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The qualifier of epicurean It has historically been used to disqualify anyone who points out a crack in the edifice of Absolute Truth. Even today, Orthodox Jews call those they consider apostates or heretics – that is, all those who are not like them. apikoros ‘epicureans’. In LilithPrimo Levi tells how in the horror of Auschwitz, another Polish Jewish deportee tells him the adventures of this character from oral tradition.
Don’t you know the story of Lilit? He did not know her, and he smiled an indulgent smile: you know, all the Hebrews of the West are epicureans, apikorsim, incredulous.
The same Italian author assumes the term as his own, and once the narrative about Adam’s rebellious first wife is finished, he writes that “it is a paradox that destiny has chosen an Epicurean to repeat this pious and impious fable.” Adding insult to injury, the racist Rabbi Kahane, a supporter of the expulsion from Palestine of all goyim and mortal enemy of any mixed marriage, alluded to the Jews who criticized his ideas with the name of Hellenized rabble. This identification with the Greek of everything that opposes the irrational faith of the charcoal burner is a long-lasting constant in the field of monotheism.
In Constantinople, in the year 562, the Christians arrest the Hellenes – insulting epithet […]– walking them through the streets of the city. […] An immense bonfire is lit into which his books are thrown (Onfray: Atheology Treatise).
Those who live off the faith of others, demand absolute obedience to their interpretations or practice the most abject submission to earn Paradise know very well what their worst is.r enemy. His name is logos, reason, logical discourse, recourse to intelligence, freedom of thought, praise of life and its pleasures. And that smells like Greek. But a good part of what is best offered on the shelves of the intellectual warehouse of the West is originally Hellenic, or its continuation by other means. In their effort to find insulting epithets, those Christian Taliban of ancient Byzantium could not have been more wrong.
It is no coincidence that this philosophical current has been persecuted, distorted and ridiculed to the point that today, for a large majority, epicurean It is synonymous with the pursuer of the pleasure of the senses. The foundations of Epicurean philosophy are ethics as a path to a full life based on a rigorous theory of knowledge, the study of Physical (Physis ‘nature’) and a very special theological vision. It is about determining criteria of truth that enable the person to avoid error and aspire to happiness (Theory of knowledge). His physics, based on atomism of Democritus and Leucippus, seeks to explain the multiplicity of things and their modifications without resorting to metaphysical entities, without the need for demiurges or suprahuman intelligences. His conception of the gods as fulfilled beings who have no interest in men implies a denial of the fear of the supernatural and the afterlife. In all these Epicurean ideas a clear concern for freedom appears. And in defense of this, he also tries to remove the fear of death, a common source of power of the intermediaries of the divine.
So the most dreadful of evils is nothing to us, since, as long as we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it has no effect on either the living or the dead, because for the former it is not there and the latter no longer exist. The wise man, on the other hand, neither refuses life nor fears not living. Because he is not burdened by living, nor does he consider it any evil not to live (Epicurus: Letter to Menoeceus).
That pleasure – not just what we usually think of – is the essential incentive that nature uses to make us strive to achieve our goals is something about which modern neuroscience has few doubts. The left prefrontal area of the brain is at the base of great projects, the objectives that give meaning to our lives. In turn, the right seems to function as behavior inhibitor. One region invites us to go to the end, to take risks to obtain what we want, while the next discourages us by showing the disadvantages of the enterprise. The Epicurean point of view – the true one, not the interested and caricatured distortion with which monotheisms have tried to hide it – allows an adequate coexistence and balance between both halves. While it resizes and gives restraint to the ambitions of the left hemisphere, it softens and appeases the misgivings of the right.
An “Epicurean” who adheres to the doctrine of Epicurus is a balanced person who squeezes happiness from the many small pleasures of life, overcomes his fears and lives socially and in harmony with others (Precht: Who am I and… how many?).
It is this attachment to what there is, to raw and naked reality, and its rejection of all consolation through imaginary daydreams and idealistic constructions, which has motivated the hatred of Epicureanism throughout the centuries. Prominent in the list of charges against him is his refutation of an immortal soul. Dante himself dispatches him to the sixth circle of hell: “His cemetery in this part has / with Epicurus all his followers / that the soul, they say, dies with the body” (Divine Comedy). Hegel’s addiction to order considered it a good thing – for which he did not hesitate to thank God – that the works of Epicurus had not been preserved (Lessons from the History of Philosophy). The incorruptible empiricism of his theory of knowledge and the praise of joy and happiness that enamel the Epicurean discourse are unbearable to his stolid enemies. Apparently, the teacher’s last words were “Live joyfully and remember my doctrines.” Let us add the sentence stamped on his Letter to Menoeceus: “Joy is the beginning and the end of a happy life.”
It is not difficult to guess the reasons for professing such hatred for those who, defending and propagating condemnatory anxieties of the flesh, consider it essential to stifle every hint of pleasure. However, well-conceived Epicureanism is not incompatible with deep beliefs. It is enough to evoke the poem by Fray Luis de León Retired lifethe one that begins:
What a restful life
that of the one who flees from the worldly noise
and the hidden one continues
path where they have gone
the few wise men in the world who have been!
Almost all the phrases that appear in the verses could be illustrations of the Epicurean ideal. Another aspect of this school that raised eyebrows for centuries was its conviction that society is constituted through an agreement of non-aggression between men. The concept of coexistence pact or social contract forward the letter as the basis and origin of the State, it called into question the divine origin of power and authority so dear to any religious conception, and even more so to those who take advantage of it. It seems sensible to vindicate the relevance of Epicurus, his Garden and his school, since “medicine […] proposed by the philosopher of Samos […] It could well be a parapet against the maelstrom that threatens to drag us down” (Cardona: Hellenistic philosophy).
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