Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Catherine Wilson 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008291693

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Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Preface

6 Note on the Text

7  PART I: HOW THE EPICUREAN SEES THE WORLD

8  1. Back to BasicsThe Epicurean AtomAtomism: Three Consequences

9  2. How Did We Get Here?The Epicurean Theory of Natural SelectionDarwin’s Upgrade: How Selection Causes Evolution

10  3. The Material MindThe Mystery of ConsciousnessThe Evolution of Consciousness

11  4. The Story of HumanityThe State of Nature and the Rise of CivilisationAuthority and InequalityThe Lessons of the Past

12  PART II: LIVING WELL AND LIVING JUSTLY

13  5. Ethics and the Care of the SelfPleasure and PainPrudence and its LimitsHedonism and its ProblemsDon’t Suffer in Silence!The Pleasure Merchants

14  6. Morality and Other PeopleMorality vs PrudenceMoral Truth and Moral ProgressWhy Be Moral?What’s Different About Epicurean Morality?

15  7. Beware of Love!The Epicurean ExceptionThe Pains and Pleasures of LoveSexual Morality: Minimising Harm to OthersUsing Your Head

16  8. Thinking About DeathThe Epicurean View of DeathDeath at the Right and Wrong TimesAbortion vs InfanticideSuicide vs EuthanasiaResisting and Accepting MortalityDon’t Count on the Afterlife

17  PART III: SEEKING KNOWLEDGE AND AVOIDING ERROR

18  9. What Is Real?Nature and ConventionThings in BetweenHuman Rights: Natural or Conventional?The Imaginary: UnthingsThe Reality of the Past

19  10. What Can We Know?The Importance of First-Person ExperienceResolving DisagreementIs Empiricism True?

20  PART IV: THE SELF IN A COMPLEX WORLD

21  11. Science and ScepticismScientific ExplanationCan We Trust the Scientists?Living with Uncertainty

22  12. Social Justice for an Epicurean WorldThree Epicurean Philosophers on War, Inequality and WorkEpicurean Political PrinciplesJustice for Women: Nature, History and Convention

23  13. Religion From an Epicurean PerspectiveBelief in the ImaginaryPiety Without SuperstitionCan Religion Be Immoral?Can a Religious Person Be an Epicurean?

24  14. The Meaningful LifeTwo Conceptions of the Meaningful LifeMeaningfulness for the IndividualThe Problem of AffluenceThe Philosophical Perspective

25  15. Should I Be a Stoic Instead?The Stoic SystemToo Much Fortitude?Wrapping Up

26  Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading

27 Acknowledgements

28  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

Philosophy wears garments of many colours and textures. It can stitch together intricate analysis or pretentious bafflegab, deep insight or pseudo-profundity, impartial advice or personal prejudice. It shows up, in flashy or drab form, not only in the lecture rooms of universities but in the New Age section of your local bookshop, shelved next to books about ESP and meditation. Regardless of its patchwork character, philosophy asks you to try to think for yourself, logically and coherently, to create order from chaos. You use ideas and frameworks developed by others, especially the great philosophers of the past, as scaffolding. But ultimately, you make – and use – your own system of the world in deciding what to believe, what to do and what to hope for.

My aim in this book is to build you a piece of scaffolding by introducing you to what, to me, is the most interesting and relevant of the ancient philosophical systems: Epicureanism, a ‘theory of everything’ originating in the observations and ideas of the 3rd-century-BCE Athenian philosopher Epicurus and set into Latin verse by his 1st-century-BCE Roman follower, Titus Carus Lucretius. Although the world has changed since Epicurus wrote and lectured, the issues of money, love, family and politics that he dealt with remain with us in new forms. The Epicurean perspective remains, to my mind, relevant and valuable.

Epicureanism was one of the five major schools of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, existing alongside – and competing for adherents with – Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism and Aristotelianism. Unlike the city-based Platonists and Stoics, Epicurus had decided to ‘live apart’ with his followers. His philosophical school was set in a garden (actually a grove), usually considered to have been located outside the city walls, where philosophy was discussed, meals were taken together, and books and letters were written.

Most of Epicurus’s original writings were lost. The largest known collection of his and his followers’ writings, located in the town of Herculaneum near Naples, was buried in the ash and lava of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. But Lucretius had seen and made use of them more than a century earlier, and several of Epicurus’s philosophical letters and collections of sayings, as well as the reports of ancient commentators, survived.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Lucretius’s Roman contemporary, took an interest in Epicureanism, though he criticised it heavily. His dialogues on religion and moral philosophy show how Epicureanism stacked up against its rival Stoicism, at least from Cicero’s point of view. Largely but not wholly lost to medieval and Renaissance readers, Epicurean philosophy was revived in the 17th century, when it exercised a significant influence on moral and political philosophy, as well as on cosmology, chemistry and physics. The great utilitarian social reformers of 19th-century Britain, as well as the framers of the United States Constitution, paid homage to the Epicurean ideal of human welfare. And Lucretius’s Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things, at first admired mainly for its elegant Latin, came to be considered a model for the vivid and memorable communication of abstract scientific ideas. At the same time, as you will see in what follows, Epicureanism had certain features that shocked, or at least unsettled, many who encountered it.

Before I start, more about me: as a lecturer, I have taught philosophy in the US, Britain, Canada and Germany. As a researcher I have worked in archives and libraries, published books and articles, and engaged in controversies with other academics. Many of my writings focus on the physical and life sciences of the 17th and 18th centuries, and especially on the concept of the microworld of subvisible organisms and material particles. But all along, thanks to early exposure as a teenager through volunteer activities and work camps, I have been interested in the problems of warfare, poverty and social justice. Both sets of interests are reflected in this book, which is addressed to some of the problems of modernity, both theoretical and practical, as they face us in contemporary life.

Like most readers, I am concerned about the array of political and economic problems affecting us and our children and causing us anxiety even when we live in conditions of affluence. There is increasing economic inequality, fostering resentment and violence; the corruption of democratic processes on a mass scale; the existential threats posed by climate change and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; the depletion of environmental resources, including soil and water; the loss of plant and animal species, and the toxification of our air and our oceans.

The modern economy uses vast quantities of energy from oil and gas (and from the atom) to transform oil and other raw materials into consumer products, only a few of which make our lives better. The rest stuffs and fattens our closets and drawers and piles up as waste in landfills. And it does not make us happy. Mood disturbances, especially depression, afflict large segments of the population, and many people drink too much alcohol or are addicted to stimulants or tranquillisers. Over one-third of Americans are ‘completely inactive’, and sleep disturbances from artificial light as well as immune dysregulation arise from lack of exposure to natural sunlight. ‘In effect,’ as one observer comments, ‘humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable and socially isolating environment with dire consequences.’ We live longer than most of our ancestors but in a sicklier fashion. And from every pain or deprivation, somebody benefits. Pharmaceutical manufacturers benefit from our sugar-induced diabetes and our mental-health problems; oil companies from the destruction of wilderness and poisoning of the atmosphere; the chemicals industry and their stockholders from the use of plastics; the automobile industry from the absence of public transportation; and the prison industry from the desperation and violence that characterise the poorest neighbourhoods.

At the same time, we face problems in our private lives that reflect the age-old human condition, intensified by the social changes of the last fifty to one hundred years. The stresses of urban life, the monotony of suburban life, bad jobs and bad bosses, sexual predation and confusion affect almost all of us.

Tinkering around the edges of our problems with scented candles, new exercise routines and productivity apps isn’t going to help much in the long-run, and no philosopher who is honest about it can give you a formula for being happy – certainly not for being happy all the time. Nevertheless, philosophy can point the way to the sources of satisfaction that are available to almost every human being and to strategies for facing off against the major threats to human happiness. These threats lie in wait for us in the form of outsized ambitions, fear of failure and feelings of futility. The history of philosophy can also help us to see the difference between what philosophers call the necessary and the contingent, or accidental in our historical and social conditions, and to see how the moral commitments of individuals have made a positive difference.

In this book, I’ll explain how the ancient Epicureans saw the world and how a present-day Epicurean sees it. At the same time, I’ll try to be honest and objective. Epicureanism was always a controversial philosophy, and it needs rethinking in some respects. Philosophers have their own irrational enthusiasms, and their views should never be accepted on faith without critical scrutiny. As far as that’s concerned, I expect readers to roll their eyes at some of my opinions. In the end, you may find the Epicurean system as I present it here compelling and useful in working out your own ideas about how to live. Or you may find it offputting and see in its very problems helpful directions for living in a different way. In any case, real Epicureanism is probably considerably different from what you might have thought.

As reported by Lucretius:

[Epicurus] saw that almost everything that necessity demands for subsistence had already been provided for mortals … he saw, too, that they possessed power, with wealth, honour and glory, and took pride in the good reputation of their children; and yet he found that, notwithstanding this prosperity, all of them privately had hearts ranked with anxiety …

The Epicureans believed that most people have the wrong conception of the nature of the universe and their place in it. They wanted to replace indoctrination and wishful thinking with respect for reality. They sought to uncover the real sources of joy and misery in our finite lives and to balance the ethical treatment of others with our own self-interest. This required attention to opportunities for ‘choice and avoidance’ in everyday life. Three of Epicurus’s most famous (also his most infamous) teachings were: first, everything that exists, including the human mind, is composed of material atoms; second, if a God or gods exist, it or they did not create our world, and it or they do not care about humanity; and third, there is no life after death and no other world to go to.

From these three basic and interrelated claims – the material nature of everything, including the human individual, the absence of divine oversight of the world and the finality of death – the Epicureans worked out a system covering both the natural world and the human world. They tried, ambitiously, though not always convincingly, to explain the origins of the cosmos, the causes of volcanoes and earthquakes, the evolution of life and the origins of war, poverty, dominion and servitude, appealing only to physical processes and human inventions and decisions. They explained what morality and justice are all about and warned of the dangers of belligerent and kleptocratic rulers. They made suggestions as to how to live with less fear and regret and what attitude to take in the face of adversity. Unlike their main philosophical rivals, the Stoics, they did not believe the mind is all-powerful in the face of adversity or that we should strive to repress our emotions, griefs and passions. Their moral philosophy is relational rather than individualistic. And unlike the other, more influential schools of ancient philosophy, especially the Platonic and the Aristotelian, the Epicureans welcomed women into the sect.

Central to their understanding and to their views on social equality was their distinction between nature and what they termed ‘convention’. By nature they meant the realm of living things – what we would call the plant and animal kingdoms – along with light and fire, the varied landscapes and waterscapes of our planet, and its celestial objects, the sun, moon and stars. Nature, they recognised, presents an ever-changing spectacle, but it is in many ways predictable. The seasons come around on a regular basis, and animals produce offspring that resemble them from generation to generation. Fire can be counted upon to burn dry straw.

By convention the Epicureans meant perceptions, attitudes and beliefs dependent on our specifically human constitution and reflected in our categories and the words we use. Epicurus’s Greek forerunner, the philosopher Democritus, stated: ‘By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality, atoms and the void.’ The sweetness of honey and the bitterness of rocket depend on our taste receptors, and colours, too, are perceived differently by different animal species and even by different individual humans. Poverty and marriage are not found in nature; they are understood differently by different groups of humans and have different implications, depending on where you are and what group you identify with.

The distinction between nature and convention helps to break down egocentrism and speciesism. My perceptions don’t have any special claim to objectivity, and my preferences – indeed, human desires in general – don’t deserve automatic priority over the preferences of other people and animals. The nature–convention distinction is also important for taking a critical perspective on politics, economics and social relations. In adolescence, most of us come to a point where we question the rules and structures that we have to obey and live within. Some people retain this inquisitive, even rebellious spirit for their entire lives; others decide in time that there are good reasons why things are organised and administered the way they are, or that acceptance and conformity are necessary for getting ahead in life. The Epicurean is acutely aware that our institutions and practices – our schools, law courts, police systems and government bodies – along with our ways of making things and selling them, and our expectations from marriage and family life, are conventional. We have decided that they are to take on the forms they have. At the same time, to refer to ‘our’ decisions is to gloss over the fact that the decisions that actually shape our lives are rarely made by the same people whose lives are shaped by them.

Many customs and policies that are purely conventional are assumed to be based in nature and treated as just, beneficial and unchangeable. Some examples, which I will discuss later in the book, include our supposedly natural selfishness and our supposedly unlimited desire for material goods. The assumption that acquisitiveness is a primary human drive provides the rationale for the way we organise and reward work. The supposed natural differences between men and women, in respect of their abilities, temperaments and interests, provides the rationale for giving women less of many of the things that men enjoy in greater abundance, especially social freedom and the opportunity to develop their talents and contribute to how the world is going to look and operate.

Although I have found Epicurean philosophy to be a rich source of ideas for thinking about nature, society, and personal life, the decision to write about Epicureanism for a broader readership presented a challenge nothing like the ones I was used to in my professional role.

First, in the more than 2,000 years since Epicurus founded his school of philosophy, the world has undergone a series of technological and political upheavals. We have experienced the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural revolution, the rise of global capitalism and factory labour, and the Internet revolution. We have an understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, engineering, computing and the social sciences that has enabled us to develop and transform our environment and to accumulate and share experiences in ways that could never have been foreseen. We can observe and communicate at the speed of light with people on the other side of the world. Could the ideas of an ancient philosopher from a time when civilisation, though not the world itself, was young, and when what expert knowledge there was lay in the hands of a small elite, really have any relevance today?

Second, Epicureanism is an optimistic philosophy, but it is not the intellectual equivalent of comfort food. Lucretius described Epicurus’s world view as bitter medicine that he aimed to sweeten through the sensuous imagery of his poetry. The Epicureans were concerned with how to think clearly and objectively about the world and about our social and political relations with one another, and they did not shrink from stating inconvenient truths. Could modern readers be persuaded that it was worth taking the medicine?

Third, the words ‘Epicure’ and ‘Epicurean’ are associated with unbridled consumption and high living. If you think visually, the first image that comes to mind might be that of a dainty, emaciated aristocrat, fussing over his wine cellar, or that of a fat, jowly, solitary diner with a voluminous napkin tucked under his chin, tackling an enormous roast. You probably weren’t thinking of a middle-aged woman who owns a bicycle and whose refrigerator at the moment contains only a few wilting green onions and half a jar of marmalade.

In fact, Epicurus did consider pleasure, including pleasure in food and drink, to be not only the main motive of our actions but also the supreme good. As he put it:

Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.

This may strike you as an unacceptably frivolous and selfish claim. What would the world look like if everybody forgot about calories, the family, sales goals, deadlines, grades, the nation, truth, honour and responsibility and instead went all-out in the pursuit of pleasure? What about the sexually transmitted diseases, overdoses and bankruptcies that would inevitably follow? What about the feelings, pleasures and choices of the sadist? And isn’t the pursuit of pleasure expensive and ecologically irresponsible?

Let me reassure you that real Epicureanism is neither frivolous nor dangerous to health, nor a threat to other people. Epicurus himself pointed out that the direct pursuit of pleasurable sensations is usually self-defeating. At the same time, he stated clearly that the best life is one free of deprivations, starting with freedom from hunger, thirst and cold, and freedom from persistent fears and anxieties. Living well requires friends to entertain and comfort us and curiosity about nature and how the world works. It doesn’t require stupendous achievement or large outlays of cash. And life can be and feel significant even without religious faith in the usual sense. Although it might seem surprising in light of the many attacks from medieval and early-modern Western theologians on Epicureanism for its atheistic framework, the Epicurean conception of the good and meaningful life can even be found in the Jewish and Christian bibles. Ecclesiastes 8:15 says, ‘Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.’ Isaiah 22:13 says, ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.’

Although Epicureanism is a way of life, this is not a lifestyle book in the usual sense. I start off with a generous helping of Epicurean physics, the theory of nature and history, with the Epicurean theory of everything. My contention is that ethical and political values are grounded in particular ways of seeing the world, about which we are normally unreflective. Philosophy brings these assumptions to the surface and makes them explicit so that they can be examined, and refined or discarded. Our choices should flow spontaneously from our examined convictions without our having to take on board and remember specific rules, including rules for living. I can’t solve for my readers all or even many of the problems of modern life, but I hope my book will help you to acquire a framework for living, not only comfortably and happily, as far as possible, but in a responsible and meaningful way.

Note on the Text

Most of Epicurus’s original writings have been lost, though the collection destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has recently been partially rescued and partially restored to legibility. I’ve drawn on the most available of Epicurus’s letters and sayings and on Lucretius’s poem, On the Nature of Things, based on Epicurus’s still mostly unreconstructed book On Nature. Bibliographical information is found at the end, along with suggestions for further reading.

PART I

How the Epicurean Sees the World

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.

The same thought would have occurred to anyone in the early 19th century who stumbled on a woollen mill in a clearing in the woods, or anyone in the 20th century who encountered an automobile factory that turned sheets of steel and other materials into functional cars. Watches, mills and factories have to be carefully thought out and put together by a group of intelligent and capable beings – or by one extremely intelligent and extremely capable being – to succeed in doing what they do.

Animals somewhat resemble watches, mills and factories. Like watches, they have a lot of small moving parts. Like mills and factories, they transform inert basic materials – air, food and water – into functioning tissues and organs. Their individual parts work together in an integrated, harmonious manner to make life and reproduction possible, as the springs and wheels of the watch or the various components of the mill or factory function to turn the hands on the dial or deliver blankets, shawls and cars. The conclusion that animals – the first prototypes, at least – had been designed and created by a supernatural being looked inescapable.

The ancient Epicureans were not impressed by the argument that integration and harmony always imply a mastermind creator or a team working closely together with oversight of the whole process of manufacture. But as watches and automobile factories were in their time unknown, no one was around to present to them the argument that such complex and well-functioning things can’t make themselves or appear by chance. If they had been confronted with such arguments, they might have insisted that a watch or a factory could arise through the chance combination of atoms. But I suspect they would have had to agree that it is probably impossible for a watch or a factory to assemble by chance. For this to happen, the various components would have to stick together and start to interact in just the right way. And to imagine a fly or a mouse or an elephant coming to be in this way strains credulity too far. Isn’t this like expecting (as 20th-century critics of evolutionary theory used to argue) monkeys with typewriters to produce the plays of Shakespeare?

This was a stumbling block that seemed to give the advantage to Creationism.

I can well understand that a person brought up on the Genesis story of the creation of the universe in seven days and sitting in the classroom listening to a lecture on how Darwin discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection would be sceptical about his supposed achievement. Such a person might reasonably wonder: how could just one scientist in the 19th century looking at finch beaks in the Galapagos, and talking to pigeon breeders in England, prove that we evolved over hundreds of millions of years from apes and monkeys, which in turn evolved from something like fish and worms?

Even if you favour the Darwinian view over the Genesis story, it is good to remember that, on the face of it, it is somewhat implausible. But conversely, if you find Darwinism implausible, it is helpful to stop thinking of Darwin as suddenly and single-handedly coming up with a new and startling theory for which there is still no conclusive evidence. You can think of him instead as one of a long line of thinkers familiar with Epicurean philosophy who found the way over its major stumbling blocks where the theory of natural selection was concerned.

Darwin’s Upgrade: How Selection Causes Evolution

Lucretius’s claim that nature had experimented with unsuccessful animal species that lacked the right structure to maintain themselves and reproduce was well known to the 18th- and early-19th-century theorists with whom Darwin was familiar. (One of them was his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the author of a long poem on the origins and evolution of life). The early, hostile reviews of On the Origin of Species all mentioned its relationship with the Lucretian text. One reviewer complained, for example, that there was nothing new in Darwin’s ‘speculative’ cosmogony. ‘It is at least as old,’ he said, ‘as Democritus and Epicurus, and has never been presented with more poetic beauty than by Lucretius.’

Darwin did not attach his own account to Epicureanism, and especially to Lucretius’s version, for obvious reasons. First, Lucretius (and grandfather Darwin) were notorious atheists, and Darwin kept or tried to keep his sceptical views on religion to himself. Second, he had to fend off the charge that his theory of evolution was a poetic fantasy or mere speculation. What, then, was he able to add to (and subtract from) the Epicurean theory that plants and animals evolved ‘by chance’ that changed its status in his mind and eventually in the minds of his early followers? How did Darwinism go beyond speculation to develop into an accepted account of the origin of the various species?

By the time the 19th century rolled around, most naturalists were doubtful that the astonishing number of different species then identified – far too many to have fitted on the Ark – including hundreds of different species of beetles, had been created by twos and on purpose. The true age of the earth had been calculated, and the former existence of the dinosaurs and the giant mammals that had once roamed Europe and Asia was generally known. Two scientific developments transformed the Epicurean theory of the natural origins of plants and animals from a somewhat implausible speculation to a well-founded scientific hypothesis. These were: the cell theory, and the notion of ‘variation’ from generation to generation.

The discovery, based on the microscope, unavailable to ancient philosophers, that all plants and animals were combinations of individual living cells, and that some cells were free-living animals like the amoeba, made it possible to think of the origins of life in terms of the first appearance of a living cell. To imagine, as Epicureanism required, an elephant emerging from a combination of atoms or even from an atomic seed in the earth was far more difficult than imagining a few single cells forming by chance and later joining up into larger cellular units.

Another obstacle for the Epicurean theory was the assumption that animals always gave birth to animals like themselves. This seemed obvious to them. Cows did not give birth to sheep, or blackbirds to swallows. This meant that they had to stick to their theory that the original prototypes of every sort of animal had sprung by chance from the earth. Although they fancied that not all of these animal types had been capable of survival and reproduction, they could not envision the descent of one kind of bird or mammal from an entirely different kind of bird or mammal.

Darwin’s breakthrough occurred when he reflected on the selective breeding farmers had carried on for millennia, choosing from the pack or flock or herd, and breeding together male and female dogs, sheep and cattle with desired characteristics. He knew that within the group, individuals varied in their qualities and that offspring were not exactly like their parents. To the idea of variation, he was able to apply the Epicurean idea of selection – success or failure in living and reproducing.

For Darwin, nature, acting unconsciously, rather than the breeder acting with intention, did the selecting when the resources needed for life were limited and predation was the rule. Animals ate and sometimes killed plants and killed and ate one another. Bacteria, fungi and poisonous plants killed animals. Plants derived nutrition from decomposing animals. Naturalists had long wondered why, if the world was created by a supremely benevolent and skilled craftsman, this was how things worked. They also wondered why trees produced so many useless seeds and short-lived seedlings; why humans produced such an oversupply of ‘spermatic animals’; and why so many children died in infancy. The grim truth was that competition for life was intense. Many individuals of a given species would starve, be eaten or die of accidents before reproducing, or fail to find or attract mates. Darwin argued that the appearance of entirely new species was the result of thousands or millions of generations of variation and selection in changing environments. The temporary stability that the Epicureans had ascribed to the world, which they saw as constantly evolving as the atoms fell into new combinations, was a feature of the individual species as well, and the mortality of the individual person applied to the whole species, whose eventual extinction was similarly inevitable.

Darwin’s contribution, to my mind, was not just to think out how natural selection might work, but to show that it could be considered a lawful process rather than one based entirely on chance. For the constantly repeated accusation against the ancient Epicureans was that the beauty, intricacy and functionality of the many forms of life could not arise from the random motions of atoms. But, in Darwin’s view, the breeder who seeks to improve his or her flock of sheep or hunting dogs, or the pigeon fancier who presents his or her fluffy tailed or brightly feathered specimens to other fanciers, is employing a technology, and wherever a technology is successful, there we expect to find laws of nature. Nature, too, must be employing a technology to create the succession of living forms of the past near 4 billion years.

To be sure, nature is not aiming to improve any individual species or the livestock or biomass of the planet itself. She is not trying to make animals or entire species faster, smarter or more beautiful. In fact, nature is not trying to do anything. But she mercilessly eliminates some members of each species who aren’t keeping up with the others in producing, and in some cases raising to maturity, offspring who will have their own offspring. As a result, the face of living nature changes in ways we can often explain. Species have appeared and disappeared over the eons, and for this to have happened, there must be laws of nature underlying these changes. Chance – or what we think of as chance, namely coincidence – nevertheless plays a role. Many organisms perish, not because they lack strength, speed, cunning or good metabolisms, but just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A good example is the class of dinosaurs that just happened to be inhabiting the earth 65 million years ago when it was hit ‘by chance’ – though fully in accord with the laws of physics – by an asteroid that wiped them all out.

The Lucretian account of the formation of the cosmos and the evolution of animals, and the Judaeo-Christian account of the divine creation of the world, were recognised as rivals from the early medieval period onwards. Their combat has been long and persistent, but also somewhat hidden from view, which is why Darwin receives too much credit for thinking out the basic idea of evolution by natural selection and too little credit for realising that variation was the key that could solve the problem of the origin of new species. The rivalry was not for a long time manifested in open debate because of the severe criminal penalties attached to blasphemy, a capital crime in earlier periods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and because of the ubiquity of censorship in many parts of Europe.

Why were ideas about the origins of life so dangerous? It was thought that if too many people began to take seriously accounts of the natural origins of life, they would cease to believe that they were created by and responsible to the God who had created them. If they stopped believing they were responsible to God, they would stop believing that obedience to God’s commands and their rulers was obligatory and that disobedience would be harshly punished. If they stopped believing that obedience was obligatory, they would become libertines, criminals and revolutionaries.

Today, the fear that motivated execution for heretics and resulted in the banning, confiscation and burning of scientific books takes a different form. It is not fear of revolutionary violence that explains the persistence of Creationism and intelligent design theories. Some Creationists would probably like to overthrow their secular governments by force of arms and replace them with theocracies. The fear is rather that if the Epicurean–Darwinian theory is true and intelligent design false, divinities and religious texts are not sources of moral authority, and eternal life is not the reward for faith. In that case, there is no reason to obey the Ten Commandments or all the moral ordinances of one’s own church. Moral anarchy, by which Creationists usually understand homosexuality, adultery, abortion and divorce, and the breakdown of the family and society, will result.

If the divine-command theory of morality were the only option, and if the inescapability of death actually spoiled our lives, worries about the social and psychological effects of accepting evolutionary theory might be justified. But it was Darwin himself, drawing on a long tradition of secular British moral theory as well as his own observations of birds and mammals, who first argued that certain forms of altruism characterised group living animals, contributing to their survival. Conscience, or a moral sense, would inevitably arise, he declared, in any social animal that had developed intelligence comparable to that of a human being.

More recent research on primates and young children has confirmed that the moral sentiment of empathy and the disposition to help others, along with a preference for fairness, are to some extent prefigured in our evolutionary ancestors and wired into us from birth. These endowments can be strengthened and extended, as Darwin saw, through formal learning, or weakened by experience and indoctrination. And despite having no conception whatsoever of the descent of one species from an entirely different one, the ancient Epicureans had a serviceable theory of natural morality that I’ll explore in Chapter 6. They showed how it was possible to live cheerfully and ethically as a mortal.

3

The Material Mind

The spirit … is born with the body, develops with it, and succumbs with it to the stress and strain of age.

Lucretius

Even if you are not tempted by Creationism, you may well wonder how conscious awareness and the power of perception and thought – mind or spirit – could arise from combinations of material particles. In keeping with their sparse ontology of atoms and void, the ancient Epicureans declared the soul – the principle of movement, sensation, experience and thought in living beings – to be composed of a special sort of atom. ‘Soul atoms’, they proposed, were especially small, especially mobile and very lively. They pervaded the limbs of the human body, enabling us to think, feel and move. Unlike the soul of Christian and other theologies, the Epicurean soul was not immortal or an object of special care and concern by contrast with the body.

We feel and know that we are wholly united with our bodies, says Lucretius. ‘The spirit’s interpenetration of the body through veins, flesh, sinews and bones is so complete that even the teeth are given a share in sensation, as is shown by toothache, or the twinge caused by icy water, or the crunching of rough grit concealed in a piece of bread.’ Too much wine has the effect of ‘confounding the spirit within the body’. Now, ‘the limbs become heavy; [the drunkards] reel about with staggering steps; the tongue drawls, the mind is sodden, the eyes swim’. In an epileptic fit ‘the spirit in every part of their frame is so distracted by the violence of the seizure that it surges and foams, just as the waves of the salt sea seethe beneath the furious force of the winds’.

Because body and mind are entirely interwoven, the body cannot live on and experience sensation without its mind, and the mind divorced from the body cannot produce any thought or movement. At the moment of death, the soul particles escape into the surrounding atmosphere without causing any immediate change in the weight or shape of the body. ‘It is like the case of a wine whose bouquet has evaporated, or of a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air, or of some object whose flavour has departed.’ The death of the body most certainly means the permanent annihilation of that body’s mind.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, who had no problem with the Epicurean account of the origins of plants and nonhuman animals, famously balked at taking the same view of humans. Where plants and animals are just unconscious material machines, human beings, he argued, are material machines that also possess an incorporeal, immortal soul that endows them with conscious awareness, free will and rationality. Each human soul must have a divine origin. Not only did this claim excuse him from having to try to explain consciousness, free will and rationality in mechanical terms, it enabled the rest of his basically Epicurean ‘corpuscularian’ philosophy to make it past some of, though not all, the censors. (Despite his extensive references to God and the incorporeal soul, his books were viewed with considerable suspicion and for a time appeared on the Index of Prohibited Books of the Catholic Church.)

Descartes’s official theory of the special human soul put him in good and extensive company. The majority of the human race believed in his time, and the majority still believes, that the soul is a something that lives in the body. The soul is thought of as a permanent, indestructible entity that can survive the death of the body. Not only can it survive, it can reattach itself to a new living body – either the resurrected body of the person who died, or one of their descendants, or an animal of another species – where it will continue to see, feel and think to the extent permitted by that body. The Epicurean of today will, however, insist that the soul is not able to detach itself from its original body or attach itself to another unensouled human body. My death, she supposes, will be the end of all my experience and thinking, and it will not be the start of some other being’s experience and thinking, except in the sense that some of the particles composing me may eventually find their way into another organism.

But if we don’t have immaterial and potentially immortal souls or minds, how can thought, experience and voluntary movement be explained? No one today can take seriously the idea of soul atoms. As we see it, there is something about how my living body is put together from individually lifeless and thoughtless particles that enables me to be conscious, aware of my environment, subject to pain, able to initiate actions, to reflect on myself and the world, to make plans and decisions, and to build and create. Nothing more than a brain, composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of subatomic particles, located in an animal body is needed for experience, thought and voluntary movement. And it is not a foregone conclusion that a brain is necessary for feeling and deciding. Other biological structures found in living beings, or even other structures or programs that could be placed into computers, might make thought and feeling possible.

The Evolution of Consciousness

It is currently thought that consciousness may be widely distributed in nature. There is little doubt that mammals and birds have experiences and feel emotions, and the sensation of pain must have appeared very early in evolutionary history. As difficult as it is to imagine the experiences of a gecko or a spider, many animals, including fish, reptiles, cephalopods like octopi and squid, and even insects, have a good claim to awareness of a sensory world of flavours, odours, sounds and visible, tangible objects and substances.

Still, it might seem incredible that consciousness and all our mental powers, including rational decision-making and creativity as well as perception and feeling, could arise from purely physical underpinnings, from processes in our brains that work according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The alphabet analogy goes some way towards explaining how individual elements – letters – can give rise to composites – words and sentences – with new qualities. But we may still wonder how, from the ultimately real colourless, odourless, tasteless, silent particles and forces, consciousness can present to us a world of flavour, colour, scent and sound.

No one has ever explained, scientifically, how we can be aware of a world and why we experience the qualities we do – why the scent of roses is as it is, and why certain wavelengths of light are correlated with the experience of red rather than the experience of blue. No one has ever explained how I can initiate an action voluntarily and deliberately. Nevertheless, the Epicurean of today asks: which is more likely? That whether we can ever explain it or not, consciousness and mentality arise from purely physical underpinnings, nothing more being required? Or that a non-physical entity lives in us somewhere and, when connected properly to a functioning physical brain, enables the possessor of that brain to think, feel, perceive and decide?

A more tractable question than ‘How does conscious awareness arise?’ is the question of why conscious awareness is useful. Developing lungs or wings enabled prehistoric animals to exploit particular features of their environment: to move from the sea onto the land where there were new things to eat, or from land into the air, where many predators could be avoided. But what does having awareness, consciousness of a world and, with it, knowledge of how my body is related to other bodies enable me to accomplish what I couldn’t accomplish if I were a well-programmed unconscious machine? With robotics constantly improving and developing remarkable recognition and navigation skills, this question is highly actual.

To see why, despite technological advances, consciousness might be necessary for many living things, consider the simple robot known as the Roomba. The Roomba is a disk, about 16 inches in diameter, with two independently operating wheels, that gets plugged into the wall to charge. It then runs around your floor sweeping up crumbs and dust. According to its literature, it is able to ‘change direction upon encountering obstacles, to detect dirty spots on the floor and to sense steep drops to keep it from falling down stairs’.

The Roomba does only one thing, but it does it reasonably well: it forages for dust and dirt. Successive generations of Roombas evolve, because consumers want and will pay for upgraded models with fewer problems and more capabilities. It is, however, not a machine that transforms raw materials into energy and work. It does not use the dust and dirt it collects to keep running. Because it can draw on an unlimited supply of electricity from the wall to recharge its batteries, it does not need to be self-sustaining. It is highly dependent on its owner for continuing operation, for it can get stuck under furniture and run out of charge.

Now imagine we want to build a robot that forages for food outdoors on variable terrain, rather than for dust and dirt on flat indoor surfaces, and that it will convert this food into the fuel that powers its movements. It now faces certain dangers, not only from sharp rocks and precipices in its environment, but also from heat, cold and rain that will destroy its electronic components. It must avoid consuming non-food substances. It must be efficient in expending its energy if it is to survive, because the amount of food it can find, consume and metabolise for power is limited. This robot is mortal. It can just wear out, like the Roomba, through friction and corrosion. But it can also ‘die’ if its energy needs exceed the amount of food it is able to find, consume and convert to power, or if it fails to detect a lethal danger. It may also be attacked and killed by another robot that can consume its body for fuel or replacement components, or by an irritated human being.

Using present technologies, this robot will have very complex software. It will need to perceive the difference between food and non-food that closely resembles food. It will need a memory to avoid wasting energy searching in places where no food was found recently, but some such places may become good sources of food in the future, and it will need to remember that. In order to know when to start foraging and when to stop, it will need sensors that monitor its energy needs. It will need a decision mechanism that can make critical choices, such as the choice to continue its food search even when its energy stores are so low that it may ‘die’, or to abandon the search to conserve energy and to wait for food to replenish itself in the environment.

Now let’s imagine that the robot can reproduce. It will build copies of itself that accidentally vary slightly. Either it must build full-size copies of itself or smaller variant copies that will grow as they consume nourishment. If the former, it will expend large amounts of energy; if the latter, new software will be needed to direct growth. A robot that exists among other robots competing for the same food and shelter and competing to be a faster producer of little robots will have to be endowed with better competencies than theirs. If it is a sexually reproducing robot, it will also need to be able to identify potential ‘mates’, and to perform courtship behaviour that is successful in inducing the other robot to cooperate.

By now it should be clear that it may be impossible from an engineering point of view to pack all these competencies into an unconscious machine operating on chips that is only the size of a Roomba, or to pack them into a unit the size of a mouse using only Roomba-type materials and structures. However the mouse is doing all that a Roomba does, it isn’t doing it with Roomba-type materials and structures, and it is probably conscious. The mouse’s ability to have experiences, to see, to recognise places and things, to remember locations, to make decisions, to choose mates, to feel the emotion of fear that enables it to avoid cats and boots, and the emotion of love that moves it to care for its young while they are small will make it an efficient and competitive organism. If evolution can tap into the laws of nature that make consciousness possible, the mouse will not need the fancy electronics and tremendous bulk and complexity that a foraging and reproducing robot would need if built with unconscious technology.

When we look at a human brain, a soft, lobular structure roughly the consistency of oatmeal, it is impossible to imagine it producing experiences and ideas. The case bears no comparison with, for example, looking at the liver, another soft, lobular structure, and wondering how it can produce liver enzymes; someone can no doubt explain this. Yet we know that the patterned excitation of the three trillion neurons in the average brain gives rise to what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls ‘the feeling of what happens’. Perhaps this is accomplished through the classical mechanisms of physics and chemistry, but an emerging trend is to propose that evolution has tapped into quantum mechanics. If organisms can tap into the laws of hydrodynamics to swim and fly efficiently, and the laws of action and reaction to push off from the earth in locomotion; if they can use photons to see, and to organise their circadian rhythms, why should they not be able to tap into quantum mechanics to master some of the challenges of life?

We tend to think of consciousness as all or nothing. We suppose that either a conscious organism experiences the world just as I do or that it is just an insensate machine. But this must be wrong. There must be forms and degrees of consciousness that are only somewhat or hardly at all like mine, as well as forms that are very like mine. If the nervous system first evolved to co-ordinate movement, we can imagine that a side effect of having just a little bit of conscious awareness – perhaps for pain or scent – could give an early organism an advantage and that nature continued to add on as new ways of gathering information from the environment through light or sound or scent were invented and new perceptual and emotional motivations assisted with the tasks of living.

Philosophers and neuroscientists continue to debate whether consciousness is accidental or intrinsically useful, whether it extends to invertebrates like the bee or the oyster, and whether it is only present in animals with brains of a certain complexity. The Epicurean can only follow these debates with interest, never doubting that the mind is, at any rate, a natural thing whose existence is dependent on the smallest particles and subtlest forces of the physical world.

4

The Story of Humanity

The human beings who lived on earth in those early days were far tougher than we are … [T]hey were not easily affected by heat or cold or unaccustomed food, or any physical malady. During many lustres of the sun revolving through the sky, they lived random-roving lives like wild beasts … What the sun and rains had given them, what the earth had spontaneously produced, were gifts rich enough to content their hearts.

Lucretius

Although they belonged to the highly developed civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Epicureans were fascinated by the recognition that human beings had not always lived in cities or practised farming, industry and commerce. They were aware that their ancestors had formerly lived in families and tribes with little political organisation. They understood that they had only later come together into federations, empowered kings and magistrates, and enacted laws and systems of punishment for offences and crimes. Relying on the manuscripts of Epicurus, as well as on the knowledge of his contemporaries about the distant past, Lucretius thought deeply about the origins of civilisation, and in the fifth book of On the Nature of Things he narrated the story of humanity, drawing important conclusions about technological progress, human happiness and political oppression that deserve our continued attention.

The State of Nature and the Rise of Civilisation

Lucretius describes the earliest phase of human life as dangerous but in many ways attractive. Adults lived as solitary foraging animals (presumably carrying or followed by their children). Many were ‘caught by wild beasts and provided them with living food for their teeth to tear’, while others died of their wounds ‘as no one knew anything of medicine’. But, says Lucretius pointedly, ‘Never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many thousands of men marching beneath military standards; never did the boisterous billows of the ocean dash ships and sailors upon the rocks.’ People died of famine, but not of surfeit; they got poisoned accidentally from eating the wrong thing, whereas ‘nowadays they make away with themselves more expertly’.

Fire was not stolen from the gods, as the Greek myth of Prometheus had it, nor was it a divine gift. Rather, Lucretius explains, forest fires were frequent in those early days, caused by lightning or the friction of tree branches rubbing against one another. People figured out how to capture, control and preserve fire, and this marked a turning point. They grew used to warmth and drew together to live as families in huts. They learned to cook their food, and living with women and children made men gentler and more obliging. Human language, which Lucretius saw as just another form of animal language, was invented, along with crafts such as plaiting and weaving. Although they fought with stones and clubs, early humans could not do each other much damage. There was relative equality and relative freedom without priests and judges to lay down the laws and threaten punishment.

Lucretius’s reconstruction has been largely validated by archaeologists and students of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Anthropologists have noted the ‘preference for equality’ in small and simple societies and the resentment of anyone who begins to act in an aggressive manner. There may be a headman in larger tribal societies, but his main function is to negotiate with outsiders, not to make rules for insiders, and he does not normally distinguish himself in dwelling or dress. How, then, did human beings make the transition from living in small, relatively egalitarian groups to oligarchies and imperial bureaucracies? In these political structures, wealth and power are concentrated in a small number of hands, and a very few rulers make decisions affecting the experiences and even the survival of millions of their subjects. For, as Lucretius emphasises, though he perhaps exaggerates the uninterrupted harmony of archaic life, warfare was unknown. All motivation to attack the neighbours was lacking, as well as effective weapons for doing so.

Lucretius is vague about how this happened. He supposes that ‘those endowed with exceptional talents and mental power’ invented new and admired practices and that kings appeared who rewarded their favourites and built cities. The invention of money brought in a new political era. ‘Later, wealth was invented and gold discovered, [which] robbed the strong and handsome of their prestige; for as a general rule … people … follow in the train of the rich.’

In Lucretius’s account, archaic society came to an end with a chance discovery, the discovery of the metals: copper, gold, iron, silver and lead. People observed how, in the immediate aftermath of a forest fire, metals oozed and ran out of rocks and solidified in new shapes. Here was a material that was far harder and more durable than wood and that, unlike stone, could be formed as one wished. Human ingenuity took over, and with metal technology came agricultural slavery, class divisions and brutal conquest. ‘With bronze they tilled the soil, and with bronze they embroiled the billows of war, broadcast wide gaping wounds; and plundered flocks and fields; for everything unarmed and defenceless readily yielded to the armed.’

Contemporary archaeology bears out Lucretius’s view that cities, trade and warfare evolved rapidly with the introduction of metal technology. With the plough and draft animals, human beings could now till vast fields and grow, store and trade grain, the new staple of the diet of the poor. With saws and hammers they could build houses, walls and fences to keep people indoors and livestock segregated. Carts for trade and travel could be furnished with wheels and drawn by domesticated animals. Tools applied to mining brought up precious metals and gems. With the new abundance of food wrested from the soil, populations grew and markets expanded. The art of shipbuilding made long-distance travel possible. A vast gap began to open up between rich and poor. The rich were those who persuaded or forced others to work for them in the fields, to manufacture tools and ornaments, to build dwellings for them and to fight their battles. The poor were those who had no choice but to enslave themselves to the rich.

This process involved gains and losses. Life became safer in some ways, and the countryside was beautified, ‘attractively dotted with sweet fruit trees and enclosed with luxuriant plantations’. Village life remained idyllic, Lucretius thought. People would lie in the grass in friendly company and ‘there would be jokes, talk and peals of pleasant laughter’. Bedecked with garlands of flowers, they amused one another with simple, rather clumsy dances. Singing was a good remedy for insomnia.

At the same time, everything got worse in other respects. Shipbuilding made long-distance warfare possible. Iron spears were far deadlier than Stone Age weapons, and there was now more to fight for. In the cities, the rich began to vie among themselves for wealth and power, and a period of bloodshed and chaos ensued. ‘[T]he situation sank to the lowest dregs of anarchy, with all seeking sovereignty and supremacy for themselves. At length some of them taught the others to create magistracies and established laws … The reason why people were sick and tired of a life of violence was that each individual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly than is now allowed by equitable laws.’ If humans had not invented law and bureaucracy, that would have been an end to our species. But they did. Criminality was suppressed, enabling wealthy civilisations to advance further with the building of roads, the erection of palaces and the creation of artworks.

As we now know, ancient artisanship produced objects of utility and beauty for trade and domestic use, but only by making use of slave labour in huge urban workshops. The concentration of settled populations fostered learning in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other sciences, as well as the great feats of ancient engineering. It also produced a parasitic upper class that lived from the hard labour of others, enjoying their rents, tax revenues and inheritances, but at the same time gnawed by anxiety over managing and retaining their wealth. Whether rich or poor, Lucretius observed, ‘human beings never cease to labour vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares, evidently because they have not learned the proper limit to possession, and the extent to which real pleasure can increase’. Ambition, aggression and corruption render societies that appear externally to be flourishing internally rotten.

Authority and Inequality

There are two especially important features of Epicurean prehistory. First, the Epicurean account invites us to reflect on the nature of power and political authority. Second, Lucretius’s account of the gains and losses of civilisation will resonate with anyone concerned about the effects of technological progress and development on human well-being and the well-being of the rest of life on our planet.

Political authority, in the Epicurean view, does not belong to nature. It exists ‘by convention’. That is to say, there are many forms of government, all of which depend on some form of human acquiescence, and what we define as criminal behaviour and what penalties we impose on lawbreakers are matters of human decision. Rules such as ‘an eye for an eye’ do not constitute natural justice; they rather reflect good or bad decisions about appropriate punishment. Penalties such as a certain number of years in prison for kidnapping, murder or fraud do not fit the crime in any objective sense. They have simply been deemed appropriate by lawmakers, sometimes for no good reason.

The significance of the Epicurean view was considerable. It challenged the prevailing assumption that authority and justice were defined in advance of human decisions and agreement. The Epicurean invites us to distinguish between naked authority – the raw exercise of power: the power to make laws, to establish rules for institutions, to inflict suffering on others, or to reward them with what they value – and legitimate authority, arising out of human agreement.

The original human interpretation of political authority was theological. In archaic and tribal societies, the gods were or are conceived as owning the land and its living beings. They, or subordinate spirits, are imagined to lay down laws concerning permitted and impermissible actions where the rest of nature and other people are concerned. In some tribal societies, divine ownership entailed judicious use of natural resources, especially game, along with other rules for living, strongly or weakly enforced.

In any case, theological accounts of political authority emphasise the power of the gods to punish actions that escape human notice. The Judaeo-Christian-Islamic Bible opens with an account of God’s creative power and his legislative authority. It describes his instructions to the first human pair in his personally owned garden, their disobedience and the terrible consequences of their disobedience. The authority of God’s first prophet Moses, who commands people to leave Egypt and form a new nation, is authority conferred upon him by God. And in Christian political theory, temporal rulers are theorised as placed and held in power by God and as owed a duty of obedience in light of their origin. For the religiously orthodox person, if God didn’t want some particular person to be president of the United States, that person would not be president, so whatever that person does must be consistent with God’s will.

A rival and equally influential tradition regarded political authority as built into the very structure of the universe. Epicurus’s predecessor, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, thought it obvious that the cosmos is hierarchically organised. The superior, he said, always rules the inferior. The heavens rule the earth below them, causing the seasons, which cause weather, which determines the food supply and reproductive behaviour. Many animal species have dominant individuals; masters rule their slaves; men rule women; and women rule children. This is the natural order of things, he maintained, and it would be perverse to question it. His views on natural domination offered one regrettable interpretation of the ancient ideal of ‘life in accord with nature’.

In the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, there could be tension and conflict between the Church’s own wealthy hierarchy of the Pope, the archbishops, the bishops and the lesser clergy and the secular emperors, kings and princes. Both had the power to raise revenues and to make rules. No ordinary person, no peasant farmer, or merchant, or artisan, or small landowner could doubt that the power to command, punish and reward descended from above. The forms these commands, punishments and rewards took did not depend on the agreement of those affected, but only on the social class into which they were born. As a result, there were different legal standards for the privileged and the poor, for men and women, and for different categories of persons such as the hereditary nobility and the clergy. The relative invulnerability of the socially powerful permitted extraordinary abuses: the waging of private wars and raids to increase wealth and dominion; the execution of rivals and confiscation of their estates; favouritism towards the incompetent; and the sexual abuse of women and children.

In the medieval and early modern periods, it has been estimated that 80–90 per cent of the population of the Holy Roman Empire were peasants or renters, tied to the land, paying tithes, rents or taxes to their landlord and serving as soldiers when required. The clergy, the aristocracy and craftspersons made up the rest of the population. Indoctrination in the form of weekly sermons inculcated the duty of obedience. Revolution, a literal turning upside down of social relations, putting those at the bottom on top and those on top at the bottom, was seen as a crime against God and nature. The assurance that Heaven awaited those who endured their sufferings and deprivations and patiently practised humility was offered on a weekly basis. The sufferings and deprivations of the people were by implication trivial as compared to those of the great martyrs, including Jesus himself, as the iconography of the churches emphasised.

Did those at the bottom passively accept their subordination? Were their lives uniformly miserable? As historians have shown us, village life had its share of joys and sorrows. Yet history is dotted with slave revolts and peasant uprisings prompted by taxation demands and starvation. Most rebellions were successfully put down, yet massive changes occurred between the 17th and mid-19th centuries. The transformation of these feudal societies based on the privileges and duties of the different social ranks into commercial societies based on the idea of contracts between equals has been studied from many points of view. The recovery of the Epicurean history of humanity, the distinction between nature and convention, and the Epicurean conception of justice as an agreement to avoid harming and being harmed, played an important role in rethinking questions about the legitimacy and scope of worldly powers.

Up until the mid-17th century, when Thomas Hobbes appeared on the scene, the idea of natural domination as well as the idea of divine legislation went largely unquestioned. Hobbes’s revival of the Epicurean idea of the ‘social contract’, which I’ll explore in Chapter 12, though it is still authoritarian rather than democratic, is the basis of much modern political theory, with its clear insistence that government exists only for the good of the governed.

The Lessons of the Past

One of the most important insights to take away from Lucretian prehistory and its reworking is that the purpose of political authority is to reduce interpersonal violence and to make life secure for all. A second insight is that our political and legal systems have been shaped by chance discoveries and new technologies. A third is that while life under civilisation offers a range of marvellous goods and experiences, uncontrolled and concentrated wealth and ambition make exploitation, warfare and corruption inevitable.

There is no cosmic plan in history, no destiny towards which we are inevitably travelling. No divinity is guiding us or watching out that we do not make mistakes that unleash nuclear war or that render most other species extinct and the earth uninhabitable. Chance discoveries are still possible, and human ingenuity is seemingly inexhaustible. But the search for power and gratification by the few at the expense of the many is an inevitable feature of civilisation that could be better controlled than it is, even if it can never be banished once and for all.

Another important insight emerges from the Epicurean history of humanity. Human beings invented government. We like to think of government as authority awarded to those most deserving of it, to people who have proved their commitment to the general welfare and their understanding of how the world works by presenting their beliefs and plans to the public, and by standing up to interrogation in competition with others. But we need to keep in mind that modern governments are the successors of originally kleptocratic, clan-based regimes that relied on secrecy, conspiracy, violence and intimidation to obtain and retain power and wealth and to practise violence against other groups. To a greater or lesser extent, they have either retained or shed the earlier characteristics of government. The best governments are those that have transcended their origins, rejected the seizure of power by force and fraud, and are now dedicated not to the enrichment of the clan, but to the welfare and best interests of the governed. The worst governments are those in which most of the original features of government are intact.

PART II

Living Well and Living Justly

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