On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) (3 page)

If doubts about celestial phenomena did not cause us disturbance, nor those about death, that it might really concern us, nor the failure to realize the limits of pains and desires, then we would have no need of scientific reasoning. (
Master Sayings
11)

First of all then do not think that there is any other end to the knowledge of celestial phenomena… than peace of mind (
ataraxia
) and sure confidence. (
Letter to Pythocles
85)

Epicureanism has been called the philosophy of certainty, and Pythocles is offered not just
ataraxia
but also ‘sure confidence’. Anxieties are caused by doubts; the explanations which remove these doubts must themselves be securely based or the doubts will return. There is no room for scepticism, and the Epicurean watchword was ‘All sensations are true’. If I see a cow, my perception of that cow is occasioned by something real, an image emanating from the cow which represents to me the way the cow really is. When I learned the word ‘cow’, a real cow was pointed out to me; every time I say or think the word, that original clear image should be present so long as I have not let my mind be distorted by mischievous misdefinitions of ‘cowness’. If I look at the world and think along with it in its terms, I cannot go wrong; as Epicurus says in the
Letter to Herodotus
(50), ‘falsehood and error always lie in the addition of opinion’. Scientific reasoning—
physiologia
—is a continual recall to look at the world the way it really is, and because of this it needs the assurance provided by Epicurean epistemology. Epicurus called this branch of his philosophy
kanonikon
, from the Greek
kanon
, a rule, and Lucretius develops the metaphor in his own way in
Book 4
:

There is an apparent paradox here, however. The senses are the way in which we discover reality; but the reality they reveal is one of an infinite number of atoms blindly moving in an infinite void, now coming together to form compounds, indeed whole worlds, now coming apart as these worlds and the compounds in them are dissolved. This revelation is very different from the phenomenal world; and Epicurus’ predecessor Democritus (fifth century
BC
), who offered a very similar vision, encapsulated the contrast in a famous dictum that ‘colour is by convention, sweet by convention, a compound by convention… what is real are the void and the atoms’ (fr. B125). Epicurus reacted strongly against this because he thought that it devalued the world of the senses as a guarantee of reality, but some form of the duality is essential to his philosophy also. Understanding involves both ‘the face of nature and her laws’ (
On the Nature of the Universe
1. 148 = 2. 61, 3. 39, 6. 41), both the world of colour, light, and sound and the blind dance of the atoms in the void. This duality is not an unbridgeable gulf; our experience of the world can lead us to an apprehension of its secrets. In the first place, we can use the concepts derived from the world about us as models for thought about the inaccessible world of the atoms. If we wish to think about atomic movement, for instance, Lucretius suggests we picture the motion of dust particles in a ray of light:

But more importantly the visible world can signify, can be a sign of the visible. It cannot do so directly; to use Epicurus’ legal metaphor, the phenomenal world cannot ‘witness to’ the unseen. But it can ‘witness against’; we can show that certain hypotheses about reality are ruled out by the world around us. The hypothesis that the atoms are at rest in compounds is ruled out by the constant motion of the dust particles: as Lucretius puts it, ‘their dancing shows that within matter | Secret and
hidden motions also lie’ (2. 127–8). In this way we can move from the phenomenal world to the level of the atoms and grasp the reality of things:

It is on this epistemological basis that Epicurus erects his metaphysics and physics; the void and the atoms, their eternal motion, the infinite universe with its infinite worlds. To grasp this construction is to see that there is no place in it for a providential god binding the elements together or controlling the seasons for our good. To see how compounds come to be and fall apart is to appreciate how the life of a human being is but a special case of this process and how there is nothing still in existence to be troubled by death once it has taken place. Gods there are indeed, for we see them in our dreams; death is indeed all about us; but they are not the gods of popular belief, interfering in our lives, and it is not the death of mythology, the prelude to purgatory, hell, or just the unknown. Epicureanism offers at once novelty—a new version of reality—and a comforting reassurance that things are, after all, as they are; no hell beneath us, above us only sky.

This double aspect of the philosophy, at once novel and familiar, continues into its most famous doctrine, the exaltation of pleasure as the end of life and the flight from pain as the only evil. To pursue pleasure and avoid pain is natural, and no argument is needed to sustain the doctrine, as Cicero makes the Epicurean Torquatus remark:

Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of Nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to
prove
that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, he thinks, are perceived by the sense, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet, none of which things need to be proved by elaborate argument: it is enough merely to draw attention to them. (
On the Final Terms of Good and Evil
1. 30, trans. H. Rackham)

We have only to listen to our bodies, uncorrupted by false ideas: ‘the voice of the flesh is: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold’ (
Vatican Sayings
33), a voice Lucretius turns into the bark of nature:

But this simple and natural truth was expressed in a complex theory of pleasure and pain whose details are still controversial, which to many in both ancient and modern times has seemed bizarre and unconvincing, and which to Lucretius seemed a great and new discovery of his Master:

As with the physics and epistemology, Epicurean moral theory offers simultaneously a recall to the way we have always really known the world to be and a new understanding of it.

The basis of this understanding is a double division of the notion of pleasure. The one division, between pleasure of the body and pleasure of the mind, is obvious and is shared with other ancient philosophies. But the second division is more important and more unusual. Epicurus distinguished between what he called
katastematic
pleasures, pleasures of the ‘steady state’ (
katastema
), and
kinetic
pleasures, pleasures of motion (
kinesis
). The latter are what we most obviously think of as pleasures: the pleasures of the senses, of pleasant-tasting food and drink, of pleasant sights and sounds, of sex (i.e. the pleasures of touch). These are the result of stimulation or ‘variation’ of the sense organs, and when the stimulation ceases, they cease. When stimulation is absent, we have no feeling of pleasure or pain in the sense organs. These pleasures are essential to our notion of pleasure; in a famous dictum which succeeded in shocking many, Epicurus said that he could not conceive of the good if one removed the pleasures of taste and sex and of pleasant sounds and sights (fr. 67). Whereas for others the desire for these pleasures was a fatal chain which enslaved men’s higher functions, for Epicurus they were perfectly harmless so long as they did not cause pain later on as a side effect and so long as one had the correct attitude to them. What that correct attitude was was spelled out in the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ desires:

Of desires, some are necessary, some natural but not necessary, some neither necessary nor natural but the result of empty opinion. The desire for food and drink and for clothing is necessary; that for sex is natural but not necessary; but that for a certain kind of food or a certain kind of clothing or a certain kind of sex is neither natural nor necessary. (fr. 496)

The desire for the pleasures of the senses is not necessary—one can live on gruel and water, one does not die without sex—but it is perfectly natural. As soon, however, as one starts to want not just something pleasant to drink but a particular vintage of a particular wine, and not just sexual pleasure but sexual pleasure with a particular person, one is no longer listening to the body, but to the mind; an obsession is developing whose inevitable consequence is displeasure that the desired object is missing or anxiety that it might be.

It is the first group in the Epicurean division of desires, the desires which are both natural and necessary, whose satisfaction provides
katastematic
pleasure, the pleasure of the ‘steady state’. Without food, drink, and warmth we die; when we are hungry, thirsty, or cold, our body has a physical lack, a gap in its constitution which must be filled, which causes us pain, and which, if not dealt with, will lead to death. Lucretius uses the image of a building in danger of collapse:

The desire for food, drink, and warmth is thus urgent and implacable; unlike the desire for
kinetic
pleasure, it demands satisfaction. But also unlike the desire for
kinetic
pleasure, it is finite in this demand. As the holes in the body are filled, the parts which were deficient cease to cause us pain and attain the pleasure of the steady state, of painless satisfaction; and the limit to this process is the filling of all the holes. Once the deficiency is completely remedied, further ingestion of food can bring no more
katastematic
pleasure, though we may enjoy the taste of the food as a
kinetic
, sensual, pleasure. As Epicurus puts it in the third
Master Saying
, ‘The boundary to the size of pleasures is the removal of all that is painful’, and more explicitly in the eighteenth saying, ‘The pleasure in the flesh is not increased, when once that which causes pain is removed, but only varied.’ So the desire for these pleasures also, though demanding satisfaction, is no tyrannical monster, dragging our rational minds in wayward directions, but is easily satisfied. If one is hungry, all the body needs is for
its deficiency to be remedied; as far as it is concerned, anything will do, even battery chickens and soya mince.

This fact, that the real needs of the body are easily satisfied, is the key to the understanding of the links between Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and pain and the rest of his philosophy. Just as there are
katastematic
and
kinetic
pleasures of the body (
aponia
, ‘lack of distress’, and
euphrosyne
, ‘enjoyment’, respectively), so there are of the mind. The
kinetic
pleasure of the mind,
chara
or ‘joy’, occurs when the mind reflects upon
kinetic
pleasure of the body and concentrates on its sensations. The term for
katastematic
pleasure of the mind, however, we have met before; it is
ataraxia
, ‘freedom from disturbance’. We saw that a man who is disturbed by fear of the gods and of death cannot be happy; and he cannot even enjoy the everyday pleasures of the body,
katastematic
and
kinetic
. Lucretius uses the image of a murky pool:

But nor can a man possess
ataraxia
if he is continually worried that he will lose all that is worth living for. By reminding him how small his needs really are, and how easily satisfied, that anxiety is removed. In fact the fear of deprivation, whether of things the person really needs, like food, or of things which he only thinks he needs, things like wealth and power which are the object of desires neither necessary nor natural: this fear participates in a complex syndrome with the fears of the gods and of death. We fear the gods partly because of what they may take from us; we fear death similarly as a deprivation of the things we think we need. But because we are so terrified of the gods and death, we cling to the objects of our desire as if to life itself. As Lucretius remarks in the prologue to
Book 3
, ‘Greed and blind lust for fame… These wounds of life in no small part are fed | By fear of death’ (3. 59–64). There is thus a syndrome of fears and desires which intensify each other in turn and which constitute for the Epicurean the normal state of humanity before the saving message of Epicurus.