In common with some other ancient philosophers, Epicurus regarded the developments of human culture as a chapter of natural philosophy. This explains why the Letter to Herodotus includes discussion of the origins of speech and language, the second surprising topic it tackles.8 Epicurus opposes other philosophical and popular accounts, which consider speech (as well as other distinctive human achievements) a gift of the gods, an invention of exceptionally gifted human beings, or in other ways a manifestation of divine providential regard for humankind. In Epicurus’ own explanation, the communicative potential of human beings’ natural powers to emit and hear sounds is spontaneously discovered and only later refined and enlarged gradually by deliberate conscious effort. The effect is to diminish the gap between animals and human beings. And by emphasizing that linguistic communication is the result of discovering uses for the powers of voice and hearing, rather than (as other philosophers held) the purpose for which they were designed or the use for whose sake they exist, his theory can fairly be viewed as the ancestor of efforts to explain the development of speech and language in the context of evolutionary theory.
The prominence Diogenes gives to “meteorological” phenomena by including the Letter to Pythocles is explained by Epicurus’ view that heavenly phenomena are an especially fertile breeding ground for superstition (cf. Chief Maxims XIII, at 10.143). Even Aristotle had thought there was an important element of truth in the perennially popular view that the heavenly bodies were divine and that celestial phenomena showed the gods at work (Metaphysics 1074a38–b10).
The most distinctive and original element of Epicurus’ approach to celestial matters is the method of multiple explanation, which gives the letter an interest beyond the phenomena discussed in it. He held that our aim as natural philosophers should not always be to discover the single correct explanation for the phenomena under examination (as it was in establishing the fundamental principles of the natural world). Rather, Epicurus says, one should be satisfied if we can find a number of possible explanations and not insist on rejecting some in favor of others when there are no grounds to do so (10.87, 94, 98, and 113).
For example:
The waning and, in turn, the waxing of the moon may be due to the rotation of the body and equally well to configurations assumed by the air; they may also be due to occultations, or may happen in any of the ways the facts of our experience can suggest to explain such phenomena. But one must not be so enamored of the explanation based on a single cause as groundlessly to reject the others from ignorance of what can and cannot be understood by a human being, and the consequent longing to understand what cannot be understood. Furthermore, it may be that the moon’s light emanates from itself; alternatively, it may be derived from the sun (10.94).
Since the ultimate aim is to banish superstition, it suffices to know there are plausible natural explanations for a phenomenon, without being certain which explanation is correct. But evidence from outside the letter suggests Epicurus also held the intriguing view that in an infinite universe containing infinite worlds and existing for eternity, all genuinely possible explanations must be realized in some world at some time, if not in our own world at this time (cf. Lucretius 5.526–33).
The Letter to Menoeceus contains explanations of, and arguments for, some of the central ethical teachings of Epicurus. One of its main effects is to demonstrate how much the Epicureans had in common with the arguments of other philosophical schools.
It begins with an exhortation to the lifelong study of philosophy, presented as the sure means to happiness (10.122). Epicurus proclaims his belief in the gods, saying he rejects only popular misconceptions of the divine, whose credulous acceptance is true impiety (10.123; cf. 10.133). He celebrates possession of the virtues as the sole necessary and sufficient condition for happiness (10.132; cf. Chief Maxims V, at 10.140). He makes short work of the charge that when his school identifies pleasure as the goal it means the pleasure of a dissolute life (10.131–32). Above all, he embraces the ancient philosophical ideal of self-sufficiency, which frees us from dependence on circumstances beyond our control and renders our happiness immune to the influence of fortune (10.130 and 134; cf. Chief Maxims XVI, at 10.144).
In what is perhaps the most innovative element in the system expounded in the letter, however, desires are divided into three kinds: (i) natural and necessary: (ii) natural but not necessary; and (iii) neither natural nor necessary (10.127; cf. Chief Maxims XXVI, XXIX, and XXX, at 10.148–49). Natural and necessary desires must be satisfied for one to live, to be free of pain, and to be happy. They are few and easily satisfied. Nonnatural desires—those based on false opinions about what is good or necessary to our happiness—are empty. An ancient gloss (or scholion) to Chief Maxims XXIX offers “desires for crowns or for statues dedicated in one’s honor” as examples (10.149).
Had Epicurus been content with these two divisions, his view would seem to belong to the ascetic tendency so prominent in ancient philosophy. The key to happiness, from that perspective, is to reduce one’s desires to the bare minimum, the better to diminish or eliminate the chances of failing to fulfill them. The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope, for example (Book 6), could plausibly be viewed as following such a strategy. But Epicurus recognized another class of desires natural to have and harmless to fulfill, even though we can be happy without satisfying them. The same scholion gives the desire for “luxurious food” as an instance (10.149).
Epicurus’ idea, which sets him apart from the philosophical apostles of the ascetic life with whom he otherwise has so much in common, seems to have been that there need be no harm in desiring—and enjoying—a full range of pleasures so long as we are able to take them or leave them. Any other attitude, as Epicurus observes in Chief Maxims, will be a recipe for misery (10.149). Correct appreciation of the nature of desires will permit us to enjoy all the pleasures life has to offer when circumstances permit, but allow us to remain just as contented when they do not. He concludes the letter by affirming that those who take these and similar truths to heart will live like gods among men (10.135).
After a brief section on ethical subjects omitted in the letter, Diogenes sets out the forty Chief Maxims that he describes as the crown of his Lives (10.138–54). All but two relate to ethics (XXIV and XXV concern epistemology). When natural philosophy is mentioned, its value or use, not its substantive content, is discussed. No overall plan seems to govern the collection, though there are clusters of doctrines dedicated to common themes. Two clusters deserve special attention.
Doctrines XXXI–XXXIX (10.150–54) present in concise form Epicurus’ theory of justice, which shows his ability to cast a fresh eye on an important subject.9 He rejects theories of natural justice, according to which our behavior toward one another is subject to a set of obligations applying to all human beings in all circumstances, independently of positive law (XXXIII). On the contrary, he maintains that justice has no existence outside a compact or convention: it imposes no obligations on, and affords no protections to, those not party to the compact. Nevertheless he speaks of “natural justice,” as well as the nature of justice and a corresponding concept of justice (XXXI, XXXVII). The nature of justice is to be a mutually beneficial agreement not to harm on condition of not being harmed: there is a standard against which systems of justice can be measured and a perspective from which they can be criticized. Doctrine XXXVIII explains how different compacts containing different rules can be equally just because of variations in local conditions, and how a compact that had been just because it promoted mutual benefit could, owing to changing circumstances, cease to be just in whole or in part.
The second noteworthy cluster comprises the first four doctrines, which contain a compact summary of the promise of Epicurean philosophy and are likely what Diogenes had principally in mind when he spoke of ending his book with teachings that are the beginning of happiness (10.139–40). Later Epicureans condensed the four doctrines even further into the so-called tetrapharmakos, or fourfold
remedy:
God presents no fears, death no worries. And while the good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.10
1 A text of De Rerum Natura with an excellent translation and notes can be found in Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, ed. M. F. Smith, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
2 David Sedley argues that the tradition representing Epicurus as a uniquely vituperative critic of other philosophers goes back to the testimony—sometimes false, sometimes exaggerated—of Timocrates. David Sedley, “Epicurus and His Professional Rivals,” in Etudes sur l’epicurisme antique, ed. Jean Bollack and André Laks, Cahiers de Philologie I (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Fr.: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1976), 119–59.
3 See Diskin Clay, “The Athenian Garden,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9–28.
4 See Gisela Striker, “κριτήριον τῆς ἀληθείας,” in Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22–76.
5 Diogenes discusses the Cyrenaics in his life of Aristippus, 2.65–104, and briefly compares their views on pleasure with those of Epicurus at 2.89 and 10.137. Cf. John M. Cooper, “Pleasure and Desire in Epicurus,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 485–514.
6 According to Nausiphanes (DL 9.64).
7 See David J. Furley, “Study I: Indivisible Magnitudes,” in Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).
8 See Alexander Verlinsky, “Epicurus and His Predecessors on the Origin of Language,” in Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age, ed. Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56–100.
9 See Antonina M. Alberti, “The Epicurean Theory of Law and Justice,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy, ed. André Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161–90.
10 Text and translation in A. A. Long and David N. Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:156, sect. 25j.
Diogenes Laertius and Nietzsche
Glenn W. Most
It is well-known that Friedrich Nietzsche began his career as a classicist but turned himself into an important figure of modern philosophy; less well-known is the role that Diogenes Laertius played in this trajectory.
As a philosopher, Nietzsche admired Diogenes Laertius for transmitting memorable anecdotes and reports regarding the lives and doctrines of the great Greek philosophers, and Nietzsche learned from him a lesson about the relation of philosophy and life that would shape his own thought and legacy. But as a young philologist who studied Diogenes with the more limited project of investigating his methods and reliability as a compiler of earlier sources on the history of Greek philosophy, Nietzsche ended up having a much less positive view of his value. To explain this curious state of affairs, we must begin with a few words about Diogenes himself.
Like most prose authors of later antiquity, Diogenes Laertius composed his treatise by compiling, selecting, arranging, and revising the works of his predecessors. After all, by Diogenes’ time, many centuries had elapsed since the death of most of the philosophers he was discussing; their original writings were frequently difficult to understand, and many were hard or even impossible to come by; those writings that did circulate were often incomplete, textually corrupt, or even forged. An enormous scholarly literature on this vast and heterogeneous material had already developed. Under these circumstances, it would have been irresponsible, even irrational, for Diogenes to refuse to take advantage of the scholarship of preceding generations. In this regard, his situation is not essentially different from our own.
But we are the uneasy heirs of centuries of the gradual professionalization, improvement, and refinement in historical method. Whatever doubts and controversies still mark contemporary research, nowadays no reputable historian of philosophy, or of any other subject, will fail to attempt to obtain access to original sources, to evaluate them with regard to their authenticity and reliability as scrupulously as possible, or to attain as full, as systematic, and as critical an overview of the secondary scholarship as possible.
Historiography in the ancient world was less disciplined and consistent, more amateurish and individualistic. It would obviously be unfair to measure Diogenes’ work by the standards of our own day. But even within the terms of ancient scholarship, his treatise displays a number of perplexing features.
On the level of surface detail, it seems rife with incoherencies, contradictions, obscurities, and non sequiturs; the style is uneven; and where quotations begin and end is often unclear. More generally, the work raises at least three questions regarding its own character: the dates of the author, his philosophical orientation, and his intended audience. An answer in one passage seems to contradict another, or what we think we know about ancient Greek philosophy from other sources.
How are such difficulties to be dealt with? Since the Renaissance, various strategies have been tried: ignore them; emend them to produce a more acceptable meaning, on the theory that they arose not in the head of the original author but in the hands of subsequent scribes; or try to explain them away.
None of these maneuvers has been very successful. Ignoring the problems has not made them disappear. Much of the language has proved resistant to emendation, and the intellectual contortions required to explain away the difficulties are seldom worth the exegetical gains. What is more, piecemeal approaches are always hampered by their trade in hypotheses invented ad hoc. Would a different kind of approach not be preferable, one that solved all the puzzles at once?
Precisely this was the young Nietzsche’s idea. Suppose the internal inconsistencies or those reports that conflict with what we think we know about Diogenes or Greek philosophy were written originally not by Diogenes but by his sources, and that he had simply copied them into his own work. If we could determine which sources he had used, could we not interpret the problematic passages more satisfactorily, and would we not be in a better position to assess the reliability of the information he transmits?
By asking these questions, Nietzsche applied to Diogenes Laertius the recently developed and fashionable German scholarly method of Quellenforschung, or “source criticism”; and by providing startling if specious answers, he launched a brilliant if brief academic career.
Nietzsche was one of the first to try to develop a single coherent and universal theory of the relations between Diogenes and his sources. His strategy was to explain discrepancies within the Lives as the result of differences among the sources; its goal was to arrive at a hypothetical but highly detailed narrative of the ways in which Diogenes had excerpted, compressed, and compiled all the sources available to him, one that would show the text as we have it as the inevitable result of all these operations.1
In the writings Nietzsche published for a nonprofessional audience, the few explicit references to Diogenes are uniformly positive: he is held up as a model for a true understanding of at least the spirit if not the letter of Greek philosophy, in opposition to the German academic establishment of professional philosophers and classicists who looked down on him but in fact understood far less about the real character of the Greek philosophers than he did. So, most famously, in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” the third of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, published in 1874:
Who for example will save the history of Greek philosophy once again from the soporific fumes that have been diffused upon it by the learned, but not overwhelmingly scientific—and unfortunately extremely boring—works of Ritter, Brandis, and Zeller? I for one would rather read Laertius Diogenes than Zeller, because in the former there lives at least the spirit of the ancient philosophers, but in the latter neither that spirit nor any other one.2
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And in a number of crucial passages Nietzsche wrote about the lives and characters of the Greek philosophers, especially the Pre-Socratics—e.g., in “Philosophy in the Age of Tragedy” and the section on “The Tyrants of the Spirit” in Human, All Too Human—Diogenes’ influence is transparent even if Nietzsche does not mention him by name.3
Intense study of the text of Diogenes was also crucial in helping Nietzsche to free himself from the constraints of university philology and philosophy and to develop a new and deeply personal conception of the relation between philosophical speculation and a philosophical way of life—one that was to make a strong impression on subsequent generations.
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By contrast, the view of Diogenes to be found in the writings Nietzsche composed as a classical philologist and intended for a professional readership starts unenthusiastically and concludes extremely negatively. The more Nietzsche worked on Diogenes in his early years, the more he came to see him not as a learned and honest authority on ancient Greek philosophy but instead as a liar, a thief, and a fool. For example, in an unpublished manuscript on “Laertius Diogenes and His Sources. A Contribution to the History of Ancient Literary Studies,” he writes
What is La. Di. to us? Nobody would waste a word about the lowbrow physiognomy of this writer if he were not by chance the dim-witted watchman who guards treasures without having a clue about their value. He is the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.4
In the years 1866–1868, Nietzsche worked on the competition prize question De Laertii Diogenis fontibus (“On the Sources of Diogenes Laertius”), researching not only the sources of Diogenes himself but also those of imperial, late ancient, and Byzantine scholarship and of various earlier classical and Hellenistic Greek prose authors (Herodotus, Aristotle), as well as the ancient life of Hesiod. The Byzantine encyclopedia Suda, which presents significant overlaps with Diogenes’ text, was a particular focus, along with such other authorities as Apollodorus, Athenaeus, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Hesychius, Eustathius, the Etymologicum Magnum, and Stobaeus. Nietzsche’s posthumously printed notes show how many radically different hypotheses he tried out and how gradually and tentatively he developed his provisional conclusions.5 Yet the three lengthy philological studies he published on the subject in 1869 and 1870 are clear, dogmatic, and self-assured.6
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Page 87