How to Be an Epicurean. Catherine Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ combinations and perfumes are appealing. But the visual world of an eagle or a panther, the odiferous world of a dog, or that of a lizard that can smell carrion several miles away, must be different from ours, insofar as their bodies and sensory organs are composed of differently put-together particles. We should beware of supposing that human perception sets any kind of standard, as though other animals enjoy enhanced or suffer from defective versions of our perceptual abilities.

      Individual differences can be strongly marked when it comes to the values – positive or negative – we ‘see’ in objects, situations and events, or feel ‘belong’ to them. We believe that strawberries are truly red and truly delicious when ripe, and that premeditated murder for financial gain is truly wrong. But we can only make such confident judgements because certain arrangements of particles, those composing strawberries or making up the pixels on a television screen at a certain time or the print in a newspaper article, make more or less the same impact on different human sensory systems and minds.

When we disagree in our perceptions or our moral judgements, the reason for this is not hard to fathom. We are similar but not identical, and the world presents itself a little differently to everyone. Please don’t jump to the conclusion, however, that an Epicurean must be a relativist who thinks everyone’s judgement is as good as everyone else’s when it comes to questions of taste or morality. The actual Epicurean position on the issue of relativism is far subtler.

      To return to the theme of atomic reality, the realisation that everything is fragile and tends with time to get broken up points us in two directions. First, we should not be surprised that our wine glasses break, our houses crumble, stock market runs come to an end and our relationships go awry. Forewarned is forearmed. At the same time, we can appreciate that some objects and situations are more likely to hold up over time, either because, like boulders, they are large, hard and resistant, or because, like the soft human body and like some relationships, they can repair themselves ‘from within’.

      The Epicurean recognises that the tendency to fall apart is built into the nature of things. Aware that this is so, she preserves, repairs and restores where this is in her power, and accepts the inevitable when it is not. Further, she recognises that the future is genuinely open and unpredictable. We do not know what combinations will come along or what accidental ‘swerves’ will upset a delicate balance and make for sudden reversals. The Epicurean expects the future to be predictable and stable where experience and science have shown it to be so, but she is always prepared for surprises.

2

       How Did We Get Here?

      From time everlasting countless elements of things, impelled by blows and by their own weight, have never ceased to move in manifold ways, making all kinds of unions, and experimenting with everything they could combine to create.

      Lucretius

      Many species of animals must have perished and failed to propagate and perpetuate their race. For every species that you see breathing the breath of life has been protected and preserved from the beginning of its existence either by cunning or by courage or by speed.

      Lucretius

The Epicurean believes that there was always something. There was never a time when nothing existed. This something was not, we now know, matter, but the precursor of matter. Today, we are told of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum of virtual particles, flickering in and out of existence, that gave birth to space, time and matter. Explosive events studded space with stars in which the elements of the periodic table were born, and the world we experience now emerged from a disorganised state of matter in motion that fell into stable configurations over perhaps 14 billion years. Our earth was a molten mass spun off from the sun whose geological features – its continents, oceans and mountains – were formed by violent physical processes as it cooled down.

In the ancient seas, some hundreds of millions of years after the formation of planet earth about 4.5 billion years ago, bombardment by lightning is thought to have produced organic molecules, including amino acids, which are composed of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen and which are the building blocks of proteins. These were stable molecules that came together to form protein strands that were also relatively stable and served as templates that formed other molecules into identical strands. Structures that held together and copied themselves proliferated, and varied, adding small increments of complexity and joining up with others. The others just fell apart.

      Or perhaps these stable organic molecules were formed somewhere else in the universe and seeded our earth, arriving in meteors or in the icy tails of comets. In either case, the first single-celled organisms emerged around 3.85 billion years ago. Some were able to join up with others to form larger stable complexes. The ‘struggle for existence’ has accordingly been happening for nearly 4 billion years. Time, chance and the operation of the forces described by physics and chemistry have been sufficient to produce everything we see around us.

The Epicurean Theory of Natural Selection

      Many of us were taught in school, or at least came away with the impression, that until Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, ‘everybody’ believed that the world had been created by a divinity in seven days, that Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and that Noah’s Ark housed all the originally created animals. This is incorrect. Although Christianity and Judaism share this account, and although the Islamic account is similar to it, the other major religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism, have their own accounts, and stories about how the world came to be are found in every culture on earth.

Further, the ancient Greek philosophers who preceded the Epicureans imagined the origins of the universe and its inhabitants in very different ways, as arising, for example, from the interactions of Love and Strife. Intriguingly, the ancient Epicureans themselves grasped the basic principle of what Darwin later called ‘natural selection’, anticipating some elements of his theory of evolution without having any real notion of the time scales involved and without understanding how one species could possibly give rise to another.

      The Epicureans proposed that combinations of atoms taking the form of animals developed by chance or from atomic ‘seeds’ buried in the earth. Animals with features that favoured their survival, such as cunning, courage and speed, were able to persist longer than others that lacked these features. Over time, animals whose internal structure happened to create copy-creating copies of themselves arose by chance. If nature hadn’t stumbled on such devices in the distant past, we wouldn’t be around to observe other living things and to have thoughts about the origins of life. ‘I am anxious that you should carefully avoid the mistake,’ Lucretius says, ‘of supposing that the lustrous eyes were created to enable us to see; or that the tapering shins and thighs were attached to the feet as a base to enable us to walk.’ All such explanations, he adds, ‘are propounded preposterously with topsy-turvy reasoning … Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes.’

      This position was long ridiculed as absurd. The ‘random concourse of atoms’, it was alleged, could never have produced functioning living bodies and the regular movements of the heavenly bodies. But thanks to its perceived absurdity, it remained a target of criticism and stayed fresh in the minds of philosophers.

It is not so difficult to believe that the geological features of the earth appeared on account of the laws of physics and chemistry, that no intelligent being had to design them and make them. But life, in its complexity and diversity, has always posed much more of an explanatory problem. How could roses, peacocks and tigers, not to mention human beings, have come into the world through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? How could not only structure, СКАЧАТЬ