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Episode 170 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 23 - Chapter 10 - The New Freedom 03

Date: 04/20/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3012-episode-170-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-23-chapter-10-the-new-freedom-03/

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

Episode 170 completes Chapter 10, “The New Freedom,” working through the remaining subsections: necessity of death, freedom and government, freedom in public careers, control of environment, freedom in the simple life, and control of desires. The episode opens with Vatican Saying 31 from Metrodorus — “all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls” — and the Epicurean response to the necessity of death: not anxiety, but a pressing urgency to use the time available wisely. DeWitt quotes Ecclesiastes 9:10 and several Vatican Sayings (14, 10) on mortality and the scorn of procrastination, including his own translation of Vatican Saying 14: “thou fool, though not master of tomorrow, postpone the hour, and each and every one of us goes to death with excuses on his lips.” The freedom/government section introduces a recently published book — Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy by Javier Ruiz and Marcello D. Boeri — which the group notes takes a much more nuanced view of Epicurean political engagement than the simplistic “avoid all politics” reading. DeWitt contrasts Epicurus’s vision with Plato’s Republic, which DeWitt characterizes as “a maximum of government and a minimum of liberty.” Joshua introduces Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which traces Plato’s political ideas through Hegel and Marx to totalitarianism. Martin confirms that Popper wrote it as his contribution against Nazism. Joshua provides historical illustrations of how Epicurus inspired visions of political liberty, including Poggio Bracciolini’s 1417 discovery of Lucretius (and his description of the baths at Baden as an “Epicurean center of life”) and Thomas More’s Utopia inspired by Amerigo Vespucci’s description of Native Americans as Epicurean in their mode of life. Martin raises the caution that DeWitt is inferring considerably more from Epicurus’s surviving texts than is strictly warranted — Epicurus never explicitly endorsed a particular form of government — and Cassius agrees while noting the general implication of any philosophy that values individual pursuit of pleasure is that government should at minimum not obstruct it. Principal Doctrine 31 is cited: “the justice of nature is a covenant of advantage not to injure one another or be injured.” Cassius notes that the word “covenant” implies a democratic process and free individual choice rather than the imposition of enactments by a lawgiver. He also mentions that Epicurus’s position on government must be understood in context: having seen what happened to Anaxagoras (exile) and Socrates (execution), Epicurus pragmatically chose to teach philosophy in his own garden on the Dipylon Road rather than in the gymnasium, rejecting both the fully political life and the purely contemplative life (as Plato and Aristotle had extolled it). In “Freedom and Public Careers,” DeWitt’s point is that Epicurus strongly advised against basing a career on the favor of the crowd — “when a bare majority decides whether you live or die, some years that goes in your favor, some years it does not.” Vatican Saying 67 is cited: “a life of freedom cannot acquire great wealth because of success in this being difficult apart from servitude to mobs or to monarchs.” Cassius cites the inscription celebrating Philonides of Laodicea, an Epicurean at the Seleucid court under Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Demetrius I Soter, as the earliest physical evidence that Epicureans did engage in politics. Atticus, Cicero’s friend, is cited as the exemplary Epicurean who maneuvered through Rome’s most divisive political period by remaining on good terms with all sides — documented in the life of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos, also edited by Denis Lambinus. Vatican Saying 58 (“we must plan our escape from the prison house of the conventional education and political careers”) is discussed, with the qualification that Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens illustrates Epicurus going to the aid of a drowning friend — he was not advising total indifference to the world. In “Control of Environment,” the phrase lathē biōsas (“live unknown”) attributed to Epicurus by Plutarch is discussed: DeWitt argues Epicurus was not averse to fame provided it became unsought, and that Diogenes Laertius notes Epicurus had friends “not counted by whole cities.” The episode’s central practical discussion concerns Principal Doctrine 27: “by far the most precious is the acquisition of friendship.” Cassius presents this as more than social pleasantry — Epicurus was advising “making a systematic business of friendship,” building networks of mutual support across many cities so that the community of like-minded friends becomes a safety net more valuable than any amount of accumulated wealth. The discussion of friendship leads to “Freedom in the Simple Life” and a memorable passage — DeWitt quotes Horace: dulce est desipere in loco (“it is sweet to play the fool in the right place”) — which DeWitt expands to mean “it is a special pleasure to forget one’s philosophy on occasion.” This captures the Epicurean balance: the simple life is the norm not as an ascetic virtue but as a safeguard against dependence on what cannot be sustained, while luxury is not rejected when it presents itself. The “Control of Desires” section closes the chapter with Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings on the practical approach: Vatican Saying 59 (“it is not the stomach that is insatiable — they have a false opinion about the limitless quantity required to fill it”) and Vatican Saying 71 (asking of any particular desire “what will be the result for me if the object of this desire is fulfilled, and what if it is not fulfilled?”). Cassius concludes the chapter by noting that Lucretius in his text holds out the prospect that “so infinitesimal are the residual traces of natural faults which reason cannot eradicate from the educated that nothing hinders them from passing a life worthy of the gods.” Joshua closes by observing they are at page 205 of 397 in DeWitt’s book, well past the halfway point. Next week: Chapter 11, “Soul, Sensation, and Mind.”

Transcript

Section titled “Transcript”

Cassius: Welcome to 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’ll walk you through the Epicurean texts and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.

Cassius: Welcome to Episode 170 of Lucretius Today. We are continuing in Chapter 10 of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. The topic of the chapter is “The New Freedom,” and we are in the subsections that are talking about other aspects of necessity and freedom. We’re going to start today with “Necessity of Death.” The other topics include “Freedom, Government, and Law,” “Freedom in Public Careers,” “Control of Environment,” “Freedom in the Simple Life,” and “Control of Desires.” The first one is one of those issues that is not something we have freedom about — we have no ability to escape death no matter how long we live. And DeWitt starts with Vatican Saying 31: “Against all other hazards, it is possible for us to gain security for ourselves. But so far as death is concerned, all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls.” And DeWitt’s interpretation of that is that “the immediate effect of this is to invest the present with a pressing urgency and to demand the control of experience with respect to the past, the present, and the future.” I think the ultimate point is that since we cannot ultimately defeat death, and since we have taken the position that there is no life after death, there is a sense of — maybe “urgency” is not exactly the right word — but importance and significance to the time that we have. Urgency might imply that we’re going to be anxious about things, and while some things we may end up being anxious about, I think DeWitt’s ultimate point is that you plan to use the time that you have as best you can, as wisely as you can. You know that you’re not going to have an unlimited amount of time, and you simply have to efficiently choose to spend your time in a way that acknowledges that your time is going to be limited. As he often does, DeWitt goes back and forth with the Bible. He quotes Ecclesiastes 9:10: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest.” And I think DeWitt is correct that there’s strong similarity between that sentiment and Epicurean viewpoints.

Joshua: Yeah, Ecclesiastes is an interesting case because I think it’s the last book of the Old Testament and is considered to have a high degree of Hellenistic and particularly Epicurean influence.

Cassius: In Vatican Saying 14, Epicurus says — or I guess whoever wrote Vatican Saying 14 says — “We have been born once and cannot be born a second time. For all eternity we shall no longer exist. But you, although you are not in control of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies without enjoying leisure.” And there’s a number of sayings that are like that. Vatican Saying 10 says: “Remember that you are mortal and have a limited time to live, and have devoted yourself to discussions on nature for all time and eternity and have seen things that are now and are to become and have been.” It’s a consistent theme throughout the Vatican Sayings. Josh, with the one you mentioned about dying without enjoying leisure — I think that’s Vatican Saying 14. And I think you read a version different from the one that DeWitt translates himself. I see that he’s got an interesting variation on that last phrase, which has always been a little bit troublesome to me. DeWitt translates that as: “Thou fool, though not master of tomorrow, postpone the hour, and each and every one of us goes to death with excuses on his lips.” Now that may be more of a paraphrase than a literal translation, but this is a continuing theme — that we cannot ultimately defeat death and we don’t need to be procrastinating any more than we absolutely have to. The scorn of procrastination, as DeWitt says, is a continuing theme, which makes sense. You’re alive only for a brief period of time; for an eternity, you’re not alive. And so all the different clichés about making hay while the sun shines are absolutely applicable here.

Joshua: I think he quotes the Hippocratic doctrine of “life is short, art is long, and the occasion urgent.”

Cassius: The point in all of this is that you are going to die — what’s as certain as anything in life is that you are going to die. And the question that should bring up in your mind is: how are you going to live your life knowing that that’s true? Are you going to spend your life banking on the idea — which some people will try to promise you — that there’s something beyond the grave? And for Epicurus, the answer is no. He’s not going to rely on that. And everything that is ever going to happen to you is going to happen to you in this brief span of years that has been given to you in this world and not in the next.

Cassius: Right. And DeWitt has inserted that here in the context of freedom and determinism. Death is certainly an issue of necessity because, as people say, death and taxes perhaps are the only things that are absolutely certain in life. But it provides a good reminder here that freedom is something to be used with a sense of importance and significance — and to some extent urgency — because you know that your time is limited. And so what DeWitt does with the rest of the chapter is go into how do you use the time that you do have available to you, because you do have some degree of agency to influence the things that are going to happen to you. DeWitt covers a number of areas of life in the rest of the chapter where you can have some degree of influence, and he discusses the attitude you should take towards those areas. He sees Epicurus suggesting that there is a dual level of decision making. You have to set your general attitude towards things — diathesis, I think, is the word. But also, even though you have a particular attitude about what you’d like to do, you’re going to run into particular problems where you sometimes have to make choices that seem to swerve around the direct course to what you like. In other words, your attitude is that the goal of life is to live pleasurably, but there are certainly individual circumstances where you’re going to have to choose pain in the short term in order to avoid greater pain or obtain greater pleasure in the future.

Cassius: The first of the topics is “Freedom, Government, and Law.” Now, there’s a new book out that one of our forum members, Oninsky, has brought to our attention, entitled Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy. I can’t pronounce the names, so Joshua, what are the names of the authors?

Joshua: Well, I can’t pronounce them very well either, but I think it’s Javier Ruiz and Marcello D. Boeri. They’ve just released this book within the last month or two here in 2023. And they’ve written a series of articles about these topics. This is an area that’s of continuing interest — to what extent do you get involved in the world around you? I’ve only been able to read the introduction so far of that book, but it looks like it’s going to have a lot of really good material. Because it seems like in many quarters there’s a what I would call superficial view that Epicurus says absolutely no involvement in politics — people think that’s the extent of his interest and we just move on past that. But that does not appear to be, when you dive into the details, what Epicurus really had to say. Like everything else, he’s going to be making his decisions based on the context of the situation and your individual circumstances. And as this Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy book illustrates, there were many Epicureans in the past who were involved in government and law, and there’s a lot of subtlety there in terms of what’s appropriate and what’s not — you should not just consider there to be a blanket condemnation.

Cassius: Now what DeWitt goes into first here is he’s contrasting Epicurus’s views with those of Plato. How Plato had, especially in his Republic, recommended a highly regimented state — and DeWitt translates that into “a maximum of government and a minimum of liberty,” which probably is accurate. But from a more philosophical point of view, perhaps the general understanding from the Republic is that Plato was considering certain types of people to be “golden” and other types of people to be associated with other types of metal, and he was suggesting that the best society would be strictly regimented into divisions of authority and divisions of function — a road that Epicurus did not go down at all.

Joshua: Yeah, and actually I might need Martin to help me out with this, because Karl Popper wrote a book called The Open Society and Its Enemies in which he takes Plato’s ideas in the Republic and sort of traces them throughout history and finds all the ways in which they have informed some really terrible political theories, particularly in the 20th century. Martin, I think you’re familiar with that, and you say that Karl Popper may not have understood Plato as well as he presents in his book.

Martin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, specifically this book was written by Karl Popper as his contribution to the war against Nazism. He showed with his book that starting with Plato, then going over Hegel, and then Marx, that these three thinkers basically prepared the ground for the Nazis. So however well or not well he may have understood Plato, it’s clear in Plato’s Republic that he does have, or does suggest — as DeWitt says here — a more regimented society. And another thing to support what Joshua said about this: Popper states that “the equalitarian movement as Plato knew it represented all he hated and that his own theory in the Republic and in all later works was largely a reply to the powerful challenge of the new egalitarianism and humanitarianism.” And later he clearly says that Plato’s ideal state was a totalitarian state.

Joshua: I was reading a book — I’ve referenced this several times — called The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, and they described the founding of the city of Alexandria from the time it was first laid out under Alexander the Great’s eyes. The job of the city planner was not just to lay out roads and buildings and the harbor and all that. His job was to consider what the ideal state should look like — what percentage of the population should be merchants, what percentage should be artisans, soldiers, rulers, and all of that. So this idea of political theory becomes really important in ancient Greece and there are a lot of people thinking about it. What makes Epicureanism interesting is that there are several instances in history — particularly in the Renaissance — in which political thinkers will look to Epicurus to explain societies that they see as being more open than the societies they themselves live in. Quite recently I mentioned Thomas More in his book Utopia, which was founded on the travelogue of Amerigo Vespucci, who said that the Native Americans he happened to come across lived like Epicureans — they didn’t have governments or an established church or any of that. They just lived in nature. Another example would be Poggio Bracciolini, who in 1417 discovered one of the last surviving manuscripts of Lucretius in the monastery of Fulda in Germany. In that same time, he went to this town called Baden, which is famous for its baths. The story he tells about the baths is that the standards of sexual morality had become so lax that men and women are bathing naked with only a screen to separate them. And he’s writing to his friend Niccolò Niccoli back in Italy, and he says much the same thing that Amerigo Vespucci says. He says, “I’m describing this to you so that you will understand what a great Epicurean center of life this is because of issues relating to political liberty.” And that seems to me the theme of DeWitt’s whole section here on “Freedom, Government, and Law.”

Cassius: He says Epicurus is no anarchist. He knows that a certain degree of legal control over society is a necessity. But at the same time, he insists that “the maximum of liberty implies a minimum of government.”

Joshua: The question, Cassius and others, is: where in Epicurus’s surviving writings does he come across these ideas? That’s the difficult thing to answer.

Martin: It’s a conjecture of DeWitt. It’s written in none of the extant text. I think DeWitt over-interprets this here. I think Epicurus just stated it as fact — that wherever humans are organized, there is a state with something. He never really wrote that this is how it must be or how it shouldn’t be, because I never saw anywhere that Epicurus really makes a clear statement on what politics he would prefer in particular, except of course that we want freedom to pursue our pleasure. So I think DeWitt overstates what we can find in Epicurus.

Cassius: Yeah, Martin, I agree with what you’ve just said. I think that DeWitt is inferring an awful lot here. Now in fairness to DeWitt, it seems like what he infers is what most people infer when they read Epicurean philosophy — and the opposite is what they infer from Plato. We do our best to avoid current political discussions, because our focus is on understanding Epicurean philosophy without getting sidetracked into contemporary debates. But obviously, everybody who looks at the ancient Greeks comes away with an application of what the fundamentals they’re talking about would lead you to conclude. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody suggest that Plato leads you to conclude that a libertarian government is the best way to go and let everybody do what they want. And on the other hand, most people who read Epicurus do end up with this conclusion that if you’re valuing freedom in the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness, then there’s an implication at least that the government is going to not stand in the way of that, if not actually assist it. In fact, I was looking at this as we started today — we’re on Chapter 10 of 15 chapters. When we get to Chapter 14, under “The New Virtues,” there is a section on justice where we’ll come back to Principal Doctrines 30 through 40 that do talk about all these issues. But Principal Doctrine 31 says “the justice of nature is a covenant of advantage not to injure one another or be injured.” And I would say it’s probably fair to derive from that that the very word “covenant” implies a democratic process and the free choice of the individual as opposed to the imposition of enactments by the lawgiver — or “the golden few,” as in Plato’s system.

Cassius: It seems like most commentators reach conclusions similar to that, but I agree that there is certainly not an Epicurean-philosophy-specific endorsement of a particular system of government. He doesn’t praise democracy at any point that I can see. On the other hand, he’s clearly warning people against participating as a lackey of a king. The individual often does not have the ability to control what type of government he finds himself under — but the individual has the goal of happiness. I would presume that what we’re saying here is that to the extent possible, the individual is going to maneuver and navigate within whatever system he finds himself for his happiness, to the extent that he can. Right, and there’s that story of the flight from Mytilene and the angry Platonists he had ruffled up when he was there. But in general, you’re totally right — we can say for certain things like: do kings have a divine right to hold power given by a god? No, of course not, that you couldn’t say that in Epicurean theory. Were the pharaohs of Egypt gods themselves? No, that’s not true either. So there are a very small handful of specific situations where we can say for sure one way or another. But for the most part, a lot of detail gets filled in in a conversation like this one, because there just aren’t enough surviving texts to really know in detail what he would have suggested as far as government. I understand the Roman example — if not Greek — would be that there would be times in war or a particular threat to the country where you would have a dictator. But on the other hand, the Romans, at least in the republican period, were very anti-kingship. So it’s always seemed to me that it made the most sense that you just have to decide your governmental issues based on the context you’re facing. We do have ideologies that seem to control the way people think — you’ll get wedded to a particular position that this form of government is always the best in every situation for every person at every time. And that approach does not seem to me, at least, to be what Epicurus would be advising. He’s constantly looking at the context of the situation. And if we would go further into the doctrines on justice, it’s interesting how they do seem to focus on the idea that changing circumstances will determine whether a particular law is just or not just — and in fact he specifically says that a law which is just at the beginning, if circumstances change, becomes unjust.

Cassius: I would think that one of the fundamentals of this whole discussion is that your engagement in politics is going to be very context-dependent. What starts this discussion with DeWitt is Principal Doctrine 5: “It is impossible to live pleasurably without living according to reason, honor, and justice.” It seems to me he’s probably right to point out that you’re living pleasurably as an individual by following rules of conduct that make sense and lead you to neither harm nor be harmed by other people. The focus is on your individual conduct and your own relationship with the people around you as the best way to guarantee your happiness and safety — which gets into the friendship discussions. Part of how Epicurus understands his relation to government and society, and in some ways his removal from it into his garden — although it wasn’t like the garden was on a mountaintop. It’s not like a Japanese temple where it’s so far away that you can’t even get to it. It’s on the main road outside of the Dipylon Gate. But he sees what has happened to Anaxagoras, who was condemned to die for his philosophy and survived only by exile in Lampsacus. He saw what happened to Socrates, who was condemned to die and did drink the hemlock. So things like that have to inform the way he positions himself in relation to prevailing systems of government, because sometimes it’s just not worth dying for the right to teach your philosophy in the gymnasium, if it’s just as good to teach your philosophy in your own private garden.

Joshua: And this is another point that Socrates, at his own trial, had to deal with — because they accused him of denying that the Sun was a divinity. And he said, essentially, “You know, it’s ludicrous to accuse me of this one. For one thing, I haven’t even put this position forward. But for another, Anaxagoras’s books are available in the marketplace for a drachma. And he did claim that the Sun was a hot ball of metal the size of the Peloponnese.”

Cassius: Yeah. And Joshua, that leads into what closes this section with, and I think the ultimate point he’s making is worth repeating. He contrasts Epicurus with Plato in the issue of whether your model is looking up at the stars and seeing the regularity with which those move, versus just looking at the way life is here on Earth and how living things pursue pleasure. In other words, Epicurus is accusing Plato of seeking the music of the spheres — some type of celestial necessity and regularity as the model. But when Epicurus looks at life, and of course his atomism and the Swerve and so forth, he is seeing a different model by which to go. And that DeWitt says that “Epicurus and Plato stood at opposite extremes in advocating regimentation.” I think that probably is a useful point. Epicurus is warning — I think in the letter to Pythocles — that you’re not attempting to come up with a theory of everything in explaining the movement of what’s going on in the skies above you. You’re looking basically to understand it in a way that will allow you to be happy, in a way that will allow you to explain things in a natural way without the requirement of supernatural gods controlling everything. There’s just an essential difference in looking, as Plato was doing, to a perfect form of government as he was talking about in his Republic, versus just looking at the reality of the way things are here on Earth.

Joshua: It’s that idea that you can look to the heavenly spheres for inspiration as to how to order government on Earth that informs what in the Middle Ages was this idea of the Great Chain of Being — that at the very bottom you had mineral, then vegetable, then lower order of animals and then higher order of animals, and then wives were subservient to husbands, and children to parents, and the lower classes to the upper classes, and the nobility to the king, and then the king ultimately to what was above him, and then above that you have angels and archangels and so on until you get up to God and Jesus at his right hand. And of course for an Epicurean, things just don’t work like that.

Cassius: No. Nature — and I mentioned this recently in reference to Thomas Hobbes, who said that life in nature is nasty, brutish, and short — it doesn’t take much time to study nature to recognize that there is no pact between lions and sheep, or between wolves and their prey. That nature isn’t like that, and to look to nature for cues to how we govern ourselves only works if you have blinders on and you’re unwilling to see how nature really does operate.

Cassius: Okay, we’ll move on to “Freedom and Public Careers” after that. Again, we’re treating this at a high level and not attempting to get into some of the details that hopefully we’ll be able to get into in the future when we discuss some of the more recent writing. In fact, I mentioned previously the book Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy. There’s also an article out there that is very interesting on the same topic by Jeffrey Fish entitled “Not All Politicians Are Sisyphus.” There’s a lot of good work on this issue that we’re not going to be able to cover today. But the general issue in this relatively short section on public careers is that Epicurus was suggesting that it’s a very unwise idea to base your career — the majority of the way you spend your time — in a field that is going to put you at the mercy of the crowd, at the mercy of other people who are notoriously fickle and cannot be counted upon. That if you’re looking for safety, security, and stability in the pursuit of happiness, you’re going to want to maintain a level of independence from that, which is just not generally consistent with a career in politics.

Joshua: Or any kind of really public persona in any field. Socrates was not a politician, but when a bare majority decides whether you live or die, some years that’s going to go in your favor, some years it’s not, and it only takes one time to not go in your favor for the effect to be permanent. So there’s a point to which removing yourself from some of this just is good for your longevity. Because when you look at an area that we often look at, Cassius, which is this period at the end of the Roman Republic when Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus are forging an empire, the remnants of the Republic — just about every major person in that story dies violently. Stick your head out of the tall grass and you’re likely to get it cut off. It seems to be human nature that you’re going to attract envy and dislike the more powerful or famous you become.

Cassius: DeWitt carries this forward by pointing out that at his time there had been a division between those who were advocating that the active life, the political life was the best life for the Greek, versus those who advocated contemplation and withdrawal as the best life. DeWitt says Epicurus heightened the heat of the controversy by rejecting both the political life and the contemplative life as Plato and Aristotle had extolled it. There was a monk — I think it was Bodhidharma, the first patriarch to bring Buddhism to China — and the story is that he sat in a cave staring at the wall for so long that his eyes burned two holes into the wall. Epicurus is not advocating that level of removal from society. He’s not in the center of it, but he’s not so far removed from it that he’s burning holes in the walls of a cave with his eyes. He’s right there on the Dipylon Road — really no more removed from society than the Academy, which was also on that road. So it’s not so much the physical removal that is important to him. In practice, in many ways, he removed himself from society by not seeking public favor, by not taking the political route, by not teaching in the gymnasium. He avoided those practices, but he also didn’t go into the desert and become a hermit. He avoided both of the extremes.

Cassius: I think DeWitt does a pretty good job with this, and he says that “discerning the approach of Epicurus is not difficult. The objective of life is happiness, and to attain this the individual must retain control of his experience.” And this is where he gets back into this double choice. He says the control means the choice of two things — you have to choose your attitude and then you choose the particular instance. The most important is to choose the attitude. He quotes Diogenes of Oinoanda saying “the secret of happiness is in the diathesis, the attitude, of which we are the sole arbiters.” But that doesn’t mean that in any particular instance you’re going to be able to follow your general inclination. DeWitt goes on to point out that there are careers in both democracies and royal courts, but that he was recommending that the best idea was to try to avoid both of those if you could. And this bleeds back into the issue of living the simple life. He says in Vatican Saying 67: “A life of freedom cannot acquire great wealth because of success in this being difficult apart from servitude to mobs or to monarchs.” He cites Seneca as saying that Epicurus had told his friend Idomeneus that he should do his best to escape from the court of the ruler “and make haste before some major emergency should arrive and deprive you of the liberty of withdrawing.” And along with that, he cites Vatican Saying 58: “We must plan our escape from the prison house of the conventional education and political careers.” Which is a subject that both Plutarch and Cicero and many others over time have used to criticize Epicurus because they’re saying that Epicurus is advising absolute non-participation in public affairs or the protection of the public, which I think goes too far in accusing Epicurus, because I don’t think Epicurus suggested that you should turn a total blind eye to what’s going on around you. Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens uses the illustration of Epicurus himself going to the aid of a friend of his who was in jeopardy of drowning in a stream. You simply have to, at certain times, take action.

Joshua: Yeah, one thing I don’t see mentioned in this chapter is this inscription which records Philonides of Laodicea. It’s one of the oldest inscriptions that gives any record of the work of any Epicurean. He lived between approximately 200 and 130 BC, and he was at court in the Seleucid dynasty during the reigns of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Demetrius I Soter — which means “savior.” And there’s this inscription which celebrates him and his activities. So in one of the earliest surviving physical remnants of anything relating to Epicureanism, we have this inscription celebrating the political career of an Epicurean. So it’s clear that from the very earliest period, it was kind of a mixed question as to whether they would go into politics or not. You can cite examples in which they did, and of course many examples in which they didn’t.

Cassius: One episode that it does mention here in this section is about Cicero complaining to Atticus after the assassination of Julius Caesar. He accuses Atticus of mentioning Epicurus and daring to warn him to keep out of the political game. Atticus is one of your examples of someone who was not necessarily engaged himself in the middle of taking a political position, but he was maneuvering within this political environment in which he ended up trying to remain friends with everyone on both sides of the issue.

Joshua: Yeah, Cicero was killed when he was being carried in his litter — his hands and his tongue were nailed to the Senate door. He did certainly meet an extremely gruesome end.

Cassius: Yeah. There’s a life of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos that is preserved from that period, that gives a long discussion of Atticus’s devotion to Epicurean philosophy as well as his experience as a leading Roman of the time. I constantly refer to Cassius Longinus as another Epicurean who’s intimately involved in political action, but perhaps Atticus might be one of the most well-documented and best examples of how it’s generally best, if you can, to try to remain on good terms with as many people as you can. And Atticus was apparently very successful at doing that even in the middle of one of the most divisive periods of Roman history.

Joshua: Yes, and one of the great scholars of Lucretius, Denis Lambinus — really one of the most influential scholars ever to work on the poem — also edited a life of Atticus by Cornelius Nepos, so that’s out there if you want to go read that.

Cassius: Now continuing on, there’s another subsection called “Control of Environment.” I think we’re basically continuing to talk about the same general subject. In this section, DeWitt talks about the phrase “live unknown” — lathē biōsas — that is reported by Plutarch to have been associated with Epicurus. DeWitt says this saying is not found in the extant writings of Epicurus and is reported by Plutarch invidiously, as if Epicurus had courted fame by his writings while advising his disciples to shun it. But DeWitt says that Epicurus was not averse to fame provided it became unsought. What he did desire, in fact, was a fame that was earned and deserved. His warning was against the notoriety that is earned in the public assembly and on the street. The other point to be made there is one that Diogenes Laertius makes when he says that Epicurus’s friends cannot be counted by whole cities — that his influence has spread so wide and so far, but that he has made so many more friends than enemies by doing it in the way that he did it. It seems like the general consensus is that during Epicurus’s lifetime he was well-liked in Athens. He wasn’t persecuted in Athens. No evidence that he was ever hauled up on any kind of charges. And he was writing letters to Epicurean schools around the Aegean. The early growth of the Epicurean school, as DeWitt said early on in this book, was in Ionia and in Asia Minor — it actually wasn’t on the Greek mainland. And partially because of Epicurus’s early work to establish Epicurean communities in places like Lampsacus, Samos, Lesbos — all of those little islands that are on the other side of the Aegean from mainland Greece.

Joshua: One thing we haven’t talked about is Epicurus’s somewhat controversial advice of what you should do if you come into windfall wealth. Because it bears directly on this question, doesn’t it?

Cassius: He says, actually I do have the exact quote, because it’s on page 190: “A life of freedom cannot amass great wealth because of success in this life being difficult apart from servitude to mobs or monarchs. But it does enjoy all things in uninterrupted abundance. If, however, now and then great wealth does fall to its lot, it would gladly disperse this to win the goodwill of its neighbor.” So the idea in Epicureanism — and it takes a little bit to sort of set this up — is that having networks of well-supported friends, that in itself is a safety net better than almost any other safety net you can have, right? And you don’t establish that just so you can use it, but so that as you will in times of need rely on your friends, your friends in times of need will rely on you. And by combining those together, you get communities — not communes, because Epicurus did not advise holding wealth in common — but communities and networks of friendship that spanned many cities across the Aegean, where people in difficult times could always have someone they could count on. Lucian describes the episode in which Alexander the Oracle Monger paid the captain and crew of a ship to throw Epicurus’s friend overboard in the middle of a voyage, and he was able to get out of that partly because of the conscience of the captain who refused to do it, but partly because he had people he could rely on when he did make it to their next stop. So having networks of friends that can support you is more important than being Scrooge McDuck in a vault where you’re diving into piles of gold. The question is: how do you apply this? Because I’m not going to suggest to people listening to this that you should draw your 401k and just give it all away to your friends. I don’t think that’s a very wise course either.

Cassius: Yeah, to me, Joshua, this is where you see that the issue of total withdrawal from politics makes no sense at all and really could not have been Epicurus’s position. He’s saying — DeWitt quotes on page 190 — Principal Doctrine 27: “Of all the preparations that wisdom makes for the blessedness of the perfect life, by far the most precious is the acquisition of friendship.” And to me, the way he’s talking about all this and fitting it into the big picture, we’re not just talking about tea parties and who you play cards with on Saturday night. We’re talking about a strong, continuous relationship with people that you’re living nearby and living with. I don’t see a significant bright line between this and the whole issue of how society is organized in the first place. He’s not really telling you what to do in terms of where to draw your state lines or your county lines. He’s just telling you that you need a network of people around you who are supportive of you, who you like, who like you, and who can interact with you on an ongoing basis to live happily together. To me that sounds an awful lot like a society. This sounds like a much more general relationship that encompasses just about every aspect of your life. He’s telling you to study with your friends the philosophy of nature, and that that’s the best way to pursue happiness. All of this comes together in this general relationship that it’s more important to have the support of people around you than it is to have money or anything like that. Friendship is almost an immortal good. It’s almost as if he’s saying that money, food, all these other issues are sort of temporary things that change dramatically in context as time goes on, but that the way you need to look at things in general is that no matter what circumstances come your way, you need friends to work with you to deal with them. And so DeWitt says “the innovation of Epicurus was to advise making a systematic business of friendship. It was not, in his opinion, sufficient to leave the winning and keeping of goodwill to chance and opportunity. To win and to keep it was to become an integral part of the control of the environment for the sake of happiness and security, which meant freedom. Friends are made where possible, hostility is neutralized where possible, and contacts are avoided where neutrality or friendship is impossible.”

Cassius: I think we do tend to think of this in terms of who do we like to talk to on the telephone, or who do we go have lunch with on occasion. It seems to me this is a much more sweeping advice — that you organize every aspect of your life among people who you have an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed with. This is the way you’re going to structure your whole life. If everyone around you is starving, you’re not going to be able to maintain your own happiness for very long. And he talks about an example recorded apparently by Plutarch about there being a time in Athens where the Epicureans had to divide the beans among themselves. So I see this as just hugely important in the application of Epicurean philosophy. It’s not just a matter of thinking about correct philosophy and understanding your relationship to gods and pleasure and virtue and things like that. You actually apply it and live it through surrounding yourself by people who are your friends who see things similarly.

Cassius: So that leads us to “Freedom in the Simple Life,” which is of course a continuing theme. In this context, it seems like he’s emphasizing the aspect that in your relationships with other people and your ability to continue to have control over your environment, the best way to have control over your environment and the expectation of being able to maintain your happiness is to focus on a lifestyle in which you are able to be sure that you can continue that lifestyle. Maybe the buzzword nowadays is sustainability. That if you know that you have the ability to supply yourself with the things that you need, then you are much more independent of the ups and downs of life in general and of other people in the mob. He quotes the section: “We judge self-sufficiency to be a great good, not meaning that we should live on little under all circumstances, but that we may be content with little when we do not have plenty.”

Joshua: A little bit before that, Cassius, he says — I’m not sure who’s quoting here because he mentions Horace and Epicurus — but he says: “Before you look for something to eat and drink, you should look around for companions with whom to eat and drink. For life without a friend is just the roaring of a lion and a wolf.” That in some ways it’s not just beneficial to you, but it’s also a more civilized life, and it’s better and more pleasurable if you have friends to share it with.

Joshua: I like something that you find here on page 193 where he says, quoting Horace here I think, who says in Latin dulce est desipere in loco — which DeWitt says means not merely “it is a pleasure to forget one’s philosophy on occasion,” but that “it is a special pleasure to forget one’s philosophy on occasion.”

Cassius: We talk about this typically in reference to things like food. If a fine dinner is presented to you, you’re not going to refuse that for the sake of simplicity — that would be silly. I mentioned last week Diogenes the Cynic refusing fine garments and demanding his threadbare cloak back. An Epicurean is not going to make that choice. If they’re presented with something nicer than what they’re accustomed to, they’re going to take it because it’s pleasurable. The danger would be becoming accustomed to something that is beyond your means to sustain. But that phrase — “it is a special pleasure to forget one’s philosophy on occasion” — is something I’m going to have to remember.

Cassius: Yes, I guess the dulce Latin that you’re quoting evokes Book Two of Lucretius, right? Dulce means it’s sweet, is that?

Joshua: Yeah. It’s sweet to occasionally forget — in circumstances. Now, DeWitt’s paraphrasing that and extending it to talk about philosophy. It’s sweet to sometimes forget yourself, it’s sweet to sometimes forget your place, I think. Yeah, because like you said, that’s a reference to what DeWitt’s going to talk about next in terms of the condensation of pleasure. I have that quote from Horace, if you want me to read it.

Cassius: Okay, yes.

Joshua: He says: “It is delightful to play the fool occasionally. It is nice to throw aside one’s dignity and relax at the proper time.”

Cassius: The point he’s making is that we’re not following a simple lifestyle in order to just follow a simple lifestyle. We’re following it so that we can be unshrinking before the inevitable vicissitudes of life and fearless in the face of fortune, because we know that we can be happy even if we do have only the simple diet. But when we are confronted with the possibilities or able to obtain the more luxurious diet or lifestyle, we don’t shrink back from that either — we just don’t accustom ourselves to it and believe that it’s necessary for our happiness.

Cassius: Right. You’re not going to bankrupt yourself looking for the best meal that money can buy and trying to live on that, because you won’t be able to do it. And the pain that is going to accrue to you is going to be far, far greater than the pleasure you get from eating it. And so this last section about “Control of Desires,” as you were saying a moment ago, Joshua, is focused on basically this: that you need to maintain an understanding of the big picture and not let yourself get carried away out of context with pursuing things that are not necessary. DeWitt is again avoiding the terminology of both Plato and Aristotle. He’s not talking about the harmonies between parts of the soul or about a mean in virtues. He’s setting up the logical construct that in order to be happy, a man must possess freedom — but freedom is not a right but an achievement, and it consists in maintaining and retaining control of your experience under all circumstances. And that’s not going to be the Stoic suppression of desire. It’s going to be looking at your circumstances, realizing that happiness is your goal, but doing what’s necessary under the individual circumstances to best achieve happiness — not just for the sake of controlling everything, but because control leads you to the happiest result. And he goes on to say, quoting Vatican Saying 59: “People say the stomach is insatiable, but it is not the stomach that is insatiable. They have a false opinion about the limitless quantity required to fill the stomach.” In other words, it’s the desire that has grown out of all proportion to what is really needful. To emancipate oneself from this servitude to false opinion and to make every act an act of choice is made possible through practical reason. And he considers that to be an attitude that when you understand that some things are natural and necessary and you fit them into all those categories, that gives you a general understanding of the possibilities that confront you. But then within that general understanding, you have to do what is stated in Vatican Saying 71: “You look at the particular choice according to the question: what will be the result for me if the object of this desire is fulfilled, and what if it is not fulfilled?” It’s plain pragmatism, as DeWitt says here — the control of experience for the sake of happiness. You don’t really gain anything by simply spending all your time thinking about categories and trying to fit everything into a specific label. You gain an understanding through a process of that that is helpful, but in the end what you have to do is look at every particular choice that’s in front of you and ask what’s going to happen if you pursue it and what’s going to happen if you don’t. And simply because you choose to follow a formula that has worked for you in the past is no guarantee of future results, as they say in the financial industry. You have to look at every circumstance and make the decision that’s going to be the best under the terms of your situation.

Cassius: So as we begin to reach the end of Chapter 10, the final issue is how Lucretius makes the point that the freedom that we have — we’ve been discussing all through this chapter — allows us to hope to attain a happy life. DeWitt says the text of Lucretius is explicit: “In these matters I do seem able to make this assertion, that so infinitesimal are the residual traces of natural faults which reason cannot eradicate from the educated that nothing hinders them from passing a life worthy of the gods.” And for the remainder of the chapter here, DeWitt talks about how Lucretius had identified that within animals there’d be certain types of atoms or arrangements of atoms that would lead them to have particular personalities — maybe the lion being potentially angry or hot-tempered, other people being cooler and maybe less inclined to anger — but the general point here is the last sentence of the chapter: “Thus the individual gains control of experience, which is the prerequisite of happiness.” So maybe the general foundation of all of this is that the atomist philosophy — the Swerve that provides the basis for free will and the ability to affect our future — provides us an understanding by which we can take action that will produce beneficial results and allow us to live more happily than if we would otherwise. Certainly if we were bound by necessity we would have no ability to control our futures, but the bottom line conclusion of all this is that we have the ability to take action, and therefore, given the shortness of life, we should live as happily as possible.

Joshua: Since you brought up education — I have a degree in the liberal arts, so I’m going to quote from the page on Wikipedia where it says: in fourth-century BC Athens, which is the time that Epicurus was born, “the government of the polis or city-state respected the ability of rhetoric or public speaking above almost everything else. Eventually rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic became the educational program of the trivium or the three-part way. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person — in Latin liberalis, worthy of a free person — to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life. Something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service.”

Cassius: Yes, we’ve spent all of Chapter 10, and as we bring it all to a conclusion today, the whole point of all of this is that the universe is so arranged that we have freedom of action — and that means educating ourselves, studying nature, and then applying the lessons that we learn from all of this to improve our lives. If the determinism of Democritus and hard determinism were the situation, there would be no reason for us to be concerned with any of this. We would just consider everything to be a matter of necessity and not worry about taking any particular actions ourselves. But because some things are within our control and life is short, it makes sense to use our time to improve our lives. Education and study of nature is the way to do it. Combining it with friendship — we have this problem that if our most important tool in life in obtaining happiness is to have friends, we do need friends who are in agreement with us. We need to have people who share our opinions and share our viewpoints on life as probably the firmest foundation of friendship — to have this general understanding of agreement not to harm each other, not to be harmed. And that means there’s a matter of talking to other people, communicating with them, and ascertaining who’s our friend and who’s not going to be our friend. All of this is a matter of communication with other people. We don’t just live the best life by reading a book and storing within our minds some knowledge without application. So we’ve come to the end of Chapter 10. Next week we’re going to start a whole new section on soul, sensation, and mind — Chapter 11. For today, hopefully we’ve over the last several episodes hit the issue of freedom and determinism hard enough. There’s a clear path to freedom, and neither determinism nor fate nor chance nor government nor law nor civic duties nor desire are so intrusive in your life that you can’t find a way to get to that freedom. That’s the whole purpose of the chapter. And that’s certainly a big struggle that a lot of people have in adverse conditions — you get to the feeling like everything is stacked against you. At root, you need an attitude of realizing that your life is short, but you do have some flexibility. No matter how bad the cards you may be dealt at a particular time, it’s up to you to do the best with the table as it’s set for you. There’s not a supernatural god, there’s not a force of fate or a force of luck that’s going to come to your assistance. Ultimately, things are to a large degree something that you have to take charge of yourself. So maybe with that we should go to closing statements for the day and for the chapter. Martin, closing thoughts?

Martin: I have nothing to add. Okay.

Cassius: Callistheni, anything today?

Callistheni: I have nothing to add. Thank you.

Joshua: Not fully related, but I’m reading the PDF as we go through this, and I’m on page 205 out of 397 — and of course that’s including all of the extra material at the back of the book that we won’t read. So we seem to be well over halfway in our project of going through this book — we are making progress. This has been one of those sections that possibly takes people by surprise when they go through a book like this and think that they’re going to hear all about the details of pleasure. But it’s a foundational point that if we don’t have the ability to make choices and see the results of our choices, then everything else falls apart. So we’ve started out in the process by eliminating that, and we continue through the practical application of nature as we find it.

Cassius: Okay, well, with that we have completed Chapter 10, and we’ll be back next week to take up Chapter 11 — “Soul, Sensation, and Mind.” In the meantime, please come by the forum and let us know any questions or comments, or just engage in general discussion about Epicurus with us. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.