Episode 198

The Life of Epicurus

Epicurus was born on the Isle of Samos, which lies directly off the west coast of Turkey, but still today remains part of Greece. The Greeks had always had a strong presence in this part of the Mediterranean, and this, in part, is what allowed Epicureanism to spread so rapidly across the Mediterranean world.

When Epicurus was only about 7 years old, Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont into Persia and kicked off an empire-expanding war drive that extended the reach and power of the Greek world so rapidly and intensely that this time period can only be described as “peak Hellenism.” If we have any classics majors out there who would care to disagree – just let me have this one for the sake of argument.

Military and Social Upheaval in the Hellenistic World

Some of you may recall that Alexander wasn’t really Greek – he was Macedonian, and the reason why his father Philip II was able to build an empire and hand it over to his son, Alexander, is because the century leading up to his rise to power was filled with war on the Greek peninsula.

Athenians and Spartans fighting the Persians (twice – you can watch The 300 and its sequel if you want a fun Hollywood summary of these wars), Athenians and Spartans fighting each other (this was referred to as the Peloponnesian War), Athenians and Spartans variously fighting with and against each other and OTHER city states like Thebes and Corinth in what has come to be called the Corinthian War. Suffice it to say that there was a lot of bloodshed in Greece between roughly 450 and 350 BCE.

Another major event that would have been fresh on the minds of people in Epicurus’ parents’ generation is the Athenian Plague that occurred between 429 and 426 BCE, killing about 25% of the city’s population. This event would have been more contemporary to Epicurus than the Spanish Flu is to us today.

If you were to take a snapshot of the last 100 years of American history and foreign policy and place it side-by-side with the century leading up to Epicurus’ birth, you’d notice some striking similarities, namely: almost constant war, civil unrest, and the looming threat of plague. This is the cultural terroir that very directly influenced the flavor of Epicurean thought.

Speaking of which, let’s get back to Epicurus.

During his childhood, he likely received a solid foundation in both rhetoric and the prevailing Platonist philosophy of the time. He then went on to study under a few notable teachers who introduced him to the teachings of Democritus, among others. Keep that name in your back pocket – it will be very important here in just a bit.

Marble Bust of Epicurus

Eventually, Alexander died and his furious eastward march was halted. This threw his vast, yet fledgeling empire into chaos as all his greedy generals fought over how to divvy it up. This may have been what prompted Epicurus and his parents to move away from Samos, eventually landing him in Athens, where both his parents were born.

During his young adult years, Epicurus did a lot of writing and teaching – sometimes in Athens, and sometimes forming little learning communities elsewhere with folks who were excited by his ideas. The most noteworthy and final stage of his life, however, took place in and around a school he built called “The Garden,” which was located just outside the city walls of Athens, roughly between Plato’s “Academy” and the “Stoa,” where the Stoics gathered.

Epicurus’ Garden was probably closer to what we today would think of as a “commune,” as opposed to a more formal educational setting. People came to learn, but they also brought with them various skills that allowed the community to function while they pursued Epicurus’ vision of a simple life filled with meaning and punctuated here and there with some welcome pleasures.

Epicurus lived a good, long life, and upon his death in 270 BCE at the relatively advanced age of 71 years, he handed the reins of his Epicurean school over to his chosen successor, Hermarchus, and the Epicurean way of life was then entrusted to others who would spread and explicate its tenets.

Epicurean Philosophy (In Brief)

But what WAS this way of life? What does “Epicurean” philosophy entail?

To put it succinctly:

Epicurean philosophy was designed to help people live a happy, meaningful life by providing them with tools to dispel fear and anxiety, optimize for serenity and pleasure, and most importantly not fear death.

At face value, this might sound a lot like the projects of many philosophies or religions out there, but the really remarkable thing about Epicureanism is that most of its precepts follow logically from one very concrete notion: that the entire universe is composed entirely of two things – atoms and void. To us today, this might not seem like that big a deal, but back in Classical Greece, some of the ideas that were born from this atomistic philosophy were considered radical, and even dangerous.

Epicurean physics (a thought of experiment)

Before we jump into complicated stuff like ethics, let’s try to understand Epicurean physics by visualizing it with a thought experiment.

As a 90s kid, one of my personal memories that I know many of you will share is the screensaver for Windows 95 called “Flying Through Space.” It’s a series of recurring white pixels that seem to be mimicking stars that increase in size as they approach the edges of the screen, giving the impression that your computer is like the Starship Enterprise plunging through the universe at high speed. It’s like all these little stars are whizzing by you.

So what I’d like to have you do is try to conjure up an image of this screensaver in your mind and imagine that the black, empty space represents void and that the flying white pixels represent not stars, but tiny atoms.

The Swerve

In Epicurus’ view, this is how the universe works. According to him, the nature of atoms is to fall in straight, vertical lines through the void. That is, until one of those atoms happens to do a fancy little move called a “swerve.” So imagine, in your thought experiment of flying through space, that there are about 3 or 4 times more stars than in the Windows 95 screensaver and that they’re all zooming by peacefully, in straight lines, until suddenly one little pixel takes a hard left turn and smacks into another pixel, throwing the whole scene into chaos.

For Epicureans, this initial “Swerve” explains why the world as we know it exists. It’s a story that looks and feels suspiciously like our “Big Bang” theory, where everything starts off kind of boring and in a state of very low entropy, and then suddenly a singular, acute event kicks off a whole series of recombinations that eventually result in the universe as we know it.

So not only did epicureans come up with an atomistic worldview several millennia before it was cool, they also developed the OG predecessor to the Big Bang Theory, and hopefully my little thought experiment helped you picture it.

Implications of Epicurean Physics

Epicurian physics also deals with a lot of stuff that’s too complicated to get into here, like the fact that there are lots of different types of atoms, how those atoms come together to form more complex materials and organisms, how those atoms interface with our sense organs to produce our experience of the external world, and most importantly that the soul ITSELF is comprised of atoms.

This last one is a biggie because if the soul is composed of atoms, the Epicureans argue that when a person dies, this fragile substance we call “soul” disintegrates and leaves the body, returning to the void as individual atoms. For them, the decay of the soul is like a radically sped up version of how one’s corporeal body reverts to dust over time.

The Tetrapharmakos

To think about some of the logical consequences of this atomistic physics, let’s take a quick look at the Epicurean version of the 10 Commandments, a little list of directions for living a good life called the Tetrapharmakos, which translates to the “four-fold cure” or “remedy.” Simply translated the Tetrapharmakos goes like this:

1. Don’t fear the gods

2. Don’t worry about death

3. What is good is easy to get

4. What is terrible is easy to endure

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The first two instructions follow logically from Epicurus’ atomism. If everything is atoms and void, the gods (if they do exist) are just atoms and void like we are. They’re not really concerned with us, and they don’t have an impact on things like weather or fortune,
so don’t get bent out of shape worshipping them.

A little nuance here: In his lifetime, Epicurus was careful enough to avoid being labeled a heretic and killed Socrates-style for corrupting the minds of Athenians by insisting that the gods don’t exist, but later Epicureans were a bit bolder about their criticism of the gods on the basis of their atomistic worldview.

When it comes to that second instruction – not worrying about death – well, we’ve already established that the soul just disperses when you die, and if there’s no omnipotent gods running around then we don’t have to worry about languishing in Hades in the
river Lethe or striving for some sort of eternal reward after death. Some atoms swerve and
you’re born, then eventually you die and the atoms revert to their more basic or essential state.

So, if there’s no gods pulling the strings and if there’s no point worrying about death, then where does that leave us? The answer is: right here, in your body, which experiences the world through the senses.

The third and fourth directives of the Tetrapharmakos deal precisely with this reality. The third statement, “what is good is easy to get,” reveals a kind of essentialism that runs through Epicurean thought. Put simply, the good life – for Epicurus and his followers – isn’t so much about chasing fancy pleasures but about getting yourself into a complementary set of states called Aponia and Ataraxia, which refer to a sense of calmness and wellbeing in the body and mind, respectively.

For Epicureans, happiness isn’t so much the presence of something good, or interesting, or shiny, but rather the absence of pain and distress – whether physical or psychological. And if you approach life this way, instruction number 3 from the Tetrapharmakos doesn’t seem that complicated at all. As long as you’re not perturbed or in pain, and as long as your basic food and shelter needs are met – what do you really have to complain about? This mindset is actually really compatible with attachment-averse philosophies like Buddhism or with life in those notoriously happy Scandinavian countries whose secret to contentedness lies in keeping your expectations low.

The fourth, and final statement in the Tetrapharmakos – what is terrible is easy to endure – is simply the logical corollary to the third statement. If everything is just atoms and void, and if we are simply collections of atoms walking around experiencing the world with our senses, then there’s no need to get worked up when something bad happens. Either it’s going to be bad for a little while and then get better, or it’s going to be intensely bad for a short period of time, at which point you’ll die, and the atoms of your body and your soul won’t have to endure the pain any longer.

There are many other aspects to Epicureanism that are worth noting. The emphasis on cultivating a community of close friends, for example, or the instruction to avoid getting caught up in politics if you can reasonably avoid it – but the lion’s share of Epicurean thought can be traced back to the Tetrapharmakos, which itself is derived very simply from the fact that we live in a universe comprised of two things: Atoms and void.

Stoic and skeptic opponents

As it turns out, the other two major Hellenistic philosophies at this time – Stoicism and Skepticism – were also geared toward helping people find peace of mind in a chaotic world. The Skeptics did it by saying:

Look, the senses are fallible, as is the human intellect, so let’s not get too attached to any kind of knowledge. The only way to stay sane is to withhold judgment and avoid dogma at all costs.

If Socrates was famous for saying, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing,” then the Skeptics were famous for saying, “yeah? Well, guess what, we’re not even sure we know that much!”

For the purposes of cultivating calm in the face of hardship, The Stoics, on the other hand, turned to reason.

Logos: Everything = Everything

According to Stoic philosophy, the universe contains a divine order, which they referred to as Logos. This term is also loosely synonymous with “reason,” “nature,” and “God.” So the self-reinforcing logic of the Stoics is that humans are part of nature. Nature has a divine order, and when humans use their reason to maintain or become more attuned to that divine order, they are acting in accordance with God. Nature = Reason = God.

This school of thought was also heavily influenced by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was one of the original proponents of the whole Logos idea and who also emphasized the prevalence of flux and change in the universe. Whereas the Epicureans (influenced by the atomism of Democritus) had an extremely mechanistic theory of how the world works, the Stoics had a more biological theory, where Logos acts as a divine “life force” that suffuses all inert matter.

For Epicureans, the universe was atoms and void, but for the Stoics, it was non-living matter acted upon by divine energy.

With this distinction, we arrive at the very beginnings of why Epicurean philosophy was slandered, misrepresented, and almost written entirely out of Western History: because it wasn’t compatible with the immortality of the soul, which is something that Christians and other religious folks cared a lot about.

The Fall of Epicureanism

The prevalence of Epicureanism can be almost perfectly inversely plotted against the rise of Christianity in Europe. Like Stoicism, Epicureanism had a lot of fans and proponents throughout the Mediterranean world when the weird, historical clock we’ve created clicked over from 1 BCE to 1 CE. But in the ensuing centuries, and especially after church doctrine became standardized at the first Nicean council in 325 CE, people got real hyped about Jesus and way less enthusiastic about philosophies that didn’t leave room for eternal life after death.

This is a time when rumors about Epicurus’ hedonism flourished. He was mischaracterized by both Stoic and Christian critics for having lived a life of gaudy excess and taking part in constant orgies and drunken festivities. And if you think rumors are bad in our internet age, imagine living in a world where anyone could step off a ship in a new port, say pretty much ANYTHING they wanted, and no one could prove otherwise.

A Hierarchy of Pleasure

One of the reasons we can reasonably assume these rumors to be false is because of a distinction that Epicureans drew between types of pleasure. We already mentioned the difference between Aponia (absence of pain in the body) and Ataraxia (absence of trouble in the mind). These are both known as Katastematic (or static) pleasures – they are pleasant because of what is absent. The other two types of pleasures were referred to as “Kinetic,” implying that they needed to be actively pursued. In terms of the body, kinetic pleasures would be anything hedonistic, anything above and beyond what you need to live a simple life: fancy foods, wines, non-procreative sex, etc. In terms of the mind, it would simply represent passions to be pursued in times of leisure, like philosophy, poetry, and other intellectual or creative activities.

All four of these types of pleasure had a hierarchy. First, one strove for Ataraxia – that static pleasure of having a mind free from pain (which importantly can be achieved even if your body is in pain), next one strove for aponia, the other static pleasure, a body without pain. After that came the intellectual kinetic pleasures, which leaves the hedonistic pleasures of the body at the bottom of the Epicurean pecking order. Essentially, what Epicurus is saying is that you can live a good life without these physical pleasures, but there’s no reason to avoid them if they happen to come along.

In reality, life in Epicurus’ Garden was probably a fairly simple and pared down affair. The food was purported to be hearty, but basic, and the rare extravagance that we’re told Epicurus sought out wasn’t a harem of women or a multi-day bender, but rather a simple pot of cheese.

Unfortunately, this didn’t save Epicureanism from the ravages of time. During the Middle Ages, the only people who could copy books were those who knew how to write, and almost all of those people were Christian monks who copied and illuminated the bible and other sacred texts as a type of service within their monasteries.

For a fascinating (and Pulitzer Prize winning) account of how Epicurean philosophy was both lost and finally resurrected from the depths of monastic libraries, you should check out a book by Stephen Greenblatt called, fittingly, The Swerve. It’s probably the most gripping and utterly fascinating entry point into Epicureanism, so I can’t recommend it enough, but for our purposes right here and right now, the thing to know is that Epicureanism suffered from some bad and inaccurate PR, and then its teachings became informally banned from being copied due to its incompatibility with certain important Christian beliefs. Greenblatt picks up the story from there, and his book will walk you through Epicureanism in the Middle Ages right up to the founding of our Nation in the 1700s.

Epicurean and stoic ethics

So to recap what we know:

• Epicureanism and Stoicism became prominent philosophies in a time when people were completely stressed out by almost constant war and the threat of plague.

• Both philosophies aimed to help folks achieve peace of mind, but they went about that project in very different ways.

• Stoicism remained popular because it was compatible in some important ways with Christian beliefs, while Epicureanism was slandered and practically written out of history due to its incompatibility with the prospect of an immortal soul and life after death.

At this point, you might be thinking – yeah, or maybe Stoicism is just straight up a better philosophy. Did you ever think THAT might be the reason it survived, smart guy?

Perhaps, but before you make up your mind completely, let me present one more piece of evidence before I make my final pitch.

A few minutes ago, you might recall I drew a distinction between Epicureanism and Stoicism by saying that epicurean physics was mechanistic, while Stoic physics was more “biological.”
Well, there’s another distinction to draw that has to do with how these two philosophies dealt with ethics and the application thereof.

To put it simply, Epicureans gave up any pretense of being able to tightly control the good and bad of the universe. They still wanted to understand the universe as well as they could, but they harbored no illusions about the limitations of their senses and their ability to change how it operated. In an Epicurean universe, everything and everyone is pretty much on equal footing (all atoms and void), and if you took this concept seriously, there’s really no need to strive for wealth, power, or control. Their ethics were rather non-interventionist – a sort of “thrive and let thrive” approach to being with others. As a side note, this is also why Epicureanism was probably the Hellenistic philosophy that was most welcoming of women and people of low social standing.

Stoics, on the other hand, believed that a good life meant living in accord with nature and using Logos to overcome any “passions” that might corrupt the mind. The more work you did by employing reason against your passions, the more virtuous you were perceived to be. So instead of a “thrive and let thrive” ethic like the Epicureans advocated, Stoics were very much in the interventionist camp. When you encounter passion or disorder in yourself or the world around you, the virtuous thing to do is to use Logos (or reason) to bring things back into alignment with nature or God. And not only that, but they strove to do all this while maintaining a very specific mindset.

Apatheia vs. Ataraxia & Aponia

Where Epicureanism advocated Aponia and Ataraxia, Stoicism valued a state of mind called Apatheia, from which we derive the word “apathy,” or “apathetic.” Because pleasure was associated with passion for the Stoics (and passion is the enemy of reason), they strove instead for Apatheia by cultivating a passive indifference to the difficulties and changing nature of the world. This is where we get our contemporary, non-philosophical definition of the adjective, “stoic.”

Now I know you probably aren’t in the market for a linguistics lesson right now, but you may have noticed that these words, Aponia, Ataraxia, and Apatheia all sound a bit similar. That’s because in Greek, when a word starts with “A,” that letter can work as a negative prefix. Think about our own words: amoral, asocial, apolitical – when you stick that prefix on the front of a word, it’s basically like the “reverse” card in Uno in terms of what that word then means.

By examining these Stoic and Epicurean values and learning what these people were against, we can catch a glimpse of some of the strengths and limitations of their respective philosophies. When we break down Apatheia, we realize that Stoics are averse to “Pathos,” literally “passion” or “emotion,” whereas the Epicureans (with their Aponia and Ataraxia) are simply averse to distress in the body and trouble in the mind.

Through the filter of Christianity we are presented with an honorable and quasi-saintlike impression of the Stoics, almost gallant in their indifference to suffering. We read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and are awed by how the most powerful man in the world could be so down-to-earth and serene while running an empire. We marvel at how the philosopher Epictetus used Stoic principles to rise above his social status as a slave and eventually obtain his freedom.

A Final Pitch For Epicureanism

Stoicism, as a set of principles designed to help us deal with sucky circumstances, is actually a pretty handy toolkit. Find yourself in a bit of trouble? Try to use reason to confront that trouble and put things back into their natural order. But the problems (for me) with this toolkit are that it’s derived from an unprovable, self-glorifying belief in the divine, and its chief export is a mindset that abhors passion and pleasure. So if you are a slave, a prisoner of war, a refugee, or happen to be terminally ill – essentially, if you find yourself in a situation where there ain’t much of a chance for pleasure – then yes, you can probably derive a great deal of comfort from Stoic philosophy. But if, like the vast majority of us, you’re just looking to start and end your day feeling good and with a calm mind, I think Epicureanism is actually the more reasonable philosophy to engage with.

At any given time, you can run through the quick Epicurean checklist:

• Do I have an untroubled mind?

• Is my body free from pain?

• Do I have hobbies or passions to pursue?

• And finally, if all those are in order, can I squeeze in a little something special?

For you, something special could be a visit to the spa, a fun new outfit, a trip to somewhere you’d like to visit, or an exquisite meal at your favorite restaurant. For me, it happens to be spirits and cocktails. You may have heard me say in the past that flavor is my favorite way to participate in the universe, and there’s a very specific reason why I formulate the statement that way.

It’s because when I taste an exceptional drink, I know that I am a collection of atoms taking in another (delicious) collection of atoms, and in that respect I am the universe experiencing itself. So even though I don’t buy the Stoic proposition that there is some sort of divine Logos infused in the world, I still derive a sense of wonder from the fact that there are all these atoms sitting in the glass in front of me, and by some special (yet reproducible) cosmic coincidence, they make me very, very happy.

Thanks for taking the time to work through some of this fairly esoteric philosophy with me. I know it’s a departure from the kind of stuff we usually talk about on this show, but I think once in a while a big “zoom-out” is useful.

Cheers,
Eric