Why You Should Choose Epicurus To Be Your Guide - 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 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 has shown, 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. In Sedley’s words his teleology 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. “The single most significant ancestor of Stoic physics is Plato’s Timaeus,” Sedley writes, 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 the 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 a century or more before him. 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.

• Truth is found above the senses. 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 not an accident. It was made or ordered for a purpose, and man has a place in that purpose.
• 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. His three standards of truth are the senses, the anticipations and the feelings. His universe is atoms and void, without beginning, without purpose and without end. 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.

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” (Nietzsche on Humanism). 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. The absolute Good began with Plato, and every tradition in this book either inherited it or, like the Skeptics, left it in place.

The Epicurean Alternative

Epicurus offered no such Good, and so he claimed no such right. 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). The 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 Results, Question by Question

The Canon

Every tradition in this book 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.

Physics

The chapters show the argument from design in every 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 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 the gods comes from “false suppositions” and not from the evidence of the senses (DL X.124).

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. In every case 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.” 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.

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 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. He promises in return not a reward after death but a pleasant life now, among friends, free from the fear of the gods and of death. “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).

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).