all this that made Epicurus and his philosophy so scandalous in
the ancient world and beyond. Plato never did get to create his perfect
society. But his followers did manage to establish variants of Platonism
as the dominant philosophy of later antiquity. And all the other main
schools of philosophy were agreed that the world should be ruled by
intellectuals. These should tell the civil authorities how to govern.
They should provide the moral and spiritual justification for the rule
of absolute and unaccountable systems of government - systems of which
the Roman imperial system was only the most developed. They should have
positions of honour within these systems.
Epicureanism was a standing challenge to these pretensions. We have no
precise evidence for the spread of Epicureanism in the ancient world.
But it does seem to have spread very widely. Why else should Cicero,
Plutarch and many of the Christian Fathers have given so much effort to
sustained attacks on it? Why else, in spite of his emphatic remarks on
the nature of happiness, was Epicurus, even in his own lifetime,
subjected to the most outrageous accusations?
We have one statement from Cicero, that Epicureanism in his own day was
one of the dominant schools of philosophy in Italy. So far, he says,
Greek philosophy had been available only in the original language. But
Romans such as Amafinius had translated several Epicurean works
on the publishing of whose writings the people were moved, and
enlisted themselves chiefly under this sect, either because the doctrine
was more easily understood, or because they were invited thereto by the
pleasing thoughts of amusement, or that, because there was nothing
better, they laid hold of what was offered them.[xxx]
There is no doubt that it influenced the classical literature of Rome.
Of course, there is the great poem by Lucretius. But there is also
Catullus and Horace and even Vergil. Without citing them, their works
are imbued with an Epicurean outlook on life, either directly from
Epicurus or indirectly from Lucretius.
Another indication of popularity is that once converted to Epicureanism,
people hardly ever switched to another philosophy. The philosopher
Arcesilaus testifies to this fact even as he tries to explain it:
You can turn a man into a eunuch, but you can't turn a eunuch into a
man.[xxxi]
Then there is the curious testimony of the Jews. During the three
centuries around the birth of Christ, the main everyday language of many
Jewish communities was Greek. The Gospels and Letters of Saint Paul were
all directed at mainly Jewish audiences and are in Greek. One of the
most important philosophers of the age, Philo of Alexandria, was a
Hellenised Jew. Many Jews took on Greek ways. Many, no doubt, stopped
being Jews and made themselves into Greeks.
The condemnation of these Hellenised Jews is Apikorsim, which may easily
be taken as a Semitic version of Epicurean. The term survives in Jewish
theological writing. According to one Internet source,
Apikorsim are what Chasidim refer to as Jewish Goyim, or secular
Jews. They seem to be the worst opposition for Hasidic Jewry.[xxxii]
A term of abuse so loaded with contempt is unlikely to have been taken
from the doctrines of an insignificant philosophical tradition among
ordinary people of the age. It is reasonable to suppose that many lapsed
Jews became Epicureans. If so, Epicureanism must already have had large
numbers of adherents among at least the semi-educated classes.
Decline and Apparent Death
The philosophy seems to have continued strong into about the 3rd century
AD. Thereafter, it went into decline. By the middle of the 6th century,
when the Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in
Athens and dispersed the teachers, Epicureanism appears to have been
already dead.
The main traditions of thought during the last few centuries of the
ancient world were turned away from the everyday world. There were the
neoplationists, with their settled belief in a higher reality that could
be approached through a combination of mathematics and magic. There
were, of course, the Christians, for whom the world is simply a
preparation for the better life that is to come.
As said, relating what people think to what is happening around them is
not easy. But the last few centuries of the ancient world were ages of
great uncertainty. There were epidemic diseases that swept away
multitudes without warning and without apparent cause. There were
barbarian attacks and civil wars. There was catastrophically
overextended government to grind the survivors into helplessness and
poverty. In this sort of world, the teachings of Epicurus about seeking
happiness in this life may have lost their attraction.
In one of his more sensible comments on Epicurus, Plutarch writes:
As to the vulgar sort...when they lose their children, wives, or
friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain,
though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved,
and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of a
dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as
intimate death to be the soul's remove and not destruction. ....
....And they are discomposed when they hear it said of any one,
he is perished, or he is gone or he is no more....
And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of
immortality they [the Epicureans] take away the sweetest and greatest
hopes the vulgar sort have.[xxxiii]
In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend
to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.
There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of
Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church
that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of
all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any
deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature
delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce
in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll
would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together
would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.
The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression.
There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries
together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works
for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology,
those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to
Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture.
Since, with the exception of Lucretius - whose work largely survived -
the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only
for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced
to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37
volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.
So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not
studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and
whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.
And then something remarkable happened.
The Age of Reason
For the 19th century liberal and historian of ideas William Lecky, the
most striking fact about England and France in the 17h century was the
decline of belief in the supernatural.[xxxiv] And the most striking
instance of this fact was the collapse of belief in witchcraft.
At the beginning of that century, belief in witchcraft had been
universal and unchallenged. James VI of Scotland (1567-1625) was one of
the most learned men of his day. He believed without question in
witches, and was a notable persecutor. When he became King of England as
well in 1603, he brought his policies with him. It was to gain favour
with him that Shakespeare introduced the witchcraft theme into Macbeth.
James procured a law that punished witchcraft with death on first
conviction, even though no harm to others could be proven. This law was
carried in a Parliament where Francis Bacon was a Member.
The law was given effect throughout England, and was especially used
during the interregnum years of the 1650s. In 1664, under the restored
Monarchy, Sir Matthew Hale - one of the greatest jurists and legal
philosophers of the age, presided over the trial of two alleged witches
in Suffolk. He told the jury that there could be no doubt in the reality
of witchcraft. He said:
For first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; and secondly,
the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which
is an argument for their confidence of such a crime.[xxxv]
One of the witnesses called for the prosecution was Sir Thomas Browne,
one of the most eminent writers of the age. Appearing as a medical
expert, he assured the jury "that he was clearly of opinion that the
persons were bewitched."[xxxvi] They were convicted and hanged.
It was the same in France. In the town of St Claude, 600 persons were
burnt in the early years of the century for alleged witchcraft and
lycanthropy. In 1643, Cardinal Mazarin wrote to a bishop to congratulate
him on his zeal for hunting out witches.
Yet, in 1667, Colbert, the chief minister of Louis XIV, directed all the
magistrates in France to receive no more accusations of witchcraft.
Those convictions still obtained he frequently commuted from death to
banishment. By the end of the century, witchcraft trials had all but
ceased.
In England, belief collapsed later, but even faster than in France. The
last trial for witchcraft was in 1712. Jane Wenham, an old woman, was
accused of the usual offences. The judge mocked the prosecution
witnesses from the bench. When the jury convicted her against his
directions, he made sure to obtain a royal pardon for the old woman and
a pension.
Whatever the lowest reaches of the common people might still believe,
belief in witchcraft had become a joke among the educated. And because
of the tone they gave to the whole of society, disbelief spread rapidly
beyond the educated. Anyone who tried to maintain its existence was
simply laughed at. Laws that had condemned tens or hundreds of thousands
to death, and usually to the most revolting tortures before death, were
now sneered into abeyance.
We should expect that a change of opinion so immense had been
accompanied by a long debate - something similar to the debates of the
19th century over Darwinism, or to the debates of the day over the
toleration of nonconformity. Yet Lecky maintains that there was almost
no debate worth mentioning. There were sceptics, like Montaigne, who
disbelieved all accounts of the supernatural, or Hobbes, who was a
materialist and atheist. But, while, book after book appeared in England
during the late 17th century to defend the existence of witches and the
need for laws against them, almost no one bothered to argue that witches
did not exist.
Lecky says:
Several...divines came forward...; and they made witchcraft, for
a time, one of the chief subjects of controversy. On the other side, the
discussion was extremely languid. No writer, comparable in ability to
Glanvil, More, Cudworth, or even Casaubon, appeared to challenge the
belief; nor did any of the writings on that side obtain any success at
all equal to that of [Glanvil].[xxxvii]
Belief in witchcraft perished with hardly a direct blow against it. What
seems to have happened, Lecky argues, is a change of world view in which
belief in witches ceased to have any explanatory value. We live in a
world where, orthodox religion aside, belief in the supernatural is
confined to the uneducated or the stupid or the insane. But if we step
outside the consensus in which we live, we should see that there is
nothing in itself irrational about belief in the supernatural, nor even
in witches. The belief is perfectly rational granted certain
assumptions.
Let us assume that the world is filled with invisible and very powerful
beings, that some of these are good and some evil, that some human
beings are capable of establishing contact with these evil beings, and
that some compact can be made in which the power of the evil beings is
transferred to human control. Granting these assumptions, it becomes
reasonable to ascribe great or unusual events to magical intervention,
and to accept that it should be the purpose of the law to check such
intervention.
Now, the Platonic philosophies do accept the existence of such beings.
That is how Plato reconciled his One Creator with the many gods of the
Greek pantheon. This belief was taken over by the Church Fathers, who
simply announced that the ancient gods were demons. It then continued
into the 17th century. It seemed to explain the world. Doubtless, cases
came to light of false accusations and of people convicted because they
were ill rather than possessed by demons. But our own awareness of
corrupt policemen and false convictions does not lead us to believe that
there are no murderers and that murder should not be punished. So it was
with witchcraft.
During the 17th century, however, the educated classes came increasingly
to believe that the world operated according to known, impersonal laws,
and that God - assuming His Existence - seldom interfered with the
working of these secondary laws. In such a view of the world, the
supernatural had no place. Belief in witchcraft, therefore, did not need
opposition. It perished as collateral damage to the system of which it
was a part.
The Epicurean Revival
Lecky ascribes this intellectual change to the growth of scepticism.
This may have been part of the answer. But while sceptics doubt the
existence of the supernatural, they do not necessarily affirm the
existence of invariable laws of nature. A more powerful cause of the
change may have been the revival of Epicureanism during the first half
of the 17th century.
In this revival, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) is the most important
philosopher. A French priest and professor of philosophy, he conceived a
strong dislike both of Aristotelianism and of the new philosophy of
Descartes. He turned instead to Epicurus. His work falls into two parts.
First, there is the immense scholarship with which he went through every
extant ancient source to try to reconstruct what Epicurus had said.
Second, there is his attempted reconciliation of Epicureanism and
orthodox Christianity.
Briefly put, his reconciliation is to deny that the atoms have existed
from eternity and to deny that motion is natural to them. The atoms were
created by God, and they move in paths directed by God. This being so,
he cleared the way for a view of the universe in which God exists, but
operates by secondary causes. For all practical purposes, knowledge of
the world is to be obtained by observing the world.[xxxviii]
I say again that influences are very hard things to trace. But there is
no doubt that Gassendi had made all that remained of the Epicurean
writings available in one convenient place, and had made some attempt to
remove any charge of impiety. These were important achievements. The
Dialogues of Cicero were part of the standard education; and educated
men would probably have read some Lucretius. But hardly anyone had
bothered to hunt out all the references that set these into a greater
whole. No one had yet collected these in a single place. And no one had
yet laboured to overcome the religious prejudices that worked to prevent
an impartial reception of what had survived.
Nor is there any doubt that Epicureanism began suddenly to exert a
decisive influence over at least English science from about the middle
of the 17th century.
Edwin N. Hooker writes:
Scientists found [Epicurean physics] a highly useful working
hypothesis in their investigations in physical nature. But by 1660 the
working hypothesis had been blown up into a very different shape, and in
its altered shape was being peddled as the final truth concerning
nature, man, and human society. The new monster had a wide appeal. In
1662 Edward Stillingfleet wrote in Origines Sacrae that of all theories
the Epicurean at that time was making the greatest noise in the world. A
few years later John Wilkins, the remarkable Bishop of Chester who had
been for years the leading spirit in that amazing group of scientists
laboring at Oxford (a group which became the nucleus of the Royal
Society), commented on the extravagant and irrational opinions then
afloat, inspired by Epicurus and his atoms. A little later Ralph
Cudworth, probably the most learned member of the Cambridge Platonists,
remarked that of late there had been an extraordinary enthusiasm for
Epicurus. From all sides came testimony to the effect that Epicurus had
indeed risen from the dead and that the atomistic theory had burst its
seams.[xxxix]
What had risen from the dead may sometimes have been the Epicureanism of
the Master. But much was that of Gassendi. Both Locke and Newton appear
to have read Gassendi. There are obvious similarities between them and
this version of Epicurus. Newton, for example, constructs his physics in
terms of matter and motion through a void. For him, light is a stream of
atoms. He accepts the revised physics of Gassendi, denying any implicit
motion to atoms, and then goes further with his hypothesis of action at
a distance, or gravity.[xl]
For the growth of empiricism and utilitarianism, it would be necessary
to write a book. These are both similar to the ideas of Epicurus. They
emerged in an intellectual climate where Epicurus had been made
available again and where he had been made respectable to Christian
orthodoxy. There is no necessary reason to suppose that these facts are
connected. It may be that interest in Epicurus had revived in a
civilisation that was autonomously moving toward the same general
approach. But it does seem reasonable to suppose a connection.
If, however, there was a connection, it was not merely a revival of
Epicurus and his philosophy. As in every other recovery of ancient
thought, save perhaps the cultural, the moderns very quickly transcended
the ancients. The moderns began by revering the giants on whose backs
they had climbed. They soon grew into giants in their own right.
I have already mentioned the differences between Epicurus and ourselves
with regard to the natural sciences. Knowledge for us is valued not
mainly because it liberates us from mental pain, but because it
contributes to mental and physical happiness. We observe. We form
hypotheses. We experiment. We make use of the mathematics that Epicurus
derided. We use the knowledge thereby gained to change our conditions of
life. We check suffering. We cure illness. We extend life. We fill our
lives with the wealth that comes from our knowledge.
With regard to his ethical theories, the modern utilitarians have also
gone beyond Epicurus. They begin with the same premise, that the purpose
of life is happiness, but pass then to the notion of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. This leads them straight into the
politics that Epicurus rejected - to an investigation of what social
orders are most productive of the general happiness, and to a
willingness to argue for the removal of impediments to that happiness.
We can add to this the knowledge of economics that comes from the
application of Newtonian physics to human affairs - that is, the
investigation of the natural forces that lead spontaneously to the
generation and maintenance of an order in which individuals pursue their
own happiness and promote the happiness of others - we come inevitably
to the doctrine of individual rights that is implicit in the philosophy
of Epicurus and that is central to modern classical liberalism.
The Debt We Owe to Epicurus
Thomas Jefferson understood the value of Epicurus. In 1819, he wrote to
a friend:
As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the
genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything
rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us...Their
great crime [the stoics] was in their calumnies of Epicurus and
misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the
candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid,
rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself,
dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been
deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in
his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness
whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention.[xli]
So too did Ludwig von Mises. In Human Action, he says:
The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as
elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted
in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the
origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the
spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by
the philosophy of Epicureanism.[xlii]
When classical liberals and libertarians discuss the intellectual roots
of their ideas, they are quick to cite Aristotle and Aquinas. It would
show justice if Epicurus could be given at least equal place of honour.
Indeed, whether or not you call yourself a libertarian, if you are
content to live in a world in which you can make the best for yourself
and your loved ones, in which there are no supernatural terrors, but
instead a body of natural science that assists us in the pursuit of
happiness, you too are an Epicurean.
We have virtually everything that Plato wrote and almost nothing that
Epicurus wrote. But Plato, has had no discernable impact on the social
sciences beyond providing legitimation to various cliques of demented
and often murderous intellectuals. For all we have so few of his
writings, the ideas of Epicurus have survived. And they have made the
world a better place.[xliii]
Notes
[i] Nearly all our biographical information about Epicurus comes from
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X. Diogenes was
an otherwise unknown biographer and compiler of the 3rd century AD. An
English translation of his Life of Epicurus is available at
http://www.epicurus.net/en/lives.html - checked August 2007. All
quotations from Epicurus are taken from the translations made available
on this site. Many of these are duplicated in different versions at
http://www.epicurus.info.
[ii] "Epicurus was quite a prolific author, surpassing all in the
quantity of books produced. He authored, in fact, some three hundred
books, and he never cited any other authors - all the words contained in
them were Epicurus' own." (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers,
X.26:)
[iii] See, among many others, Diogenes Laertius: "He uses plain language
in his works throughout, which is unusual, and Aristophanes, the
grammarian, reproaches him for it. He was so intent on clarity that even
in his treatise On Rhetoric, he didn't bother demanding anything else
but clarity" (ibid.)
[iv] Epicurus, "Letter to Menoeceus", contained in Diogenes Laertius,
op. cit.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Principal Doctrines, 8, quoted in Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
[vii] W.E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Augusts to
Charlemagne (first published 1869), Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1911,
volume 1, p.14. Lecky is translating Pierre Gassendi, Philosophiae
Epicuri Syntagma, who in turn is summarising the ancient sources.
[viii] Principal Doctrines, 27.
[ix] Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
[x] Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible,
13, p. 1095C, helpfully collected by Erik Anderson, Epicurea: Selections
from the Classic Compilation of Hermann Usener (1834-1905), 2005 -
available at: http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/epicurea.html - checked
August 2007
[xi] Plutarch, Against Colotes, 17, p. 1117B, in Anderson, ibid.
[xii] Adapted from Principal Doctrines, 12.
[xiii] Plato is an incredibly verbose writer in English translation, and
is almost unreadable in Greek. Finding any useably short quotation to
explain what he appears to be arguing is next to impossible. But take
this on the duty of the magistrate to punish "impiety": "After the
prelude shall follow a discourse, which will be the interpreter of the
law; this shall proclaim to all impious persons:-that they must depart
from their ways and go over to the pious. And to those who disobey, let
the law about impiety be as follows: - If a man is guilty of any
impiety in word or deed, any one who happens to present shall give
information to the magistrates, in aid of the law; and let the
magistrates who. first receive the information bring him before the
appointed court according to the law; and if a magistrate, after
receiving information, refuses to act, he shall be tried for impiety at
the instance of any one who is willing to vindicate the laws; and if any
one be cast, the court shall estimate the punishment of each act of
impiety; and let all such criminals be imprisoned. There shall be three
prisons in the state: the first of them is to be the common prison in
the neighbourhood of the agora for the safe-keeping of the generality of
offenders; another is to be in the neighbourhood of the nocturnal
council, and is to be called the 'House of Reformation'; another, to be
situated in some wild and desolate region in the centre of the country,
shall be called by some name expressive of retribution. Now, men fall
into impiety from three causes, which have been already mentioned, and
from each of these causes arise two sorts of impiety, in all six, which
are worth distinguishing, and should not all have the same punishment.
For he who does not believe in Gods, and yet has a righteous nature,
hates the wicked and dislikes and refuses to do injustice, and avoids
unrighteous men, and loves the righteous. But they who besides believing
that the world is devoid of Gods are intemperate, and have at the same
time good memories and quick wits, are worse; although both of them are
unbelievers, much less injury is done by the one than by the other. The
one may talk loosely about the Gods and about sacrifices and oaths, and
perhaps by laughing at other men he may make them like himself, if he be
not punished. But the other who holds the same opinions and is called a
clever man, is full of stratagem and deceit - men of this class deal in
prophecy and jugglery of all kinds, and out of their ranks sometimes
come tyrants and demagogues and generals and hierophants of private
mysteries and the Sophists, as they are termed, with their ingenious
devices. There are many kinds of unbelievers, but two only for whom
legislation is required; one the hypocritical sort, whose crime is
deserving of death many times over, while the other needs only bonds and
admonition. In like manner also the notion that the Gods take no thought
of men produces two other sorts of crimes, and the notion that they may
be propitiated produces two more. Assuming these divisions, let those
who have been made what they are only from want of understanding, and
not from malice or an evil nature, be placed by the judge in the House
of Reformation, and ordered to suffer imprisonment during a period of
not less than five years. And in the meantime let them have no
intercourse with the other citizens, except with members of the
nocturnal council, and with them let them converse with a view to the
improvement of their soul's health. And when the time of their
imprisonment has expired, if any of them be of sound mind let him be
restored to sane company, but if not, and if he be condemned a second
time, let him be punished with death. As to that class of monstrous
natures who not only believe that there are no Gods, or that they are
negligent, or to be propitiated, but in contempt of mankind conjure the
souls of the living and say that they can conjure the dead and promise
to charm the Gods with sacrifices and prayers, and will utterly
overthrow individuals and whole houses and states for the sake of money
- let him who is guilty of any of these things be condemned by the court
to be bound according to law in the prison which is in the centre of the
land, and let no freeman ever approach him, but let him receive the
rations of food appointed by the guardians of the law from the hands of
the public slaves; and when he is dead let him be cast beyond the
borders unburied, and if any freeman assist in burying him, let him pay
the penalty of impiety to any one who is willing to bring a suit against
him. But if he leaves behind him children who are fit to be citizens,
let the guardians of orphans take care of them, just as they would of
any other orphans, from the day on which their father is convicted."
(The Laws, X, translated by Benjamin Jowett - available at:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.html - checked August 2007)
[xiv] For a short and explicit statement of the "noble lie", see
Polybius: "But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most
distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious
convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other
peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains
the cohesion of the Roman State. These matters are clothed in such pomp
and introduced to such an extent into their public and private life that
nothing could exceed it, a fact which will surprise many. My own
opinion at least is that they have adopted this course for the sake of
the common people. It is a course which perhaps would not have been
necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, but
as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned
passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible
terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the
ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people
notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that
the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs. The
consequence is that among the Greeks, apart from other things, members
of the government, if they are entrusted with no more than a talent,
though they have ten copyists and as many seals and twice as many
witnesses, cannot keep their faith; whereas among the Romans those who
as magistrates and legates are dealing with large sums of money maintain
correct conduct just because they have pledged their faith by oath.
Whereas elsewhere it is a rare thing to find a man who keeps his hands
off public money, and whose record is clean in this respect, among the
Romans one rarely comes across a man who has been detected in such
conduct...." (Histories, VI, 56 - available at:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html -
checked August 2007)
[xv] "Letter to Pythocles", contained in Diogenes Laertius, op. cit..
[xvi] This summary of Epicurean physics is taken from the very full
explanation given in Books One and Two of the De Rerum Natura of Titus
Lucretius Carus. There is also the summary given by Epicurus himself in
his "Letter to Herodotus", contained in Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
[xvii] "Letter to Pythocles".
[xviii] "Letter to Herodotus", op. cit.
[xix] Principal Doctrines, 11.
[xx] "Letter to Pythocles", op. cit.
[xxi] "Letter to Herodotus", op. cit.
[xxii] Vatican Sayings, 2.
[xxiii] Lucretius, op. cit., I, 101 et supra.
[xxiv] Adapted from ibid., III, 74-93.
[xxv] Vatican Sayings, 24.
[xxvi] Principal Doctrines, 31.
[xxvii] Diogenes Laertius, op. cit.
[xxviii] Vatican Sayings, 70.
[xxix] Principal Doctrines, 17.
[xxx] Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), Tusculan Disputations, IV, iii.
[xxxi] Quoted in D.S. Hutchinson, The Epicurus Reader, translated and
edited by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, Hackett Publishing Company Inc,
Indianapolis, 1984, "Introduction".
[xxxii] "Basic Jewish Terminology", in Hebrew for Christians - available
at:
http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Glossary/Common_Terms/Common_Terms.html
- checked August 2007.
[xxxiii] Plutarch, That It is Not Possible to Live Pleasurably According
to the Doctrine of Epicurus, complete though bad translation available
at: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/plutarch/essays/complete.html
- checked August 2007.
[xxxiv] W.E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism
in Europe (first published 1865), Longmans, Green and Co, London, 1893,
volume 1, chapter 1, "On the Declining Sense of the Miraculous".
[xxxv] Quoted, ibid., p.110.
[xxxvi] Ibid.
[xxxvii] Ibid, p.119.
[xxxviii] His most important works are: De Uita et Moribus Epicuri Libri
Octo, 1647; Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri cum Refutationibus Dogmatum
Quae contra Fidem Christianam ab eo Asserta Sunt. 1649. There is also
the very influential summary and translation into French of his works,
François Bernier. Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, 1678. Excerpts
from this translation are given in English by Erik Anderson at
http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/gassendi_concerninghappiness.html -
checked August 2007.
[xxxix] Edwin A. Hooker, "Dryden and the Atoms of Epicurus", English
Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 3. (Sep., 1957), pp. 177-190.
[xl] For a short but useful discussion of these matters, see the article
"Pierre Gassendi" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - available
at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gassendi/#5 - checked August 2007.
[xli] Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Short, 31st October 1819 -
available at: http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/Jefferson.html - checked
August 2007.
[xlii] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (first
published 1949), Contemporary Books Inc, Chicago, no date, Chapter VIII,
p.147. This passage is quoted in Martin Masse, The Epicurean Roots of
Some Classical Liberal and Misesian Concepts, available at -
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050415-14.htm - checked August 2007.
[xliii] All this being said, Karl Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on The
Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature
(1841), and it is rather a good read. It opens: "Greek philosophy seems
to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to
meet, namely, a dull ending. The objective history of philosophy in
Greece seems to come to an end with Aristotle, Greek philosophy's
Alexander of Macedon, and even the manly-strong Stoics did not succeed
in what the Spartans did accomplish in their temples, the chaining of
Athena to Heracles so that she could not flee." (available at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/index.htm -
checked August 2007. None of the erudition and insight one finds here
seems to have made Marx a better person - let alone the inspiration for
a better world.
--
Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance
Tel: 07956 472 199
***@libertarian.co.uk http://www.seangabb.co.uk
http://www.libertarian.co.uk http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk/
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