| 2 ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In a strict sense, Epicureanism is the
philosophy taught by Epicurus (341-270 BC); in a broad sense, it is a system of ethics
embracing every conception or form of life that can be traced to the principles
of his philosophy. In ancient polemics, as often since, the term was employed
with an even more generic (and clearly erroneous) meaning as the equivalent of hedonism,
the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the chief good. In popular parlance,
Epicureanism thus means devotion to pleasure, comfort, and high living, with a
certain nicety of style. |
|
|
|
|
|
Several fundamental concepts
characterize the philosophy of Epicurus. In physics,
these are Atomism, a mechanical conception of
causality, limited, however, by the idea of a spontaneous motion,
or "swerve," of the atoms, which interrupts the necessary effect of a
cause; the infinity of the universe and the equilibrium of all forces that
circularly enclose its phenomena; the existence of gods conceived as beatified
and immortal natures completely extraneous to happenings in the world. In
ethics, the basic concepts are the identification of good with pleasure
and of the supreme good and ultimate end with the absence of pain
from the body and the soul--a limit beyond which pleasure does not grow but
changes; the reduction of every human relation to the principle of utility,
which finds its highest expression in friendship,
in which it is at the same time surmounted; and, in accordance with this end,
the limitation of all desire and the practice of the virtues, from which
pleasure is inseparable, and a withdrawn and quiet life. (see also science,
philosophy of, Utilitarianism) |
|
|
In principle, Epicurus' ethic of
pleasure is the exact opposite of the Stoic's ethic of duty. The consequences,
however, are the same: in the end, the Epicurean is forced to live with the same
temperance and justice as the Stoic. Of utmost importance, however, is one point
of divergence: the walls of the Stoic's city are those of the world, and its law
is that of reason; the limits of the Epicurean's city are those of a garden, and
the law is that of friendship. Though this garden can also reach the boundaries
of earth, its centre is always a man. (see also Stoicism) |
|
|
|
|
|
Epicurus' predecessors were in physics
Leucippus and Democritus and in ethics Antiphon Sophista, Aristippus of Cyrene,
and Eudoxus of Cnidus, a geometer and astronomer. Epicurus differed from all of
these in his systematic spirit and in the unity that he tried to give to every
part of philosophy. In this respect, he was greatly influenced by the philosophy
and teachings of Aristotle--taking over the
essentials of his doctrines and pursuing the problems that he posed. |
|
|
|
|
|
In 306 BC, Epicurus established his
school at Athens in his garden, from which it came to be known as The
Garden. |
|
|
|
|
|
In accordance with the goal that he
assigned to philosophy, Epicurus' teaching had a dogmatic character, in
substance if not in form. He called his treatises dialogismoi, or "conversations." Since the utility of the
doctrines lay in their application, he summarized them in stoicheia, or "elementary propositions," to be memorized.
In this respect, Epicurus was the inventor of the catechetical method. The
number of works produced by Epicurus and his disciples reveals an impressive
theoretical activity. But no less important was the practical action in living
by the virtues taught by him and in honouring the obligations of reciprocal help
in the name of friendship. In these endeavours, continuous assistance was
rendered by Epicurus himself, who, even when old and ill, was occupied in
writing letters of admonishment, guidance, and comfort--everywhere announcing
his gospel of peace and, under the name of pleasure, inviting to love. |
|
|
|
|
|
Philosophy was, for Epicurus, the art of
living, and it aimed at the same time both to assure happiness and to supply
means to achieve it. As for science, Epicurus was concerned only with the
practical end in view. If possible, he would have done without it. "If we
were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about
death," he wrote, "and also by our failure to grasp the limits of pain
and desires, we should have no need of natural science." But this science
requires a principle that guarantees its possibilities and its certainty and a
method of constructing it. This principle and this method are the object of the
"Canon," which Epicurus substituted for Logic. Since he made the
"Canon" an integral introduction to the "Physics," however,
his philosophy falls into two parts, the "Physics" and the
"Ethics." |
|
|
The name canon, which means
"rule," is derived from a special work entitled "On the
Criterion, or Canon." It held that all sensations and representations are
true and serve as criteria. The same holds for pleasure and pain, the basic
feelings to which all others can be traced. Also true, and included among the
criteria, are what may be called concepts (prolepsis),
which consist of "a recollection of what has often been presented from
without . . . ." Man, therefore, must always cling to that "which was
originally thought" in relation to every single "term" and which
constitutes its background. Since the truth attested by each of the criteria is
reflected in the phainomena, man must
cling to these, employing them as "signs," and must
"conjecture" whatever "does not appear." With the use of
signs and conjecture, however, the level of judgment is reached, and thought is
well advanced into that sphere in which error is possible, a state that begins
as soon as single terms are tied into a proposition. Error, which consists of
what "our judgment adds" to the evidence, can be of two types, one
relative to what is not an object of experience, the other relative to what is
such an object but for which the evidence is dubious. Each type has its own
method of proof. Following the principles and methods of the "Canon,"
Epicurus arrived at an Atomism that, like that of the ancient naturalist Democritus,
taught that the atoms, the void space in which they move, and the worlds are all
infinite. But in contrast to Democritus, who had followed the deductive route of
the intellect, considering the knowledge of the senses to be spurious, Epicurus,
following an inductive route, assigned truth to sensation and reduced the
intellect to it. On the basis of the totality of problems as Aristotle posed
them in his "Physics," Epicurus modified entirely the mechanical
theory of causes and of motion found in Democritus and added the concept of a
natural necessity, which he called nature, and that of free causality, which
alone could explain the freedom of motion of man and animals. For this purpose
he distinguished three forms of motion in the atoms: a natural one of falling in
a straight line, owing to their weight; a forced one due to impacts; and a free
motion of declination, or swerving from a straight line. Secondly, he made
finite the number of forms of the atoms in order to limit the number of sensible
qualities, since each form begets a distinctive quality, and he taught a
mathematical as well as a physical Atomism. Lest an infinity of sensible
qualities be generated, however, by an infinity of aggregations (if not of
atomic kinds), Epicurus developed, from just this concept of infinity, the law
of universal equilibrium of all the forces, or "isonomy." Upon it,
enclosing the events in a circle, he founded a theory of cyclic returns. |
|
|
As part of his "Physics,"
Epicurus' psychology held that the soul must be
a body. It is made of very thin atoms of four different species--motile,
quiescent, igneous, and ethereal--the last, thinnest and the most mobile of all,
serving to explain sensitivity and thought. Thus
constituted, the soul is, from another perspective, bipartite: in part
distributed throughout the entire body and in part collected in the chest. The
first part is the locus of sensations and of the physical affects of pain and
pleasure; the second (entirely dissociated from the first) is the psyche
par excellence--the seat of thought, emotions, and will. Thought is due not
to the transmission of sense motion but to the perception
of images constituted by films that continuously issue from all bodies and,
retaining their form, arrive at the psyche
through the pores. The full autonomy and freedom of the psyche is assured, as, with an act of apprehension, it seizes at
every moment the images it needs, meanwhile remaining master of its own
feelings. (see also fear) |
|
|
The object of ethics is to determine the
end and the means necessary to reach it. Taking his cue from experience,
Epicurus looked to the animal kingdom for his answer. He concluded from this cue
that the chief end is pleasure. He distinguished two kinds--a
"kinetic" pleasure of sense and a "static" pleasure,
consisting in the absence of pain--and taught that the pleasure of sense is
good, though it is not good merely as motion but rather as a motion favourable
to the nature of the receiving sense organ. In essence, pleasure is the
equilibrium of the being with itself, existing wherever there is no pain. |
|
|
Epicurus concluded that "freedom
from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind" is the ultimate aim of
a happy life. The damages and the advantages following the realization of any
desire must be measured in a calculus in which even pain must be faced with
courage if the consequent pleasure will be of longer duration. |
|
|
Having thus given order to his life,
however, the wise man must also provide himself with security. This he achieves
in two ways--by reducing his needs to a minimum and withdrawing, far from human
competition and from the noise of the world, to "live hidden"; and by
adding the private compact of friendship to the
public compact from which laws arise. To be sure, friendship stems from utility;
but, once born, it is desirable in itself. Epicurus then added that "for
love of friendship one has even to put in jeopardy love itself"; for every
existence, being alone, needs the other. "To eat and drink without a
friend," he wrote, "is to devour like the lion and the wolf."
Thus, the utility sublimates itself and changes into love. But as every love is
intrepid, the wise man, "if his friend is put to torture, suffers as if he
himself were there" and, if necessary, "will die for his friend."
Thus, into the bloody world of his time, Epicurus could launch the cry:
"Friendship runs dancing through the world bringing to us all the summons
to wake and sing its praises." |
|
|
If man's unhappiness stemmed only from
his own vain desires and from worldly dangers, this wisdom, founded upon
prudence alone, would suffice. But besides these sources of unhappiness there
are two great fears, fear of death and fear of
the gods. If science, however, is effective in revealing the bounds of desire
and (as already seen) in quelling the fear of the gods, it can also allay the
fear of death. Regarding the soul as a body within another body, science
envisions it as dissolving when the body dissolves. Death, then, "is
nothing to us, so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes,
then we do not exist." But death is feared not only for what may be
awaiting man in the beyond but also for itself. "I am not afraid of being
dead," said the comic Epicharmus of Cos:
"I just do not want to die." The very idea of not existing instills a
fear that Epicurus considered to be the cause of all the passions that pain the
soul and disorder men's lives. Against it Epicurus argued that if pleasure is
perfect within each instant and "infinite time contains no greater pleasure
than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure," then
all desire of immortality is vain. Thus, Epicurus' most distinguished pupil, Metrodorus
of Lampsacus, could exclaim, "bebiotai"
("I have lived"), and this would be quite enough. He who has conquered
the fear of death can also despise pain, which "if it is long lasting is
light, and if it is intense is short" and brings death nearer. The wise man
has only to replace the image of pain present in the flesh with that of
blessings enjoyed, and he can be happy even "inside the bull of
Phalaris." The most beautiful example was set by Epicurus at the moment of
his death: |
|
|
A happy day is this on which I write to
you . . . . The pains which I feel . . . could not be greater. But all of this
is opposed by the happiness which the soul experiences, remembering our
conversations of a bygone time. |
|
|
The ultimate concentration of all his
wisdom is the Tetrapharmacon, preserved
by Philodemus: "The gods are not to be feared. Death is not a thing that
one must fear. Good is easy to obtain. Evil is easy to tolerate." |
|
|
|
|
|
Epicurus' successor in the direction of
the Garden was Hermarchus of Mitylene, and he was succeeded in turn by
Polystratus, who was the last survivor to have heard Epicurus. Superior to both,
however, were Metrodorus and Colotes, against whom a small work by Plutarch was
directed. Among the Epicureans of the 2nd century BC, mention must be made of
Demetrius of Lacon, of whose works some fragments remain, and Apollodorus,
who wrote more than 400 books. Much was also written by his disciple Zeno of
Sidon, who was heard by Cicero in 79 BC in
Athens. After Zeno, there were Phaedrus, also a teacher of Cicero, who was in
Rome in 90 BC, and Patro, the head of the school until 51 BC. Already famous as
an epigram writer was Philodemus of Gadara (born
110 BC). In the papyri of Herculaneum, comprising the effects of Philodemus'
library, there are sizable remains of almost all of his numerous works.
Epicureanism had already been introduced in Rome, in the 2nd century BC. The
first person to spread its doctrines in Latin prose was a certain Amafinius. At
the time of Cicero, Epicureanism was in fact the philosophy in vogue; and the
number of Romans subscribing to it was, according to Cicero, very large. Among
the greatest was Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 95-55 BC), who, in the poem De
rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things"), left an almost
complete and amazingly precise exposition of Epicurus' "Physics." The
extent to which Epicurus was still popular in the 1st century after Christ is
demonstrated by Seneca, who cited and defended
him. To the 2nd century AD belongs Diogenes of Oenoanda, who carved Epicurus'
works on a portico wall. In the same century should perhaps be mentioned
Diogenianus, fragments of whose polemic against the Stoic Chrysippus are found
in the church historian Eusebius. Also Epicurean, between the 4th and 5th
centuries, was the epigrammatist Palladas. |
|
|
On account of its dogmatic character and
its practical end, the philosophy of Epicurus was not subject to development,
except in the polemic and in its application to themes that Epicurus either had
treated briefly or had never dealt with at all. To be aware of this, it is
sufficient to run through what remains of the representatives of his school and
particularly of the works of Philodemus of Gadara. Epicurus' philosophy remained
essentially unchanged. Once truth has been found, it requires no more
discussion, particularly when it completely satisfies the end toward which man's
nature tends. The main thing is to see this end; all of the rest comes by
itself, and there is no longer anything to do but follow Epicurus,
"liberator" and "saviour," and to memorize his
"oracular words." |
|
|
|
|
|
In the Middle
Ages Epicurus was known through Cicero and the polemics of the fathers.
To be an Epicurean at the time of Dante meant to be one who denied Providence
and the immortality of the soul. In the 15th century, the notable humanist Lorenzo
Valla--following brief hints by Petrarch--wrote, in the dialogue De
voluptate (1431; "On Pleasure"), the first modern defense of the
ethics of Epicurus, maintaining that the true good is pleasure and not virtue
but concluding that the supreme pleasure is that which awaits man in heaven,
which even the Bible calls paradisum
voluptatis. In the 16th century, in terms of attitude and direction of
thought, the first two great Epicureans were Michel de
Montaigne in France and Francesco Guicciardini in Italy. Epicurean in
everything, as man and as poet, was the early 16th-century classicist Ludovico
Ariosto. But not until the 17th-century Provençal abbot Pierre
Gassendi was the system of Epicurus to rise again in its entirety--this
time, however, by approaching truth through faith. Gassendi in 1649 wrote a
commentary on a book by the 3rd-century (AD) biographer Diogenes Laërtius.
This comment, called the Syntagma
philosophiae Epicuri ("Treatise on Epicurean Philosophy"), was
issued posthumously at The Hague 10 years later. At the same time, in England, Thomas
Hobbes, a friend of Gassendi, took up again the theory of pleasure and
interpreted it in a dynamic sense, which was therefore closer to the doctrine of
the ancient Cyrenaics. Starting from the premise that, in the natural state,
"man is a wolf to man," he concluded that peace, without which there
is no happiness, cannot be guaranteed by anything but force, and that this force
must be relinquished, by common agreement, to the power of only one. |
|
|
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the
European nation in which Epicureanism was most active was France, where its
representatives were called libertines, among them moralists such as François,
duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Charles de Saint-Évremonde; scientists such
as Julien de La Mettrie, who believed that man
could be explained as a machine, Claude-Adrien
Helvetius, who reduced the ethic of the useful to a form of experimental
science but who put public above private well-being, and Paul
Henri Dietrich, baron d'Holbach, who gave particular importance to the
physics of the atoms. The purely sensistic conception of knowledge had its most
thoroughgoing theoretician in Étienne de
Condillac. In England, Adam Smith,
developing the ethical concepts of Hume (founded on sympathy), surmounted the
egoism that is the basis of every act by using the principle of the impartial
observer invoked to sympathize with one or another of the antagonists. After
him, the jurist Jeremy Bentham, eliminating
sympathy, reduced ethics to the pure calculus of the useful, which--in an
entirely Epicurean formula--he defined as a "moral arithmetic." In the
Epicurean stream lay also the Utilitarianism of
the 19th century, of which the greatest representative was John
Stuart Mill. |
|
|
|
|
|
In contemporary times, the
interpretation of pleasure as a psychic principle of action was initiated by Gustav
Fechner, the founder of psychophysics, and developed toward the end of
the century by Freud on the psychoanalytic level
of the unconscious. |
|
|
Epicureanism and egocentric hedonism
have few faithful representatives among 20th-century philosophers, though the
viewpoint remains as a residue in some strains of popular thinking. |
|
|
|
|
|
In the first half of the 17th century,
at a time when Pierre Gassendi was reviving atomistic Epicureanism, René
Descartes, often called the founder of modern philosophy, offered
arguments that tended to undercut Atomism. Reality
is a plenum, he held, a complete fullness; there can be no such thing as a
vacuous region, or the void of Atomism. Since matter is nothing but spatial
extension, its only true properties are geometrical and dynamic. Because
extension is everywhere, motion occurs not as a passage through emptiness, as
Epicurus supposed, but as vortices, or "whirlpools," in which every
motion sets up a broad area of movement extending indefinitely around itself--a
view that has tended to be confirmed in contemporary gravitational and field
theory. |
|
|
Close to the heart of Epicureanism is
the principle, which occurred also in Democritus, that denies that something can
come from or be rooted in nothing. In a poem composed by an ancient monist,
Parmenides of Elea (born c. 515 BC),
this principle had been expressed in the two formulas: "Being cannot be
Non-Being," and "Non-Being must be Non-Being." Though Epicurus
had faithfully adhered to this principle almost throughout his system, he has
been criticized for abandoning it at one point--in the swerves that he
attributed to occasional atoms that take them aside from their normal paths.
Epicurus abandoned the principle at this point in order to avoid espousing a
physics that was inconsistent with the autonomy that he observed in the physical
behaviour of men and animals. But to his Stoic critics, the swerves of the atoms
were a scandal, since they implied that an event can occur without a cause. It
has seldom been noted, however, that the swerve is merely a special case--a
transposition into atomistic terms -- of Aristotle's
theory of accidents (i.e., of
properties that are not essential to the substances in which they occur),
inasmuch as an accident, too, as Aristotle himself had stated (Met.
I 3), is without a cause. Moreover, a similar view has been seriously
advanced in modern times under the name of tychism by Charles
Sanders Peirce, a philosopher of science. (see also Stoicism) |
|
|
To the Stoic charge that Epicurus lacked
a doctrine of Providence (since he viewed the
gods as being lazy), Epicurus answered that "mythical gods are preferable
to the fate" posited by the Stoics. It has been suggested that he might
equally well have added that the "immobile Prime Mover" of Aristotle's
theology was hardly less lazy than Epicurus' gods. Epicurus' way of phrasing
this issue, however, must not obscure the fact that the problem of Providence
and its secularization has been a crucial one in the philosophy of history ever
since ancient times. |
|
|
The effort of Epicurus to reduce the
good to pleasure reflects the only criterion to which he would entrust himself,
the "evidence of those passions immediately present," which give man
the word of Nature. In the argument of psychological
hedonism, here implied, the Epicurean holds that men as a matter of fact
do take satisfaction in pleasure and decry pain, and he argues then to an
egoistic ethical hedonism that identifies the (objective) good with pleasure.
Most moralists, however, have felt that a thoroughgoing psychological hedonism
cannot be defended; that desire is often, as a matter of fact, directed toward
an object with no thought at all about the pleasure that it will bring; that a
mother's impulse to save her young from danger is more fundamental than any
pleasure involved (which usually comes only afterward); that the tendency of a
child to imitate his parents can be, in fact, quite painful; and that, as a
19th-century Utilitarian, Henry Sidgwick, has
argued, in what he called the "hedonistic
paradox," one of the most ineffective ways to achieve pleasure is to
deliberately seek it out. |
|
|
Some scholars have even argued that an
Epicurean egoistic hedonism, however foresighted it may be, must logically be
self-defeating. If the view is universalized, the egoist must advocate the
maximization of his enemy's pleasure as well as of his own, which can lead to
actions painful to himself. In consequence, the entire branch of ethics that
covers the advising or judging of other agents is banned from consideration, and
it may be questioned whether such a view can comprise an ethic at all. |
|
|
On the other hand, it has been argued
that man is subject to antinomies, or contradictions, that no system can escape;
there are dimensions in his nature that transcend the rational level. Thus,
whatever its rational credentials may be, Epicureanism, as an attitude toward
life that was theorized in its purest form by Epicurus, nonetheless remains one
of the important forms that human behaviour has often assumed; and, at its best,
it has achieved a type of asceticism that, even in retirement and solitude, does
not negate company but welcomes it, finding the purest joys of life in the
unique richness of human encounters. |
|
|
(C.D.) |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
