Epicurus and the Garden

⊕ Epicurus, 341-270 BCE.

Hermarchus, 4th to 3rd century BCE.
Successor to Epicurus as head of the school. Works are lost.

Lucretius, first century BCE.
Roman poet and author of On the Nature of Things. Explains the principles of Epicureanism in Latin verse.


Epicurus's Garden (an estate with grounds that came to be used as the location for his lectures) was located just outside Athens along the road from the Dipylon gate to the Academy (Cicero, On Ends 5.1.3).

The Diplyon gate was the main gate in the wall around Athens. Themistocles (Athenian general) built it when rebuilt and fortified Athens after the Persian Wars.

Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE) preserves three letters from and Epicurus and lists the forty-one titles of Epicurus's "best" books (Lives of the Philosophers X. 27). These titles are all we have of these books. What we know about Epicurus depends primarily on the three letters. Epicurus's school is "the Garden" (ὁ κῆπος). He set it up in Athens in about 306 BCE.

Few of Epicurus's writings have survived. His philosophy became unpopular and was not preserved once the critical reaction to the classical tradition gave way to the resurgence of non-skeptical forms of Platonism and to the subsequent rise of Christianity.

The Good Life and Happiness

Epicurus thought the "four-fold remedy" (τετραφάρμακος) is the key to happiness.

"For who do you believe is better than a man who has pious opinions about the gods, is fearless about death, has diligently considered the natural goal of life and understands that the limit of good things is easy to achieve completely and easy to provide, and that the limit of bad things has a short duration or causes little trouble" (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus X. 133).

⊕
The τετραφάρμακος: "God presents no fears, death no worries, and while good is readily attainable, bad is readily endurable" (Philodemus of Gadara, preserved in Herculaneum Papyrus 1005, 4.10–14)
Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus, 1005.
Discovered at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

This is not easy to read, in part because it is written in unicals (a form of majuscules or large letters) without the word individuation and punctuation to which we are accustomed. Here it is (beginning on the ninth line of the text) in majuscules in a more readable form:

ΑΦΟΒΟΝ Ο ΘΕΟΣ, ΑΝΥ
ΠΟΠΤΟΝ Ο ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ, ΚΑΙ
ΤΑΓΑΘΟΝ ΜΕΝ ΕΥΚΤΗΤΟΝ,
ΤΟ ΔΕ ΔΕΙΝΟΝ ΕΥΕΚΚΑΡ
ΤΕΡΗΤΟΝ

In minuscules, it is:

ἄφοβον ὁ θεός, ἀνύποπτον ὁ θάνατος, καὶ τἀγαθὸν μὲν εὔκτητον, τὸ δὲ δεινὸν εὐεκκαρτέρητον. We get the word τετραφάρμακος from Epicurus's 1st century BCE follower, Philodemus of Gadara. The text in which it occurs was discovered in the 18th CE archeological excavations at Herculaneum (one of the towns buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE).

τετραφάρμακος means "drug, or medicine, with four parts." It is the cure to the misery to which we are prone. Taking the τετραφάρμακος makes us εὐδαίμων or "happy."

Diogenes of Oenoanda (a 2nd century CE follower) was so impressed with the τετραφάρμακος that in his home city of Oenoanda (in the southwest of Turkey) he had a wall erected and inscribed with Epicurus's philosophy for the benefit of passers by.

The Four-Fold Remedy

Epicurus advances the τετραφάρμακος as a solution to life's most worrying problem.

We worry about what tomorrow will bring, but taking the τετραφάρμακος shows us that there is an easy-to-execute and effective plan for living that is overwhelmingly likely to result in a life in which the pleasure we experience vastly outweighs the pain.

The τετραφάρμακος is thus a source of immense relief and satisfaction. It removes the worry we have for ourselves and our life, and it shows us that the few bad things that can happen are never going to be disturbing to undermine our peace of mind and happiness.

God presents no fears

⊕

"There are some who have supposed that we have arrived at the thought of gods from marvellous happenings. This opinion seems to have been held by Democritus, who says that when the men of old saw things happen in the heavens, such as thunderings and lightnings, and thunderbolts and collisions between stars, and eclipses of sun and moon, they were frightened, imagining the gods to be the causes of these things" (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists 1.24). The first part of the τετραφάρμακος is that "God presents no fears."

This part of the cure consists in sufficient knowledge of physics and the nature of the gods to dispel the fears mythology reinforces and that undermine our happiness.

The relation of knowledge of reality to the good life is thus very different for Epicurs than for Plato and Aristotle. For Epicurus, the knowledge is just to remove supersitition.

Fears of the sorts described in mythology haunt human beings. About natural phenomena we do not understand, we make up threatening stories. We think these phenomena indicate divine mood and that storms and other such phenomena are punishment from the gods. Knowledge of physics and the nature of the goods is necessary to dispel the fears enshrined in mythology and thus to correct the unfortunate and all too common tendency of human beings to form distressing but false beliefs about the world and their place within it.

[D]eath [presents] no worries

⊕

"Accustom yourself to think that death is nothing to us, for good and bad are in sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable" (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus X. 124). The second part of the τετραφάρμακος is that "death [presents] no worries."

Epicurus explains that the fear of death stems from a false belief about what happens to us in death. He argues that in reality death is "nothing to us."

1.  Something is bad for us only if we suffer when it is true.
2.  The dead do not suffer (because they do not feel anything at all).
3.  If (1) and (2) are true, then death is "nothing to us."
----
4.  Death is "nothing to us."

The argument shows us that the fear of death t is really nothing more than one of the many superstitions to which human beings are prone and that undermine their happiness.

[G]ood is readily attainable, bad is readily endurable

⊕ "Of desires some are natural, others are groundless; of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only. And of the necessary some are necessary if we are to be happy, some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness, some if we are even to live. He who has an unwavering understanding of these things will direct every preference and aversion toward securing health of body and tranquillity (ἀταραξίαν) of soul, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life" (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus X. 127).

"[The Epicureans] say that the stable and settled condition of the flesh and the trustworthy expectation of this condition contain the highest and the most assured delight for men who can reckon" (Plutarch, Moralia. That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, 1089d).

Plutarch, Platonist, 1st to 2nd century CE

"While therefore all pleasure because it is naturally akin to us is good, not all pleasure is choice worthy, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged" (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus X. 129).

"When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation, but [we mean that the end is] the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of fish and the other delicacies of a luxurious table, that produces a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul" (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus X. 131). This part of the τετραφάρμακος gives us the correct understanding of the good life.

Epicurus thought that living the good life is a matter of having a certain pleasure of the mind he called "tranquillity" (ἀταραξία). He thought that to have this pleasaure, we should restrict our desires to those that are natural and necessary. These are the desires we fulfill in a life of moderation, not excess. A life of excess is difficult to achieve and likely to be punctuated with extreme unpleasantness, but if we live a moderate life, the things we need are "readily available" and the few bad things that do happen are small and "readily endurable."

Against the Classical Tradition

The stress on memory in Epicurus suggests that he is allied with an empiricist tradition.

"Tranquillity is to be released from all these [troubles] and to have a continual remembrance of the general and most important points [I have set out]" (Letter to Herodotus, X. 82).

This "continual remembrance" not the what Plato and Aristotle think goes on in the good life.

Aristotle, for example, thinks that the good life is activity of the part of the soul with reason in accordance with its proper virtues. He thinks that the best of these virtues is wisdom, that wisdom is the virtue proper to the part of the soul with reason that grasps what cannot be otherwise, that someone with wisdom has the knowledge in theoretical science, and that the activity in accordance with wisdom is the contemplation of this knowledge.

This "contemplation" is an exercise of what Plato and Aristotle call reason. The "continual remembrance" in Epicurus is something he tries to understand in terms of memory.

Whenever someone with "continual remembrance" of the four-fold remedy thinks about what to do, he experiences "tranquillity," not worry for himself in the future. When he thinks about what to do, the thought that "God presents no fears, death no worries, and while good is readily attainable, bad is readily endurable" comes into his mind. This "remembrance" causes him to experience "tranquillity" or ἀταραξία because it eliminates anxiety about the future and causes him to believe that he is going to experience more pleasure than pain.

"The cry of the flesh is not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be shivering. Somone who has satisfied these cries of the flesh and expects to satisfy them in the future could compete even with Zeus in happiness" (Vatican Sayings, 33).

The Vatican Sayings are 81 maxims attributed (not always correctly) to Epicurus. They were discovered in 1888 in a 14th century Vatican manuscript about which little is known.

Experience, Reason, and Knowledge

⊕ "Those who rely on experience only are called empiricists. Similarly, those who rely on reason are called rationalists. And these are the two primary sects in medicine. The one proceeds by experience to the discovery of medicines, the other by means of indication. And thus they named their sects empiricist and rationalist. But they also customarily call the empiricist sect observational and relying on memory and the rationalist sect dogmatic and analogistic" (Galen (130-210 CE), On the Sects for Beginners I.65 ).

"empiricists" (ἐμπειρικοί), "rationalists" (λογικοὶ) In what survives of his work, Epicurus does not work out his epistemology in much detail. What he says, though, seems to confirm that he sees himself as part of an empiricist tradition.

The empiricists questioned whether we need to recognize a power of mind that grasps relations of consequence and incompatibility we represent in a deductive theory.

The following example helps make the issue a little clearer.

Suppose that all human beings we and others have known have always been mortal. Is this enough for us to know that all human beings are mortal?

It would not be for Aristotle because he thinks that knowledge requires that we grasp the relation of consequence between being a human and being mortal.

We, though, might counter that we gain nothing by positing a power of mind to grasp relations of consequence and incompatibility and that we can account for our knowledge that all human beings are mortal in terms of our sense experiences and our memory of them.

In this empiricist approach to knowledge, the experiences we retain in memory produce certain beliefs. When the human beings of which we have had experience (either directly ourselves or through the reports of others who had experiences of them) turn out to be mortal, our memory produces in us the belief that all human beings are mortal. Further, because of how we form this belief, it counts as knowledge if its propositional content is true.

Some Evidence for Empiricism in Epicurus

There is not much textual evidence, as so little of his writing has survived, but Epicurus seems to take this empiricist point of view about how to account for knowledge in terms of memory.

Preconceptions are Recollections

⊕ One indication that Epicurus sees himself as part of this empiricist tradition is that he makes what he calls "preconceptions" (προλήψεις) a function of memory.

These preconceptions correspond to the knowledge Aristotle thinks human beings acquire when they acquire reason through the process of induction as they become adults.

Epicurus, however, unlike Aristotle, does not talk about reason and its knowledge.

"By preconception they mean a sort of apprehension or a right opinion or notion, or universal idea stored in the mind; that is, a memory of an external object often presented, e.g. such and such a thing is a man" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers X.33).

This sounds like the sort of view Socrates says he thought about in his youth.

⊕ The view about the brain Socrates is wondering about seems to go back to Alcmaeon of Croton (6th century BCE). He was part of the Ancient medical tradition that was interested in the nature of knowledge as part of an effort to defend the claim of medicine to be a real "art" (τέχνη).

"Reasoning is a kind of memory combined with things apprehended with the senses" (Hippocrates of Cos (father of medicine, 5th century BCE), Precepts 1).


"Turn next to the second division of philosophy, that of method and of dialectic, which is termed λογική. Of the whole armour of logic, Epicurus is absolutely destitute. He does away with definition; he has no doctrine of division or partition; he gives no rules for deduction or syllogistic inference, and imparts no method for resolving dilemmas or for detecting fallacies of equivocation. The criteria of reality he places in sensation" (Cicero, On Ends I.22).

"They will not get Epicurus, who despises and laughs at the whole of dialectic" (Cicero, Academica II.97). "He scorns dialectic, which contains the entire science of discerning what each thing entails, of judging of what kind each thing is, and of arguing methodically" (Cicero, On Ends II.18).

"The Epicureans reject dialectic as superfluous, explaining that it is sufficient for physicists to proceed in accordance with the words attached to things. In On the Criterion [a lost work], accordingly, Epicurus affirms that our perceptions and preconceptions and our feelings are the criteria of truth" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers X. 31).

"The empiricists argue that no art has any need for dialectic" (Galen, On the Sects for Beginners I.77). "Is it the blood, or air, or fire by which we think? Or is it none of these, and does the brain furnish the sensations of hearing and sight and smell, and do memory and opinion arise from these, and does knowledge come from memory and opinion in a state of rest?" (Phaedo 96a).

Dialectic is Superfluous

Epicurus rejected dialectic, and this too suggests that he sees himself as part of the empiricist attempt to understand knowledge and reason that Plato and Aristotle rejected.

In rejecting dialectic, what Epicurs rejects is the rationalist understanding of what we ordinarily call our reasoning. When we see a human being, we do not believe he is mortal because we are making an inference based on a deduction. Rather we believe that this human we see is mortal because of our memory of our experiences of human beings.

Similarly, when we make mistakes in reasoning, Epicurus does not explain this by saying that we have an inadequate grasp of the real relations dialectic helps us organize into a theory. He thinks that we go wrong because we uncritically accept thoughts that perception occasions. The perceptions themselves are never false. So, to prevent ourselves from forming false beliefs, we should subject the thoughts we get to confirming and disconfirming.

"Falsehood and error always depend upon the intrusion of opinion" (Letter to Herodotus, X.50). "Error would not have occurred, if we had not experienced some other movement in ourselves, conjoined with, but distinct from, the perception of what is presented. From this movement, if it be not confirmed or be contradicted, falsehood results; while, if it be confirmed or not contradicted, truth results" (Letter to Herodotus, X.51).

We have a perception. It prompts us to think that some proposition is true, but we should not simply believe this proposition is true. Epicurus thinks that this sort of uncritical acceptance is what leads to false beliefs, not our failure to use dialectic as the rationalists understand it.

Epicurus and the Empiricist Tradition

This suggests that the empirical tradition Plato and Aristotle rejected largely disappeared from the historical record but did not go out of existence. Epicurus is part of a revival.

This revival would turn into Pyrrhonian Skepticism.

Perseus Digital Library

Plato, Phaedo
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon

ἀπολαυστός, apolaustos, adjective, "enjoyable,"
ἀπολαύω, apolauō, verb, "have enjoyment of [a thing],"
ἀταραξία, (ἀ ("not") +‎ ταράσσω ("trouble, disturb"), ataraxia, noun, "impassiveness, calmness,"
θόρυβος, thorybos, noun, "noise, uproar, clamour"
ἐπιλογίζομαι, epilogizomai, verb, "reckon over, conclude, consider,"
ταραχή, tarachē, noun, "disorder, disturbance, upheaval,"
τετραφάρμακος, tetrapharmakos, adjective, "compounded of four drugs"

Arizona State University Library. Loeb Classical Library:
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Volume II: Books 6-10


"Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus, for instance, is replete with references to memory. He tells us to remember firmly the basic principles of Epicureanism, in fact to memorise them. What is behind these admonitions does not seem to be just the trivial view that if one wants to be an Epicurean one had better remember the basic tenets of Epicureanism, but rather the view that our whole way of thinking is determined by our memory, by what we remember having experienced and what we have committed to memory in the, perhaps wrong, belief that it is the case. It is tempting to think that Epicurus' rejection of dialectic or logic is related to this (see D.L. x.31). As understood by Platonists, Peripatetics or Stoics, dialectic or logic, as we noted earlier, is based on the assumption that there are certain relations between terms or propositions, or rather their counterparts in the world, such that in virtue of these relations certain things follow from, or are excluded by, other things. Dialectic teaches us to see these sometimes complex relations and to reason accordingly. In fact, this is what it is to reason, to argue on the basis of one's adequate or inadequate grasp of, or insight into, these relations. So when Epicurus rejects dialectic, one is inclined to assume that he is rejecting this rationalist view of thought and inference, just as the empiricists reject dialectic for this, too" (Michael Frede, "An Empiricist View of Knowledge: Memorism," 240-241. Companions to Ancient Thought. I. Epistemology, 221-246. Cambridge University Press, 1990).