Why You Should Choose Epicurus To Be Your Guide - Epilogue: What Next?

The First Step

If this book has persuaded you that Epicurus is the better guide, the next question is what to do about it. The first thing to do is also the most challenging: educate yourself accurately about Epicurean philosophy.

The word that matters is “accurately.” A great deal is written about Epicurus today, and much of it is friendly in tone. But friendliness is not accuracy, and a guide who gets Epicurus wrong on the main points can lead you further from him than an open enemy would. Epicurus himself told his students where to begin. “It is necessary to go back on the main principles, and constantly to fix in one’s memory enough to give one the most essential comprehension of the truth” (DL X.36). The rest of this chapter is about how to do that.

Why Reliable Guides Are Few

The sad state of affairs, for reasons covered at length in the previous chapters, is that very few reliable guides to Epicurean philosophy are available. For more than two thousand years the traditions surveyed in this book ran the schools, the churches and the universities, and each of them had reason to bury Epicurus or to remake him in its own image. Nearly all of his own three hundred rolls were lost. Much of what survives about him reached us through his opponents, such as Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca, who quoted him in order to refute him. Norman DeWitt summed up the result: “As for classical scholars, their attitude toward Epicurus has been contemptuous in the main and their treatment perfunctory,” and “many tedious investigations remain to be made if the misrepresentations of centuries are to be rectified” (Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 358).

The popular books are often worse. Most “self-help” discussions of Epicurus cut many corners, and some outright contradict core Epicurean doctrine. Among the most common errors:

• Tranquility in place of pleasure. They make calm, or the absence of disturbance, the goal of life. Epicurus named pleasure as “the beginning and end of the blessed life” (DL X.128).
• “Absence of pain” as a minimum. They read it as a rule to want as little as possible, and they turn Epicurus into an ascetic. The Case for Epicurus chapter shows what he meant by it.
• Epicurus as a Stoic in a garden, or as a teacher of mindfulness and detachment beside the Buddha. This book has shown how deep the differences run.
• Physics left out, as obsolete, or treated as a comforting story instead of the truth about nature on which everything else depends.
• The senses doubted, with “all sensations are true” dismissed as naïve, so that the Canon disappears.
• Virtue made an end in itself, when Epicurus held that “virtue is preferred for the sake of pleasure, and not for its own sake” (DL X.138).
• Withdrawal from life as the ideal, when Epicurus founded a school, wrote hundreds of books, sent letters to friends in many cities and built a movement that lasted for centuries.

Each of these errors is answered in the earlier chapters. A guide who makes several of them is teaching something other than Epicurus, whatever name he puts on it.

DeWitt: The Best Modern Book, but Not the Last Word

The best modern book on Epicurus remains Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954). DeWitt took Epicurus seriously as a systematic thinker and as a reformer and leader. He saw that the Canon, with its preconcepts, is the foundation of the system, and he saw how badly the centuries had treated it. Anyone who wants to understand Epicurus should read him.

But even DeWitt is far from perfect. At times he does not go far enough in pursuing his own insights, and leaves the reader to draw conclusions that he points toward but does not state. At other times, especially in regard to Christianity, he dwells on what the two have in common more than on the far more important differences. He closed his book on that note: “In particular the New Testament must be diligently studied anew for traces of the language and thought of Epicureanism, which in that day was flourishing both in Judaea and in the Greek cities where the apostles sought their converts. This background was helping to shape the new doctrine” (p. 358). He developed the theme in a second book, St. Paul and Epicurus. Paul may well have borrowed Epicurean words and methods. But the chapter on the Abrahamists shows how little else he borrowed: a creator in place of a world without design, judgment after death in place of “death is nothing to us,” faith in place of the senses, and the denial of pleasure in place of pleasure as the guide of life. Those differences decide which way a man’s life will go. Read DeWitt first, but read him with the questions of this book in hand.

No Schools, So Start With Friends

There are no reliable schools of Epicurean philosophy in the modern world. The ancient Epicureans had the Garden in Athens, communities in many cities, and teachers who could trace their learning back to Epicurus himself. Nothing like that exists today.

So the first step in recovering Epicurus for the modern world has to be taken by individuals, working through small groups of like-minded people who are truly dedicated to Epicurean philosophy, not to some eclectic amalgam of their own. That last point matters. It is tempting to take a little from Epicurus, a little from the Stoics and a little from the Buddhists, and to call the result a personal philosophy. But this book has shown that those traditions disagree with Epicurus at the root: on what is real, on whether nature has a design, on whether the soul survives death, and on whether pleasure is the goal. A mixture of contradictory roots will not grow into a coherent life. A group that studies Epicurus has to be willing to take him as he is, and to test its conclusions against what he actually taught.

This is how Epicureanism began. Epicurus told his students to study “night and day by yourself; and with a companion like to yourself” (DL X.135), and in his will he provided for “the assembly of my disciples which takes place on the twentieth of each month” (DL X.18). Centuries later, Diogenes of Oinoanda carved the teaching on a wall in his city because “[it is] right to help [also] generations to come (for they too belong to us, though they are still unborn) and, besides, love of humanity prompts us to aid also the foreigners who come here” (Fr. 3). EpicureanFriends.com, the forum behind this book, has been active since 2015 for the same purpose: to bring together people who want to study Epicurus as he was, and to test their understanding against the texts and against each other.

This Book as a Test

Part of the purpose of this book has been to provide a test by which you can judge which guides to Epicurus are reliable. The Questions at Issue chapter sets out the main points. Hold any book, article, course or teacher against them:

• What is real and what is true? The world we see is the real world, the senses are the first standard of truth, and nature, which has no design and no opinions, does not deceive us.
• Where did the world come from? From atoms moving in the void, with no creator.
• Do gods govern the world? No. A class of beings Epicurus calls gods exists, but they neither govern the world nor punish or reward men.
• What happens at death? The soul is scattered, and death is nothing to us.
• Does nature act for a purpose? No.
• Is everything fated? No. Some things happen by necessity, some by chance and some by our own choice.
• What is the goal of life? Pleasure, in the full sense in which Epicurus used the word, not tranquility or the mere absence of feeling.
• What is virtue for? Virtue is chosen because it leads to a pleasant life, not for its own sake.
• What are justice and law? Agreements among men not to harm or be harmed, with no absolute justice behind them.

If a guide omits, distorts or contradicts Epicurus on these major issues, that source should not be considered reliable. It is as apt to lead you astray as to lead you in the right direction. A guide who gets them right may still make mistakes on smaller points, but he is at least walking the same road as Epicurus.

Why Not Go Straight to the Texts?

It may seem that the cure for unreliable guides is to skip them and go straight to the original texts. That is not likely to be the best approach either, at least not at first.

What survives of Epicurus is fragmentary. We have three letters, which are summaries written for students who already knew the system; two collections of short sayings; a long poem by Lucretius; an inscription in pieces; and reports by enemies who quoted him in order to refute him. Epicurus’s views rest on foundations, the Canon, the atoms and the void, and pleasure as the guide of every living thing, that are so poorly known today that a reader who starts with the sayings will waste a great deal of time spinning his wheels. Many of the sayings can be read in more than one way, and the reader who does not already know the direction of Epicurus’s thought will usually read them in the way his own culture has taught him.

So first identify the direction of Epicurus’s thought, and then look for interpretations of his specific statements that fit the overall picture. This is the method Epicurus himself prescribed. He wrote his summaries so that his students could “keep adequately in mind at least the most general principles in each department,” and he promised that “the accurate knowledge of details will be fully discovered, if the general principles in the various departments are thoroughly grasped and borne in mind” (DL X.35–36).

The phrase “absence of pain” shows why. Read alone, “The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful” (PD 3) can sound like a call to want as little as possible. Read in the direction of the whole system, in which pleasure is the guide that nature gives every creature and every experience we find desirable counts as pleasure, it describes a life full of pleasure with no pain mixed in. The same words point in opposite directions depending on the picture into which they are fitted.

Once the direction is clear, the texts open up. A good order is the Letter to Menoeceus and the Principal Doctrines; then the Letter to Herodotus; then Lucretius; then Torquatus’s speech in Cicero’s On Ends I and Velleius’s in On the Nature of the Gods I; then Diogenes of Oinoanda. Read the hostile reporters, Cicero in his own voice, Plutarch and Seneca, knowing that they are hostile. All of these texts are on EpicurusToday.com, linked from the chapters of this book.

Living It

Study is the first step, but it is not the goal. Epicurus taught a way of life, and the test of the teaching is whether it makes your own life more pleasant. Thomas Jefferson, who called himself an Epicurean, saw that clearly. When an old friend wrote that he was yielding to a life of repose, Jefferson answered that he was “not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding,” and that “fortitude, you know is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards” (Letter to William Short, October 31, 1819).

The pleasures open to an Epicurean are as wide as life itself: a good meal with friends, a quiet hour with a book, a garden in the evening, but also climbing a mountain, sailing open water, building a business, traveling to places you have never seen, and perhaps someday flying to Mars. Choose among them with care, weigh each against the pains it brings, and do not let anyone tell you that pleasure is something to be ashamed of.

The recovery of Epicurus will not come from the universities or from the popular books. It will come, if it comes at all, from individuals who take the trouble to learn him accurately, who find others who share that commitment, and who show in their own lives that his way works. “Friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life” (VS 52).