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Episode 356: The Letters of Epicurus
00:36:12
John J. Miller is joined by Spencer Klavan to discuss the letters of Epicurus.
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Spencer Clavin
Foreign.
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John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the Letters of Epicurus. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Spencer Clavin, a scholar and writer and the host of the Young Heretics podcast. He's the associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, as well as the author of how to Save the West. His latest book, which came out last fall, is Light of the Mind, Light of the Illuminating Science Through Faith. And he's the editor of Gateway to the Stoics, as well as the just published Gateway to the Epicureans. He's podcast with us previously on the Book of Isaiah and the Persians by Aeschylus, and he joins us by Zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Spencer, welcome back to the Great Books Podcast.
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Spencer Clavin
John, it's so good to be back. Thanks for having me. You've upgraded to Zoom since we last talked. It's a whole new world.
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John J. Miller
Well, Spencer, we're always trying to be at the tip of the spear of technology here at the Great Books Podcast. But tell us, why are the Letters of Epicurus a great book?
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Spencer Clavin
It's interesting you should ask, because if you asked somebody in the ancient world, a contemporary of Epicurus, if you asked Cicero, for instance, he would probably deny, outright, vociferously deny, that the Letters of Epicurus count as a great book. And indeed, there was a lot of suspicion of Epicureanism in the ancient world. It was sort of a niche philosophy. And even on up to, say, John Adams, the revolutionary period, this was sort of understood as the black sheep of ancient philosophies. But now that the scientific revolution has worked its magic and we all think to some extent in terms of atoms and the mechanical motion that creates sort of the material world around us. Epicurus and some of his predecessors, like Democritus and Leucippus, have suddenly come to seem wildly ahead of their time. And in fact, in this collection, I argue that there's a good argument to be made that we are kind of all Epicureans now without even realizing it. So even if you disagree with Epicurus, as I do, quite strenuously, it is almost essential now to read and understand the Letters of Epicurus, in which he basically lays out the outlines of his philosophy to his students and friends, because this is kind of the root of a lot of modern ideas that we're already now living with. And to some extent, we kind of have to Understand what Epicureanism is. If we want to understand what we currently believe and where we might be.
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John J. Miller
Going, we're going to talk about all of that. Epicurus, the man and his letters, the school of thought named for him, his relation to the Stoics, his legacy, a lot more. And Spencer, I want to go right to a line you just uttered. It's also the title of the preface of your new collection, Gateway to the Epicureans. And that is, we are all Epicureans now. What do you mean?
- [03:20]
Spencer Clavin
Well, I mentioned a really important Epicurean concept that we all use every day and are totally familiar with without maybe necessarily realizing that it's Epicurean, and that is the atom. We take these things, these abstract concepts of atoms so for granted now that we probably don't even think of them as philosophical. We just think of them as like chairs or tables. They're just something that exists in the world. We all learned about them in high school. If we did chemistry or physics or whatever. We talked about atomic motion, maybe we talked about neutrons and protons and all of that. But that basic concept that the world is made up of these little objects, these little building blocks, and when you put them together, they turn into, you know, materials, they turn into fluids and solids, and they create the world around us. That concept, which is extremely counterintuitive in the ancient world, does come from the Epicurean tradition. And the basis of it is that the reality of things, if you get down to the bedrock of existence, what you do is you scrape away all of our human experience, all of our desires, all of the way that we see the world, things like color and what we would now call subjective perceptions. You really get down to the basis of things. It's all just atoms in. In motion. This is kind of a prime idea in Epicureanism. And again, you know, at the. They didn't have microscopes. This was kind of an abstract, out there idea. Now, in the wake of the scientific revolution, I think we're all kind of addicted almost to thinking in this way. To the extent that we even account for our own emotions with reference to particulate matter. I mean, we say things like, I had an adrenaline rush, or John Mayer's lyric, I'm waiting until we can go into a serotonin overflow. This, like, materialist way we have of talking is. Is a fundamentally kind of Epicurean ide. And it's not actually the only way of looking at the world. I mean, you can believe in atoms or in something like atomic Motion. And you can even believe in advanced physics, while not necessarily thinking that everything is atoms or everything is reducible to matter. But that position, which is Epicurus position, suddenly gained this amazing new currency in the wake of the scientific revolution. And what we don't necessarily understand is that along with it comes this whole ethical way of looking at the not just about what are we made of, it's about what's our purpose. Do we have any higher calling or the gods, or is God interested in us? And Epicurus, uniquely, and this was accounts for his bad reputation in antiquity, distinctively says, no, actually our purpose here is to live it up, enjoy life, maximize our peace of mind, our serenity. And whereas this was again, a sort of strange thing to say at the time, it is sort of now a major attitude that you see in people who just want to kind of get through life with the minimum amount of trouble, the maximum amount of enjoyment, and then assume that we all kind of dissolve back into the atomic stream afterward. This is a very recognizable philosophy. Even though a lot of people have not heard of Epicurus, now a lot of us believe what he believed.
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John J. Miller
Now, when I think of Epicureans, I think of exactly what you just said at the very end of that remark. Because, Spencer, I rarely think about atoms, okay? And when I think about Epicureans, I'm thinking about, you know, that's the fun philosophy, right? That's the philosophy of parties and binging and living for today. This is hedonism, right? How do we get from your boring conversation about atoms, like, you know, the fun stuff, how do we get from point A to point B?
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Spencer Clavin
I know, I'm sorry to be such a killjoy, but we don't even at the end of this get to like pass out in a nightclub bathroom at. In the morning. That's actually not what Epicureanism is about. It's been ever since Epicurus lived, which we should say was during, at the turn of the third century B.C. so kind of the tail end of the Greek heavy period of antiquity. Even then people accused him of being this hedonist, of only wanting to debauch himself with all these awesome parties and material delights, but that was actually always kind of a caricature, you know. Now when we say Epicurean, we might mean that or we mean somebody who's really interested in like micro gastronomy or whatever. It's not quite the case that that's what Epicurus wanted. What he was saying was basically that because the world is made up of atoms and because the basic reality of life is just these kind of mindless forces that work automatically. We don't have to worry about or concern ourselves with, like an ultimate trajectory of our souls, because our souls are made of atoms, too. He thinks they're like a kind of fire or air that passes through our bodies. And when we die, when our body decomposes, our soul decomposes too, so we cease to exist. We shouldn't be afraid of death because there won't be an us to experience it. He's constantly saying. And so this is how your physics, which is kind of one of the major categories of ancient philosophy, translates into an ethics, which is the one that we all like to think about. As you say, everybody wants the payoff, right? How is this going to make us live? What are we going to think about ourselves and our trajectory? And one thing that I think the ancient philosophers understood that maybe we don't so much, is that these things are really closely interrelated. Like, you don't go around thinking about atoms all the time, but what you believe about the material world and our place in it, and, you know, its order or not, its created order or not, is going to have implications for how you think you ought to live. Are you pursuing just the most enjoyable kind of ride through this atomic stream, or are you pursuing some kind of absolute standard that is above the material world, that is ultimate and even perhaps eternal? And that's kind of the big question that Epicurus gets the, you know, the opposite answer to from most of his contemporaries.
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John J. Miller
Let's jump into what this guy actually wrote, and in your collection, Gateway to the Epicureans, you reproduce three of his letters. First of all, apparently this is most of what survives of all the things he wrote. What we have are just three letters, right?
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Spencer Clavin
And that's actually kind of a lot relative to what we get from most ancient philosophers. We. We constantly, I think, have to remind ourselves of this, because if you don't study classics and you're not used to reading a lot of, like, Greek philosophy, because why would you be? You know, you. You might think, well, we have all these giant libraries of material from the ancient world, but we really have just this t. Tiny iceberg tip that remains. I mean, less than 10 plays from the great tragedians out of hundreds that they wrote. And the same is true, unfortunately, of the philosophers. Obviously, we have a lot of Plato, we have a lot of Aristotle, some of the really big ones that made a huge impact on the medieval world and afterward. But for these Hellenistic philosophers who come a Little bit later in the tradition and who proliferate. There's all these different schools. Most of them wrote book upon book that just totally vanished. And a lot of what we know comes from one book by this guy, Diogenes Laertius, the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. And in each section of that book, he kind of talks about a different philosophical school. So he gives one to the Stoics and one to the Socratics, and one ultimately to the Epicureans. But a lot of people think. We're not sure, but a lot of people think Diogenes was actually himself an Epicurean because he spends a lot of time defending Epicurus against some of those salacious rumors that he loved to, like, sleep with prostitutes and just like, totally go ham on all the. All the physical pleasures. And then he reproduces. Rarely for him, he reproduces these letters, which are kind of like little cliffnotes summaries for his busy students, not his, like full time professional philosophers, but the guys that were out there in the world. He gives you these summaries of his philosophy. And then, yeah, after that, it's mostly people responding to that. We have a long verse treatment by Lucretius, and from ancient Rome, a Latin poem about Epicureanism, but from the mouth, from the horse's mouth, as it were. We really only have a limited amount of material.
- [11:56]
John J. Miller
Letter number one is to Herodotus, which I was excited to see until I realized this is not your dad's Herodotus. This is a different Herodotus entirely. But give us a quick summary of letter number one to the other Herodotus.
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Spencer Clavin
I know, he's really a tease. Epicurus is, in that he's like, you know, you think you're gonna get debauchery and communications with the father of history, and it turns out it's just some other guy named Herodotus.
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John J. Miller
It's almost like you came on this podcast expecting Andrew Klavin and you had Spencer Clavin here.
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Spencer Clavin
Almost as if. Yeah, my whole life is really just about minimizing disappointment. We can't escape it. But as they say in Lord of the Rings, as Ramon says to Denethor, you are a lesser son of greater sc. And that's really where we're at here. Okay.
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John J. Miller
We're focused on Epicurus. So what does he say in this first letter?
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Spencer Clavin
Well, so in the letter to Herodotus, he really kind of gives us the atomistic theory. This is where we get the most expansive description of Epicurus. Views on atoms and what's really Interesting is that he kind of has to convince Herodotus that such a thing as an atomic must exist. It's a logical argument that everything we see can be kind of divided into these smaller chunks. And ultimately you must get to this indivisible thing that is that which is atomos in Greek, which means uncuttable. The thing that you can't split. And we still use that word even though it's turned out notoriously that atoms are in fact very splittable. And that's because we're still thinking in these Epicurean terms. I mean, we still can't see atoms with the naked eye. We have to register their impact on measuring devices, have to look at the way they show up in experiments and tally up their weights and measures and so forth. And Epicurus kind of lays out how you might do that and why you might want to think about things in these terms. Basically, that the human experience of life is kind of derived from this much more abstract and quantifiable set of natural laws that applies to atoms. And this, he says importantly, is all so that you can relieve yourself from cares. All philosophy in Epicurus view is just to kind of like assuage your anxieties that you might have. Am I going to get punished by the gods? Am I responsible for some higher order of existence? No, as Epicurus don't worry. The whole thing is. Point of the whole thing is ataraxia, which is basically serenity. It's peace of mind or quietude. And he's trying to dispel all the Greek myths and the legends and the moral systems that might lead you to feel worried. He's, he's doing what you would now call cosmic insignificance therapy, which is where you say, look, we're just like a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet and we don't really have to worry about the gods who are unconcerned with us. We just have to nicely kind of assimilate ourselves to the atomic flow.
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John J. Miller
Letter number two also felt a little bit like a physics lecture, although it was maybe more applied physics, right? Because we get astronomy. Eclipses, comets, weather, clouds, whirlwinds, snow and so forth. What's going on in this letter? Why is it important?
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Spencer Clavin
On the surface of it, it just seems like a really very obsessive sort of treatment of this series of weather patterns. And you sort of start, you start out, you think, why is he doing this? What's he talking about? And you realize, well, for one thing, the weather and the heavens and the motion of the stars and the planets is actually today and in the ancient world is one of the most sort of mysterious physical phenomena that we encounter. It's very ancient impulse to look at, say the constellations and try to read the future, predict what's going to happen. And so Epicurus is concerned in this letter to basically debunk a lot of that mythology, a lot of the idea that the stars and the heavens and the planets kind of represent some higher order of existence. Basically he's saying we can think of a million different ways that these phenomena like hailstorms and eclipses and comets, how they might come about in a purely atomic material universe. And he gives in many cases a bunch of different explanations just to show that he's got any number of ways that this might happen. And for those of us that are kind of skeptical of this, it might sound like kind of motivated reasoning. But he really wants to preserve his students against the idea that this is happening because Zeus is like moving, throwing thunderbolts or what have you. It's a very kind of a hyper rationalist way of explaining away the myths.
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John J. Miller
The third letter, then this one feels like the letter from Epicurus that have been waiting for. Right? It actually feels like epicureanism, as I sort of understand, or to think I understand it. What is this one all about?
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Spencer Clavin
This is the payout, if you like. I mean, we as Americans, we're very similar to the Romans in that we really just want the bottom line of these philosophies. You know, the Greeks loved to work out these comprehensive systems. And that's what Hellenistic philosophy in this period was all about. It was about these interlocking systems of physics and logic and then finally ethics. And ethics is kind of like, okay, so all of this is happening. This is what the world is made of. This is how the world is constructed. What does that mean for how we ought to live? And in the letter to Menoechius, Epicurus basically gives the list of things that we ways that we ought to behave. And this is where you get the famous arguments that, that as they say, death is nothing to us. And this is why we shouldn't be afraid of it. It's also why we shouldn't concern ourselves with what happens after it. It's why ultimately our main goal or the whole point and purpose of life is to be at peace, to conduct, to get peace of mind. And you might think of this as sort of like an early psychotherapy. This is like if you go now to a sort of secular therapist, they probably won't tell you, you know, how do you, please God, they'll tell you. How do you attain a certain ment. And you know, importantly, the way that Epicurus works this out is by insisting again and again that you're just made of atoms. And therefore even virtue, even ethical, good, even things like courage, temperance and prudence, those things aren't good in themselves. We don't want them simply because they're good whether they make us happy or not. We want them because they make us happy. And if they didn't make us happy, we wouldn't want them. And he's constantly arguing for this. And this is where you get the idea of hedonism is this Greek concept, hedona, which means pleasure. And it's not again that we're going to like, you know, eat a million cheeseburgers if we want to. It's actually kind of the opposite. He spends a lot of time saying, actually, you know, the happiest life is the most prudent life is a serene life, is one where you sometimes deny yourself. Pleasures delay gratification, which is one of the points where people take issue with epicureanism because they say, well, actually it always turns out that the thing you're supposed to do is the conventionally moral thing. In much the same way as people who like to reduce morality to evolution say this is just a kind of tribal evolutionary model. They always sort of end up with the morality that we, that we already have. And Epicurus has a tendency to do that as well, to kind of like work his way around from this very transgressive and radical atomistic idea to basically you want to pursue wisdom and courage and prudence in this way that people always, always have. So again, sorry to disappoint, but you don't really get to like go hurl yourself at the buffet or whatever it is that you're trying to get permission from.
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John J. Miller
So that's what struck me about this letter, because it's almost an argument against hedonism, which made me wonder, why did he get that reputation then? Because he doesn't really go there.
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Spencer Clavin
One reason why is you might argue plausibly that although Epicurus himself was a fairly self controlled, contained, genteel fellow, the implications of his arguments would lead other people to eventually just indulge themselves. And I think there's a, there's a good argument for that in the modern world where you say like, okay, so there's no restraint, no cosmic restraint on us. And therefore the thing that we're seeking is the most enjoyable or peaceful or serene way of life. And you think that people are just going to be rational actors about that. But in practice, it turns out you get people. I mean, we've just had this giant dispute about this poor girl, Lily Phillips, who makes this argument. Well, like, it's my. My pleasure, my delight and my joy is in, like, sleeping with 100 men in one day. And the question is not, did Epicurus want people to do that? The question is, can Epicurus argue consistently against doing that? Is there some reason why she shouldn't do that if it supposedly gives her enjoyment and serenity and pleasure? And this is where Epicureanism, I think, starts to falter, is if I come to you and say what gives me pleasure and serenity and peace of mind is to ram my head against the wall repeatedly or to punch other people in the face, it's very difficult from an Epicurean standpoint to refute that. So he kind of gets that reputation by proxy.
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John J. Miller
Now, I want to turn soon to the Epicurean tradition, but before doing that, I want to ask about the Stoics. You've already mentioned them briefly. We think of these guys as opposites. Like, these are the Crips and the bloods, right, of the Epicureans and the Stoics. Is that a good way to look at them? Who were the Stoics? What were they saying about the Epicureans?
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Spencer Clavin
Yeah, that is how they felt at the time about one another. The Stoics and Epicureans were rival philosophies. And Marcus Aurelius, the most famous Stoic ever to live, emperor of Rome, repeatedly in his Meditations, contrasts these two philosophies in a characteristically pithy way. He says, either there is providence or atoms. And by that he means there's really only two ways of looking at the world. One is it's governed by a rational mind. Providence, Zeus, Logos. This was what the Stoics liked to talk about. Or it's just a stream of atoms governed by mindless laws and kind of automatic physical material tendencies. And I think that one reason why these guys have endured is they crystallized that choice. It really is. Those are. These are the two ways. And you can develop these two versions of philosophy in a million different ways, and people did. But ultimately it comes down to the question, do you think there is a higher order in the world that we are responsible to, or do you think that we are accidental products of a merely physical and ultimately quite random order? So they were totally in. In conflict with one another, and Again, the Stoics were much more socially acceptable than, than the Epicureans, by and large, get a lot of arguments about how nasty and bad Epicureanism is, even though there were some prominent Epicureans, and it did catch on in some rarefied circles.
- [23:12]
John J. Miller
One of those Epicureans was a guy called Philodemus, and I did a show on him in the Great Books podcast last March on the works of Philodemus. Is he one of these Epicureans, one of these people who was arguing for Epicureanism long after the life of Epicurus?
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Spencer Clavin
John, I can't believe you're giving me shtick about talking, reading the actual letters of Epicurus when you've already done an episode about Philodemus, of all people, for goodness sake. I mean, this is my, this guy was. My PhD thesis was about Philodemus. So I'm a big fan. I'm really interested in Philodemus. But talk about obscure. This is a kind of upper crust Epicurean philosopher whose life's work was kind of to explain Epicureanism to the sophisticated set in Rome centuries after Epicurus death. And in that way he shares a lot with Lucretius, who's the great poet of Epicureanism. His works were preserved in what's called the Villa DEI Papiri, the House of the Papyri, which is in Herculaneum, one of the cities that was buried under the ash of Mount Vesuvius. So they're really severely damaged. And it's a good example of what I was talking about earlier, the kind of desperate attempt to salvage whatever we can from the ancient world. People found these papyrus fragments and rolls crusted in ash in the 18th century. And ever since then we've been doing everything we can technologically to unroll them. And what we find, yeah, is an Epicurean approach to the history of philosophy. So Philodemus is all about refuting the other philosophers of his day and before, in defense of the Epicurean attitude, which does seem to have kind of caught on maybe even among like some of Virgil's friends, maybe some people say Virgil himself is interested in it. So it was certainly in vogue in like the Augustan period, even though it was never a majority position.
- [25:06]
John J. Miller
My interest in Philodemus was exactly what you said, which was the new revelations. There are new technological abilities to read some of these manuscripts that are almost like these, these little pieces of charcoal, almost is how, how the archaeologists are finding them. But we're, we're increasingly able to, to read what they actually said, and I wonder, do you think there's a possibility that at some point we might get, you know, a fourth letter of Epicurus in these archives that we're only just beginning to start to understand?
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Spencer Clavin
Oh, I mean, a fourth letter. Epicurus is nowhere near ambitious enough. This is the most exciting time to be a classicist, certainly since I've been alive, but probably much, much longer than that. You know, of course there's always new stuff to say about Homer. Of course, the tradition of studying the classics never burns out, in my opinion. But we're not living in the early Renaissance when Petrarch can just uncover the letters of Cicero randomly lying around in a manuscript collection somewhere. We feel, or have felt for a while, the set catalog of things that we have is finished. And there are some caches of papyrus like Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. So we're still kind of sorting through stuff. But this new technology which uses machine learning and basically AI to unravel these papyri without damaging them to look into, you know, we have X rays that can do it, but now we have a much more sophisticated way of trying to figure out what these things say. We focused on Philodemus because there's a lot of Philodemus in that library and there's only, you know, Philodemus is only in that library in many cases. But, but the library itself was just the very learned collection of an educated and well heeled fellow, probably L. Calpurnius Paiso in the Augustan period. So it could have, like Ennius, it could have some of the dialogues of Aristotle. I mean, big names could emerge. We're already finding, this is not from Herculaneum, but we're already finding new fragments of Euripides these days. And so, yeah, we've only begun to scratch the surface of what might be in that library. I can't promise you another Sappho or whatever, but there's definitely a lot of potential there from that huge library of stuff that we, that we have lost.
- [27:24]
John J. Miller
Your new collection is called Gateway to the Epicureans. The subtitle is Epicurus, Lucretius and their Modern Heirs. We've talked about Epicurus, you've mentioned Lucretius. Their modern heirs who are in this collection include Isaac Newton and David Hume. But I want to get to the most unexpected guys, at least for me, in this collection. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a couple of American presidents. They were what, friends, enemies, frenemies, whatever. What are they doing in your collection on Epicurean thinking?
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Spencer Clavin
Yeah, this is one of My favorite parts of this book is the kind of modern heirs and the people who are using, using Epicurus and the Stoics as a way of having their contemporary debates. And my, my friend Richard Samuelson, who's a scholar of Adams, was the one who first sent me this, this letter by Adams, which I had never heard of before I knew the Jefferson text that's in there. But the Adams letter is basically one in which he grouses, as Adams was wont to do, about modern times. And all these, the kids these days, they're all Epicureans. And he says, in the ancient world at least you could pick. You had Stoicism, you had the Cynics, there were the skeptics, there were all sorts of noble, admirable ways of looking at the world. But our modern philosophers are all below groveling disciples of Epicurus. At one point he calls them swine pigs from the Epicurean sty. And this is a very Adams type thing to do. But in characteristic Adams fashion, he's kind of right. I mean, the argument that I make in the introduction is that we have all accepted some form of Epicureanism without knowing it, and that this has lowered the horizons of our modern world. And this is what Adams thinks, for all the reasons I've been saying that, you know, you can't actually sustain true virtue without a translation, transcendental or transcendent, rather plain for the world. Unless you think that there's something more to life than atoms, you're never going to get it anywhere. And of course he has in mind Jefferson, who much more famously, I think, said I too am an Epicurean. And he laid out what he meant by that. It's not totally clear to me that he understood Epicureanism in great detail, but he had this kind of interest, Jefferson did in the French Enlightenment and in the Revolution. And that included a real and genuine interest in science and modern developments and of course in the advance of reason. And Jefferson thought that Epicurus represented kind of the summit of the rationalist Greek tradition and that really, that was where we were headed. This is why he famously wanted the Bible to be stripped of a lot of its kind of miraculous contents. He thought that the future of mankind lay in this very rationalistic direction. And Adams was much more skeptical of that, thought that we needed ancestral traditions, that there was wisdom in religion and that we would be lost without it. Which, personally, I think Adams has clearly stood the test of time better and got the better of that particular debate. But it's amazing to Watch them fight it out, even already in the 1700s.
- [30:30]
John J. Miller
Well, let's build on that by going back to where we started, which is the preface of your new book, Gateway to the Epicureans, because you've given us this excellent presentation on who are the Epicureans? We learn so much more about them. It's not just the philosophy of parties and gluttony and hedonism and so forth. There's a lot more to it. But in your preface, you write this as a system of belief and a way of life. Epicureanism has proven a total failure, unquote. What do you mean?
- [31:02]
Spencer Clavin
I know when I showed this book to one of my friends for comments, he said, I worry that you've dissuaded us from reading the rest of the book with the introduction, because I do pronounce a kind of judgment upon this modern Epicureanism and ultimately on Epicureanism itself. I think, you know, it's actually urgent, though, that we. That we read and understand what's going on here precisely because we're at a period in our history where we have to reckon with the limitations of the materialist philosophy. And one of those limitations is the ethical one. And I think that living according to, like, maximal serenity and maximal peace of mind, to just bring people into this kind of, like, psychologized, sedated, is obviously not satisfying the human heart. Like, there is this enormous rise in despair in. In our modern world, there's a, you know, an epidemic around the world of plummeting birth rates. The sense that there's no point in living anymore. And if you read people in, like, you know, if you just go on Reddit and you scroll like the doomer posts about people that think the world is going to end or the environment is going to burn us all up in flames, they will often say things like, what is the point of living if we're all just atoms, right? Why should I bring children into this world that is is doomed to turn into a kind of heat death? So from that perspective, I think the idea that Epicurus had that once we cleared away the religious horizon, we would all be free to live these contented, placid lives, I think that has been just totally refuted. It's totally failed to satisfy. And the other part of it is then that atomism of this kind of rudimentary kind that we all still think about, that these are these chunks, chunks of stuff just moving mindlessly through the world that's not even scientific anymore. The real part of this and this is where you got to go to my other book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World is that for over a hundred years, physics has been looking more carefully into the smallest, most rudimentary component parts of our existence. And it turns out they're not just chunks of indiscriminate stuff. They're actually much more mysterious kind of probability fields that exist in relationship with the observing mind. So this Epicurean atomism that underwrites the Epicurean hedonism is in itself totally inadequate to describe the world that we really live in. The world that we actually exist in is much more similar to the world in, say, the book of Genesis, this created order, than it is to the world as envisioned by, by Epicurus or by these early modern mechanistic philosophers. So on both counts, the physics and the ethics, I think epicureanism is kind of falling apart all around us, which raises the question, what should we believe in instead? And that's kind of where the book leads you in the end.
- [34:03]
John J. Miller
So, Spencer, given that, why bother? Why should we read the letters of Epicurus?
- [34:08]
Spencer Clavin
Of course, you ultimately don't want to stop with a philosophy that doesn't. That doesn't work, right? So if our only purpose in reading books was to know all the right answers to all the important questions, then I would say you should throw your Epicurus in the trash, from my perspective. But that's actually not why we read the great books. What we do when we read ancient philosophy especially, is we try to understand ourselves better by knowing where we came from. And right now, I think we are so steeped in the materialist philosophy, so steeped in epicureanism, that we don't even understand that it is a philosophy. We think of it as just the way the world is. This is just how things are and how things exist. And in order to reconsider that, in order to work our way out of a kind of meaningless Epicurean existence, we first have to understand that epicureanism is a point of view among others. And that will enable us to actually consider it for its advantages, why it was interesting to people, why it seemed plausible at the dawn of the modern era, and its defects, why it is that there are other things that it can't explain, that they can't make sense out of. And until you do that, until you understand that you are swimming in water, you actually can't decide whether to get onto land. You know the old joke that the two fish are swimming by, two young fish, and they pass an old fish, the old fish says, how's the water, boys? And the young fish turn, turns to his friend and says, what's water? Epicureanism is the water that we're swimming in. And unless you understand that, you don't really understand the world.
- [35:46]
John J. Miller
Spencer Clavin, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the Letters of Epicurus.
- [35:51]
Spencer Clavin
Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.
- [35:52]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our website@heymiller.on Twitter. My handle is at heymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with an episode of the Great Books Podcast.