by Tim O'Keefe
FIFTEEN
Friendship
Epicurus praises friendship in extravagant terms, calling it an “immortal good” (SV 78), which “dances round the world announcing to us all that we should wake to blessedness” (SV 52). This is because friendship is by far the greatest thing for making our whole life blessed (KD 27). Knowing that we can count on our friends to help us out in times of need allows us to face the future fearlessly. But in order to have such friends, we must in turn help our friends out when they need us. So the Epicureans believe they can accommodate friendship within their egoistic hedonism. In fact, they even claim that there is good prudential reason to love your friend as much as yourself. Egoistically loving your friend as much as yourself is a difficult trick to pull off, and it may seem that in the case of friendship, at least, Epicurus abandons his strict psychological egoism. This is probably not true. However, some later Epicureans did advance such non-egoistic theories, and while they are inconsistent with key tenets of Epicureanism, they are also, arguably, closer to the psychological phenomena of friendship.
The security of friendship
Just as courage comes to be by reasoning out what is advantageous, so too does friendship come to be because of its usefulness (DL X 120). The main reason given by Epicureans for the importance of friendship is that it provides safety: with friends to protect you, your life will be secure from danger, whereas the friendless life is beset with risks (Cic. Fin. I 65–66). Even a person who has limited his desires as he should would have to worry about being unable to fulfil them if he has to go it alone. Epicurus says that the wise person wishes to have friends so that he might have somebody to attend him when he is sick and help him when he is imprisoned or impoverished (Sen. Ep. 9.8, IG I-54).
Friends provide a kind of “mutual aid” society; the friends protect one another from danger and provide for one another in time of need. If you are surrounded by friends, and thus able to eliminate all fear of your neighbours, your life will be most pleasant (KD 40). Epicurean friendship is communal. Its focus is not on the one-on-one interaction between friends, but on how having a network of friends who look out for one another is beneficial to all. In their communities, Epicureans tried to implement this type of friendship.1
Having friends, therefore, will help you avoid both bodily pain and mental distress. When your friends help you out in times of sickness or hunger, this improves your bodily state and helps you achieve aponia, the limit of bodily pleasure. But having reason not to fear that you will be in great bodily pain, and thus achieving ataraxia, is far more important to happiness. It is for this reason that Epicurus maintains that it is not so much the actual help from our friends that we need, but confidence that they will help us (SV 34).
A network of friends can also provide an intellectual mutual aid society. Friendship among Epicureans reinforces proper philosophy, provides models of conduct and helps prevent vain desires from developing. Forthright philosophical discussion and censure are central to Epicurean pedagogy, and this practice of speaking frankly is considered part of “the office of a friend”.2 Epicurus recommends practising his ethical precepts with like-minded friends in order to avoid disturbance (Ep. Men. 135). Within an Epicurean community, being surrounded by right-thinking compatriots helps to sustain one on the straight and narrow. There were even mugs featuring portraits of Epicurus, celebrations of his birthday and the like, to help bring the community members together and reinforce Epicurus’ teachings.3
Egoistically loving your friend as much as yourself
So the Epicureans have excellent reason to value friendship and to praise it in high-flown terms. Nonetheless, regarding your friends as a kind of “mutual aid society” may seem inadequate for true friendship. At the end of Cicero’s exposition of Epicurean ethics in book one of On Ends, the Epicurean spokesman Torquatus defends Epicureanism against the charge that hedonism would make true friendship impossible, and he insists that Epicureanism can accommodate even the demand that a true friend will love his friend as much as himself. Torquatus admits there is a variety of ways Epicureans try to accommodate this demand, and he presents three different Epicurean theories of friendship.
Proponents of the first theory start from the unimpeachably Epicurean observation that, like the virtues, friendship is only instrumentally valuable and deserves to be cultivated only because it allows us to live securely (Cic. Fin. I 68, II 82). And they admit that we do not value our friends’ pleasures and pains in themselves as we do our own (Cic. Fin. I 66). Still, the wise person recognizes that he needs friendship to attain the greatest pleasure for himself. Furthermore, he recognizes that friendship requires us to love our friends as much as ourselves. And so, on egoistic grounds, he does love his friends as much as he does himself: he feels exactly the same towards his friend as towards himself and exerts himself as much for his friend’s pleasure as for his own (Cic. Fin. I 66–8).
At least initially, this theory suffers from two obvious problems. The first involves the final ends of the Epicurean sage, who supposedly loves his friend as much as himself because loving him in this way is the most effective means for securing his own pleasure. Either (i) the theory is inconsistent in how it describes the final ends of the Epicurean sage, asserting that the sage values only his own pleasure for its own sake and also that he values his friends and his friends’ pleasures as much as his own. Or, consistently within itself, (ii) the theory ascribes an inconsistent set of motives to the wise person, making him suffer from a serious case of doublethink: the sage values his friends’ pleasures as much as his own, while recognizing that he does so for the sake of his own pleasure, the only thing he regards as valuable in itself.
Secondly, the process of coming to love your friend as much as yourself seems to suffer from psychological implausibility: is it possible to decide, on egoistic grounds, to cultivate a disinterested love of others? As Cicero points out (Fin. II 78), genuine affection does not usually result from calculations of expediency. Now, people can play all sorts of mind games with themselves. For instance, consider the person described in Pascal’s wager (Pensées §233), who cannot believe in God initially, but gets himself sprinkled with holy water, has masses said for himself and engages in other sorts of trickery in order to make himself believe in God, because he thinks that having this belief is prudent. But even if a person could cultivate religious belief by following Pascal’s recommendation – and I believe he could – this sort of process, applied to friendship, would not be endorsed by the Epicureans, who prize prudent, clear-eyed rationality above all else.
Given these problems, one might be tempted to conclude that the Epicureans’ position on friendship is inconsistent with their overall psychology and ethics, and this conclusion has often been drawn.4 But these problems stem from assuming that the wise Epicurean loves his friends as much as himself in the sense that he values his friends’ pleasures as much as he values his own. The problems dissolve, however, if we interpret the talk about “loving one’s friend as much as oneself” in behavioural terms, that is, as prescribing a policy of action, instead of describing what one ultimately values. We desire pleasure for ourselves, and we see that friendship is one of the best means of attaining that end. If we are wise, however, we will also realize that we must treat our friends as well as we treat ourselves in order to have a stable friendship. Only by acting in this way can we build up the mutual trust that is the foundation of friendship. Thus, on egoistic grounds, we do treat our friends as well as we treat ourselves, and in this sense we love them as we do ourselves.5
Fools do not see this, so they are willing to betray their friends when not betraying them would involve significant pain and sacrifice. But the wise person realizes that failing to come through for his friends would destroy his reputation, so he is willing to go to great lengths to help his friend. In fact, the wise person will sometimes die for his friend (DL X 121). This may appear inconsistent with egoism, but remember that the Epicureans believe that deat
h is “nothing to us”. If you betray your friend, your life will be totally upset and confounded (SV 56–7), just as you would always live in fear that you might be caught if you break the laws, even if you were never caught (KD 34–5). So if you have to choose between dying for your friend and betraying your friend (and thus living out an anxious, upset life), the prudent thing to do would be to die for your friend.
The third Epicurean theory of friendship (Cic. Fin. I 70) is more forthright than the first in making love a matter of one’s behaviour. (We shall look at the second theory shortly.) According to the third theory, wise people make an agreement between themselves to love each other as much as they love themselves, because doing so is conducive to living pleasantly. So this theory assimilates the Epicurean position on friendship to their position on justice. Justice is an agreement to neither harm nor be harmed, a pact of mutual non-interference, whereas friendship is an agreement to treat one another as well as one treats oneself, a pact of mutual beneficence.
A heterodox account of friendship
Just as in the case of justice, critics of Epicurean hedonism could argue that the clear-eyed pursuit of pleasure would sometimes justify immoral actions, such as breaking your word to your friend when you thereby stand to gain a great deal and can do so with impunity (see e.g. Fin. II 51–5). Still, given the Epicurean doctrine that peace of mind is the greatest pleasure, they have at least a plausible argument that the wise person will treat his friend as well as he treats himself. The more fundamental objection to the Epicureans is that, even if we grant that the wise person would care for his friend in this way, this sense of “loving” one’s friend as much as oneself is too niggardly to deserve the name “love”. The Epicurean “friend” may behave well, but given his motives and the way he regards his friend, he is still cold-hearted and selfish. And some later Epicureans are apparently impressed enough by this sort of objection that they are willing to make important modifications to Epicurean psychology to answer it. They offer the second theory of friendship recounted at the end of book one of On Ends (Fin. I 69).
These “timid” Epicureans (as Torquatus calls them) offer their alternative account because they fear that friendship would be totally crippled if we sought it only for the sake of our own pleasure. Their identity is unclear, but Cicero says that they are recent Epicureans and that their position is an innovation, never put forward by Epicurus himself (Fin. II 82). The first century BCE Epicurean Philodemus was probably one of them (see Tsouna 2007: 27–31). According to these Epicureans, our initial interactions with our friends are motivated entirely by a desire for our own pleasure, but later we can develop a love for our friends that is not rooted in a desire for our own pleasure, whereas in the first theory the desire for pleasure continues to be our sole motive later on. Spending time together engenders familiarity, so that we come to love our friends for their own sake, even if we gain no advantage from the friendship. This is likened to the process whereby we (supposedly) come to have disinterested affection for pets, familiar activities, our home city and the like, by repeated association with them. In the second theory, it is explicitly denied that friendship is desirable only for the sake of our own pleasure.
Once I have this sort of affection for my friends, it also opens up a different sort of hedonistic justification for friendship. With familiarity, I become fond of locales and pets. So I enjoy hanging out by the neighbourhood convenience store watching pierced teenagers asking passersby for cigarettes, even if being there serves no further purpose of mine like getting food. Likewise, petting my mangy old cat is soothing, even if she is totally worthless otherwise. My friends offer much richer opportunities for these sorts of pleasures. Spending time with them is enjoyable, and this pleasure need not be reduced to considerations of how they will have my back, unlike on the first theory. If we wish, we could try to fit this into the Epicurean framework of desires by positing a natural and necessary desire for friendship, in which having friends is necessary for happiness, although not for life itself, and where we desire friendship for its own sake, not simply for the sake of satisfying some further desire, such as for food or shelter.
Cicero, for one, says that this sort of theory is humane (Fin. II 82). But embracing it would require considerable deviation from orthodoxy. Most fundamentally, it gives up psychological hedonism and egoism, as with time we come to care about our friends for their own sake, apart from any usefulness derived from the relationship. That my motives in the beginning were self-seeking does not alter this point. And because Epicurean ethics is based on Epicurean psychology, these heterodox Epicureans are going to have difficulties in maintaining the fundamental tenet that only our own pleasure is valuable once they admit that we care about things other than our own pleasure.
Nor is this point altered by noting that pursuing friendship can be justified on hedonistic grounds. Let us presume that I care for my friend for his own sake, and that as a result I enjoy hanging out with him and helping him out. Then I would have excellent hedonistic reasons to spend time with my friend and to benefit him: doing so is pleasurable. As David Hume points out, though, the fact that I get pleasure from interacting with my friend does not show that I value my friend for the sake of the pleasure. If the explanation for my why I enjoy interacting with my friend is that I care about him for his own sake, then I care about him for his own sake.6
Let us leave aside this problem: perhaps a revisionist Epicurean could say that we simply find spending time with our friends enjoyable in itself, without rooting this enjoyment in a concern for our friends’ welfare for their own sake, any more than I care about the welfare of the neighbourhood convenience store, even though I am fond of the place. This account of the pleasures of friendship is plausible, more plausible than the theory that the pleasures of friendship are based on expectations of security and memories of benefits. But it would require abandoning the thesis that all mental pleasures depend on bodily pleasures. It is not just by oversight that orthodox Epicureans describe the value of friendship in terms of the security from physical danger that it provides; instead, it follows from their view of the dependence of mental pleasures on bodily ones. As Cicero notes, Epicurus would never allow that pursuits such as literature and learning are pleasurable in themselves, and Torquatus agrees with this, although he also says that some later Epicureans do allow for some mental pleasures that do not arise out of bodily ones (Fin. I 25, 55).7
In short, orthodox Epicureans can make a very strong case for the importance of friendship and of treating your friends well. But the ways in which orthodox Epicureanism tries to explain the particulars of how we regard our friends and how we find friendship pleasurable is inadequate, and these inadequacies put serious pressure on Epicurean psychology.
SIXTEEN
The gods
A central goal of Epicurean physics is to banish the fear of the gods, because that fear is one of the chief impediments to attaining happiness. We have already looked (in Chapter 5) at the negative side of Epicurean theology. The workings of the cosmos can be explained entirely in terms of the purposeless motions, reboundings and entanglements of atoms moving through the void, and so there is no reason to attribute them to the gods (DRNV 1161–1225). Furthermore, the manifest flaws in the world show that it is not under the control of philanthropic deities, and the random ways in which phenomena such as lightning bolts occur show that they are not the result of any sort of agency, even the jealous and flawed agency of the Olympian gods.
Since the Epicureans eject the gods from the world, denying that they have any influence whatsoever on it, it is understandable that “Epicurean” became a byword for “atheist” in antiquity. (In fact, a Hebrew word for an unbelieving heretic, an apikoros, is derived from “Epicurean”.) But the Epicureans vigorously rebut this accusation. Epicurus pointedly calls some of the prominent atheists of his time crazy, comparing them to people in a Bacchic frenzy (Phld. Piet. 112.5–12, LS 23H). He says that the knowledge that there are gods
is enargēs, evident or obvious. Enargēs is the same term he uses to label obvious and evident phenomena such as there being bodies in motion, phenomena on the basis of which we make inferences about what is hidden, the adēlon. Why the existence of the gods is supposed to be so obvious is itself, unfortunately, unclear. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, our main source for Epicurean theology, the Epicurean spokesman offers the inadequate but widespread argument from common consensus: all human beings have a naturally occurring, innate preconception of the gods and that they exist, and so they do (Nat. D. I 43–4).
Our basic grasp (prolēpsis; see Chapter 10) of the gods is of a blessed and immortal being (Ep. Men. 123–4; Cic. Nat. D. I 45). On this basis, the Epicureans are able to criticize the views of most people regarding the gods as impious falsehoods. Feeling anger and giving trouble to others are signs of weakness inconsistent with blessedness (KD 1). So Epicurus would be on firm ground in criticizing “gods” like Hera, whose jealous anger at Zeus’ infidelities makes her vengefully strike out at his poor paramours, and Yahweh, who orders Joshua and his army to kill all of the men, women, children and animals in Jericho and then gets angry when they keep some of the plunder for themselves against his orders. Less plausibly, the Epicureans criticize the providential god of the Stoics, who administers (and is identical to) the cosmos, by saying that world-management is high-stress, hard work (Cic. Nat. D. I 52).
So it is obvious what the gods are not for the Epicureans, but what they are is much less clear. Our ancient sources seem to conflict with one another. Broadly speaking, there are two theories on what the Epicureans’ gods are like, both in the ancient sources we have and in the recent scholarly literature on the topic, the “realist” and “idealist” views. As will become clear, I find the “idealist” view far more plausible. But it is worth presenting both, in part because the attractions of the “idealist” view are much clearer after working through the “realist” view.
