Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
opening up a file that I think a lot of us think
we know, but if we're honest, we've probably
got the polar opposite of the truth. We were
talking about Epicurus. Right. And I have to
say, looking at the prep material, I felt a little
called out. Called out? How do you mean? Well...
You know, when I hear the word Epicurean, I get
this very specific image in my head. I'm thinking
like a Friday night where I blow half my paycheck
on some crazy tasting menu, maybe a bottle of
Barolo. Just pure indulgence, you know. The magazine
Epicure is all about high -end food. Epicurean
delights means luxury. Of course. But then I
open up the source material and I'm reading about
a guy who's living on bread and water in a garden
somewhere complaining about stomach aches. It
just feels like a massive bait and switch. It
is probably the single greatest branding failure
in the history of philosophy. Yeah. Or maybe
it's the most successful smear campaign. It really
depends on how you look at it. Because if the
real Epicurus, the actual man, walked into that
Michelin star restaurant you're picturing, he
wouldn't just be confused. I mean, he'd be horrified.
He'd probably look at that tasting menu. and
see it as a recipe for misery. Like misery. That
seems like a bit of a stretch. I mean, truffles
are rarely miserable. For him, they were. Or,
to be more precise, the need for them was. The
premise we have to start with is that Epicurus
wasn't a party animal. He wasn't a foodie. He
was a system builder. And his whole system, it
wasn't designed to maximize fun in the way we
think of it now. It was designed to cure a very
specific disease. And what's the disease? Anxiety.
Fear. Mental disturbance. So he's not a chef.
He's a therapist. He's more like a trauma surgeon
for the human soul. I mean, you have to put yourself
in his shoes. This man lived in a time of absolute
chaos. Alexander the Great dies and his whole
empire just shatters. Right. The wars of the
Diadochi. Exactly. His generals are just fighting
over the scraps. Cities are being razed. Political
alliances shift overnight. The world felt dangerous
and just completely random. So Epicurus looks
at the human condition and he asks a really fundamental
question. Why are we all so terrified all the
time, and how do we make the pain stop? That
is a much heavier starting point than eat, drink,
and be merry. It's so much deeper. And to understand
his answer, we have to treat his philosophy as
a complete package. We can't just cherry -pick
the pleasure part and ignore the rest. We have
to look at his physics, his theory of knowledge,
and his ethics as one giant interconnected machine.
And it's all designed for one purpose. One purpose?
To produce ataraxia. tranquility, peace of mind.
So where are we getting all this from? What are
the sources? Well, we're pulling from a pretty
wide stack today to piece this all together.
We've got the biography by Diogenes Laercys,
which is, you know, where we get a lot of the
juicy personal details. He's always the guy with
the gossip. He is. Then we have some of Epicurus'
own surviving letters. The letter to Menoetius,
which is a summary of his ethics, and letters
to Herodotus and Pythocles on physics. And then
we have the big one. The massive epic poem by
the Roman poet Lucretius called Dererum Natura.
On the nature of things. And that's basically
the Epicurean Bible, but written in verse. That's
a great way to put it. It's a six book epic poem
that preserves the entire physical system. Honestly,
without Lucretius, we'd have lost half of it.
The Christian world did its best to erase him.
So our mission today is to rebuild that system.
We need to understand why a guy obsessed with
atoms thought that was the key to being happy.
Okay, let's start with the man himself then.
You mentioned the chaos of the time. Was he born
right in the middle of it? He was born directly
into it. February 341 BC on the island of Samos.
Now his parents, Neocles and Cheristrate, they
were Athenians, but they were colonists, settlers.
Okay, so they weren't locals. That would have
made them outsiders. Exactly. And that sort of
precarious status really defined his early life.
Because when Epicurus was about 18, so basically
college age, the politics shifted again. The
native Samians, backed by a Macedonian general,
kicked the Athenians out. So his family became
refugees. Overnight, they had to flee to Colophon,
which is on the coast of modern -day Turkey.
Wow. That's a rough start. It is absolutely crucial
context. If you ever wonder why Epicurus later
preached life hidden and don't get involved in
politics, you just have to look at his youth.
He saw firsthand that political power is completely
unstable. One day you're a citizen with a home.
The next day you're a refugee with nothing. It
must have instilled a really deep craving for
security. A fortress. Yeah. A place where the
world couldn't hurt him. So this refugee is looking
for answers. Where does he go? Who did he learn
from? Who were his teachers? Well, the says he
studied under a Platonist named Pamphilus and
then later a man named Nosiphanes who was a follower
of Democritus. And Democritus is the original
atom guy? He's the OG atomist. The guy who first
proposed that the world is made of atomos. These
tiny uncuttable particles. Now clearly Epicurus
learned a huge amount from these guys. His entire
physics is basically a remix of Democritus. But
here's where you get a little glimpse of his
personality. Oh yeah. He hated admitting it.
He absolutely refused to give them credit. Wait,
really? He wanted all the credit for himself.
He claimed to be self -taught. He publicly called
Nosiphanes a mollusk. A mollusk. Yeah, basically
calling him spineless. He said all his predecessors
were just confused and that he discovered the
truth all on his own. So he sounds a little bit
arrogant. Or maybe insecure. It might have been
a bit of both, but you could also see it as really
smart branding. He was trying to set up a new
school, a rival to Plato's famous academy and
Aristotle's Lyceum. And you can't just say, hey,
I'm teaching the same stuff as those guys down
the road. Exactly. You need a unique selling
proposition. So in 306 BC, he moves to Athens,
the philosophical center of the world. And he
does something really radical. He doesn't buy
a grand public building or a gymnasium. He buys
a house with a garden. The famous garden. The
garden. And the location itself is symbolic.
It was located just outside the city walls of
Athens, sort of in between the Stoa, where the
Stoics would later teach, and Plato's Academy.
And this physical location really matters. The
academy was an institution. The SOA was a public
porch, the garden. It was a home. It sounds much
more like a commune than a university. It was
absolutely a commune. They lived there. They
shared meals. Epicurus didn't believe in forcing
people to give up all their private property.
He actually thought that created resentment and
distrust. But they essentially pooled their resources
to support the community. And the guest list
for this commune was the biggest scandal in Athens.
That was the thing. Everyone. While Aristotle
is over at the Lyceum teaching that women are
biologically inferior and that some people are
just natural. born slaves, Epicurus is opening
his gate to women and slaves as full members
of the school. That must have ruffled a lot of
feathers in polite society. It was completely
shocking. You had highborn women like Themista,
who was a student, but you also had courtesans,
you know, sex workers living and studying as
equals with the male philosophers. But me? Yes.
We know some of their names. There's a woman
named Leona Kuhn, who was apparently a brilliant
writer and philosopher in her own right. She
even wrote a treatise attacking Theophrastus,
who was Aristotle's successor as the head of
the Lyceum. Hold on. A courtesan wrote a philosophical
takedown of the most prominent Aristotelian of
his day. Yes. And the establishment, as you can
imagine, hated it. Centuries later, you have
the Roman orator Cicero still clutching his pearls
about it, complaining that a little courtesan
dared to criticize a great philosopher. But for
Epicurus, the logic was simple. Does this person
have a mind? Can they feel pain and anxiety?
And they need philosophy. Then they need philosophy.
It wasn't an intellectual social club. It was
a hospital for the soul. And you don't turn away
sick people because of their gender or their
social status. That metaphor of the hospital
is really interesting. Because it implies that
everyone outside the garden is, well, sick. That's
exactly how they saw it. To them, mainstream
society is a madhouse. It's driven by ambition,
fear, superstition, the pursuit of empty desires.
The garden is the sanctuary. It's the sanatorium.
And Epicurus was the head doctor. But he wasn't
alone, right? There was a core group. He had
a core group of guides, people like Metrodorus,
Hermarchus, and Polyenus. And by all accounts,
they were an incredibly tight -knit group. They
weren't just colleagues. They were best friends.
So did he practice what he preached right up
to the end? I mean, it's one thing to be a chill,
tranquil philosopher when you're healthy and
life is good. That is the ultimate test, isn't
it? And Epicurus died in 270 BC at the age of
72. And he died the hard way. He developed a
blockage of his urinary tract, almost certainly
caused by kidney stones. Oof. I've heard kidney
stones described as pretty much the worst pain
a human being can experience. And you can add
dysentery to that as well. So it was a slow,
agonizing, too -weak decline. But this is where
the philosophy stops being abstract and gets
tested in the real world. On what he knew was
his last day, he wrote a letter to his friend,
Idomeneus. And a version of it survives. What
does he say? Get me some morphine. He writes,
and I'm paraphrasing here, on this truly happy
day of my life, as I am at the point of death,
I write this to you. The disease in my bladder
and stomach are pursuing their course, lacking
nothing of their natural severity. So he's not
downplaying it. He's admitting the pain is maxed
out. He is. He's totally honest about the physical
reality. But then he says, but set against all
this is the joy in my heart at the recollection
of my conversations with you. And he ends the
letter by asking Odominus to take care of the
children of their friend Metrodorus, who had
died earlier. OK, I have to play the skeptic
for a second. Is that real or is that just him
trying to, you know, look tough for the history
books? I'm in agony, but my brain is so powerful
I don't feel it. It sounds a little bit like
stoic bravado. It does sound like it, but the
mechanism is actually very different. A stoic
might say something like pain is not an evil.
Epicurus says, no, pain is absolutely an evil.
It's the worst thing. He's not denying the sensation
at all. So what's he doing? He's engaging in
a kind of mental balancing act. He believed the
mind has a unique capacity that the body lacks.
It can travel through time. His body was trapped
in the painful present, right? But he was forcing
his mind to dwell in the past, on the pleasant
memories of friendship and philosophical conversation.
He was literally using nostalgia as an analgesic.
So he's basically just distracting himself. It's
more than distraction. He's counterbalancing.
He's flooding the scales of his consciousness
with positive mental data to outweigh the negative
physical data. It's a learned technique. And
whether it worked perfectly or not, the fact
that he was coherent enough to be writing letters
about caring for his friend's kids while dying
of kidney failure, it suggests he wasn't completely
consumed by self -pity. It's an impressive exit.
I'll definitely give him that. Yeah. But to get
to that level of mental control, we have to dig
into this system. And this is where the listener
might get thrown off because the system starts
with physics. Yes, the foundation. Right. And
if I go to a therapist today because I have anxiety
and they start talking about protons and electrons
and quantum mechanics, I'm walking out of that
office. Why did Epicurus think you need to know
about atoms to be happy? Because he had a different
diagnosis for the root cause of our anxiety.
In the ancient world, the world was alive with
invisible threats. If lightning struck a tree,
it wasn't a discharge of static electricity.
It was Zeus. He was angry. Exactly. If the Earth
shook, it was Poseidon in a rage. If you got
sick, it was Apollo shooting plague arrows at
you. You were constantly being watched, judged,
and potentially punished by these volatile, invisible
superpowers. It's basically paranoia on a cosmic
scale. It is. And Epicurus realized that you
can never, ever be truly tranquil if you think
a capricious god might crush you at any moment
for any reason. So he needed a way to... well,
to kill the gods, not literally he thought gods
existed, but to kill their involvement in the
natural world. He needed a purely mechanical,
purely naturalistic explanation for everything.
And to the atom. And to the atom. If lightning
is just a certain kind of atom colliding in the
clouds, then it's not a divine judgment. It's
just weather. And if it's just weather, you don't
have to be afraid of it. Physics is the antidote
to superstition. But didn't he have this weird
rule about explanations? The principle of multiple
explanations? Ah, yes. This is the part that
drives modern scientists completely crazy, but
it makes perfect sense if you remember he's a
therapist, not a physicist. He said that when
you're looking at something distant and hard
to verify, like the phases of the moon or an
eclipse, if there are three or four plausible
natural explanations, you should accept all of
them as possibly true. Wait, even if they contradict
each other, like if one explanation is the moon
is a ball of rock reflecting sunlight and another
is the moon is a bowl of fire that waxes and
wanes. Yes, exactly. Because from his perspective,
he doesn't care which one is technically correct.
He only cares that you accept that the cause
is natural. As long as a God is doing it is not
on your list of possibilities. You're safe. The
goal isn't scientific precision. The goal is
peace of mind. If you obsess over finding the
one true cause, you just trade one anxiety fear
of gods for another, the anxiety of not knowing
for sure. That is pragmatism on steroids. It's
like, I don't care how the toaster works, just
convince me there isn't an angry ghost living
inside it. That is a perfect analogy. Precisely.
Now, when it comes to the atoms themselves, he
borrows the basics from Democritus. The universe
is eternal, and it consists of only two things.
Matter, which is atoms, and void, which is empty
space. The atoms are uncuttable, they're infinite
in number, and they vary in shape, size, and
weight. Okay, that sounds pretty straightforward.
And he even had a theory of perception based
on this. Vision, for example, happens because
objects are constantly emitting these thin films
of atoms, like a skin, that fly through the air
and hit our eyes. Like a constant stream of little
pictures. Right. But he adds a twist to the system
that Democritus didn't have. And this twist is
absolutely essential for his ethics. It might
be the most brilliant and, frankly, weirdest
part of his entire system. You're talking about
the swerve. The Klineman. The unpredictable swerve.
Okay, explain this to me, because it sounds like
a glitch in the Matrix. So, Democritus' atomism
had a huge problem, at least from Epicurus' point
of view. Democritus said that atoms move by necessity.
They fall through the void. They hit other atoms.
They bounce off. It's a perfect, unbroken chain
of cause and effect. Which means everything is
predetermined. Hard determinism. Exactly. And
if you knew the position and momentum of every
single atom in the universe right now, you could
theoretically predict the entire future with
perfect accuracy. And that means my choice to
say pick up this water glass isn't really a choice.
It was just the inevitable result of atoms banging
into each other in my brain for billions of years.
Right. And Epicurus hated this idea. He famously
said it would be better to believe in the myths
of the gods than to be a slave to the destiny
of the physicists. At least with the gods, you
can try to pray to them or appease them. You
can't pray to a mathematical equation. It removes
all human agency. So how does he break the equation?
How does he escape this prison of determinism?
He introduces a tiny element of randomness into
the fabric of reality. He says that as atoms
fall downwards through the void, at no fixed
time and in no fixed place, they will occasionally
swerve. Just a tiny, tiny bit. For no reason.
Not because they were hit by another atom. For
no reason at all. It's an uncaused event. A random
wobble. Okay. Why? What did that get him? It's
a masterstroke, because that one little wobble
solves two massive problems for him. The first
is a physics problem. It explains how atoms collide
and clump together to create worlds in the first
place. If they all just fell in perfectly straight
parallel lines, they'd never interact. Okay,
that makes sense. But what's the second more
important problem it solves? It creates a break
in the chain of fate. It's the physical basis
for free will. Whoa. So he's trying to find a
loophole for human freedom in the random motion
of a single atom. That's it. He argues that this
random uncaused motion in the atoms that make
up our soul is the ultimate source of what he
calls the free volition in living things. It's
the reason we aren't just biological robots playing
out a pre -written script. That connects weirdly
well to like modern quantum mechanics. The idea
that at the most fundamental level of reality,
it's all about probability, not certainty. It's
a stunningly modern intuition. He somehow understood
that a perfectly ordered, perfectly predictable
mechanical universe is actually a prison. You
need a little bit of chaos, a little bit of unpredictability
to have freedom. OK, so the universe is just
atoms in void. They swerve around and there are
no angry gods watching me. I have to admit, I
feel safer already. But how do we know any of
this is true? How do we know anything is true?
He didn't like abstract logic games, did he?
No, he hated them. He thought Plato was completely
lost in the clouds with his abstract forms. Epicurus
was a hardcore empiricist. He believed that all
knowledge, without exception, comes from the
senses. And this is his canon, his, like, ruler
or standard for measuring truth. Correct. The
canon, or the standard of truth, has three parts.
And the first one is the most important. Sensation.
He says that our sensations are always, always
true. They are irrefutable. Hold on a minute.
That can't be right. If I have a high fever and
I eat honey and it tastes bitter to me, my sense
of taste is telling me this is bitter. But honey
is sweet. Isn't my sense lying to me? Epicurus
would say, no. Your tongue is accurately reporting
the physical interaction between the honey atoms
and the atoms of your sick, feverish tongue.
The raw report is true. The error only comes
in with your opinion or your judgment. Your mind
jumping to the conclusion the honey itself is
bitter. Rather than the more accurate conclusion,
my tongue is messed up right now and this is
how it's perceiving honey. Okay, that's a very
subtle but important distinction. He trusts the
raw data from the sensor. But not the user's
interpretation of that data. Exactly. Don't shoot
the messenger. The senses just deliver the mail.
It's our minds that misread it. All right. What's
the second part of the canon? The second part
is prolepsis, which is usually translated as
preconceptions or concepts. This is basically
how we form general ideas and recognize things.
You see a horse, then you see another horse,
then another one. Your mind stacks up those repeated
sense impressions to form a generic composite
concept of horse. It's pattern recognition. It's
exactly that. So that when I say the word horse
to you, an image or concept immediately flashes
in your mind. That's a prolepsis. It's a memory
of past sensations. And the third part. The third
part is the most... critical one for our deep
dive today. Feelings, or in Greek, pathy. And
for Epicurus, there are only two of them that
matter, pleasure and pain. So this is the internal
compass. It's the only compass that matters for
guiding our actions. He says nature has given
every living creature two flags. Pleasure is
the flag that says pursue this, move towards
this. Pain is the flag that says avoid this,
move away from this. You don't need a complex
philosophical argument to know that putting your
hand in a fire is bad. You feel it. It's immediate.
It's non -negotiable. And this leads us directly
into the ethics, which is the part where we have
to fix everyone's definition of hedonism. Yes,
the main event. Because if pleasure is the ultimate
guide, why isn't he telling us to, I don't know,
go do heroin? or eat cake for every meal. Those
things produce a lot of pleasure, for a while
at least. This is the absolute crux of the entire
misunderstanding of Epicurus. He defines pleasure
in a very specific and for us very counterintuitive
way. We usually think of pleasure as what he
called kinetic pleasure. That's active stimulation,
the pleasure of eating, of drinking, of sex,
of scratching an itch. The dopamine hit, the
feeling of satisfying a craving. Exactly. But
Epicures points out that this kind of kinetic
pleasure is almost always just the process of
removing a pain or filling a lack. You only enjoy
the act of eating if you are hungry. Hunger is
a state of pain, a deficiency. Eating is simply
the process of removing that pain. So what happens
once the pain is gone, once you're not hungry
anymore? That is the goal. He calls that state
catastematic pleasure. It's static pleasure or
the pleasure of being in a stable state. It's
the state of satiety. If you are not hungry.
not thirsty, not cold, and not afraid, you have
reached the summit of all possible happiness.
That sounds, I don't know, kind of boring. To
a modern ear, not being in pain doesn't sound
like happiness. It just sounds neutral. Like
zero. And that, Epicurus would say, is exactly
why we are all so miserable. We don't recognize
that neutral state of non -disturbance as the
peak. We think we need to constantly add more
stimulation, more excitement to be happy. But
he argues you can't get fuller than full. If
you keep eating after you're already full, you
don't get more pleasure. You just get indigestion.
You get pain. So his hedonism is actually a philosophy
of limits, of knowing when to stop. It is a philosophy
of subtraction, not addition. Happiness isn't
about getting everything you want. It's about
getting rid of the things that hurt you. The
ultimate goal is a twofold state. Aponia, the
absence of physical pain, and ataraxia, the absence
of mental anxiety or disturbance. Once you have
those two things, you are, in his words, living
like a god. But we're human. We're hardwired
to want stuff. We have all these desires pulling
us in different directions. How do we just turn
that off? You don't turn it off. You manage it.
You have to become a ruthless auditor of your
own desires. He gives us a brilliant framework
for this, breaking them down into three distinct
categories. It's often called the calculus of
desire. All right. Walk us through the spreadsheet.
What's the first category? Class one, natural
and necessary desires. These are the non -negotiables.
They're rooted in our biology. Food, water, shelter,
basic clothing, and interestingly, friendship.
He puts friendship in the necessary category,
like on the same level as food and water. For
him, yes. It's absolutely essential for a happy
and secure life. We'll definitely get back to
that. But basically, if you don't have these
class one things, you either die or suffer immensely.
So the rule is you must satisfy these. But luckily,
he says, nature makes them very easy to get.
Water is free. A bowl of oatmeal is cheap. A
roof over your head doesn't have to be a palace.
Okay, that makes sense. What's class two? Class
two, natural but not necessary desires. This
is where variation and luxury come in. You need
water to live. That's class one. But you might
want a glass of fine wine. That's class two.
You need basic food for sustenance, class one.
But you might want a gourmet steak dinner, class
two. Sex also falls into this category. It's
natural, but you won't die without it. Exactly.
And what's the rule for this class? Don't get
hooked. That's the perfect way to put it. The
rule is, enjoy these things if they happen to
come your way easily and without effort, but
do not become dependent on them. If a friend
offers you a glass of that expensive wine, by
all means, drink it and enjoy it. But if it's
not there, you must be perfectly happy and content
with your cup of water. The danger is attachment.
The moment you feel you need the wine to enjoy
the dinner, you've lost your freedom. You are
now vulnerable to fortune. That's the classic
hedonic treadmill, right? used to the luxury.
You can't go back to the simple stuff. And your
baseline for happiness just keeps getting higher
and more expensive. Precisely. He wants you to
keep your baseline for pleasure as low as possible.
That way, a simple piece of bread and a pot of
cheese can feel like an absolute feast. You become
very difficult to make unhappy. What about the
final category, class three? Class three, unnatural
and unnecessary desires. He also calls these
vain and empty desires. And this is the category
that includes most of what our society tells
us to chase. Fame, political power, vast wealth,
statues in your honor, immortality. So the life
goals of basically every influencer, politician,
and billionaire on the planet. He would say,
cut these out of your life entirely. Suppress
them completely. They are poison. Why? What's
so uniquely bad about them? Because unlike the
natural desires, they are limitless. You can
eat until you are full. You can drink until you
are no longer thirsty. There is a natural stopping
point. But you can't get full of power. There
is always someone with more. You can't get full
of fame. You are constantly worried about losing
it or being replaced. These desires are bottomless
pits that are designed to generate infinite anxiety.
So the only winning move is not to play. Offed
out of the rat race completely. A complete and
total withdrawal. This is the source of his famous
advice, Live Hidden. That's a radical prescription.
It's basically telling 90 % of modern society
that their core life goals are a form of mental
illness. It is. He's looking at everyone scrambling
to climb the ladder and he's saying, you are
running a race you can't possibly win for a prize
that won't make you happy, even if you get it.
The only sane thing to do is to stop running.
So we have the diagnosis and the general treatment
plan, which is this audit of desires. But he
actually had a more specific, memorable prescription,
right? The four -part cure, the tetrafarmacose.
Yes, the four -fold remedy. This was a simple
four -line summary of the core therapeutic doctrines.
It was something that Epicureans would memorize,
like a mantra or a prayer to use when they felt
panic or anxiety setting in. Let's go through
the four doses. Dose number one, don't fear God.
We touched on this with the physics. The gods
exist, but their nature is to be blessed and
immortal, to be perfect. And if you're a perfect
being, you don't have needs or wants. If you
don't have needs, you don't get angry or jealous.
Anger is a sign of weakness, of being affected
by others. So the gods are in a state of perfect
bliss and are completely indifferent to human
affairs. They are just chilling in the metacosmia,
the quiet spaces between the different worlds.
It's the divine indifference. They aren't malevolent.
They just don't care about us. Which is the best
news ever. It means you can stop worrying about
angering them. You can stop with the elaborate
sacrifices. You're off the hook. Okay, that's
a relief. What's dose number two? Don't worry
about death. This is probably the hardest pill
for most people to swallow. His argument is deceptively
simple, and it's a direct consequence of his
materialism. He says, death is nothing to us.
For all good and evil consists in sensation,
but death is the deprivation of all sensation.
Right. This is the famous line, when I am, death
is not. When death is, I am not. Exactly. You,
the conscious feeling subject, will never actually
meet death. It is literally impossible for you
to experience the state of being dead. I get
the logic. It's a clean syllogism. It makes perfect
sense on paper, but I just don't buy it as a
complete cure for the fear. I'm not necessarily
afraid of the experience of being dead, the darkness.
I'm afraid of the loss, the FOMO. I'm afraid
of not seeing my kids grow up, of missing out
on the future. Cold logic doesn't seem to fix
that emotional reality. That's a very fair and
common pushback. And Epicurus, or maybe more
accurately, Lucretius, has an answer for that.
He would say that fear is based on a false projection.
You are imagining a ghostly you hovering over
your own grave, feeling sad about all the parties
you're missing. But there is no you left to miss
anything. So how do you convince yourself of
that? He uses what's sometimes called the symmetry
argument or the mirror of time argument. Lucretius
does this beautifully in his poem. He says, look
at the infinite abyss of time that existed before
you were born. The Punic Wars, the building of
the pyramids, the Trojan War. Did you suffer
because you missed them? Were you in pain? No,
of course not. I didn't exist. And nature, he
says, holds up that past eternity as a mirror
to the future eternity that will come after you
die. It will be exactly the same. A peaceful,
sensationalist non -existence. If the prenatal
abyss doesn't scare you, then the postmortem
abyss shouldn't either. They are identical. That
is chillingly comforting in a strange way. But
it demands you really truly accept materialism.
If you have even 1 % doubt, if you think maybe
there is a hell or some kind of judgment. the
whole system breaks down that's why the physics
is the absolute foundation you have to be 100
convinced that your soul is just a temporary
arrangement of atoms that will disperse at death
if you have any doubt the fear comes creeping
back in okay moving on to the more cheerful doses
dose three what is good is easy to get this refers
directly back to the calculus of desire The good
he's talking about is the satisfaction of our
class one natural and necessary desires. Simple
food, clean water, basic shelter, good company.
Nature, he says, is kind. It doesn't make the
things we absolutely need for happiness rare
or expensive. We are the ones who make happiness
difficult by convincing ourselves we need the
rare, expensive class two and class three stuff.
And finally, dose four. What is terrible is easy
to endure. This one, I'll admit, can feel like
a bit of gaslighting, especially when you consider
how he died. Oh, don't worry, those kidney stones
are easy to endure, says who. His argument here
is about the relationship between duration and
intensity, he claims. If a pain is extremely
intense, it is usually short, because it either
passes or it kills you. If a pain is chronic
and long -lasting, it is usually of a milder,
more manageable intensity. I feel like there
is a very large middle ground of long, agonizing,
but not fatal. that he's maybe ignoring there.
Perhaps. But the deeper point, I think, is about
mental resilience. He's not saying the pain isn't
real. He's saying that even in the midst of chronic
pain, the mind has the ability to retreat into
the pleasant garden of memory or to focus on
the anticipation of future pain -free moments.
You are not reducible to your pain. You have
a sanctuary inside your own head. It's a call
to cultivate that mental toughness. So we've
fixed the internal self. We've got our four -part
cure. But we still have to live in the world
and deal with other people. We mentioned he was
strongly anti -politics. Vehemently, live in
obscurity. For him, a political life is the opposite
of a tranquil life. It brings envy, competition,
danger, and it's entirely focused on the pursuit
of those toxic class three desires for fame and
power. It's a guaranteed recipe for anxiety.
But if everyone follows that advice, if all the
wise and good people retreat to their gardens,
who builds the roads? Who defends the city from
invasion? It seems like a fundamentally parasitic
philosophy. It relies on other, less enlightened
people doing the dirty work of running the state
so the Epicureans can be safe and tranquil. That
is the classic and probably the most powerful
criticism of Epicurean social theory. It's a
free rider problem. And Epiterius would probably
just shrug his shoulders and say, let the fools
who are addicted to power and glory run the city.
We will obey the laws to ensure our own safety,
but we will not be the ones riding them. His
goal isn't to create the perfect state. It's
to create a perfect life for the individual within
whatever state exists. Speaking of laws, he had
a very modern, almost revolutionary take on justice.
Oh, this is huge. Before Epicurus, justice was
usually seen as something divine or something
written into the fabric of nature, a cosmic law.
Epicurus said, no, justice is nothing more than
a social contract. It's a pledge, a mutual agreement,
neither to harm nor be harmed. It's a deal we
make because it's useful. So killing someone
isn't wrong in some. absolute cosmic sense it's
just bad for business because it makes society
less stable and secure it's bad for my personal
tranquility if i go around harming you i have
to live in constant fear that you or your friends
will come after me that's a state of anxiety
so purely out of enlightened self -interest I
agree not to harm you and you agree not to harm
me so that we can both live without fear. It's
self -interest masquerading as morality. Or you
could see it as the realistic and durable foundation
for morality that doesn't require us to believe
in any superstitions. But he does have one massive
exception to this cool calculating self -interest
rule. Friendship. Friendship or philia is the
crown jewel of the Epicurean life. He valued
it above. almost everything else. He has this
amazing line, of all the things which wisdom
provides to make us entirely happy, much the
greatest is the possession of friendship. But
isn't friendship incredibly risky from an Epicurean
perspective? It's a profound attachment. If my
best friend gets sick or dies, I'm going to be
in immense pain. Doesn't that violate the primary
rule of avoiding pain and disturbance? It's the
great paradox at the heart of the philosophy.
And he admits that friendship probably starts
out for reasons of utility, for mutual defense
and security. I need you to have my back. But
he says it ripens into something much more, a
state where we come to love the friend for their
own sake, not just for what they do for us. And
the immense security and joy that a network of
true friends provides far, far outweighs the
potential risk of pain from loss. The garden
wasn't a collection of isolated hermits. It was
a chosen family, a network of love. I want to
talk about that letter you mentioned in the prep,
the one that was found on a wall written to his
mother. oh this is just a lovely little fragment
it was found inscribed on that massive wall in
inawanda that we'll talk about it's a letter
epicurus wrote to his mother who was apparently
having bad dreams and worrying about him and
he writes to her to say basically mother don't
worry i'm living well and happily your bad dreams
are just atoms moving in your mind i am safe
and well It shows this incredibly tender human
side that completely contradicts the caricature
of him as some cold, detached calculator. He
loved his mom and wanted to ease her anxiety.
Let's pivot to the legacy now. Because the story
of how this philosophy survived at all is just...
It's insane. We almost lost everything. We very
nearly did. For centuries after his death, Epicureanism
was a huge and popular philosophical movement
across the Greek and Roman world. But then the
Christians took over the Roman Empire, and if
you think about it, Epicureanism is the ultimate
anti -Christianity. No immortal soul, no divine
providence, no afterlife, and pleasure, not faith,
is the goal of life. It's public enemy number
one. The early church fathers, like Justin Martyr
and Augustine, they went on the attack. They
systematically dismantled it. They created the
Epicurean pig caricature claiming they were all
just gluttons and atheists who lived in debauchery.
They burned the books. By the Middle Ages, Epicurus
was literally in Dante's Inferno, buried in a
flaming coffin for the crime of being a heretic
who denied the soul's immortality. So if all
the books were burned, how do we know anything
about them today? Two absolute miracles and a
couple of other lucky breaks. The first miracle
is Lucretius. A single forgotten manuscript of
his poem, De rerum natua, was found in a German
monastery in 1417 by a Renaissance book hunter
named Poggio Bracciolini. That one book, rediscovered,
brought the atoms and the swerve back to Europe.
It was a bombshell. And the second miracle. The
second miracle is the Villa of the Papyri. This
story is straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
In the Roman town of Herculaneum, there was a
huge, luxurious seaside villa. It was likely
owned by the father -in -law of Julius Caesar,
a man named Piso, who was a patron of an Epicurean
philosopher named Philodemus. And this villa
had a massive library filled with Epicurean texts.
And the Matmosuvius erupted. 79 AD. The pyroclastic
flow from the volcano buried the entire town
instantly. In the villa's library, it carbonized
the papyrus scrolls. They were flash -cooked
into what looked like lumps of charcoal. When
explorers first found them in the 1700s, they
thought they were just burnt logs. They literally
threw some of them away. Oh no, that's painful
to hear. It is, but then someone realized they
were books. For centuries, we couldn't read them
because if you tried to unroll them, they would
just crumble into dust. But today, using advanced
technology like multispectral imaging and...
CT scans. We are virtually unwrapping them layer
by layer without physically touching them. We
are recovering lost Epicurean texts right now
as we speak. It's a time capsule from the garden.
That is absolutely incredible. We are literally
downloading the mind of this ancient philosopher
from a piece of 2000 year old charcoal. And it's
completely changing our understanding of the
school. It shows us they weren't just naval gazers.
They were sophisticated thinkers writing detailed
treatises on poetry, music, rhetoric, even anger
management. And we can't forget the giant wall
you mentioned, Notawanda. Diogenes of Inuranda.
This is one of my favorite stories in all of
philosophy. Imagine a rich Roman citizen in the
second century A .D. living in a small town in
what is now Turkey. He's an old man and he decides,
I want to save my town and all future generations
from anxiety. So what does he do? He commissions
a massive limestone wall. It was something like
80 meters long and three meters high. And he
has the entire philosophy of Epicurus inscribed
on it in huge letters for everyone to read. A
billboard for tranquility. Exactly. He wrote
a preface on the wall that says, I have set this
up not for myself, but for the salvation of all.
It's an incredible monument to philosophical
humanism. So the ideas survived against all odds.
They trickled down through people like Pierre
Gassendi who kind of cleaned them up and made
them acceptable for the church. And then they
hit the big time with, of all things, the American
revelation. Thomas Jefferson. This is the connection
that blows people's minds. Jefferson was a devoted,
though private, Epicurean. He owned multiple
editions of Lucretius. In his letters, he wrote
explicitly, I too am an Epicurean. So when he
wrote in the Declaration of Independence about
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
He wasn't talking about the pursuit of property,
which was the standard phrasing at the time.
He was almost certainly talking about the pursuit
of ataraxia, the fundamental human right to live
a life free from physical pain and mental turmoil,
free from the tyranny of kings and priests. The
American dream has Epicurean DNA woven right
into it. And it doesn't stop there. Mark's too.
Carl Marx wrote his entire PhD thesis on the
difference between the physics of Democritus
and Epicurus. He absolutely loved the swerve.
For Marx, the atom that randomly swerves, that
refuses to just follow the deterministic path,
was a metaphor for human freedom and resistance.
For Marx, Epicurus was the first great rebel
against the crushing deterministic machine of
fate. Wow. From a quiet garden in Athens, to
the Declaration of Independence, to the Communist
Manifesto, that is some s**t. serious range.
It really shows that the core system he built
addresses something universal and timeless. The
fear of being controlled and the deep, deep desire
for individual freedom and peace of mind. So
let's wrap this up. We've gone pretty deep today.
We've debunked the foodie myth. We've rebuilt
the universe out of atoms and void. We've neutralized
the gods. We've tried to face death without fear.
We've done the work. If the listener wants to
apply this today, not the atomic physics maybe,
but the therapy, what's the single biggest takeaway?
I think it's the power of subtraction. We live
in an economy, an attention economy, that is
designed from the ground up to manufacture and
sell you class three desires. You need this new
phone. You need this vacation. You need this
social status. You need to look this way. Epicurus
is that quiet but firm voice in the back of your
head saying, no, you don't. So just check your
desires constantly. Ask yourself that one simple
question before you chase after something. Is
this natural and necessary? Is this something
I actually need for my well -being? Or is this
just empty calories for my soul? Because if you
can genuinely find happiness with a bowl of soup,
a good book, and conversation with a friend,
you are invincible. The world can't really take
that away from you. And for me, I'm still stuck
on the swerve. Kleinemann. That tiny random wobble.
The idea that a perfect, flawless, predictable
system is a prison. And that the flaw, the glitch,
the little bit of chaos. That's where all the
freedom is. It's a beautiful thought, isn't it?
We are free because the universe itself is just
a little bit broken. I think I'm going to go
cancel my expensive dinner reservations and just
call a friend instead. A very wise choice. Thanks
for diving deep with us. We'll see you in the
garden.