The Case for Epicurus - Conclusion

What the Survey Shows

The seven chapters of this book have examined seven traditions over more than two thousand years: the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Stoics, the Skeptics, the Abrahamists, the Humanists and the Buddhists. They differ from one another in many ways, and they have often fought each other as fiercely as they fought Epicurus. But when they are set side by side against Epicurus, three results stand out.

First, they are not seven views but variations on one. The view of the world that Socrates and Plato first set out passed from school to school in the West. It was edited and renamed at each step, but its core survived. Buddhism arose independently, far from Greece, but it reached many of the same conclusions by another road.

Second, at nearly every step that view puts something above the feelings of pleasure and pain, and then imposes it on others. Each tradition finds a Good that is higher than pleasure and that does not depend on what any man feels. Each then claims the right to make others live by it.

Third, Epicurus answered that view at every stage, and his answers still stand. He did not answer one school at a time. He answered the root from which they all grew.

One View of the World

The Line of Descent

The line begins with Socrates. As David Sedley shows in Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, the argument from design first appears in Xenophon’s report of Socrates, who asked whether the eyes, the eyelids and the eyebrows could be “products of chance or intelligence” (Against The Platonists). Plato built that argument into a whole cosmology in the Timaeus: a good craftsman made the world, the only world, as a living creature on the pattern of an eternal Form. The soul is immortal, the senses deceive, and the good is not pleasure.

Aristotle took away the craftsman but kept the purposes. His teleology, in the words of the same book, is “a reasoned modification of Plato’s creationism” (Against The Aristotelians). Nature does nothing in vain, plants exist for animals and animals for men, and the highest life is the contemplation of a god who is pure thought.

The Stoics brought the craftsman back and put him inside the world. Their physics descends from Plato’s Timaeus, and the early Stoics “were in fact even willing to be known by the title ‘Socratics’” (Against The Stoics). The world became a living, rational god, and providence governed every part of it.

The Skeptics, Plato’s own Academy among them, seemed to break the line, because they denied that anything could be known. But they denied it in a way that left the old beliefs standing. The Skeptic “following the ordinary view” reverences gods, and the Academic Cotta says, “I must believe the word of our ancestors even without proof” (Against The Skeptics).

The Abrahamic religions then made the Platonic and Stoic world an article of faith. The creator, providence, the immortal soul and the judgment after death were no longer arguments. They were commands, and to doubt them was a sin and, for many centuries, a crime. Augustine wrote that the Platonists came nearest to the Christian faith (Against The Abrahamists).

Finally the Humanists gave up the Christian God but kept much of the Christian morality. Nietzsche saw it clearly: “They are rid of the Christian God and therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them to hold tight to Christian morality” (Against The Humanists). The “sacred” was moved from God to man, and duty, dignity and the good of Humanity took the place of the divine law.

A Parallel Road: The Buddhists

Buddhism owes nothing to Plato, and it began before him, in India. But it arrives at the same place. It too distrusts the senses: “The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire.” It too holds that the soul’s deeds are judged after death, though it denies the soul: “evil-doers go to hell; righteous people go to heaven.” And it too places the good above pleasure, in the extinction of desire: “From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear.” When Buddhism reached the West in the nineteenth century, it was welcomed by many who had left the older traditions behind, because it offered the same world without the creator (Against The Buddhists).

The Common Core

What survives through all these changes can be stated in a few sentences.

• The truly real is above the world we see, and so is the truth. It is found in the Forms, in universal essences, in the reason of the sage, in revelation, or in the dictates of conscience. Even the Skeptic, who denies that truth can be found, denies it by denying the senses first.
• The world is the result of supernatural design. It was made or ordered for a purpose, and man has a place in that purpose, often a place assigned to him before he can choose it: by the Fates, by providence, by God’s decree or by the karma of former lives.
• Man is more than his body. Some part of him is divine, or immortal, or sacred, and it gives him a worth and a duty that do not depend on anything he feels.
• The good is above pleasure. It is virtue, contemplation, obedience, duty or the perfection of man. Pleasure is at best a by-product, and at worst the mark of a beast.

Epicurus denied every one of these sentences. The world we see is the real world, and to be true is to be as it is said to be. His three standards of truth are the senses, the preconcepts and the feelings. His universe is atoms and void, without beginning, without purpose and without end, and some things in it happen by necessity, some by chance, and some by our own choice. His soul is a body of fine atoms, scattered at death. And his good is pleasure, “the beginning and end of the blessed life,” judged by “the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good” (DL X.129).

That is why the seven traditions so often joined against him, even while they fought each other. They disagreed about the details of the higher world. Epicurus denied that there was one.

The Good Imposed on Others

A Pattern in Every Chapter

A Good that does not depend on what any man feels is a Good that can be enforced on any man, whatever he feels. The chapters of this book show that these traditions drew that conclusion again and again.

• Plato made unbelief a crime. A man who held “that the gods exist, but have no care for men,” the Epicurean view, was to be reported to the magistrates and held in a “reformatory,” and “if he be convicted again on a like charge, he shall be punished by death.” The rulers of the Republic would tell the citizens a “royal lie” for their own good (Laws 909a; Republic 414b).
• Aristotle reasoned from the order of nature that “she has made all these things for men,” and that a war against those “intended by nature for slavery” who “are unwilling to submit to it” is “by nature just” (Politics I.8). From the order of the heavens he drew the motto “one ruler let there be” (Metaphysics XII.10).
• The Stoics asked each man to will whatever fate brings. Seneca translates Cleanthes: “Fate leads, but the unwilling drags along” (Letters 107.11). Chrysippus said that the foot, “if it had a mind, would seek to be covered with mud” (Epictetus, Discourses II.6.10).
• The Skeptics, having no Good of their own, followed whatever Good their city imposed. The Skeptic lives by “the tradition of laws and customs … whereby we regard piety in the conduct of life as good” (Outlines I.24).
• The Abrahamists set before every man “life and good, and death and evil,” with everlasting punishment for disobedience, and wrote the name of Epicurus into their law as the name of a man who “has no share in the world to come” (Against The Abrahamists).
• The Humanists began, in Thomas More’s Utopia, with “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” (Utopia). Kant declared that “the majesty of duty has nothing to do with enjoyment of life” (Critique of Practical Reason), and Comte gave his religion of Humanity the motto “Live for Others” (A General View of Positivism).
• The Buddhists need no ruler to enforce their Good, because they place the enforcement in nature itself. Every deed is weighed by the law of karma: “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter into the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Dhammapada 127).

The language changes from chapter to chapter, but the structure does not. There is a Good above feeling. Some men know it better than others. Those who know it may rule, persuade, deceive or punish those who do not.

The Higher World and the Noble Lie

One charge runs through every chapter, and it is the most practical of all. It holds that whatever the truth may be, men will not be good unless they believe in something higher and truer than this world, and above all in gods who watch them and will punish them, so that the belief must be kept alive by myth, by law or by force. Nietzsche traced that “true world” from Plato to Kant, and found it in its last form still claiming to be “a comfort, an obligation, a command” (Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable”). Plato let his rulers tell a “royal lie” and made unbelief a crime. Aristotle approved the myths added “with a view to the persuasion of the multitude.” Cicero warned that without piety “justice itself, the queen of all the virtues” would disappear. The Abrahamic writers made the judgment after death the reason to obey, and Lactantius concluded that without it “it is the part of the wise man to do evil.” More’s Utopia barred from office anyone who denied providence and the immortal soul. Karma carries the same threat across lives.

Epicurus answered that the good is found in this world, that a morality built on a lie cannot be trusted, and that the lie does not work. Wrongdoers who do not fear the laws do not fear the gods either, and the wise are just because they understand what injustice costs. “On account of what kind of gods, then, will human beings be righteous? For they are not righteous on account of the real ones or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ Judges in Hades.” (Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fr. 20). The Epicurean keeps the compact of justice because it secures his own safety and the friendships that make life pleasant, and he needs no myth to make him keep it.

Nietzsche’s Diagnosis

Nietzsche saw this pattern in the morality of his own day. “In Europe people evidently know what Socrates thought he did not know … they ‘know’ today what is good and evil,” and the morality they know insists that it is the only one: “Morality in Europe at present is herding-animal morality” (Beyond Good and Evil 202). He traced it, as this book has, back through Christianity to Socrates and Plato.

Epicureans need not accept Nietzsche’s own program to see that his diagnosis fits. Plato set up the absolute Good, and every one of the seven traditions either inherited it or, like the Skeptics, left it in place.

The Epicurean Alternative

Epicurus offered no source of supernatural Good above the feelings of pleasure and pain given to us by nature, and so he claimed no right to impose a Good on anyone else. Pleasure and pain are felt by each living thing, and no philosopher-king, priest or moralist can feel them for another. Justice is not a Form or a command but “a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed” (PD 31). A law that does not serve that advantage “no longer has the essential nature of justice” (PD 37). Gods neither command nor punish. “The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour” (PD 1).

This does not make Epicureanism a doctrine of “anything goes.” The Epicurean measures every choice by its consequences in pleasure and pain, and he finds that “it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly” (DL X.132). But the standard is one that each man can test for himself, by his own feelings, and not one that some other man claims to know on his behalf.

The Charges Answered

The Canon

The deepest disagreement came before the question of how we know. Plato made the eternal Forms the only true reality. Aristotle placed the highest reality in form and in an eternal mind. The Stoics made truth an “incorporeal judgement” of reason. The Skeptics doubted that anything is true at all. The Abrahamists placed reality in an unseen God, the Humanists doubted that the senses reach “the real table,” and the Buddhists taught that “All forms are unreal.” Epicurus held that the world we see is the real world, and that “there is no difference between saying that a thing is ‘true’ and saying that it is ‘subsisting’” (Against the Logicians II.9).

From that first disagreement came the second. Every one of the seven traditions that competed with Epicurus distrusted the senses. Plato called them deceivers and sent the soul back to what it knew before birth. Aristotle began with them but crowned them with an intellect that grasps essences. The Stoics trusted only a rare class of impressions that the Skeptics showed no one could identify. The Skeptics turned the distrust on everything. The Abrahamists blessed those “that have not seen, and yet have believed.” The Humanists put conscience and reason above the evidence of feeling. The Buddhists called the senses “on fire” and taught the disciple to conceive an aversion for them.

The Epicurean answer holds against them all. “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23). Every critic of the senses relies on his senses to read the texts, hear the arguments and live his life. The Skeptic eats when he is hungry. The Platonist steps out of the way of a cart. The question is not whether to trust the senses but whether to admit it, and to build on them. Nor is there any reason to fear that nature deceives us on purpose. Plato pictured the world of the senses as shadows of puppets cast on the wall of a cave by men hidden behind a screen, but nature is no puppeteer. It has no design, no aims for men and no opinions, so it cannot hand us false ones. The rivals who put a designing mind behind the world could not say as much: the Academics asked the Stoics how their god could send visions “which appear to be false,” and Paul wrote that “God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.” Error comes only from the opinions we add.

Physics

The chapters show the argument from design in age after age: Socrates’ eyebrows, Plato’s craftsman, Aristotle’s nature that does nothing in vain, Balbus’s orrery, Paul’s “invisible things … clearly seen,” and the Humanists’ dignity of man in a universe that was supposed to have no purpose. Epicurus answered it with a single principle: “nothing was born in the body that we might use it, but that which is born begets itself a use” (Lucretius IV.832–835). The order of nature comes from the nature of its elements and from the survival of what works.

On the question of gods, the seven traditions offered a craftsman, an unmoved mover, a providence, a custom, a judge, a Humanity and a law of karma. Each of them gives men something to fear or to obey. Epicurus offered gods who are happy and who trouble no one, and he showed that the fear of gods comes from “false suppositions” and not from the evidence of the senses (DL X.124).

On fate, the traditions offered the throne of Necessity and a choice of lives made before birth, a Stoic chain of causes that leads the willing and drags the unwilling, a suspension of judgment on “what is in our power,” a God who has decreed everything and still judges, a freedom that Kant and Russell could find only outside nature, and a karma that “allots beings to meanness or greatness.” Aristotle stood closest to Epicurus here, but his system, which had no atoms, never had to meet the necessity that Democritus had drawn from them. Epicurus faced it and answered it: “that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame” (DL X.133). “It were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers” (X.134).

On death, the seven traditions offered judgment, transmigration, survival until the burning of the world, suspension of judgment, resurrection and hell, a morality still shaped by them, and rebirth without a self. Epicurus offered the plain truth: “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us” (PD 2). “There is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living” (DL X.125).

Ethics

The seven traditions placed the good in virtue, contemplation, quietude, obedience, duty, dignity and the extinction of desire. Again and again the arguments against pleasure turned out to be arguments against a caricature of pleasure: the leaky jar of Callicles, the beast at its trough, the glutton who says “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Epicurus rejected that caricature in his own words: “it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning” (DL X.132).

The traditions also confess, again and again, that they cannot do without pleasure. Plato’s Phaedo admits that ordinary men are temperate in order to obtain greater pleasures. Aristotle calls the life of his god a life whose “actuality is also pleasure.” Balbus lets slip that Stoic Providence “appears to have been at times a disciple of Epicurus” (On the Nature of the Gods II.160). Sextus admits that no argument can talk a hungry man out of his hunger. Augustine admits that, but for his belief in an afterlife, Epicurus “had … won the palm.” Even the Dhammapada calls its goal “the highest happiness.” Each of them, at some point, bears witness that pleasure is what nature seeks.

The Buddhists went furthest of all. They made desire itself the cause of suffering and its extinction the goal, and the modern world often places them beside the Stoics as twin teachers of calm. Epicurus answered both. The desire for pleasure is not a disease but the guide that nature gives every living thing, and the task of philosophy is not to quiet it but to satisfy it wisely, choosing the pleasures that bring the least pain and the greatest return over a whole life.

In our own time the pieces of several traditions have been assembled into a single piece of advice, and it is often presented as the teaching of Epicurus himself: clear the mind, meditate, let go of desires and concerns, own less and want less, and happiness will arise of its own accord. It takes the Buddhist’s meditation and “there is no happiness higher than rest,” the Stoic’s “freedom is not acquired by satisfying yourself with what you desire, but by destroying your desire,” the Skeptic’s quiet that follows giving up “as a shadow follows its substance,” and the Gospel’s “Take no thought for your life.” Its practical form, minimalism, is a kinder, gentler asceticism. It is a major modern corruption of Epicurus. He taught that happiness is produced by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance” (DL X.132), not by emptying the mind; that the ability to live on little is valuable “not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things” (DL X.130), but so that we need not fear the loss of many; and that the surest joy belongs to those who “rightly calculate” the stable condition of the body and “the sure hope of its continuance” (Fragment 11). The Epicurean does not wait for happiness to arise. He reasons his way to it.

Why Choose Epicurus as Your Guide

The question this book set out to answer is a practical one. Which philosophy should a man choose to guide his life?

The seven traditions covered here each ask him to give up something real for something he cannot see. Plato asks him to give up the world of the senses for a world of Forms. Aristotle asks him to give up pleasure for contemplation. The Stoics ask him to give up his own judgment of good and evil for the will of providence. The Skeptics ask him to give up the search for truth and to follow custom. The Abrahamists ask him to give up the evidence of his senses for faith, and this life for the next. The Humanists ask him to give up his own happiness for duty and for Humanity. The Buddhists ask him to give up desire itself, and even love, for the blowing out of Nirvana.

Epicurus asks him to give up nothing but his fears. He asks him to trust the senses that nature gave him, to understand the world well enough to see that there is nothing in it to dread, and to choose among pleasures and pains with care. What he holds out in return is not a reward after death but the confident expectation of a pleasant life now, among friends, free from the fear of gods, of death and of fate. “Meditate therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day by yourself; and with a companion like to yourself, and never shall you be disturbed waking or asleep, but you shall live like a god among men” (DL X.135).

The book began with this choice, and it ends with it. Trusting the senses takes nerve, and Lucretius states what is at stake if we lose it. “For not only would all reason give way, life itself would at once fall to the ground, unless you choose to trust the senses and shun precipices and all things else of this sort that are to be avoided, and to pursue the opposite things” (IV.507–510). Where Munro writes “choose,” the Latin is stronger: nisi credere sensibus ausis, “unless you dare to trust the senses.” The seven traditions asked men to doubt the senses. Epicurus asks them to have the courage to trust them, and to build their lives on what they find.

The evidence is now before you: the words of Epicurus and of his opponents, set side by side on the questions that divide them. The verdict is yours.

Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman named the two things Epicurus did, in the order in which he did them: he was “that discoverer of truth and architect of the happy life” (On Ends I.32). Nearly every rival tradition reversed that order. Each began with the good it wanted, a world of Forms, a providence, a God, a duty or an escape from desire, and shaped its account of nature to support it. Epicurus began with nature as the senses reveal it, and built the happy life on what he found. That is why his ethics still stands: it rests on the truth.

Lucretius described what Epicurus did for those who followed him. “When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth crushed down under the weight of religion … a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face” (I.62–79). He “rescued life from such great billows and such thick darkness and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so brilliant a light” (V.1–12). And he chose Epicurus as his own guide in words that can close this book:

“THEE, who first was able amid such thick darkness to raise on high so bright a beacon and shed a light on the true interests of life, thee I follow, glory of the Greek race, and plant now my footsteps firmly fixed in thy imprinted marks” (Lucretius III.1–6, tr. Munro).