The History of Philosophy, page 15
The starting point for Epicurus’ philosophy is that the fundamental stuff of nature is matter in the form of atoms, which are individual solid material particles that cannot be divided further. They are too small to be perceived, and they move or ‘fall’ in the void (empty space), understood as ‘where matter is not’. The theory is Democritean, but it incorporates solutions to problems that Aristotle and others had seen in Democritus’ theory. For one thing, there was the problem of making sense of the idea of an ‘infinite void’ – no up or down, no direction; how can anything ‘fall’ or move in such a space? – and for another, as Aristotle argued in Book VI of his Physics, the idea of a ‘minimum’ particle of matter is incoherent, for consider: if two such minima cross paths, how could they ever be halfway past each other, given that if they were so, then they are not minima? An implication of Aristotle’s view, interestingly, is that if there are minima of matter, then space and time themselves must be quantized. But if atoms are discrete minima, then they do not move continuously but must jump from point to point in space and time, and must all do so at the same speed.
Epicurus’ response is ingenious. It is, first, that although atoms are (as their name implies) indivisible, they are not the same thing as the least conceivable amount of matter, that is, the minima; atoms are composed of minima but cannot be broken down into them. No minimum of matter can exist independently by itself. As indissoluble aggregates of material minima, atoms have shapes – hooks and indentations – which is why they can adhere to each other to form larger objects of the kind we perceive. He accepted the idea that time and space consist of discrete quanta, and that all atomic motion occurs at the same speed. These motions cancel out in the aggregations of atoms constituting familiar macroscopic objects, through their collisions, deflections and conjunctions.
Atoms are indefinitely various in their shapes, explaining the variety of things built out of them, and they are ‘in continual motion throughout eternity’. The atomic theory is the result of noting the implication of two propositions taken together: that what we encounter in experience is complex, that is, consists of parts; and that nothing can come from nothing. Therefore there must be fundamental units of material reality. And for them to move, combine and decouple, there must be space, a void, for them to move in. The properties of things we perceive – their colours, tastes and the rest – are caused by the configurations of the atoms constituting them, and how these interact with the configurations of atoms that constitute our sense organs.
This latter point is central to Epicurus’ theory of mind and perception. Our perceivings (seeing, hearing and the rest) are reliable, Epicurus held, and arise from the interaction between the world and our sense organs. The world is entirely physical; there are no non-physical things, which means in particular that there are no non-physical souls or minds (the word for ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ is the same: anima). Our bodies are moved by our minds, and our minds are affected by what happens to our bodies, but neither could occur if minds were not made of the same stuff as bodies. Our souls or minds are accordingly themselves made of material atoms, though they are especially fine ones, which are dispersed throughout our bodies, and we perceive and feel by the causal interactions between the body-constituting and mind-constituting atoms. When the body dies these soul atoms are dispersed, and the functions of sensation and thought thereby cease. There is no life after death. And therefore there is nothing to fear in regard to death, Epicurus says; ‘death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience.’
In Epicurus’ celebrated view, the ‘alpha and omega of a blessed life’ is pleasure: ‘Pleasure is our first and native good.’ The whole of the Epicurean ethic can be summed up as ‘the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain’. We get the modern meaning of ‘Epicureanism’ – indulgence in wine, feasting and partying, devotion to the pleasures of the senses – from a completely erroneous interpretation of what Epicurus meant by this remark. For he immediately goes on to say:
We often pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance arises from them … and we often regard certain pains as preferable to pleasures when in consequence they bring a greater pleasure to us later … We regard being independent of outward things as a great good, not in order always to make use of little, but so that we are not inconvenienced when we do not have much; for they most enjoy luxury who have no need of it, and we know that what is natural is easily procured, while only vain and worthless things are hard to get. Plain food gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, bread and water confer the highest pleasure when conveyed to hungry lips … To habituate ourselves to a simple and inexpensive diet supplies all that is needful for health, and enables us to meet all life’s necessities without shrinking.
And that is why he nominates pleasure as ‘the end and aim’: ‘We do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or of sensuality … we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the mind … what produces a pleasant life is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice, and banishing those things that cause tumults in the mind.’ Understanding the nature of the world is the ground of this rational view; when we know that the universe is a material realm we are no longer afraid, as Lucretius points out in his great poem, of ‘our foe religion’ and superstition, but instead base our view of the world on reason and a clear understanding of reality.
Among the difficulties with Epicurus’ theory is the problem that its picture of a mechanistic universe raises for the question of free will – a problem that continues to bedevil philosophy today, all the more so because the discoveries of neuroscience place mental phenomena ever more securely in the physical realm. Epicurus tried to deal with this by saying that the atoms swerve slightly as they move through the void, giving rise to accident and randomness; but this is not a satisfactory solution, for if our choices are not connected causally to the actions that, as we take it, follow from them, but instead occur randomly or accidentally only, then ‘free will’ is neither will nor free.
One of the greatest pleasures, according to Epicurus, is that of friendship, philia. Friendship might begin with considerations of the usefulness that people have for each other, but soon develops into a bond of deep and abiding mutual altruism.fn2 The process mirrors the evolution of society, as Epicurus saw it; human beings were solitary creatures in the beginning, who over the course of history began to form families and communities, acquiring language and sharing the development of skills such as agriculture and building. (There is something in this of the idea of society emerging from an idealized ‘state of nature’, as Locke and Rousseau conceived of it much later, when the utility of cooperation was recognized.) In course of time the increasing complexity of societies saw the appearance of kings and tyrants, of religion and of fear of punishment. But the true source of justice is the perception of mutual benefit in the keeping of compacts, and the belief that a prudent, honourable and just life is the most pleasant one. If everyone lived by this ideal, Epicurus said, there would never be tyranny, and no need of religion, because society itself would be good.
For Epicurus the chief purpose of philosophy is to help people see what the best kind of life is, and why it is so. Philosophy is an education of the mind and a therapy for the soul: ‘if philosophy does not heal the soul it is as bad as a medicine that does not heal the body,’ he said. The happy life is the life of ataraxia, and one achieves it through philosophical understanding of the true nature of things, and by living in conformity with that understanding.
STOICISM
Crates the Cynic is reputed to have been the teacher of Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, who as we shall see can be said to have taught the internalization of the Cynic virtues of continence and self-mastery, and to have applied the concept of ‘indifference’ – apatheia – not to society and the goal of an honourable life, but to the vicissitudes of fortune and the inescapabilities of ageing, illness and death. What recommended Stoicism to educated and patrician Romans later was its high ideal of a noble self-mastered life, a life of courage and fortitude, a robust and manly life which could, with equal dispassion, bear the hardships of the military frontier abroad and the demands of duty at home.
Zeno hailed from Citium on the island of Cyprus, where he was born in 334 BCE. He began adult life as a merchant, but after reading Xenophon’s account of Socrates he decided to study philosophy. It is said that while on a visit to Athens he asked a bookseller for advice on whom to approach among the teachers of philosophy, and at that moment Crates passed by, so the bookseller pointed him out. Zeno acquired from Crates his dedication to the Cynic virtues of continence and simplicity, but his modesty prevented him from living with ‘shamelessness’ in the preferred Cynic manner; hence his idea of internalizing the virtues – of being a semi-Cynic in private, as it were. In addition to modesty he also had a strong sense of civic duty, which requires that one perform one’s responsibilities as a citizen rather than rejecting society altogether. His convictions in this respect are illustrated by the fact that when he was offered Athenian citizenship he refused it in order to keep faith with his native Citium, where he had endowed the public baths and was held in great esteem.
Crates was not Zeno’s only teacher; he listened to teachers of the Megarian school of logic and the philosophers of the Academy, and whereas Cynicism gave him inspiration for his ethical teaching it was from these other influences that he developed views in logic and physics. He set up his own school in the painted colonnade or Stoa (stoa poikile) of the Athenian agora, from which the name of the school derives. His pupil and then colleague Cleanthes (c.330–c.230 BCE) succeeded him as head of the school when he died in 262 BCE. The logical and physical teachings of Stoicism were developed by Cleanthes and his own successor as the school’s head, Chrysippus (279–206 BCE). It is not known which of them is chiefly responsible for the doctrines of early Stoicism, but later Stoicism, as exemplified by Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, was almost exclusively devoted to the ethical question of how to live, though this aspect of Stoicism was present from the outset.
In their physics the Stoics were committed to the view that the signature of reality is the capacity to act or be acted upon, and they therefore said that the only things that exist are physical bodies. Matter, therefore, is a fundamental principle (arche) of the universe. But they pointed out that we also refer to many other things that are not bodies, for example places, times and imaginary objects such as mythical beasts. These things do not exist but ‘subsist’, that is, have a kind of courtesy semi-existence because they can be talked about. Unlike Plato who held that universals really exist (albeit in a Realm of Being accessible only to the intellect), they described these objects of reference as mental entities only, much as did the nominalists of later philosophy.
The arche, matter, is indestructible and eternal. But there is another fundamental principle of the universe alongside matter, also indestructible and eternal; this is logos, reason. It pervades and organizes the universe, making it go through a cycle of changes beginning with fire, passing through the formation of the elements – fire, air, water and earth, the first two active and the latter two passive – thence on to the emergence of the world as we know it, constituted by combinations of these elements, and thence back again to the universal fire, which begins the cycle over again, in eternal recurrence. This logos the Stoics also called ‘fate’ and ‘god’, and it is a material thing, like the physical universe which it orders through these endlessly repeating cycles.
The Stoics held that the universe is a plenum of matter, meaning that there is no empty space. This raises the question of how things can be individuated – told apart – externally, and how they can maintain themselves internally as individual things. The answer is that they are kept apart as different individuals, and kept together internally each as a single individual, by pneuma or breath, which is a combination of fire and air. Pneuma penetrates all things, and because it comes in different ‘grades’ it is the cause of things having different properties. It is what gives plants and animals their respective kinds of life, and it is what gives reason to humans. It is unclear whether this view committed the Stoics to thinking that, because pneuma is physical stuff, its role as the rational part of a human being cannot survive a bodily dissolution at death. Chrysippus said that the pneuma of the wise would survive the death of their associated bodies until the next fiery conflagration, perhaps because the pneuma of the wise has greater self-integrating power than that of the unwise; but the view smacks of compromise.
‘Logic’ was a broad topic for the Stoics, including not just reasoning and its science but also epistemology and philosophical grammar. Their contributions to logic strictly so called were significant; unlike Aristotle’s logic of terms they explored the inferential relations between whole propositions, and identified three basic rules of inference (actually they thought there were five, but three of them are the same rule written three different ways), which are familiar and central in today’s propositional calculus.fn3 An interesting feature of their logic is that it is committed to strict bivalence, that is, the principle that there are two and only two ‘truth-values’, namely, true and false, and that every assertion must be one or the other. Aristotle had wrestled with the question whether this must be so, by contemplating a proposition about the future: ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow.’ Is this now definitely either true or false? If it is either, there must now be a fact about the future. But the future does not exist, so how can there be a fact about it? Aristotle therefore decided that the proposition is neither true nor false – bivalence does not, he said, apply to future-tensed propositions about contingent matters.
Chrysippus however thought that all statements, even future-tensed ones, must be definitely either true or false, and this therefore committed him to strict determinism: if ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now either true or false, it is now already settled that there will or will not be a sea battle tomorrow. In asserting the Stoic metaphysical principle that logos as ‘fate’ drives the universe through its repeating cycles of history, he is to be taken quite literally.
This view brought the Stoics into conflict with the Academy, Plato’s school which had by this time been converted to scepticism (see below). The Stoics argued that the criterion of a belief’s truth is whether or not the experience that gives rise to it is caused in one’s mind by the thing itself; as they put it, truth consists in the phantasia kataleptike or ‘cognitive impression’ being ‘stamped and impressed [on one’s mind] in accordance with the very thing itself, and is such that it could not arise from what is not’. The sceptics pointed out that ‘no impression arising from something true is such that an impression arising from something false could not be just like it.’ This is a point that has made sceptical arguments a central concern in epistemology throughout its history. The Stoics did not think that merely having an impression amounted to knowledge, just by itself, nor did they think that having an impression and assenting to it or believing it is enough. The impression has to be supported by something further, something that ‘nails it down’ as Plato had said. What is that ‘something further’?
This is the $64,000 question that all epistemology has tried to answer. The answers have included ‘watertight justification of some kind’, ‘conformity with other known truths’, ‘a logical relationship to foundational or “self-evident’ or “basic” propositions’ – the candidates have been numerous. Zeno of Citium had himself given the following illustration: hold out your hand: that is perceiving. Fold the fingers back: that is believing. Clench your fist: that is comprehending. Grasp your fist very tightly and securely in your other fist, so that it is supported: that is knowing. Like these other suggestions this indicates the form of what a definition of knowledge should be like, but not the substance.
It was however the ethics of Stoicism that made it so influential for so long, especially in the Roman world. The fundamental Stoic idea in ethics is that happiness – which they agreed is the end or goal, telos, of life – consists in ‘living in accordance with nature’. What is in accordance with nature is what is good. The good is what benefits us in all circumstances, unlike things which are only good in some circumstances and not in others, for example, wealth. Things that are sometimes good and sometimes bad the Stoics called ‘indifferents’. The things that are always good are the virtues of prudence, courage, moderation and justice. Given that wealth can sometimes be good though it is not an unqualified good like prudence, we need to distinguish between ‘what is good’ as such and what can sometimes have value (axia). Things which have value can be preferred over their opposites – wealth, health and honour can be preferred to poverty, illness and dishonour – because they are usually of advantage to us, or ‘appropriate’, oikeion, for us; and as such we have a natural tendency to seek them. But if they interfere with the realization of what is wholly and unqualifiedly good, they are of course not to be preferred to it.
