On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics)

by Ronald Melville

  The original context of Epicurus’ teaching was in the communities he established, and he lays great stress on the practice of philosophical discussion and on the oral apprehension and memorization of his doctrines. This stance puts Epicurus in the line of moral educators whose archetype was Socrates and whose most conspicuous representatives in the generation before Epicurus had been Diogenes and Pyrrho, the effective founders of Cynicism and Scepticism respectively. Unlike these men, however, Epicurus wrote books, and a large number of them, on a variety of topics in physics and ethics (over forty titles are known). The most important work was the immensely long On Nature in thirty-seven books, whose title is recalled in Lucretius’ own title. This somewhat discursive work was written over a period of years, and because of its very length it must have been used mostly as a reference work by later Epicureans; luckily there were epitomes which gave the essentials of the philosophy in a shorter compass. Epicurus seems to have regarded it as highly important that such summaries should be available, and the only works of his that have come down to us whole rather than in fragmentary quotations or papyrus remains belong to this class. These works, preserved in the Lives of the Philosophers of Diogenes Laertius (?third century AD), are the Letter to Herodotus (a general epitome of the philosophy), the Letter to Pythocles (on the ‘phenomena of the sky’), the Letter to Menoeceus (on ethics), and the Master Sayings (a collection of forty maxims for living). Another collection of maxims, put together by a later Epicurean, was discovered in the nineteenth century, the so-called Vatican Sayings.

  Later Epicureans also wrote extensively, from the time of the Master himself to the later Roman Empire, though in most cases we only have fragments. Lucretius’ contemporary Philodemus, active at Rome from the 80s BC, wrote a large number of works, extensive fragments of which were found in the so-called ‘Villa of the Papyri’ in Herculaneum (Ercolano), near Naples, at the end of the eighteenth century (a fragment of Lucretius has recently been identified amongst the same collection). The most eloquent memorial of all, however, is perhaps a huge inscription put up in the second century AD in the centre of Oenoanda (in Lycia, now southern Turkey) by one Diogenes. One of the largest Greek inscriptions known, it gives a full exposition of Epicureanism in several separate treatises. A passage near its beginning eloquently attests to the continuing attraction of the Epicurean way, and why figures such as Diogenes and Lucretius felt it important to try to save their fellow human beings:

  Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a [fine] anthem [to celebrate the] fullness [of pleasure] and to help those who are well-constituted. Now if only one person or two or three or four or five or six or any larger number you choose, sir, provided that it is not very large, were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually and do all in my power to give them the best advice. But, as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep); moreover, [it is] right to help [also] generations to come (for they belong to us, though they are still unborn); and, besides, love of humanity prompts us to aid also the foreigners who come here. Now, since the remedies of the inscription reach a larger number of people, I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly the [medicines] that bring salvation. These medicines we have put [fully] to the test; for we have dispelled the fears [that grip] us without justification, and, as for pains, those that are groundless we have completely excised, while those that are natural we have reduced to an absolute minimum, making their magnitude minute. (fr. 3, trans. M. F. Smith)

  In setting out the Master’s philosophy, then, Lucretius places himself in a long line of Epicureans, though he is unique in doing so extensively in verse. Much of the poem is concerned with what we would call physical science, but the reason for this focus is that the Epicureans believed that it was vital to understand the basic principles of the universe if one was not to have ‘false opinions’ about the world which would wreck one’s happiness. Epicurus aimed to give men peace of mind, what he called ataraxia, ‘being undisturbed’; the metaphysics, the physics, the epistemology, the psychology, the theology were all designed to provide this peace. There was no room for the high Platonic or Stoic ideal of Tennyson’s Ulysses, ‘to follow knowledge like a sinking star | beyond the utmost reach of human thought’; for Epicurus, we need knowledge only because without it we are unhappy:

  If doubts about celestial phenomena did not cause us disturbance, nor those about death, that it might really concern us, nor the failure to realize the limits of pains and desires, then we would have no need of scientific reasoning. (Master Sayings 11)

  First of all then do not think that there is any other end to the knowledge of celestial phenomena… than peace of mind (ataraxia) and sure confidence. (Letter to Pythocles 85)

  Epicureanism has been called the philosophy of certainty, and Pythocles is offered not just ataraxia but also ‘sure confidence’. Anxieties are caused by doubts; the explanations which remove these doubts must themselves be securely based or the doubts will return. There is no room for scepticism, and the Epicurean watchword was ‘All sensations are true’. If I see a cow, my perception of that cow is occasioned by something real, an image emanating from the cow which represents to me the way the cow really is. When I learned the word ‘cow’, a real cow was pointed out to me; every time I say or think the word, that original clear image should be present so long as I have not let my mind be distorted by mischievous misdefinitions of ‘cowness’. If I look at the world and think along with it in its terms, I cannot go wrong; as Epicurus says in the Letter to Herodotus (50), ‘falsehood and error always lie in the addition of opinion’. Scientific reasoning—physiologia—is a continual recall to look at the world the way it really is, and because of this it needs the assurance provided by Epicurean epistemology. Epicurus called this branch of his philosophy kanonikon, from the Greek kanon, a rule, and Lucretius develops the metaphor in his own way in Book 4:

  Lastly, in a building, if the ruler is crooked

  And the square is faulty and misses the straight line

  And the level is even slightly unbalanced,

  The whole house then will of necessity

  Be wrongly constructed and be falling over,

  Warped, sloping, leaning forward, leaning back,

  All out of proportion, so that some parts seem

  Ready to collapse, and the whole destined to fall,

  A victim to the first false measurements.

  So your reasoning about things must be false and warped

  Whenever it is based upon false senses.

  (4. 513–21)

  There is an apparent paradox here, however. The senses are the way in which we discover reality; but the reality they reveal is one of an infinite number of atoms blindly moving in an infinite void, now coming together to form compounds, indeed whole worlds, now coming apart as these worlds and the compounds in them are dissolved. This revelation is very different from the phenomenal world; and Epicurus’ predecessor Democritus (fifth century BC), who offered a very similar vision, encapsulated the contrast in a famous dictum that ‘colour is by convention, sweet by convention, a compound by convention… what is real are the void and the atoms’ (fr. B125). Epicurus reacted strongly against this because he thought that it devalued the world of the senses as a guarantee of reality, but some form of the duality is essential to his philosophy also. Understanding involves both ‘the face of nature and her laws’ (On the Nature of the Universe 1. 148 = 2. 61, 3. 39, 6. 41), both the world of colour, light, and sound and the blind dance of the atoms in the void. This duality is not an unbridgeable gulf; our experience of the world can lead us to an apprehension of its secrets. In the first place, we can use the concepts derived from the world about us as models for
thought about the inaccessible world of the atoms. If we wish to think about atomic movement, for instance, Lucretius suggests we picture the motion of dust particles in a ray of light:

  You will see a multitude of tiny bodies

  All mingling in a multitude of ways

  Inside the sunbeam, moving in the void,

  Seeming to be engaged in endless strife,

  Battle, and warfare, troop attacking troop,

  And never a respite, harried constantly,

  With meetings and with partings everywhere.

  From this you can imagine what it is

  For atoms to be tossed perpetually

  In endless motion through the mighty void.

  (2. 116–24)

  But more importantly the visible world can signify, can be a sign of the visible. It cannot do so directly; to use Epicurus’ legal metaphor, the phenomenal world cannot ‘witness to’ the unseen. But it can ‘witness against’; we can show that certain hypotheses about reality are ruled out by the world around us. The hypothesis that the atoms are at rest in compounds is ruled out by the constant motion of the dust particles: as Lucretius puts it, ‘their dancing shows that within matter | Secret and hidden motions also lie’ (2. 127–8). In this way we can move from the phenomenal world to the level of the atoms and grasp the reality of things:

  The terrors of the mind flee all away,

  The walls of heaven open, and through the void

  Immeasurable, the truth of things I see.

  (3. 16–17)

  It is on this epistemological basis that Epicurus erects his metaphysics and physics; the void and the atoms, their eternal motion, the infinite universe with its infinite worlds. To grasp this construction is to see that there is no place in it for a providential god binding the elements together or controlling the seasons for our good. To see how compounds come to be and fall apart is to appreciate how the life of a human being is but a special case of this process and how there is nothing still in existence to be troubled by death once it has taken place. Gods there are indeed, for we see them in our dreams; death is indeed all about us; but they are not the gods of popular belief, interfering in our lives, and it is not the death of mythology, the prelude to purgatory, hell, or just the unknown. Epicureanism offers at once novelty—a new version of reality—and a comforting reassurance that things are, after all, as they are; no hell beneath us, above us only sky.

  This double aspect of the philosophy, at once novel and familiar, continues into its most famous doctrine, the exaltation of pleasure as the end of life and the flight from pain as the only evil. To pursue pleasure and avoid pain is natural, and no argument is needed to sustain the doctrine, as Cicero makes the Epicurean Torquatus remark:

  Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of Nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, he thinks, are perceived by the sense, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet, none of which things need to be proved by elaborate argument: it is enough merely to draw attention to them. (On the Final Terms of Good and Evil 1. 30, trans. H. Rackham)

  We have only to listen to our bodies, uncorrupted by false ideas: ‘the voice of the flesh is: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold’ (Vatican Sayings 33), a voice Lucretius turns into the bark of nature:

  Do you not see that Nature cries for this,

  And only this, that pain from out the body

  Shall be removed away, and mind enjoy

  Sweet sense of pleasure, freed from care and fear?

  (2. 16–19)

  But this simple and natural truth was expressed in a complex theory of pleasure and pain whose details are still controversial, which to many in both ancient and modern times has seemed bizarre and unconvincing, and which to Lucretius seemed a great and new discovery of his Master:

  Therefore with words of truth he purged men’s hearts

  And set a limit to desire and fear.

  He showed the nature of that highest good

  For which all mankind strives, and showed the way,

  The strait and narrow path which leads to it

  If we go forward with unswerving steps.

  (6. 24–8)

  As with the physics and epistemology, Epicurean moral theory offers simultaneously a recall to the way we have always really known the world to be and a new understanding of it.

  The basis of this understanding is a double division of the notion of pleasure. The one division, between pleasure of the body and pleasure of the mind, is obvious and is shared with other ancient philosophies. But the second division is more important and more unusual. Epicurus distinguished between what he called katastematic pleasures, pleasures of the ‘steady state’ (katastema), and kinetic pleasures, pleasures of motion (kinesis). The latter are what we most obviously think of as pleasures: the pleasures of the senses, of pleasant-tasting food and drink, of pleasant sights and sounds, of sex (i.e. the pleasures of touch). These are the result of stimulation or ‘variation’ of the sense organs, and when the stimulation ceases, they cease. When stimulation is absent, we have no feeling of pleasure or pain in the sense organs. These pleasures are essential to our notion of pleasure; in a famous dictum which succeeded in shocking many, Epicurus said that he could not conceive of the good if one removed the pleasures of taste and sex and of pleasant sounds and sights (fr. 67). Whereas for others the desire for these pleasures was a fatal chain which enslaved men’s higher functions, for Epicurus they were perfectly harmless so long as they did not cause pain later on as a side effect and so long as one had the correct attitude to them. What that correct attitude was was spelled out in the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ desires:

  Of desires, some are necessary, some natural but not necessary, some neither necessary nor natural but the result of empty opinion. The desire for food and drink and for clothing is necessary; that for sex is natural but not necessary; but that for a certain kind of food or a certain kind of clothing or a certain kind of sex is neither natural nor necessary. (fr. 496)

  The desire for the pleasures of the senses is not necessary—one can live on gruel and water, one does not die without sex—but it is perfectly natural. As soon, however, as one starts to want not just something pleasant to drink but a particular vintage of a particular wine, and not just sexual pleasure but sexual pleasure with a particular person, one is no longer listening to the body, but to the mind; an obsession is developing whose inevitable consequence is displeasure that the desired object is missing or anxiety that it might be.

  It is the first group in the Epicurean division of desires, the desires which are both natural and necessary, whose satisfaction provides katastematic pleasure, the pleasure of the ‘steady state’. Without food, drink, and warmth we die; when we are hungry, thirsty, or cold, our body has a physical lack, a gap in its constitution which must be filled, which causes us pain, and which, if not dealt with, will lead to death. Lucretius uses the image of a building in danger of collapse:

  So food is taken, to prop up the body,

  And working inside renews the strength and stops

  Through veins and limbs the gaping desire to eat.

  (4. 867–9)

  The desire for food, drink, and warmth is thus urgent and implacable; unlike the desire for kinetic pleasure, it demands satisfaction. But also unlike the desire for kinetic pleasure, it is finite in this demand. As the holes in the body are filled, the parts which were deficient cease to cause us pain and attain the pleasure of the steady state, of painless satisfaction; and the limit to this process is the filling of all the holes. Once the deficiency is completely remedied, further ingestion of food can bring no more katastematic pleasure, though we may enjoy t
he taste of the food as a kinetic, sensual, pleasure. As Epicurus puts it in the third Master Saying, ‘The boundary to the size of pleasures is the removal of all that is painful’, and more explicitly in the eighteenth saying, ‘The pleasure in the flesh is not increased, when once that which causes pain is removed, but only varied.’ So the desire for these pleasures also, though demanding satisfaction, is no tyrannical monster, dragging our rational minds in wayward directions, but is easily satisfied. If one is hungry, all the body needs is for its deficiency to be remedied; as far as it is concerned, anything will do, even battery chickens and soya mince.

  This fact, that the real needs of the body are easily satisfied, is the key to the understanding of the links between Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and pain and the rest of his philosophy. Just as there are katastematic and kinetic pleasures of the body (aponia, ‘lack of distress’, and euphrosyne, ‘enjoyment’, respectively), so there are of the mind. The kinetic pleasure of the mind, chara or ‘joy’, occurs when the mind reflects upon kinetic pleasure of the body and concentrates on its sensations. The term for katastematic pleasure of the mind, however, we have met before; it is ataraxia, ‘freedom from disturbance’. We saw that a man who is disturbed by fear of the gods and of death cannot be happy; and he cannot even enjoy the everyday pleasures of the body, katastematic and kinetic. Lucretius uses the image of a murky pool:

  headlong out of doors

  The fear of Hell be thrown, which from its depths