Visiting the Epicurean Café

What ails humanity? According to Epicurus (341-270 BC), it is the fear of death and of the consequent  punishment of the soul in the beyond. This causes great anxiety and, in turn, produces irrational desires. Epicurus was a philosopher of happiness—and happiness, he taught, arises from absence of pain. His doctrine is not even close to hedonism as ordinarily understood, but Epicurus survives in the popular mind linked to pleasure, not least the pleasures of food. Not surprisingly, therefore, when Brigitte and I both worked at the then pre-eminent office tower in Detroit, the Penobscot building, beginning  in the late 1980s, the eating place in the basement was called the Epicurean Café. So let us visit that café.

The teachings of Epicurus are more coherent and rational than merely “grabbing all the gusto ‘cause you only go ‘round once.” His was a philosophical projection based on a strictly serious materialistic view of reality as it surfaced in Greece in the transition between the classical and Hellenistic periods†. Materialism, as this shows, is one of those things that goes around—more than once—and therefore comes around.  Epicurus belongs to a tradition, in other words. In the Greek instance the earliest remembered figure was one Leucippus, whose dates are not remembered but put into the fifth century BC. He is said to have been the first atomist (all is atoms). Democritus (460-370 BC) was the next tall figure in this tradition, and Epicurus studied his teachings. Within the Graeco-Roman realm, the last prominent transmitter of this view was the Roman Lucretius (99-55 BC) known for his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things.

Epicurus meant well; he was also original. He meant well because he thought that he could free humanity of its degraded condition simply by banishing the fear of death and of post-mortem punishment. He was original. The entire materialistic world conception suffers from absolute determinism. Everything is nothing but moving atoms following laws. In order to explain what appears to be unpredictable motion in nature and freedom in humans, he suggested that atoms, at quite unpredictable times, “swerve,” thus change their absolutely linear motions. The modern form of this is the uncertainty principle. Ultimately the smallest particles are waves; their presence cannot be predicted; they live in a kind of cloud of probability. Trust us to make things much more complicated.

Now suppose that we knew, with absolute certainty, that after death we would pass into another and more complete world where life continues in a manner echoing the way we lived our life on earth. Would that produce universal happiness, thus absence of pain? Would such knowledge, on average, change human behavior? I think not. Nevertheless no time ever suffers from a shortage of millennial expectations according to which our current travails will turn into something quite radically different. None have yet borne fruit. But Epicurus’ doctrine is having a genuine test in this our Hellenistic period. Vast numbers believe the atomic theory and also that life ceases after death. But when I open the paper in the morning, settling in my booth at the Epicurean Café, it isn’t filled with news of joy. Quite to the contrary. Isn’t it time, people, to get with the program? It’s been around since the about the third century BC.

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†Classical: fifth through fourth centuries BC; rise and clash of Athens and Sparta. Hellenistic: dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the conquest of Greece by Rome (146 BC).