Episode 160 - Closer Look: Epicurus Reader Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The podcast where your two favorite philosophers encourage you to lead the good life.

[00:00:25] Ellie: I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:27] David: And I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:30] Ellie: David, we often tend to think of philosophy nowadays as something that is taught within particular context, namely colleges and universities, at least in the US and even if more broadly than at least something that is taught in a school. But if you went to ancient Athens, you would've been confronted with philosophy everywhere.

I'm thinking about how when I walk down Hollywood Boulevard here in LA, I might come across a Scientologist Proselytizer, a Hari Krishna, perhaps like a Christian, telling me that Jesus will save my sins. That was kind of the vibe of the agora in ancient Athens and the philosopher that we're gonna be talking about today, Epicurus, was one of the sages whose teachings would've been touted in the public square. In the book that we're reading, we're gonna be using the Epicurus reader for reasons that will become apparent, namely that none of Epicurus writing survive in their entirety. But there's this great compilation that we're using.

The editor of the Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood, has this great way of starting the text in order to signal like how Epicurus would have been sort of advertised at the time. He says, do you wanna be happy? Of course you do. Then what's standing in your way? Your happiness is entirely up to you. This has been revealed to us by a man of divine serenity and wisdom, et cetera, et cetera.

His name was Epicurus. So just imagine like somebody pitching that to you in the public square in ancient Greece.

[00:02:01] David: Okay, so this introduction that you're giving us of Epicurus as a proselytizer in the public square is making me imagine him like an ancient Jehovah's Witnesses sitting on a bench with pamphlets. That's like, is this philosophy right for you?

[00:02:17] Ellie: but it's not an Epicurus himself. It's a follower of Epicurus being like, follow his teachings.

[00:02:21] David: True. So maybe it was like the epicureans with a pamphlet with, Epicurus his face on it. You know, it's just like, do you wanna follow this man into salvation and the ethical life? Please join our group. But so you're right that there was this sense in ancient Athens that philosophy was sort of scattered and just infusing public life.

It was not hidden in universities or in academies, even though there were, of course, what are known as the schools, which were literal places where particular philosophers would have their followers learn their way of thinking and sort of master their system of ethics, their system of metaphysics. But that's something that we have lost in the present, and I think that's why a lot of people in recent years have been seeking to reclaim this ancient way of life philosophy as a way of life by turning back to ancient thinkers. You know, we talk a lot about the renaissance of Stoicism in our episode on the wisdom of the Aztecs. We talked a little bit about this. What would it mean to go to a different source for thinking about the present?

But interestingly, Epicurus and Epicureanism have not really had their own Renaissance, I don't think there's like a lot of people nowadays who identify as Epicureans in the same way that there are people who identify as Socratic or as stoics.

[00:03:47] Ellie: Yeah, and I think a lot of this arises from a very common misconception of epicureanism. If you think about the term, what does it mean to be an epicurean? You almost certainly have an idea of a gourmand in your head. Somebody who loves to eat caviar to drink champagne. The pleasures of life, right?

Maybe sensual pleasures, certainly pleasures of luxury, and that simply could not be farther from what Epicurus actually taught. So I think there's just like a really widespread misconception about what it means to be an epicurean. And if we actually revisit Epicurus's texts, then we'll get a picture that is actually much closer to, for instance, stoicism than people tend to think.

That also I think has some really interesting insights in its own right. So we definitely want to talk about those today. I had just one other note on what you said earlier, David, about how philosophy was much more I implicated in everyday life, and I just wanted to make clear that a large part of the reason for that is that philosophy was not distinct from natural science.

And it also was a lot less distinct from religion than it is today. And so we situated Epicurus at the beginning as somebody who basically would've been seen as a religious sage. And that's right. And he's also a philosopher.

[00:05:05] David: Well, and it was not a profession, right? When we think about philosophers nowadays, we think about somebody for whom it's a career rather than the ancient conception of it being a mode of life that is accessible to everybody. And that's certainly the way in which Epicurus himself wanted us to think about philosophy.

So a couple of just biographical notes on Epicurus to contextualize this text that we're gonna be discussing in detail. Epicurus was born in a small island in the Agean Sea called Samos in 341 BCE. Then when he was a young man, he moved to Athens and then for political reasons, having to do with the death of Alexander and the political ramifications of that death, especially the collapse and the splintering of the Macedonian Empire, he then moved away from Athens.

He moved back to what is now modern day Turkey, and then traveled a little bit before eventually making his way back to Athens and when he. Came back to Athens and installed himself there. Now, as a more mature wise man, or you said Sage, he bought a piece of land in the outskirts of Athens and it created what was known as the garden, which was his school of philosophy where he would teach philosophy in this peripatetic style by talking to people and by hoping that his system of thought would then be passed down from generation to generation. And so the text that we're gonna be talking about, which as you said, is a collection of fragments and letters and doxographical reports is the best we have nowadays for trying to understand this system of thought that had its own academy in ancient Greece.

[00:06:46] Ellie: Poor guy because he wrote a 37 volume treatise on natural philosophy, which has not survived. But luckily we still have some things that did.

[00:06:57] David: I want to emphasize that some of these fragments are literally fragments. They are charred pieces of papyrus that we have since excavated from the villas in Herculaneum, in the wake of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Today we are giving a closer look to the Epicurus reader.

[00:07:21] Ellie: Why did this ancient Greek philosopher believe that pleasure was the highest goal?

[00:07:25] David: Can Epicurus four part cure help us live a better life?

[00:07:29] Ellie: And is he right that we should not fear death?

[00:07:32] David: As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:07:41] Ellie: For Epicurus, the good life should be our ultimate goal. And the good life is a life of pleasure. But lest you think we need to all go about having orgies. We need to actually look at what Epicurus says about this because sadly, it is not a life of orgies that he sees as our highest good.

[00:08:01] David: Although interestingly, did you know that people thought there were orgies at the garden? Because one of the things that was socially revolutionary at the time about Epicurus's school, is that he allowed women and enslaved people to be part of his school. And so other Athenians were like, what are those women doing studying philosophy?

And so there, there were all these sort of like slanderous accusations against Epicurus and his followers that they were just having massive origins. Sadly, that was not the case because as you point out, his conception of pleasure is entirely alien to what he himself calls the pleasures of consumption.

And he goes to great lengths to specify and clarify that his vision of the good life is not about acquiring things like wealth. It's not about having things like sex. It's about attaining a state of mind that he called ataraxia, which can be translated as either peace of mind or tranquility or unperturbed ability,

[00:09:02] Ellie: Okay. Okay. Hold on.

[00:09:03] David: Which I really like as a translation.

[00:09:04] Ellie: Yes, David. That is where we're going. But I wanna stick with the orgies for a second. Let's pull back just a little, because Yeah, no. In reading the inward introduction to this, I hadn't revisited Epicurus in some years before we decided to do this closer look episode. An episode where we focus on a single text and I was really struck by that claim that it's not just that we nowadays have a misunderstanding of what epicurean means. The Athenians back in the day also had a misunderstanding of what Epicurean meant because they thought it was actually about sensual pleasures.

And of course, like when you have women being welcomed into this spaces, you're gonna get accusations of like lewdness and debauchery. But I think the ideal of community that Epicurus fostered initially through the garden and then afterward, including after his lifetime, you know, but in virtue of his teachings through having people live together. 'cause friendship was also really important to him provide a model of what it actually means to live out one's philosophy.

[00:10:07] David: The role of friendship, I think we definitely need to come back to. But let's begin then with this notion of pleasure because it is the ground of this misunderstanding then and now about who Epicurus was and what his system of thought entailed. So Epicurus like most other ancient philosophers, believe that the ultimate goal is you eudaimonia.

You want to be happy and to flourish. The question for him was, how do we get there? What is the most secure route for attaining  eudaimonia.? And that is where ataraxia comes in. This tranquility or peace of mind that you can think of almost in terms of a state of rest when your mind is undisturbed and there is no inner tumult.

He talks a lot about tumultuousness in his letters to various people that have survived. And in some of the doxographical reports where people talk about his philosophy, they refer to this idea of calming the inner storms of the body and of the mind, and that kind of peace and tranquility. Is the kind of pleasure that he has in mind, which is why it's so outrageous that people thought he just wanted people to be like in a bacchanalian orgy with wine and grapes and cheese and sex.

[00:11:27] Ellie: Absolutely, and so diving into this more deeply, what we find is I wanna just like highlight some particular things that Epicurus says around this. He says that Pleasure is the starting point and goal of living blessedly for, we recognize this as our first innate good. And so one of the really interesting things about this philosophy is that he judges the good, as he literally puts it by the criterion of feeling, do you feel good or do you feel bad?

That's all we mean by the good and by the bad, and so forget, you know, any conception of the good that is overly abstract. I certainly think he's really different from Socrates in this respect. But he says we should judge every good by the criterion of feeling. And so for Epicurus, and maybe we'll have a chance to elucidate this further later, feeling is not opposed to reason.

They work very well in tandem. But it is noteworthy that his goal of the good life is essentially one about feeling rather than about truth, reason, definitely justice. He actually doesn't seem to care in my reading that much about justice.

[00:12:38] David: No he doesn't. And actually I'll wanna come back later to his references to crime, which I totally disagreed with

 But let's put a pin on

[00:12:47] Ellie: Okay. Once we talk about, once we talk about some critiques.

[00:12:51] David: But staying with pleasure. So there is a letter that he wrote to Menoeceus where he talks about how do we know which of our desires we should pursue and which ones are likely to increase our pleasure as he understands it.

And so he gives us almost like a decision tree where, you know, you ask a couple of questions about your desire in order to decide whether it's a good one or a bad one. And he distinguishes between two kinds of desires. There are natural desires, which we should be open to, and then there are what he calls groundless desires.

Those groundless desires that we should be very worried about are precisely things like sex, the acquisition of money, the search for fame, the need for political power, and that's because they are never easily satisfied. You know, once you have wealth, you want more and more and more wealth, and so it actually increases that inner turmoil and that takes away from your ataraxia.

And so whenever there is a desire that is likely to increase this kind of restlessness inside of you, you should suspect that it's a groundless desire and that it's not one that you should cultivate and incorporate into your way of life.

[00:14:11] Ellie: And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't, if a such a pleasure, a groundless pleasure presents itself to us, that we necessarily should reject it, right? So if I'm offered a free pair of designer shoes, I'm free to accept it. But like obsessing over buying those designer shoes is definitely something I should avoid.

[00:14:31] David: That's a really good point because he says the point is not that we have to reject these and always live without them. Like he's not advocating a vow of poverty or asceticism. His worry is that if you need them, then when you can't have them, you will suffer. But he says if you can relate to them in such a way that you can embrace them and be happy with them, but you can also be happy without them then no worries.

So, yes, have the orgy, have the wine, have all the money that's available to you, but don't structure your life in such a way that you will suffer in their absence. So you have to be able to live without them. That's the key point.

[00:15:12] Ellie: Instead, structure your life in a way that you would be happy with a barley cake and a cup of water. That's what he suggests. And so I think there we see a kind of ideal that some people would consider ascetic. Literally the opposite of what you might think of as epicurean. And that nowadays we would often associate with people who have chosen a religious life of renunciation.

There's something appealing about this to the extent that Epicurus suggests that the good life is very easy to gain. All you need is to free yourself from pain and anxiety, which means freeing yourself from the desire for these groundless pleasures. And that means that this life is literally accessible to anyone.

As we mentioned, it was also accessible to enslaved people and women, which was very unusual for the time. And it's certainly accessible to you, whatever your income status is. And I think, you know, this is at odds at least with a common view of Aristotle. I would wanna defer to an Aristotle scholar as to whether or not this is accurate, but Aristotle thinks that the ideal life is a life of leisure, and that although Aristotle's not saying you need champagne and caviar for that, I think probably such a view wouldn't quite go far enough for Epicurus.

[00:16:27] David: Yeah, no, that's right. And if we think about this taxonomy of desires, right? Like there are the groundless desires that we should, let's say proceed with caution because they are very dangerous. Then on the other hand, we have what he calls the natural desires and those, he divides into two categories.

He says Some natural desires are necessary, like everybody needs to satisfy them. He gives the example of living without hunger, living without thirst, and living without cold. So you have to do things to make sure that you're protected in those basic kind of biological ways. Then there are also natural desires that he says are not quite necessary.

They're just natural and it's okay to pursue them as long as they don't cause you or others any harm. And I think that middle ground of the natural but not necessary desires is where he would also put some of the things that he really values. Things like community, friendship, social connection, although he's not entirely clear about that.

But you know, you could imagine somebody living like a hermit entirely isolated from other people and attaining a state of ataxia, but maybe there would still be something missing in their life if they are not rooted in a community, the kind of community that he wanted to model in the school, known as the garden.

[00:17:53] Ellie: Yeah, I would actually slightly disagree with you on that, I think, because although you're right, that he, so we've got this whole taxonomy here. First, there's the primary distinction, which you articulated before between the natural desires and the groundless desires, and then within the natural desires we have the distinction, which you also just described between the necessary natural desires and the merely natural desires.

And I think you've just suggested maybe friendship is in that merely natural desire category. But within the necessary natural desires, he even has a further taxonomy where he goes through what is necessary for freeing the body from trouble. That's certainly, you know, getting food, getting shelter, what is necessary for.

Life itself. Actually maybe like a basic food is necessary for life itself. But then like not having a rock in your shoe is necessary for freeing the body from trouble and then what is necessary for happiness. And I actually think maybe friendship would go there.

And I will say maybe this is like a chance for us to kind of situate ourselves here. David, you and I as I think our listeners very well know, our both philosophy professors, we are trained in the history of philosophy and so we feel that we are equipped at least to speak about this in a way we would with like an intro to philosophy level class, but we're not actually experts specifically within ancient philosophy, which is why a lot of our episodes tend to focus a little bit more on more recent philosophy 'cause that's more our area. So I would maybe want like an Epicurus Scholar's answer to that specific question. I think, however, the broader point that you're making, which is that Epicurus wants us to be able to identify how necessary the satisfaction of different desires are for our wellbeing.

And I think that's where reason comes in. Also sense perception. So Epicurus offers a view of life that focuses on living in the present moment and living in the present moment. One of the things that means, which we're gonna be talking about later, is living in the present in the sense of not worrying about your death.

But, with respect to what we're talking about here. Another way he describes living in the present is living with a careful attention to your own sense perception and feelings. And although somewhat anachronistic or maybe not anachronistic, but rather just like a little bit overly simplifying in terms of cross-cultural differences, this I think reminds me a lot of mindfulness.

He thinks that you need to attend to your sense perceptions and your feelings. Those are two crucial foundations of mindfulness in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. And when you do that, what you find is that then your reason comes into play and you develop a careful sense of which pleasures are actually necessary and which ones are not.

And this in turn means that there are certain pleasures that you are going to turn away from. Even though pleasure is the ultimate goal of the good life, because for instance, that pleasure is going to lead to further suffering down the line, and this is for instance, his view of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is largely to be avoided because it's gonna lead to suffering down the line in his view.

[00:21:02] David: Yeah, like at best sex won't mess you up entirely. So like feel free to do it if you wish. It's just really risky behavior according to him. But I like these three terms that you've used living in the present, attending to sense, perception, and then reasoning about the objects of our sense experience.

And this is where Epicurus introduces a term that's very well known to anybody who has studied ancient philosophy, which is phronesis, which is a kind of practical wisdom where you know what is appropriate to different circumstances.

And there is a maxim that has survived from Epicurus, although sometimes we don't really know if, you know, the maxims that have survived were literal quotes by other people or paraphrasing. So, we'll take it with a slight grain of salt, but there is a maxim where he says, when it comes to the good life that is oriented toward happiness and flourishing, that kind of practical rationality, phronesis, may be even more important than philosophy itself.

So if you had to choose between like being a really smart philosopher who knows a lot about the natural world and about metaphysics and being a practically wise individual who knows how to choose their desires and pursue them appropriately. You should opt for the latter. And it's interesting because he himself, I think he sees himself as both. He's a practically wise individual, but he's also very much a philosopher because the first third of this book is about metaphysics, is his interpretation of reality and the natural world and atoms and motion, but he does definitely want to subordinate any kind of philosophical interest in ultimate reality to the ethical project of living a good life. The only reason to study metaphysics for Epicurus is so that it helps you lead a good and ethical and tranquil life.

[00:23:06] Ellie: Absolutely. But as you said, like he wrote a lot on this, on his cosmology and metaphysics, and in fact, as I mentioned earlier, there were 37 volumes of natural philosophy. I will warn listeners if you end up buying the Epicurus reader after hearing this episode, which I do recommend, the first maybe 25 pages or so are his excursions on things like the nature of dew and snow and atoms, which may be kinda funny from like a history of science perspective, but.

I find it a bit dry, so I think things really heat up like around page 28. But David, I was struck by that claim that phronesis, or it's translated as prudence here, is a more valuable thing than philosophy because to my mind prudence would emerge in and through our philosophically informed actions. And so I had a moment of being like, is he setting up this idea of philosophy as removed from practical life?

Which I think otherwise his way of thinking is not doing right. He's really seeing philosophy as a way of life. So I don't have an answer to that. I just wanted to like mention it sounds like maybe you have a thought.

[00:24:10] David: I have a thought insofar as it's often said by experts in ancient philosophy that one of the shifts that happens from the pre- Socratics to the post Socratics is that the pre-Socratics really created an understanding of theory and philosophy that was about contemplating ultimate reality. What is the nature of being?

Is it sameness? Is it change? What are the fundamental constituent elements of reality? Which element is the most fundamental? Is it water? Air? Earth? Whatever. And by the time you get to Socrates, one of his most radical interventions in the history of ideas was shifting the focus of philosophy from the natural world to the social world and starting to inquire not into how atoms and motion operate, or the elements, but how people interact with one another and what's the good life.

And so in that sense, I think Epicurious as a post Socratic philosopher would be worried about these two visions of philosophy. One that is primarily theorizing about reality in isolation from social and historical circumstances.

And the other one that is much more Socratic, that is concerned with ethics and politics. So I don't think he explicitly thematize that distinction, but I think it's in the back of his mind.

[00:25:32] Ellie: Yeah, interesting. I want to go to a description of pleasure that he gives that's right above his description of feis. I'm looking at bottom of 30, top of 31, I feel like this really encapsulates his view. He says, so when we say that pleasure is the goal, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligate or the pleasures of consumption, as some believe, either from ignorance and disagreement or from deliberate misinterpretation for cough, cough, the Athenians who are accusing us of orgies, rather here's his definition of pleasure, the lack of pain in the body, and disturbance in the soul.

So you mentioned David, that the view of pleasure that we get here is one of ataxia, this like freedom from disturbance. And I wanna highlight here that that's a primitive view of pleasure. Pleasure is not some positive thing. It's actually the absence of pain. And so that means we're not going out and seeking like the pleasure of dancing all night.

We're seeking the absence of pain. I mean, I love dancing all night, but I am gonna feel terrible in the morning. Speaking of which he goes on to say, for it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women or consuming fish, and the other dainty of an extravagant table.

So no caviar, but fish for sure. That was like the ancient Athenian view of, you know, the, the fancy food. It's not those things which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation, which searches out the reasons for every choice. And avoidance, so for everything you wanna do and not do, choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions, which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men's souls.

So the sober calculation, that's a, that's reasoning, right? And the sober calculation involves figuring out the causes of things. And so Epicurious thought it was crucial to study philosophy and natural science, which at the time was part of philosophy because that will tell us what the cause of something is, right?

So if I feel pain, I need to explore rationally what might be causing that pain, and that will then allow me to overcome it. And so this is why for him, ultimately this study of natural science, including meteorology, including biology, et cetera, et cetera, he loves talking about meteorology here, but. In any case, that will help us uncover the causes of things and then pull out pain at the root.

[00:28:06] David: Like all ancient sages, Epicurus had a recipe for the good life, a set of steps that. You should follow if you don't wanna be one of the crappy members of the masses.

[00:28:18] Ellie: Like any good thought leader today included.

[00:28:21] David: Yeah. How to make a cult, according to Epicurus, this is what has become known as the four Part Cure, and the four parts of this cure are as follows.

Number one, what's good is easy to get. Number two, what's terrible is easy to endure. Number three, don't worry about death. And number four, don't fear God or the Gods in plural. And so for Epicurus. If you manage to really incorporate these maxims into your worldview and into your mode of living, you will be able to attain ataxia.

And in the previous part of our discussion, we already hinted at the first part of this cure that what is good is easy to get because the good life consists in food, water, shelter, and maybe community and friendship, which are pretty easy to get.

[00:29:19] Ellie: I think it's actually even simpler than that. The good life consists in pleasure and pleasure is the absence of pain. And it's as simple as that. And of course there are those things that you just mentioned, but I really think like when we boil this down, the idea that what's good is easy to get, is that what's good is pleasure.

And pleasure is defined as the absence of pain, right? And that is accessible to everyone. Now, for the second part of the cure. Where Epicurus suggests that what's terrible is easy to endure. We can think about the nature of pain, and I think maybe a more common term for us today would be anxiety, perhaps like suffering you could think about as well, but it's just, or even discomfort, right?

Like our lives are pretty uncomfortable by and large. But we can minimize that discomfort. And Epicurious thinks in particular that the discomfort we feel, although pervasive is actually not that bad, so we should like stop adding suffering to our pain and just like embrace what life throws at us because pain is usually either acute but short-lived, or it's chronic but mild. And I mean, I don't know if I agree with him on that, but that is his view of this second part of the cure. What's terrible is easy to endure. 'cause what's terrible is pain and it's usually short-lived or mild.

[00:30:47] David: Yeah, no, I think people with chronic acute pain would certainly disagree with this classification of either it's really easy to endure and it can take a long time, or it's short and very painful.

[00:30:57] Ellie: Yeah. Although to his credit, Epicurus died in a very painful fashion, although that sounds very weird to say. To his credit, died painfully.

[00:31:06] David: He really wanted to die a painful death, and he succeeded.

[00:31:09] Ellie: But I was gonna say he died in a painful fashion. He suffered from kidney stones, but he was able to continually live out this philosophy even as he was dying. And he was like, yeah. You know, in the scheme of things like, I'm able to handle this. I've got my barley cake and my water.

[00:31:28] David: But not my fish, my women and my boys. He also is quite clever in not introducing too sharp, a distinction between pain and pleasure in terms of their relationship to the good life, yes, pleasure is good and we should pursue it, and pain is something that we can endure. But he also says that there are some pains that ultimately lead to more pleasure down the road.

And so if you are smart enough and you have a good grasp of the cause and effect relationships of various. Pains and pleasures and their relationship to human life, you can make that distinction. So it made me think, for instance, about something like vaccination. You know, when you get vaccinated you have to get stung, and that's painful.

But ultimately, the aggregate good of the vaccination makes room for more pleasure and for a better life. And so he's not saying that pain should always be something we're suspicious of. Again, it's something that will last very little or will not fully derail your life.

[00:32:31] Ellie: Like that laser facial I got last week.

[00:32:33] David: Yeah, that's definitely with the fish and the boy and the women.

[00:32:35] Ellie: Yeah, it's definitely with the fish and the boys and the women.

[00:32:38] David: Let's bring it back to the four part cure. So, We need to talk about death and God. So the third and fourth parts of the cure are don't fear death, don't fear God. And so the question is, A, why would we fear them in the first place? And B, how do we overcome that fear?

Now, why we would fear death and God is pretty easy to see, right? Most of us have an interest in living. We are told that we should live for as long as we can because death is. A pain or a bad, right? It's a net deficit to our existence. And conversely, if you look at the image of the gods that the Greeks were dealing with, a view that is expressed largely through mythology, the gods were vengeful, kind of busy bodies who were always meddling in human affairs. And if you pissed one off, well then all bets are off. You know, you might suffer the wrath of one of the gods. And so from a Greek perspective, this idea of fearing the gods makes perfect sense because a lot of people have their lives turned inside out by the interventionist nature of the deities.

This is where we have to go back to Ellie's observation from a few minutes ago that for Epicurus, studying natural philosophy is really important for our ethical objectives, and that's because understanding the natural world allows us to have a more accurate and objective picture of reality, and it allows us to understand how baseless some of our fears are, including our fear of death and our fear of the gods.

Now, what is that picture of reality that Epicurus defense in his metaphysical writings. In short, Epicurus was what is known as an atomist, meaning that he believed that reality is constituted by nothing more than atoms falling in a void. So imagine almost like a matrix-like scene with a black pitch background, which is the void, which is infinite, and then all these atoms just like bumping around like drops of water in that void.

And as they interact, they form assemblages, right? Like they start forming bodies like tables, chairs, cows, dogs, human beings. And so it's this chaotic but really lawful interaction of atoms in space by means of motion. Now, once you understand that, you can see why it's irrational to fear either death or God.

It's irrational to fear death because death is just the rearrangement of atoms. Right? When I die in my current David form, the atoms that constitute me don't disappear into nothingness. They just get rearranged. They sort of get shuffled back into this atomic soup, and they give rice to other assemblages.

And similarly, he says, the Gods do exist, but not in the way mythology tells us they exist. They're not these vengeful people who are really trying to get involved in human drama. The Gods are just doing their own thing, and because they're perfect, they don't have to get involved in human affairs, and so we have no reason to believe that the gods who obviously are real would ever take out their vengeance or their interests or their desires on suspecting or unsuspecting humans.

But those two insights are only possible once you have developed and internalized this atomistic metaphysics that explains the way reality ultimately is structured.

[00:36:28] Ellie: To add a little bit more to this, I mean, one other way of putting this is just that Epicurus is a materialist. He doesn't believe that the soul, for instance, is in corporeal, above and a beyond the body. And I wanna talk about that in a moment. But before I do, I wanna just mention a couple corollaries to what you described.

One is that the creation of the world is accidental. And this is something that Epicurus kind of accidentally got, right? So when we're reading these ancient philosophers who are speculating about physics, biology in all manner of natural sciences without the advantages of the scientific method, a lot of stuff they get wrong. And then occasionally they got some things right.

One of the things they got right is atoms, the existence of atoms, but they didn't get right. What that essentially means they had like a bit of a simplistic view of what an atom was that was not correct. However, another thing that Epicurus accidentally got right is sort of, I mean he didn't prefigure the big bang, but he did think that there's just like a coming together of atoms, that is our world, and that happened to be conducive to life, and related to that, it happened to be conducive to the life of the gods. One of the things that really struck me in rereading this is that he actually describes the gods as blessed animals.

So he doesn't think of the gods as essentially above and beyond life, the Gods also are living. Obviously there are different kinds of. Animals than we are because he says, not only are they blessed, but they're also indestructible. They have eternal life, but they're not of a fundamentally different form. Namely, they're not in corporeal. Now, what does this mean for the soul?

Can I talk about the soul? Do you have any quick interjections before I do?

[00:38:14] David: One quick interjection. This might be a little bit nitpicky. Sorry, but you talked about the creation of the world, and I just wanna say that Epicurious did not believe the world was created for the ancients. The world was eternal. As he says at the beginning of his metaphysics, the totality has always been so there is no moment of creation.

There is just an infinite void with an infinite number of atoms. That has always been and will always be. And this is a point of tension between ancient metaphysics and later Christian notions of a moment of beginning.

[00:38:47] Ellie: Yeah, but the totality takes different forms over time. So I didn't read that as meaning that the world, I think like the atoms of the world are eternal. But actually looking back, maybe you're right because I'm reading back in the Inwood introduction and he says that some worlds, although there are numerous worlds and these worlds are changing, some of them are unstable and others are stable, and ours is a stable world, and it's the stability of our world that makes it seem like it was created by like a God or Gods, right?

It seems like it was designed to be stable, but that's a kind of illusion.

[00:39:26] David: Yeah. And his worry ultimately is that we often, and by we, I mean the Greeks interpret meteorological phenomena as actions of the gods, right? So like in Homeric poems, for example, the gods would act through storms or through wind or through other natural events, and Epicurus was really worried about this anthropomorphizing of meteorological phenomena, which is why he spent so much time at the beginning of some of these letters talking about the rainbows and wind and the comets and the dew rain. Yeah, like there is just like so many one by one.

[00:40:09] Ellie: Sorry, Zeus Thunderbolts are not up to you. They are natural phenomena.

[00:40:14] David: Exactly. And so why fear the gods when they are not the cause of the things that we fear? Maybe it's reasonable to fear the thunderbolts. You know, I don't wanna get struck by lightning, but if I do, it won't be the fault of Zeus.

[00:40:29] Ellie: Yeah, no, so that's great. Okay, so there we have I forgot the order in which you listed the four parts of the cure. I think that was number three though, right? Or was death number three? It was the third one that we are discussing. This then gives us an opportunity to talk about. The one part of the cure that we haven't yet discussed, which is the fear of death.

And you know, you mentioned, you already started us on this, so I guess we haven't talked about it a little bit, but I wanna get deeper into it here. So, as for the soul, because Epicurus is a materialist, he thinks that the soul is not immaterial, right? And so he doesn't think that the soul leaves the body on death and then continues to persist in some inal realm.

The soul, he identifies with our ability to perceive things through our senses, but that is dependent on us having a living body in order to perceive. So for Epicurus, there is no afterlife, and this means that we don't have to worry about the judgment of the gods, nor do we have to worry about death.

While we are alive, we're not dead. While we're dead, we're not alive. And so why would we worry about dying? Death simply means nothing to us. Nor does it matter whether our life is long or short. As you mentioned before, David, our usual way of thinking about life is that the longer it is, the better it is, but that's not the way we should think about it for Epicurus.

For Epicurus, if we're really living in the present, we're free from pain. Hey, like that's the best life has to offer. It doesn't matter if we have that for a day or for a hundred years.

[00:42:06] David: And I'm now remembering that he uses the analogy of food to illustrate this point. He says, you know, you shouldn't eat a ton of shitty food just to be fully satiated. Your goal should be to eat a few like bitefuls of filling good stuff. And that's his view of life, right?

[00:42:25] Ellie: Not you bringing Epicurus into diet culture.

[00:42:28] David: Well, no, he uses it himself. I would have to find the page reference, but he says the goal

[00:42:33] Ellie: So you're saying he's already in diet culture.

[00:42:35] David: Yeah, he already is there. So like he, he says you should have a little bit of the good rather than a lot of the bad. And that's his view of life and also his view of food, I guess. Which maybe is just an analogy

[00:42:48] Ellie: If we remove this from the diet culture, possible implications. Not saying that they're necessarily there, but that's how it was sounding, for a moment, I can at least say, I'll use myself as an example. One of my favorite candies are the Mexican candy Pulparindos,

[00:43:06] David: Yeah, I know. It was so weird when I first saw you eating those, I ahh my cultural categories are mixing.

[00:43:12] Ellie: I love  Pulparindos so much. If I eat like one small pack of puls, I feel great. If I eat multiple, then I have a stomachache and a headache, so we can just leave it at that.

[00:43:22] David: But now to stay with the topic of death and the soul, I just wanna say that I really love his account of the soul because he's doubling down on his material atomistic perspective. He says the soul is. Constellation of atoms. So it is atomic, it is like a structure made of building blocks that are indivisible, and so it's a body.

The soul is a physical structure that exists with a place in time and space, and it is encased by our physical body. So it's like a body within a body, almost like those Russian dolls, you know, that are nested within one another.

[00:44:02] Ellie: Well, no, not a Russian doll. It's an aggregate that is distributed, so it's a body that is just. Distributed throughout the rest of the parts of the body.

[00:44:09] David: Yeah, but it is contained within the outer limit of our physical body. So there's a containment and also a diffusion

[00:44:17] Ellie: A Russian doll just sounds like a homunculus, which is like the soul's a little body inside.

[00:44:20] David: No, No, no, no.

[00:44:22] Ellie: Go ahead. I just wanted that caveat there.

[00:44:25] David: No, that's good. And he says, if you have to visualize what this body is, imagine a combination of breath and fire. So it's like a fiery breath. That's what the soul is.

And it's the principle of perception and judgment and reason in the human body. And when we talk about death, again, we're just talking about the decoupling of those atoms that make up the soul and their return to that primordial atomic soup, that is the universe. But ultimately they will go on to have other lives, i.e. other formations in the future.

And so in a sense, there is an afterlife for epicurus. It's just not a transcendental one, outside of the material realm. Our atoms will have other bodies that they are parts of. And so I like to think that there is an afterlife of sorts, just of a material kind.

[00:45:21] Ellie: Yeah, I just wouldn't wanna call that an afterlife. That's not what we mean by afterlife. And so, in particular, if the soul is characterized by its ability to perceive through the senses and you know, through other things too, like reasoning, et cetera. None of that exists after death. And that's like the whole point. It's like we die and that's it.

[00:45:41] David: But our atoms survive and they give rise to other formations

[00:45:42] Ellie: no, I know David, but I don't

[00:45:44] David: It's so beautiful.

[00:45:46] Ellie: Yeah. But I don't care about that nearly as much, at least for our purposes here as I care about the ethical upshot, which is in terms of how we actually live.

And so no offense, like if you wanna wanna go into the metaphysics and maybe some of our listeners are like, let David go off here. 'cause certainly like that is important. But I think when we're talking about the four part cure, the idea that death is nothing to us, like we gotta live as though that is true because it is.

And so he says, I love his way of putting this. He says, get used to believing that death is nothing to us. We need to accustom ourselves to that truth because everything is gonna pull us in the direction of fearing our death. And I think rereading this like this, really it's such a well known, even cliche idea, but it really impacted me rereading this text last night because I live my life in such a way that I feel like I'm constantly racing against time.

I don't know how long my life is gonna be, but I do know that I have so much more that I wanna accomplish in this lifetime that I ever would be able to. And I think compounded by that is like worries that I'm gonna lose my memory at a certain age because that runs in my family and like all kinds of other things, every single day I'm beset by my own mortality and Epicurus is telling me, get used to believing that death is nothing to you is a really powerful message.

So we've been talking about Epicurus main principles here, four part cure, his view of pleasure, and it's time now to think a little bit about what our thoughts on it are or some possible criticisms I may end up deferring to Plutarch a little bit. And David, I don't think we have too much time left for this, but I know you in particular had some ideas, so hit me.

[00:47:32] David: Okay, so these are gonna be just like quick fire objections that I. Had to some of the things that Epicurus says, especially in his maxims, but also in some of the letters. So one, I mentioned earlier that I wanted to return to his views on justice and crime. You are right that he doesn't really care about justice all that much.

He just cares about living in small communities with your friends in a garden with peace of mind. That's his vision of the good life. And so in the context of his discussion of justice, there is this question of crime, which you know is unjust. So if the point of life is just to live happily and in a state of tranquility, but we don't really have a stronger sense of justice, one might wonder and ask Epicurus, well, what stops somebody from committing crime, from violating the laws of the police or doing things that ultimately harm another person?

If I can make the argument that they don't really disturb my peace of mind, maybe I'm just a really chill criminal, you know, who can murder people without being internally disturbed. And his answer I think is really unsatisfying because he says, the reason that we should not commit crime is because you cannot guarantee that you will get away with it, and because you can't guarantee that you're gonna be worried and that worry is a disturbance of your mental state and therefore a departure from tranquility.

[00:49:00] Ellie: You know, we can consider this. On the one hand from a perspective of consistency with Epicurus's other views, and on the other hand, from the perspective of whether or not this renders his views undesirable or even wrong. So from the first perspective, just wanna briefly say that because Epicurus says that we should judge using only the criterion of feeling, this tracks. This idea that the fear of suspicion is what should lead you to avoid a crime.

Now, I think we could say from an epicurean perspective that there are plenty of things that are undesirable because of the pain they will ultimately produce. Well, actually, let's take an example here.

Let's use the example of murdering somebody you know, you like really dislike this person. They cause you a lot of pain and then you end up killing them. We know that Epicurus would say that that is gonna cause fear of suspicion for you and ruin your ataraxia, could we find any independent reasons using an epicurean framework that that murder would be wrong?

[00:50:20] David: So I think we can, but it would be despite Epicurus himself and I think the way to go about this. Yeah, I think the way to go about this would be through the concept of friendship, because you are effectively removing a possible friend that could be a member of your community and your garden in the act of killing them.

And so, I think that's one possible way to go about this because he really does place a very, very high value on friendship. He says that we must be willing to risk a lot of things for friendship. He also says that friendships have moral value because our friends remind us of the value of living a tranquil and blessed life.

And he even says this in connection to sex where he says, look, when people have sex with one another, and they value it very highly, what they really want is not the sex itself. What they want is the companionship. It's spending time with that person. It's talking to them, is being together. And so friendship really is at the top of his ethical thinking.

And I think friendship could provide not the strongest, but at least a possible condemnation of murder and harm on epicurean grounds. But again, despite Epicurus himself.

[00:51:42] Ellie: Well see. I actually don't think that's gonna take us far enough because I think Epicurus is ideal of friendship. Is premised on the fact that friends are good because they help you live the good life. You know, they remind you of your death. They are fellow travelers. They, remind you of what's worthwhile and what's not.

So he really sees like the ideal friendship as being an ideal friendship. That's like with like minded people, probably fellow epicureans. So I'm not sure that's gonna take us that far.

[00:52:11] David: So murder people as long as they're not epicureans,

[00:52:15] Ellie: No, I think you bring up a really good point here. One thing I wanna throw in the mix too is this is from a text.

This is the ancient collection of maxims, and this is one of the texts that we're not entirely sure was written by Epicurus himself versus one of his followers. So do take it with a grain of salt.

[00:52:30] David: Which one is it?

[00:52:31] Ellie: It's number 79 on page 40. He who is free from disturbance within himself also causes no trouble for another.

So the idea there is that if you are fully free from disturbance. You will live in such a way that you won't cause trouble for other people. And that actually I think is a more compelling answer to me because if all I'm doing is eating my barley cakes and drinking my water and then like hanging out with my fellow Epicurean friends, I am not going to be driven to crime.

Because if you think about what would drive you towards a crime, you know, like murder, it's largely going to be one of these groundless desires I will say. And then maybe we can move on from this. 'cause I wanna mention a broader implication here. I will say perhaps that would actually leave some room though, for like a murder and self-defense or somebody who's like the victim of daily domestic violence and the only way to get out of it is through murder.

So I don't know there, it could be that there's like some prudential form of murder in Epicurus view, but I think there is something compelling to be said for the fact that if you are living in such a way that adheres to epicurean and principles, you likely wouldn't be led into crime in the first place.

[00:53:43] David: So I really like this interpretation that you're laying out because it's also consistent with his account of the gods. The reason that the gods are not busy bodies who care about our human drama is because part of the essence of their being is their tranquility. They are maximally, ataraxic subjects, and for that reason, they have no reason to go out of themselves.

And influence or interfere with other affairs. And so I think if we scale that down a little bit, we could say that the epicurean subject who attains ataraxia becomes blessed and God-like, and almost divine in that sense of becoming so content and at peace with themselves, that they would literally have no reason to go outside of themselves.

And if they do, it would be a sign that they have not attained at ataraxia.

[00:54:34] Ellie: Yeah, and I think a broader line of thinking that your critique is bringing up is a question of to what extent this is an individualistic philosophy. There is certainly in the four part cure, an onus that is put upon the individual to live well and I think that's all well and good. Like I don't think if it's an individualist philosophy that's like necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it obviously may render the philosophy limited if we're looking to it for political and even to some extent ethical guidelines depending on how we're construing ethics.

So it's useful ethically speaking from the perspective of like living out our own daily practices in tandem with others might not be super useful when we're thinking about ethics in terms of like, how to be fair to one another, right?

The justice stuff doesn't take us very far and you know, not to like put Epicurus on blast here but there is in his biography a quick note that he was friend to all, but he didn't really participate in political life.

[00:55:37] David: Yeah, so this is a broader concern that a number of people have articulated about philosophy in the Hellenistic period, that it becomes focused primarily on the individual and on finding happiness within rather than without and in dynamic engagement with others and the world. So I think the criticism is fair.

Once again, I do think his remarks on gratitude, his few remarks on justice, his extensive remarks on friendship, put him somewhere between a fully individualistic and a more socially politically committed philosophy, and we see this even in his personal life, because even though he did believe that the ideal form of life was almost like a small community, right, the garden was that it was not him by himself.

It was a small group of like-minded people sharing and doing things in common. And in the biography of Epicurus, in the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, the author points out that at the very end of his life. His final act before dying was actually to provide for the children of his friends in his will.

And so he, he does this gesture. Is that political in the sense of getting involved in political office and, you know, organizing for the downtrodden? Not quite. Is it fully individualistic? Not either. So there is a big gray area here of maybe what we can call the social that I do think he is very invested in.

But I would say it's impossible to derive a political philosophy from Epicurus because that is not his objective.

[00:57:28] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

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