The Case for Epicurus - The Charges

Epicurus stands accused, and the charge is that he erred in championing this world: nature, and the faculties nature gives us, the senses, the preconcepts and the feelings. Most of the charges brought against him are therefore charges against nature itself, and to answer them is to defend nature as well as Epicurus, in nature’s own court, which is reality, the only world there is.

The seven traditions in this book bring ten charges again and again. This chapter sets them out one by one. Under each charge comes Epicurus’s answer first, and then the positions of the seven accusers side by side, so that the reader can see at a glance where each parts company with him. Not every accuser joins in every charge: Aristotle denied that our lives are fated, and the Skeptics affirm nothing at all. The chapters that follow then answer each accuser in the words of its own leading writers.

Charge I: That the Senses Nature Gave Us Cannot Be Trusted, and That Truth and Reality Lie Beyond This World

Before we ask how we know the truth, we have to ask what we mean by “true” and by “real.” Most people assume the meaning is obvious, but the traditions give very different answers. Sextus Empiricus, who collected the ancient arguments, reports that “some say that there is not, others that there is, something true; and of the latter, some have said that only intelligibles are true, others that only sensibles, and others that both sensibles and intelligibles alike are true” (Against the Logicians II.4). Epicurus tied the two questions together. “There is no difference,” he held, “between saying that a thing is ‘true’ and saying that it is ‘subsisting,’” and “That is true which is in the state in which it is said to be” (II.9). What is real is what exists in nature, and what is true is what reports it as it is. Only then comes the question of the standard by which we test it.

• Epicurus: the real is what exists and acts in nature: bodies, made of atoms, and the void in which they move. The true is what is “in the state in which it is said to be.” Nature has no design and no intent to deceive, so we test it by the senses, the preconcepts and the feelings, and reason works from them and is tested by them.
• Platonists: the truly real is “that which always is and has no becoming,” the eternal Forms, and the world we see “is always becoming and never is.” The mind alone knows the Forms. The senses deceive: men are like prisoners in a cave who see only shadows of puppets carried behind a screen, and learning is the soul’s recollection of what it knew before birth.
• Aristotelians: Aristotle defined the true almost as Epicurus did, “to say of what is that it is.” But the highest reality is form and the eternal unmoved mover, true knowledge is of universal forms grasped by the intellect, and demonstration from first principles outranks the evidence of the senses.
• Stoics: only bodies exist, but the true is an “incorporeal judgement,” so that sensations are true only “by reference to the intelligibles associated with them.” The test is the “comprehensive” impression, which the sage alone can recognize, and the good is judged by reason, not by feeling.
• Skeptics: whether anything is true at all is in dispute, and “if nothing true exists, the criterion of truth also disappears.” Every appearance can be opposed by an equal appearance, and the wise man suspends judgment.
• Abrahamists: the highest reality is the unseen God, and “the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The truth is revealed and received by faith: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
• Humanists: many doubt that the senses reach reality at all. Kant placed the “thing in itself” beyond experience, and Russell wrote that “the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience.” Reason and conscience become the standard, with a “sacred” dignity of man that feeling cannot establish.
• Buddhists: the world of the senses is impermanent, the self is “a mere name,” and “All forms are unreal.” Truth is reached by insight in meditation. The senses and every sensation are “on fire,” and the disciple conceives an aversion for them.

Charge II: That Nature Could Not Have Produced the World Without a Divine Designer

• Epicurus: it was not made. The universe is eternal and infinite, and our world is one of countless worlds formed by the motions of atoms.
• Platonists: a good divine craftsman made the world, the only world, as a living creature with a soul, on the pattern of an eternal Form.
• Aristotelians: the world is eternal and unique, and everything in it moves toward ends, set in motion by an unmoved mover who is pure thought.
• Stoics: the world is a living, rational god, made and governed by divine reason, and it will be burned up and made again in an endless cycle.
• Skeptics: we cannot know, and so we follow the opinions of our city.
• Abrahamists: God created it out of nothing by his word.
• Humanists: they rarely say. Many accept whatever the latest scientific theory may say while keeping a view of man’s place in the world that depends on the older, created one.
• Buddhists: the Buddha refused to say whether the world is eternal or not, because such questions “profit not.”

Charge III: That Gods Govern Nature and Care What Men Do

• Epicurus: no. Gods are blessed and immortal, and they neither cause trouble nor suffer it.
• Platonists: yes. Gods care for men, and the man who denies it must be re-educated or punished under the law of impiety.
• Aristotelians: Aristotle’s god does not govern by command, but he is the supreme cause on which “the heavens and the world of nature” depend.
• Stoics: yes. Providence governs every part of the world for the sake of gods and men, and reveals the future through divination.
• Skeptics: we cannot know, but “following the ordinary view” we reverence gods and ascribe to them foreknowledge.
• Abrahamists: yes. Not a sparrow falls without the will of God, and the denial of providence is the mark of the heretic.
• Humanists: the old providence is replaced by Humanity or Progress, which give the individual his duties.
• Buddhists: there is no creator, but the law of karma rewards and punishes every deed, in this life or the next.

Charge IV: That the Soul Does Not End with the Body, and Will Be Rewarded or Punished After Death According to Its Actions in Life

• Epicurus: the soul is scattered, and death is nothing to us. This life is the only one we have, and it is to be enjoyed, not spent preparing for another.
• Platonists: the soul is immortal, existed before birth, and will be judged.
• Aristotelians: the soul is the form of the body and perishes with it, but the active intellect is “immortal and eternal.”
• Stoics: the soul survives for a time, or until the burning of the world, and is then reabsorbed into the whole.
• Skeptics: we cannot know.
• Abrahamists: the soul survives, or the body will be raised, and every man will be judged and sent to everlasting life or everlasting punishment.
• Humanists: most deny the afterlife, but many keep the moral weight that belief in it once carried.
• Buddhists: there is no self, yet there is rebirth, to hell or to heaven, until desire is extinguished.

Charge V: That Nature Acts for a Purpose Set from Above, and That Man’s Destiny Is a Part of That Purpose

• Epicurus: no. “Nothing was born in the body that we might use it, but that which is born begets itself a use.” The order of nature comes from the nature of the atoms and from the survival of what works.
• Platonists: yes. Everything was designed by the craftsman for the best.
• Aristotelians: yes. “Nature makes nothing in vain,” and plants exist for animals and animals for men.
• Stoics: yes. The world was made for gods and men, down to the pig whose soul serves as salt.
• Skeptics: we cannot know.
• Abrahamists: yes. The invisible things of God are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
• Humanists: many deny cosmic purpose but give man a purpose and a dignity that only a purposeful world could supply.
• Buddhists: nature is not designed, but it is ordered by karma, a moral law that weighs every deed.

Charge VI: That Our Lives Are Fated, Decreed or Settled Before We Choose

• Epicurus: no. Some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some are within our control, and “that which is in our control is subject to no master.” It would be better to follow the myths about gods “than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers.” The freedom to choose is part of nature, seen in our own experience, and the man who says that all things happen by necessity refutes himself.
• Platonists: each soul chooses its life before birth, but “the life which he chooses shall be his destiny,” made “irreversible” beneath “the throne of Necessity.” In this life, “no man is voluntarily bad.”
• Aristotelians: no. Aristotle defended deliberation and held that “virtue also is in our own power, and so too vice.” But his freedom rests on a nature full of purposes, under heavens that move by eternal necessity.
• Stoics: yes. Fate is “a certain order and series of causes,” and the willing soul “Fate leads, but the unwilling drags along.”
• Skeptics: we cannot know. Carneades argued against fate, but for Sextus the question of “what is in our power” is “still unsettled.”
• Abrahamists: God has decreed all things, yet he judges men for their deeds. “Nothing can befall us but what God hath destined for us.” “Everything is foreseen; and freewill is given.”
• Humanists: many accept a nature of strict necessity and keep freedom only outside it, in Kant’s moral law or in Russell’s “thought.”
• Buddhists: the Buddha rejected open fatalism, but karma from former lives “allots beings to meanness or greatness.”

Charge VII: That Pleasure Is Not Only Not the Goal of Life but Is a Distraction and a Hindrance to That Purpose

Nearly every ancient school agreed that the goal is happiness, eudaimonia. The question is what happiness is. As Diogenes of Oinoanda put it, the issue is not “what is the means of happiness?” but “what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?” (Fr. 32).

• Epicurus: pleasure, judged by the feeling of pleasure itself. Pleasure is not only bodily excitement. Every experience in life, of body and mind, that we find to be desirable deserves to be considered within the term pleasure, because pleasure and pain are the only two feelings nature gives us to judge by. A life free from pain is not an empty life but a life full of pleasure, because there is no neutral state between the two.
• Platonists: virtue and the knowledge of the Good, and “to become like God.” The life of pleasure is the life of “a leaky jar.”
• Aristotelians: happiness as the activity of virtue, and above all contemplation. The man who makes pleasure his goal chooses “a life suitable to beasts.”
• Stoics: virtue, the only good. Pleasure is “the good of cattle.”
• Skeptics: quietude, which comes when the search for truth is given up.
• Abrahamists: obedience to God and the reward of the world to come. The love of pleasure is a vice of the last days.
• Humanists: the perfection of man, the good of Humanity, and duty for duty’s sake. Pleasure is at best a by-product.
• Buddhists: Nirvana, the extinction of craving. Life and birth are suffering, desire is their cause, and “From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear.”

A modern blend of several of these answers is now often presented as Epicurus’s own: clear the mind, meditate, let go of desire, own less, and happiness will arise by itself. It takes the Buddhist’s meditation, the Stoic’s removal of desire, the Skeptic’s quiet that follows giving up, and the Christian’s “take no thought for your life,” and it calls the mixture minimalism. Epicurus’s answer is different. Happiness is a life of pleasure, and it is reached not by emptying the mind but by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance” (DL X.132). He valued the ability to live on little “not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things,” but so that we need not fear the loss of many (DL X.130).

Charge VIII: That Virtue Must Be Chosen for Its Own Sake

• Epicurus: virtue is the means to the pleasant life, as medicine is the means to health.
• Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics: virtue is chosen for its own sake. For the Stoics it is the only good.
• Skeptics: virtue is good only “by belief,” and the Skeptic follows the customs of his country.
• Abrahamists: virtue is obedience to God’s law, rewarded and punished after death.
• Humanists: virtue is the fulfillment of duty and of human dignity, owed regardless of its consequences.
• Buddhists: virtue is the path to the end of desire and of rebirth.

Charge IX: That Justice Is an Eternal Law Handed Down from Above, and Is the Same for All People at All Times and All Places

• Epicurus: justice is a compact for mutual advantage, and a law that does not serve that advantage “no longer has the essential nature of justice.”
• Platonists: justice is a Form, known to the philosopher-kings, who may lie to the citizens for their good.
• Aristotelians: justice is in part natural, and some men are slaves by nature.
• Stoics: justice is the law of the world-city, written by the reason that governs all things.
• Skeptics: whatever the laws and customs of one’s country require.
• Abrahamists: the law revealed by God.
• Humanists: the rights and duties that follow from the dignity of man, binding on every rational being.
• Buddhists: the law of karma, built into nature: “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter into the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Dhammapada 127).

Charge X: That No Society Can Be Good If There Is No World Beyond This One

The rival traditions repeat one charge more than any other: that a good life and a just society cannot last unless men believe in something higher and truer than this world, whether the belief is true or only useful. The higher world may be a realm of Forms, a providence, gods who watch and judge, a life after death, a moral law above nature, or a law of deeds that follows a man from life to life. Gods are its commonest form, but not the only one. Nietzsche named the pattern: “The ‘true world’ has been erected upon a contradiction of the real world” (Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” §6). Cicero put its religious form in his own voice: if piety toward the gods disappears, “loyalty and social union among men” will disappear as well, “and justice itself, the queen of all the virtues” (On the Nature of the Gods I.4).

• Epicurus: yes. The good is found in this world, in the pleasure and pain that every living being feels, and justice in the compacts men make for their mutual advantage. The fear of gods restrains no one whom the laws do not already restrain. The wise are just because they reason correctly about pain and death, and ordinary men, so far as they are just, are held to it by the laws and their penalties. “On account of what kind of gods, then, will human beings be righteous? For they are not righteous on account of the real ones or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ Judges in Hades” (Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fr. 20).
• Platonists: no. The true world is the world of the Forms, and the good is known by turning away from this one. “No one who believes, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods has ever yet done an impious deed voluntarily.” The rulers may tell the citizens a “royal lie,” and unbelief is punished by law.
• Aristotelians: the stories of gods in human form were added to the ancient belief “with a view to the persuasion of the multitude and to its legal and utilitarian expediency” (Metaphysics XII.8).
• Stoics: no. The world is a city of gods and men, governed by providence, and “Injustice is impiety” (Marcus Aurelius IX.1).
• Skeptics: they keep the ancestral religion as a custom of the city. The critic Critias, whose verses Sextus preserves, said openly that “some shrewd man first … Discovered unto men the fear of Gods, Thereby to frighten sinners.”
• Abrahamists: no. “Fear God, and keep His commandments,” for “God shall bring every work into the judgment,” and without that judgment, says Lactantius, “it is the part of the wise man to do evil, if it is advantageous to him, and safe.”
• Humanists: More’s Utopia barred from office anyone who denied providence and the immortal soul, lest men “seek after pleasure by all possible means, lawful or unlawful.” Kant kept the higher world as a moral law above nature, and Nietzsche described what remained of it in Kant: “The true world is unattainable, it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought, alone, it is a comfort, an obligation, a command” (Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable”). Modern Humanists keep the morality while doubting the beliefs that once enforced it.
• Buddhists: the law of karma enforces morality across lives: there is no spot in the whole world “where a man might be freed from an evil deed.”