Life Worthy of the Gods

David Konstan

Description

Epicurus, and his Roman disciple Lucretius, held that the primary cause of human unhappiness was an irrational fear of death. What is more, they believed that a clear understanding of the nature of the world would help to eliminate this fear. They contended that if man recognizes that the universe and everything in it is made up of atoms and empty space, he will see that the soul cannot possibly survive the extinction of the body-and no harm can occur to him after he dies. A fascinating exploration of Epicureanism as a coherent analysis of irrational fears, desires, and beliefs, including a look at why they persist even in modern societies.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Parmenides Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781930972575
• Langue: English

Extrait

A L IFE W ORTHY OF THE G ODS
A L IFE W ORTHY OF THE G ODS
The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus

D AVID K ONSTAN
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING Las Vegas | Zurich | Athens
2008 Parmenides Publishing All rights reserved.
In part originally published in 1973 as Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology by E.J. Brill, Leiden
This revised and expanded edition published in 2008 by Parmenides Publishing in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-930972-28-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Konstan, David.
A life worthy of the gods : the materialist psychology of epicurus / by David Konstan. - New ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Some aspects of Epicurean psychology. 1973
ISBN 978-1-930972-28-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Epicurus. 2. Lucretius Carus, Titus. De rerum natura. 3. Emotions. 4. Human behavior. I. Konstan, David. Some aspects of Epicurean psychology. II. Title.
B573.K66 2008
187-dc22
008029131
Excerpts from On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and translated by Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001) appear by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Typeset in Book Antiqua and OdysseaUBSU (Greek) by 1106 Design Printed by United Graphics in the United States of America
1-888-PARMENIDES www.parmenides.com
Contents
Preface to the Revised Edition
Introduction to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
C HAPTER 1: Epicurean Passions
C HAPTER 2: Psychology
C HAPTER 3: Social Theory
C HAPTER 4: Epistemology
Bibliography
Preface to the Revised Edition
This book is a new edition of Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology , originally published by E.J. Brill in 1973. Besides being brought up to date in a great many details, it includes much wholly new material, for example this preface, the entire first chapter, and more. This revised edition was first published in Italian (Konstan 2007a), thanks to the kind encouragement of my dear friend, Ilaria Ramelli, who also translated it, and of Professors Roberto Radice and Giovanni Reale, the editors of the series, Vita e Pensiero, published under the auspices of the Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan.
A word of justification is needed for republishing a book on Epicureanism that is now more than thirty-five years old. The field has changed greatly over the past few decades. New editions of papyri from the Epicurean library in Herculaneum, accompanied by fine commentaries, have greatly augmented our knowledge both of the later tradition of Epicurean theory and of the original form it took at the hands of Epicurus himself, for example in his magnum opus, On Nature . In addition, Epicureanism has come in for intensive investigation, stimulated both by the work of Marcello Gigante and his associates in Naples and other scholars in Italy, as well as by the meetings and publications sponsored by the Symposium Hellenisticum, where specialists from various countries focussed critical attention on Epicureanism, Stoicism, skepticism, and other relatively obscure philosophical traditions. We understand a great deal better today Epicurean epistemology, physics, and moral theory than we did in the early 1970s (for recent surveys of Epicurean doctrine in general, see Konstan 2002, 2005).
There would have been little point in republishing an essay on Epicurean psychology that took no account of these developments, and I have endeavored to bring the present volume up to date, in the sense that I have taken notice, where it seemed relevant, of the principal contributions to the subjects that are covered in it, indicating where they seem to confirm or to challenge the conclusions that I had drawn. Naturally, in reflecting on the themes treated here in light both of new research and my own wider experience of ancient philosophy, I have modified my views, and this too had to be reflected in a new edition (note especially the new Chapter 1). All of this required a good deal more than the mere addition of references to new books and articles, with the body of the book left unaltered.
And yet, this is not simply a new study of Epicurean psychology (in the sense to be specified below). It is a new edition of an old book, however much it may have been amended and, I hope, improved. The basic argument and armature of the original study have been left intact. This gives the book a certain hybrid or palimpsestic quality: it preserves the original plan and idea, and yet is in many respects quite new, incorporating numerous supplementary passages and arguments that materially affect the exposition. This new edition is meant to replace the old (which is now in any case out of print), not to complement it (my thanks to E.J. Brill for releasing me from the copyright of the original version, and encouraging the publication of the new one).
Inevitably, there is a certain tension in the structure of a work of this sort. The arguments I presented thirty-some years ago were cast in reponse to the predominant scholarship of the time, and this determined to some extent their order and emphasis. It did not seem appropriate to eliminate the citations of earlier research, even though I might add discussions of more recent studies, in which the focus had changed and some of the older problems were either settled or have come to seem marginal to an understanding of Epicureanism. I have sought, in this new edition, to preserve the basic dialectic of the original version, even as I adapted it, where necessary (which was often), to reflect new texts and currents of thought. I believe that, in spite of this double focus, the book continues to exhibit a line of argument that is both coherent and contemporary. My readers will have to be the judge of how well I have succeeded in this attempt.
The reader may wish to see in advance an outline of the arguments that follow, in which the major theses are stated and the most controversial conclusions are clearly marked as such. With the benefit of much new scholarship, some of which has engaged directly with the hypotheses and analyses presented in the first edition of this book, I can myself perceive more plainly where my contributions are more or less solid, given the state of the evidence. In what follows, then, I present a summary of the central claims, and an indication of how they hang together. For the details, the reader will have to consult the chapters that follow, which, despite considerable expansion over the original version, retain the relative brevity suitable to a monograph.
In Chapter 1, which, as I have said, is wholly new, I make a radical claim concerning the nature of the path in Epicurus own writings. In brief, I argue that the path for Epicurus are precisely pleasure and pain, and that they, like sensations or aisth seis , reside in the non-rational or alogon part of the soul (the very division of the soul into a rational and non-rational part in Epicureanism is controversial). It follows from this that a positive or negative sentiment or reaction experienced in, or requiring the participation of, the rational part of the soul (the logikon ) is not, strictly speaking, a pathos , that is, either pleasure or pain, but something else. In fact, Epicurus refers to such responses as either joy (khara) or fear (phobos), terms which stand in, as it were, for pleasure and pain at the level of the rational soul. Although later Epicureans, and Philodemus in particular, do not always observe the distinction between path in the narrow sense and what we may call emotions (Epicurus seems not to have employed a special term to cover both positive and negative feelings in the rational soul), it represents, I argue, a crucial distinction in Epicurean psychology.
In Chapter 1, then, I examine an aspect of Epicurean psychology in the ancient sense of the term, that is, the science of the soul or psyche. For the Epicureans, as A.A. Long and David Sedley observe, the soul s primary functions are consciousness in all its aspects-especially sensation, thought, and emotion-and the transmission of impulses to the body (1987: 1.70). In modern terms, much of this material would come under epistemology at one extreme and physiology at the other. In the balance of this book (that part which represents the revision of the original monograph: here, Chapters 2 to 4), I investigate, or attempt to reconstruct, certain views of the Epicureans concerning what we may call psychology in the modern sense, that is, the mental states, emotions, and activities that contribute to or disrupt the healthy operation of the psyche. Today, psychological therapies look to treat pathologies such as depression, obsessive and compulsive syndromes, and delusions. Such disorders, or behaviors that are comparable to these clinical conditions, were of concern to Epicurean thinkers as well: even more than the other philosophical schools of classical antiquity, the Epicureans conceived of their insights as providing a cure for tribulations afflicting the mind, and it is this aspect of their program that I consider in the sequel (cf. Nussbaum 1994).
It is well known that the Epicureans believed-and were often ridiculed for believing-that the principal cause of human unhappiness is the fear of death and the punishments that were imagined to attend upon it. But death, they held, is in fact nothing, so far as human beings are concerned, and hence it is not a proper object of fear. As Epicurus writes in the Letter to Menoeceus (124): Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, since all good and evil reside in sensation [aisth sis], and death is the privation of sensation. 1 The doctrine is summarized more pithily in the second of the so-called Principal Doctrines of Epicurus, and also by Lucretius (3.830: nil igitur mors est ad nos ), and is a cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy.
The fear of death is disturbing in itself, whether the Epicureans thought of it as an unconscious or repress