The Philosophy of Epicurus

by Epicurus, George K. Strodach (Editor)

Overview

Despite its modern-day connotations of hedonism, "Epicureanism" has more to do with living a mindful, uncomplicated life. Epicurus — who was born at Samos, Greece, in 341 BC and died at Athens in 270 BC — founded a school of philosophy that focused on maximizing simple pleasures and minimizing pain, such as the irrational fear of death. "Death is nothing to us," declared Epicurus, "since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."  
The philosopher did not believe that humans would be punished for their sins after death, and he stressed the lifelong search for lasting pleasures: tranquility, friendship, and philosophical inquiry.  Although Epicurus was a prolific author, very few of his writings have survived. This volume, edited and translated by George K. Strodach, features three important letters and a collection of observations preserved by the biographer of ancient philosophers, Diogenes Laertius. Students of philosophy and ancient history will appreciate this compilation of Epicurus's enduring wisdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486845104
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	11/13/2019
Series:	Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,335,940
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) founded a school in Athens that focused on the art of living. Although he was a prolific author, very few of his writings have survived, making this collection all the more precious.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I. DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATOMIC CONCEPT

Many of the characteristic positions which Western philosophy has developed in its long history of twenty-five centuries are already clearly represented or at least adumbrated by Greek thinkers of classical antiquity. One of the best known of these ancient schools of thought is the point of view traditionally known as materialism, the theory that all reality is reducible to matter or matter-in-motion. Ancient materialism has a number of representatives, but chief among them are the Greek philosopher Epicurus (c. 342-270 B.C.) and the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius (94-55 B.C.), and it is with these two figures that this book is principally concerned.

If we are to consider materialism, we must first consider matter itself, and if we discuss matter we cannot avoid talking about the Greek conception of the atom, the irreducible unit of matter and the foundation of all reality — physical, psychological, biological, moral, social, and historical. Neither Epicurus nor Lucretius had originated the atomic theory, though they both had much to do with propagating its doctrines. When Lucretius came to versify in hexameters for Roman readers of the Ciceronian and Caesarian period, he utilized one of the longer, more popular digests of atomism (the so-called "Major Epitome") composed by Epicurus two centuries earlier. And Epicurus in turn had relied heavily, especially for his physics and metaphysics, on the works of the Greek atomist Democritus, of the fifth century B.C. Between Democritus and the first beginnings of Greek thought there is an expanse of over 50 yea rs, during which the initial crudities were enlarged upon, contradicted, compromised, and at last refined into the first statement of atomism. Let us see briefly how this came about.

A perennial question in Greek philosophy, early and late, is the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many. This may be put in the form of a question: Is it possible to penetrate the veil of the senses, which reveal the world as multiple and diversified, and to discover some underlying unity from which the many may be derived? In other words, is it possibl e to reconcile the multifarious world of sensory experience with ultimate reality? Or what is the nature of the "real" world that lies behind the ordinary everyday world? The Greeks attacked these speculative questions with zest and great ingenuity and were by no means discouraged when they found themselves unable to obtain a final, definitive answer. The earliest speculators, three members of the Ionian or so-called Milesian school, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.), were frank materialists who postulated primary stuffs such as water or fiery air as the underlying real from which the entire world of physical objects is derived. At the same time they assumed this primary stuff to be living in itself and, if living, to be capable of all possible change. The actual mechanics of change they explained by two principles, condensation and rarefaction. Thus water, for example, is rarefied into vapor or steam or compacted into ice, rock, bone, tissue, etc.

But this first attempt to explain natural change did not pass muster with the more sophisticated thinkers who came later. So the successor of the Milesians, Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 B.C.), concentrated on the problem of change, so much so that he made change itself the metaphysical real. The world has no underlying unity except flux, which is the denial of unity. Heraclitus pictured the world of things dialectically as an unstable and temporary harmony of opposing cosmic forces. On the one hand, he believed, there is a force that compounds the four Greek elements — earth, air, fire, and water — into "things"; simultaneously the opposing cosmic force is at work decompounding them, so that permanence, stability, and self-identity are written off as illusions of the senses. "It is im possible to step into the same river twice," Heraclitus said, but he might just as well have said, "It is impossible to step into the same river once," because "same" is a mere linguistic convenience which falsifies the nature of things. The cosmic process is poetically symbolized as Fire (for Heraclitus, like all the early cosmologists, philosophized in poetry) and is called "god," but it would be a mistake to suppose that he conceived reality as being either of these exclusively. Reality is all things simultaneously, or, in the Greek phrase, it is a process of "becoming" in which even apparently clear-cut opposites lose identity and merge into each other. Thus, "Good and evil are one" and "It is the same thing in us that is alive and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shif ted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former." Heraclitus' position is well summed up in the two words panta rei ("All things are in flux"), and of all the pre-Socratic thinkers he is perhaps the most congenial to us today because he is the distant forerunner of all modern thinkers who represent the world as dynamic process-thinkers such as Spencer, Bergson, Whitehead, and Dewey.

Now if we have one thinker who finds that ultimate reality is flux, it is dialectically possible, indeed necessary, to have another thinker who finds that reality is nonflux, i.e., complete immutability and immovability. And that is precisely what happened in the Greek development. Parmenides (c. 470 B.C.) contradicts his predecessor Heraclitus at all points. Parmenides first points out that nothingness is inconceivable or, as we say, contradictory, since if you attempt to conceive of nothing you conceive of something. Furthermore, he argues, if nothingness is inconceivable, then nothingness is likewise nonexistent; there is no such thing as nothing. If nothingness is nonexistent, empty space is likewise nonexistent. That leaves only one alternative: namely, that only "what is" — or being, or full space — exists. How shall we describe this "what is" of Parmenides? In his own words: (i) "There are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for it is now, all at once, a continuous one. ... I shall not let you say or think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not" (i.e., reality can neither be created from nor destroyed into nothingness, since nothingness is nonexistent; and if reality is both uncreated and indestructible, that is the same as saying it is eternal). (2) "Nor is it divisible ..., for what is is in contact with what is" (i.e., reality is a plenum, absolutely full space; if it were divisible, it would contain interstices of nothingness , which is inconceivable). (3) "Moreover, it is immovable. ... It is the same, and it rests in the selfsame place, abiding in itself" (i.e., motion and its correlative, change, are both ruled out; if a thing changes, something that is passes into nonexistence, and something that is not comes into being from nonexistence, both of which are impossible). And (4) "since ... it has a furthest limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the center in every direction ...; for the point from which it is equal in every direction tends equally to the limits."

Reality, then, according to Parmenides, is a single and undifferentiated sphere-material in nature, eternal, absolutely continuous, and without motion or change. Furthermore, it is finite, and, if finite, it must be bounded-by what? Not by empty space or nothingness, because these are both nonexistent! Thus we see that not only Heraclitus lied but our senses lie to us daily when they tell us that the world is multiple and full of motion and change. Such an extreme denial of the senses is rare among the Greeks, who of ten doubted the evidence of the senses without writing them off altogether. But Parmenides was a doctrinaire rationalist, one who believed that truth is attainable by logic and by logic alone.

It is obvious that we have now reached an apparent impasse in the Greek development, where two major thinkers and their respective principles contradict each other. Parmenides contradicts Heraclitus, and the principle of stasis contradicts the principle of flux. But this is by no means the end, because the Greek genius now proceeds to the final stage of the dialectic, which is a synthesis of the two contradictories, a synthesis that reconciles both and thereby saves parts of both. This saving compromise is known as pluralism. The Parmenidean real is still retained in principle but is now fragmented into minute particles, each particle being eternal, completely solid, without motion or change. Empty space is at first denied, and extraneous forces, or prime movers, such as Love and Strife (attraction and repulsion), are imported in order to energize the inert particles of matter, to assemble them into the configurations we call "things," and to shift them about in orderly processes. Thus change and motion are allowed but are interpreted as wholly relative. They pertain to phenomena only, things as they appear to us through the senses; but in the ultimate particles themselves there is neither change nor motion. By a feat of imagination the Parmenidean real has now been converted into a tiny miniature of itself, and at one stroke we have moved from the macrocosm to a microcosm that is almost atomic. This is clearly a sensible reconciliation of two ways of knowing-the way of logic, or rationalism, and the way of the senses, or empiricism; and it is essentially the same outlook that animates science today.

The earlier pluralists, like Empedocles and Anaxagoras (c. 450 B.C.), presented certain crudities that were later refined in the atomism of Democritus. For example, Empedocles broke down the Parmenidean real into a host of earth-particles, water-particles, fire-particles, and air-particles, each particle being unmixed, eternal, and inert. Under the action of Love and Strife these are shuffled and reshuffled into changing individual things that have no peculiar substance of their own. Things "are only a mingling and interchange of what has been mingled. Substance is but a name given to these things by men." The particles of Anaxagoras, on the other hand, are far more elaborately conceived. There are, to be sure, particles, or "seeds," that are predominantly earth or water, hot or cold, sweet or bitter, rough or smooth, hair or bone or flesh; but each of these, being infinitely subdivisible, contains also subparticles of every other natural quality, but not in large amounts. Everything is "in everything; nor is it possible for them to be apart, but all things have a portion of everything." In this way Anaxagoras aimed to explain the infinite variety of the natural world and the countless changes that occur in it.

This qualitative hodgepodge in the ultimate particles of matter is radically revised by Democritus (c. 42 5 B.C.), who along with his little-known predecessor Leucippus represents the last refinement in ancient particle theory. Democritus' "seeds," now also known as "atoms," apparently for the first time, are denuded of all qualities except size, shape, and inherent motion. Natural qualities such as colors, tastes, sounds, etc., are explained in quantitative and kinetic terms, an explanation still valid in principle today. Odors, for example, are subjective responses in us to atomic films impinging from without. We smell different odors because the films differ in structure, complexity, type and velocity of atoms, etc. In addition, Democritus held that the atom, though mathematically divisible, was physically indivisible. Each atom was homogeneous throughout, without parts or empty space — in other words, a tiny Parmenidean world. He furthermore introduced two revolutionary changes in the pluralistic theory, which still labored under the dead weight of Parmenides' logic: (1) He postulated the real existence of nothingness or empty space, primarily in order to provide a medium for free atomic movements of all sorts. His predecessors had ruled out empty space as a logical impossibility and had been content to work a miracle by having their particles move about in a plenum under the action of omnipotent cosmic forces. (2) He endowed each atom with eternal motion as an inherent trait, thereby reducing the cosmic processes to kinetic mechanisms and obviating the introduction of such concepts as divine creation, providence , and cosmic purpose, which are always an embarrassment to any materialistic system. But his predecessors had consistently clung to Parmenides' view that self-motion is a contradiction and that the real cannot move without ceasing to be itself.

At this point we might do well to compliment the Greeks, especially the Atomists, for having gone thus far in the direction of what we today call science. But then we should immediately ask, Why was the progress of science stalemated for so many centuries? To this there are several answers: First, the Greeks neither understood nor employed experimental method to any significant extent. In certain cases they erected brilliant hypotheses, such as the atomic theory, and then dogmatically asserted the truth of such hypotheses without rigorous testing. An untested hypothesis is scientifically valueless except as a starting point for verification; so we should not give the Greeks too much credit for the atomic theory, especially in view of the fact that the modern conception of the atom is radically different from theirs. In fact, perhaps the only noteworthy similarity between the ancient and modern theories is the name itself. On the other hand, science without hypothesis is dead; so we must credit the Atomists at least with speculative depth, with vision into the finer structure of matter. Second, the Greeks never applied mathematics to physical nature so as to obtain precise quantitative measurements, as is done constantly in science today. Although the ancient Pythagoreans were expert mathematicians and the Atomists good physicists, there was never any fruitful union of the two schools. Third, it must be remembered that in the ancient and medieval worlds materialism was always a poor competitor of transcendentalism of various sorts. The prosaic truths and morally repugnant (to many, at least) values of materialism simply could not compete on an equal footing with the soaring poetries of Platonism and a Platonized Christianity. In addition, the new theory of mechanistic causation did not fall on sympathetic ears. The majority of men were not prepared either intellectually or psychologically to believe that everything that happens in nature, including the nature of man himself, occurs through blind and impersonal causes involving the movements of unseen atoms. They were much more inclined to explain events in terms of the will of anthropomorphic gods or a benign Providence whose ways they could not hope to understand. Hence for more than fifteen centuries there was a severe dislocation of human interest in the natural world, and the scientific attitude all but perished. Atomism itself was not resurrected until the time of Gassendi, a seventeenth-century Jesuit who was a contemporary of Descartes.

II. FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ATOMISM AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

The following sections are constructed primarily from the writings of the later Atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, inasmuch as the works of Democritus, once voluminous in extent, are now unfortunately almost entirely lost.

1. Nothing arises from nothing. "Nothing is generated from the nonexistent," Epicurus tells us. "This is so because otherwise anything could be generated from anything and not require seminal particles." In other words, if things were created out of nothing, either with or without divine agency, there would be no fixed order of happenings in nature, and things would occur at random. We should be inclined today to restate this in positive form as the principle of universal causation: every event whatsoever has a prior cause, whether known or not. The whole structure of modern science (at least insofar as it concerns itself with gross aggregates of particles) still rests on this assumption, and the principle, though strictly unprovable, has the highest possible pragmatic value. In the Atomists such principles usually have two aspects, scientific and ethical, and the scientific is regularly subordinate to the ethical. Thus Lucretius uses the "nothing from nothing" principle to explain and illustrate the regularities of nature, the fixity of species, and so on. But in his hands it is also a powerful weapon in the Epicurean war against superstition, fear, and popular religion. To know the causes of things and to know that these are wholly natural is to banish groundless fears of a god or gods who work in unsearchable ways; and the conquest of such fear represents a marked diminution of human pain and suffering and hence is an essential ingredient of the good life. If we want to bring this point home in modern terms we can remind ourselves that there are plenty of people throughout the world today who attribute cancer and other diseases, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other natural disasters to the machinations of an inscrutable god who has his own plans for us miserable men. Such people, and they are counted in the millions, lead lives of fear and propagate a vulgar religion of fear. The Epicurean devil, of course, was (and is) popular religion with its massive ignorance and superstition. The Epicurean savior today would be the humanitarian scientist, who would tell us that cancer is not divinely sent but naturally caused, even though he does not yet know its precise cause. With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface
Introduction
I. Development of the Atomic Concept
II. First Principles of Atomism
III. The Motion of Atoms
IV. Sensation and Perception
V. Theory of Knowledge
VI. Religion and Theology
VII. Ethics and the Good Life
A Note on the Translation
Excerpts from the Life of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius
Letter to Herodotus (Parallel Passages from Lucretius)
Letter to Pythocles (Parallel Passages from Lucretius)
Letter to Menoeceus (Parallel Passages from Lucretius)
Leading Doctrines
The Vatican Collection of Aphorisms
Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index