Epicurean Philosophy

Epicurus, like most Greek philosophers, felt the true goal of all philosophy was to help provide man with the tools to lead a good life. Additionally, like other philosophers of his time period, he felt philosophy should offer practical advice on matters over which man had exclusive power, that is, his character and deportment. This led him to a philosophy based, not in Platonic state-driven ideals, but to a paradigm devoted to individual peace of mind and mental self-sufficiency.

Epicurus began by observing human behavior. The common thread he saw woven through all of it was the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. For this reason, he concluded that pleasure was the chief quality of a life well lived. This earned him a reputation as a hedonist, both in his own day and in our own. This, however, is not entirely fair. Epicurus, and those who followed him, defined pleasure as the absence of pain, and pain as the hollowness of unsatisfied desire.

Epicurus broke desires into two types, physical and mental. The physical, he divided into three rough categories, those of physical necessity (food, for example, or sleep), physical drive (sex primarily), and frivolous whim (luxury). No ascetic, he believed that those desires of the first type (physical necessity) should be satisfied as well as possible. Those pleasures of the second category, he advised be moderately and prudently sated. Desires of the third category however, the desires for luxury, should be checked. Pain, he argued, comes only when the pleasures of the first two categories are neglected.

Of greater import to human happiness, however, is the avoidance of mental pain: anxiety, remorse, guilt, and most especially fear. The avoidance of these pains amounts to true mental pleasure, the peace of mind he called ataraxia. This concluded, Epicurus provided a system of living by which man could avoid these mental pains.

Anxiety he saw chiefly as the result of the stresses of a public life, and advised man to avoid publicity, society, fame, and politics. His maxim was: "Live unseen and unknown." Remorse and guilt, he reasoned, could be avoided by living a virtuous life. In this he differed dramatically from his Academic contemporaries. Epicurus saw virtue not as the foundation of a good life, but simply as a pragmatic way to avoid the pains of a guilty conscience. Justice, rather than being the underpinning of universal ethics, he reduced to a sort of social contract to inflict no harm. Justice is simply a tool to avoid pain by promising to not inflict it upon others.

Most damaging of all to man's well being is fear. Fear springs from the unknown, most especially fears of the gods and fears of hell (or, at least, of punishment in the after-life). Epicurus felt both of these fears were rooted in misunderstandings and superstition. Epicurus felt that a correct understanding of the world could help allay these fears, and for this understanding he turned, like many modern philosophers, to physics.

The world we see is full of change and chaos, yet careful observation yields the intuition that there is some level at which the universe is ordered and understandable. In the ancient world, this understandable, ordered nature was called "physis", and it is from there that we derive our word "physics". The goal of physics, both ancient and modern, is to provide a model of the observable universe that helps us explain and predict the phenomenae that make up our experiential lives.

Epicurus's system required a physics that would help to eliminate superstitious fears. The materialists, who proposed that the word was created of physical stuff, and that the appearance of anything as non-physical else was illusion and falsity, had theories strikingly similar to the materialism currently in fashion among philosophers.

Of the early materialists, the atomists were the most prominent philosophy. Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera foremost among them, the atomists described a world made of particles moving in void. These particles were indivisible, thus the name “a-tom” (un-cut). These are not exactly like modern chemical atoms; I will offer a brief comparison.

In modern chemistry, we speak of a finite number of types of atoms; we call each type a chemical element. Moreover, we can speak of the particles of which these atoms are made up, of which there an even smaller number. (The chemical atom was named well before we knew that it could be subdivided.) Modern atoms are constantly in motion and often collide, forming and breaking bonds. The atoms are joined together by electrical interactions; and they can be created and destroyed, albeit in dramatic nuclear reactions rare on earth. They differ one from another in composition, size, shape, and charge (which are really all functions of composition). What science now considers the smallest particle of matter, the quark, is similar to the old view of the atom. There are 6 kinds of quarks in matter. The exact nature of their difference is most often referred to as “flavor”, and has no analog among "every-day" type objects.

The ancient atom is different, but in many ways the same. Indivisible, the atom cannot be broken further into constituent parts. This is the defining quality of the ancient atom. The material world is seen as composed of these atoms; different materials display different qualities dependent on the differing shapes of the atoms that made it up, and in the configuration in which they are combined. The atoms are constantly at motion, as they are in modern science, and they collide, sticking together sometimes, due to “hooks and barbs” on their surfaces.

Democritus, among others, gives numerous examples of how atomism can explain everyday phenomena. For example, he hypothesizes that “sharp” tastes may be caused by pointy atoms.

However, the theory drew great criticism, in particular from Aristotle and his followers. They did not like what they saw as logical inconsistencies in the theory (for example: If atoms have different shapes, then they have geometrical parts, and this means that they are mathematically divisible into disparate points). They also objected that the theory could not account for a number of characteristics of matter, like color and odor. At the core of his objection, however, was the atomic view that the universe is fundamentally without design or purpose. Aristotle instead supported a natural philosophy that made nature a willful agent.

Unlike the Aristotle, however, Epicurus found in atomism a brilliant device to dispel the worry brought on by what he saw as superstitious nonsense about a universally willful creative agent. However, he agreed with some of the lesser Aristotelian criticisms. He made several updates to Democratic atomism to assuage these doubts. First, he differentiated between mathematical (geometric) indivisibility such as that of a point and the physical indivisibility of the atom. Moreover, he speculated that atoms had weight (so as to avoid the tricky problem of making up massive matter from mass-less particles). He constructed a system whereby, in the beginning, all atoms moved with equal velocity thru the void, until one atom ("without the intervention of any outside force or guiding intelligence") veered slightly off course. This resulted in a cascade of collisions and swirlings, which produced the universe we know.

Epicurean atomism is best understood as a physical model of the universe. A "model" in this sense is like the rules for a game. It would be possible to define chess by defining every possible game. This, however, is so daunting a definition that we could never learn the whole thing, and we would not be able to play. Instead, we break each game into a series of “moves” and then define the rules that allow us to distinguish between legal and illegal moves. The world is like chess, but infinitely more complex. A physical model is the rules we think the universe is played by.

Like most models, Epicurean atomism can best be understood by considering several observable phenomena and examining how the model explains them. In fact, one of the lasting legacies of Epicurus is his move away from teleological (intentional) explanations of natural phenomena to functional (mechanistic) explanations. This marks a radical departure in science, away from the intentional/purposive paradigm exemplified by Aristotle’s medical background to the functional/mechanistic paradigm of hard science.

In his “Letter to the Pythocles”, Epicurus prefaces his explanantions with the following:

“In the first place, remember that, like everything else, knowledge of celestial phenomena, whether taken along with other things or in isolation, has no other end in view than peace of mind and firm convictions."

This makes a strong point about his views. He considers science to be simply a tool for generating the correct frame of mind in which to live a good life. This only further emphasizes his differences with traditions that value science, and other methods in the pursuit of truth, as valuable in their own virtue. Epicurus wished to use physics (and metaphysics) only as a servant of ethics. To this end, he proposed numerous explanations of astronomical observances, all of which were consistent with his physics.

For example, in attempting to explain the motion of heavenly bodies, he says:

"The intertropical movements of the sun and moon may depend, either on the obliquity impressed by fate on the heaven at certain determined epochs, or on the resistance of the air, or on the fact that these ignited bodies stand in need of being nourished by a matter suitable to their nature, and that this matter fails them; or finally, they may depend on the fact their having originally received an impulse which compels them to move as they do describing a sort of spiral figure. The sensible evidence does not in the least contradict these different suppositions..."

He makes similar statements about the moon's phases:

"The evacuations and subsequent replenishing of the moon may depend either on a conversion of this body, or on the different forms which the air when in a fiery state can adopt, or perhaps to the interposition of another body, or lastly, to some one of the causes by which one gives account of the analogous phænomena which pass under our eyes. Provided, however, that one does not obstinately adopt an exclusive mode of explanation; and that, for want of knowing what is possible for a man to explain, and what is inaccessible to his intelligence; one does not throw one’s self into interminable speculations.

It may also be possibly the case that the moon has a light of her own, or that she reflects that of the sun. For we see around us many objects which are luminous of themselves, and many other which have only a borrowed light."