** The Epicureans

[ Photo: Bust of Epicurus ]

Of the philosophies that were new in the Hellenistic age, two were outstanding in importance and influence, and they were those of the Epicureans and the Stoics.

Epicureanism was very much the creation of a single thinker, Epicurus (c. 341-270 BC). Its aim above all else was to liberate people from fear, not only the fear of death but the fear of life. In an age when all formsof public life were unpredictable and highly dangerous it taught people to seek happiness and fulfilment in their private lives. "Live unknown" was one of its maxims. This was completely at odds with all previous ideas of seeking fame and glory, or even wanting something so apparently decent as honour. But Epicureanism was to an unusual degree a fully worked-out philosophy that tried to embrace all aspects of existence. It began with a view of Physics.

First of all, Epicurus accepted the atomism of Democritus. He believed that all there was in the material universe were atoms and space, nothing else.

Since it is impossible for atoms to come into existence out of nothing or pass away into nothing they are indestructible and eternal. However, their movements are unpredictable, and no combination that they form ever endures. For this reason, physical objects, all of which are combinations of atoms, are ephemeral. Their life is always a story of atoms coming together and then, eventually, dispersing again. All change in the universe consists either of this endlessly repeated process or of the objects thus formed moving in space.

Women and slaves included:

We ourselves are among the objects formed in this way. A group of particularly fine atoms comes together to make a body and a mind in the form of a single entity, a human being, whose eventual dispersal is inevitable. But this dispersal is not to be feared. Such a dissolution of the human being means that the entity that we are ceases to exist when we die, and therefore there is no one to whom being dead happens: so long as we exist, death is not, and when death is, we are not. Nor is there anyone to whom those terrors, that so many religions threaten people with after their deaths, can happen. "Death is nothing to us," says Epicurus; and anyone who genuinely grasps that truth, deep down, is liberated from fear of death.

As for the Gods, Epicurus manages to get them out of the picture without denying their existence (which would have been a dangerous thing for him to do) by saying that they are far, far away and, being Gods, they have no desire to become involved in the perpetual mess and turmoil of human affairs. So they are inactive as far as we are concerned, "and we have nothing to hope and nothing to fear" from them. It is as if they do not exist.

Since non-existence is our own inescapable destiny we should make the best of the only life we have.

The good life in this life, happiness in this world, should be our aim. The way to achieve this is to have nothing to do with the violence and uncertainties of public life but to withdraw into private communities of like-minded people. And because both our physical health and the maintenance of good personal relationships require it, we should enjoy our pleasures in moderation, though no non-injurious activity needs to be regarded as forbidden in itself.

The communities formed by the Epicureans for these purposes were in principle open to anyone, including women and slaves - a fact which drew a great deal of antagonism towards them from their surrounding societies. When Christianity came on the scene the Epicureans were anathema to Christians in particular, because of their denial of immortality and of the existence of a benevolent God, and also because of their affirmation of the values of this world.

Poetic Masterpiece:

What is striking about Epicureanism is how similar it is, almost point by point, to the Scientific and Liberal Humanism of the 20th C. It was the first thought-through version of an attitude to life that has been widely embraced in our own age. Its most dramatic and widely read articulation was achieved in a long poem written in the Latin language in the 1st century BC, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius (c. 95-52 BC). This is one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, and its purpose was to import Epicureanism into Roman culture.

The poet seems to have been somewhat desperately seeking salvation in the philosophy he so passionately embraced, for he himself was intermittently subject to the terrors of madness, and he dies eventually by committing suicide. Perhaps because the doctrines of Epicureanism were to such an unusual degree the creation of a single thinker,it remained surprisingly unchanged throughout its long history. In the Middle Ages it was denounced by Christians as Antichrist, and then almost petered out; but it was rediscovered in the 16th and 17th centuries, and had a significant influence on the beginnings of modern science and humanism.

- The Story Of Philosophy ~ Bryan Magee