Episode 157 - Lucretius Today Interviews Dr. Emily Austin - Part Two
Date: 01/25/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2841-episode-157-lucretius-today-interviews-dr-emily-austin-part-two/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 157 is the second part of the interview with Dr. Emily Austin. The discussion opens with the Epicurean/Stoic dispute over the role of virtue: Stoics hold virtue to be intrinsically good (good independent of its consequences); Epicurus holds pleasure to be intrinsically good and virtue to be merely instrumental — good only insofar as it produces pleasure. Emily notes this is the core technical dispute and that critics worried Epicurus might be licensing vice in circumstances where vice could be instrumentally advantageous. She argues that modern Stoics, by accepting evolutionary theory, physicalism, and divine non-intervention, have effectively already adopted the Epicurean premises that most angered the ancient Stoics — raising the question of what exactly they still object to in Epicureanism. The episode addresses Epicurus’s welcoming of all people into the Garden, including women and slaves, in contrast to the exclusivity of other schools; the gendering of Epicurus in Pamela Gordon’s The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus; and the Latin/Greek roots of “virtue” (virtus/vir = man) and “courage” (andreia = manliness). Don raises the topic of translating ancient philosophy into modern terms, both linguistically and practically; Emily argues Epicureanism is better suited for modern life than most ancient alternatives, though the community aspect is harder to achieve in individualistic American culture. She discusses the Vatican Sayings’ reliability (she takes them as Epicurean), Gassendi’s unauthorized textual amendment on marriage, and the manuscript tradition and apparatus criticus. On the science dimension, Emily notes many astrophysicists quote Lucretius in the frontispieces of their books, and Don mentions an Einstein foreword to a German edition of Lucretius. Emily describes the last chapter of her book, “Practicing Epicureanism”: writing about philosophy, prioritizing friends over exhaustion, journaling/gratitude practice. The interview closes on Emily’s interpretation of why Lucretius ends his poem with the Plague of Athens: she argues Lucretius was following Thucydides’s account, where the plague changed people’s priorities (prayer didn’t save them; honor became irrelevant), giving survivors a new lease on life — a deeply Epicurean conclusion that the poem abruptly breaks off before reaching.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to the second of a special two-part episode 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. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you too 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 this and each of our podcast episodes and many other topics. In the first episode of this series, we introduced you to Dr. Emily Austin, Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of the book Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. In Part 1, Dr. Austin told us about how she became interested in Epicurus and decided to write her book. We began our discussion of the basic fundamentals of Epicurean philosophy, how Epicurus differs from the Stoics, and we addressed several questions that are frequently asked about how to pursue the desire for pleasure. In this Part 2, we’ll continue that discussion and will dive further into how to apply Epicurean philosophy to modern life. Now let’s return to the discussion.
Cassius:
Now there — when you say sometimes those pleasures are okay and sometimes they’re not — that leads me to one of the other topics I want to make sure we cover today, and that’s the distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans on virtue. I’m sure you get that question a lot among your students and it’s also a matter of frustration as we look at modern discussions of Stoicism today. The ancient Stoics seem to be very, very clear about how virtue was their goal. The modern Stoics seem to be a little less clear about that because they seem to want to blend over and just talk about living well, with the implication that we’re all just interested in living happily. But when you really dig into the philosophy and try to distinguish Stoicism versus Epicureanism, it seems like there is an eternal dispute between the two of them as to the role of virtue versus the role of pleasure. There’s an example in the inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda in which he even uses the word that he’s shouting about this issue — that virtue is not the goal but is a tool towards living happily, which means a life of pleasure. What’s the best way to really get at that issue?
Emily Austin:
I think in some sense I will say that I prefer to think about the ancient Stoics rather than modern Stoics, in part because I think it’s a lot easier to see the differences in the ancient world. I think those differences get sort of overlooked in the contemporary landscape of modern Stoicism. But in general, kind of what they were debating about — not so much in the weeds, but it’s technical — they wanted to know the thing that was intrinsically good, so good in and of itself. And the Stoics thought that what was good in and of itself — good independent of its consequences — was virtue. So even if virtue led to all sorts of bad things, it’s still totally good. Anyway, it’s good in and of itself and the only thing that’s bad in and of itself is vice. And Epicureans thought, no, no, no — it’s pleasure. And there are different accounts of how they got to that assumption. But yeah, the big difference is that for Epicurus, virtue is good only insofar as it produces pleasure. So it’s an instrumental good — it’s good because of what it produces, not in itself — whereas pleasure is good in itself.
And there are a lot of reasons that people didn’t like Epicurus’s claim that virtue was instrumentally good. Part of it is because they thought: well, what if it’s not? What if vice is instrumentally advantageous for pleasure? And they didn’t like the idea that this was sort of contingent or circumstantial rather than a necessary connection. So they thought, well, look, he could very well be licensing vice here, at least in certain circumstances. And I think that’s more of a legitimate criticism than just the idea that pleasure is bad. So I think there’s something to be said for the criticism about where Epicurus puts virtue. But I think Epicurus himself thinks virtue is always instrumental to a good life. And so for him, it’s almost like a conceptual matter — he just thinks that to live a good life, you do have to be virtuous. So what’s the big deal? But the Stoics just really didn’t like that.
And the other reason they don’t like pleasure is that it’s what animals care about. They tend to think that human beings have these rational capacities that are in some way in line with divine capacities, and that using those capacities has to be what makes human life good — it can’t be this very animalistic thing. So they also didn’t just object to the idea that it made virtue contingent on pleasure, but that it was just too lowly a good for human beings.
Cassius:
And it seems that that probably derives from the Epicurean worldview, or the physics, or their ideas of the nature of the universe. And I know that in your book you don’t necessarily go really far into those details of Epicurean philosophy, but I do think I recall you saying that the Epicureans certainly saw their ethics and basically all of their worldview as deriving from their understanding of the way the world works.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I think so. And also just a kind of natural science, not only of the world, but of human beings — of human animals. So I think that they were sort of scientists of happiness. And so the term that gets used a lot in philosophical language is “naturalism” — this idea that there is a nature to human beings, and it doesn’t have to be some abstract nature sort of independent of human beings, but there are things that make our life go well. And that’s what our nature is. And Epicurus wanted to figure that out. And then he decided that what was natural was this state that we can have where we’re largely free of anxiety, and that itself is pleasant, and it makes all sorts of other things pleasant for us. So he was really kind of studying us as a distinctive kind of animal — not where we have some divine capacity within us, like the Stoics thought, but just where we have sort of powers of deliberation about the future because we’re beings in time, we have a sense of ourselves as having a past, a present, and a future, and we are really good at instrumental reasoning.
I think that’s actually one of those things that is interesting, because I wrote an article about whether modern Stoics are actually Epicureans. And the thing is that a lot of these modern Stoics — I think there are a number of ways that modern Stoicism not necessarily misrepresents ancient Stoicism or smudges along the edges for its own purposes, in much the same way that the Romans did that too. The Romans kind of altered Greek Stoicism. But a lot of these modern Stoics believe in evolutionary theory. And evolutionary theory tells us that we’re animals, and that the way that we navigate the world, at least initially, is almost primarily through pleasure and pain. And so technically they’re already on board with that assumption that made the ancient Stoics so angry. So the evolutionary bit and the fact that we’re animals — I think that’s the way many of us think of ourselves now. And so that was a huge point of contention for the ancient Stoics, and I think that modern Stoics are actually on the Epicurean side on that front.
Modern Stoics also tend to be physicalists in general, right? So they think the natural world is governed by laws, that it was not created by a being for the good of human beings, and that gods, should they exist, don’t intervene in the world. And so in a lot of ways, the things that made Epicureanism distinctive — about the natural world and human beings as things you study like other natural animals or beings — the modern Stoics actually already believe. And so if you think that these systems hang together, and that’s the core of Epicureanism and the core of the dispute, then you just have to ask yourself, well, why do these modern Stoics think they’re modern Stoics? If these core commitments of Stoicism are things they reject, and there are core commitments of Epicureanism that they accept — part of me just wonders, what is it that they have against pleasure?
Cassius:
Yeah, there’s an interesting way that this part of the argument was expressed in the ancient world, and it’s kind of harsh in some ways, but the question was asked — it’s almost like a knock-knock joke the way it reads — the question was asked, why is it that so many people from other schools are seen to leave those schools and become Epicureans? But with very few exceptions, no Epicureans are seen to leave Epicureanism and join other schools. And the response to that was: because you can make a eunuch out of a man, but you can’t make a man out of a eunuch. So there was a very bright line here in the way that Epicurus and the Epicureans looked at this issue — the sort of lack of any differentiation between lower orders of animals and higher orders of animals — and certainly some of the philosophies in the ancient world really pushed back against that issue in a very hard-line way.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I do want to give a shout-out to one of my favorite books about Epicurus, which is The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus by Pamela Gordon. She has a lot of really super funny anecdotes in there, but it also does a really good job of showing why Epicurus was often associated in a derogatory sense with sort of a non-masculinity. And I think that a lot of that just stems from their disinterest in things like politics — the places where male citizens were known to distinguish themselves. If you were an Athenian male, you would look to be a general or a politician. And insofar as the Epicureans said those were not worthwhile activities, people took that to be an insult against these major ways of life that the Stoics — or at least the Roman Stoics — were very fond of. And so there’s a sense in which the idea that they’re somehow not masculine has to do with the idea that they would rather stay at home like a woman, or something along those lines.
But yeah, there are a lot of ways in which Epicureans get insulted — even just the idea that pleasure is a “feminine” word matters to them. So there are people who left Epicureanism and maligned it, but generally Epicureanism was distinctive in that it didn’t change very much. Stoicism had a lot of internal disagreement, but Epicureans kind of toed the party line for centuries.
Cassius:
Yeah, about seven centuries, in fact. Just to add some symmetry to what you said about how pleasure is a feminine word in some of these ancient languages — virtue is directly related to the word vir in Latin, which means “man.” So there’s a distinct masculine connotation there. It’s something we do talk about on this podcast fairly frequently — not something we tend to shy away from.
Emily Austin:
The same thing is true of courage, right? Andreia, which is essentially manliness. So there is a sense in which when you make virtue instrumental, people don’t like that.
Cassius:
Yeah, this brings to mind one of the things that both intrigued me and attracted me to exploring Epicureanism from the very beginning — the fact that Epicurus did seem to welcome everybody into the Garden: women, slaves, any members of society seem to have been welcome, where some of the other schools seem to have had a much more exclusive attendance.
Emily Austin:
That’s actually one of those places where, again, this book was good for me because it led me to cross the barriers into classicism more than I have to when I do a lot of my writing for scholarly journals. And so I did learn a lot more about Epicureanism as a cultural phenomenon than I would have otherwise. But it’s true that in that respect my understanding is still somewhat limited, and I definitely rely on other scholars who have done a lot more of the legwork. But I really do recommend the Pamela Gordon book. It’s excellent.
Cassius:
Dr. Austin, this is a perfect place to bring in a point that Don had earlier suggested we wanted to cover today: the difficulties of trying to translate an ancient philosophy into modern terms. Don himself has spent a lot of time attempting to learn Greek as part of his study of Epicurus. Most of the rest of us are not as successful. To what extent can you translate an ancient philosophy into modern terms successfully?
Cassius:
And I’m curious about your take on translating, in quotes, an ancient philosophy into the modern world — with all of our scientific advancements and that sort of thing, but also just the whole idea of trying to use some of those terms. Like we even mentioned ataraxia — translating those terms into modern ideas as well. I’d be interested to get your take on either of those.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. So I mean, I was thinking of translating in both of the senses you were mentioning — how effectively can we live this ancient life now as a sort of translation, and then the textual issues. So as far as the extent to which we can do this now — I think Epicureanism is a lot better suited for modern life than most of the other ancient Greek approaches to living. Skepticism gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons, but I think there are domains or areas of life where skepticism works fairly well. But I do think Epicureanism — because it is at the margins of course, and we’ve worked out a lot more details of the science, and some of Epicurean science was wrong — it does have the naturalistic physicalist approach to the world that people have now. And so in that respect, even in itself, that gives it some better grounding for being a life worth choosing.
I do think that ancient Epicureans would recognize certain ways of living as Epicurean. One thing I don’t think happens very often now is the idea of community — a community of Epicureans. I think we tend to be kind of atomistic; we live as an Epicurean almost individually. You all are an exception because you have an Epicurean community online. But I do think that that’s an element of Epicureanism that is harder to incorporate into American life. Stoicism is so individualistic that it makes it easier — it’s sort of all about being resilient and independent and self-sufficient — and Epicureanism just doesn’t have that. They don’t think we are self-sufficient. We need other people, and we need other people who can help give us the reassurance we need. And that reassurance comes primarily from other Epicurean-minded people.
So the community aspect I think is harder in American culture. But I do think that a prudent approach to pleasure is easier than a very austere conception like Stoicism. I mean, the truth is Stoicism really does say your child is not intrinsically good, and if your child dies it doesn’t affect your happiness. And so there are all sorts of very intuitive commitments that Epicurus has that Stoicism doesn’t, because they foreground pleasure and pain rather than virtue and vice. The Stoics just say: if it doesn’t make you vicious, then it doesn’t matter.
The other thing about the Greek Stoics — it’s always worth remembering — is they didn’t think any of us were actually virtuous. They even thought that every moral error you make is equal. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this image: they thought that the person who is one inch below the surface of the water is just as much drowning as the person a thousand feet below the surface of the water. And so it didn’t really matter if you got close to virtue — you were still drowning. And so the Stoics, especially the early Stoics, weren’t making a life that was for normal people or for the average person — and I think Epicurus was. And that’s another way in which he’s very applicable to modern life.
Cassius:
So it sounds like if we took Pythocles or Diogenes Laertius, they would at least recognize what we’re trying to do in the modern world as Epicureanism. It sounds like there might be more of a question with the Stoics.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I don’t think the Stoics would recognize modern Stoicism as Stoicism. And there are things that ancient Epicureans would probably find really bizarre about the way that we live. But I think they would see people who are trying to live a pleasant, largely anxiety-free life as at least amenable to Epicureanism, especially if they have the right kind of commitments about the natural world.
As for the language — Epicurus’s Greek was so technical and so difficult. To some extent, the letters are not as hard to read as some of the other stuff, like the key doctrines. But Epicurus kind of made up a lot of stuff, as did other ancient Greek philosophers. And so you do kind of get used to their technical vocabulary. One example that is probably good to think about: at the very beginning of Lucretius, Lucretius says look, this is going to be really hard because I’m going to have to make up a lot of Latin to explain Epicurus, because our language just doesn’t have that technical vocabulary. And Cicero says the same thing — there are all these technical terms and I’ve got to come up with Latin equivalents rather than just keep using the Greek. So that’s just a perpetual problem, and it’s kind of unclear how much things get lost.
But Cicero really prides himself — I think at the beginning of De Finibus — he says no one has written more philosophy than I did, and I made up all these words. Cicero was never shy about touting himself. But yeah, so I think there’s always going to be that problem. And even now, if you have contemporary philosophers, just ask them what a “reason for action” is and they’re going to talk past one another. They’ve all got different ideas of what a reason does, whether a reason motivates or rather justifies, and whether a reason has to fit the justification or whether just any old reason will do. And if they don’t clarify all that at the beginning, they’ll just argue for hours and nothing is happening. So getting your terms clear in philosophical discussion, even if you share the same language, is hard.
I do think that there is some consistent philosophical terminology that has been agreed upon. But the further you get into the weeds, the more overwhelming it gets. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I think the core of Epicureanism doesn’t require that. I think it rewards deep engagement. There’s a lot to be said for some disputes that are practically relevant. But when it comes to writing a book even to convince people who are either otherwise hostile to Epicureanism, or just people who are actually interested in living a pleasant life, thankfully you don’t have to get into “why does this take the genitive when usually it doesn’t.” So yeah, it can be translated at a level that makes it accessible to other people.
Cassius:
That’s great. And so to follow up on that for just a second — the different translation controversies that we run into. A classic example being, I see people continue to debate, did Epicurus recommend that you should get married, or did he actually recommend not getting married?
Emily Austin:
Yeah, the whole marriage thing, for me, I just find it deeply puzzling. Because something can’t be right when you read it that way. And it’s one of those times when I think: well, no, it’s definitely not right. I mean, if you read the will, it’s clear — his followers named children after him, he took over the guardianship for Metrodorus’s kids, and he even said make sure to give Metrodorus’s daughter a dowry, at least as long as she marries another Epicurean. So does it sound like a man who thinks no one should marry? So what exactly led people to alter the text there, I think, is this impulse that people have to asceticize Epicurus — this idea that somehow he would not have attachments, he would be entirely self-sufficient — when I think that’s just part of making Epicurus more in line with other Hellenistic philosophies. It kind of effaces the distinctiveness.
Cassius:
And it’s kind of remarkable, isn’t it, that the way in which we have these weird sources for some of these texts is particular to the Epicurean school — we have Lucretius, the longest didactic philosophical poem that survives from the ancient world; we have the inscription at Oinoanda, the longest inscription of any kind from the ancient world; we have the largest cache of papyrus scrolls that survives from the ancient world — all dealing with Epicurean philosophy.
Emily Austin:
I agree with you, there is a wonderful wealth of information that has survived in very weird ways. Yeah, I mean, I always think about how despondent Aristotle would be to discover that his dialogues are lost, because I think people thought his dialogues were even better than Plato’s — but they’re all gone. So what we have are essentially his lecture notes, which is why they’re so awful to read. So yeah, what survives and what gets lost is almost always so subject to fortune. You just think: wow, that crisis was narrowly averted.
Cassius:
And the fact that we have anything that survives of Epicurus and the Epicurean school is amazing, because it was so anathema to the Christian texts and things like that that were being copied. The fact that we still have people copying Diogenes Laertius, and then the entire Book 10 has to do with Epicurus — it is surprising.
When things come from the past, how much do we have to worry that something was mistranslated — or even in modern translations, how do we determine which is a good translation? And also, do you have any knowledge about the Vatican Sayings? Are those trustworthy? Is that something we can be assured Epicurus really did write?
Emily Austin:
So I’ll start with the last one — the Vatican Sayings. I made an executive decision to take them to be by Epicurus. I haven’t found a compelling enough reason not to. Well, Vatican 23 — I think the one about friendship — gets a lot of attention because it makes it sound like friendship is good in and of itself. And so some people have been tempted to say, well, that’s later Epicureanism. So there are some where I think, is that really consistent with Epicureanism? But if they’re not by Epicurus, I take them to be by Epicureans. And maybe they’re not perfectly reflecting Epicurus — maybe they’re even reflecting changes in the school. But for the most part, I think they tried to stay pretty consistent. They didn’t want to depart far from Epicurus, except on some things, like they thought maybe we needed an argument for why pleasure was the good, and they were a little hesitant about his view that friendship is not good in and of itself. But I just decided there’s not a good enough reason to not take them as expressing at least Epicurean ideas.
As for the other questions about how confident we can be — there are times when people do what Gassendi did and just say, “Oh well, Epicurus can’t approve of marriage, so I’ll just change it.” And thankfully, most of the time what we have is a manuscript tradition. So we’ll have different manuscripts and you can compare them. Usually there’s a thing at the bottom called an apparatus criticus, and it’ll say: this manuscript doesn’t have this in the genitive, it actually has it in the dative. And then classicists and philosophers will fight over which manuscript to go with. But at least you can compare them. It’s when you only have one manuscript that you’re really out of luck — and sometimes that’s just true.
But at least you can see: oh, Gassendi amended this, because he told us he did. So then you can fight over which one is better. For the most part, I think we can be relatively confident that we at least have a version of the original Diogenes. Now what he was working with, where he got it — I think we just have to say, well, that’s the starting point. I do think he was an Epicurean, and I think he wasn’t trying to make Epicurus into something he was not. He was really trying to give the world the texts. And so I think he probably did them right. Now, there’s no way to not make a transcription error — all of us have tried to copy something and left out a word or misspelled something. I looked at my book last night and I was like, oh my God, there are errors. So again, the worry is when the error changes the meaning. And I guess in some sense, you always have to just think: that’s going to happen, and hopefully we can stick to the big picture.
Cassius:
Thank you. Emily, we have a lot of people who get interested in Epicurean philosophy because of the science that’s involved in Lucretius. The Swerve is one of the most popular books in recent years about Epicurus, so we have a lot of people who get interested through a history of science angle. And I know you don’t cover much of that background in your book. What is your personal take on the science aspect of Epicurean philosophy?
Emily Austin:
I guess because I’m not a historian of the philosophy of science, I don’t have really nuanced views on that — I couldn’t get into the trenches with people who spend a lot of time on it. I do think that it’s a very natural way to get into Epicurus because it is so modern. It’s shockingly modern for an ancient theory, and people who want to dismiss ancient philosophy because, I don’t know, Thales thought everything came out of water, have a lot of trouble dismissing Epicurus because his science is pretty fascinating. And then people who are interested in Renaissance science and Enlightenment science — I think The Swerve gives a good picture of how influential Epicurus’s scientific ideas were.
What’s interesting is that a lot of those people in the Enlightenment were drawn to the science but repulsed by the morality — so they tried to make Epicurus into a really good guy who happened to have some not-so-great views. So one thing that I always wonder, when people come into Epicurus through the science, is to what extent they then find the ethics and the views about human interactions and pleasure equally compelling. I haven’t talked to enough people who came into Epicurus that way to find out whether they think: oh, the science is great but this ethics is horrible.
Cassius:
Which is interesting because Epicurus thought they were inextricably linked.
Emily Austin:
Oh yeah, definitely. That’s the thing that I don’t like about modern takes on these ancient schools of philosophy — all of these schools thought of themselves as a coherent philosophy, so you couldn’t really separate the parts. You kind of needed all of them. And so the idea that you could just carve off part of it — they would think that’s like mutilating the philosophy.
Cassius:
And that is one of the things that amazes me about the science of Epicurus — while maybe factually wrong now in the way he expresses it, the fact that it can be translated into modern terms, into that naturalistic philosophy, just amazes me. We’re talking about a 2,300-year-old tradition that can still be talked about in a coherent way without mutilating the philosophy.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. And I mean, just to think that he did it all on the basis of rational deduction — “it must be that way, I can’t see it but it must be that way.”
Cassius:
Yeah, exactly. But so much of it did turn out to be right once we could start seeing things. And I think a lot of astrophysicists — everybody wants to throw in a quote at the beginning of their scientific work for some reason — and they generally choose Lucretius. They’re sort of like: oh, here is an ancient predecessor to my view. Almost always they choose Lucretius. And so there is some kind of line of connection that people find — people like to tie things to ancient traditions, and Epicurus is the best way to go there.
Don:
And it’s almost in some ways analogous to Einstein’s thought experiments — that’s how he would sort of think about a problem and try and come up with a theory of relativity and so on. It’s almost like Epicurus sort of thinking: how can this be, let’s think about different alternatives. So that’s kind of an interesting modern analogy too.
Cassius:
Don, it’s interesting that you mentioned Einstein there, because going along with what Emily was just saying about trying to draw connections to the ancient world — there was a German edition of Lucretius in which Einstein was actually commissioned to write the foreword. So that’s out there if anyone wants to go look for it. It’s interesting to read.
Emily Austin:
That’s really fascinating.
Cassius:
One thing I’d sort of like to mention before we get to death and destruction: we have people who come to the forum and what they’re particularly looking for, when they come to the forum, is — okay, I’m interested in the philosophy, I think I understand it okay — what I’m looking for is a meditation-style approach to how I can apply this to my life. I’m referring to the book by Marcus Aurelius, and while you don’t go to that level, Emily, the last chapter of your book, I think, is going to be useful to people like that, because it’s all about specifically the question of how do we apply this philosophy — what are some practices. The chapter is called “Practicing Epicureanism,” and in this chapter I think you represent it as being a challenge that you laid for yourself: if I’m going to write a book about this, I need to actually see if it works. Maybe you want to talk about that approach a little bit, because I really think there are people who are going to find this whole book very useful but particularly that last chapter.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, and actually that’s one of the things that my editor really wanted, and it dovetails with this movement in ancient philosophical pedagogy to bring back these philosophies as ways of living — not just as exercises in textual interpretation — because they were meant to be lived. But it is hard to figure out with Epicurus what the practice involves. He clearly thinks you do practice it because he says you should practice it with your friends, but he doesn’t say here are some habits. So I did have to suss some of those out from the text. A lot of it came from Philodemus, and some of the practices we just get from the Romans — and they overlap with Stoic practices in part because the Romans had a hodgepodge approach to these schools.
But I do think that some of the things that worked for me — one of them is a little bit cumbersome, but I really do think people benefit a lot from writing about things. So if they struggle with something like generosity or prioritizing their friends, writing about why you should do that, or why something else is bad, it’s super helpful. It takes time, but it clarifies a lot of things.
And I think actually for me the thing that helps the most is to think about priorities. Because I think there are a lot of moments we have where we have to make a decision about how we’re going to spend our time. And for me the thing that has been most important is: prioritize your friends, and prioritize memories. Because I don’t know — you get home at the end of the day and you’re tired, and your friend says do you want to come over and order pizza, and you’re like “no, not really, because I’m tired.” But I notice that now I’m just like: no, I’m gonna do that, and then I’m gonna be happy that I did it. Because I know that that will actually be a good thing — I just have to get over the exhaustion.
Or — I’m sure that my university won’t listen to this, but I am oddly and unexpectedly good at administrative tasks. And so I think the administration has been thinking: oh, well, maybe she should join the dean’s office. But you lose two months of your free time and it’s relatively thankless work, but you get more money and a bit of attention. And so it’s sometimes hard to turn things down. And so I keep thinking: Epicurus does not want me to enter the administration.
But also, I think the gratitude piece — I have started journaling, which I thought I wouldn’t really do. But I have a good friend whose father got Alzheimer’s very early — kind of early onset — and his mother, in the process of being a caregiver, someone said you should consider journaling. And so she started. That was something like 20 years ago and she does it every day. And then her daughter gave her this gratitude journal that you’re supposed to do for like 30 days or something. The daughter did it for 30 days and said “hey, I did it,” and his mother is on like day 533 or something. So I do think that I have a very rich episodic memory, but having reminders is really good — especially when you start thinking about times when you might really want to remember the good things about people.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think it’s a really good way of putting it. We’ve mentioned about the vast amount of text relatively speaking that we have from Epicurus, but we of course lost so much, so we don’t really know whether he ever did have, you know, a list of practices of that kind. But I think you bring up a good point in that it seems to me that a lot of Epicurean philosophy is very contextual. Instead of having “here are the 10 things you need to do here and the five things you need to do there,” it seems to me it’s a lot more about looking at the broad picture and making good choices and using prudence — that sort of thing is at the core of Epicurus’s philosophy.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, that seems right to me. What you were just saying — practicing Epicureanism is the title of your last chapter, and we’ve called this podcast from the beginning Lucretius Today. What did Lucretius do, what did Epicurus spend most of his time doing in terms of practicing Epicureanism? They were writing about it — probably the best way of practicing Epicureanism is to write about it and talk about it to people. Because if indeed one of the most prudent things a person can do to pursue pleasure is to have friends, then you’ve got to have the ability to communicate your ideas. And you’ve done just an excellent job in Living for Pleasure in carrying out the model that Lucretius did himself in terms of explaining Epicurean philosophy in an attractive and persuasive way.
Cassius:
Well, this is the question that I’ve been wanting to end on in this interview today. One of the points of your book that I found most interesting — and even unique; I think you mentioned it in one of your footnotes that you’ve not seen this point brought out in past discussions — is about Lucretius and the ending of his poem. Lucretius has gotten a lot of criticism, or people wonder why in the world would you end your poem talking about the Plague of Athens. And in your book you suggest a potential answer to that question. Can you talk about that for just a moment, and perhaps translate for us what might have been in Lucretius’s mind in using this as the ending of his poem?
Emily Austin:
Yeah. So I guess, like professionals of all sorts, we like to be relevant. And even though I actually had a chapter on pandemics planned — it was already in my book proposal — that was before the pandemic. And so when COVID hit, you know, we’re all at home and all the academics were like: well, what can I say that’s relevant to this moment? I guess probably the Camus scholars were like, “all right, about the plague!” And ancient Greek people were all like: well, what about the plague in Lucretius or in Thucydides?
So I had a friend who was working on Thucydides, and I had read the passage a good bit and thought about it. But I went back to it and I was kind of myself a little bit dispirited by the plague passage — like I felt like it had a sense of being kind of like the other passage where Lucretius is looking down on people: “sort of like, look at all these idiots who are dying grotesque deaths, and if you’re an Epicurean you won’t feel that.” So I was hesitant to write about the plague because I thought maybe it was an expression of Lucretius’s condescension.
But then when I was working through it, I noticed that Lucretius breaks off in a very dark moment — I think it’s something like people were stealing each other’s burial pyres, just throwing their dead relatives onto their dead neighbors’ funeral pyres. But then I noticed that after that point in Thucydides, he talks about the way that the plague changed people’s priorities or altered them. So that once they realized that praying wasn’t going to save them — the gods weren’t going to save them — it changed their idea about the role of the gods in human life. And once they realized that honor in the future was not actually important, they stopped caring about it. And so there are all these ways in which coming to terms with death and the plague’s arbitrariness gave them a new lease on life, so to speak.
And I thought: well, that’s just so Epicurean that it would be shocking if that weren’t where Lucretius was going with that. And while I don’t know that we can say he intended to end the whole work with the plague, I do think he intended to finish off the plague by incorporating that Thucydidean passage, because I think it’s just such a model of the Epicurean approach to living. Once you realize that you don’t have tomorrow necessarily — it’s kind of unclear even what Thucydides thinks about that; Thucydides is really hard to interpret, and he even ends that passage with the way that people interpreted a prophecy on the basis of what they wanted the prophecy to say, and it’s not clear whether Thucydides is mocking people who interpret prophecies. So it’s unclear how traditionalist Thucydides himself is. But it’s clear to me at least that Lucretius had that in mind, and it didn’t get there, and that’s why it breaks off abruptly.
And while I think this is somewhat novel, I will confess that I did not cull the European commentaries on Lucretius when doing the work. I tend to find that it’s usually been done in another language, so there may be someone out there who’s written this in German and I just didn’t have time to hunt it down. But it’s true that I didn’t find it in the commentaries that I was consulting. And I do think it’s compelling, because it does fall in with that theme of: once you realize that you could die, it gives you a greater appreciation of each day.
Cassius:
Lucretius seems to talk throughout his poem that Epicurean philosophy has a bitter side to it to some degree — that people who think they’re going to live in eternity in heaven in blissfulness will find it potentially bitter to hear Epicurus say that those things are not true. But there is an offsetting reason to study the material when you realize that you only have one life to live and you best make the best of it.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I do think that Lucretius thinks — and there are hints of this in something like Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, where there are these powers behind the scenes, some puppeteers, who are trying to convince you of those things so that you play nice, so that you do what you’re supposed to do, express ambition, bow to the prevailing norm, so that you can get a reward eventually. And once that goes away, you kind of do become the author of your own daily existence. And that can be very unsettling for a lot of people. But I do think Lucretius thinks that in the end you’re going to gain from that.
Cassius:
I just want to say how thoroughly I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I’ve enjoyed your book, Emily. You mentioned you were open to doing this again, and I have to say for my point of view that would be more than welcome. We would love to have you back sometime.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, that would be great. It’s just really nice to be in a group of people who are not only sort of interested in Epicurus but really interested in Epicurus — there aren’t that many people who know much about him. We appreciate your help in trying to fix that problem, and your book is going to be one of the major tools in doing that in the coming years.
Emily Austin:
Well, thanks. You guys have been way more than kind.
Cassius:
Okay, as we close — is there a way our listeners can follow your work or get in touch with you?
Emily Austin:
Um, yeah, actually — if you can just go to the Wake Forest University philosophy page, my email address is there and I’m happy to correspond by email. I don’t have a website or a social media account. But you can definitely contact me at my email and I will almost certainly write back. As far as my work, most of it is scholarly in nature, admittedly, but much of it is available at Academia.edu, which is a little bit of a repository of academic papers. Most of my papers you’ll discover are about Plato, but my Epicurus paper is there. But a lot of that is again scholarly work. But anybody can feel free to contact me. This was a blast, really. It’s nice to talk about Epicurus at a sort of high level. I have really enjoyed reading what you’re talking about — I would say you’re way better versed in the whole of Epicureanism than pretty much anyone I know, because you really cover all of it. So yeah, it’s been great.
Cassius:
Okay, well, thanks very much. And we’ll definitely do something again.
Emily Austin:
Okay, great. Thanks.
Cassius:
Thank you to Dr. Austin and to our podcast panel. That completes our interview today. But if you found this discussion motivates you to want to learn more about Epicurus, please look us up at EpicureanFriends.com and consider joining us in our study and pursuit of the philosophy of Epicurus.