Epicurus

Epicurus of Samos

Look up the word "epicurean" in any dictionary and you will find it fastened to fine wine, rich food, and the pursuit of luxury. It is one of the great misnamings in the history of language, because the man whose name it carries lived on bread and water, counted a little cheese as a feast, and taught that the road to happiness runs through wanting less, not more. Epicurus did make pleasure the goal of life, which is how the confusion started. But by pleasure he meant almost the opposite of indulgence. He meant a settled tranquility, the quiet of a body free of pain and a mind free of fear, and he held that you reach it not by piling up enjoyments but by paring your desires down to the few that are simple to satisfy. His philosophy is not a menu. It is a medicine, and the disease it treats is the low, grinding anxiety that eats away at most human lives.

The four-part cure. His followers boiled the whole system down to four lines they could carry like a card in a pocket, the tetrapharmakos, the "four-part cure." Do not fear the gods. Do not fear death. What is good is easy to get. What is bad is easy to bear. Each line is a dose aimed at a particular source of misery, and together they make a complete therapy. The real genius is the diagnosis underneath: that almost all human unhappiness is driven by two engines, fear and insatiable desire, and that both can be switched off by clear thinking. We torment ourselves with dread of divine punishment and of dying, and we wear ourselves out chasing wealth and status and pleasures that can never quite be enough. Remove the fears, simplify the wants, and what is left is not deprivation but the very thing everyone was chasing all along: peace.

Death is nothing to us. The boldest dose is the one against the fear of death, and it is a single clean argument that has been chewed over for twenty-three centuries. Death, Epicurus says, is the end of all sensation, and where there is no sensation there is nothing good and nothing bad, nothing to be experienced at all. So death is not a harm to you, because a harm has to be felt by someone, and at the moment death arrives the "you" that could be harmed is already gone. "When we exist, death is not; when death exists, we do not." There is therefore no instant at which death is bad for the person who dies, and the dread of it is the dread of nothing. You need not find the argument fully convincing, and serious thinkers from Lucretius to the present have gone on disputing whether it works, to feel its force as a therapy. The aim was never to win a debate. It was to pull the single largest thorn out of the human mind.

It is only atoms. All of this rests on a startlingly modern physics. There are, Epicurus says, only two things in the universe: atoms and empty space. Everything, your body, your mind, the stars, the gods themselves if they exist, is just atoms moving and combining in the void, and when you die the atoms that briefly made you simply come apart and rejoin the common stock of things. This is exactly why there is nothing to fear: no immortal soul left over to be punished, no underworld waiting, no gods reaching down to meddle. And to the old atomism he inherited from Democritus he added one strange and brilliant detail. If atoms only fell straight down through the void forever, they would never touch, and no world could ever form; so the atoms, he proposed, every so often make a tiny, uncaused swerve, and out of that swerve come both the collisions that build worlds and the loophole in the chain of cause and effect where human freedom can live. Two thousand years later Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on that swerve, and physicists hunting the randomness at the bottom of nature have found the old idea oddly familiar.

The garden. Epicurus did not only write the cure; he built a place to live it. On a small plot outside the walls of Athens he founded a community he called, simply, the Garden, and it scandalized the city, because he admitted into it as equals both women and slaves, at a time when the grand schools of Plato and Aristotle did nothing of the kind. The Garden ate plainly, kept out of the noise of politics, "live unnoticed," he advised, and gave itself over to philosophy and, above all, to friendship, which Epicurus ranked among the very greatest of human goods. The point of shrinking your desires, in the end, was never austerity for its own sake; it was to free you for the things that actually make a life good, and at the head of that short list he set the company of friends. A few people you love, enough bread, and freedom from fear: he thought that was not the bare minimum for happiness but very nearly the whole of it.

A name dragged through the mud. The room reads what little of Epicurus survives, three letters and two collections of pointed maxims, preserved by a later biographer; of the three hundred books he is said to have written, almost everything is gone. Part of the reason is that for over a thousand years it was unsafe to be caught reading him. The Christian world turned "Epicurean" into a slur for an atheist and a libertine, fastening on his claim that the gods do not run the world and ignoring nearly everything else he taught, and his works were left to crumble. The full system came through mainly in a single Latin poem, Lucretius's, which itself nearly vanished and was rescued from a German monastery in 1417 by a book-hunter whose find helped pry the modern mind back open. From there Epicurus returned: Gassendi rebuilt his atomism for the scientific revolution, Jefferson signed his letters as an Epicurean, and the argument that death is nothing to us is still the opening move in every serious philosophy of dying.

The long slander, in its way, proves the point. Epicurus spent his life trying to free people from fear, and the people who most needed the gods to be angry and death to be terrible could not forgive him for taking their terrors away. But the cure outlasted its enemies, because it answers a question that never goes out of date. We are still afraid of dying, still half convinced that a little more money or status or stuff will finally settle us, still mistaking the next indulgence for the peace we actually want. Epicurus's answer is as bracing now as it was in the Garden: that you already have, or can easily get, almost everything you genuinely need; that the rest is fear and fantasy; and that a life of plain food and good friends and a quiet mind, unimpressed by the gods and unafraid of the dark, is not a consolation prize. It is the prize itself.