Epicurus

Introduction

Epicurus is the Greek philosopher who founded Epicureanism in the Garden he established at Athens in 307 BCE and produced one of the most influential ethical traditions of the ancient world. The Epicurean framework integrates atomist physics (derived from Democritus and modified), empiricist epistemology (the canonic of sense-perception and prolepsis), and hedonistic ethics (the doctrine that pleasure is the natural goal of human life and that the highest pleasure is ataraxia — freedom from disturbance). The framework was developed in opposition to both the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition (which Epicurus rejected as incorrect) and the Stoic tradition (which arose contemporaneously and against which Epicureanism continued to define itself for the next six centuries).

The Epicurean tradition was one of the four major Hellenistic schools alongside Stoicism, Platonism (Academy), and Aristotelianism (Lyceum). It produced one of the most successful institutional traditions of ancient philosophy: the Garden continued at Athens for over five centuries, with Epicurean communities established across the Mediterranean. The Roman engagement through Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (mid-first century BCE) made Epicureanism the principal philosophical voice of the late Roman Republic.

Life

Epicurus was born in 341 BCE on the island of Samos, where his Athenian father had been part of a colonial expedition. The family returned to Athens around the time of Alexander's death (323 BCE); Epicurus spent his early adulthood teaching in Mytilene and Lampsacus before establishing his Garden at Athens in 307 BCE. The Garden was both a school and a residential community; Epicurus lived in the Garden with his closest disciples until his death.

The biographical evidence is preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (third century CE), Book X of which is devoted to Epicurus and preserves four letters (to Herodotus on physics, to Pythocles on meteorology, to Menoeceus on ethics, the Principal Doctrines) and a doxographical account. The fragments and reports from other ancient sources have been collected in Hermann Usener's Epicurea (1887) and in subsequent editions.

Epicurus wrote — Diogenes Laertius lists thirty-seven works — but most of the corpus is lost. The surviving texts are the four letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius and the Principal Doctrines (a collection of forty short maxims summarizing the school's core ethical doctrines). Fragmentary remains of larger works (especially On Nature, the major physical treatise) have been recovered from the papyrological discoveries at Herculaneum (the Villa of the Papyri, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE and excavated from the eighteenth century onward).

Epicurus died in 270 BCE of complications from chronic kidney stones. The letter to Idomeneus written on his last day, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, records his serene composure in the face of pain: On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. The pains of strangury and dysentery are with me, such that nothing could augment them; but over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations. The letter became one of the canonical Epicurean texts and was widely cited as an exemplar of philosophical practice in the face of death.

The problem he worked on

Epicurus's project was the development of a comprehensive philosophy adequate to the conditions of Hellenistic life. The decline of the autonomous city-state, the rise of the Hellenistic monarchies, the cultural pluralism of the post-Alexander world, and the religious anxieties of the period all called for a philosophy that could orient individual life in conditions where the traditional Greek civic frameworks no longer applied.

The Epicurean response is a comprehensive integration of physics, epistemology, and ethics. The physics establishes that the world consists of atoms and void with no purposive divine action; this dissolves the principal sources of religious fear (fear of divine intervention, fear of an afterlife of punishment). The epistemology establishes that the senses are the criterion of truth and that knowledge of nature is accessible to careful inquiry. The ethics, grounded in the physics and epistemology, identifies the natural human good as pleasure and develops the framework within which the highest pleasure (ataraxia, freedom from disturbance) can be achieved.

Contributions

Atomist physics

The Epicurean physics is a modified version of the atomism developed by Leucippus and Democritus in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. The basic claim: the world consists of atoms (indivisible particles) and void (empty space in which atoms move). Atoms are eternal, indestructible, and infinite in number; they differ in size and shape but not in qualitative content. Macroscopic objects are temporary configurations of atoms; their generation and destruction are the coming-together and dispersal of atoms.

Epicurus modified the Democritean framework in one respect: the doctrine of the swerve (parenklisis in Greek; clinamen in Lucretius's Latin). Atoms moving downward through the void occasionally swerve from their straight paths in tiny, unpredictable ways. The swerve was introduced for two reasons: to explain how atoms come into collision (which would not happen if all atoms moved in parallel straight lines forever) and to ground a form of free agency (since the swerve introduces genuine indeterminacy into the otherwise deterministic atomic motion).

The canonic

The Epicurean theory of knowledge — the canonic (kanonike) — establishes three criteria of truth: sense-perceptions (aistheseis), preconceptions (prolepsis — general concepts formed by repeated sensory experience), and feelings (pathe — pleasure and pain as the criterion of value).

The foundational claim: all sense-perceptions are true. Sense-perceptions cannot be wrong because they are bare receptions of physical impressions; the errors that ordinary people attribute to the senses arise from the judgments that go beyond the sensory data. A distant tower that looks round but is square is not a sensory error; the round appearance is a true report of the impressions received at that distance, and the false judgment that the tower is round is an extrapolation that goes beyond what the senses report.

Ethics: pleasure and ataraxia

The Epicurean ethics is the most-discussed and most-misunderstood portion of the philosophy. The central thesis: pleasure is the natural goal of human life. The thesis is hedonistic in the technical sense (it identifies the good with pleasure) but the substantive content is far removed from the popular caricature of Epicureanism as the pursuit of bodily indulgence.

The key distinction is between kinetic and katastematic pleasure. Kinetic pleasure is the pleasure of active satisfaction (eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, sexual gratification); it is genuinely pleasurable but accompanied by the pain of the desire being satisfied and is in any case temporary. Katastematic pleasure is the steady pleasure of the absence of pain — the condition of bodily health (aponia) and mental tranquility (ataraxia). The katastematic pleasures are the higher and more stable form of pleasure; the Epicurean life is organized around their cultivation.

The practical framework that follows is ascetic. The Epicurean is to live simply (since the simple satisfactions reliably produce the absence of pain), to withdraw from public life (since political activity introduces disturbances), to cultivate friendship (which Epicurus calls the greatest good of the wise person), to free oneself from the four great fears (fear of the gods, fear of death, fear of pain, fear that the good is hard to achieve), and to recognize the natural limits of desire (the natural and necessary desires are easily satisfied; the unnecessary desires are the source of suffering).

The famous tetrapharmakos (four-part remedy) compresses the ethical framework: do not fear god; do not worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.

Death and the gods

The Epicurean treatment of death and the gods is the most distinctive single contribution of the philosophy and the source of much of its influence. The doctrine on death: Death is nothing to us. For that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us (Principal Doctrine II). Since the soul is composed of atoms that dissolve at the moment of death, there is no surviving subject of experience after death; death is the cessation of experience rather than a state we undergo; we cannot suffer death because by the time it has arrived we no longer exist.

The argument is one of the most-discussed in ancient and contemporary philosophy of death. The framework has been engaged by contemporary philosophers (Thomas Nagel's Death, 1970; Bernard Williams's The Makropulos Case, 1973; Shelly Kagan's Death, 2012) and continues to organize debate about whether and in what sense death is bad for the one who dies.

The doctrine on the gods: the gods exist (since the universal human conception of the gods cannot be wholly mistaken) but are perfect beings dwelling in the intermundia (the spaces between the worlds) in a state of perfect ataraxia; they do not intervene in human affairs because such intervention would disturb their perfect tranquility. The framework dissolves the principal source of religious anxiety (fear of divine punishment) while preserving the genuine religious experience that the philosophy treats as natural.

Key works

Most of Epicurus's corpus is lost. The surviving texts are:

• Letter to Herodotus (on physics; preserved by Diogenes Laertius)
• Letter to Pythocles (on meteorology; preserved by Diogenes Laertius)
• Letter to Menoeceus (on ethics; preserved by Diogenes Laertius)
• Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai; forty short maxims; preserved by Diogenes Laertius)
• Vatican Sayings (eighty-one short maxims; preserved in a single Vatican manuscript)
• Fragments from On Nature (recovered from the Herculaneum papyri, still being edited)

The standard collected edition is Hermann Usener's Epicurea (1887). The dominant English collection is Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson's The Epicurus Reader (Hackett, 1994).

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Democritus and Leucippus (the atomist tradition Epicurus extended and modified); Pyrrho of Elis (the skeptical tradition that shaped Epicurean tranquility); Nausiphanes of Teos (Epicurus's teacher, a follower of Democritus); the Cyrenaic school (the hedonistic predecessors against whom Epicurus defined his higher conception of pleasure); Aristippus of Cyrene (the founder of the Cyrenaic school).

Influenced: The Epicurean tradition through five centuries of institutional continuity: Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Polystratus, Apollodorus, Zeno of Sidon, Phaedrus, Philodemus (whose Herculaneum library contained both Epicurean and other philosophical works); the Roman Epicurean tradition through Lucretius (the major Roman expositor of Epicureanism in De Rerum Natura) and Diogenes of Oenoanda (whose massive second-century CE inscription presented the philosophy on a Lycian colonnade); the Renaissance revival through Lorenzo Valla, Pierre Gassendi (who revived Epicureanism in the seventeenth century in conscious opposition to Aristotelianism); the modern philosophical engagement through Marx (whose 1841 doctoral dissertation was on Democritean and Epicurean atomism); the contemporary engagement through A. A. Long, David Sedley, Stephen Greenblatt (whose The Swerve, 2011, traces the Lucretian transmission), and the ongoing work on Hellenistic philosophy.

Reception

The ancient reception was substantial. The Garden continued at Athens for over five centuries; Epicurean communities were established across the Mediterranean; the Roman Republic and early Empire saw Epicurean influence among the educated classes. The Christian period saw the gradual decline of organized Epicureanism, though Epicurean themes continued to influence Christian engagement with the philosophy of pleasure and the philosophy of death.

The Renaissance recovery was substantial. The rediscovery of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini brought the Epicurean cosmology to Renaissance Europe; Lorenzo Valla's On Pleasure (1431) revived the ethical framework; Pierre Gassendi's work in the seventeenth century made Epicureanism one of the major modern philosophical traditions, especially through Gassendi's atomist alternative to the Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

The modern engagement has been continuous. The Enlightenment treatment of Epicureanism (through Diderot, La Mettrie, the broader French materialist tradition) made the philosophy one of the major modern alternatives to traditional religious frameworks. The contemporary engagement, especially through the work on Hellenistic philosophy from the 1970s onward (A. A. Long and David Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers, two volumes, 1987, is the standard scholarly anchor), has restored Epicureanism to a central place in ancient philosophy scholarship.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes A. A. Long and David Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987), James Warren's Facing Death: Epicurus and his Critics (2004), Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism (2010), the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Warren, ed., 2009), and the work of David Konstan, Phillip Mitsis, and Pierre-Marie Morel. The papyrological work at Herculaneum continues to recover portions of Epicurus's lost works. Active debates concern the precise function of the swerve, the relation between kinetic and katastematic pleasure, the contemporary applicability of the Epicurean death argument, and the relation between Epicurean and contemporary hedonist ethics.

Further reading

• Ataraxia — the highest pleasure in the Epicurean ethical framework
• Aristotle — the contemporary alternative tradition Epicurus rejected
• Zeno of Citium — the Stoic contemporary against whom Epicureanism continued to define itself

The Greek philosopher who founded Epicureanism in his Athenian Garden and produced one of the most influential ethical traditions of the ancient world.