Against The Humanists From An Epicurean Perspective

Why Humanism Matters to Epicureans

“Humanism” is a hard word to pin down. Stoicism had a founder, a school and a set of doctrines. Platonism and Aristotelianism have their master’s books. Humanism has none of these. The word has been used for at least four different things:

• The Renaissance humanists. In fifteenth-century Italy a humanista was a teacher of the studia humanitatis, the “humane studies” of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, a phrase taken from Cicero. Petrarch, Valla, Pico, Erasmus and Thomas More were humanists in this sense. They were scholars and Christians, and most of them were churchmen or devout laymen.
• The “dignity of man.” From the Renaissance onward the word came to stand for a view of man as a being of special worth, placed at the center of creation, free to shape himself and owed a reverence that no animal is owed.
• The religion of humanity. In the nineteenth century, thinkers who had given up Christian belief set out to keep its morality by putting Humanity in the place of God. Auguste Comte founded a “Religion of Humanity” with its own worship and calendar of saints. Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God had always been man’s own nature, projected into the sky.
• Organized Humanism. In the twentieth century the word was claimed by organizations that issued manifestos, beginning with the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, signed by John Dewey among others, and continuing with the declarations of Humanist associations today.

Modern Humanism is not a philosophy in the way that Epicurus’s teaching is a philosophy. It has no theory of knowledge of its own, no physics of its own and no account of the goal of life that it is willing to defend against all rivals. On the ultimate questions it is often careless. The 1933 Manifesto declares that the universe is “self-existing and not created,” but adds that “humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered.” Bertrand Russell, the most famous Humanist of the last century, admitted in 1918 that “I feel less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil.” This easy uncertainty about first principles places modern Humanism close to Skepticism. What it holds firmly is not a doctrine about nature but a set of moral feelings: the worth and dignity of every human being, duty to all mankind, and progress. Those feelings came from somewhere, and this introduction traces where. They did not come from Epicurus.

Epicureans need to understand Humanism for three reasons.

First, Humanism is the tradition most often confused with Epicurean philosophy today. Many people who are drawn to Epicurus call themselves Humanists, and Humanist writers claim Epicurus and Lucretius as their ancestors. Corliss Lamont’s Humanism as a Philosophy (1949) gives Epicurus and Lucretius an honored place in “the Humanist tradition.” Both traditions reject supernatural religion, and both say that this life is the only one. It is easy to conclude that they are the same thing. They are not.

Second, Humanism kept the moral structure of the traditions Epicurus fought. Plato, the Stoics and the Christian writers taught that there is an absolute Good that stands above the feelings of the individual and commands him. Humanism removed the gods and the Forms, but it kept the absolute Good. It renamed it Human Dignity, Duty, Humanity or Progress, and it went on imposing it on individuals as before. In contrast, Epicurus taught that “we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.” Humanism has never accepted that standard.

Third, Humanism has a long history of adopting Epicurus in name while rejecting what is essential to him. The Renaissance humanists brought Epicurus back into European thought. But Lorenzo Valla made his Epicurean speaker lose the debate to a Christian, Erasmus argued that pious Christians are the true Epicureans, and Thomas More let his Utopians pursue pleasure only after binding them to believe in the immortal soul and divine providence. Modern Humanists praise Epicurus as a gentle elderly sage but reject his ethics. Lamont writes that he has “criticized as unsound the ethics of setting up pleasure-seeking as the supreme human aim.” Readers who meet Epicurus through Humanist books meet a Humanist caricature of Epicurus: a mild teacher of quiet living, with the pleasure removed.

The rest of this introduction begins with Nietzsche, the sharpest critic of Humanism, who also admired Epicurus. It then traces the historical record from Boethius to the present, and follows the three divisions of Epicurean philosophy: the Canon, or how we know the truth; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live. Each section states the Humanist position in the Humanists’ own words, with links to the passages, and then sets out the Epicurean response. The passages themselves are collected on three pages, each with an Epicurean guide of its own:

• Boethius and the Renaissance: Boethius, Petrarch, Pico (as summarized by Jacob Burckhardt), Erasmus’s colloquy “The Epicurean” and Thomas More’s Utopia.
• Kant, Comte, Feuerbach and Russell: Kant on dignity and duty, Comte’s Religion of Humanity, Feuerbach’s “man is a god to man,” and Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship.”
• Nietzsche on Humanism: Nietzsche on the Christian morality that survived the death of God, and on Epicurus.

Nietzsche’s Diagnosis: Christian Morality Without God

Why Begin with Nietzsche

Many self-styled Epicureans today regard Humanism as a friend. To criticize Humanism can look like an attack on reason, science and kindness. The best answer to that impression is a witness who stood outside both Christianity and Humanism, who understood both, and who also understood Epicurus. That witness is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).

Nietzsche’s opinions varied as he grew older, but even in his worst moods he was far from an enemy of Epicurus. In The Joyful Wisdom Nietzsche wrote: “Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus differently from anyone else perhaps,” and he saw in Epicurus “the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity.” In The Antichrist he named Epicurus as the great opponent of the religion of guilt and immortality: “One has only to read Lucretius in order to understand what Epicurus combated,” not paganism but “the corruption of souls through the concept of guilt, through the concept of punishment and immortality.” Nietzsche added: “to deny immortality was at that time a genuine deliverance.” Epicureans need not accept Nietzsche’s whole program, with its focus on struggle, to see that on this point his diagnosis is correct and in many cases Epicurus and Nietzsche waged war against the same opponents.

”They Are Rid of the Christian God”

Nietzsche’s most direct statement about Humanism is a short paragraph on George Eliot, the English novelist who translated Feuerbach and gave up her Christian faith while keeping its morality: “They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality.” Nietzsche denies that this can be done: “When we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon all right to Christian morality.” The reason is that “Christianity is a system, a complete outlook upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the whole is destroyed.” Christian morality “is a command, its origin is transcendental,” and “it stands or falls with the belief in God.” The Humanist who thinks he knows “intuitively, and of their own accord, what is good and evil” only shows how deeply he is still ruled by Christian values: “For Englishmen morality is not yet a problem.”

This is the heart of the matter. The Humanist claims to have thrown off religion, but he kept the moral commands that religion gave, now with nothing beneath them.

The Shadow of God

Nietzsche’s famous announcement that “God is dead” is not a cry of triumph. It is a warning that the work is not done. “God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow,—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” In the parable of the madman, the people in the market-place who “did not believe in God” laugh at the madman, because they do not see what they have done. He asks them: “Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?” The Religion of Humanity is the answer Nietzsche feared: man does become the god, and worships himself.

”I Am Morality Itself”

What survives in the shadow of God is the belief that there is one morality for all. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says that in Europe “people evidently know what Socrates thought he did not know,” namely what is good and evil, and that their morality “says obstinately and inexorably ‘I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!’” The political form of this belief is the creed of equal rights and universal duty: “the democratic movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement.” In The Antichrist Nietzsche traces equal rights back to the doctrine of the immortal soul. “When the centre of gravity of life is laid” in a world beyond, “life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts.” The idea that each soul has infinite worth is a Christian idea, and “The poison of the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’—has been dispensed with the greatest thoroughness by Christianity.”

Nietzsche aims the same charge at Kant, the great philosopher of duty and of human dignity: ““Virtue,” “Duty,” “Goodness in itself,” goodness stamped with the character of impersonality and universal validity—these things are mere mental hallucinations.” Against Kant he states a rule that Epicurus would have accepted: “An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it.” And he notes that Kant, the “nihilist with the bowels of a Christian dogmatist,” regarded happiness as an objection (The Antichrist 11, tr. Ludovici).

Nietzsche saw that the Stoics had done the same thing long before. They claimed to live “according to Nature,” but “In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature.” Every philosophy that “begins to believe in itself” does the same: “It always creates the world in its own image."

"We Are No Humanitarians”

Nietzsche refused the name that so many of his readers would later want to give him. “We are no humanitarians; we should not dare to speak of our ‘love of mankind’.” He saw in the gentle, humane age around him not strength but weakness dressed up as virtue: “weakness makes people gentle, alas, so gentle, so just, so inoffensive, so ‘humane’!”

What the Epicurean Takes from Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s analysis gives the Epicurean a simple test for any moral rule that is said to survive the loss of belief in the gods. Where does it come from? If it can be traced back to the pleasure and pain of actual living beings, it stands. If it can only be traced back to God, to the Forms or to an abstract Duty, then removing God has removed its support, whatever its defenders feel.

Epicurus had already built an ethics on that test, more than two thousand years earlier. He did not need to keep Christian morality after dropping Christian theology, because he had never had either. Justice, for Epicurus, “never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another … it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed” (Principal Doctrine 33). Virtue is valued for the pleasant life it brings. The feeling of pleasure and pain is the standard. That is why the Epicurean can agree with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Humanism without following Nietzsche elsewhere. Humanism is what happens when men abandon the gods but cannot bring themselves to take pleasure as the standard. Epicurus took that step, but Humanism never has.

Humanists and Epicureans: The Historical Record

Boethius: The Precursor

Boethius (about AD 477–524) was a Roman senator and Christian who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison while awaiting execution. He was not a humanist. He belongs to the last age of the ancient world. But the Renaissance humanists honored him as a model, and the Consolation was among the most read books of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It shows the attitude to Epicurus that the humanists inherited.

In the Consolation, Lady Philosophy explains that after the death of Socrates the schools fought over her inheritance: “the Epicurean herd, the Stoic, and the rest,” each “went about to seize the heritage he left,” and “they tore in pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands.” For Boethius, true philosophy is the teaching of Socrates and Plato, and Epicurus is a thief of a fragment of it.

Boethius knew the Epicurean question about the gods and evil, and puts it in his own mouth: “If God exists, whence comes evil? Yet whence comes good, if He exists not?” The rest of the book is Philosophy’s answer. He grants that Epicurus “with some consistency concluded the highest good to be pleasure,” but only as one of the false paths men take toward happiness. The true path ends in God. Philosophy proves that God and the highest good are one, and draws the conclusion: “So every man who is happy is a god,” not in his own nature but “by participation in that nature.”

Epicurus also spoke of living “like a god among men,” but in a very different sense. The Epicurean gods are living beings who enjoy perfect pleasure, and a man who lives pleasantly and without fear shares their kind of life. For Boethius, happiness means union with the one God who is the Good itself. The humanists would carry this idea forward: man’s worth lies in his likeness to a manipulative and meddling God.

Petrarch: Turning Away from Nature

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) is often called the first humanist. He revived the study of Cicero and Seneca, collected manuscripts, and wrote letters to the ancient authors as if they were his friends. In one of them he scolds Cicero for his treatment of Epicurus: “You are continually praising his life, but his talents you ridicule.” Petrarch knew that Epicurus was “held in disrepute among the vulgar but esteemed by those better able to judge.”

But Petrarch’s own philosophy was Augustine’s. His most famous letter tells how he climbed Mount Ventoux in 1336 and, at the summit, opened Augustine’s Confessions at random. He read: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” He closed the book, “angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself.”

This is the founding scene of humanism, and it is the opposite of Lucretius. Lucretius taught that the terror and darkness of the mind “must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature.” Petrarch climbed a mountain and turned his eyes inward, away from nature, to the soul.

In his dialogue The Secret, Petrarch has Saint Augustine teach him that “to recollect one’s misery and to practise frequent meditation on death is the surest aid in scorning the seductions of this world.” Augustine tells him that “of all tremendous realities Death is the most tremendous,” and that “We must picture to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily frame,” down to the sunken eyes and the smell of the corpse. Epicurus taught the opposite: that “death is nothing to us,” and that the right understanding of death “makes the mortality of life enjoyable.”

Lorenzo Valla: Epicurus on Trial

Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) wrote On Pleasure (De voluptate, 1431, later revised as On the True and the False Good), a dialogue in three books. A Stoic speaker praises virtue. An Epicurean speaker, the poet Maffeo Vegio, answers him with a bold defense of pleasure as the only good. Valla gave the Epicurean the best speeches, and the book was long suspected of being a disguised defense of Epicurus.

But the last word belongs to a Christian, the friar Antonio da Rho. In Book III he declares: “I have now confuted or condemned both the Epicurean and Stoic dogmas, and have shown that the highest good, or the good that ought to be desired, is not found in either school or among any philosophers, but does exist in our religion, being attainable not on earth but in the heavens.” Valla’s solution is that pleasure is indeed the good, but the true pleasure is the joy of heaven. This became the standard humanist way of dealing with Epicurus: accept the word “pleasure,” and move its object to the next world.

Pico della Mirandola: The Dignity of Man

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) wrote the speech that gave humanism its motto, the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) shaped the modern idea of the Renaissance, summarized and translated its central passage. God speaks to Adam: “I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayst sink into a beast, and be born anew to the divine likeness.”

Here is the root of the humanist idea of human dignity. Man’s worth lies in his freedom to rise toward God or sink toward the beasts. His dignity is a rank in a cosmic order created by God, and his task is to climb. Every later appeal to the “dignity of man” carries this picture with it, even when God is no longer named.

Burckhardt also describes how the Renaissance saw Epicurus. Epicureanism, known from Lucretius and Cicero, “is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless universe.” Dante placed the Epicureans in burning tombs in Hell, and “their sin against the Church lay in their general disposition, which was summed up in the belief that the soul dies with the body.” The Church understood why this doctrine was dangerous: “it took away all reason for her interference in the affairs of men after death.”

Erasmus: The Christianized Epicurean

Desiderius Erasmus (about 1466–1536), the most famous scholar of northern Europe, wrote one of his last colloquies on Epicurus. In “The Epicurean” (1533), two friends discuss Cicero’s On Ends. Spudaeus, the serious one, prefers the Stoics. Hedonius, the lover of pleasure, says “I like no Sect so well as the Epicureans,” and states Epicurus’s teaching fairly: “He places the Happiness of Man in Pleasure, and judges that Life to be most blessed, that has most Pleasure, and least Pain.” He even asks, “What can be more divine than this Sentence?”

Then he turns the argument. “If we will speak the Truth, none are greater” Epicureans “than those Christians that live a pious Life.” The proof rests on premises that Epicurus rejected: that soul and body differ as “immortal and mortal,” and “that God himself is the chiefest Good.” The chief pleasure is a clear conscience and “Peace with God.” In the end Erasmus gives the name of Epicurean to Christ himself: “no Body more deserves the Name of an” Epicurean “than that adorable Prince of Christian Philosophers,” because the Greek word epikouros means “helper.”

Erasmus’s colloquy is often cited as a defense of Epicurus. It is better described as a capture. Erasmus kept the word “pleasure” and the name “Epicurean,” and filled them with the Christian God, the immortal soul and the fear of sin. Nothing of Epicurus’s physics, his theology or his teaching on death survives in it.

Thomas More: Pleasure Under Guard

Thomas More (1478–1535), Erasmus’s friend, described an ideal commonwealth in Utopia (1516). The Utopians are the most Epicurean people in Renaissance literature. “They seem, indeed, more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part, of a man’s happiness in pleasure.” They weigh pleasures as Epicurus did: “that a lesser pleasure might not stand in the way of a greater, and that no pleasure ought to be pursued that should draw a great deal of pain after it.”

But the Utopians base their pursuit of pleasure on religion. They believe “That the soul of man is immortal,” and that God “has, therefore, appointed rewards for good and virtuous actions, and punishments for vice, to be distributed after this life.” Without these beliefs, they say, men would “seek after pleasure by all possible means, lawful or unlawful.” And the founder of Utopia, though he allowed every religion, “made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence.” Such men are thought “scarce fit to be counted men.” They are not punished, but “They never raise any that hold these maxims, either to honours or offices.”

Here the “dignity of human nature” is used directly against Epicurus. The two doctrines that More’s law forbids, the mortality of the soul and a world not governed by providence, are two pillars of Epicurean physics. In Utopia a true Epicurean could not hold public office.

The Religion of Humanity: Kant, Comte and Feuerbach

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many educated Europeans no longer believed in the Christian God, but almost none of them were willing to give up Christian morality. Three thinkers stand out among them.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a Christian, but he grounded morality on reason alone, without appeal to revelation. His formula of the moral law became the creed of modern Humanism: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.” He gave the modern meaning to the word “dignity”: “In the kingdom of ends everything has either value or dignity.” Whatever can be exchanged has a price, but “whatever, on the other hand, is above all value, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.” And Kant named Epicurus as the great error: “The Epicureans had indeed assumed as the supreme principle of morality a wholly false one, namely that of happiness, and had substituted for a law a maxim of arbitrary choice according to every man’s inclination.” The Stoics, by contrast, “had chosen their supreme practical principle quite rightly.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) founded Positivism, a philosophy that claimed to accept only the findings of science. He then founded a religion. “Love, then, is our principle; Order our basis; and Progress our end.” Its god is Humanity: “Towards Humanity, who is for us the only true Great Being, we, the conscious elements of whom she is composed, shall henceforth direct every aspect of our life, individual or collective.” Positivists will “regard life as a continuous and earnest act of worship.” Comte coined the word “altruism,” and his motto was “Live for Others.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) argued in The Essence of Christianity (1841) that religion is man’s worship of his own nature: “the consciousness of God is nothing else than the consciousness of the species.” His conclusion was not that the sacred should be abandoned, but that it should be moved: “If human nature is the highest nature to man, then practically also the highest and first law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est” (man is a god to man). “Let friendship be sacred to thee, property sacred, marriage sacred,—sacred the well-being of every man.” George Eliot translated this book into English in 1854. It was her morality that Nietzsche described when he wrote that “They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality.”

Organized Humanism: The Manifesto, Dewey, Russell and Lamont

In 1933 thirty-four American ministers, professors and writers, many of them Unitarian clergy, signed A Humanist Manifesto. They did not present Humanism as a philosophy. They presented it as a new religion. “Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions,” they wrote, and “To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present.” The Manifesto declares that “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created” and that “the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.” But it sets as “the end of man’s life” not pleasure but “the complete realization of human personality,” and it calls for “a socialized and cooperative economic order.”

John Dewey (1859–1952), the best-known signer, explained in A Common Faith (1934) that he would keep the word “God” for the union of ideals and actual conditions: “It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name ‘God’” (p. 51). He criticized “militant atheism” for its “lack of natural piety,” and argued that “Use of the words ‘God’ or ‘divine’ to convey the union of actual with ideal may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance” (p. 52).

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) accepted the Epicurean picture of nature more fully than any of them. In “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903) he wrote that man’s “origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” and “that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.” But he drew from these facts a conclusion that no Epicurean would draw: “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” And he built on that foundation a temple. “In this lies Man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.” The way into the temple runs through “a cavern of darkness”: “There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain.” In the same essay Russell condemned “The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us.”

Russell offers only two choices: worship Force, or worship “the God created by our own love of the good.” Epicurus would reject both, and he would reject the choice itself. Nietzsche’s attack on Christian and Humanist morality is not a worship of force, and neither is Epicurus’s. To deny that there is an absolute Good standing above the feelings of living beings is not to say that might makes right. Epicurus denied the absolute Good and still taught that justice is “a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed” (Principal Doctrine 31), and that the wise man lives at peace with his friends. Russell’s alternative, a “worship” of ideals that he admits are his own creation, keeps the form of religion after giving up its content. The Epicurean worships neither Force nor the Good. He measures every choice by the pleasure and pain it brings, and he finds that justice and friendship serve that measure far better than violence does.

Corliss Lamont (1902–1995), later honorary president of the American Humanist Association, wrote the standard account of Humanism as a philosophy. Lamont praises Epicurus, and calls him “perhaps the outstanding example of a great philosopher who has been perpetually misunderstood” (Humanism as a Philosophy, 1949, p. 51). But he rejects the core of Epicurean ethics. “This pleasure ethics is founded on a false analysis of human nature,” he writes (pp. 290–291), and “Humanism affirms the psychological possibility and the ethical desirability of intelligent altruism” (p. 291). He describes the Epicurean ethics as “an individual quietism of minimizing desire,” and he has “criticized as unsound the ethics of setting up pleasure-seeking as the supreme human aim” (p. 308).

Today’s organized Humanism states its creed in the Amsterdam Declaration (2002) of Humanists International: “Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual,” and “Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” The words are not Epicurus’s but Kant’s and Comte’s: dignity and duty to all humanity. Pleasure is not mentioned.

The Canon: How the Humanists Say We Know

Feeling Cannot Be the Standard

Epicurus taught that “the tests of truth are the sensations and concepts and the feelings,” and that the feeling of pleasure and pain is the standard of good and evil in action. Every major Humanist rejects the last part of this. Kant states the objection plainly: “feelings, which naturally differ infinitely in degree, cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil.” The principle of private happiness “is the most objectionable,” because “the springs it provides for morality are such as rather undermine it and destroy its sublimity, since they put the motives to virtue and to vice in the same class and only teach us to make a better calculation.” Lamont makes the same objection in the language of psychology: we do not desire objects because they please us, but find them pleasing because we desire them.

Epicurus answers that the feelings are not a theory but a faculty of nature, like the senses. A child and an animal recognize pleasure as good and pain as bad before any argument, and no argument can replace that recognition. The Humanist who distrusts the feelings must find his standard somewhere else, and he always finds it in reason: Kant’s “law,” Comte’s “Social Sympathy” guided by science, the Manifesto’s “intelligent inquiry,” the Amsterdam Declaration’s “methods of science and free inquiry.” But reason alone, cut off from the feelings, cannot tell a man what is good. It can only tell him what follows from what he already values. In practice the values that Humanist reason “discovers” are the Christian values it inherited.

The Retreat from Nature

The Epicurean canon starts from nature: from what the senses report and from the study of things as they are. Petrarch’s turn on Mount Ventoux set humanism on a different road, toward the inner life of the soul, the “dignity” of man and the moral feelings of the educated. The Renaissance humanists were masters of language, rhetoric and history, and many of them looked down on the study of nature. Modern Humanism claims the authority of science, but it uses science mainly to clear away religion, and then builds its ethics on moral feelings that science did not supply.

Uncertainty About First Principles

Because Humanism does not take its standard from the feelings, it cannot be sure of its standard at all. Russell, who wrote in 1903 of “the God created by our own love of the good,” confessed fifteen years later that he felt “less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil.” The Manifesto keeps the door open to “realities as yet undiscovered.” Dewey keeps the word “God” because it may protect men from “despair or defiance.” These are the habits of Skepticism: a refusal to commit on the ultimate questions, together with a strong attachment to the moral customs of the day. Epicurus held that knowledge is possible, that the senses and feelings are reliable when used with care, and that a man can know what is good for him.

Physics: The Dignity of Man in the Universe

Man at the Center

The Renaissance idea of human dignity depended on a picture of the universe in which man stands at the center of creation, between the angels and the beasts. Pico’s God tells Adam, “I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly,” and gives him “a growth and a development depending on thine own free will.” Boethius taught that happiness is union with the God who is the highest good.

Epicurus taught that the universe is infinite, that worlds without number come into being and pass away, and that man is one kind of living being among many, produced by nature without design. The world was not made for us. Lucretius: “the nature of the world has by no means been made for us by divine power: so great are the defects with which it stands encumbered.” There is no ladder of being for man to climb, no rank in a cosmic order that gives him a worth or a task beyond the pleasant life.

This does not mean that Epicurus offered no model to aspire to. He did. The gods are the model of the blessed life, and the man who lives by Epicurus’s teaching “shall live like a god among men.” But the life of the Epicurean gods is a life of perfect pleasure, free of trouble and fear, and to imitate them is to pursue that same pleasure as fully as a mortal can. The Humanist ideal is different in kind. Pico’s man rises toward a God who is the Good itself, Kant’s toward a moral law that “has nothing to do with enjoyment of life,” and the modern Humanist toward the “complete realization of human personality.” In each case the goal is something other than pleasure, set above pleasure and used to judge it. The Epicurean aspires to live as the gods live, pleasantly. The Humanist aspires to become something higher than he is, by a standard that is not pleasure at all.

The Law Against Chance and Mortality

The sharpest humanist attack on Epicurean physics is not an argument but a law. More’s Utopia, a land of toleration, makes one exception: those who hold “that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence” are judged to “degenerate from the dignity of human nature” and are barred from office. More’s reason is the one Lucretius had answered sixteen centuries before: without fear of punishment after death, men will break every law. Epicurus held that the wise man keeps the compact of justice because injustice brings fear and trouble in this life, and “it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly” (DL X.132).

More’s law is not an accident of the sixteenth century. It shows what Humanism is at bottom: a code of ethics that claims to know the good for man, and that is willing to require men to follow it. More barred the Epicurean from office. Comte designed a whole society around “Live for Others,” with a priesthood to teach it. The 1933 Manifesto called for “a socialized and cooperative economic order” to be built according to Humanist values, and the Amsterdam Declaration lays on every Humanist “a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” Humanists differ among themselves in how far they would go in enforcing their code, and few today would bar anyone from office for his beliefs. But the structure is the same in each case. There is a Good for man, defined by the Humanist and not by the feelings of the man himself, and society is to be arranged so that men live by it. Epicurus held that no such Good exists, and that the only rules men owe one another are the compacts they make for their mutual safety and advantage.

Modern Humanism: Atoms Without Joy

Modern Humanism accepts much of Epicurean physics. The 1933 Manifesto declares that the universe is “self-existing and not created” and rejects the dualism of mind and body. Russell accepts “accidental collocations of atoms” and the end of the individual at death. On these points the Humanists have come round to Epicurus.

But they have not come round to his conclusions. For Lucretius, the discovery that the world is made of atoms and void is a liberation. Epicurus “ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes” to religion and withstand her, and “us his victory brings level with heaven.” For Russell, the same discovery is “unyielding despair.” For Dewey, it leaves man in danger of “isolation” and needing the word “God” for comfort. The Humanist accepts the atoms but still feels the loss of the God he no longer believes in, because his ethics was built for a world ruled by God.

The same gap shows when Humanists speak of happiness. They speak of it often. But the happiness they mean is not Epicurus’s. The 1933 Manifesto makes “the complete realization of human personality” the end of man’s life, and the Amsterdam Declaration describes Humanism as “a lifestance aiming at the maximum possible fulfilment through the cultivation of ethical and creative living.” These are versions of the old view of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, in which happiness is the perfection of human nature through virtue, or of the Christian view, in which it is the fruit of a righteous life. They are not Epicurus’s view, in which happiness is the pleasant life, “the beginning and end of the blessed life,” and the feeling of pleasure is the standard by which it is judged.

The same language has reached the United Nations. In 2012 the General Assembly proclaimed 20 March the International Day of Happiness (resolution 66/281), “recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives.” “Happiness is a fundamental human goal,” the UN’s page announces, and it calls for “a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all peoples.” Pleasure is not mentioned. Happiness here is “well-being,” measured by surveys of “life satisfaction,” and it is something for governments and international bodies to define, plan and deliver to “all peoples.” Epicurus’s happiness is the pleasant life of a particular man among his friends, judged by his own feelings.

Humanists also misread the Epicurean gods. Lamont writes that Epicurus and Lucretius “made one concession to convention and tradition” in admitting the gods, and did so “mainly to escape being branded as outright atheists” (p. 52). Epicurus says the opposite: “For gods there are, since the knowledge of them is by clear vision.” The Epicurean gods are the model of the blessed life, not a polite fiction. The Humanist cannot imagine a god who is not a ruler, so he concludes that Epicurus did not mean it.

Ethics: Dignity and Duty Against Pleasure

Human Dignity

The center of Humanist ethics is the idea of human dignity. Pico placed it in man’s freedom to rise to the divine. More used it to exclude those who deny the immortal soul. Kant defined it as a worth “above all value,” which “admits of no equivalent.” The Amsterdam Declaration begins its ethics with “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual.”

Epicurus does not speak of dignity in this sense. He does not hold that human beings have a worth above all value, given by God or by reason. He holds that human beings are living creatures who feel pleasure and pain, and that their good is the pleasant life. They have every reason to treat one another justly and to form friendships, because these bring security and pleasure. But a worth “above all value” that cannot be weighed against anything else is exactly the kind of absolute Good that Epicurus rejected. It is the Platonic Good with man in place of the Forms.

Duty Against Pleasure

Kant states the Humanist view of pleasure in its purest form: “The majesty of duty has nothing to do with enjoyment of life.” Reason, he says, was not given to us for happiness at all: “our existence has a different and far nobler end, for which, and not for happiness, reason is properly intended.” The private ends of man “must, for the most part, be postponed.”

Epicurus taught that “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life.” Duty, for Epicurus, has no majesty of its own. Prudence, justice and the other virtues are valuable because they produce the pleasant life, and they are chosen for that reason. The Kantian demand that a man act from duty “without joy” is, in Nietzsche’s words, “the recipe par excellence of decadence.”

Altruism: “Live for Others”

Comte’s Religion of Humanity demands that the individual live for Humanity: “The calculations of self-interest can never be substituted as a combining influence for the sympathetic instincts.” Every aspect of life, “individual or collective,” is to be directed to Humanity. Lamont calls for “intelligent altruism.” The Amsterdam Declaration speaks of “a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.”

Epicurus valued friendship more highly than almost any ancient philosopher: “Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship” (Principal Doctrine 27). But friendship is a bond between particular people who know and help one another, and it is valued for the pleasure and security it brings. It is not a duty to all mankind. Epicurus’s justice is a compact among those able to make one so as to secure their own pleasure (Principal Doctrines 31–33), not an obligation to an abstract Humanity. The command to “live for others” makes the individual’s own life a means to an end outside himself. That is what the Stoic did when he made himself a citizen of the cosmos, and what the Christian did when he made himself a servant of God.

The Sacred Without God

Feuerbach did not want to abolish the sacred, only to move it from God to man: “Let friendship be sacred to thee, property sacred, marriage sacred,—sacred the well-being of every man.” The Manifesto declares that “The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained,” because everything human is now religious. Russell speaks of “worship” and a “temple.” Comte designed a calendar of saints.

Epicurus honored the gods as models of the blessed life, and he joined in the festivals. But he did not make human relations sacred. Friendship, marriage and property, like justice itself, are good when and because they bring pleasure and security. To call them sacred is to put them beyond the judgment of the feelings, which is the very thing Epicurus would not do.

Death

The humanist tradition’s attitude to death runs from Petrarch’s “meditation on death,” with its picture of the decaying body, to Russell’s “firm foundation of unyielding despair.” The first teaches contempt for life in preparation for the next. The second accepts that there is no next life, but cannot be glad of it.

Epicurus taught that “death is nothing to us,” because “all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.” Lucretius: “Death therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal.” The knowledge that death is the end does not lead to despair. It removes the fear that spoils life, and “there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.”

Pleasure Moved to Heaven

The humanists who were most friendly to Epicurus, Valla, Erasmus and More, all did the same thing. They accepted the word “pleasure” and gave it a new object. For Valla the true pleasure is the joy of heaven. For Erasmus it is “Peace with God” and a clear conscience. For More it is a pleasure fenced in by the immortal soul and the rewards and punishments after death. In each case the pleasure that Epicurus meant, the pleasure of this life judged by the feelings of a mortal being, is set aside. Readers who meet these writers as “Christian Epicureans” should remember that Epicurus’s physics, his theology and his teaching on death are all missing from their Epicureanism.

Where the Humanists Help the Epicurean Case

The Humanists are hostile witnesses on the central question of ethics, but they have helped the Epicurean cause in several ways.

• They brought the texts back. The humanist manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini recovered Lucretius’s poem in 1417, and humanist scholars restored Diogenes Laertius, Cicero and Seneca to European readers. Without them most of what we know of Epicurus would have been lost.
• They took pleasure seriously. Valla’s Epicurean speaker, Erasmus’s Hedonius and More’s Utopians all state the case for pleasure with force and clarity, even though their authors overrule it. Erasmus has Hedonius say that Epicurus “places the Happiness of Man in Pleasure, and judges that Life to be most blessed, that has most Pleasure, and least Pain,” a fair summary, and he asks what could be “more divine.”
• They confirm what was at stake. More’s law against those who deny providence and the immortal soul, and Burckhardt’s account of Dante’s burning tombs, show plainly which Epicurean doctrines the Christian world found most dangerous.
• Modern Humanists accept Epicurean physics. The Manifesto’s “self-existing and not created” universe, its rejection of mind-body dualism, and Russell’s “collocations of atoms” all confirm the Epicurean view of nature against Plato, the Stoics and the Church.
• Their own words show the gap. Kant’s verdict that the Epicurean principle is “wholly false,” Lamont’s rejection of “pleasure-seeking as the supreme human aim,” and Comte’s “Live for Others” make it plain that Humanism and Epicurean philosophy differ at the root. No reader who has seen these passages can mistake one for the other.

The Humanist Epicurus

The Humanist tradition has created its own picture of Epicurus. He is the fragile and gentle sage of the Garden who freed men from superstition, lived simply among his friends, and taught a mild ethics of limited desire. Lamont describes him retiring “to his garden to live quietly, abstemiously and nobly, achieving a kind of philosophic saintliness” (p. 51), and calls his ethics “an individual quietism.”

This picture keeps what the Humanist approves of in Epicurus, his rejection of supernatural religion, and sets aside what the Humanist cannot accept: that pleasure is the goal of life, that the feelings are the standard of good and evil, that virtue is only the means, and that there is no duty to Humanity above the good of the individual and his friends. It is the same picture the Stoics drew, with the Stoic Providence replaced by Progress and Humanity.

Epicurus was not a Humanist. He did not hold that man has a dignity above all value, that duty has majesty, or that we must live for others. He held that pleasure, in its full sense, is the goal, that the feelings are the standard, and that virtue, justice and friendship are the means to the pleasant life. Nietzsche saw that Humanism is Christian morality living on after the death of its God. Epicurus offers what Humanism lacks: an ethics that was never built on God in the first place.

The Sources

Author and work	Date	On this site
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy	AD 524	Excerpts (James)
Petrarch, letter on Mount Ventoux; The Secret	1336; 1340s	Excerpts (Robinson and Rolfe; Draper)
Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure	1431	Valla page
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man	1486	Excerpt (Burckhardt)
Thomas More, Utopia	1516	Excerpts (Burnet)
Erasmus, “The Epicurean”	1533	Excerpts (Bailey)
Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason	1785; 1788	Excerpts (Abbott)
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity	1841	Excerpts (Evans)
Comte, A General View of Positivism	1848	Excerpts (Bridges)
Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom; Beyond Good and Evil; The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist	1882–1888	Excerpts (Common, Zimmern, Ludovici)
Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”	1903	Excerpts
A Humanist Manifesto	1933	American Humanist Association
Dewey, A Common Faith	1934	Quoted above
Lamont, Humanism as a Philosophy	1949	Quoted above
Humanists International, Amsterdam Declaration	2002	Humanists International

The Most Important Passages for Epicureans

Nietzsche’s Diagnosis

• Christian morality without the Christian God: Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes” 5.
• The shadow of God and the madman: Joyful Wisdom 108 and 125.
• “I am morality itself”: Beyond Good and Evil 202.
• Against Kant’s impersonal duty: Antichrist 11.
• Immortality and equal rights: Antichrist 43.
• Nietzsche on Epicurus: Joyful Wisdom 45 and Antichrist 58.

The Renaissance

• Philosophy’s torn robe and the “Epicurean herd”: Boethius I.3.
• Petrarch turns from nature to the soul: Mount Ventoux.
• The dignity of man: Pico.
• Pious Christians as the true Epicureans: Erasmus.
• The Utopian law against Epicurean physics: More.

The Religion of Humanity

• Humanity as an end and the kingdom of ends: Kant and dignity.
• Feeling cannot be the standard: Kant.
• The Epicurean principle “wholly false”: Kant.
• Humanity the Great Being and “Live for Others”: Comte.
• “Man is a god to man”: Feuerbach.
• Atoms and “unyielding despair”: Russell.

About These Texts

The passages on the three source pages are taken from translations published between 1854 and 1918, with links to scans of the printed pages on archive.org. The modern Humanist documents (the 1933 Manifesto, Dewey, Lamont and the Amsterdam Declaration) are quoted briefly from the published texts. Lorenzo Valla is quoted from the translation already on this site. Each source page lists its editions in full.