Epicureanism Read online

  The “realist” view: the gods are immortal extraterrestrials

  The gods are supposed to be immortal and blessed. Furthermore, they are supposed to have no impact whatsoever on the workings of our (or any other) world. So, writes Lucretius, the abodes of the gods cannot be anywhere in our world. The gods are intangible to us, as we perceive them with only our minds and not our senses, and their habitation must be as tenuous as are their bodies (DRN V 146–55). Anywhere in our world, the gods would be subject to the same forces that work for our dissolution, and which trouble our bodies. Lucretius writes instead that they live in perfect peace, far removed from our world (DRN II 646–51), in calm, radiant realms with no storms, frosty snow or other disturbances (DRN III 18–22). The only place that fits these descriptions, on the “realist” view, would be the intermundia, the spaces in between the worlds. Here, the gods can live eternally and in perfect peace.

  One’s first reaction to this theory may be that it is deeply wacky: do the Epicureans seriously believe that there are races of immortal people floating in outer space? That is my own reaction, but an incredulous stare is not much of an objection. The theory, however, is subject to objections beyond the incredulous stare.

  The first, and most serious objection is that all compound bodies eventually fall apart, and this would apply to the gods also. Compound bodies have void spaces in them that allow the constituents of them to be forced apart (DRN I 526–39). Only three things can exist eternally: (i) impenetrable elements that can repel blows, that is, individual atoms; (ii) things that are immune to blows, that is, void, which simply allows objects through it and so cannot be “hit”; and (iii) things that have no surrounding empty space into which their constituents may disperse, that is, the universe considered as a whole (DRN III 806–18). Lucretius lists these three things in order to show that the mind, which satisfies none of these three conditions, is not immortal. But the gods also would not satisfy them. It might be replied that the gods, living in the intermundia, would not be subject to the buffeting forces that break apart other compound bodies. But this reply does not work. The atoms that make up compound bodies are in constant, buzzing motion, so internal forces would still be at work to break apart the bodies of the gods. For the gods to be eternal, they would have to be in environments that somehow eternally replenish exactly what their bodies lose as a result of their internal vibrations.

  A second set of objections comes from Epicurean biology. The Epicureans insist that the gods must be human in shape, because the gods are beautiful, and nothing can be more beautiful than a human being (Cic. Nat. D. I 47–8). But human beings do not just happen to have the bodily shape that they do. Instead, the bodily parts we have are well adapted for survival and reproduction in our environment. The Epicureans disagree with Aristotle’s contention that hands are made for grasping; instead, they happen to be useful for that purpose. Nonetheless, it is no coincidence that we have hands with opposable thumbs, as they helped us survive, while creatures like us but without opposable thumbs were worse at grabbing bananas and died off. If the gods live in outer space, in need of nothing and facing danger from nothing, it would seem wildly improbable that they would have the same bodily shape as we would. Furthermore, Lucretius insists that fully grown creatures must come to be as the end result of a process of biological development from the proper sorts of “seeds”, which is inconsistent with the idea of eternally existing animals like the gods.

  The “idealist” view: the gods are thought-constructs

  Given the serious problems with thinking that the gods literally exist as immortals in the spaces between the worlds, there is good reason on grounds of charity to see if there is another plausible way to interpret the Epicurean theory. Fortunately, there is.1

  Where do we get our ideas of the gods? Many sources confirm that we view the gods not with our sense-organs, but with the intellect (Cic. Nat. D. I 49; DRN VI 68–79). That is, some of our ideas arise directly from sensing examples of the item in question, for example the concept of “cow” arises from seeing Bessie, Daisy, Clover and so on. But not all of our ideas are like this, and these include some of our preconceptions, such as “truth” and “usefulness”. “God” is in this latter category.

  Sextus Empiricus gives the most complete explanation of how the process is supposed to work (Math. IX 43–7, LS 23F). We start from dream impressions of human-shaped images. (This starting-point fits with the Epicureans’ truly unfortunate theory [DRN IV 722–822] that imagination is a matter of the mind “tuning in” to some of the fine eidōla that are constantly impinging directly on the mind, bypassing the senses.) The Epicureans then explain how we get from this idea of “human-shaped animal” to the idea of “god” by analogy to how we get the idea of “Cyclops”. Both involve “transition”. In the case of a Cyclops we start with the basic idea of a human being, enlarge him, and subtract an eye. Voilà! There’s a Cyclops. For the gods, we start with the idea of a happy and long-lived human being, then intensify and make perfect his happiness, and extend his lifespan endlessly. In the case of gods, however, this process of concept-formation occurs naturally and automatically, among all people.

  On the “idealist” view, the gods just are such idealizations of the most blessed human life. That the gods are simply thought-constructs and not solid bodies is supported by Cicero’s description of the gods’ nature (Cic. Nat. D. I 49). We do not perceive the gods as we perceive solid bodies, which offer resistance to our touch and are perceived by the senses. Instead, our intellect attends to innumerable similar images of the gods, and these images flow to the gods. Some editors have wished to emend this text to the more expected sentence that the images flow from the gods. But if we retain the manuscript reading, this gives us the surprising but satisfying notion that the gods just are the result of this process of gathering together these images. The gods exist, but as projected ideals of human perfection. Rather than the gods creating us, we create the gods.

  Thinking of the gods as thought-constructs would allow the Epicureans to retain the traditional anthropomorphic conception of the gods in the face of attacks by people such as the Presocratic Xenophanes. Xenophanes notes that the Ethiopians have black and snub-nosed gods, while the Thracians have blue-eyed, red-haired ones (Clement Miscellanies 7.22.1 = DK 21 B16), and he goes on to claim that if they had hands, horses would draw images of gods like horses and cattle like cattle (Clement Miscellanies 5.109.3 = DK 21 B16). The Epicureans can cheerfully accept this point. If the gods are our idealizations of blessedness, then we can unapologetically assert such things as: the gods have human shape because we consider that shape most beautiful of all. On the realist view, insisting that the gods in the intermundia must have a human shape because that shape comports with our standards of beauty (as opposed to, for example, Martian standards) seems to be a piece of absurd parochialism.

  The Epicurean spokesman in De Natura Deorum also claims that even though the gods have human appearance, they have not bodies but “quasi-bodies”, and they have not blood but “quasi-blood” (Cic. Nat. D. I 48–9). Cicero dutifully records the Epicurean doctrine in his exposition of the theory, but later he admits he has no idea what the Epicureans mean by “quasi-body” and “quasi-blood”, and he mocks the idea as a piece of obscure flimflam (Cic. Nat. D. I 71). But asserting that a god has a “quasi-body” may be a sensible way to try to answer the difficult question of whether a god has a body. Either straightforward answer seems wrong. The Epicurean would not want to answer that a god does not have a body. After all, the idea of a god is an idea of a supremely blessed being that is human in form: that is, an idea of a being with a body. And the Epicurean would not want to give the impression that a god is simply incorporeal void, or some sort of disembodied intelligence like Plato’s deity of cosmic mind, such as the Craftsman of the Timaeus. But nor does a god, as a thought-construct, have a body in the same way as does George W. Bush. Formed by us from streams of images, a god would be atomic in some sense
(as are all mental phenomena), but he is not a solid body that offers resistance to blows, as does George W. Bush. Similarly, the idea of a god would be an idea of a being with blood, but a god does not have blood in the same way as does George W. Bush.

  A similar manoeuvre may help to explain away some of the passages that suggest a home for the gods in the intermundia. We can ask “Do the gods have an abode?”, and in one sense, of course, the answer should be yes: since our idea of the gods is an idea of supremely blessed beings with human form, this would include the idea of living somewhere. But the gods will not have an abode in our world, in the way in which George W. Bush has a ranch outside Waco. This is for two reasons: (i) since the gods are supremely blessed, they would have to live in a place free from all conditions, such as tornados, excessive heat, great humidity and so on, which cause bodily discomfort, unlike Waco or anywhere else in our world; (ii) since the gods are thought-constructs, they do have literal abodes in places such as Waco, unlike George W Bush. It would only be by noticing reason (i) but ignoring reason (ii) that an Epicurean would want to find a literal location (like the intermundia) for the gods rather than simply describing the sort of abode the gods must inhabit.

  The Epicureans make a pair of claims about the gods that, on the surface, seem contradictory. On the one hand, the gods are not affected by weakness or gratitude, and they cause us no troubles (KD 1). The gods are utterly indifferent to us. On the other hand, the greatest harms come from the gods to bad people and the greatest benefits to the good (Ep. Men. 124). But the two are consistent. As our ethical ideals, the gods can greatly benefit or harm us, even though the correct conception of the gods is of blessed beings who take no notice of us.

  Consider the man who worships a jealous and vengeful god who demands blood and plunder. Of course, there really is no such god. But the belief in this kind of god causes great fear. Even more fundamentally, considering such a being worthy of worship is an expression of a disturbing psychic illness, of a misguided adoration of power and cruel domination, and belief in this god reinforces the illness. So this man’s god does cause him the greatest harm.

  The Epicurean joins in public celebrations of the gods because they are the cause of many good things (Phld. Piet. 105, IG I-56). But in these celebrations, the Epicurean does not engage in petitionary prayer or hope in some other way to curry favour from the gods, thereby gaining their help. Instead, her ideas about the gods express and help reinforce correct ideas about blessedness, and by prayerfully reflecting on and striving to emulate them, she gains the greatest benefits from her gods.

  Whether one accepts the “realist” or “idealist” view, the practical upshot of Epicurean theology is identical. The gods function as ethical ideals whose lives we can worship and strive to emulate, but whose wrath we need not fear. In fact, a wise Epicurean, in attaining blessedness, lives like a god among mere human beings (Ep. Men. 135, LS 23J). Epicureans who deify themselves in this way can, in turn, become role models for those who follow. As we have seen (Ch. 13, § “Philosophy”), Epicurus himself was regarded as this sort of human deity by later Epicureans.

  SEVENTEEN

  Death

  Even more than fear of the gods, the fear of death troubles us. The Epicureans offer two main arguments against the fear of death: the “no subject of harm” argument and the “symmetry” argument. Both try to show that your death is not bad for you, and hence it should not be feared. But the Epicureans also address whether you should worry about your death being bad for others, or the death of others bad for you. Finally, they realize that the fear of death is often fuelled by subconscious factors, and completely curing the fear of death requires that these too be eradicated.

  The “no subject of harm” argument

  The main Epicurean argument against the fear of death is the “no subject of harm” argument. In it, the Epicureans argue that for death to be bad, it must be bad/or somebody: the harm of death must have a subject. But death is annihilation: after you die, you do not exist. So your death cannot be bad for you. As Epicurus says, death is “nothing to us”. When we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist. So it is nothing, to either the living or the dead. It does not affect the living, as they are not yet dead: they have not been annihilated. And the dead do not exist, so death cannot be bad for them (Ep. Men. 125). As Lucretius notes in his presentation of the argument (DRN III 861–9), a person must exist in order for evil to befall him.

  And if your death is not bad for you, it is irrational to fear it. It is rational to fear something only if it is bad, for example my fearing the wisdom tooth extraction by an incompetent dentist. As Epicurus puts it, the person who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it arrives but because it is painful when it is still to come, is a fool (Ep. Men. 125). So the Epicurean hope is that the “no subject of harm” argument will convince you that your death is not bad for you, with the consequence that you will come to realize that your fear of death is irrational. And then, realizing that your fear is irrational will cause you to shed it.

  The argument, of course, rests on the assumption that death is annihilation. But the Epicureans do not simply assume this, but argue at great length that the mind is a bodily organ that dies along with the rest of the body. A person who does not know this would have reason to fear death, as he worries that he may be sent to spend an eternity in a flaming tomb with other heretics, reincarnated as a factory-farmed chicken or suffer some other horrible fate. Furthermore, it addresses only the fear that your death is bad for you. It does not address the fear that your death may be bad for your children, or that your friends death may be bad for you. This feature does not make the argument unsuccessful, but merely limited in its scope, and the Epicureans do have some resources for soothing these latter fears of death. Also, they might assert – cynically but plausibly – that it is the fear that your own death is bad for you that is mainly responsible for anxiety. Finally, the argument concerns the badness of death, not of the process of dying: of being trapped in a burning car, ripped apart by wild dogs, and the like. Certain manners of dying can be extremely painful, and the Epicureans would have to concede that these would be bad for you. However, this is really a fear of pain, not of death, and would be handled by their overall ethics: in particular, by the assertion that severe pains are usually short-lived and often followed by death, which is not painful.

  Of all parts of Epicureanism, the arguments against the fear of death have spurred the greatest interest among contemporary philosophers. Thomas Nagel’s short paper “Death” is the starting-point for much of the subsequent discussion, so here I shall focus on it. Nagel’s main complaint against the Epicureans is that they misidentify why we think death is bad. According to Nagel, the Epicureans argue as if we suppose that the state of non-existence is in itself bad. Nagel agrees with the Epicureans that non-existence cannot in itself be bad. But if it were the permanent cessation of consciousness in itself that we feared, we would also regard temporary periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep as bad, which we do not (Nagel 1979:3).

  Instead, says Nagel, what makes death bad is what it deprives us of: life, and all of the goods of life. If I step out of my office tomorrow on to Peachtree Street, and a passing bus pulverizes me, then I miss out on the joys of watching my children grow up, nestling with my wife on the back porch and hanging out with my friends. So what makes getting hit by the bus bad for me is that it deprives me of all of these goods that I would have had if I had not died. There can be cases where a person’s future prospects are so dim – for example a bitter, friendless man suffering from pancreatic cancer – that death is not an evil. But usually life is a good thing, and so having it taken away from you is bad (ibid.: 1–2).

  Lucretius has a ready reply to this line of argument. Death removes both goods such as friends and family and the craving for them (DRN III 894–903). A life without these sorts of things would be bad, but the dead person does n
ot miss them. And since the deprivation does not bother him, it does not hurt him.

  This sort of reply might make it seem that the Epicureans’ argument against the badness of death depends on their hedonism. Lucretius asserts that being deprived of family cannot be bad for you if you do not miss them. Likewise, Epicurus asserts in Letter to Menoeceus 124 that all good and bad consist in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. If we deny the Epicureans’ hedonism, we can expand the range of possible harms.

  Nagel explicitly denies that hedonism is true, because we care about things other than our states of consciousness. For instance, I want for my wife and children actually to love me. If my wife is carrying on a torrid affair during my office hours while laughing at my cluelessness, and my children are pretending to like me in order to come into a vast inheritance while anonymously spreading around nasty stories about me on the internet, then I am not getting what I want. If I never discover their betrayals, they will never bother me. But it is mistaken to regard the betrayals as bad only because they will cause me pain if discovered. Instead, I would find discovering the betrayals so painful because I regard them as bad; that is, because I want my children and wife really to love me and be faithful to me. So even on the simple analysis of good and bad as consisting, respectively, in getting what you want and not getting what you want, unknown betrayals can be bad. Likewise, being deprived of life and the goods of life can be bad for me, even if the deprivation does not bother me (ibid.: 5).