An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
Roman philosophy can boast names as great as those of Greece, but considerable interest in the Greek philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism influenced Roman life.
Greece was conquered first by Macedonia in the fourth century BC and then by Rome two centuries later. Neither of these military powers fostered any independent or original development of philosophy. The Roman cultivated classes took their philosophical ideas from the Greeks, who in turn compensated for their political subordination by dominating their masters in the theoretical field.
Epicurus (341-270 BC) founded the Epicurian school, which for five or six centuries rivalled Stoicism in the Graeco-Roman world. He was born of Athenian parents on the island of Samos. At the age of 18 he went to Athens for military training, but during the disturbances following the death of Alexander the Great (322) he joined his father at Colophon. He taught philosophy in several centres until he founded his famous Garden School in Athens, where he taught his followers in the last twenty years of his life.
The reputation of Epicureanism has come down to our own time in two senses. It is equated with sensualism, deliberate indulgence in coarse pleasures, submergence in bodily appetites. An epicure is defined as a person found of foods, wines, etc. However, this would more properly apply to the school of Hedonism, the doctrine of pleasure, rather than to the doctrines of Epicurus.
In its other guise, Epicureanism is identified with atheism. The hatred of the orthodox Jews for the heretical teachings of Epicurus is recorded in the rabbinical term for apostate: this too, is a half-truth. The Epicureans, as materialists, did not believe either in a pre-life or an after-life, in the immortality of the soul or the omnipotence of a benevolent and just God. However, they were not atheists.
They taught that gods existed but lived in the spaces between worlds, occupied with themselves and not bothering about the affairs of men. But this removal of divinity from our world was enough to stamp them as disbelievers in the eyes of Jews and Christians.
The Epicurean system of philosophy was, like stoicism, divided into three parts: logic (or "canonic", ie theory of the criterion of truth), physics and ethics, and showed a similar subordination of the theoretical and scientific interest to the moral and practical. Epicurus's main aim was to rid human minds of the evils that destroy their peace: fear of the gods and fear of death, with the accompanying dread of the after-life.
By showing that the universe was material and governed by mechanical law or by chance, he sought to banish from nature all trace of design or arbitrary divine agency and to disprove the possibility of human survival, thus freeing humankind from groundless terrors and promoting true piety.
His criterion of truth provides the key to his system. It formulates the general principles that entitle us to assert anything as true and lay down rules of procedure. Sensation is infallible, Epicurus insists, for it gives us immediate assurance of the reality of outside things: it is thus our sole ultimate guarantee of truth.
A second criterion is given by “preconceptions” or “anticipations”, ie general concepts that the mind forms from successions of similar sense images. Stored up, these aid the mind in perception of identify and so congise fresh sensations; and by comparing and combining them the mind is enabled to reason.
The pleasure and pain that accompany every sensation provide the third criterion: that of good and bad in morals. We reason by analogy from things perceptible to things imperceptible (which include celestial phenomena, whose causes are unperceived, as well as atoms and void, the unseen realities), using the indications supplied by sense experience — here lies the germ of an inductive logic of “signs”, which was developed by later Epicureans. Truth is attained in perception by the “clear vision” of the “new view”, error arising owing to the intrusion of opinion when the mind makes additions to the data of sense and pronounces hasty judgments without awaiting confirmation.
Certainty about our knowledge of the gods or the ultimate verities, atoms and void, is due to an act of immediate mental apprehension, or intuition, of the divine images or of clear scientific concepts. As regards celestial phenomena where direct confirmation by sense is lacking, we have to acquiesce in a plurality of causes, any one of which may be true and all of which operate somewhere in the infinite universe.
Thus, in matters immaterial to our welfare, we may resort to the negative condition of non-contradiction by sense experience. In his canon, Epicurus laid down that words should be used in their simple primary sense avoiding metaphor, so that the plain man could understand them; but in his own practice he was driven to develop a highly specialised terminology. For Aristotle’s logic and for rhetoric and every form of literary culture he had profound contempt.
The atomic theory of Democritus formed the basis of Epicurus’s physics. To adapt it to his sensationalist theory of knowledge he introduced some fundamental changes elaborating and systematising it with a wealth of detail and subtle argument. Following Democritus, he postulated, as the sole independent existences, firstly, atoms, indivisible and inconceivably minute entities infinite in number, unalterable and impenetrable; and secondly, infinite void or empty space.
The former are the basis for his permanence and indestructibility of matter, the latter a presupposition of the observed fact of motion; the truth of both is guaranteed by the mind’s clear vision of their concepts. The doctrine is carefully worked out in Epicurus’s letter to Herodotus and in Lucretius’s epic poem, On the nature of things. Lucretius was the most gifted exponent of Epicurean atomism in the Graeco-Roman world.
On the Nature of Things is the work of antiquity that is closest in spirit to modern materialism. It influenced the thinking of the renovators of science in the seventeenth century and of Diderot and other materialists in the eighteenth century. It can still be studied with profit by every serious adherent of the materialistic outlook. The poem describes the nature and motions of the atoms, and how motions of the constituent atoms generate new qualities of two sorts: invariable properties and separable accidents. Among these are included not only the “secondary qualities” of colour etc, but states of action and suffering and all kinds of occurrence.
The atoms, whether free or entangled in bodies, move at an unimaginable uniform speed in the void, which offers no resistance. Inside bodies they oscillate and vibrate in their tiny “trajects”, colliding and rebounding by mutual blows with absolute velocity: compounds, whose visible motions result from the constituent atomic motions, are retarded by these internal collisions.
Epicurus denied to the atoms infinite sizes and shapes, since by a finite but incomprehensibly large number he could account for the variety of phenomena; otherwise some atoms would be so big as to be visible, which is disproved by experience. But his main departure from his predecessor are there in number:
(1) His unhappy ascription to the atoms of the primary property of weight, involving their perpendicular downward movement in the infinite void and the consequent necessity of assuming, at unspecified times and places, an imperceptible swerve to cause the collisions that lead to the formation of things and worlds.
(2) His abandonment (both here and in the postulate of human free will, explained by the swerve of the soul-atoms) of Democritus’s universal determinism, coupled with a willingness to admit the working of chance elsewhere in nature.
(3) His attribution to compound bodies of those secondary qualities of colour, odour, heat etc, which perception assures us that they possess, but which Democritus had dismissed as conventional.
Epicurus’s introduction of the “swerve” of the atom from the vertical line of descent of Democritus served two purposes. Firstly, in physics it made possible the entanglement of the atoms, which would otherwise fall in parallel lines and never meet to form compound bodies. He regarded this as a defect of Democritus’s physics. Secondly, in morality it liberated humankind from subjection to an infinite and inescapable chain of physical causation and enabled freedom of choice.
The reasons for this innovation were not solely of a theoretical character but were rooted in the changed historical situation. Both necessity and chance are organically associated aspects of reality. The Greeks had symbolised them in two figures: one called Ananke, or necessity, a blind force; the other, Tyche, or chance. Both of these mythical figures, reflecting different aspects of reality, became objects of worship in cults. The question arose: which was supreme and ruled the world? These two sides of the same situation, or opposite poles of the same conception, were bound together. The one or the other was regarded as predominant in obedience to the specific social circumstances and class needs that were most coercive upon the given philosopher.
Epicurus lived when the Roman Empire was in decline and the new world empire was branching out from Alexandria. The city-state was disintegrating and the new Alexandrian world empire was superseding the city states and creating new types of relationships between individuals and society around them. The atomism of the Epicureans sought to take these new conditions into account and find a rational basis for the new social conditions.
Their natural philosophy was closely akin to their ethics. They sought to liberate humanity from domination by the gods, and fear of them, and fought to eliminate the arbitrary interference of supernatural forces in nature and society. They aimed to rid human minds of superstition and to strike a blow at the use of religion as an instrument of mass subjection to aristocratic upholders of oligarchic and the traditional defenders of the religious associations.
Whereas idealists like Plato advocated the self-sufficiency of the city-state, the Epicureans preached above all the self-sufficiency of the individual. The wise and happy man withdrew from public life, did not participate in political affairs, but “cultivated his own garden”. This was a matter of deliberate choice in defiance of compulsion from without.
This prescription provided a general model for their conception of the atom, the gods and the good life. The atoms that constituted the elements of the universe were impassive and impenetrable. The gods were equally idle and unconcerned with one another or with mankind. They lived in spaces between the worlds and had no responsibility for what happened on earth.
They, too, were composed of atoms, corporeal beings of human form but larger. They were not by nature immortal, although they could, like humans, acquire immortality and preserve happiness by being watchful. There was no divine government of the universe, no divine providence for men, no prophecy. The self-sufficiency of the atoms and the deviation in their motion, the imperturbability of the gods, and their cultivation of eternal bliss for themselves alone, form a symmetrical complement to the self-sufficiency of the individual and the ideals of life recommended by Epicurus.
Epicurus scorned the Platonic conception that the universe was a work of art made by the gods to serve the needs of humankind. The universe was the outcome of a material development proceeding from the movement of atoms in empty space, with which the gods had nothing to do and that was in fact created the gods themselves. There was no teleology in the Epicurean view of the cosmic process. The heavenly bodies had been created without any purpose, and so had the organs of humankind. They were the result of haphazard adaptation, not divine foresight.
For the classic idealists the model human was the citizen of the city-state who fully participated in all its public life. The perfect Epicurean was a very different personage, who felt no more responsibility for civic life than did the gods for the affairs of humans. Since he could not dominate or direct the course of events either in nature or in politics, these being vested in external powers beyond control, the Epicurian abstained from attempting the impossible.
There was, however, one sphere in which the Epicurian could aspire to prevail. That was in the superintendence and control of his own life, especially his inner life. The precondition for this was withdrawal from public strife and the larger stage of events. The perfect Epicurean would not permit himself to be subservient either to the monarch or the mob, that is to say, turned his back equally upon the democratic and oligarchic movements.
The Epicurean doctrine of pleasure insisted that the aim of human life was not self-denial self-frustration or immolation but the improvement and perfection of specific human qualities rid of superstition and fear. “I spit upon the beautiful and those who unreasonably adore it when it gives no pleasure,” Epicurus vehemently cried. “As for me, it is to continuous pleasures that I invite you and not virtues that are empty and vain and offer but harassing hopes of reward,” These continuous stabilised pleasures were rational because they did not lead to loss of health and wealth and thereby bring pain.
Epicureanism not only developed into a world philosophy under the Alexandrian and Roman empires but also inspired the most eminent literary work of materialism in all antiquity, the poem of Lucretius, On the nature of things. This supreme work marks the peak of materialist thought in the first phase of its evolution.
In modern times, Epicureanism was resuscitated in seventeenth century France by Pierre Gassendi, with a few changes in the atomic doctrine and incorporeal and theological additions to its materialism.
The Stoic philosophy was founded by Zeno (340-264 BC). Its object was to deliver humanity from the fears and desires that made them miserable, by showing that the only real good was completely within the reach of anyone who willed to have it. The only real good was a good will, which was in anyone’s power to have if they so desired.
So long as happiness depended on anything outside ourselves, over which we had no control, we were bound to experience anxiety and restless craving and disappointment, but if our happiness was in ourselves, we were absolutely independent of outside circumstances and chance could not touch us.
All the circumstances outside our own control, all that happened to us, were things ordained by God, and the Stoic so identified his own will with that of God that nothing that happened to him, however painful, was contrary to what he chose himelf.
But in order that humanity might joyfully accept this course of things, the Stoics taught that the god who governed the universe was perfect reason. In fact the universe was God and God was a material substance. However, unlike modern materialists they endowed God’s material substance with the properties of spirit. God, they said, in his proper being was a kind of fiery gas — fire, ether, breath — but this fire was conscious, was pure reason.
The universe passed backward and forward continually from one condition to another. Sometimes the divine fire, God, existed alone; then part of the divine fire became condensed and turned into passive matter — air, water, earth — and a world such as that we live in came about.
But a part of the divine fire remained as a kind of envelope around the world and pervaded the matter of the world, directing its whole course according to the divine plan. So destiny, providence or nature were only other names for God. The reason in each individual was a little particle of the divine fire.
After the world had run its ordained course, it was all burnt up again in the divine fire, and God was once more alone. Then, after a time, a new world was formed and ran its course and was absorbed again into the divine fire, and so on forever.
A philosophy that proposed an ideal life based on knowledge had to show that knowledge was possible. Since to the Stoic all reality was material, it was natural that knowledge should depend on sensation. Zeno maintained that in the act of sensing the mind was, by a purely mechanical process, modified so as to produce with greater or less fidelity the characteristics of the thing sensed.
A perfect production was called cognitive image; assent to such an image was cognition and knowledge followed if the assent was unshakeable. We can therefore be certain of knowledge of the external world only if we can be certain of recognising cognitive images and refusing assent to all others. It was against this point that the so-called New Academy directed the weight of its attack, claiming that even if any images do perfectly reproduce the external object they cannot certainly be recognised as doing so.
Before completing this period of the struggle in Graeco-Roman times between the materialist doctrine of Epicurus and the idealist thought of the Stoics, mention must be made of Lucian (AD 117).
Lucian was a satirist, a moralist, a caustic critic of Graeco-Roman society in the second century, when Greece and Rome were in disintegration and collapse, unsure of the future.
His principal works were short satiric dialogues, mocking the gods, deriding the living through the dead, exposing religious imposters from downright quacks to sincere believers, exploding the pretensions of various schools of philosophy.
Engels called him the “Voltaire of antiquity”. He had a passionate sympathy for the lower classes, for the millions on farms and in tenement houses, artisans, labourers, sailors, harlots.
In Lucian’s Hades, society is turned upside down and the role of the classes reversed. The rich and the powerful become penniless and despised; the common people enact legislation against the powers that were. His wrathful attitude toward the rich is seen in one of his Dialogues of the Dead, in which the popular assembly of Hades passes the following decree against the plutocrats: “Whereas the plutocrats perpetuate a number of inequalities in life, by plunder, by violence and in every way utterly despising the poor, be it enacted by the senate and the people that, when they die, their bodies undergo punishment, just as do those of other worthless people, but that the souls be sent up above again into life, and enter into asses until they have, in such state, passed through two hundred and fifty thousand years, becoming asses from generation to generation, and carrying heavy burdens, and driven by the poor laborers; and after that period, that it be permitted them finally to die.”
Lucian addresses the gods in a mocking vein. “Oh, Goddess! who hatest the poor, and are the sole subduer of wealth, who knowest how to live ‘well’ at all times, thou delightest to be supported on strange feet, and knowest how to wear shoes of felt, and ointments are a care to thee. Thee, too, garlands delight, and the liquor of the Ausonian Bacchus. But these things never exist for the poor. And, therefore, thou fleetest from the threshold of poverty, that has no gold and art delighted on the other hand, in coming to the feet of wealth.”
In his Dialogues of the Gods he transforms Olympus, their abode, into a bourgeois household, where jealous Hera squabbles with her husband, Zeus, over his infidelities with boys as well as women. In another dialogue he describes a panicky council in which the gods, like threatened aristocrats, are concerned about being deposed from office. The alarmed Zeus tells the assembly, which includes barbarian along with Greek gods, that they are likely to die of starvation because the sacrifices offered to them are so scanty and scrawny. He complains that a ship captain who had promised a banquet when his ship was heading for the rocks, in fact offered only a single cock when he had sixteen gods to entertain; and that was “an old bird afflicted with catarrh — and half a dozen grains of frankincense: those were all mildewed so that they frizzled out on the embers, hardly giving enough smoke to tickle the nostrils.”
Zeus blames the teachings of the atheists for these slim pickings. “As I was engaged in these thoughts, I reached the Portico, and there I found a large crowd of men vociferating, I judged correctly that there were philosophers of the militant variety, and I stopped to listen. The bone of contention was ourselves. Damis the atheist — the reptile — was maintaining that we did not exist. Timocles was on our side, he illustrated the orderly and discerning character of our government and extolled our providence. But he was exhausted and quite husky; the majority were inclining toward irreligion. I saw how much was at stake, and ordered night to come and broke up the meeting.”
Then in the person of Momus, the god of Raillery, the voice of Lucian himself, his sympathy for the oppressed flashes forth and he shows the social sources of his aversion to the gods. “I swear to you,” Momus says, “that we need not blame the philosophers for the prevalence of atheism. Why, what can one expect of men when they see all life today topsy-turvy — the good neglected, pining in poverty, disease and slavery; detestable scoundrels honoured, rolling in wealth and ordering their betters about; temple robbers undetected and unpunished; the innocent constantly crucified and defiled. With this evidence it is only natural that they should conclude against our existence.”
Epicurus and Zeno were contemporaries and keen rivals. This rivalry was to continue throughout antiquity. In the Roman world the two systems divided between themselves the support of almost all who cared to think.
Then, with the empire in decline Stoicism achieved far greater popularity. The idealist tendency, as a rationalised reconstruction of religious views and an ideological instrument of patrician domination, corresponded to the specific world outlook, political requirements and social psychological characteristics of the Greek and Roman urban aristocracies — slaveholders and wealthy landed proprietors.
The general thought of these sections of the ruling class were influenced both positively and negatively by the conditions of urban culture and by the interests and ideas of the manufacturers, merchants, moneylenders, shipowners and craftsmen.
These opposing forces interpenetrated. This is seen not only in the positive doctrines of the idealists but in the very fact that they had to adopt the form and logical methods of philosophy as the mode of expression of their class needs in place of the mythological material of the local cults that served the old monarchies.
The materialist tendency, on the other hand, was the distinctive outlook of the new dynamic forces in the Greek city-states, born and sustained by their far-flung trade, industry, banking and government interests: the merchants, manufacturers, shipowners, along with sizable bodies of artisans, miners and maritime workers. Their thought, in turn, was subject to influences and pressures from above of the aristocrats and from below of the discontented peasants, soldiers, plebeians, foreigners, freedmen and even slaves.
Neither of these philosophic tendencies were world views characteristic of the plebeian classes or the slaves. Philosophy throughout antiquity remained the privileged possession and product of the educated upper orders, who had the leisure and the opportunity to theorise. In the main, the producing classes lacked the most elementary conditions for intellectual life or had to feed upon the old religions or the new cults and mysteries. At the same time, neither the mercantile nor the landed classes could drive philosophy further. The slave structure had placed its stigma and limitations upon ancient thought from its beginnings and this was the ultimate cause of its undoing. The progress of materialist thought stopped at the end of the second century AD.
As already noted in Plato’s time, the Greek historian Polybius praises the Roman aristocracy for its skilful use of superstition in maintaining its power. “The foundation of Roman greatness,” he asserted, “is superstition. This has been introduced into every aspect of their private and public life with every artifice to awe the imagination. For the masses in every state are unstable, full of lawless desires, Irrational anger and violent passions. All that can be done is to hold them in check by fears of the unseen and familiar shams. It was not for nothing but of deliberate design that the men of yore introduced to the masses notions about god and view on the afterlife.”