Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 057 - Nothing to Fear - Epicureans on Death and the Gods.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lieberman Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Nothing to Fear, Epicureans on Death and the Gods. It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. So says Woody Allen. But I don't believe him about not being afraid to die. For one thing, this is the same guy who said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying. For another thing, let's face it, we're all afraid to die. I can remember being about 15 years old, and having a sudden crushing realization in English class that one day I would cease to exist. An intimation of utter nothingness. Not black emptiness, but genuine nothingness, non-existence. Then the bell rang and we went to lunch. Some day, of course, the bell really will ring for me, for you, for everyone. We hope to go peacefully in our sleep at an advanced age, but one way or another we will all go to find out whether Socrates was right to argue in the Phaedo that death is mere separation of the soul from the body, or rather total oblivion. Either way, I'm not looking forward to it. Epicurus believed that the purpose of philosophy was to relieve human suffering. He remarked in fact that a philosopher who provides no therapy against this is just wasting words. As a hedonist, he naturally took physical pain to be an important form of suffering and offered advice on how to avoid it. But mental pain is worse than physical pain, just as the pleasure that lies in the absence of all pain is better than the volatile physical pleasures of sex, food, and drink. If Epicureanism has a chief aim, it is to dispel mental anguish, anxiety, and fear. Thus, the Epicureans summarize their teacher's message as follows. The gods are not to be feared, nor is death. Pleasure is ready to hand, and pain readily endured. This is the so-called tetra-pharmacon, or fourfold remedy, quoted by authors like the first century AD Epicurean author Philodemus. It's significant that it is described as a remedy. For Epicurus, ethics is like a medical regime, but for the soul rather than the body. And it is the soul we need to discuss if we're to understand Epicurus's arguments against fearing the gods and death. The importance of these two sources of anxiety is clear from the fact that they make up the first half of the tetra-pharmacon. We've already seen how Epicurus would defend the other two bits of reassurance, that we can always find pleasure and always overcome pain. Just think again of his ability to master agony on his deathbed by thinking of pleasant times spent with friends. But death and God? Those are harder nuts to crack, and the theory of pleasure won't suffice by itself. Instead, as I say, we'll need to look at what Epicurus has to say about the soul. If you were to guess what he might say, you'd have a good chance of getting it right on the first try. You already know that Epicurus is a materialist who believes that the world consists entirely of atoms and void. So you won't be surprised to discover that he thinks the soul is a material thing made of atoms. But not just any atoms. Epicurus, like other philosophers including Aristotle and the Stoics, believes that the soul is like warm air. Sometimes soul is associated with pneuma, which is Greek for breath. This is, of course, where we get words like pneumatic. This makes a certain amount of sense. We need to keep breathing to live, and so long as we live, we are warm. Epicurus, of course, puts an atomic spin on the theory. He says in one of his letters that the soul is made of atoms that resemble hot air or wind. It also contains other atoms of a very special sort, even finer than the atoms of wind. This makes the soul uniquely capable of producing sensation. Because this complex of warm, windy, and special atoms is so fine and subtle, it can be dispersed into every part of the body, which is why every part of us is able to feel pain, pleasure, and other physical sensations. But for the same reason, the soul cannot survive outside the body. Epicurus believes that such a fine network of atoms would simply disperse if extracted from the body. Equally important for Epicurus' purposes is that even if the soul could survive apart from the body, it would not be able to have any sensory experience. Sensation requires not just a soul, not just a body, but a mingling of the two. Our soul and body are, Epicurus says, affected along with one another. The reason this is important is that it helps to show why we should not fear death. We'll come back to this in a moment, but for now I'll just mention the main upshot of the theory, which is that upon death my soul will cease to exist. Even if my soul could survive, though, it would be unable to experience pain or anything else. Thus, it is doubly pointless to fear painful experiences after death. Woody Allen can rest easy. As it turns out, he won't be there once he dies. Unfortunately, this will only comfort Woody Allen if he believes that his soul is really made of fine atoms distributed throughout his body. But what if the Socrates of the Phaedo was right? What if we each have an immortal, perhaps immaterial, soul which will allow us to go to Tartarus or wherever evil souls are sent to be punished for their sins? Clearly, this is ruled out by Epicurus' atomic theory. But, as he points out, the theory does include something immaterial or incorporeal void. As we saw, Epicurus understands void not just as empty space, but as that which cannot physically interact with other things. There's an important lesson there. If something is not material, it cannot affect or be affected by anything else. So, the Platonist material soul, if there were one, would no more be able to have bad experiences than a patch of empty space. It would be causally cut off from everything, including anything that could hurt it. I sense, though, that you're still nervous about this whole death thing. Perhaps I can, with Epicurus' help, offer you further reassurance. Let's think a bit more about what it means to have a sensory experience. This must be some kind of physical interaction. That much is clear from our everyday experience, given that we need to touch or be placed near things in order to sense them. Plus, as we just saw, without physical interaction, nothing can be affected, and having sensation is surely a way of being affected. So, consider vision, for instance. What must be happening here is that visual images are coming to our eyes from the things we see. These images, the Greek word is eidola, must be made of atoms, because, well, everything is made of atoms. When the images strike our eyes, the presence of soul atoms in the eyes allows us to register that impact as a visual experience, and so on with the other senses. This analysis can be extended to cover apparently non-sensory experiences, like when we imagine something. This, too, must have some physical cause. The Evocurean poet Lucretius suggests that if we imagine a centaur, for instance, it will be because an image of a horse has gotten tangled together with one of a man. We are able to receive these tangled images, too. A similar explanation can be provided for dreams, and in short, all our experiences, even imaginary ones, are somehow grounded in a physical interaction with the atomic world around us. You may find some of the details there unconvincing, but you have to admit that this particular dose of Epicurus' medicine does do what it says on the label. It is a theory of sensation, and experience in general, that makes it impossible for a disembodied or immaterial soul to experience anything, whether painful or otherwise. In fact, this theory of soul and sensation looks like it was designed precisely with that outcome in mind. It is a theory designed to dispel the fear of death, not a theory designed to settle once and for all the nature of the soul. As far as Epicurus is concerned, so long as his theory is consistent with experience, and so long as it achieves the aim of removing fear, he can say, mission accomplished. His mission is to remove fear, after all. And one can consider his whole psychological theory as just an elaborate argument against the fear of death. The Epicureans didn't stop there, though. Lucretius devoted the entire third book of his poem, On the Nature of Things, to arguments against fearing death. It's been counted that he offers 33 of them, enough to supply you with an argument a day for a whole month, with a couple left over if you're feeling particularly nervous. The most fundamental point, however, is that we will no longer exist after death. Why should you be afraid of a situation where you will no longer be present? Lucretius presents a powerful version of this idea, often called his symmetry argument. It asks you to compare the time after your death to the time before your birth. In one case, you will no longer exist, in the other you did not yet exist. But the two situations are the same insofar as you aren't there. You see nothing fearful and remember nothing awful about the time before you were born, so neither should you fear or expect anything awful in the time after death. Lucretius admits that in theory the atoms that make up your soul could one day re-form to make another soul, especially given the infinity of future time available. But, by the same token, they could have formed a soul in the distant past, yet we remember nothing of that. So he thinks I can assume that there will be no continuity of experience between me and a possible future person who has the same soul atoms. Even if my soul is there, I won't be there. In a couple of weeks I'll be interviewing a leading expert on Epicureanism who has written extensively on the arguments against fearing death, so I don't want to dwell on it for too much longer in this episode. But I should at least mention an obvious possible objection. You might argue that it is not really painful experiences or torment after death that I fear. As I said, when I was 15, what really got to me was the sheer idea of not existing anymore. Isn't that worth fearing? The Epicureans say no, for the same reason that it isn't worth looking forward to. If it is neither painful nor pleasant, it is neither to be feared nor hoped for. The only possible reason to fear it is that I will miss out on the pleasures I could have if I were to live longer. But Epicurus and Lucretius rule out even this basis for anxiety. Not only is it self-defeating—I shouldn't ruin the time I do have by worrying about how long it will last—it is also to misunderstand the nature of pleasure. As we saw last time, Epicurus thinks that the painless state, which he calls static pleasure, is already the most blissful condition for man. Someone who has achieved this state needs no improvement, whether by stuffing more kinetic pleasures into his life or by prolonging that life. The whole point of static pleasure is that one wants for nothing, and that includes not wanting things you can't have, like immortality. As Epicurus puts it, when it comes to death, we all live in a city with no defensive walls. The only way to defeat this enemy is not to fear it at all. Let's suppose that we've come this far with Epicurus. We've signed up to the atomism, we've trained ourselves to be content with modest pleasures, though we'll be glad to partake of luxurious pleasures should they come along, we've made good friends to give us security against bad fortune, and we've stopped fearing death. Serenity beckons as we sit in the garden, chatting and memorizing the master's precepts. Unfortunately, there's one last thing to worry about—the gods. If there are gods, and they are anywhere near as temperamental as Homer makes them seem in the Iliad, we in fact have a great deal to worry about. These are mighty, terrifying beings who need to be propitiated lest they should, well, do really bad stuff to us. In this life, they might bring it about that we and our friends are subjected to all manner of torment. If I may allude briefly to a different ancient culture, I refer you to a jolly little tale called the Book of Job, which shows what a god with a vivid imagination can inflict on us if he really sets his mind to it. And that's nothing compared to what the gods might do to us in the afterlife. All that stuff about atoms and sensation is well and good, but I'm off to the temple to sacrifice to Athena just in case. As it turns out, Epicurus would not discourage us from going off to make those sacrifices. Epicureans generally did not avoid participating in traditional religious ritual, but this was not because they feared what the gods might do if they failed to participate. Epicurus teaches that the gods are no more to be feared than death. He asks us to consider what he calls our preconception of a god. As you might remember from episode 55, preconceptions are rough-and-ready notions that we derive from sensation and memory. In this case, our basic idea of a god is a being who is supremely blessed and everlasting. Everyone, or at least just about everyone Epicurus knew about, accepts the existence of gods, so there is no point denying their existence. And yet most people have ridiculous ideas about the gods, ideas incompatible with the basic preconception of what it is to be divine. For instance, they think the gods fight with each other, get angry, and so on. This is clearly incompatible with their blessedness, especially from Epicurus' point of view. Remember, this is a guy who thinks that blessedness consists in being entirely untroubled. Clearly, then, the gods will not be bothered about whether we sacrifice to them. Indeed, they will not be troubled about us at all. They will show us neither favor nor displeasure, since even paying attention to the petty actions of humans would compromise their beatific calm. Epicurus also points out that the world is full of evils, which is hardly compatible with the idea that the gods are exercising providence over us. Rather than blaming evils on these blessed divinities, we should simply accept that the gods are not getting their hands dirty by trying to arrange the world around us. Epicurus seems to be radicalizing the theological critique delivered by Plato, and, before him, by the pre-Socratic Xenophanes. Both of them complain that traditional ideas about gods were degrading to the majesty of the divine. Epicurus agrees, but he goes further by effectively removing them from any interaction with us or the world we live in. Now, I know what you're thinking. If the gods are this remote, why believe that they exist at all? At first blush, Epicurus' answer is a simple one. We should believe in them because we have a preconception about them, as we just saw. But how can we have a preconception of them if we've never had direct experience of a god? My preconception of giraffes is meant to arise from seeing giraffes, but I don't remember ever seeing a god. Remember, though, that Epicurus extends his account of sensation to include things like imaginary and dream images. In the same way, he supposes that our preconception of the gods arises from images we have received. He allows us to picture them as outsized humans, very much like us, because this would be the most dignified form to assign to them. The later Epicurean Philodemus even suggests that the gods must speak Greek, because it is the best language. This account has led some interpreters to think that, in his heart of hearts, Epicurus was indeed an atheist. This image of god as a big human, who has all the best features I can think of, sounds dangerously like a fiction. It might arise through the same sort of process that gives me images of centaurs. I've seen big things like giraffes, and I've seen humans, so I can combine the concepts to get the idea of god as a big human. Perhaps, then, gods are no more real than centaurs. Neither Epicurus nor his followers come out and say that they are atheists, but you'd hardly expect them to. As it was, their opponents were already accusing them of adopting a view that might as well be atheistic, since the Epicurean gods are utterly uninvolved with us. Without trying to settle the issue, I will just remind you that the point of his theology is the same as that of his psychology, to dispel anxiety. The question is not whether there are gods, but whether we should be afraid of them. They might be fictional, or real and unconcerned with us, either way, there is nothing to fear. Epicurus has another reason to hold on to the preconception of the divine, which is that the gods represent an ethical ideal to which we can aspire. Remember his provocative statement that someone who lacks all pain and expects to stay that way lives a life like that of Zeus. This shows how useful it is to have a conception of god. It is the conception of a being who is utterly free of anxiety and suffering. In other words, Epicurus agrees with Plato that our goal should be likeness to god, insofar as is possible for us. As a rule, the possibility is unfortunately rather remote. Humans do by nature seek the good, namely pleasure. That much is crucial to the Epicurean cradle argument, which we looked at last time. But we show little wisdom in the way we pursue pleasure, often bringing pain upon ourselves even while seeking pleasure, for instance by overeating or dating exciting people we know will break our hearts in the end. Worse still is our tendency to dwell on upsetting fears, thus ruining our chances of attaining and keeping the godlike state of static pleasure. This is why Epicurus offers therapy for those fears, trying to argue us out of our anxieties. Admirable though this may be, it might be thought a waste of time. Sure, sometimes a false belief can make me afraid, but that isn't how it always works. I, for instance, am not crazy about flying. I know perfectly well that the plane is exceedingly unlikely to crash, that the car ride to the airport was probably more dangerous than the flight, and so on, yet my palms still sweat at the slightest sign of turbulence. It's no good trying to convince me the plane is almost certainly not going to crash. I already know that, but I'm scared nonetheless. So it is with fear more generally. Even if I came to accept the Epicurean arguments against fearing death and the gods, I might still be afraid. But, to their credit, the Epicureans understood the difficulty of extinguishing fear. Epicurus himself did not merely write down arguments, he encouraged his followers to repeat them and think of them daily. Later Epicureans came up with their own ways of delivering the master's message in ever more effective ways. There is no better example than Lucretius, who set down the message in Latin verse. The beauty of the poetry, says Lucretius, is intended to help people ingest the philosophical contents, as one smears honey on the rim of a cup to get a child to take his medicine. We'll be concentrating on his honeyed words next time. Join me then for another dose of Epicureanism, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.