THE PUrpose of life: enjoyment (Epicurus)

Philosophies of Life

For your last exercise in this class, you will be asked to consider three influential ideas about the purpose of human life, and to explore your own thinking around this question at this point in time. What is the purpose of life?

We will be looking at the way two different “dead White guys” and one (recently) dead Back woman have explored what makes for a satisfying life for a human being. Two are philosophers, and one is a culture critic and poet, but all are practicing "philosophy" in the sense that one of the goals of philosophy is to use thought to understand why we are here or how we should live.

The first thinker is Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher who lived shortly after Plato. He thinks that what we should aim for in life is enjoyment or pleasure We should make ourselves happy.. He has an unusual definition of what will truly make us happy, but I hope you will consider what he had to say.

The second thinker is Friedrich Nietzsche, a radical German philosopher who wrote in the second half of the 1800s and whose works can still be shocking to some and stimulating to others today. We will look at aspects of Nietzsche’s writing where he proclaims that creation, experimentation, and evolution are the best things for a human being to do with their life. The purpose of life is to create yourself, as a work of art.

The final thinker is bell hooks, an African American poet, essayist, educator, and cultural critic, who dies in 2021. hooks was a feminist and wrote extensively on race, gender, the media and society in contemporary America. Her 2000 book All about Love attempts a multifaceted and revisionist philosophy of love as the underlying human virtue.

All of these thinkers can broadly be considered Humanists, meaning that they do not look to a religion to tell them what the meaning of life is, but instead think they must figure it out for themselves, based on observation, reflection, and critical thinking.

In exploring your own philosophy of life, I invite you to take this approach. You may come back to a religious point of view, but you will have arrived there by thinking about it.

As you read about these thinkers, I encourage you to understand how they thought in as accurate a way as possible, even though it will probably be different from exactly how you think. At the same time, ask yourself how close or far you are from their way of seeing things. Your challenge is to understand them in your own terms, and understand yourself better and how you are similar or different from them.

Epicurus

The Greek philosopher (341-270 BCE) lived not long after Plato, whose Allegory of the Cave began this class. In his day, Epicurus was widely seen as a dangerous sort of "anti-philosopher," and, like Socrates, as a potential corrupter of society, but for very different reasons. His ideas were radically at odds with those of the priests, rulers, and other philosophers of Ancient Athens. He moved out of Athens and set up a country house as a sort of commune, where he and his friends and followers lived, away from the false ideals and hubbub of the big city life.

When people heard that he was preaching a philosophy of pleasure, they imagined – as most of us would – feasts, orgies, and all kinds of hedonistic excess. The ancient Greek version of a rap party video. (If you don't know the word hedonist, it will be explained more below.)

As you will see, this was not what Epicurus was advocating, I'm afraid. The official reading for this week is a contemporary look at Epicurus by Alain de Botton (link in sidebar). As de Botton says,

Those who had heard the rumours must have been surprised to discover the real tastes of the philosopher of pleasure. There was no grand house. The food was simple, Epicurus drank water rather than wine, and was happy with a dinner of bread, vegetables and a palmful of olives. “Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast whenever I like,” he asked a friend. Such were the tastes of a man who had described pleasure as the purpose of life. (de Botton, p. 55)

What Epicurus proposed was a rejection of the high life that the rich and famous of Athens thought was the definition of happiness, as well as a rejection of the various gods and abstract philosophies that more "highbrow" Athenians thought mattered. The “powers that be” thus all felt threatened by Epicurus, because he didn’t care about all the things they held as of utmost important: power, the gods, wealth, abstract philosophy and intellectual authority, fame, or the latest crazes and fashions in the city. He was closer to being something like an anti-establishment hippie.

The Priests didn’t like his ideas because they focused on this life, the body, and enjoyment, as opposed to morality and divine things. The Philosophers didn’t like him because he thought the goal of philosophy was not to attain higher truths or “The Good” but to learn how to enjoy life. (As I suggested, he was "the anti-philosophy philosopher" in some ways.) Those with political power, wealth, and influence didn’t like him because he thought their world was one of empty vanity. He had no respect for privilege, power, or wealth, and he broke down social barriers. Among other things, he was very radical for his day in that he invited women to be equal partners in his philosophical discussions and lifestyle. He even allowed slaves to take part in his school. He suggested that the status symbols and power and wealth of the city were foolish wastes of time that would not ultimately make people happy. According to Epicurus, pursuing fame, power, wealth, and status actually made most people unhappy.

The three things you need to be happy

In the reading, de Botton draws attention to the three things that Epicurus thought were essential to a happy life. I'm sorry to say they were not sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll!

1. FRIENDS
Most of us can probably follow Epicurus on his first idea: that you need friends for a happy life. Some people might disagree and be loners or feel they can achieve happiness without having close friends, but Epicurus firmly believed that without friends one cannot lead a happy life.

Notice that he does not say that you need a partner or a family. These might actually distract you from the quiet life of enjoyment Epicurus thinks is best. Friends are the way to go. (Perhaps “friends with benefits” would be okay too.)

Some of the reasons Epicurus thought friends are crucial: Loneliness is terrible. You should never eat alone, according to Epicurus. It can be argued that we don’t really exist unless we are acknowledged by other people. True friends accept us as we are and understand us. Without this kind of acceptance and understanding, life is very hard and perhaps for some people unbearable. “A handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not.” (de Botton, p. 58)

Notice that Epicurus distinguishes true friends from false ones. We might have a thousand Facebook friends, but no true ones. You can’t buy true friendship. Friends are better than fans, or people who fawn on you. Kanye West and Donald Trump may have many “friends” who are only interested in what they can get from them.

2. FREEDOM
The second thing Epicurus thinks you need to have for a happy life is freedom. On some level this is obvious. If you are imprisoned or enslaved, you are unlikely to be happy. But for Epicurus freedom is more radical. We have to be free from the things most “free” people are enslaved by: status, the opinions of others, money, work, possessions. To be really free, you can’t work for other people or for a salary. Epicurus recommends you create a commune with good friends, grow your own food, and enjoy your work and leisure time as your own.

Most people are “working for the man,” as they used to say. They are spending their lives working for somebody else, doing what that person wants them to do for eight or nine hours every day, in order to get money, to which they have also become enslaved. Such a person is "enslaved" to a boss, to money, to possessions, to status, to societal expectations. Epicurus believes you need to be as free as you can possibly be from all those forms of "enslavement."

The philosopher thinks you should stay away from the big city and all the glittering things people are obsessed with there. In our day, it might be designer goods, the latest technology, celebrities and their lifestyles, etc. If you are always thinking you need those things to be happy, you will never be happy.

3. THOUGHT
Finally - and this will be the hardest for most people to go along with - Epicurus believed you need to do thinking and to have time for thinking in order to be happy.

If you don’t have time to think, you will never know what will really make YOU happy, and you will never stop chasing after things that distract you from thinking. Time to think allows you to free yourself from anxiety, to explore what really matters to you deeply.

You might argue that thinking is what makes us unhappy. It makes us get down on ourselves, it makes us worry, it causes anxiety – and certainly overthinking can have those effects. But Epicurus, a bit like those who recommend the Cognitive approach to anxiety, argued that you can only fight negative and frightening thinking by doing more thinking, not by trying to avoid thinking. You have to actually think things through.

Epicurus assumed that most of us are terrified of death. Thoughts of death are the most anxiety-producing thoughts. He assured his followers, however, that if you think about death carefully enough you will discover that it is not really anything to fear. As with the Cognitive Therapy practitioners, the way to stop negative thinking from making you miserable, is by thinking more (and more carefully and realistically), not trying to avoid thought.

Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world. If we avoid thinking, or have no time to think, we will never know ourselves, never make decisions of our own, and never be truly happy.

Until the pandemic, most of us were hurtling through life, hurrying to try to accomplish the things other people want for us, to live up to the expectations society seems to have and that we have come to impose on ourselves – to be successful, famous, desirable, loved, powerful, etc. Epicurus would say we need to slow down and spend time in reflection, to get in touch with what really can make us happy, as opposed to what everyone is telling us is important. Part of every happy life is reflection. Without thinking, we are not free. Without freedom, we cannot be truly happy.

Another thing about thinking is that it is a free form of entertainment. If you can free yourself of relentlessly negative thinking, your mind can become a three-ring circus of creative and amusing thoughts.

Epicurus on material possessions

You can probably guess how Epicurus would have felt about all the STUFF we are focused on owning in our materialistic modern lives, and how owning things is treated by our culture as an ideal of freedom, status, and happiness for us. He thought that was completely wrong-headed. Here are a few of his statements on the subject of possessions:

“A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs and monarchs.”

“The things you really need are few and easy to come by; but the things you can imagine you need are infinite and you will never be satisfied.”

The things you actually need are food, shelter, air, water, and (in colder climates at least) clothing. To this list of the things we need in order to survive as animals, Epicurus adds the three exclusively human things he thinks we need: friends, freedom, and thought.

The reason he doesn’t think possessions are important is because for most people they involve giving up your freedom. We become enslaved to what today we would call consumerism and status. We practice retail therapy instead of thinking about what is actually important.

Most of us have to work, and we need to work harder or longer if we want to have more or more luxurious possessions. When he says that it is not easy to own a lot of possessions “without servility to mobs and monarchs” we might translate that into modern terms something like this: It’s not easy for most people to have a lot of stuff without being enslaved to a boss or the pressures of "society." The “mob” of today might be social media or what the advertisers try to convince us we need. The monarch of today isn’t the king or the president or the prime minister: it’s your boss.

Beyond that, the desire for stuff is insatiable. There is always something else for us to buy or own. There is no conceivable end to the human's potential desire for stuff. The English poet William Blake put this forward in a more affirmative way in his 1788 book of sayings There is no natural religion:

More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man

If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal
lot [fate]

The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite

If Blake's view of a godlike human wanting to have it "All" sounds like the right attitude to you, hold on a week or so. You may find Nietzsche's ideas about life more attractive than Epicurus's.

When thinking about the things you imagine will make you happy, Epicurus encourages you to ask yourself two questions:

1. Is it natural to want this?
2. Is it necessary to have this?

If you find that it is neither natural nor necessary, Epicurus encourages you to consider crossing it off the list of things you pursue to make yourself happy. As you can see, Epicurus thinks of a human being in terms of basic needs, not luxuries, and suggests that it’s not worth exchanging your freedom and time to reflect and enjoy for more money so you can have more luxuries.

In the reading, Alain de Botton creates this table to show how the things people thought were important for happiness in Epicurus’s time would have been categorized by Epicurus:

I think we could translate some of these into modern terms:

Natural but unnecessary

• To  own your own home
• A swimming pool
• Eating out at expensive restaurants
• Servants or employees
• Fancy food

And we could probably add to his list of "Neither natural nor necessary": immense wealth, status.

For Epicurus, ideals like fame and power are wrong-headed human perversions, distracting us from what brings true enjoyment. A person who can enjoy a simple bowl of brown rice, with a circle of true friends, without having to be enslaved to the Rat Race of Western civilization can enjoy it FULLY, in undistracted, free, calmness of thought. Most of us, once we have enough, however, are chugging champagne without even fully enjoying it. We are focused on looking like we are having a good time, on judging whether or not we are having a good enough time, and always on getting more. As Epicurus saw it, this kind of striving mostly just makes you unhappy.

Live small?

If you have hopes of being a major celebrity or the first black female Prime Minister or the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or of owning the moon, it could well seem to you like Epicurus’s advice is basically the unappealing two-word motto: LIVE SMALL (and make time and space to enjoy the things you have). I see parallels in the Buddhist wisdom of divesting oneself from attachment and suffering, in the practice of mindfulness as a way of attaining greater appreciation and clarity, or even in the "Minimalist" movement you find people promoting on YouTube.

Are these worthy goals for a human being? Isn't there more to life than a bowl of brown rice and the time to fully enjoy it? Whether you want to live large like a thug, save the world, devote yourself to a family, or strive for the ultimate truth, the Epicurean ideal may strike you as paltry: relax and enjoy the little pleasures of life, work as little as possible, spend time tripping in your own head, hang with some friends.

Ataraxia: the highest state of being -- or just chilling and going nowhere?

When Epicurus talks about happiness and pleasure as the purpose of life, he means above all the state of ataraxia. That is a word used by Greek philosophers for a fully conscious and aware state of alert calm, characterized by freedom from stress, anxiety, and worry. Mindful calm.

Epicurus had some tendency to define the goal of life in negative terms. His school of thought believed that the goal of life is to enjoy aponia (the absence of pain, both physically and mentally) and ataraxia (the absence of mental distress or disturbance). Those who have experienced intense physical pain know the sweet pleasure of simply being not in pain again, and those who have suffered serious anxious will recognize the bliss one can feel when one's mind is at ease. For a true Epicurean just being alive is quite pleasurable when you are not in pain or anxious.

A quick detour into Aristippus: True hedonism in a more modern sense

The absence of pain and distress might seem like a very modest kind of hedonism. Hedonism is a philosophical commitment to maximizing pleasure, and comes from the Greek word for pleasure. A more typical modern understanding of the term could be associated with a different Ancient Greek philosopher: Aristippus (c. 435 – c. 356 BCE). Aristippus, like Plato, was a student of Socrates, but whereas Plato viewed the purpose of life to be to control the passions and strive for higher things - justice and "The Good" - Aristippus kind of went in the opposite direction. If you don't warm to Epicurus's view of pleasure, you might like the more active and disruptive pleasure that Aristippus's brand of hedonism recomments.

This is close to the rap party video view of pleasure. Life is short: grab as much pleasure as you can in the moment. Aristippus reasoned (1) we are alive right now; (2) we will be dead some day; (3) pleasure feels good and now is the time when we can feel. So, we should devote all of our time to seeking out the most intense pleasure possible
“The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.” Truly an anti-Plato position, and even an anti-Epicurean one, but this sounds more like the " hedonism" that was popular with teenagers when I was younger, and has been promoted by many a mainstream media product.

But back to Epicurus's hedonism

If you have the basic necessities of life plus of course FRIENDS, FREEDOM, and TIME AND SPACE TO THINK, Epicurus believes you can attain the state of pleasure, and continue to enjoy it. When I think of "ataraxia," I think especially of being relaxed and unanxious, because so much of my life has been the opposite. I associate the condition of ataraxia with just chilling, or the most carefree play of childhood, when one is not focused on anything particular and can enjoy the wonder of the simplest things. Lying in the grass on a sunny day and staring up at the clouds, without any immediate responsibilities or pressures, from others or oneself.

According to Epicurus, just being alive, without the distractions of the world and worry about the past and the future - with all the goals, ideals, guilts, fears, etc quieted and put in perspective - is quite pleasurable. It doesn’t require “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” - sensational stimulants - to feel this kind of pleasure. Ataraxia is the calm pleasure of just being alive, untroubled by unnecessary and unnatural desires and fears, but open to pleasant experiences as they occur.

I believe I have experienced this state myself at times in my life, so I know it exists. I had something close to a nervous breakdown when I was about 21 years old, and afterwards I was left in a strange state of "Zen openness." Everything suddenly popped; the world seemed more vivid and alive, and it didn't have to be anything special. I remember sitting on a bus with a bag lunch one time and suddenly getting a whiff of the tuna sandwich I had packed in my knapsack. It was an experience of indescribable fullness and gorgeousness. I can fully understand how a bowl of plain brown rice can be utterly delicious when you actually pay attention to it, without thinking about everything that it isn't, and everything that you aren't.

Gradually, I lost touch with that state of being. I got a girlfriend, I went to university, I worked hard, I tried to succeed, I joined society and tried to become a big shot. I became attached to all sorts of real and imaginary things that I believed I needed in order to be happy. Now, I only get back to that place through meditation (rarely) or sometimes when I have smoked some marijuana. Some people claim that psilocybin can bring you to this feeling of relaxed oneness, at least temporarily. Epicurus claimed that philosophy and the lifestyle he recommended could do it.

It could be argued that Epicurus almost wants you to become an animal again, to let go of all the stuff that makes humans "special" or gives our lives meaning or makes us worry all the time. You can still talk about ideas and stuff - he was, after all, still a philosopher - but your main focus should be on relaxing your mind and letting go, so that you can enjoy with your body all the riches that are right in front of you: quiet time alone, a bowl of brown rice, a friend.

Other philosophers tend to think there is more to life than being happy. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, for instance, once wrote "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Though they might not disagree with everything Epicurus argues, the two philosophers we will study over the next two weeks definitely think that there is more to human fulfillment than just enjoying yourself.