Welcome to the fourth post in our Epicureanism 101 series! Thus far in the series, I’ve focused on Epicurean ethics. And since we’re talking about issues of how we should live our lives, this focus makes sense.
But the Epicurean sees ethics as deeply connected to our metaphysics. Epicurus adopts a materialist, empirical metaphysics that serves to guide his ethics.
In this post, then, we’ll talk about the relationship between Epicurean empiricist philosophy and the ethical views we should adopt.
Science and Pleasure
To get there, let’s return for a moment to the Epicurean view of pleasure. As a hedonist, Epicurus argued for pleasure as our final goal or end in life. But he argued in favor of tranquillity as the highest form of pleasure. And to get there, he advised us to live our daily lives dedicated to satisfying our natural and necessary desires.
These desires concern the basic necessities of life. They include things like our need for simple food, water, and shelter. Expanding on this, Epicurus also included companionship and friendship among our core needs.
However, even that isn’t complete. Epicurus also thought we needed a basic grasp of the natural world for the same practical reasons we need food, water, shelter, and friendship. In short, we need to understand the natural world in order to satisfy our natural and necessary desires.
That’s where science enters the picture.
Epicurean Atomism
Let’s start at the beginning. Despite living more than two millennia ago, Epicurus set out a basic physics that sounds broadly similar to our physics of today. He thought the universe was composed entirely of atoms and void. He denied the existence of a Platonic or Aristotelian world of forms, any kind of Aristotelian teleology, or any kind of Stoic divine rational order.
In later centuries, this put him at odds with many Christian philosophers and theologians. However, interestingly enough, Epicurus did not deny the existence of the gods. Taking a literal reading of his account, he believed in the gods. It’s just that he thought they, like us, are made from physical atoms. Furthermore, Epicurus, much like deists of today, thought the gods were uninterested in human affairs.
For Epicurus, the gods serve as examples of a complete state of tranquillity. They serve as an example for us to consider when thinking about how to live our lives. But they didn’t create the universe (the universe is eternal), nor do they interfere with it.
On the Epicurean account, atoms move around in the void. At times, they randomly bump into one another (‘the swerve‘), coming together in compounds to form the world of everyday objects that we all see.
Epicurus thinks this process of atoms swerving and forming compounds explains the compatibility of our free will with a mechanistic, non-teleological universe.
For our part, we can see that this sounds a bit rough. But for a 2,300+ year old Greek philosopher, Epicurus explained things in a way that sounds remarkably similar to what we hear from modern physics!
Epicurean Epistemology
Epicurus grounds his atomism in empirical observation. And this naturally brings us to our next topic.
Epicureans think we come to know about the world through the senses. We look around us and see the world as it is. Then we infer atoms and void as the building blocks of the world. This places him into the category of empiricist epistemology.
This, too, places him in sharp contrast to the philosophers who came before him, particularly Plato. For Plato, we come to know things about the world largely through reason. But, for Epicurus, it all runs through the senses.
He gets to empiricism via an interesting reasoning process. Epicurus thinks that atoms in the world come into contact with our senses, such as sight and hearing. Furthermore, from this starting point, he finds our sensory information true and reliable, by definition. In short, we come to have true and reliable appearances.
Imagine you look in front of you and see a lamp. According to Epicurus, atoms from the world come into contact with your senses, giving you an impression of what’s in front of you. However, to round out our picture of the world, we need to apply judgment to those appearances. It’s the judgment you apply to the atoms that tells you that what is in front of you is a lamp.
At times, we judge wrongly. Perhaps what’s in front of us looks like a lamp, but on closer examination, we find that it’s something else. These false beliefs – bad judgment about the true and reliable information from our senses – forms the basis for where we go wrong in our lives.
Science and Ethics
At this point, readers of our first three posts in the Epicureanism 101 series should be able to piece together how Epicurean naturalism fits with Epicurean ethics.
In discussing pleasure and desires, Epicurus explains how many of us go astray in our daily lives. He says we come to focus on unnatural (empty) or unnecessary desires. These desires come from ‘groundless opinion’ or false beliefs.
In his epistemology, Epicurus explains how these false believes come about. We apply incorrect or poorly reasoned judgments to the information that comes from our senses. The information is good, but we judge it wrongly.
Furthermore, much like the gods themselves, even our souls are made from atoms. We can’t appeal to any mystical force – neither reason nor an immaterial soul – to explain away how we get things wrong. Rather, we have to use our senses to come to know things, and we have to carefully apply good principles of judgment to discern what our senses tell us.
Finally, on Epicurus’s account, our souls dissipate after death. This is something they share in common with every other compound made from atoms. And there’s no afterlife. All this bolsters Epicurean hedonism. There’s no eternal life to aspire to, nor is there any life beyond the one we’re living now.
We should make the most of it.
Image Source
P.S. – Epicureanism 101
Here’s a link to the first three posts in the series:
1. Types of Desires
2. The Nature of Pleasure
3. Fear of Death
