A Look at Epicurus

NEETlosopher Confirmed

Encountering Epicurus

A we will soon see, Epicurus actually lands more on the rigth than the left.

Visiting a bookstore with my girlfriend, I found a copy of some collected works of Epicurus. Specifically, Penguin Classics’ The Art of Happiness, with foreword by Daniel Klein and introduction by George K. Strodach. Epicurus’ name is somewhat familiar to me – I’ve seen the word “epicure” thrown around, and I’ve probably read the term “Epicurean” somewhere, so to sate my curiosity, I decided to buy it. Before plunging into the book, I decided to look up the words described. I repeat Merriam-Webster’s definitions for “epicurean” below[1].

epicurean (adjective)

Capitalized: of or relating to Epicurus

Of, relating to, or suited to an epicure

Epicurean (noun)

A follower of Epicurus

Often not capitalized: epicure sense 1

Quite a popular word for people to use it both capitalized and uncapitalized, and it must have been in circulation for some time. Looks like “epicure” is the more important word, let’s have that definition below[2].

epicure (noun)

One with sensitive and discriminating tastes especially in food or wine

One devoted to sensual pleasure: sybarite

Okay, so a hedonist who loves to eat, got it. Expecting the Ancient Greek equivalent of narrated Instagram posts describing feasts, I got cracking on Epicurus.

Preface and Introduction, by Daniel Klein:

I take some issue with this preface and introduction. For a book only about 270 pages long, an introduction that takes up 80 pages seems excessive, when footnotes also take up the last 80[3], leaving only about a hundred pages for the actual translated works of Epicurus. The reason given by the author, in the preface, however, was quite tantalizing, and promised plenty of novelty in the text to come.

Preface

Epicurus is a neglected philosopher. No complete translation of his extant works has appeared in English since Cyril Bailey published his Oxford edition in 1926.

Interesting. I read on, and the next paragraph started with:

“The public image of Epicurus has come down to us gravely flawed. The educated layman has picked up various stereotypes to the effect that he was an epicure, an atheist, a pleasure-monger, and an ethical materialist. The introduction and commentary of this book attempt to correct these grievous and unnecessary errors by defining terms and by setting forth the leading concepts of the Epicurean school in full context.”

Alright, Mr. George Strodach, you’re promising a banger of a book here, so I certainly hope you deliver.

The Summary Proper

Epicurus writes a lot, and it is translated into a dense and scientific style that is difficult to read. In order to prevent essay bloat, I will follow the structure of the Introduction, but insert commentary and quotes from the translated works to support the point. Much as I would like to review the two parts separately, I feel that the introduction does an excellent job of summarizing Epicurus’ points into a digestible format.

Section 1: Development of the Atomic Concept

The legendary 80-page introduction is more an introduction to Epicurus as a whole, rather than to the works presented. As such, it goes on an overview of the Epicurean school, mostly through the writings of its two greatest contributors – the philosopher Epicurus (342-270 BC), and the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius (94-55 BC). Epicurean thought is from the point of view of materialism. Materialism is the point of view that the theory that all reality is reducible to matter, or matter-in motion – probably easier to think of it as everything that happens having an underlying material phenomenon. This extends, in stronger forms, even to mind and consciousness, meaning that a strict materialism is also a negation of free will[4]. The particular form of materialism that Epicurus followed was the atomism of Democritus, from the 5^th Century BC[5]. To oversimplify, atomism a materialist approach that claims that there are only two types of things – atoms, which are tiny particles people can’t sense, that form the basis of all matter, and void, which is pure nothingness. Everything that happens is the product of atoms and their interactions.

If that sounds like something you learned in science class, it is. Atomism looks just like the atoms you’ve learned about in physics and chemistry – tiny particles, invisible to the eye, that make up everything around us. You may ask why, then, does the history of atoms jump from Atomism to the early 1800’s[6], rather than being discovered by the Greeks?

George Strodach says that the Greeks will come up with brilliant hypotheses, but don’t use the experimental method, instead dogmatically and rigorously asserting the rational correctness of their claims. I want to go a step further and claim that the Greeks viewed all things as ethics – finding the universal principles that underlie everything. Philosophy, biology, and physics would be best understood as ‘general ethics’, ‘ethics of men, animals, and plants’, and ‘ethics of matter’. Rather than actually drilling down and learning how it works, they were content to argue endlessly over how these things work – or, as we will see, how they wish they worked.

Kind of explains why the Greeks invented all the math while the Romans built all the ancient structures we still visit today.

Section 2: First Principles of Atomism and their Implications

These next sections are lists with long explanations, so I’ll be providing a numbered list to start off and stacking the interpretation on after.

Nothing Arises from Nothing – If things could be created from nothing, then they would simply spring into existence randomly from nothing. This runs against experience, and therefore, we cannot create something from nothing. In general, no effect occurs without a cause.

1. Nothing Passes Away into Nothing – If something we cannot observe disappears into nothingness, eventually, everything will disappear. Therefore, atoms and matter must be preserved, merely converted into other forms. We would call this indestructibility or conservation of matter today.

2. Only Atoms and Space Exist- Everything is made out of atoms, whether all of the same type or in combination. The only exception to this rule is space, which is the medium through which atoms move. Everything is the product of atoms or combinations of atoms in motion and empty space.

3. Space and Atoms are Infinite – Because only atoms and space exist, beyond the borders of “the universe” must be more space. Lucretius gives an example – throw a javelin at the boundary of the universe, and what happens? Since only atoms and space exist, it must hit either atoms or space. Either way, it would be made of the same stuff as the universe, and should therefore be part of it, since it still obeys the same rules.

I’ve summarized it down to just the principles here, but I want to emphasize two things that George Strodach talked about in the explanations - first, that these principles are indeed materialist, boiling everything down to matter and its interactions, and second, that they are deterministic, not allowing for “the fear of groundless gods who work in unsearchable ways”. This passage from Strodach is most instructive:

… 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.

Epicurus, in the conclusion to his letter to Herodotus, does not quite go so far as that, but is in general agreement. Paragraph 81 of the letter is reproduced below:

In addition to all these general considerations we must realize that the most important types of spiritual confusion consist (1) in men’s believing that the heavenly bodies are themselves blessed and immortal and at the same time have wills, activities and motives that are contrary to such properties; (2) in their constantly anticipating or imagining some frightful everlasting fate, like those in the myths of hell, or dreading the loss of sensation at the time of death as though this were relevant to “themselves”; and (3) in undergoing all this suffering not as a result of rational judgment but because of some irrational drive (and by not setting limits to mental suffering, they consequently experience turmoil equal to or more intense than they would if they rationally entertained such beliefs). But mental serenity means achieving release from all such fears and keeping the most important general principles constantly in mind.

Or, put more succinctly in his Leading Doctrines #13:

Great pains have been taken by Epicurus to remove the influence of the divine, the immaterial, and the irrational from one’s life, in order to properly and scientifically understand the nature of the world in accordance to these axioms. The goal, as you may have guessed, is to remove as much as possible all needless worries that one may have, in pursuit of total peace of mind, ataraxia, which he considers the good life.

Section 3: The Motion of Atoms

1. Motion is Eternal – Atomic motion has no beginning or end – it always has been, is, and will be.

2. Meaning of “Body” – A body or object is a complex structure of atoms with various shapes, sizes, and velocities. These can be seen because of their internal atomic collisions, reducing normal atomic speeds to the range of human perceptions.

3. The Two Kinds of Motion - There are two kinds of motion in the world – unseen atomic motion, and observed motion of bodies. The movement of object is the sum total of the motions of all of its atoms. The object exists separate from its atoms because it is sensed in its own right.

4. The Atomic Swerve – Epicurus postulates that sometimes, atoms deviate from their caused course and into each other, causing the collisions and combinations that create objects. The example given is atoms falling perpendicularly to the ground like rain sometimes, somehow deviating from their courses, colliding with one another, and creating objects. This sets off a chain reaction that eventually results in the world we have today.

Epicurus sets up a deterministic system and attempts to bring it as close to sensed experience as possible. We do not see atoms, but they make up the things we see. Those things are “bodies” or “objects”, composed of combination of varied atoms in motion, with the void taking up the rest of the universe. I want to call your attention to the Atomic Swerve – Epicurus’ concept that sometimes, without cause, atoms will deviate from their caused course. For such a strongly deterministic system as atomism, this is unacceptable, and reads as a logical inconsistency, or, as the kids say, a “cope”. Quoting Mr. Strodach:

The postulate of the swerve occasions a difficult logical dilemma, and we must critically take note of it. The swerve is either caused or uncaused. If it is uncaused, then the principle of ‘nothing arises from nothing’ is violated; but if it is caused, it must be caused by something – but by what? Epicurus and Lucretius do not tell us, and Lucretius’ phrase ‘at quite unpredictable times and places’ is more than a hint that such swerves are random, uncaused events.

Although an uncaused event in a tight deterministic system such as atomism is an absurdity, Epicurus had an overwhelmingly good reason (as he thought) to entertain such a notion. His notion was ethical rather than physical, although the swerve was also very serviceable in explaining cosmic origins. Epicurus, and Lucretius after him, wished to free man from tyranny – not only the tyranny of unpredictable gods but also the tyranny of matter itself. If man is nothing but a material mechanism and part of the world mechanism, then his choices of good and evil are mechanically determined, and he cannot be said to be an autonomous and responsible ethical being.

This is why I consider the Greek system of physics and thought more like physical ethics than a pure science. In the modern paradigm, “free will” is a concept debated only in explicit philosophy, banished otherwise to sophomore conversations over drinks or weed being real deep and introspective, man. To the Greeks, it was apparently perfectly natural to worry about the implications of your physical theory on free will, and therefore, ethics and how people should live and act. There must be consistency between the way the world is and how we should live, aligning ourselves with the principles embodied by the world around us.

Greeks, man, they were something else.

Section 4: Sensation and Perception

Sensation is produced by the Interaction of Soul and Body Atoms – Only a body with a soul can sense things, in the same way that eyes and ears take in light and sound and relay them to the mind for interpretation.

1. Sensation Impossible in Death – Dead things, no longer having a soul, sense nothing.

2. Perception dependent on atomic films flowing off of objects – Bodies emit thin films of atoms (what we would consider reflected light or vibrations for sight or sound) that interact with our sensory organs, exciting complicated patterns of vibration (vibes) that inform us of these bodies. These films are called eidola (eidolon?)

3. Truth and falsity in perception – Whatever you perceive is unquestionably true, but whatever you think about what you perceive may or may not be true. At a distance, the circular tower and an electricity pole without cables look the same, but your eyes do not deceive you - it is only your judgment that it’s one or the other that steered you wrong.

The Epicurean idea that everything is caused by moving atoms naturally results in these ideas. Determinism rears its head again, particularly in the insistence that the senses cannot lie and can only be misinterpreted. This was, according to the author, a retort against the Skeptics, who doubted the ability of the senses and the mind to know the universe, which would directly obviate his work, and perhaps, all philosophy. As Epicurus says in Leading Doctrines #23 and 24:

If you reject all sensations, you will not have any point of reference by which to judge even the ones you claim are false.

If you summarily rule out any single sensation and do not make a distinction between the element of belief that is superimposed on a percept (something you perceive, not a precept) that awaits verification and what is actually present in sensation or in the feelings or some percept of the mind itself, you will cast doubt on all other sensations by your unfounded interpretation and consequently abandon all the criteria of truth. On the other hand, in cases of interpreted data, if you accept as true those that need verification as well as those that do not, you will still be in error, since the whole question at issue in every judgment of what is true or not true will be left intact.

We can see clearly that Epicurus’ materialist ideas show in his very rigid and scholarly language, translated for us by Mr. Strodach. There is a clear thrust here – the senses are true, only the mind lies – which will be important later when we tackle ethics and the pursuit of the good life in section 7. For now, we move on to Epicurus’ theory of mind.

Section 5: Theory of Knowledge

1. Purpose of knowledge – The purpose of all knowledge, metaphysical and scientific, is to free us from irrational fears and anxieties and bring us peace of mind.

2. Epicurean empiricism – Our stock of general ideas is derived from experience rather than innate a priori concepts (like Plato’s forms) and that our judgments and beliefs are true or false depending on their correspondence to our sensations, feelings, and our general ideas. Interestingly, feelings are a truth criteria – so depending on what you want, both a high-pressure, high-stakes, high-pay job in an expensive city and a relatively low-pressure job in a cheap city can both be correct choices. So are general conceptions such as horses, oxen, or men. It is only these package concepts, so we are told, that allow us to order our knowledge beyond simply directly sensing everything. We have a surprising number of degrees of freedom for something so deterministic.

3. Principle of Non-Contradiction – If a judgment or belief cannot be contradicted by our experience, it is still true/can be taken as true. The author calls this an escape clause, which is a fair interpretation, but I choose to believe it simply allows for new knowledge to appear. Atomic phenomena lying below the range of the senses and celestial phenomena too remote to be observed, after all, do exist and can have effects on us – which we know with the benefit of hindsight. The rigor of the theory takes another blow, partly because feelings and experience, being open-ended, are given the same status of truth.

4. Use of Analogies as means of Scientific Inference – You can propose an imperceptible phenomenon that has a similar perceptible phenomenon. For example: “We do not know how lunar eclipses are caused, but we can guess there is something traveling in front of the moon, because that is how light from a torch or a brazier can be blocked”. Again, a very open-ended assertion, and one that would not pass muster in science today.

5. Causation – Causation can be single (one cause) or plural (multiple causes for a single effect) based on the nature of the question, existing experience on the matter, and the politics of the question. Terrestial physics, metaphysics, and ethics, for example, were strictly single-cause, as was the fashion at the time. Celestial phenomena, however, were plural-cause in the Epicurean system, as their opponents were religionists who advanced the single-cause “divine causation” theory. This split, while regrettable for the consistency of Epicurean thought, was natural in light of their opposition to divine causes.

Here is where Epicureanism and its ideas begin to interface with the real world and philosophical opponents, and we begin to see the determinism forced to yield somewhat. Trying to hold to a strictly rationalist and deterministic position is all nice in theory, but when you oppose yourself to popular religion, Skeptics who deny the veracity of mind and senses, and the real world, which, with the benefit of hindsight, we know is an incredibly complex system built on networks of interconnected phenomenon, things become a lot more difficult, particularly since it was much harder to measure things in those times. To expect a consistent logical framework to hold up against an inconsistent and ever-changing world is too high of an expectation.

That being said, we begin to see the key contradiction in Epicurean thought, and one that I will harp on for the remainder of this essay. Despite being a materialist, closed-ended system where sense perception and experience are all effects have causes, Epicureanism also allows open-ended ideas - uncaused phenomenon such as the atomic swerve, and explanations such as unobserved causes, assumed to be analogous to observed phenomena.

This is Greek “ethical physics” at work. Epicurus wants a world free from irrational fears and worries, that allows people to approach reality with clear eyes, peaceful hearts, and free will, so he proposes a deterministic system. However, real life is never so clean. Feelings (good and bad alike), experience, and shared concepts are sensed, but open-ended, not necessarily having direct material causes, but being undeniable facts of life. It would be un-Epicurean to refuse to acknowledge them as sources of truth, but to do so weakens the strict determinism and materialism of his own theory.

Epicurus is a rationalist progressive coming to terms with the fact that rationality is a lot harder than simple logic, because logic is bounded by premises, while rationality takes the whole world as a premise.

Section 6: Religion and Theology

1. Existence of the Gods Known Through Perception – We perceive the gods as eidola – their film of atoms travels to us and gives us the experience of their existence. They are not a cause for things to have happened, but as paragons of what it is to live the good life, which, according to Epicurus, is ataraxia, or peace of mind. These are the least Greek gods imaginable, as described by a Greek.

2. Epicurus’ “Theology” – Since Epicurus’ gods are already perfectly at peace, they cannot cause anything because they are absorbed in self-reflection on their own perfection. They’re too busy living their best life. Epicurus instead advances a religion of contemplation, because the gods are at peace and will not hear your prayers – so you must figure it out yourself. A natural offshoot at this is that the world was not created for a purpose, since the atomic swerve is the cause of everything, and the atomic swerve is random.

3. The Attack on Popular Religion – Religion fundamentally prevents us from reaching ataraxia. The traditional Greek gods, with their capricious, petty behavior, the fear of death and the afterlife, and the divine causality of the universe are anathema to Epicurus’ vision of the good life. Rationally determined and correctly understood peace of mind through absence of irrational fears cannot coexist with capricious, petty gods, nymphs, fairies, and the promise of death and a horrible afterlife in Hades. These are the things Epicurus wishes to banish, in favor of contemplation and cultivation.

4. Epicureanism as a Secular Religion – Confirmed. Lucretius, Epicurus’ Roman poet fanboy, proceeds to treat him as quoted below:

You who were the first to lift so bright a light in a night so deep and to illumine the good things of life, I follow after you, O Epicurus, ornament of Greece, and pliantly set my feet in the tracks you have already printed – not from desire to vie with you but because I thirst with love to imitate you. Can the swallow contend with the swan? Can the young goat with its timorous limbs rival the doughty horse in the race? You are our father; you impart to us a father’s precepts, O revealer of nature!

Less flippantly, Epicurus and Lucretius diagnose suffering as a consequence of the unnatural desires of man – money, power, position – and rejecting a simple life free of mental and bodily pain. With anxieties and fears being fairly universal, there must also be a fairly universal remedy, with Epicurus found in reason. Reason allows the man to discern what is truly important and purify his irrational desires down to pleasure and pain.

When I read this section I thought that Epicurus was a 1990s-2000s atheist who had read too much Dawkins and Nietzsche and therefore concluded that God is dead. I was transported back to my high school days, where I had a doubting Thomas for one of my best friends and the generally less-religious nerds as my crowd. Speaking of nerdy things, the fact that Epicurus, preaching rationality, became deified by those who followed him, is peak Warhammer 40,000[7].

This discarding of gods and desires also resembles Buddhism – something that will come up later.

Section 7: Ethics and the Good Life

Perhaps appropriately, the part that Epicurus is best known for is saved for last. As defined in the beginning, to be an “epicure” is to be a consumer and enjoyer of fine food and drink.

Epicurus’ Hedonism

It’s Buddhism in a toga. Pleasure is the absence of pain. Pleasure is a moral good, and pain is a moral bad. Anything that creates pleasure and avoid pain, in total, is good. Remove from yourself the fear of gods, death, and the torments of hell. Remove from yourself the unnatural mortal desires of power, wealth, and position, and embrace a simple, contented life. This forms ataraxia – perfect peace of mind. In a history written by Diogenes Laertius, we get this:

But they [Epicurus’ friends] came to him from everywhere and lived with him in the Garden (as Apollodorus tells us) on a very frugal and plain diet. In fact, they were satisfied with a half pint of cheap wine and usually drank water… Epicurus himself remarked in his letters that he was satisfied with just water and plain bread. ‘Send me a small pot of cheese’, he wrote, ‘so that I can have a costly meal whenever I like.’ This was the man who gave it as his opinion that pleasure is life’s goal…

You know, it kind of feels like the word “epicurean” got lost in translation. Or maybe someone forgot the “pleasure is in the absence of pain and unnatural desires” part, so they went all-out on the partying. Anyway, moving on.

Determinism and Free Will

We know that Epicurus was just as concerned with not allowing gods or matter to tyrannize people – because if we lived in strict determinism, there would be no real need to have an ideal of the good life. Everyone would be good or bad by default. His thought is therefore stuck in the unenviable position of being deterministic but leaving space for free will – between Scylla and Charybdis, as they may have said.

These two moral parts form a strange whole. On the one hand, one is encouraged to, in Epicurus’ words:

When I say that pleasure is the goal of living, I do not mean the pleasures of libertines or the pleasures inherent in positive enjoyment, as is supposed by certain persons who are ignorant of our doctrine or who are not in agreement with it or who interpret it perversely. I mean, on the contrary, the pleasure that consists in freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation. The pleasant life is not the product of one drinking party after another or of sexual intercourse with women and boys or of the sea food and other delicacies afforded by a luxurious table…

Or, in George Strodach’s words in the introduction:

…disciplining of the appetites, curtailment of desires and needs to the absolute minimum necessary for healthy living, detachment from most of the goals and values that are most highly regarded, and withdrawal from active participation in the life of the community, in the company of a few select friends – in a word, plain living and high thinking.

Despite this, Epicurus clearly had a great desire to improve the lives of others. His dogmatic attack on what he viewed as irrational religious fears and his dissemination of wisdom on how to live a good life clearly animated him. Despite taking a more passive stance than the positive utilitarianism of Mill or the Christian conception of love, his actions and writings show that he wants more good for more people, even if he disagrees with them on what that is. Restraining himself from forcing his vision on others is commendable, if somewhat less aggressive than one would expect.

The introduction also brings up that Epicurus was active during hard times – the Hellenistic period being one far removed from modern plenty, and it is well-suited for the individual at those times, who needs to weather the storm before moving on. However, I find it insufficient as a binding ethic for a larger group, as it blocks the cooperation and ambition that I believe is necessary for society to work and grow. Goals must be set and achieved, talents must be nurtured, and people must be bound together as citizens, rather than live apart as individuals. For my fuller thoughts, see below.

2.A. Be Self-Centered

Fundamentally, Epicurean thought is a negative, defensive mechanism – one that cedes desire, initiative, and progress entirely while maintaining a rationalistic and altruistic outlook. You can see this as the seed of progressivism because of the attitude towards religion or a kind of more socially-interested Buddhism due to the moral import given to pain and pleasure, but to tell you the truth, that would be too large of a scale. Epicureanism, as originally understood, is a personal retreat from the obligations of society, and is not, in my opinion, a viable system.

I’m sure anyone homesteading or living off-grid can tell you that life is a constant struggle to make ends meet. Anyone who has to go out into nature – and I mean the wild or on farms in the sticks where the only road’s a dirt road – that nature sucks and is always trying to kill you, beautiful only when it has decided it has had enough of battling you for now. I doubt that Epicurus would choose something that comes with so much pain.

TL;DR:

me after typing all this

We think Epicurus is some kind of gigachad hedonist who has huge parties, fucks all the bitches, eats all the food, and drinks all the booze. Apparently, he was some kind of basement-dwelling straight-A student living on gyros and chicken tendies, writing online about debunking religion like any self-disrespecting fedora-tipping atheist, schizoposting about determinism and the atomic swerve, and never leaving his basement fort if he can help it. We’re not sure how he makes money, but he’s probably some kind of streamer, online writer, or VTuber.

Somehow a bigger NEET than Plato, the guy who fantasized about people being chained up in a cave.[8]

Section 8: Cherrypicking

This is a section for quotes I found funny or insightful that didn’t quite fit into this overly bloated essay. If you’re looking for restack quote material but don’t want to use the tl;dr, this is probably the best place to look.

From Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Epicurus:

“Even if the wise man is tortured, he is happy. Nonetheless he will moan and groan under those conditions. – par. 118”

Masochists.

“Intercourse never helped any man, and it’s a wonder that it hasn’t hurt him. – par. 118”

Lmao this next quote literally comes after that:

“In addition, the wise man will marry and beget children, as Epicurus tells us in his problems and his work On Nature; but he will marry according to his station in life, whatever it may be.- par. 118”

Did you forget where babies come from? Next quote.

“He will avoid certain persons and certainly not make a fool of himself when drinking, as Epicurus remarks in the Symposium. – par. 118”

Good advice.

From the Letter to Pythocles, Section II. On Worlds

A world is a circumscribed section of the heavens and includes a sun, moon, stars, an earth, and all that occurs in the heavens; at its dissolution everything in it will be thrown into disorder. It is a segment of infinite space and terminates in a periphery that is either rarefied or dense, either in circular motion or in a state of rest, either spherical or triangular or of any other shape. All these possibilities exist, inasmuch as they are not contradicted by any phenomenon in our own world where it is impossible to lay hold of a terminal point.

Furthermore, we can readily grasp the fact that such worlds are infinite in number and that any such world may be generated within a world or in the cosmic interspaces (i.e. the spaces between worlds) in a region containing a good deal of empty space but not in a pure vacuum of great size, as some persons claim. The birth of a world occurs after the necessary atoms have streamed in from one or more worlds or interspaces, gradually form organized aggregates, and effect the transfer of matter to various areas of the system as chance dictates, feeding in the appropriate materials until the world is completed. (par. 88 and 89)

Parallel worlds confirmed. That’s why I keep losing my stuff, it falls into the void between worlds and some other world sucks it up and turns it into matter.

From the letter to Menoeceus:

If a man is to be wretched and in pain in the future, he must of course be existent at that time, if evil is to befall him. Now, since death does away with life and cancels the existence of everyone to whom such afflictions might accrue, we may infer that there is nothing in death for us to fear and that we cannot be wretched if we are nonexistent. In fact, when once the death that knows no death has done away with our mortal existence, it is no different than if we had never been born at all! – par. 124 (Lucretius par. 25)

In the Epicurean world, this is perfectly legitimate, because there is no sensation in death and sensation is the only arbiter of the sensation of pain and pleasure, and hence, morality. There is absolutely nothing to fear from death once you see net pain on the horizon. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying[9] program confirmed Epicurean.

From the Leading Doctrines:

3: The quantitative limit of pleasure is the elimination of all feelings of pain. Wherever the pleasurable state exists, there is neither bodily pain nor mental pain nor both together, so long as the state continues.

The directly negative definition of pleasure is one of the key issues with Epicurus. You’re not allowed to have fun, life just doesn’t suck. While a laudable goal in times of trouble, it doesn’t build surpluses or allow us to enjoy times of peace. That kind of lack of motivating fire in Epicurus’ philosophy is brought into stark relief by the next quote:

5. It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. A person who does not have a pleasant life is not living sensibly, nobly, and justly, and conversely the person who does not have these virtues cannot live pleasantly.

Original meaning: “Avoiding pain is morally correct.”

Translation: “You can do no good, only avoid evil.”

See what I mean?

11. We would have no need for natural science unless we were worried by apprehensiveness regarding the heavenly bodies, by anxiety about the meaning of death, and also by our failure to understand the limitations of pain and desire.

12. It is impossible to get rid of our anxieties about essentials if we do not understand the nature of the universe and are apprehensive about some of the theological accounts. Hence it is impossible to enjoy our pleasures unadulterated without natural science.

13.There is no advantage in gaining security with regard to other people if phenomena occurring above and beneath the earth – in a word, everything in the infinite universe – are objects of anxiety.

We have a blend of a reasonable attitude of science allaying our worries to straight out “no gods no masters” because the gods are inscrutable, and, as we know, ruin my deterministic system that is supposed to make people not-afraid and not-sad. Granted, if my gods were as unreasonable as the Greek ones, I would probably have more sympathy for this viewpoint. You’ve got Cronus the kid-eater, Zeus the serial rapist, Hera the jealous killer, Ares the madman, Hades the wife-kidnapper… maybe Epicurus was right after all.

14. The simplest means of procuring protection from other men (which is gained to a certain extent by deterrent force) is the security of quiet solitude and withdrawal from the mass of people.

Security by obscurity, Epicurus-approved, the exact opposite of scalable.

17. The just man is the least disturbed by passion, the unjust man the most highly disturbed.

Not sure if this is in support of Stoicism or autist supremacy. Probably the former.

33. Justice was never an entity in itself. It is a kind of agreement not to harm or be harmed, made when men associate with each other at any time and in communities of any size whatsoever.

34. Injustice is not an evil in itself. Its evil lies in the anxious fear that you will not elude those who have the authority to punish such misdeeds.

Somehow Epicurus makes it so that breaking the law or doing something horrible can be justified. He has to, considering that his theory is purely about the greatest long-term pleasure, so something that might be illegal now but has good consequences in the future has to be permissible. Again we see here Epicurus’ perfectionism – either you hold up to your agreements or you get the lash, but you can only be “good”. You can never be “great”, or better than your peers.

Makes it ironic that he then becomes the object of near-worship by Lucretius later on.

---

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epicurean

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epicure

[3] Disclaimer: I don’t read footnotes unless something is really strange. It breaks the flow of reading prose, which I don’t like.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#Dalton's_law_of_multiple_proportions

[7] See the Imperial Truth, which later morphed into the Imperial Cult. https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Truth

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

[9] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-services-benefits/medical-assistance-dying.html