Catherine Wilson - How to Be an Epicurean

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Catherine Wilson 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008291693

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008291716

Version: 2019-04-02

1 Cover

2 Title Page

3 Copyright

4 Contents

5 Preface

6 Note on the Text

7 PART I: HOW THE EPICUREAN SEES THE WORLD

8 1. Back to Basics The Epicurean Atom Atomism: Three Consequences

9 2. How Did We Get Here? The Epicurean Theory of Natural Selection Darwin’s Upgrade: How Selection Causes Evolution

10 3. The Material Mind The Mystery of Consciousness The Evolution of Consciousness

11 4. The Story of Humanity The State of Nature and the Rise of Civilisation Authority and Inequality The Lessons of the Past

12 PART II: LIVING WELL AND LIVING JUSTLY

13 5. Ethics and the Care of the Self Pleasure and Pain Prudence and its Limits Hedonism and its Problems Don’t Suffer in Silence! The Pleasure Merchants

14 6. Morality and Other People Morality vs Prudence Moral Truth and Moral Progress Why Be Moral? What’s Different About Epicurean Morality?

15 7. Beware of Love! The Epicurean Exception The Pains and Pleasures of Love Sexual Morality: Minimising Harm to Others Using Your Head

16 8. Thinking About Death The Epicurean View of Death Death at the Right and Wrong Times Abortion vs Infanticide Suicide vs Euthanasia Resisting and Accepting Mortality Don’t Count on the Afterlife

17 PART III: SEEKING KNOWLEDGE AND AVOIDING ERROR

18 9. What Is Real? Nature and Convention Things in Between Human Rights: Natural or Conventional? The Imaginary: Unthings The Reality of the Past

19 10. What Can We Know? The Importance of First-Person Experience Resolving Disagreement Is Empiricism True?

20 PART IV: THE SELF IN A COMPLEX WORLD

21 11. Science and Scepticism Scientific Explanation Can We Trust the Scientists? Living with Uncertainty

22 12. Social Justice for an Epicurean World Three Epicurean Philosophers on War, Inequality and Work Epicurean Political Principles Justice for Women: Nature, History and Convention

23 13. Religion From an Epicurean Perspective Belief in the Imaginary Piety Without Superstition Can Religion Be Immoral? Can a Religious Person Be an Epicurean?

24 14. The Meaningful Life Two Conceptions of the Meaningful Life Meaningfulness for the Individual The Problem of Affluence The Philosophical Perspective

25 15. Should I Be a Stoic Instead? The Stoic System Too Much Fortitude? Wrapping Up

26 Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading

27 Acknowledgements

28 About the Publisher

Landmarks CoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pages iii iv 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 15 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 29 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 55 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 69 71 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 147 149 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 187 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 205 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 225 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 261 263 264 266 267 268 269 270 271 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 295

Philosophy wears garments of many colours and textures. It can stitch together intricate analysis or pretentious bafflegab, deep insight or pseudo-profundity, impartial advice or personal prejudice. It shows up, in flashy or drab form, not only in the lecture rooms of universities but in the New Age section of your local bookshop, shelved next to books about ESP and meditation. Regardless of its patchwork character, philosophy asks you to try to think for yourself, logically and coherently, to create order from chaos. You use ideas and frameworks developed by others, especially the great philosophers of the past, as scaffolding. But ultimately, you make – and use – your own system of the world in deciding what to believe, what to do and what to hope for.

My aim in this book is to build you a piece of scaffolding by introducing you to what, to me, is the most interesting and relevant of the ancient philosophical systems: Epicureanism, a ‘theory of everything’ originating in the observations and ideas of the 3rd-century-BCE Athenian philosopher Epicurus and set into Latin verse by his 1st-century-BCE Roman follower, Titus Carus Lucretius. Although the world has changed since Epicurus wrote and lectured, the issues of money, love, family and politics that he dealt with remain with us in new forms. The Epicurean perspective remains, to my mind, relevant and valuable.

Epicureanism was one of the five major schools of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, existing alongside – and competing for adherents with – Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism and Aristotelianism. Unlike the city-based Platonists and Stoics, Epicurus had decided to ‘live apart’ with his followers. His philosophical school was set in a garden (actually a grove), usually considered to have been located outside the city walls, where philosophy was discussed, meals were taken together, and books and letters were written.

Most of Epicurus’s original writings were lost. The largest known collection of his and his followers’ writings, located in the town of Herculaneum near Naples, was buried in the ash and lava of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. But Lucretius had seen and made use of them more than a century earlier, and several of Epicurus’s philosophical letters and collections of sayings, as well as the reports of ancient commentators, survived.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Lucretius’s Roman contemporary, took an interest in Epicureanism, though he criticised it heavily. His dialogues on religion and moral philosophy show how Epicureanism stacked up against its rival Stoicism, at least from Cicero’s point of view. Largely but not wholly lost to medieval and Renaissance readers, Epicurean philosophy was revived in the 17th century, when it exercised a significant influence on moral and political philosophy, as well as on cosmology, chemistry and physics. The great utilitarian social reformers of 19th-century Britain, as well as the framers of the United States Constitution, paid homage to the Epicurean ideal of human welfare. And Lucretius’s Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things , at first admired mainly for its elegant Latin, came to be considered a model for the vivid and memorable communication of abstract scientific ideas. At the same time, as you will see in what follows, Epicureanism had certain features that shocked, or at least unsettled, many who encountered it.