How to Be an Epicurean

PART I

1

Back to Basics

The totality is made up of bodies and void … Beyond these two things nothing can be conceived … Among bodies, some are compounds, and some are those things from which compounds have been made. And these are atomic and unchangeable …

Epicurus

There are certain particles whose concurrences, movements, order, position and shapes produce fires; different combinations of them form things of different nature, but they themselves are unlike fire or any other thing …

Lucretius

Let’s start with a set of questions – large ones, with significant implications – to which the Epicurean has a definite answer. Is there anything completely indestructible and permanent in the universe? If so, what is it? And why does the Epicurean answer to such an abstract question matter?

In thinking about endurance, we can immediately rule out tables and chairs, houses and skyscrapers, pens and pencils, and all other objects that human beings fabricate. All of these items have finite useful lives ranging from a few months to a few thousand years. Any of these items can be broken up by taking a crowbar or a wrecking ball to it, or just by snapping it in two in the case of pens and pencils. Left to themselves, over hundreds or thousands of years, each of these items will crumble into dust. Plastic bags, we have learned to our dismay, will persist for an astonishingly long time, perhaps a thousand years in landfills, but eventually they, too, will be broken down by light or heat, or by chemicals or micro-organisms.

Very well, what about enormous natural objects like mountains or the ocean? They are not so easy to destroy, but enough nuclear weapons or a very large asteroid could flatten the Himalayas. And in time – in hundreds of millions or several billion years – all life on our planet will have long been extinct. The earth will be consumed by the sun within 5 billion years, and our galaxy will collapse.

What, then, about the chemical elements – hydrogen, carbon, uranium and so on? There are many competing scenarios for the end of the universe as we know it and the disappearance of every galaxy, but in all of them the chemical elements, too, will eventually vanish.

Even time and space, and the so-called elementary particles, the quarks and gluons and bosons, will cease to exist, according to current theory.

But, surely something must continue to exist! The universe can never wind down into nothing … zero … total annihilation …?

The Epicurean Atom

The ancient Epicureans argued that everything in our experience is perishable and will someday perish. But once something exists, they reasoned, it cannot just become nothing. Correspondingly, the entire universe could not have come out of nothing. It follows that the universe must have emerged from something and that something will always exist, no matter how broken up the objects of experience come to be.

If they were right – and let’s go along with their reasoning – after the destruction of every man-made object, every geographical feature, every star and planet, and every chemical element, and after the disappearance of time and space, something must be left from which a new universe could be rebuilt.

From the time that human beings began to philosophise, many came to the conclusion that the eternal something that existed before the universe ever appeared and that can maintain it or even outlast it must be intelligent and creative – a Mind with a Plan. Creation stories take many different forms, but they have in common the idea that there must have been a definite beginning to the world and that it was brought into being for some purpose by its Creator. Human beings were the special concern of this powerful entity, and the rest of the universe was constructed according to the needs and characteristics of human beings and the grand plan of the Creator for them.

Epicurus rejected these assumptions. He maintained to the contrary that the elements of the universe are eternal and uncreated. There is no ruling mind or master plan involving them. His reasoning begins from the idea of destruction rather than from the idea of construction.

Destruction occurs when the parts of a thing, whether a boulder, or a house, or an animal body, are separated from one another by tearing, grinding, smashing, chopping, wearing away or being exploded. The truly indestructible and permanent things that remain after all such operations are the ‘atoms’ – in Greek, the ‘uncuttables’. Epicurean atoms are the ancestors of the modern scientific concept of the atom, but somewhat differently imagined. They are located and move in the void, the empty space separating visible objects and constituting the tiny gaps between the atoms of different shapes and sizes within objects. Apart from the atoms and the void in which they move and collect, sticking together and interweaving, there is nothing.

These atoms, Epicurus supposed, are far too small to be seen by human eyes. But the existence of tiny indestructible particles composing everything was suggested not only by the reasoning just described but by common observations. ‘A finger ring,’ says Lucretius, ‘is worn thin on the inside; the fall of water drop by drop hollows a stone; we see the stone pavements of streets worn away by the feet of the crowd.’ The atoms were thought to resemble the dust motes that can be seen drifting in a ray of light coming in through a window. According to Epicurus, they have different shapes and sizes, but are devoid of colour, taste and scent. They can move in all directions and have no tendencies except the tendency to fall downwards, and the ability to rebound from one other, and to become entangled with other atoms to form physical objects of perceptible sizes. Frequently, an atom ‘swerves’ in an unpredictable fashion. If they didn’t, they’d all end up in a pile at the ‘bottom’ of the world.

The Epicureans theorised that, given sufficient time, the atoms would fall into stable patterns. They would form multiple worlds, or ‘cosmoi’, each with its own plants and animals, its own stars and sun. Such worlds were, they thought, constantly coming into being and breaking up, furnishing the material for recycling into new worlds.

‘The same atoms,’ Lucretius points out, ‘constitute sky, sea, lands, rivers and sun: the same compose crops, trees and animals.’ But if the atoms have no qualities other than size, shape and motion, how can they give rise to our noisy, colourful, scented, textured world? The answer, he explains, is that combinations and arrangements of atoms can take on qualities they do not possess individually. He employs the analogy of letters and words.

The 26 letters of the Roman alphabet can be combined into at least 100,000 meaningful words of the English language. Some linguists maintain that there are up to 1,000,000 words in English, though nobody’s vocabulary could have that breadth. And from even 100,000 words, millions of intelligible, grammatically correct sentences, expressing millions of thoughts and experiences and observations can be formed. Sentences have ‘emergent’ qualities that the letters and spaces composing them do not possess. They can be gentle or inflammatory. Unlike individual letters, they can communicate information, persuade, mislead, enable actions or start a riot. In an analogous way, Lucretius suggested, starting with combinations of ‘primitive’ elements with only a few properties, everything in the noisy, colourful world of experience can be produced.

When it came to vision and hearing, the ancient Epicureans held the interesting theory that sights and sounds were rather like scents. ‘Various sounds,’ says Lucretius, ‘are continually floating through the air … When we walk near the sea, a briny taste often makes its way into our mouth; … From all objects emanations flow away and are discharged in all directions on every side.’ When we smell bacon frying in another room or catch a whiff of someone’s perfume, we can infer that tiny particles made up of still smaller atoms have drifted into our noses from some distance. Tiny particles flow into our eyes and ears as well. For the Epicureans, when I see a tree, a thin ‘film’ of coloured particles actually detaches itself from the tree and floats into my eyes. Objects, they supposed, were constantly emitting these films from their surfaces and so wearing away, while replenishing their substance by absorbing particles from the environment.

Lucretius noted how dependent colours were on the conditions of observation and the lighting. This was especially noticeable in the case of the sea, whose colour varies from hour to hour. Colour, he inferred, must depend on the arrangement of atoms in physical objects and liquids, and how it is affected by light and affects our eyes. The same must be true for scents and tastes: the particles of what we smell and savour enter our bodies and are perceived as pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. He pointed out that physical processes such as grinding could change a dark substance like horn to a white powder. He drew from this a correct conclusion: objects do not have fixed, permanent colours, though colours appear to be relatively stable. The tomatoes on my countertop, for example, tend to look the same uniform shade of red to me whenever I see them, regardless of the lighting. Artists, however, are trained to notice the subtle differences that depend on illumination.

Today, no one who has actually studied the visual system believes that vision occurs via films peeling off the surface of objects and travelling through the air. Nor do we believe that the entities that will survive the collapse of our universe will be anything like a dust mote, only smaller. Nevertheless, Epicurean physics is the ancestor of our modern physics, and the developing notion of the atom can be traced from its first appearance in ancient Indian and Greek philosophy. Chemistry employs the notion of an atom of a chemical element such as carbon, gold or uranium, and light is often described as a stream of particles, the photons. But we now recognise that the chemical atom is itself a composite of subatomic particles, and that it can be split, liberating vast quantities of energy – a concept the Epicureans did not recognise.

According to Epicurean cosmology, nothing that we are aware of and experience can be considered permanent. Where the universe that we probe with radio telescopes and other devices is concerned, it will probably last for a few more billion years before returning to its elements, or mutating into some new form altogether. We cannot, however, rule it out that some singularity, unpredictable by our current physics, should bring about the total collapse of our universe two minutes from now. Once all of life disappears from the universe, it may never return. Or universes may cycle in and out of existence, reinventing time, space and matter, and bringing forth new and wondrous forms, even intelligent beings.

In the meantime, everything we see, touch and know about not only can be, but will be reduced to its unknown constituents. ‘Time,’ Lucretius says, ‘wholly destroys the things it wastes and sweeps away, and engulfs all their substance.’ Nothing in nature or made by us endures. This applies to our clothes and furnishings, which wear out, to our bodies that weaken and sag and are eventually reduced to dust. It applies to empires, to economic systems and to our relationships with friends and relatives, even to those that are only brought to an end by death.

As long as our world remains intact, however, new things come into existence as the elements move, interact and combine. New life replaces the old with the birth of children and grandchildren: ‘Venus escort[s] each kind of creature back into the light of life.’ We build new houses in new styles, sew new garments and invent new musical, artistic and political forms. We accept and sometimes welcome the changes in our relationships and the formation of new ones. ‘No visible object ever suffers total destruction,’ Lucretius points out, ‘since nature renews one thing from another, and does not sanction the birth of anything unless she receives the compensation of another’s death.’

Atomism: Three Consequences

The Epicureans drew several important consequences from their views about the nature of reality. The world of familiar objects – tables, chairs, plants and animals, puddles and ponds – its colours, scents and sounds, they realised, is an appearance. And although everything except the atom is perishable, some things are more stable and can endure longer than others. Organisms and boulders are stable by comparison with soap bubbles or houses of cards.

Taking this perspective on board, we realise that the perception of what we call reality depends on the observer, who is nothing but an aggregate of atoms (or their modern equivalent). Human beings are similar enough in our constitutions that we can all perceive tables and chairs, plants and animals, airplanes overhead, sails in the distance, red and green traffic lights, when they are a suitable distance away and our eyes are working normally. And human bodies are different enough from one another that we disagree about what dishes, colour combinations and perfumes are appealing. But the visual world of an eagle or a panther, the odiferous world of a dog, or that of a lizard that can smell carrion several miles away, must be different from ours, insofar as their bodies and sensory organs are composed of differently put-together particles. We should beware of supposing that human perception sets any kind of standard, as though other animals enjoy enhanced or suffer from defective versions of our perceptual abilities.

Individual differences can be strongly marked when it comes to the values – positive or negative – we ‘see’ in objects, situations and events, or feel ‘belong’ to them. We believe that strawberries are truly red and truly delicious when ripe, and that premeditated murder for financial gain is truly wrong. But we can only make such confident judgements because certain arrangements of particles, those composing strawberries or making up the pixels on a television screen at a certain time or the print in a newspaper article, make more or less the same impact on different human sensory systems and minds.

When we disagree in our perceptions or our moral judgements, the reason for this is not hard to fathom. We are similar but not identical, and the world presents itself a little differently to everyone. Please don’t jump to the conclusion, however, that an Epicurean must be a relativist who thinks everyone’s judgement is as good as everyone else’s when it comes to questions of taste or morality. The actual Epicurean position on the issue of relativism is far subtler.

To return to the theme of atomic reality, the realisation that everything is fragile and tends with time to get broken up points us in two directions. First, we should not be surprised that our wine glasses break, our houses crumble, stock market runs come to an end and our relationships go awry. Forewarned is forearmed. At the same time, we can appreciate that some objects and situations are more likely to hold up over time, either because, like boulders, they are large, hard and resistant, or because, like the soft human body and like some relationships, they can repair themselves ‘from within’.

The Epicurean recognises that the tendency to fall apart is built into the nature of things. Aware that this is so, she preserves, repairs and restores where this is in her power, and accepts the inevitable when it is not. Further, she recognises that the future is genuinely open and unpredictable. We do not know what combinations will come along or what accidental ‘swerves’ will upset a delicate balance and make for sudden reversals. The Epicurean expects the future to be predictable and stable where experience and science have shown it to be so, but she is always prepared for surprises.

2

How Did We Get Here?

From time everlasting countless elements of things, impelled by blows and by their own weight, have never ceased to move in manifold ways, making all kinds of unions, and experimenting with everything they could combine to create.

Lucretius

Many species of animals must have perished and failed to propagate and perpetuate their race. For every species that you see breathing the breath of life has been protected and preserved from the beginning of its existence either by cunning or by courage or by speed.

Lucretius

The Epicurean believes that there was always something. There was never a time when nothing existed. This something was not, we now know, matter, but the precursor of matter. Today, we are told of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum of virtual particles, flickering in and out of existence, that gave birth to space, time and matter. Explosive events studded space with stars in which the elements of the periodic table were born, and the world we experience now emerged from a disorganised state of matter in motion that fell into stable configurations over perhaps 14 billion years. Our earth was a molten mass spun off from the sun whose geological features – its continents, oceans and mountains – were formed by violent physical processes as it cooled down.

In the ancient seas, some hundreds of millions of years after the formation of planet earth about 4.5 billion years ago, bombardment by lightning is thought to have produced organic molecules, including amino acids, which are composed of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen and which are the building blocks of proteins. These were stable molecules that came together to form protein strands that were also relatively stable and served as templates that formed other molecules into identical strands. Structures that held together and copied themselves proliferated, and varied, adding small increments of complexity and joining up with others. The others just fell apart.

Or perhaps these stable organic molecules were formed somewhere else in the universe and seeded our earth, arriving in meteors or in the icy tails of comets. In either case, the first single-celled organisms emerged around 3.85 billion years ago. Some were able to join up with others to form larger stable complexes. The ‘struggle for existence’ has accordingly been happening for nearly 4 billion years. Time, chance and the operation of the forces described by physics and chemistry have been sufficient to produce everything we see around us.

The Epicurean Theory of Natural Selection

Many of us were taught in school, or at least came away with the impression, that until Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, ‘everybody’ believed that the world had been created by a divinity in seven days, that Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and that Noah’s Ark housed all the originally created animals. This is incorrect. Although Christianity and Judaism share this account, and although the Islamic account is similar to it, the other major religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism, have their own accounts, and stories about how the world came to be are found in every culture on earth.

Further, the ancient Greek philosophers who preceded the Epicureans imagined the origins of the universe and its inhabitants in very different ways, as arising, for example, from the interactions of Love and Strife. Intriguingly, the ancient Epicureans themselves grasped the basic principle of what Darwin later called ‘natural selection’, anticipating some elements of his theory of evolution without having any real notion of the time scales involved and without understanding how one species could possibly give rise to another.

The Epicureans proposed that combinations of atoms taking the form of animals developed by chance or from atomic ‘seeds’ buried in the earth. Animals with features that favoured their survival, such as cunning, courage and speed, were able to persist longer than others that lacked these features. Over time, animals whose internal structure happened to create copy-creating copies of themselves arose by chance. If nature hadn’t stumbled on such devices in the distant past, we wouldn’t be around to observe other living things and to have thoughts about the origins of life. ‘I am anxious that you should carefully avoid the mistake,’ Lucretius says, ‘of supposing that the lustrous eyes were created to enable us to see; or that the tapering shins and thighs were attached to the feet as a base to enable us to walk.’ All such explanations, he adds, ‘are propounded preposterously with topsy-turvy reasoning … Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes.’

This position was long ridiculed as absurd. The ‘random concourse of atoms’, it was alleged, could never have produced functioning living bodies and the regular movements of the heavenly bodies. But thanks to its perceived absurdity, it remained a target of criticism and stayed fresh in the minds of philosophers.

It is not so difficult to believe that the geological features of the earth appeared on account of the laws of physics and chemistry, that no intelligent being had to design them and make them. But life, in its complexity and diversity, has always posed much more of an explanatory problem. How could roses, peacocks and tigers, not to mention human beings, have come into the world through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? How could not only structure, but behaviour, such as the ability to build hives composed of hexagonal cells, as bees do, or the ability to use the stars for orientation in migration, as birds do, have arisen from the unguided motion of atoms in the void? These animals seem to have been intentionally fashioned to be beautiful and adorn the world, or to be good hunters or flyers, or producers of useful foodstuffs for us.

The creative action of God was compared in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions to the activity of fashioning a figure or a pot from clay; references to the ‘hand’ or ‘hands’ and ‘finger’ of God are frequent in our literature. As the ancient painter took over where the ancient potter left off, and decorated the pot with the figures of birds, animals and humans, so God was thought of as making and embellishing the world. The theory of divine creation became more rather than less plausible in the period of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution when the intricacies of the bodies of insects and the tissues of other animals were first revealed by the microscope and when the ‘mechanics’ of the human body, considered to be a kind of hydraulic system working by the pressure of blood, lymph and cerebrospinal fluids in its vessels, began to be worked out. An argument widely considered irrefutable, and frequently presented in the 18th century, went more or less as follows: if I were to find a watch lying in the sand on a beach, I would never suppose that it had come into existence just by chance, or thanks to the laws of physics. And I would not expect a watch to produce little watches. Obviously, such a contrivance had to have been made by an intelligent being that had a purpose in mind, namely telling the time.