Lisa Sarasohn
Epicureanism is the philosophy first taught by the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epicurus (341– 270 B.C.).
It is primarily an ethical doctrine, concerned with establishing the best means to ensure individual happiness and tranquility. Physics joins ethics in a unified cosmology devoted to teaching the way to achieve a pleasurable life.
As traditional values toppled during the Hellenistic age (323–30 B.C.), an anguished search for new meanings focused on the happiness of the individual. While some found comfort in the new mystery religions that emphasized human salvation, and others turned to the Stoic vision of a virtuous and rational life, Epicurus emphasized that pleasure is the telos, the highest good. Meeting in his Garden, or school, in Athens, Epicurus gathered a group of men and women, free and slave, into a community that sought the pleasurable life.
Epicurean Pleasure
Pleasure, according to Epicurus, is often misunderstood: “When, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality…but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind” (Epicurus 1926, 89). Although throughout history Epicureanism has been confused with voluptuary hedonism, it was far from Epicurus’s intention. The highest, or katastematic, pleasure is the passive or tranquil pleasure associated with the absence of anxiety and physical pain. It is the state of being satisfied and can exist indefinitely. But it is linked with the pleasures of motion, or kinetic pleasures, which fulfill physical needs and cease once the need is filled.
Epicurus taught that any person could achieve tranquility if he understood that the natural and necessary are all that matter. The only real necessities in life are those, such as food and shelter, that release us from pain. Epicurus ranked desires on a scale of self-sufficiency. Those things that are most easily obtainable leave the individual most self-sufficient, independent, and free. Freedom and self-sufficiency contribute to the possibility of finding happiness. The outward things rejected by Epicurus included most forms of social ties, notably marriage, children, and any sort of political involvement. He considered friendship the only bond that helped, rather than hindered, the life devoted to tranquil pleasure. But Epicurus realized that not all pleasures are ultimately beneficial, while some pains can eventually lead to greater pleasure. It is, therefore, necessary, in conducting our lives, to calculate what will lead to an excess of pleasure over pain in the long run and, on this basis, to make decisions about what to pursue and what to avoid. Such a calculation will lead the wise man to shun hedonism for ascetic virtue, clearly the better choice for tranquility and contentment. Ultimately, Epicurus equated pleasure with the absence of pain. This pleasure cannot be intensified either by duration or by additional pleasures of motion. Once obtained, it contains eternity within itself.
Epicurean Physics
Some people, however, are unable to feel tranquil and happy. Fear of death and of the arbitrary nature of the gods, explained Epicurus, are the two major sources of mental anguish. The only way to avoid these anxieties is to understand the true nature of the universe. This understanding will reveal that there is no suffering, nor indeed any form of consciousness, after death. Likewise, once the nature of the universe is explored, men will understand that gods are not necessary to explain its functioning. Thus, Epicurus developed a detailed naturalistic philosophy to support his ethical teachings.
The Epicurean universe is composed of atoms and void and of nothing else. Borrowing his system from the atomist Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.), Epicurus argued that experience shows there must be one first principle, the atoms, that is indestructible, imperishable, and eternal. The atoms are finite in number and identical in substance but extremely diverse in shape and form. Their combinations explain all that exists, including sensible qualities and human consciousness itself. The idea of divine providence is unnecessary and unthinkable in such a world. In fact, the Epicurean gods, living eternally in the cosmic spaces, are simply immortal beings uninvolved in external affairs who pursue only their own bliss on a cosmic level.
Just as Epicurus insulated his universe from divine intervention, he also attempted to free it from the subjugation of fate. Natural necessity would destroy man’s self-sufficiency and control over his own destiny. To avoid any form of determinism, Epicurus introduced the concept of the swerve (clinamen). He rejected the eternal erratic motion of the atoms described by Democritus and, instead, postulated that atoms naturally fall downward in parallel lines, like rain, because of their weight. At some indeterminate time, for no particular reason, an atom swerves, a chain reaction ensues, and world-building commences.
Epicurus used the swerve to explain both the formation of the cosmos and human free will. Without the swerve, the individual atoms would never entwine in ever more complex forms, and the cosmos could never take shape. Likewise, this element of fortuitous behavior on the part of the atoms explains human free will, which also originates in the swerves of the atoms that compose the soul. Mind and matter are nothing but conglomerations of bits of matter, which after death simply decompose into atoms. Therefore, the wise man, knowing the nature of material existence, is impervious to the fear of the future and lives his life content and tranquil.
The Later History of Epicureanism
Epicurean ethical and natural philosophy was popular during the Roman Republic. Lucretius (c. 99–55 B.C.) immortalized Epicureanism in his philosophic poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura). But many pagan philosophers, led vehemently by Cicero (106–43 B.C.), attacked both the physical and the moral tenets of Epicureanism. Under the Roman Empire, as the popularity of Stoicism increased, Epicurus’s social doctrines were especially denigrated.
For Christians, Epicurus’s denial of divine providence and the immortality of the soul was intolerable.
The Christian apologists Arnobius (d. c. 327) and Lactantius (c. 240–c. 320) were particularly determined to refute him. By the fourth century, Epicureanism had ceased to be a vital force in the Western world.
Augustine noted that the ashes of Epicureans “are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them”
(Ep. 118. 12, quoted in Jones 1989, 94). The condemnation of the church Fathers resounded through the ages, even landing Epicurus in the sixth circle of Dante’s Hell, the place reserved for those who denied the immortality of the soul. For the most part, Epicureanism lingered in the Middle Ages almost entirely as a synonym for debauchery, until Lucretius was rediscovered in the fifteenth century and Epicurus’s own writings, exerpted in Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’s (fl. second century A.D.) Lives of the Philosophers, became available in the sixteenth.
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Epicureanism was one of the many ancient schools reinvigorated by the Italian humanists. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), for example, in his treatise De vero bono (On the True Good [1431]) argued that Epicurus was correct in considering pleasure to be the highest good, but he reinterpreted the meaning of pleasure for his own Christian purposes. Pleasure is, indeed, the highest good, says Valla, but only within the Christian system of grace and redemption, in which the highest pleasure is the beatific vision of God. Thus, divine love should be the aim, the summum bonum, for which human beings should strive.
In the sixteenth century, sympathetic accounts of Epicureanism became more common. Thomas More (1478–1535) and Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) both commended the Epicurean view of tranquil pleasure, and Erasmus thought, like Valla, that “[i]n plain truth, there are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians,” because they understand that leading a virtuous life will result in the ultimate pleasure of the vision of God (Erasmus 1965, 538). Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) incorporated almost all of Lucretius’s text into his Essays without, however, actually advocating Epicureanism.
Pierre Gassendi
The ultimate task of rehabilitating and christianizing Epicureanism was not achieved until the French philosopher and priest Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) reconstructed the entire Epicurean corpus according to his own religious and scientific preferences in the Syntagma philosophicum (1658). Gassendi was one of the founders of the mechanical philosophy, adopting the Epicurean cosmos of moving atoms and void space.
He made it acceptable to Christian consciences by insisting that the motion of the atoms was infused into them at the time of their creation by a providential God, who then uses their interactions as the vehicle for his divine plan. Gassendi rejected the Epicurean swerve and instead insisted that God’s “general providence” both makes and maintains the world. Gassendi’s God is in the voluntarist tradition and can do anything short of a contradiction, but normally he allows the universe to function according to the motions and meetings of the atoms.
Gassendi also wanted to preserve the Epicurean ideal of pleasure as the highest good. To do so, he suggested that God instilled the desire for pleasure into each individual at the time of his birth. The desire for pleasure motivates all human behavior up to, and including, the creation of the family, society, and the civil state. Gassendi used his understanding of the properties of motion as a prism to describe analogous human activity. Human motion is both the process of pursuing pleasure and a state of constant motion in which a wise man achieves tranquility and calm. Hence, the neo-Epicurean retained the close identification of the natural and the human realms postulated by Epicurus, but always within a Christian framework.
Humanity and nature are not, however, identical. God guides humans by means of his special providence, Gassendi argued, and also allows them to be free, a quality that the rest of the cosmos does not share.
Human rationality and choice, as well as the ability to make epistemological mistakes, free humans from the kind of necessity God imposes on every other creation. Angels must love God, and rocks must fall, but humans create their own destinies by pursuing what they think will bring them pleasure.
Gassendi, as well as christianizing the Epicurean cosmos, also reclaimed Epicurus’s own reputation in a biography of the ancient philosopher. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Epicurean notion of pleasure was no longer misunderstood, and Epicureanism became steadily more popular, especially in Britain. John Locke (1632–1704) embraced many aspects of Gassendi’s christianized Epicureanism, and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) incorporated atomism into the new worldview. Epicureanism had become part of the mainstream European tradition of thought, where it would remain into modern times.
See also Atheism; Atomism; Varieties of Providentialism
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources
Epicurus. Epicurus: The Extant Remains. Trans. by Cyril Bailey. Oxford: Clarendon, 1926.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Colloquies. Trans. and ed. by C.R. Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Gassendi, Pierre. Opera Omnia. 6 vols. 1658. Reprint. Stuttgard-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964.
Long, A.A., and D.N.Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Lucretius, Titus Carus. De rerum natura. Trans. by James H. Mantinband. New York: Ungar, 1965.
Secondary Sources
Festugière, A.J. Epicurus and His Gods. Trans. by C.W. Chilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Jones, Howard. The Epicurean Tradition. London: Routledge, 1989.
Joy, Lynn Sumida. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
——. “Epicureanism in Renaissance Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992):573–83.
Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and the Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Lorch, Maristella de Panizza. A Defense of Life: Lorenzo Valla’s Theory of Pleasure. Munich: W.Fink Verlag, 1985.
Mitsis, Phillip. Epicurus’ Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Osler, Margaret J., ed. Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
——. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Rist, John M. Epicurus: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Rochot, Bernard. Les travaux de Gassendi sur Epicure et sur l’atomisme, 1619–1658. Paris: J.Vrin, 1944.
Sarasohn, Lisa T. Freedom in a Deterministic Universe: Gassendi’s Ethical Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Sedley, D.N. Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Striker, Gisela. “Ataraxia: Happiness as Tranquillity.” Monist 73 (1990):97–110.
Strozier, Robert M. Epicurean and Hellenistic Philosophy. Lanham, Md. University Press of America, 1985.
Trinkaus, Charles. In Our Image and Likeness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
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