How to Be an Epicurean

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The significance of the Epicurean view was considerable. It challenged the prevailing assumption that authority and justice were defined in advance of human decisions and agreement. The Epicurean invites us to distinguish between naked authority – the raw exercise of power: the power to make laws, to establish rules for institutions, to inflict suffering on others, or to reward them with what they value – and legitimate authority, arising out of human agreement.

The original human interpretation of political authority was theological. In archaic and tribal societies, the gods were or are conceived as owning the land and its living beings. They, or subordinate spirits, are imagined to lay down laws concerning permitted and impermissible actions where the rest of nature and other people are concerned. In some tribal societies, divine ownership entailed judicious use of natural resources, especially game, along with other rules for living, strongly or weakly enforced.

In any case, theological accounts of political authority emphasise the power of the gods to punish actions that escape human notice. The Judaeo-Christian-Islamic Bible opens with an account of God’s creative power and his legislative authority. It describes his instructions to the first human pair in his personally owned garden, their disobedience and the terrible consequences of their disobedience. The authority of God’s first prophet Moses, who commands people to leave Egypt and form a new nation, is authority conferred upon him by God. And in Christian political theory, temporal rulers are theorised as placed and held in power by God and as owed a duty of obedience in light of their origin. For the religiously orthodox person, if God didn’t want some particular person to be president of the United States, that person would not be president, so whatever that person does must be consistent with God’s will.

A rival and equally influential tradition regarded political authority as built into the very structure of the universe. Epicurus’s predecessor, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, thought it obvious that the cosmos is hierarchically organised. The superior, he said, always rules the inferior. The heavens rule the earth below them, causing the seasons, which cause weather, which determines the food supply and reproductive behaviour. Many animal species have dominant individuals; masters rule their slaves; men rule women; and women rule children. This is the natural order of things, he maintained, and it would be perverse to question it. His views on natural domination offered one regrettable interpretation of the ancient ideal of ‘life in accord with nature’.

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, there could be tension and conflict between the Church’s own wealthy hierarchy of the Pope, the archbishops, the bishops and the lesser clergy and the secular emperors, kings and princes. Both had the power to raise revenues and to make rules. No ordinary person, no peasant farmer, or merchant, or artisan, or small landowner could doubt that the power to command, punish and reward descended from above. The forms these commands, punishments and rewards took did not depend on the agreement of those affected, but only on the social class into which they were born. As a result, there were different legal standards for the privileged and the poor, for men and women, and for different categories of persons such as the hereditary nobility and the clergy. The relative invulnerability of the socially powerful permitted extraordinary abuses: the waging of private wars and raids to increase wealth and dominion; the execution of rivals and confiscation of their estates; favouritism towards the incompetent; and the sexual abuse of women and children.

In the medieval and early modern periods, it has been estimated that 80–90 per cent of the population of the Holy Roman Empire were peasants or renters, tied to the land, paying tithes, rents or taxes to their landlord and serving as soldiers when required. The clergy, the aristocracy and craftspersons made up the rest of the population. Indoctrination in the form of weekly sermons inculcated the duty of obedience. Revolution, a literal turning upside down of social relations, putting those at the bottom on top and those on top at the bottom, was seen as a crime against God and nature. The assurance that Heaven awaited those who endured their sufferings and deprivations and patiently practised humility was offered on a weekly basis. The sufferings and deprivations of the people were by implication trivial as compared to those of the great martyrs, including Jesus himself, as the iconography of the churches emphasised.

Did those at the bottom passively accept their subordination? Were their lives uniformly miserable? As historians have shown us, village life had its share of joys and sorrows. Yet history is dotted with slave revolts and peasant uprisings prompted by taxation demands and starvation. Most rebellions were successfully put down, yet massive changes occurred between the 17th and mid-19th centuries. The transformation of these feudal societies based on the privileges and duties of the different social ranks into commercial societies based on the idea of contracts between equals has been studied from many points of view. The recovery of the Epicurean history of humanity, the distinction between nature and convention, and the Epicurean conception of justice as an agreement to avoid harming and being harmed, played an important role in rethinking questions about the legitimacy and scope of worldly powers.

Up until the mid-17th century, when Thomas Hobbes appeared on the scene, the idea of natural domination as well as the idea of divine legislation went largely unquestioned. Hobbes’s revival of the Epicurean idea of the ‘social contract’, which I’ll explore in Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo), though it is still authoritarian rather than democratic, is the basis of much modern political theory, with its clear insistence that government exists only for the good of the governed.

The Lessons of the Past (#litres_trial_promo)

One of the most important insights to take away from Lucretian prehistory and its reworking is that the purpose of political authority is to reduce interpersonal violence and to make life secure for all. A second insight is that our political and legal systems have been shaped by chance discoveries and new technologies. A third is that while life under civilisation offers a range of marvellous goods and experiences, uncontrolled and concentrated wealth and ambition make exploitation, warfare and corruption inevitable.

There is no cosmic plan in history, no destiny towards which we are inevitably travelling. No divinity is guiding us or watching out that we do not make mistakes that unleash nuclear war or that render most other species extinct and the earth uninhabitable. Chance discoveries are still possible, and human ingenuity is seemingly inexhaustible. But the search for power and gratification by the few at the expense of the many is an inevitable feature of civilisation that could be better controlled than it is, even if it can never be banished once and for all.

Another important insight emerges from the Epicurean history of humanity. Human beings invented government. We like to think of government as authority awarded to those most deserving of it, to people who have proved their commitment to the general welfare and their understanding of how the world works by presenting their beliefs and plans to the public, and by standing up to interrogation in competition with others. But we need to keep in mind that modern governments are the successors of originally kleptocratic, clan-based regimes that relied on secrecy, conspiracy, violence and intimidation to obtain and retain power and wealth and to practise violence against other groups. To a greater or lesser extent, they have either retained or shed the earlier characteristics of government. The best governments are those that have transcended their origins, rejected the seizure of power by force and fraud, and are now dedicated not to the enrichment of the clan, but to the welfare and best interests of the governed. The worst governments are those in which most of the original features of government are intact.

PART II

Living Well and Living Justly (#litres_trial_promo)

5

Ethics and the Care of the Self (#litres_trial_promo)

The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. For if someone has these things and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend even with Zeus for happiness.

Epicurus

I … do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a sensible form.

Epicurus

Ethics is the study of how to live and what to do. As Epicurus says, it is about personal ‘choice and avoidance’. It is about my decisions on what to pursue and what to avoid, and avoidance is as important as choice.

Pleasure and Pain (#litres_trial_promo)

The Epicurean believes that nature is the ultimate source of the ‘oughts’, ‘mays’, and ‘may nots’ that play an important role in human life. He regards sensory, emotional and intellectual pleasures as the goods worthy of being chosen – though ethics, as the following chapters will show, puts limits on these choices. He regards physical and psychological pain as the evils to be avoided and prevented. Nobody, Epicurus thought, has to command us to care for ourselves in this way. Nobody naturally seeks out situations of physical pain, anxiety and fear; nobody avoids situations that bring gratification, relief and release of tensions. That goes for so-called masochists as well. Masochists seek and obtain pleasure and release of tension by stimulating their fear and pain receptors.

If you think with Epicurus that pleasure is our ‘first and only good’, you are not in the company of the wise, at least not in the tradition of Western philosophy. The great philosophers have denigrated and warned against pleasure from time immemorial. For instance:

Plato: ‘Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.’

Aristotle: ‘Most pleasures are bad.’

Epictetus: ‘It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasure.’

Kant: ‘Whoever wants to be quite happy must remain indifferent towards pain and pleasure.’

To be fair, these quotes are taken out of context, and in at least some of these writers, you will find defences of pleasure suitably qualified. For example, the pleasures of heaven may be deemed desirable, and the pursuit of moral virtue may be deemed to give rise to an acceptable form of pleasure. But sensory pleasure and especially sexual pleasure are typically hedged with warnings from moral philosophers and theologians. That, one often feels, is their job. Philosophers may agree that animals in general pursue pleasure, but the point is often made that human beings are superior to other animals in being able to repress their desires. From this it is thought to follow that they should practise their superiority by doing so. Ascetic routines such as fasting, being cold and wearing uncomfortable garments are associated in many cultures with holiness and a status above that of the ordinary person.

What are the arguments against pleasure? They are rarely stated explicitly, indicating perhaps that many humans have a deeply rooted ambivalence to pleasure that needs only to be refreshed from time to time by philosophical and religious reminders. We all seem to know intuitively that pleasure and danger are associated, and that sexual pleasure is the most dangerous of all pleasures, far exceeding in this regard the dangers of overindulgence in food, or drink, or too much enjoyment of art, music, dance and travel. In fact, these other activities are sometimes tainted by the association of other pleasures with sexual pleasure. Even Epicurean theory comes with its own set of warnings about pleasure.

Prudence and its Limits (#litres_trial_promo)

To the question ‘Should we all do what we feel most like doing at any given moment, since our liking for pleasure and our aversion to pain are natural and fundamental?’ the Epicurean answer is, ‘Absolutely Not.’ To explain this answer, I’ll discuss first what philosophers term self-regarding actions, i.e., actions that have little or no effect on anyone else but a noticeable effect on the self. The next chapter will discuss ‘other-regarding’ actions from an Epicurean perspective.

Where self-regarding actions are concerned, Epicurus reminds us that the pursuit of small pleasures now can bring on severe pains later, while the endurance of certain pains now can bring on more pleasures down the road. I need to choose and avoid prudentially, in view of the long-term effects of actions that are readily foreseeable. It is sensible to undergo the mild pain of having one’s teeth scraped to prevent the major troubles of having them rot and fall out later and to get the prick of a vaccination to escape a disabling disease. More painful and tiring medical interventions may be justified by their positive impact on functioning once the wounds have healed. Limiting vacation expenses now to ensure a comfortable old age and reducing the consumption of delicious pastries to prevent diabetes in middle age is, according to the Epicurean, rational forward-thinking self-care. Refusing to think about longer-term consequences may be pleasant now, but the long-term consequences of failing to think about those consequences can be very painful.