Episode 104 - More Torquatus and a Question: Was The Ancient Epicurean Movement A Cult?
Date: 01/13/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2320-episode-one-hundred-four-more-torquatus-and-a-question-was-the-ancient-epicurean/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua reads De Finibus lines 62–63 (the passage on the wise man being continually happy, fortune crossing the wise man’s path only in small degree, and the importance of natural science/canonics), but the episode immediately pivots to address two questions raised by forum user “Smoothie Kiwi” after reading Norman DeWitt’s book: Was Epicurus arrogant? Was Epicureanism a cult?
The panel works through a checklist of cult characteristics from Dr. Steve Eichel and finds that nearly none apply to Epicureanism — and several are directly contradicted by the texts (Epicurus explicitly prohibited holding property in common because “it indicates a lack of trust”; the school was unusually open to women, non-Greeks, foreigners, and at least one slave). Forum user Nate’s memorable answer — “It was totally a cult” — is reconciled by distinguishing the ancient meaning of “cult” (a system of devotion directed toward a particular figure) from the modern connotation of manipulation and coercion.
Martin addresses the arrogance charge: by modern academic conventions, Epicurus’s reluctance to credit Democritus and his positioning himself as an original thinker does look arrogant — but those conventions didn’t exist, and in any case his modifications to Democritean atomism (especially the swerve) were substantive. Cassius cites Lucian’s portrait of the ideal Epicurean in Alexander the Oracle-Monger as the best one-line answer to the cult accusation: someone “whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight.” The panel also discusses Frances Wright’s anxiety about the similarity between the Garden and the Pythagorean commune, and closes with the observation that Epicurean philosophy is the opposite of cult thinking — it is rooted in empirical study of nature and canonical epistemology, not in authority or blind faith.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 104 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
At this point in our podcast we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we’ll continue with Torquatus’s narration, but we’ll devote the majority of the episode to responding to several questions that listeners at EpicureanFriends.com have asked. Let’s now join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua:
But these doctrines may be stated in a certain manner so as not merely to disarm our criticism but actually to secure our sanction. For this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy. He keeps his passions within bounds. About death he is indifferent. He holds true views concerning the eternal gods apart from all dread. He has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life if that be the better course. Furnished with these advantages he is continually in a state of pleasure, and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains.
For he remembers the past with thankfulness and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and agreeableness. Nor is he in dependence on the future but awaits it while enjoying the present. He is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little time ago. And when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure. And pains, if any, befall him have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation.
It was indeed excellently said by Epicurus that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path, and that his greatest and most important undertakings are executed in accordance with his own design and his own principles, and that no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life which is without end in time than is reaped from this which we know to have its allotted end.
He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate. He laid the greatest stress on natural science. That branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words and the natural conditions of speech and the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions. And when we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition, are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena — from which ignorance, more than anything else, terrible panics often arise. Finally, our characters will also be improved when we have learned what it is that nature craves.
Then again, if we grasp a firm knowledge of phenomena and uphold that canon which almost fell from heaven into human ken — that test to which we are to bring all our judgments concerning things — we shall never succumb to any man’s eloquence and abandon our opinions.
Cassius:
Joshua, thank you for reading that. Before we started today, we had a discussion about how we were going to attack these two sections — 62 and 63 — that you’ve just read. And if we are successful, we may in fact not even be able to finish a single sentence before the end of an hour goes by today, because there’s some background material and circumstances and issues that we ought to deal with before we get into this.
In the prior sections of Torquatus, we’ve been focusing on the big issue that everybody’s always interested in: what is the goal of life, what is the relationship between pleasure and virtue? And we’ve spent most of the last several weeks talking about those issues. Torquatus is now turning his attention to a series of — the word “corollaries” may imply to some people that these are subsidiary or secondary issues. But I believe when you look carefully at what we’re about to discuss, these are really so foundational that they precede in importance the issue of pleasure versus virtue. They are the foundation on which Epicurus comes to the conclusion that pleasure is the goal of life rather than virtue.
And it’s interesting — we’re going to relate the discussion today to a couple of issues that have been raised on the EpicureanFriends.com forum, which we’re very pleased to do. What has been asked in recent days on the forum is an issue that has come up over and over again. The question of: was Epicurus setting up a cult? Was he some kind of an arrogant leader of an oppressive school? It’s a word that has all sorts of negative connotations to it and has probably been drained of almost anything positive that might actually have been there.
And so we have to deal with the question of what is Epicurus doing with this philosophy. The question arises: did Epicurus require all of his students to believe all of these positions? Was there some kind of a test that, in order to become a member of his school or a certain community, you had to believe certain things and not stray too far from a certain list?
We’ve got this list that we’re going to be discussing in Torquatus, which is very similar to a list that also occurs in Diogenes Laertius in his history of the life of Epicurus. It’s very fascinating. And we have this material from Cicero in the words of Torquatus that predates Diogenes Laertius by at least a hundred years, maybe even two hundred years — Cicero was writing obviously around 50 BC, and I think everybody concludes that Diogenes Laertius was writing at least 100 AD or maybe after that.
So with that long introduction, let’s talk in general about: to what extent is it fair to consider Epicurus and the Epicurean school of the ancient world to have been a “cult”? Which probably requires you to first think about what the word “cult” really means.
So, Joshua, what is a cult? And let’s set the stage for discussing to what extent those accusations against the Epicurean school should be considered to be serious.
Joshua:
Right. So the first thing I want to absolutely make clear is that I think these are very fair questions. I’m going to give a name check here: the forum user who raised these questions was reading Norman DeWitt’s book, which we highly recommend, but which is not without problems. The forum user’s name is “Smoothie Kiwi,” and in two separate threads this person has raised first the question of “Was Epicurus really arrogant?” and then also the question of “Was Epicureanism a cult?” I just want to say that first of all, these are absolutely fair questions and fair game.
So if you look in the thread on the title “Epicureanism and cult-like mentality?” — I’m scrolling down, I’m looking for Nate’s answer. His answer was: “It was totally a cult.” And then he goes on to make the distinction that there’s a difference between the way the word “cult” was used in classical antiquity and how it’s used today. Denotatively, it was quite similar. Connotatively, it’s very different. The connotations of that word are very negative in the modern age, whereas in classical antiquity it essentially just had a definition. The definition is: “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.” Then there are two other more modern definitions: “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange and sinister,” and “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.”
So to flesh that out: in antiquity you had the prevailing pantheon of Greek gods, but you also had gods from other lands coming in — because Greece was a trading nation, a seafaring nation — so you had a cult of Isis centered in a particular area, a cult of Dionysus. In each case, you have particular sites that are especially associated with them.
And then of course the seminal reference in any Epicurean text to what an Epicurean clearly thought of as a cult is in Lucian’s book Alexander the Oracle-Monger, right? That’s a prime example of a cult: you’ve got this guy who clearly is out to con people out of their money and into influence and power for himself. He faked the birth of a material snake god, claimed that he was the only oracle for that god, and his influence grew to be absolutely tremendous. There’s one instance recorded by Lucian in which even Marcus Aurelius, who was the Stoic Emperor of Rome at the time, took his advice and went into battle and was absolutely routed. And the response from the oracle was: “We predicted there would be a great victory, but we didn’t predict from which side.”
Cassius:
Joshua, before you go too far — you’ve introduced the issue of Lucian and Alexander the Oracle-Monger. I just want to insert one quote from that that is just so relevant to this question. Because you rightly raised the issue that Lucian was pointing out that Alexander was an example of what we today would think of as a cult — somebody who was manipulating other people, forcing them to believe as he did through imposition and lying. But there’s a paragraph in this story that I think is just absolutely on point. Lucian was writing this letter about Alexander to his friend Celsus. Here’s the quote:
“At this point, my dear Celsus, we may, if we will be candid, make some allowance for these Paphlagonians and Pontics — the poor, uneducated fatheads might well be taken in when they handled the serpent, a privilege conceded to all who chose, and saw in that dim light its head with the mouth that opened and shut. This was an occasion for a Democritus — nay, for an Epicurus or a Metrodorus perhaps — a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by skepticism and insight; one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that although this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.”
And that’s the point I wanted to emphasize as we go through all this. To me, it’s a very legitimate question. There are very good reasons for raising it. But it’s almost an absurd accusation — because the Epicurean school was focused on skepticism and research into the real facts of life, opposition to claims of authority that had no reality to them. And that’s what Epicurus stood for as much as anything else. So the idea that the person who’s teaching this radical skepticism and radical challenging of authority was himself guilty of being what we today consider a cult of the worst type — it’s kind of the absolute reverse of what appears to be true when you look at the text.
Joshua:
No, you’re good. But just to push back a little bit on what you said — that’s a very convenient out for any Epicurean to use. But it’s also used by people who really are in cults. People in cults will say the same thing: “Oh, you say we’re in a cult, but we’re just dedicated to finding truth.” So we have to be a little careful there.
Cassius:
Correct. And then you run into the issues of skepticism and whether there is such a thing as truth or not, and so forth. So you keep going, Joshua. There are so many different directions you could go.
Joshua:
Okay. So then the other question that was raised apart from the idea of whether it’s a cult — but it’s an interlocking question — is the question of whether he was arrogant. Smoothie Kiwi says: “I’m left with a sour taste in my mouth” — this is after reading DeWitt, which is not what we want. We don’t want people to have a sour taste in their mouth.
So my response going into this: I want to jump ahead to where it says “claiming the right to be called a wise man as opposed to a philosopher.” This is an area where I need a better foundation in Greek drama. But “philosopher” is a word that has good connotations today. For quite a lot of people who lived in classical antiquity, however, philosophers were thought to be a subject for absurdist interpretation. Like sophists — which still has a negative connotation in English today. Isn’t there a play — is it The Clouds? — he’s got Socrates in there, and he just drags out these actors playing philosophers and makes complete fools of them in front of an audience. Because to call yourself a “lover of wisdom” is somewhat pompous in itself.
Cassius:
It is. The standard accusation against all philosophers except that they live in an ivory tower — they have no connection with reality. And even today, when I was in college, majoring in philosophy is sort of the ultimate in the minds of most people, sort of the ultimate “fluff” course to take. People see philosophy as impractical and overly intellectual. “Arrogant” would be the word Smoothie Kiwi has used.
And you’ve triggered in my mind — I hope this is not too far of a tangent — but there are texts that still survive that talk about the Epicurean criticism of Socrates. If you Google “the Epicurean criticism of Socrates,” you can get what I’m about to say out of that material.
Part of what we’re dealing with here is that the Epicureans were so practical that they resisted this idea of the Socratic method — the constant question-and-answer, the claim that endless discussion and debate is the best way to get to the truth of things. The Epicureans liked to cut to the chase. They wanted to know what the person thought as quickly as possible, without a lot of misdirection, without hiding the ball. And so it is recorded from antiquity that one of the Epicurean criticisms of Socrates was that that’s exactly what Socrates did not do. He claimed that he was looking for a wise man. He didn’t even claim to be wise himself. All he could do was ask questions, and he never could really find truth in anything.
And one way that came out — as DeWitt talks about a lot — is that Epicureans advised the use of outlines. In the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus specifically says that you can’t know all the details and keep them all in your mind at every particular time. So the way you use the information is not to try to access the details at every moment, but to keep in your mind an outline of the major headings — the categories and the topics, the important ideas reduced to a set of principles, which is kind of what the Principal Doctrines of Epicurus really are.
But one effect of that is: when you reduce things to an outline, if you’re not the person who prepared the outline, then you don’t really understand necessarily how he reached those conclusions. And it begins to look like some kind of rote method of learning where you’re just supposed to memorize something. And I think that’s an unfair criticism ultimately, because he wasn’t telling people to memorize the outlines and stop there. Because if you don’t understand it, then you’re not going to have the full effect of the Tetrapharmakon. If you don’t understand why not to fear the gods and why not to fear death, then you’re going to fall back into fearing them again.
And one effect of using outlines comes through in DeWitt specifically because DeWitt says at the beginning of his book that he’s adopting Epicurus’s method of using outlines. So chapter one of Epicurus and His Philosophy is a very high-level summary of positions — kind of like what we’re reading in Torquatus. It’s a list of positions Epicurus took without taking the time to explain the subtleties of each one. Then in the succeeding chapters of his book, DeWitt goes through and explains in much more detail what each of the headings of the outline really mean.
But if you just start reading chapter one, if you just focus on the outline, if you just focus on the general conclusions, you can get a false impression that these conclusions are somehow the equivalent of Moses coming down from the mountain with a list of ten positions. The Moses Ten Commandments method is: this is revelation from God, you must believe it, you must have faith in it. God said it, I believe it, that settles that. And the Epicurean position is exactly the opposite of that — you’re supposed to understand the details and the reasons for these conclusions. If you don’t understand them, then it’s really going to be worthless for you to have read them in the first place.
Joshua:
That is an excellent point. Taking the synoptic view or the outline view of a philosophy and presenting it as a series of doctrines first and then explaining them next — that certainly does invite the kind of criticism you’re talking about. So in order for us to actually get to the text eventually today, let me rapidly kind of go through my thoughts on both questions: Was he arrogant? And was it a cult?
Basically, on the question of was it a cult: as I said, Nate has said it totally was a cult — a movement, a small group dedicated to the veneration of a person or an object, in this case the person of Epicurus but more importantly what he taught. And we’ve often said, I think, in various ways on the forum and on the podcast, that we think Epicurean philosophy is a series of conclusions natural to derive from the way things really are. The way we phrase that sometimes is: even if Epicurus had never lived, people would have figured this out eventually. Because when you get past the list of doctrines and get to the argumentation that builds up to the conclusion of each doctrine, it really does proceed from a good understanding of nature the way it really is.
I do want to bring up on this question of was it a cult: there is a book whose author seems to have had some anxiety on this point. Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens — because in that book she has a chapter where one of the characters has just returned from an extended stay at a Pythagorean commune. The situation in the Pythagorean school was that they really did have a list of very arbitrary rules. Things like “you’re not allowed to eat beans.” And the way the character describes it in Frances Wright’s book — I’m quoting from memory here — she says something to the effect of: they were “twelve perfect specimens of mechanism with one mind to govern all.” In other words, the mind of Pythagoras governs all the bodies because there is no objection, there is no discourse. You just receive the truth from him and live it the way he tells you. I think she included that in her book because there was an anxiety that the Epicurean school did bear some resemblance to that — not as extreme as you see in Pythagoras, but it’s there. So as I say, it’s a fair question.
Cassius:
Okay, just to be clear — I think what you’re saying she did was emphasize that the Pythagorean school really did deserve the criticism of being a cult. Pythagoras was in fact setting himself up as almost an infallible authority figure who everybody had to follow almost exactly. And there’s also some allegation that he didn’t allow his students to speak — you had to have been indoctrinated into the cult before you were given much ability to even participate in it. So I think what you’re saying is that Frances Wright brought that up as a means of contrasting Epicurus against that.
There’s also another side of Frances Wright’s book that somebody would want to pursue. Because I think there are a couple of things where Frances Wright deviated from Epicurus. Towards the end of the book, there’s an elaborate discussion about how all philosophy should really simply be observation — and anytime you move from observation to conclusion in her mind, you’ve gone too far because you can’t prove that that’s true. I think she’s wrong about that. I think she misleads there as to what Epicurus was saying. She eventually took the position, in some of her other writings outside of that book, that she just really did not want to address any of the physics or astronomy or anything about whether the world is eternal — she went to the position that all of those things don’t make any difference and you shouldn’t concern yourself with them at all because you can’t observe them directly.
Joshua:
You’re right, of course, because she presents him as a strict, thorough empiricist, which I don’t think he was.
Cassius:
Right, right. All of these issues we’re discussing today are very deep, and they get involved in all of these epistemological questions, these canonics issues that are very difficult to bring out in detail. Some of which, though, we’re going to be talking about here as we eventually get to Torquatus. But I’m not sure we’re going to get very far with Torquatus today because we’ve got a ways to go yet. And Martin has already said that he would like to be the devil’s advocate on some of the things.
I mean, some translations of Diogenes Laertius say that Epicurus held the wise man to be a “dogmatist.” And of course there are few words that strike fear and loathing in the modern mind like “dogmatist” or “dogmatic.” That’s just universally condemned. And so you have to dig into the definition of what that meant. And you’ll see other translators don’t even use that word at all — they just say simply that Epicurus held the wise man takes firm positions on things. But all of that is part of what we’re dealing with in this accusation of arrogance and cult-like mentality. So I’m sorry, Martin, are you ready to jump in?
Martin:
Yeah. So, as I said before, on this arrogance — from today’s perspective, by today’s customs, yes, Epicurus was in some ways arrogant. So he described himself as self-taught and didn’t refer his philosophy to the older sources. And the reason for this, how he saw it justified, was that because he made something new. But of course, it wasn’t completely new. He took parts of Democritean atomism but modified it. And from today’s perspective, that means you quote this atomism as the part where you started with, and then based on that you created something new. But he chose not to do it the way it’s done based on the philosophical and scientific traditions we have today. For him, it was indifferent — he positioned himself as just the original thinker of all of this. And from today’s perspective, that is wrong and arrogant.
But in his defense, we can say that these traditions we refer to didn’t really exist at that time, or at least we have no clear indication that they existed. Because all this had just started to show up — that we had written-down philosophy. Things were going to be established. So there was not really a tradition where this was then violated in an arrogant way.
Cassius:
Yes. And specifically as to Democritus, you have the hugely important issue that Democritus’s atomism, followed to its logical conclusion, is that atoms moving totally mechanically produces arguably no free will, no ability to control your own future — none of that at all. And Epicurus reacted strongly against that. And that apparently is where the whole swerve comes from — that he concluded you cannot reconcile total mechanism of atoms with human free will. And of course, Cicero accuses him of making no changes related to Democritus except some changes that are for the bad — which is what Cicero’s accusing the swerve of being. But anyway, the point being: even with Democritus, who Epicurus’s atomism is most closely identified with, Epicurus made important modifications to what Democritus had come up with before.
And I’ll just say further on that point — I just don’t really even believe the accusation. The idea that he would refuse to talk about things that Democritus or Plato or somebody else had said in every context, in his school where his students are asking him questions. If he’s running a school and his students are asking him questions, then half the questions they’re going to be asking are going to be about things they’ve read in some other philosopher’s book. So the idea that he took the position that he’s the only philosopher who ever lived — that just seems overbroad. But anyway, keep going, Martin.
Martin:
That was actually all what I had to say on this arrogance. Then we had this cult thing. Okay, probably his school had a bit of elements of a cult, but I don’t see the indication that it was an outright cult in itself. It had some cult-like elements. But from today’s perspective where “cult” really has something like inherently evil in itself — what those cult-like elements assured in his time was that it was pretty much the only school that did not really get into splintering off into sub-schools which were against each other. So for the subsequent several hundred years of existence, there were no rival schools arising from within the Epicurean schools. And that means those cult-like elements — the structure of outlines and then going gradually into the details to understand them — helped keep the teaching consistent.
Cassius:
Yeah. Let me mention a couple of other things consistent with what you’re just talking about, Martin. It’s preserved clearly in Diogenes Laertius that the school largely was able to stay intact without a lot of obvious splintering for several hundred years. But there were differences of opinion, and Diogenes Laertius preserves at least two of them — and Torquatus here preserves it as well. One is that some Epicureans later on, instead of having three legs to their canon, considered that there were actually four legs. And then there’s the other issue that Torquatus himself has already brought up in what we’ve been reading: that Epicurus took the position that it’s not necessary for you to use elaborate logical argument to prove that pleasure is the goal of life, while Torquatus himself says that he takes a different position and says it is important to discuss the issue of pleasure logically.
And there was apparently also significant disagreement about what is the origin of friendship — whether friendship begins with the issue of it being a pleasure to yourself, and how you explain the origin and continuance of friendship. It’s clear from that discussion in Torquatus that there were differences of position among the Epicureans about how to argue those things. So they did have differences of opinion within themselves. It was not a totally monolithic situation where people were excommunicated if they took a slightly different position.
And now I’m on a roll. Let me make two other comments. You can certainly see, back on what Joshua was saying about how legitimate these questions are — when you read Lucretius, in the openings of his books, in one of them he basically says that Epicurus was a god. He starts talking about what a god is and what a god is not, and he says that if you really want to talk about someone who truly deserves to be thought of as a god, Epicurus fits that better than most other examples. So people can laugh and say, ha ha, he’s calling Epicurus a god, so he thinks Epicurus is better than everybody else. But I think that’s a false conclusion.
And then there’s another book where he starts talking about Epicurus as a father figure, which is probably a better analogy for the accurate Epicurean position about how to regard Epicurus. You know, you don’t consider your father to be a god. If you’re realistic, you know your father can make mistakes. But you have a lot of affection for your physical father and for the things that person has done for you. And I think that’s the root of this issue of affection. The Epicureans thought — and I would agree with them today — that Epicurus personally, as a human being, deserves a lot of credit for having done what he did. His achievement is really monumental. We’re still talking about Epicurus 2,000 years later in ways that compare him favorably to most other philosophers or even human beings. He deserves a lot of personal credit.
And so I think it would be pretty ungrateful — I heard someone use the word “churlish” lately — it would be churlish or childish or ungrateful to take the position that the Epicureans should not have had personal affection for Epicurus. Even those who didn’t live with him, who didn’t know him, who came after he was dead — it’s still logical to be grateful to somebody who has benefited your life in a profound way.
So that’s an even longer rant than normal. Joshua, bring it back to reality.
Joshua:
Okay. Well, I have a checklist of what makes a cult.
Cassius:
Okay, great.
Joshua:
All right, I’m just going to go down them quickly. And by going down this list, you are going to cement the achievement that we are not even going to talk about the first sentence of today’s passage before we have to finish today.
Cassius:
As I predicted earlier on.
Joshua:
Because after I talk about this, we have to talk about Diogenes of Oenoanda, when I read this list you’ll see he’s a great source on some of this stuff.
All right. This is Dr. Steve Eichel’s checklist of characteristics about cults. Number one: “The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.” Well, that rules out us, because obviously Epicurus is dead and isn’t coming back. That doesn’t rule out the original Garden, so we’ll keep that in mind. I’ll also note that Smoothie Kiwi made a reference to these portraits of Epicurus — as on a finger ring, for example. I understand that the plurality of surviving rings from classical antiquity that bear images of people on them are portraits of Epicurus. To me, sitting for portraits isn’t necessarily an arrogant thing to do — and those portraits and statues were apparently used as a kind of recruiting tool. They didn’t obviously have the internet or newspapers.
Number two: “The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.” This is an interesting one because one of the principal methods of attracting new people to the Garden was they wrote and disseminated literature. So there’s an element of truth to that one — they did have a goal of bringing in new members.
Number three: “The group is preoccupied with making money.” This is what I really think of when I think of a cult — Alexander the Oracle-Monger raking in cash. Epicurean philosophy, by contrast — there’s a rule preserved in Diogenes Laertius where Epicurus specifically declined to make the Garden a commune. He specifically prohibited money being held in common among his followers.
Cassius:
Exactly. And he gave a reason for that: he said, because it indicates a lack of trust.
Joshua:
Yes. Number four: “Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.” I certainly hope that’s not the case on EpicureanFriends.com. We’re answering questions right now, and I do not discourage them. It’s hard to say exactly what the day-to-day instruction was like in the Garden without knowing more, so it’s difficult to answer.
Then: “Mind-numbing techniques such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders.” And there’s no corollary there, is there?
Cassius:
Be careful there. I know where you’re going.
Joshua:
Right. I think you’re exactly right that there is no parallel in what is recorded. Of course, what I’m saying about being careful is I know there are people out there who like to combine other traditions, and they find that chanting and incense and things like that are helpful to them, and I’m not going to criticize that. If they find it helpful, go ahead. But the distinction is: it’s a different thing to choose the practice for yourself than it is to have the leader tell you to do this.
Cassius:
That’s part of it. But I do think that repetition and chanting and mind-clearing techniques — I consider those things often to be associated with manipulation of people and an encouragement to sort of clear your mind of things, when in my opinion you probably should be filling your mind with things, ordering your mind, not trying to get things out of your mind, but coming to terms with them. So I’m personally very careful and cautious about those things myself.
Joshua:
You’re taking the anti-cult view. Yes. Continuing — “the leadership dictates in great detail how members should think, act, and feel — for example, members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married, what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children.” No, there’s absolutely no sense that this was going on in the Epicurean school, was there?
Cassius:
No, no. If you wanted to stretch and look for something, you could make the point in Epicurus’s will that he suggested that, I think, Metrodorus’s daughter be eventually married off to someone within the school. But in my opinion, that’s totally legitimate — taking care of the child of a dead friend — and nothing wrong with that whatsoever. There’s no evidence that Epicurus had set up a dating and marriage factory.
Joshua:
“The group teaches or implies that it is supposedly exalted ends that justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group — for example, collecting money for bogus charities.” Convincing you that things you would have thought were immoral before you joined are moral after you join, because they serve the higher purposes of the group. I don’t think we see that at all in Epicurean philosophy.
Cassius:
Well, yes — Epicurus does teach people to question what they used to believe. And if you conclude Epicurus is right, then Epicurus says you should fight against what’s wrong. You should embrace the implications of the philosophy if you think it’s right. But to say that therefore any means is justified in pursuit of the exalted end — no, the reason things like deception and manipulation are not valid is because they won’t, in fact, lead to pleasure. You can certainly come up with your own list there.
Joshua:
“He has a polarized us-versus-them mentality which causes conflict with the wider society.” This is a difficult one. The first thing I would do here is pull in the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, where he specifically says that he’s writing this down not just for Epicureans, not just for people living in his town, not even just for Greeks — but that he’s writing it even for foreigners who live amongst us, who are, he says, something like “our brothers and sisters.” So there is the idea in Epicurean philosophy that it’s kind of open to anyone.
And there’s another Wikipedia item on cult behavior saying that cults tend to perpetuate themselves in middle-class communities. To me, that’s completely the opposite of what Epicurus was doing — Cicero we have a claim from an antagonist of Epicurean philosophy that he was appealing to people that other philosophers did not appeal to and didn’t even want to talk to. He was appealing to people — scooping up men from the crossroads.
Cassius:
“Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.” Not expected, not required, but if you certainly have the time, we love to have it. It helps everybody if people have time to devote. But no, nobody’s going to be excommunicated because they don’t have enough time.
Joshua:
And the last one on the list: “Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.” This wasn’t even true of Epicurus himself, right? He went out into the city and went to watch other philosophers as they lectured, and went to the religious rites and mysteries and all that. Just like many of these items, you could probably find a couple of passages — I think even Principal Doctrine 39, the one that talks about the happiest man as one who’s going to live among other people of like mind and separate himself from others to some extent. You can find texts that can be used to support arguments. But for every argument against, there’s going to be a countervailing argument.
And in that sense, it seems obvious that you have your greatest happiness among people who are your friends. Your friends tend to think, to some extent, generally a little bit like you. And so it’s just logical that you are going to generally want to surround yourself with people who are generally compatible with you. That does not seem to me to be anything evil or cultish.
Cassius:
The point that I would be confident in making is: I personally, through my reading, am confident that once you read enough into the text, once you think enough about what Epicurus is talking about, you are not going to conclude that Epicurus was a cult in the modern sense who needs to be rejected because of that. You’re likely to conclude the opposite, in fact.
If there’s anybody out there who’s out there deprogramming — like the people who used to want to deprogram their children from being in the Moonies — that would be the side that Epicurus would be on: attempting to deprogram people from other sources of false belief.
One final point I want to make here. We’ve touched on it in a couple of different ways, but when you read all of the available texts, it becomes very clear that the Epicurean school was unusual for its time in how open it was. Diogenes of Oenoanda opened up the school even to non-Greeks, which was unusual. But it was also open to women — and women not only were allowed to come to the Garden, but actually to engage in the intellectual work of the Garden, to engage in writing responses to other philosophers. Then there’s the slave question: at least one of Epicurus’s slaves was a part of the Garden. And Martin Ferguson Smith translates a passage in the Oenoanda inscription where Diogenes makes something very unusual — a vision for society, a sort of utopian outlook on what it could become under Epicurean philosophy. And he includes, interestingly enough, that there would be no slaves. I was kind of shocked when I read that because I had understood that the earliest opponent of slavery on record was Bishop Gregory of Nyssa of late antiquity.
Joshua:
And this is a response that’s often made — when people talk about the past, it’s like, “well, you can’t judge them for having slaves because they couldn’t even imagine a world where there weren’t slaves.” Well, interestingly enough, we do have an Epicurean who did imagine that.
Cassius:
Now, Diogenes of Oenoanda is later than Diogenes Laertius, but he’s around two centuries prior to Gregory of Nyssa. But I’d be curious to see if Martin has any response to the list of cult attributes or if you have any deeper response to that.
Martin:
Yeah, I have one comment immediately to this latest thing on abolition of slavery. This was actually a thought present in essence already before Epicurus. I read this in Popper’s work — The Open Society and Its Enemies — where he quotes Plato and interprets such that Plato mentions and discussed that there, the citizens of certain communities came close to abolishing slavery.
Cassius:
What I’m remembering there — there’s a passage that has been heavily criticized in Plato. And it says something like — Aristotle argued that if the world were just, the legal slaves would be freed, and if any natural slaves were by chance free, they should be made slaves. Yes, you’ve got this “natural slave” concept in Aristotle, if I’ve confirmed correctly.
Martin:
Okay, so this was a general justification in ancient times for making or keeping slaves. So those who were “natural slaves” would not be willing to fight until their death to avoid defeat of their own group. And because in the way slaves normally were recruited was in war — defeating the enemy army and the survivors then became slaves. So they survived and became slaves to the winners. And so this is then the concept of the natural slaves. Those who don’t fight to their death are those who are naturally slaves.
Cassius:
Martin, what you just said is very close to my understanding. I hate for us to close the episode spending too much time talking about slavery, though, because that is such a complicated and unattractive issue to be talking about. Maybe I can try to wrap this back in the original direction by saying that if Epicurus was anything, he was anti-Platonist. And it’s recorded in Diogenes Laertius that he accused Plato of being a “golden.” And if you have to look for a strain of social attitudes in Epicurus, it’s got to be an anti-elitist strain. He’s constantly talking about not participating in the politics or the schools and the culture of the time. And there are all sorts of comments that seem, in my mind at least, targeted towards just be skeptical of all of these ideas that a particular culture might be suggesting to you. You’re going to evaluate the details of it and decide what you think is right and what you think is wrong. You’re not going to accept these things on authority.
That’s the whole Platonic regime of the Republic — a beehive type of top-down philosopher-king manipulation of the lower people. And I don’t think there’s anything like that whatsoever in Epicurean philosophy.
We are probably long already, but let’s talk about closing thoughts.
Joshua:
Quickly — I did want to mention that Gregory of Nyssa lived and wrote in the fourth century, and Diogenes of Oenoanda in the second century. So this is two centuries prior to the Bishop of Nyssa.
What I want to say at the end here is I hope that we’ve, I don’t know if we’ve satisfactorily answered Smoothie Kiwi’s questions. I know we have not satisfactorily explored the text passage we were going to look at today at all. But I do want to say we encourage these kinds of questions on the forum. It’s great to be able to talk about them on the podcast. I really did enjoy this episode. I don’t know if we’ve been helpful, but I think the questions are helpful.
Cassius:
Right. And I would say that I’m never satisfied that I personally have been very articulate in explaining any of this material. But I think, Joshua, you’ve done, and Martin, you both have done a very good job with it.
But more than anything else, I’m just convinced that there are good answers to these concerns. We only sort of touched on the issue of dogmatism and whether Epicurus was a dogmatic philosopher or not. But I’m just absolutely convinced — based on ten-plus years of intensive reading on this and in my own experience — that there are good answers to these questions. And that Epicurus derived his answers from a very thorough study of the nature of the universe, which is the physics. But also — and I have to keep encouraging people to study the canonics side, the epistemology side, the issues that are discussed in Philodemus’s work called either On Signs or On Methods of Inference — these issues of logic and reason and how to apply them properly. There’s a tremendously fertile field for development of people to dig into that and write about it. Because I’m convinced when you do really dig into these issues, you’ll find that a cult-like mentality is the exact opposite of what Epicurus was after. He himself was committed to pursuing what he thought was the truth — and that’s essentially what he teaches. He teaches pleasure because he’s first convinced himself that there is a valid way of thinking and studying nature that does allow you to reach firm conclusions about some things in life. And that when you do that studying and when you do reach those conclusions, you then turn those into the ethical conclusions that he reached.
You simply cannot understand, and will not eventually stay with it, and will not appreciate where he’s coming from on the ethics and his discussions of pleasure and pain and virtue — unless you dig into his views of the nature of the universe and his views of reason and logic and this canonical issue of the role of the senses. And all of those things that we don’t have assembled for us in a single text anymore like we’d like to have. But the elements are still there — buried in Lucretius, buried in the Letter to Herodotus, the Letter to Pythocles, and other sources that do still exist.
I just would hope that no one would ever think that what we’re doing at EpicureanFriends.com has anything whatsoever to do with a cult. Because in the end, when we’re talking about these things, I enjoy expanding my circle of friends. But it’s all based on a joint desire to get at the truth of things, to understand the way the world really works. As Rolfe Humphries titled his translation of Lucretius: The Way Things Are. I want to know the way things are. I don’t want to be imposed upon by some authority figure who tells me to believe something because I have to believe it. And I think that summarizes Epicurus’s attitude in what I read in these texts as much as anything.
Martin, any final thoughts?
Martin:
No, I’m fine for today.
Cassius:
Okay, very good. And Joshua, anything else?
Joshua:
My final thought is: we have finished our conversation. But that doesn’t mean that the conversation in general has to be over, because we talk about things like this every day over on EpicureanFriends.com. And we welcome these kinds of questions. Thank you to Smoothie Kiwi for bringing them up. And thank you, Don, and all the other people who have been participating and asking questions. This has been one of the best episodes I think we’ve recorded in a long time because we had the input from our friends on the Internet to bounce off of. So I hope we can continue to do that. And we’ll take as much time as necessary to get through the rest of Torquatus, because we have no schedule except our inevitable deaths at some point in the future — many, many years away.
Cassius:
Okay, well, we’ll close for today and come back next week. So thanks very much.
Joshua:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cassius:
Okay, bye.
Martin:
Bye.