How to Be an Epicurean. Catherine Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.

      This may strike you as an unacceptably frivolous and selfish claim. What would the world look like if everybody forgot about calories, the family, sales goals, deadlines, grades, the nation, truth, honour and responsibility and instead went all-out in the pursuit of pleasure? What about the sexually transmitted diseases, overdoses and bankruptcies that would inevitably follow? What about the feelings, pleasures and choices of the sadist? And isn’t the pursuit of pleasure expensive and ecologically irresponsible?

Let me reassure you that real Epicureanism is neither frivolous nor dangerous to health, nor a threat to other people. Epicurus himself pointed out that the direct pursuit of pleasurable sensations is usually self-defeating. At the same time, he stated clearly that the best life is one free of deprivations, starting with freedom from hunger, thirst and cold, and freedom from persistent fears and anxieties. Living well requires friends to entertain and comfort us and curiosity about nature and how the world works. It doesn’t require stupendous achievement or large outlays of cash. And life can be and feel significant even without religious faith in the usual sense. Although it might seem surprising in light of the many attacks from medieval and early-modern Western theologians on Epicureanism for its atheistic framework, the Epicurean conception of the good and meaningful life can even be found in the Jewish and Christian bibles. Ecclesiastes 8:15 says, ‘Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.’ Isaiah 22:13 says, ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.’

      Although Epicureanism is a way of life, this is not a lifestyle book in the usual sense. I start off with a generous helping of Epicurean physics, the theory of nature and history, with the Epicurean theory of everything. My contention is that ethical and political values are grounded in particular ways of seeing the world, about which we are normally unreflective. Philosophy brings these assumptions to the surface and makes them explicit so that they can be examined, and refined or discarded. Our choices should flow spontaneously from our examined convictions without our having to take on board and remember specific rules, including rules for living. I can’t solve for my readers all or even many of the problems of modern life, but I hope my book will help you to acquire a framework for living, not only comfortably and happily, as far as possible, but in a responsible and meaningful way.

Note on the Text

      Most of Epicurus’s original writings have been lost, though the collection destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has recently been partially rescued and partially restored to legibility. I’ve drawn on the most available of Epicurus’s letters and sayings and on Lucretius’s poem, On the Nature of Things, based on Epicurus’s still mostly unreconstructed book On Nature. Bibliographical information is found at the end, along with suggestions for further reading.

PART I

How the Epicurean Sees the World

1

       Back to Basics

      The totality is made up of bodies and void … Beyond these two things nothing can be conceived … Among bodies, some are compounds, and some are those things from which compounds have been made. And these are atomic and unchangeable …

      Epicurus

      There are certain particles whose concurrences, movements, order, position and shapes produce fires; different combinations of them form things of different nature, but they themselves are unlike fire or any other thing …

      Lucretius

Let’s start with a set of questions – large ones, with significant implications – to which the Epicurean has a definite answer. Is there anything completely indestructible and permanent in the universe? If so, what is it? And why does the Epicurean answer to such an abstract question matter?

      In thinking about endurance, we can immediately rule out tables and chairs, houses and skyscrapers, pens and pencils, and all other objects that human beings fabricate. All of these items have finite useful lives ranging from a few months to a few thousand years. Any of these items can be broken up by taking a crowbar or a wrecking ball to it, or just by snapping it in two in the case of pens and pencils. Left to themselves, over hundreds or thousands of years, each of these items will crumble into dust. Plastic bags, we have learned to our dismay, will persist for an astonishingly long time, perhaps a thousand years in landfills, but eventually they, too, will be broken down by light or heat, or by chemicals or micro-organisms.

Very well, what about enormous natural objects like mountains or the ocean? They are not so easy to destroy, but enough nuclear weapons or a very large asteroid could flatten the Himalayas. And in time – in hundreds of millions or several billion years – all life on our planet will have long been extinct. The earth will be consumed by the sun within 5 billion years, and our galaxy will collapse.

      What, then, about the chemical elements – hydrogen, carbon, uranium and so on? There are many competing scenarios for the end of the universe as we know it and the disappearance of every galaxy, but in all of them the chemical elements, too, will eventually vanish.

      Even time and space, and the so-called elementary particles, the quarks and gluons and bosons, will cease to exist, according to current theory.

      But, surely something must continue to exist! The universe can never wind down into nothing … zero … total annihilation …?

The Epicurean Atom

      The ancient Epicureans argued that everything in our experience is perishable and will someday perish. But once something exists, they reasoned, it cannot just become nothing. Correspondingly, the entire universe could not have come out of nothing. It follows that the universe must have emerged from something and that something will always exist, no matter how broken up the objects of experience come to be.

      If they were right – and let’s go along with their reasoning – after the destruction of every man-made object, every geographical feature, every star and planet, and every chemical element, and after the disappearance of time and space, something must be left from which a new universe could be rebuilt.

From the time that human beings began to philosophise, many came to the conclusion that the eternal something that existed before the universe ever appeared and that can maintain it or even outlast it must be intelligent and creative – a Mind with a Plan. Creation stories take many different forms, but they have in common the idea that there must have been a definite beginning to the world and that it was brought into being for some purpose by its Creator. Human beings were the special concern of this powerful entity, and the rest of the universe was constructed according to the needs and characteristics of human beings and the grand plan of the Creator for them.

      Epicurus rejected these assumptions. He maintained to the contrary that the elements of the universe are eternal and uncreated. There is no ruling mind or master plan involving them. His reasoning begins from the idea of destruction rather than from the idea of construction.

      Destruction occurs when the parts of a thing, whether a boulder, or a house, or an animal body, are separated from one another by tearing, grinding, smashing, chopping, wearing away СКАЧАТЬ