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).

The Borderzone Within

There is a borderzone right inside us too—as there is one out there in the macrocosm—but we don’t think of it in mumbo-jumbo or in mystical terms because it is a matter of direct experience. Humanity has treated this matter in countless ways, but it is summed up by that all-too-familiar phrase, body and soul. If we use that duality as the whole, then the “borderzone” in question is really the point where body and soul meet and interact. But that interaction is so puzzling and mysterious, that we’ve dismissed it altogether, conceived of it as a point, have ignored it, have formed all kinds of fantastic theories about it, and have often simply thrown up our hands.

The modern way is to deny it. There is no soul. Enough already. We’re strictly chemistry arranged in a certain dynamic pattern—and that pattern has a kind of tenacious tendency to maintain itself, like a whirlpool does—but no more mysteriously than a whirlpool does; we call that tenacity survival. End of story.

Aristotle proposed that everything has body and soul if only we call the one matter and the other form. The combination of the two is the only real thing. He called it substance, and to this day, if we mean that something’s real, we say that it’s substantial. A consequence of this, of course, is that after our bodies fall apart, what we call “we” disappears. But Aristotle was not quite sure that intellect disappeared; he cut himself some slack, as it were. Almost to a man—and it usually is a man—our deep thinkers imagine the “high” element within us as intellectual. My explanation is that they expend most of their lives in thought; they get to know that faculty genuinely well; but, perhaps, they fail to experience other facets of their beings equally as fully—or observe them with the same care. There are other ways of being—there are other paths: action, art, and love come to mind. Thomas Aquinas, among the greatest thinkers of the medieval era, had a mystical experience shortly before he died. He stopped writing abruptly. Asked why, he answered that all that he had written until then (and it was a monumental opus, still avidly studied today) was “mere straw.” (1) I’ve always valued Aquinas’ thought—but I have valued this story as its crown. Paradoxically, perhaps, it holds a practical as well as a deeper truth.

Descartes, who, in a way, gave modern philosophical thought its original shape, carried simplification to a great height. He proposed two realities, the extended thing (call that the body) and the thinking thing (call that the soul). They were radically different; they communicated and met at one point in the body, in the pineal gland. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek dismissal; but to get into the complexities of Descartes’ thought on the subject you have to look elsewhere (2). My point is that humanity has struggled with this subject. The borderzone within is a very mysterious aspect of reality—and this despite the fact that it is, for us, the most familiar.

It is our inability to pinpoint precisely where higher and lower meet, to describe in mechanical (or even electromechanical) terms how spirit moves matter, our inability to capture and hold the spirit that has led to the materialistic theories of life. But modern thought had its ancient analogues too—and functionally quite similar. Lucretius was one of these theorists: everything is atoms, he said. They move deterministically, but at unpredictable times they suddenly “swerve.” This accounts for what we would call mental events and the illusion of volition. But atoms that form into bodies by law and swerves, dissolve back into free atoms, ranging from coarse to superfine. All is a dance of occasionally swerving atoms. (3) Modern theories of physics are now approaching the Lucretian level. Statistical explanations of everything real are beginning to eat away even at the claim that laws of nature exist (which, of course, suggests a law-giver) to make everything a product of chance. This is what I call throwing up the hands.

I’m of a mind to see value in all of these approaches. All of them produce raw materials, all of them spin twine useful for making a meaningful cosmology—or an understanding of the self. What we need is the right loom to weave it into fabric. (4) That loom is projected, I think, by emanationist conceptions of reality. I’ve discussed these recently under the heading of “Angels: Heavenly Schematics.” There I have suggested that reality is indeed a creation of two distinct fundamentals; they interact at every level and dynamically—thus either rising toward complexity or moving away from it. Within this dynamic spiral are regions of relative equilibrium. Borderzones are spatially conceived areas where a transition is taking place— from one region to the other. They are spatially conceived because, for us, living where we live, space is a decent concept for locating activity. But let me put this projection into more visual or linear terms.

God created two kinds of realities. One of these are agents, that which we call “we”: persons; selves. The other is what we call matter—but this matter may manifest in a vast range of subtlety—thus more than just what we call matter. We live our lives in a borderzone. What do I mean by that? I mean that both a higher and subtler and a lower and coarser kind are both present in it, mixed, as it were. We are keenly aware of the lower. And, being lower, it has a greater grip on us; why that is so I’ll try to explain in a moment. But we’re also aware of the higher. It charms and draws us. The matter of that world, however is more subtle. It is invisible to us because we are still more aware of the lower region than the higher. The higher is an imaginal (but not an imaginary) world. We sometimes dismissively label it “mental,” signaling that such worlds are unreal. Yet mental creations and realities are very real for us: great myths, great music, great works of art, great structures of thought, grand tales, personal and collective memories. And also personifications like the United States of America or the Red Menace. Lady Macbeth, meet Don Quixote. There’s also our honor—produce it for me to touch if you can—and our shame. With only the slightest of careful observation, we can easily discover that most of the things that really move us, in our daily lives, are structures of the insubstantial kind—impossible to touch although, of course, they have tangible manifestations as print on paper, images on screens, or the bodies of people whose intangible attitudes, thoughts, intentions, benevolence (or lack thereof) are the source of our pleasures and our pains. The lower order, the material aspect, sometimes touches us most irritatingly too. And their disarray, as in Haiti these days, is a great source of pain.

We live our lives in tension here because we’ve entered a developmental region, a borderzone. We come from the lower and are headed upward. But because the lower is more familiar to us, has long been our home, it has more claim on us. Hence we are more aware of it. But, at the same time, we hear the call (but cannot see) a higher region. We interact with both. But after we are freed of bodies, which way shall we go? That is the question. If in some greater scheme we are on a vector, we are lucky to be in a borderzone; we’re also at risk. If we don’t develop, we won’t be able to resist the downward pull of the lower region after death; to be sure, it is the one we already inhabit now. But if we do manage to acquire new powers sufficient to continue in the higher direction, then, at the end of life, awakening to that ability, and finally seeing the higher dimension directly, without the interference of this level’s coarser materiality, we shall look back on all our works, and like Thomas Aquinas, declare them all as “mere straw.”