Why You Should Choose Epicurus To Be Your Guide - The Questions at Issue

Eight Questions, Eight Answers

The chapters that follow argue against seven traditions, but the same questions come up again and again. This chapter sets the answers side by side, Epicurus first, so that the reader can see at a glance where each tradition parts company with him. Each chapter then tests these answers in the words of the tradition’s own leading writers.

1. What Is the Standard of Truth?

• Epicurus: the senses, the anticipations and the feelings. Reason works from them and is tested by them.
• Platonists: the mind alone, knowing the eternal Forms. The senses deceive, and learning is the soul’s recollection of what it knew before birth.
• Aristotelians: the senses begin knowledge, but true knowledge is of universal forms grasped by the intellect, and demonstration from first principles outranks the evidence of the senses.
• Stoics: the “comprehensive” impression, which the sage alone can recognize. Some impressions are false, and the good is judged by reason, not by feeling.
• Skeptics: nothing. Every appearance can be opposed by an equal appearance, and the wise man suspends judgement.
• Abrahamists: revelation, received by faith. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
• Humanists: reason and conscience, with a “sacred” dignity of man and a duty that reason commands but feeling cannot establish.
• Buddhists: insight reached in meditation. The senses and every sensation are “on fire,” and the disciple conceives an aversion for them.

2. Where Did the World Come From?

• Epicurus: it was not made. The universe is eternal and infinite, and our world is one of countless worlds formed by the motions of atoms.
• Platonists: a good divine craftsman made the world, the only world, as a living creature with a soul, on the pattern of an eternal Form.
• Aristotelians: the world is eternal and unique, and everything in it moves toward ends, set in motion by an unmoved mover who is pure thought.
• Stoics: the world is a living, rational god, made and governed by divine reason, and it will be burned up and made again in an endless cycle.
• Skeptics: we cannot know, and so we follow the opinions of our city.
• Abrahamists: God created it out of nothing by his word.
• Humanists: they rarely say. Many accept whatever the latest scientific theory may say while keeping a view of man’s place in the world that depends on the older, created one.
• Buddhists: the Buddha refused to say whether the world is eternal or not, because such questions “profit not.”

3. Do the Gods Govern the World?

• Epicurus: no. The gods are blessed and immortal, and they neither cause trouble nor suffer it.
• Platonists: yes. The gods care for men, and the man who denies it must be re-educated or punished under the law of impiety.
• Aristotelians: Aristotle’s god does not govern by command, but he is the supreme cause on which “the heavens and the world of nature” depend.
• Stoics: yes. Providence governs every part of the world for the sake of gods and men, and reveals the future through divination.
• Skeptics: we cannot know, but “following the ordinary view” we reverence the gods and ascribe to them foreknowledge.
• Abrahamists: yes. Not a sparrow falls without the will of God, and the denial of providence is the mark of the heretic.
• Humanists: the old providence is replaced by Humanity or Progress, which give the individual his duties.
• Buddhists: there is no creator, but the law of karma rewards and punishes every deed, in this life or the next.

4. What Happens at Death?

• Epicurus: the soul is scattered, and death is nothing to us. This life is the only one we have, and it is to be enjoyed, not spent preparing for another.
• Platonists: the soul is immortal, existed before birth, and will be judged.
• Aristotelians: the soul is the form of the body and perishes with it, but the active intellect is “immortal and eternal.”
• Stoics: the soul survives for a time, or until the burning of the world, and is then reabsorbed into the whole.
• Skeptics: we cannot know.
• Abrahamists: the soul survives, or the body will be raised, and every man will be judged and sent to everlasting life or everlasting punishment.
• Humanists: most deny the afterlife, but many keep the moral weight that belief in it once carried.
• Buddhists: there is no self, yet there is rebirth, to hell or to heaven, until desire is extinguished.

5. Does Nature Act for a Purpose?

• Epicurus: no. “Nothing was born in the body that we might use it, but that which is born begets itself a use.” The order of nature comes from the nature of the atoms and from the survival of what works.
• Platonists: yes. Everything was designed by the craftsman for the best.
• Aristotelians: yes. “Nature makes nothing in vain,” and plants exist for animals and animals for men.
• Stoics: yes. The world was made for gods and men, down to the pig whose soul serves as salt.
• Skeptics: we cannot know.
• Abrahamists: yes. The invisible things of God are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
• Humanists: many deny cosmic purpose but give man a purpose and a dignity that only a purposeful world could supply.
• Buddhists: nature is not designed, but it is ordered by karma, a moral law that weighs every deed.

6. What Is the Goal of Life?

• Epicurus: pleasure, judged by the feeling of pleasure itself. Pleasure in Epicurus’s sense is not only bodily excitement but everything in life, of body and mind, that is desirable. A life free from pain is not an empty life but a life full of pleasure, because there is no neutral state between the two.
• Platonists: virtue and the knowledge of the Good, and “to become like God.” The life of pleasure is the life of “a leaky jar.”
• Aristotelians: happiness as the activity of virtue, and above all contemplation. The man who makes pleasure his goal chooses “a life suitable to beasts.”
• Stoics: virtue, the only good. Pleasure is “the good of cattle.”
• Skeptics: quietude, which comes when the search for truth is given up.
• Abrahamists: obedience to God and the reward of the world to come. The love of pleasure is a vice of the last days.
• Humanists: the perfection of man, the good of Humanity, and duty for duty’s sake. Pleasure is at best a by-product.
• Buddhists: Nirvana, the extinction of craving. Life and birth are suffering, desire is their cause, and “From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear.”

7. What Is Virtue For?

• Epicurus: virtue is the means to the pleasant life, as medicine is the means to health.
• Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics: virtue is chosen for its own sake. For the Stoics it is the only good.
• Skeptics: virtue is good only “by belief,” and the Skeptic follows the customs of his country.
• Abrahamists: virtue is obedience to God’s law, rewarded and punished after death.
• Humanists: virtue is the fulfilment of duty and of human dignity, owed regardless of its consequences.
• Buddhists: virtue is the path to the end of desire and of rebirth.

8. What Are Justice and Law?

• Epicurus: justice is a compact for mutual advantage, and a law that does not serve that advantage “no longer has the essential nature of justice.”
• Platonists: justice is a Form, known to the philosopher-kings, who may lie to the citizens for their good.
• Aristotelians: justice is in part natural, and some men are slaves by nature.
• Stoics: justice is the law of the world-city, written by the reason that governs all things.
• Skeptics: whatever the laws and customs of one’s country require.
• Abrahamists: the law revealed by God.
• Humanists: the rights and duties that follow from the dignity of man, binding on every rational being.
• Buddhists: the law of karma, built into nature: “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).