1 Chapter 31 Epicurus in 19th-century Germany: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche James I. Porter The attention that Epicurus received among German Romantic philosophers, from Kant to Nietzsche, is remarkable. This is partly to be explained by the French Revolution, which elevated ancient atomism, and Epicureanism in particular, to a new level of prominence. The worldly materialism of this ancient doctrine, and its amenability to atheism, secularism, science, humanist ethics, and communal values, were obvious attractions. But the ground had been prepared earlier, with the rediscovery of ancient materialism by natural philosophers of the seventeenth century and the increased focus on Epicureanism that began with Gassendi. (Renaissance scholars had laid the foundations with renewed philological attention to the principal texts.)1 Epicurus lent himself to various appropriations and misappropriations even as he was pilloried from different quarters. As a result, his name continued to flourish among his enemies and his allies alike. A case in point is Kant, who in his youth was a card-carrying Lucretian, and in his sager period could not help working Epicurean concepts into the foundations of his critical philosophy (prolēpsis; pleasure, pain, and the feeling of life; the sublime by way of Lucretius), while never missing an opportunity to attack the atomist as inimical to his projects.2 Perhaps it is only the iconic status of Epicurus that can explain the fascination he exercised over Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche in the next century. The coincidence of these 1

Wilson (2008). Universal Natural History (1755) = Ak. (“Akademie” edition [Kant (1902 – )]) 1:212, 226; Critique of Pure Reason B 208-25, esp. B208 = Ak. 4:206-24; 4:208 (prolēpsis; Epicurus); Critique of Judgment §29 = Ak. 5:277-8 (Epicurus; feeling; life; pleasure). On the Kant and Lucretius, see Porter (2007). 2

2 three towering figures all training their sights on Epicurus is of some interest to scholars of antiquity, though anyone looking for illumination of Epicurean doctrine here is bound to come away disappointed. In one sense, though, it was hardly an accident that three such prominent if dissimilar philosophical figures should have taken so great an interest in Epicurus. All three were reared in the same classical traditions of Greek and Roman literature, history, and philosophy. And ancient atomism was fashionable again. But if their philology united them, their philosophies divided them. In his dissertation, Differenz der demokritischen und epikuräischen Naturphilosophie nebst einem Anhange (“Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature, with an Appendix”), submitted for a doctoral degree in philosophy at Jena in 1841, Karl Marx (1818-1883) set out to reclaim Epicurus from the disapprobation that had attached to the ancient philosopher, starting within antiquity (Stoics mocked him for the absurdity of his physical hypotheses), then among the Christian fathers (for his atheism), and finally in the most recent modernity—including G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the most influential German thinker since Kant, whose lofty idealism, nourished by a strong preference for spiritual concepts and a disdain for all things material, had little patience for Epicurean naïveté. Hegel had briefly discussed Epicurus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and Marx, intrigued by materialism and dissatisfied with Hegel, decided to take issue with his great predecessor (abetted by his mentor, Bruno Bauer, a member of the dissenting Young Hegelians). Where Hegel had contrasted Epicurus with Democritus (to Epicurus’ discredit), Marx went the other way. The dissertation might as well have been called “Difference between Marx and Hegel,” so polemical a reading of Hegel’s Lectures does it represent. Like Hegel, Nietzsche (1840-1900) contemplated penning a

3 work on The History of Philosophy, in which Epicurus would have featured prominently (12[1]; 1888).3 And like Marx, Nietzsche was deeply attracted to materialism. But Nietzsche and Marx were famously incompatible thinkers, perhaps as incompatible as Nietzsche and Hegel. Nowhere do their differences crystalize more sharply than in their respective views of Epicurus.4 On the other hand, any comparison is bound to be skewed. Hegel’s mentions of Epicurus are pretty much confined to his Lectures. Marx’s encounter was brief, lasting only two years, and he would effectively ignore Epicurus in his later writings. Nietzsche, on the other hand, spent a life-time thinking and writing about Epicurus, and he had ample opportunity to revise his views. In what follows, Marx and Nietzsche will of primary interest, as they have the most to say about Epicurus. But because Marx’s dissertation cannot be understood without reference to Hegel, it will be essential to look back to him before examining Marx’s own writings. HEGEL Hegel most extensive encounter with Epicurus occurs in a brief section of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the first comprehensive edition of which appeared in 1833-36, immediately before Marx set to work on the subject. (The lectures had been delivered in Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin between 1805 and 1831.5) As one might suspect of the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel finds the metaphysical postulates of atomism to be philosophically bankrupt. Epicureanism is depicted as a

3

Citations in this form are to Nietzsche’s notebooks. The numeration is after Nietzsche (1967 – ). Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 4 It is unlikely that Nietzsche knew of Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus, which appeared in print for the first time in 1902, or that he cared to read Hegel either. 5 For general background on Hegel’s Lectures, see Hegel (2009) 1-42; De Laurentiis (2005).

4 mindless victim of sensation, overwhelmed with particulars and incapable of higher orders of thought, concepts (Begriffe), and understanding (das Begreifen)—and utterly unmoored from rational teleology. In Hegel’s eyes, the whole of Epicurus’s system is afflicted with uncertainty, from its metaphysical constituents to its divinities. Atoms collide in random patterns. They represent sheer events and nothing more, conditioned as they are by causes outside themselves. With nature so constructed, it can only ever fail to add up to a unified totality (19:314).6 Can it even be conceived as such? At best, one can try to grasp the truth of nature by way of roundabout analogies, but these are mere metaphors, images, and fantasies (19:317). As a consequence, Epicurus’ philosophy is a trafficking in “unknowns” by way of further unknowns (19:314). Then there is the materialist premise, utterly objectionable to the idealist Hegel. The notion that the soul should “consist of actual atoms and [that] the atoms are separated by void” is a nonstarter: “Let’s not waste our time with such nonsense any longer; these are empty words. We cannot have any respect for Epicurus’ philosophical ideas; what is more, they are not even ideas to begin with” (19:322). Not content with this estimation, Hegel must prove it: he goes on to insure that concepts will only flounder in Epicurus’ system. Where Epicurus laid the foundations of empirical knowledge in the senses and made concepts derive from this basis, Hegel builds uncertainty into the very process of concept-formation. He does so by a peculiar sleight of hand that involves a substitution of a bad idea for a good one and a forced translation in the bargain. In a nutshell, Hegel will seek to tar Epicurus’ notion of concepts (or thought) with the brush of atomistic void, literally emptying it out of

6

References are to Hegel (1969-71), which reproduce the text of the 1833-36 edition that Marx would have used. My translations.

5 meaning, while reducing it to a hapless process that appears to have no explanation and no certain contact with outer reality as it claims and requires. All of this will lay the groundwork for Marx, who will come to Epicurus’ rescue with his dissertation. But first, let us turn to Hegel’s demolition, which begins, appropriately enough, in an analysis of error. Error results, in Epicurean epistemology (Hegel summarizes), when the sensation we have is impure and the representation that works its way into our minds produces a change such that the internal representation no longer corresponds to the object (no longer attests to it). Another, different motion occurs within, distinct from that which flows from the sensation of the object. This “interruption”—or better yet, “break” or “rupture” (Unterbrechung)—is the cause of the error (19:308). Hegel puts considerable stock in this notion of interruption, which in itself is a slightly tendentious rendering of the original Greek term διάληψις. διάληψις means something like mental “separation” or “distinction” (cf. Ep. Hdt. 58; 69; frr. [31.16].23; [34.22].10; [35.12].7 Arr.),7 though Epicurus does appear in the present context to have in mind something ultimately like a break or rupture between an atomic process and its product, whether this product is ontological, conceptual (viz., descriptive), or implies property emergence (the whole question is hotly debated today).8 As Diogenes reports, error results from “some other movement in ourselves [sc., other than the one conforming to the sensation], conjoined with, but distinct from (διάληψιν δὲ ἔχουσαν), the perception of what is presented” (Ep. Hdt. 51; trans. Hicks, adapted). By this is meant that the possibility of error is introduced when an opinion is formed about a sense perception: the opinion may be true or false, 7

This last text was emended by Laursen; see Masi (2006) 76 for the text with discussion. See Masi (2006) 76-8 and passim for discussion. For the descriptive possibility, see Atherton 2007, 214. 8

6 depending on whether the opinion is subsequently confirmed by evidence (enargeia) or not. Hegel continues: “This movement of our own is what Epicurus calls an interruption (Unterbrechung). . . . In this meager passage, which is in part either obscurely presented by Diogenes or else badly excerpted by him, the entire Epicurean theory of knowledge is found in reduced form; a more impoverished theory is not possible to imagine” (19:309). The poor quality of the report hardly prevents Hegel from embroidering on its implications to his satisfaction. In fact, he has already done so by claiming for the passage an emblematic status. What the passage probably describes is the formation, from within, of an opinion about the truth or falsity of a sensation. This judgment, which is an internal movement of thought, is linked to the sensation but added to it as an independent process. Presumably, what the mind does is sort through its memory of similar sensations, compare them and evaluate them, in order to come up with a judgment of the veracity or falsity of the sensation.9 Some sort of interruption must be involved which allows the mind to redirect itself from the immediate, outer sensation to a memory bank of like sensations and then back again to the immediate sensation. Whether the swerve is involved in this process10 depends upon how one dates the invention of the concept, which may not have been available to Epicurus at the time of The Letter to Herodotus.11 And though Hegel does not invoke the swerve directly as the cause of the interruption, he acknowledges that the swerve pervades Epicurus’ system and conditions all atomic events, imparting to them a fundamental contingency (Zufall) of motion and combination (19:312-3). Hegel’s idea of an interruption, then, is prima facie plausible, at least in some form or other. The way he goes on to expand the concept is another story. 9

See Asmis (2009) 89-95. See Englert (1987) 144-51; Englert, this volume. 11 Masi (2006) ch. 6. 10

7 Hegel continues: “Knowledge, qua thought, is determined entirely as a movement of its own [i.e., one not caused from without] that makes an interruption (die eine Unterbrechung macht),” which is to say, constitutes a rupture or break in the reception of sensory input (19:309). So far so good. Except that Hegel wants to fill in the meaning of Unterbrechung in a peculiar way, one that will be to Epicurus’ detriment. First, he attempts to render Epicurus’ concept of thought impotent at the very moment that it seems to assert itself against the outer sensory environment, by associating it with the idea of the void. Then he empties this concept of knowledge further by rendering it into an unknown and unknowable process of its own (as is everything else, he believes, in Epicurus’ system). Hegel does all of this through a series of peculiar associations that are possible only on his own speculative dialectic, and on a rather chary account of atomism. Thought is to be regarded as an interruption (in the sense of a hiatus) and associated with void and with negation (for void is the negation, or interruption, of Being): “Since the stream of atoms is interrupted by the void, it is possible to stem this flood” through the action of thought (19:309; emphasis added). The statement is in some sense true as it stands: void is the condition both of the possibility of motion and of motion’s interruption. But void is not the sufficient condition for a change of motion. Hegel ignores this for the time being. And in order to complete his reading, he must equate void with interruption in the most general of terms, which he does: “The other moment of atoms is the void, the interruption (Unterbrechung), Porus [“pore” or “way”]” (19:309). At a stroke, thought can now be assimilated to void as an agent (or site) of interruption, even if the causes of this interruption are left utterly unexplained. Epicurus offered one such causal explanation:

8 the exceedingly light and mobile nature of atoms that make up thought, and which allows for their redirection. But though Hegel is familiar with this account, he is unimpressed by it: “—utterly vacuous [lit., thoughtless] notion” (— ganz gedankenlose Vorstellung) (19:322). Why thought should be any more susceptible to interruption—“afflicted (behaftet) by a negative principle, the moment of rupture (Unterbrechung)” (19:311)— than the streaming of sense data or any other atomic motion is left obscure on Hegel’s reading. More than this is needed, to be sure: the unpredictability of the swerve, which ruptures the chains of necessity that otherwise determine the course of the atoms; and some volitional factor that takes over once determinism has been breached. What is particularly offensive to Hegel is not so much the process of atomic rupture as its location in thought. But none of this matters in the end, for with his analogies in place, or rather his equations of thought = interruption = rupture = void = (principle of) negation or negativity, Hegel can now on to reduce Epicurus’s canonic to a failed Hegelian dialectic, while literally voiding thought in the process. Hegel’s reductio ad absurdum is really just an impatient argument, and not a very good one at that. As Hegel views things, Epicurus hits, somehow, almost by chance, upon the notion of a freely formed thought, one that interrupts the influx of sensation. This is something that Hegel is happy to applaud, since it represents an incipient triumph of the mind over the empirical world and the body and a speculative movement and determination of sorts.12 Hegel implicitly links this virtual “swerve” of thought within the mind to Epicurus’ invention of the arbitrary atomic swerve and its interruption— rupturing—of the chains of physical determinism. But true to form, Hegel will never

12

As does interruption in general (understood as void), which permits motion, from which other developments can and do ensue (Hegel, Science of Logic, 5:185).

9 allow Epicurus to savor his victories. Epicurus stumbles onto a good thing, but fails to grasp what it is that he has found. He lacks, precisely, the conceptual power, and above all the respect for conceptuality, that would allow him to do so in the first place. Thus, Hegel goes on, “But what this interruptive motion now is, understood for itself (für sich), Epicurus hasn’t got a clue” (19:309). Worse, the interruption of atomic motion is in fact the distinguishing mark of all atomic motion (19:313). The trouble with Epicurus’ system, in Hegel’s eyes, is that it is riddled with unwitting inconsistency. On the one hand, Epicurus makes his atoms essentially contingent things, and he also “banishes” thought as a form of Being-in-Itself (Ansichseiendes), which is to say into a condition of unrealized potentiality, by reducing thought to a material contingency like that of atoms and void, albeit one that works against nature through the act of interruption. On the other hand, Epicurus fails to recognize that his “atoms have the very same nature that thought has.” By this, Hegel does not mean that thought is made up of atoms, which would be a perfectly unobjectionable restatement of Epicurus, but rather that thought is “a kind of Being that is not unmediated, since it is essentially the result of mediation, [viz.,] is negative or universal” (19:313). Translated into plain English, what Hegel means is that atoms are the product of thought, being conceptual devices for making sense of the world, rather than being preexisting material objects in the world, despite whatever Epicurus might claim to the contrary. In this way, Hegel has managed to accomplish three things with his destructive analysis of Epicurus: he has made error and truth indistinguishable (for there is no criterion available for distinguishing truth from falsity, while arriving at these might well

10 seem to require the selfsame process, atomistically speaking);13 he has driven a conceptual uncertainty into the heart of Epicurus’ theory of knowledge (for at bottom, Epicurus’ theory acts out the motions, so to speak, of a theory while being at a loss to explain its own foundations); and he has built a fruitless—interrupted—dialectic into the theory so that atomism in its Epicurean form will be guaranteed to be still-born and will never evolve, as it in fact never does, though for different reasons from those that Hegel ascribes to Epicurus’ following. Epicureans remained resolutely loyal to the their master’s teachings. But in Hegel’s view, Epicurus’ philosophy, to survive, must remain unreflective lest it notice its own absurdities: “[The evolution of the school] would have been precisely lapsing into understanding (ein Verfallen ins Begreifen), which would only have thrown the Epicurean system into a confusion[!]; for . . . it was just this vacuity of thought (Gedankenlosigkeit) that was made into a principle” in Epicureanism (19:334). Hegel is merciless. Having located the core issues of the philosophy to his satisfaction, Hegel concludes his opening summary: “This interruption—by us [sc., in the mind], which thought created—is bound up with the remaining ideas of Epicurus” (19:309). And on this basis, he goes on to explicate the entire system of Epicurus’ metaphysics, physics, and morals.14

13

So close are the two processes, one might easily mistake Hegel’s account of “error” for an account of how Epicurus arrives at truth. This is how he was understood by his editor and pupil, Michelet, who believed that with “interruption” Hegel was referring to erroneous thought pure and simple, rather than to judgments of truth and error: “We know the objective world when its atoms flow in just as they are. Error arises out of the void, out of an interruption of the influx of the atoms, whereby the atoms come to be dislocated and changed, and in this way they produce our imaginations and dreams” (Michelet (1876) 3-4; emphasis added). 14 We might add an additional destructive consequence of Hegel’s reading of Epicurus: the impression that the philosophy is ridden with interruption, when in fact it appears to presupposed a great deal of natural regularity, at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. See n. below; and Bobzien (2000) esp. 337: “The swerve . . . was meant to . . . mak[e] the mental dispositions of adult human beings non-necessary [i.e., non-necessitated] . . . . This is possible without great interruptions and ‘out-of-character’ developments, if one assumes a certain frequency of the swerves, a generally stable atomic structure of the mind . . . .”

11 So much for Epicurus’ physics and metaphysics. Morality fares little better. The victim of arbitrary sensation and of mere particulars, moral thought can never rise above itself to discover justifications: “in this way morality is actually eliminated (aufgehoben), or [rather] the moral principle is in fact an unmoral one” (19:323). But this is nothing new; it is just an extension of Epicurus’ general habit of turning thought against itself: “thought is used precisely in order to inhibit thought; it acts in a negative fashion against itself” (19:334). Gods, by virtue of existing in the intermundia, understood (as Hegel does) as empty space and (therefore) as the realm of pure thought, are the final and highest expression of this Epicurean paradox. Their truest essence cannot be pressed to its logical conclusion on pain of utter contradiction: Are they real or not? Are they “concretions” of atoms in compound structures or autonomous Beings that exist in and of themselves (as an In-itself)? In some sense, they display the full force of the negation of sensation, “and this negation is thought.” All this “appears ridiculous, but it is coherent with the above-mentioned Unterbrechung and the relationship of the empty to the full (the atom)” (19:330). And yet, in the end it matters little, since even atoms are no more than creatures of thought, mere figments of the mind (nur Gedankendinge), or rather of Geist and the Concept, as both lurch forward to modernity (19:335)—well past Epicurus, who turns out to have been not only mindless and thoughtless (gedankenlos, 19:322; 19:334), but decidedly inimical to thought, to abstraction, to universalization, and to the notion of the In-itself as belonging to the Being of the Concept. The irony is that “Epicurus banished thought in the form of Being-in-itself,” or rather what he understood this to be, by reducing reality to atoms (and void), but not to the Concept, “without noticing (ohne . . . zu denken) that his atoms themselves had the nature of thought,”

12 because they were generated by thought and in no other way. In other words, Epicurus was an idealist who mistook himself for a realist. Alas, “such are the inconsequential reasonings of all empiricists” (19:313). MARX Marx, already in his posthumously published dissertation, sets out to stand Hegel on his feet, and he does so by making a case for Epicurus’ coherence and significance in the history of philosophy that Hegel could never countenance. Behind this reversal of Hegel lies an equally powerful move: a rejection of the classicizing bias that jaundices Hegel’s account of all philosophy after Plato and Aristotle. Marx sets the tone with his very first sentence: “Greek philosophy appears to experience what a good tragedy should never experience, namely a dull ending . . . . Epicureans, Stoics, and skeptics are viewed as a nearly unseemly postscript that bears no relationship to its powerful premises.” The very notions of birth, flowering, and decline, which are the actual premises of this kind of view, Marx adds, are themselves “vague” notions, capable of encompassing much but of comprehending nothing, while “decline is presaged in the living,” and just as specific a characteristic as “the very shape of life” (22).15 Marx then turns to Democritus, whose philosophical position, as the early cofounder of atomism, he will measure against those of Epicurus, the school’s later representative. On Marx’s view, it is Democritus, not Epicurus, who harbors uncertainty, self-contradiction, and confusion. Is he a materialist or a skeptic? Is truth something that

15

References are to Marx (1975); all translations mine. (For an English translation, albeit one not based on the critical German edition, see Marx and Engels (1975) 23-107.) Sannwald (1957) on Marx and antiquity is fundamental, and has some good pages on the dissertation. The early piece by Bailey (1928) is a rare study by a classicist, one who remains puzzled if respectful. Gabaude (1970), the only book-length treatment, is energetic but flawed. The best single essay known to me is McIvor (2008). See below.

13 can be known or does it lie forever “hidden in the depths” (25). Are atoms real, while all else is mere subjective appearance? Or are sensual appearances real, being an ineliminable part of the physical world? (25-6). Caught on both horns of this dilemma (“antinomy”), Democritus is unable to escape the consequences: his system is fatally at odds with itself in its conceptual foundations. Objectivity and subjectivity are forever “at war.” By contrast, Epicurus resolves the antinomy by adopting a dogmatic, not skeptical, view of reality: appearances are real and irrefutable, as real as the atoms that constitute them: they have an objective and no longer subjective value. In accepting atomism’s first principles, but in refusing to grant appearances a “merely-intentional” (nur-Gemeinten), subjective value, Epicurus asserts his freedom from Democritus’ epistemic hardships (26). A good deal follows from this principled decision. Democritus now appears as a pseudo-empiricist. Insecure in his foundations, he is “driven” into empirical observation, in search of evidence that would resolve his intellectual dilemmas—but never able to satisfy this desire, which is structurally built into his theoretical position (27). Epicurus, on the other hand, is a philosopher characterized by lassitude and “boundless nonchalance” (30): he is “satisfied and blissful in philosophy” (27). He experiences true freedom, which rests on a freedom from a desire to know empirically anything in particular. Hence, he “despises the positive sciences,” for they can contribute nothing to “genuine perfection” (28). This latter is given immediately in sensation, in pleasure, and in a general indifference towards Being. Where Democritus must seek out iron-clad laws of physical necessity and determinism, Epicurus is content to let the world unwind according to the whims of contingency and the caprices of the human will. In conceding so much independent and as it were discretionary reality to Being, Epicurus can adopt a

14 corresponding independence from its demands: this is the source of ataraxia, or freedom from mental disturbance, which Marx describes as a kind of contingency of thought (Zufall des Denkens), corresponding to Epicurus’ free embrace of contingency in the physical world (31). Rather than devolving into a passive spectator sport, or a dereliction of the mind’s rational duties, such a stance permits Epicurus to develop his philosophy into a highly engaged theory and practice of perceptual and conceptual reflection. In fact, one of the virtues of his philosophy, in Marx’s view, is that the functions of sensual perception and mental conceptualization are mutually involved at every level and work themselves out in tandem. They are not stymied and confused, stuck in a stalled dialectic the way Hegel felt they were. On the contrary, they demonstrate a sophisticated and seemingly logical advance over earlier philosophical speculation. The contrast with Democritus in particular is designed to bring out this philosophical evolution. Side glances at Epicurus’ contemporaries and rivals (Stoics and skeptics) provide a further contrast. Epicurus’ first step towards a radical break with Democritus occurs in his reconception of the atom. For Democritus, the atom exists as a purely material postulate or substrate (stoicheion: “element”). Inaccessible to appearances, “it sinks down to the material basis,” where “it exists only in the void,” in a kind of formal death, embodying, qua “abstract particularity,” “freedom from existence, not freedom in existence” (47).16 So conceived, it illuminates nothing, and least of all itself. From this perspective, Democritus’ epistemological despair is easily understood. Truth truly does lie in the depths—invisibly and irretrievably so. On the other hand, Marx declares the very concept 16

This verdict is typically taken as a condemnation by Marx of Epicurus (see n. 31), but this is to overlook the fact that the position described is held by Democritus, not by Epicurus, according to Marx, who surmounts it (see below).

15 of the atom to be a formal contradiction, as it requires the ascription of phenomenal qualities (shape, form, and weight) to what is in essence a brute quantity (the atom qua matter); owing to this contradiction, the atom is “alienated (entfremdet) from its concept” (which Marx also calls its “form,” 48).17 Hegel had noted a similar difficulty in his critique of Epicurus, whose account of atomic qualities he labeled an “arbitrary poetry” (312). The problem, while lurking within the concept of the atom and hidden from view, is, we might say (to paraphrase Marx’s logic here), the actual source of Democritus’ epistemological anxieties. Democritus evaded the problem; Epicurus confronts it head on (39-43). He does so by seizing on this contradiction within the Democritean system, which is the contradiction between matter and form or between existence and essence, and then by transforming this into the positive condition of a newly reconceived atomism. Alienation (the alienated concept of the atom) is redeemed. A repressed or unwitting dilemma is made into a principle (archē) of consciousness—phenomenal and conceptual consciousness. And consciousness is raised to a new degree of self-consciousness. This is, in a nutshell, the sum and substance of Epicurus’ advances over Democritus. In targeting Epicurus, Marx’s implicit lesson is that philosophy could only advance by thinking its way, not past (as Hegel impatiently would have liked), but through the complexities of matter and materialism. The ways in which Marx works out Epicurus’ solutions to the dilemmas of atomism are therefore all the more revealing of Marx’s own attitudes towards materialism, at least at this early phase of his evolving thought.18

17

Strictly, he says: “the apparent world can arise only out of the qualified [as opposed to purely quantitative] atom, [viz., an atom] that has been perfected and alienated from its concept.” 18 A raging question in the literature is how much of a materialist Marx shows himself to be in his Dissertation. The proposals, which range all over the map, are neatly summarized by McIvor (2008) 398-9 (his own view appears on ibid., 404). Marx’s vivid interest in materialism is, I believe, indiscussible, and equal only to his desire to fuse it with Hegelian idealism; see below.

16 Epicurus’ first move, according to Marx, is to reconceive the atom as a dynamic principle, rather than an inert bit of matter. And to do this he has to view the atom as asserting itself in a radical way, by negating its surroundings (space), in much the same way as time is a negation of space (35). The association of time and atomism will become increasingly relevant. This conquest of space and self-assertion occurs when the atom swerves without cause: through the swerve, the atom lays claim to its “pure formal determination,” its “individuality,” and its freedom from physical necessity (35; 36). In this new-found independence, the atom resembles a celestial body (36), a point that will also come to dominate Marx’s analysis. The swerve represents the “soul” of the atom, its conceptual identity, and the idea of its abstract particularity (37)—something that Democritus’ atoms lacked. In this way, Democritean atoms, conceived as Beings inthemselves (as potential, inert, and material)—become Epicurean atoms, conceived as Beings for-themselves (actual, dynamic, ideal, and abstract). This, too, is an honor that Hegel had denied to Epicurean atoms, as we saw.19 But the swerve does more than make atoms into dynamic principles: it permits them to engage in a fruitful dialectic with nature and the mind. It does this first by “realizing” the internal contradiction of atomism. Marx’s interpretation of the swerve is without a doubt the most famous element of his Dissertation: it allows for radical contingency in nature and for subjective freedom, a point that Marx reiterates in his notebooks to the dissertation (H, 26);20 as such, it makes for a poignant allegory of the incipient bourgeois subject en route to its self-realization and ultimate emancipation from 19

Here, Hegel was siding with Kant, who found Epicurus to be “outrageous” (unverschämt) for having introduced the unnatural perversion of this deviant motion in nature (Ak. 1:227). 20 Marx (1976) contains the seven notebooks, or Hefte (“H”), that led up to the Dissertation (translations mine; published translation available in Marx and Engels (1975) 405-509, though not based on the more recent critical German edition). These notebooks date roughly from early 1839 to February 1840.

17 the clutches of external about determinants, one that is easily overstated.21 But the value of the swerve goes far beyond this charming political allegory. The notion of the swerve is for Marx general metaphor that pervades all of Epicurean philosophy. Atoms swerve from a straight line; the aim of individual action is to swerve, to abstract itself, to avoid (ausbeugen) pain and confusion (see DRN 2.251-60 with Bobzien 2000, 310); existence as a whole is the object of a universal avoidance; “and therefore the gods avoid the world (beugen die Götter der Welt aus), cease to care it, and live outside of it” (37; emphasis in original).22 In paving the way for a distantiated apprehension of the world by a subject, the swerve’s ultimate function is ethical: its implications bear on voluntarism (selfdetermination) and on a vitalist embrace of subjective life (as the doctrine of hedonism suggests). And the ethical stance of Epicureanism, conceived as directing us to “a form of life,” lies at the very heart of Marx’s appreciation of the ancient atomist. Explaining how all this works will take a bit more unpacking. The swerve is central to atomism for a few different reasons. First, it is through its declension, the movement away from a direct free-fall, that the atom “abstracts [itself] from existence, which stands over and against it, and withdraws from the same.” This is a moment of “negation,” in which the atom asserts its relative difference against other atoms, which must in turn be redeemed by another, positive moment—the moment of self-affirmation, in which the atom so to speak declares its own existence. Selfaffirmation is only possible, Marx claims, through such an act of alienation, and more 21

As, for example, by Gabaude (1970) 60: “Atomes égaux entre eux et dieux équivalents expriment l’individualisme et le refus de l’autorité” (with nothing in Marx to back up this paraphrase). 22 A curious term, ausbeugen (lit. “bending out of the way,” as if by swerving) is cognate with ausbiegen, and is equivalent to ausweichen, “to withdraw from,” “stand back from.” Nietzsche writes in a similar vein (but without the connotations of “swerve”), as he defines Epicurus’ “pessimism”: “das ‘Ausweichen’ als ‘göttlich’ empfunden,” “‘withdrawal’ [from the world] was viewed [by Epicurus] as ‘divine’” (8[15]; 1883). Hegel’s term for “swerve” was “abweichen” (19:313).

18 specifically an act of repulsion—through the mutual repulsion, via physical contact, of atoms. This is how atoms “realize” their identities (38).23 Here, Marx is permitting Epicurus an insight into the subjective process that Hegel, for whatever reason, would not—or rather, is allowing atoms to enter into dynamic relations that permit (or else merely prefigure) higher and more interesting levels of organization.24 The leap to social relations is easily made: “And in truth, . . . a person ceases to be a product of nature” when she goes through an identical process and encounters her peers in “material relationships” (38-9). In this way, the lex atomi translates directly into a lex individui: “Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness” (39). Material encounters are sublated into ideal ones, and the relationship is spiritualized, or at least put on the road to spiritual realization—which is to say, idealization. How atoms can know all this is another question,25 but we are in the milieu of German speculative philosophy at its finest hour, and not witnessing the history of philosophy as it is conducted today. But we should at least note that even as Marx assimilates atomism to speculative philosophy, at the very moment of the atoms’ abstraction and idealization, he will never entirely let go of its materialist premises. Atoms remain caught up in a web of material relations with one another, and this element will pervade the whole of Marx’s reconstruction of Epicurus’ 23

“For the atoms are in themselves their only object, can be related only to one another, that is, in spatial terms, [can] come into mutual contact (sich treffen), insofar as every relative existence of the same [sc., atoms], in which they come to be related to an other [Being], is negated . . . . Thus, they first make mutual contact through the declension from the [straight atomic fall]” (38; emphasis in original). 24 Fenves (1986) 441 (etc.) finds it “strange” that Marx should fail to attribute (“never mentions”) attraction to Epicurean atoms and thereby complete their speculative Aufhebung as entities existing forthemselves and endowed with an essential qualitative unity, as Hegel would argue in his Science of Logic (5:186-208; cf. Encyclopedia §262). But why should we expect Marx to do so? Epicurean physics knows only repulsion, while Hegel is describing modern Newtonian physics, which has fundamentally different properties and laws. As it happens, “ein System der Repulsion und Attraction” is in fact attributed by Marx to atoms via celestial bodies, which are “die wirklich gewordene Atome” (56). But Marx makes little of this mistaken attribution, and rightly so. He finds more interesting ways to redeem Epicurean matter, along the lines described in this essay. 25 Anthropomorphism is rampant. Cf. 36, where the swerve practically endows atoms with “consciousness.”

19 system. Having accounted for the atom’s affirmative negation of space, Epicurus’ next innovation is to redeem time. Where Democritus banished time as unreal, Epicurus reinstates time as “the absolute [and “pure”] form of appearance” (48; 49). This is a powerful reading by Marx, as it permits him to read Epicurus’ theory of appearances as a phenomenology of matter, albeit one that reflects the dimension of time into the very perception of the world. On this view, sensation just is the perception of change and of bodies as accidents. Time is the perception of this perception—of change as change and accidence as accidence. Combining these thoughts, Marx arrives at the following account of Epicurean sensation: “Human sensation is thus embodied time, the existing reflection of the world of the senses within itself” (50). One key term here is the word “reflection.” Marx’s point is that Epicurus marks an advance over Democritus, and indeed over all other predecessors, in achieving for the very first time in the history of philosophy a notion of “appearances as appearances” (Erscheinung als Erscheinung, 49), and therefore a degree of reflection on appearances that was never available before. It is worth noting that Hegel had reserved the distinction, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, to account for “truth” in one of its highest forms, as the “supersensual realm Beyond.”26 So this is a very high, and un-Hegelian, complement to Epicureanism being awarded here by Marx. The second crucial term in Marx’s statement is “embodied.” The reflection that is won is achieved in the very act of sensation itself. It is sensation, reflecting on itself in the act, that gives rise to the sense, and concept, of time (50): time is the time of sensation and the

26

“Das Innere oder das übersinnliche Jenseits . . . kommt aus der Erscheinung her, und sie ist seine Vermittlung; oder die Erscheinung ist sein Wesen und in der Tat seine Erfüllung . . . . Das Übersinnliche ist also die Erscheinung als Erscheinung” (3:118). A famous phrase, this appears to be its only occurrence in Hegel.

20 time it takes to notice the distance sensation has traveled. A union, or synthesis, of man and nature takes place: “human sensation (Sinnlichkeit) is thus the medium in which, as in an [optical] focus, the processes of nature reflect on themselves and ignite into the light of appearances” (50). A corollary of this view is that things are endowed with an intrinsic, and mortal, temporality (Marx speaks of “die Zeitlichkeit der Dinge,” by which he must mean things at a phenomenal level), while their sensation is the perception of this temporality (this is what is meant by the “embodied temporality” of perception and sensation). In other words, when we take in the world, what we take in is not only its appearance, but also its dissolution and passing away (Diremtion; sich auflösen; vergehen, 50). Time in effect consumes matter. Only, it does so not in a material way, but in a formal way. Let me explain. Marx can add this dimension of temporality to the Epicurean world, and applaud it as an advance over the Democritean conception of reality, because of his conviction that time conveys a sense of the intrinsic contradiction between the matter and the form of reality—a distinction that was lost on Democritus. With the advent of time, matter becomes abstract, or rather is abstracted from its materiality: all determinate existence (Dasein) is destroyed, annulled, and led back to a state of Being-for-itself (49). This is the speculative moment that moves the dialectic of form and matter forward. Thus, “time is the fire of essence (das Feuer des Wesens), which eternally consumes appearances and imprints upon them a seal of dependency and non-essence (Wesenlosigkeit)” (49). As a result, two things happen to matter simultaneously: it enters into the dialectic of selfconsciousness and nature (which is to say, it is elevated to a new philosophical plateau of the ideal); and it enters into concrete experience and practice, as a humanly consumable

21 entity, through sensation. The contrast is again with Democritean atoms, which, we should remember, were purely material things, inaccessible to the senses, and (as eternal beings) immune to the ravages of time, but also, paradoxically, occupying a kind of eternal death (47); they were truly “atomistic” entities, standing in relation neither to themselves (49) nor to anything else.27 In sum, they represented a kind of anomie in nature, one that Marx found abhorrent. From here, Marx passes to an unexpected quadrant in Epicurus, his theory of celestial bodies (die Meteore, τὰ µετέωρα).28 It is here that Epicurus makes his boldest and most radical moves, turning his face not only against Democritus, but also “against the entire Greek race” (51). The heavens, the traditional seat of ever-lasting divinity, presented Epicurus with the greatest challenge to his notion of ataraxy. Nature cannot be permitted to include anything eternal, anything not subject to change or diminution, apart from the atoms themselves. How could he find a way round this obstacle? Marx’s solution to Epicurus’s problem, or rather to what he perceives to be Epicurus’s problem, is strained but intriguing. It is to concentrate, in effect, all the antinomies of matter into the concept of the heavenly bodies, which (Marx claims) are the same as afflict atoms, but are merely instantiated now in a highly visible way.29 The response of the Epicurean, meanwhile, is to stand back and allow these problems to play themselves out on their own, while observing them with an attitude of complete indifference. In effect, the antinomies are irresolvable as such, except in the ataraxic mind-set of the Epicurean 27

Hegel would have concurred with some of these assessments (see Science of Logic 5:185), but Epicurus adds drama. 28 Meteore is misleadingly rendered as “meteors” in Marx and Engels (1975), and commentators unwittingly follow suit. But meteors are precisely not in question. 29 It is tempting to include time itself amongst these higher level antinomies, given how the heavenly bodies are one of the more visible ways in which time is calculated (the sun and moon, and the movement of the planets).

22 philosopher. But much in fact happens behind the scenes. If atoms are “matter in the form of independence and individuality, [and] are so to speak weight in its visible form (die vorgestellte Schwere),” celestial bodies, Marx reasons, are “the highest reality of weight,” and thus are “atoms made real” (55): they are the highest and most profound concretization of atoms. And yet, in Epicurus’ theory of matter at its pinnacle, in the theory of heavenly bodies, a rupture occurs in his system. For Epicurus’ single goal is to degrade the matter of the heavenly bodies and “to draw them down into mundane impermanence” (56). And to do so would be to ruin the hypothesis of atomism: atoms cannot be but impermanent. Epicurus lights upon another way to achieve his aim. He does so through a speculative turn. Marx continues: “The whole of Epicurean natural philosophy is pervaded by the conflict between essence and existence, between form and matter, . . . but in the heavenly bodies this contradiction is extinguished, the conflicting moments are reconciled (versöhnt)” (56; emphasis in original). They are reconciled, because a dialectical process has ensued. “In the celestial system matter received form into itself, subsumed particularity into itself, and in this way achieved independence.” It achieved a kind of independence that not even the world of atoms could achieve, the barren material world in which atoms remained locked in an endless conflict with form, with each side canceling the other out. But celestial matter is a different kind of matter: it is matter that, thanks to its internalization of form, has “become concrete particularity, [which is to say] universality,” which must mean a particularization of universality (or a concrete universal). And, “at this point [matter] ceases to be [the] affirmation of abstract self-consciousness.” That is to say, in this standoff between the desire for ataraxy and for transcending matter on the one hand and the

23 unshakeable reality of matter on the other, a transformation does occur on both sides. Self-consciousness emerges as a distinct entity from matter, like a chrysalis, “and declares itself to be the true principle [of Epicurus’ philosophy], and [as such] is hostile to the newly independent nature, . . . its brilliantly gleaming refutation [and] mortal enemy” (56). Self-consciousness, we can only say, arises out of the ashes of nature, which it negates in the very act of conceiving nature as (abstractly) possible—“for what is possible can also be different” (56). The principle of atoms—their concept (their archē)—negates their eternal character (as stoicheion); matter is vanquished, or rather reconciled to a higher purpose. The next phase, one that Epicurus never attained (30, 31), would be to convert abstract possibility into real possibility and real actuality, and then both into real necessity. This would once again mark an advance over Democritus, who knew only empirical real possibility and “relative necessity” in the form of determinism (30). A higher form of realized possibility and actuality would be these same things conceived as reflectively determined necessity (see Hegel, Science of Logic, 6:202-13). But one would have to wait for Hegel to complete this circuit of logic.30 There is much drama to this speculative logic à la Hegel. But there is also much at stake in Marx’s reading. One issue, still alive among Marx’s commentators, is whether Marx is endorsing or criticizing Epicurus here, and whether Marx is either knowingly or unknowingly sacrificing the possibility of empirical science. The question is fairly intricate, and also potentially controversial: I happen to believe that most if not all these interpretations hinge on a misconstrual of Marx’s argument. A quick look at the relevant parts of Marx’s exposition will help us arrive at a clearer view of the problem. The heavenly bodies represent the greatest challenge to atomism not simply 30

For a lucid explanation of this modal logic, see Longeunesse (2007) ch.4.

24 because they are the conventional seat of divinity, fate, providence, and all that surpasses human control, but also because in their vast unknowability, whether physical or metaphysical, they present a palpable stumbling block to the human intellect, which responds in turn by resorting to instinctual fear, most commonly in the guise of superstition and the more unsettling forms of religion. In order to dispel this fear, Epicurus takes a different route from the reductionism of Democritus, according to whom the heavens were conglomerations of atoms and void. The price Democritus paid for this move was to displace anxieties about nature onto the mind of the natural scientist, as Marx showed earlier, and as Epicurus knows very well, for instance in a passage from The Letter to Herodotus not cited by Marx but doubtless in his sights. Knowledge of celestial events contributes nothing to happiness, and if anything it detracts from happiness. For those who are well-informed about such matters and yet are ignorant what the heavenly bodies really are, and what are the most important causes of phenomena, feel quite as much fear as those who have no such special information—nay, perhaps even greater fear, when the curiosity exited by this additional knowledge cannot find a solution or understand the subordination of these phenomena to the highest causes. (Ep. Hdt. 79; trans. Hicks) Democritus’ stance also meant a reification of science. Science, as pursued by Democritus, could progress no further than its own hypotheses: it could never overcome itself, and never achieve self-consciousness (57). Epicurus, meanwhile, demonstrated how the ultimate forms of pleasure and tranquility could be sought in the contemplation

25 of the greatest menace to mankind, the starry heavens—or rather, by staring these in the face. His solution was not to seek out the ultimate causes of these phenomena, but simply not to care what they were. In Marxese, “Nothing that the ataraxy of individual selfconsciousness destroys can be eternal” (57)—nature above all. This does not spell the end of science, but only its first beginnings, its discovery of the universal, and its application of the Concept.31 The shift in accent between the two forms of atomism is indeed monumental. Whether it merits awarding to Epicurus the praise of being “the greatest Greek figure of enlightenment (der größte griechische Aufklärer)” (57) may be discussible. But there is no disputing Marx’s admiration for the man and his achievements. Marx’s dissertation as we have it is incomplete. He also left behind seven sizeable notebooks from the years leading up to 1841 all pertaining to the dissertation. These occasionally cast more light on his thoughts, especially on one area which needs to be further underscored: the ethical thrust of Epicureanism, which will help clarify what 31

Differently, McCarthy (1990) ch 1 (esp. 39-40); Stanley (1995); Shafer (2003); McIvor (2008) 409-10. One of the difficulties lies in making sense of a key text: “If abstract individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle, then indeed all true and real science is eliminated (aufgehoben), to the extent that (in so weit) individuality does not predominate in the nature of things themselves” (57). Epicurus affirms this form of self-consciousness, which does not entail that he undermines science. Science is eliminated to one extent—to the extent that Epicurus forfeits on, say, discovering the singular cause of a phenomenon. But science is by no means utterly negated (as the qualifier, in so weit aufgehoben, universally ignored, suggests). Quite the contrary, Epicurean physics rests on securing a sound scientific method (see Asmis 1984). Nor is it correct to claim for Epicurus, or for Marx’s version of him, that “tout est possible” (Gabaude 1970, 68). You cannot live forever; nothing can come from nothing; fish do not spring from the ground and cows do not grow in trees. Contrast DRN 1.159-73, etc. If Epicurus is not interested in “knowledge of nature in and for itself” but only in “the ataraxy of self-consciousness” (Marx (1975) 31), this is again not a sign of epistemic failure. Hegel would scarcely have endorsed “knowledge of nature in and for itself”; he would have endorsed, rather, a project in (the satisfactions of) selfconsciousness, which would have entailed a sublated and elevated (aufgehoben), viz., refined and preserved, form of science. There are further misconstruals of Marx. The Epicurean atom, qua principle, is not abstractly universal (Stanley, ibid., 141; 151); it is concretely individual and universal (Marx (1975) 56; 47; see above). “This is his greatest contradiction” (Marx (1975) 56) is not Marx’s accusation against Epicurus (pace several exegetes). It refers to a moment that precedes Epicurus’ recourse to a new method, which entails the “dissolution” of atomism as its final realization and its “conscious opposition to the universal” (58), i.e., the resolution of atomism as a praxis founded on the self-conscious principle that was guiding Epicureanism all along.

26 Marx may have meant when he thought of Epicurus as a great figure of enlightenment. Surely one of the traits he had in mind was a generous optimism towards the world— something that might appear counterintuitive, given Epicurus’ physical postulates and his indifference towards reality, death, contingency, and so on. But Marx is right. There is nothing indifferent in the claim that subjective appearances are real, therefore meaningful; that pleasure is the highest good; that life is the implied locus in which human happiness is to be sought; that the world is a place of possibilities, not of blank nihilism.32 Thus, as Marx states in his first notebook, “the principle of philosophy for Epicurus is to show the world and thought as conceivable, as possible” (H, 21; emphasis added). And this is, indeed, the general tenor of Epicurus’ philosophy. The trick, of course, that (at least in Marx’s view) the world is possible only to the extent that it is conceivable; thought and possibility go hand in hand: securing a place for the subject in the world is the ultimate goal of Epicureanism, even if that means rendering the world an ultimately insecure, contingent, and uncertain place. But underlying this wish for a secure place for the subject is a kind of universal desire that Marx feels he can see running through all the major philosophical systems in antiquity: a desire for Being (der Wunsch des Seins), which is “the oldest form of love”; but such a desire and love are in fact, Marx continues, a love for one’s self (die Selbstliebe), “the love of one’s particular Being” (H, 60). How does Epicureanism satisfy either one? It does, quite beautifully, if strangely, on Marx’s reconstruction—by assuring individuals that they will persist in a form of Being even when they exist no longer, after death: for they will, at that point, continue to exist in the form of imperishable, immortal atoms. Subjects are thus forever guaranteed a surrogate eternality in their very own 32

See Porter (2003).

27 physical make-up. The world is positively affirmed, and subjects have a secure place in it. The desire for immortality in any other form is a destructive illusion and is in fact a disparagement of life itself. Thus, in Epicureanism, “life is not sublated (aufgehoben) into some higher sphere, but is [merely] taken to another place” (H, 63). It is returned to itself in its elemental, physical nature. Grasp this and you will realize how in Epicureanism “the individual has been emptied of its extraneous determinations, has been determined as such in this celebration” (57). The “celebration” (Feier) to which Marx is alluding is the subject’s cry of joy at its release from anxiety. But isn’t it a contradiction to reinvest atoms with imperishability again? In point of fact there is no contradiction, because, as Marx reassures us (in a polemic against Plutarch’s banalization), everything transpires at the level of universality and consciousness; all that is “eternally fulfilled” are the requirements of their interaction, which guarantees that the universal (i.e., the atom) will assume “the form of individuality as consciousness,” and not empirical matter itself (H, 63). Following the same logic, divinity is not a separate kind of pleasure, but almost the formal condition of this subjective release, the subject’s own internal awareness of its own condition of joy and pleasure (Freude): “that which is divinized and celebrated here [in the Epicurean concept of the gods] is divinized individuality as such . . . in its ataraxia. What is worshiped is the non-existence of the god as god, but [god] as the existence of the joy of the individual”; this, as it were, worship of the divinity of being takes form of sensuous pleasure (voluptas) (57). Such is the “negative dialectic” (106) of atomism, which weaves a path between “a de-divinized nature” (eine entgötterte Natur) and “an unworlded divinity” (einer entweltete Gott) (87), and discovers, in the wreckage of its own mortal divisions and diremptions, “the vehicle of vitality” and the “ecstasy” of

28 life itself (106). For in the final analysis, Epicurus’ philosophy is a philosophy of life and an affirmative ethics of vitality. Materialism has been redeemed—as a vibrant phenomenology of sensuous spirit. Marx never returned to Epicurus, not because he had refuted him in his dissertation, as some wrongly imagine, but for other reasons that we can only speculate about. The most plausible explanation is that as Marx moved away from Hegel and more deeply into politics it was only natural that he should distance himself from Epicurus, whose political philosophy was premised on the negation of politics, and whose salvaging in the dissertation was merely a first stage in a more radical break with Hegel. NIETZSCHE Like Marx before him, and even more so than Hegel, Nietzsche found it productive to gauge an understanding of Epicurus by setting him against his atomistic predecessor Democritus, at least some of the time—the more so since Nietzsche had begun a dissertation of his own on Democritus during his university days, one that he never completed, nor did he ever intend it to fulfill any formal requirements.33 But Nietzsche’s views are quite unlike those of Hegel and Marx. For starters, he had a much stronger affinity for Democritus than for Epicurus, and he never fully relinquished this bias. His Democritea project, as he called it, was a multi-faceted research program on which he spent two to three years of intensive activity from mid-1867 to mid-1869, and again in 1870, though traces of it persist in his notebooks until 1877, shortly before he abandoned university life. Over the course of this time, Nietzsche matured as a scholar, a

33

See Porter (2000b). The literature on Nietzsche and Epicurus is even more sparse than that on Marx and Epicurus, but richer than in the case of Hegel. See Bornmann (1984); Vincenzo (1994); and Caygill (2006) (but see below).

29 philologist, and a philosopher. Epicurus was never the center of his attention during this period, but he was an important if occasional foil, as the following two notebook entries well illustrate: –

One must not overlook the idealist in Democritus. His motto remains, “the thing in itself is unknowable,” and that separates him from all realists for ever. But he believed in its existence.

–

The deliverances of the senses, according to Epicurus, give us the truth itself. Cf., e.g., De fin. 1.19 [sic; read: “1.64”]. This wasn’t the view of Democritus. Epicurus passed from atomism to realism. According to Democritus we have absolutely no knowledge of truth. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 7.135 [sic; read: “7.135 + 7.136”]: “Democritus demolishes what appears to the senses and says that none of them appears as it truly is, but only as it is thought to be. The truth concerning what exists is that there are atoms and void—‘for we do not know how each thing is or isn’t in reality.’” (Nietzsche 1933-42, 3:328; 1867-68; emphasis added. Nietzsche gives the Sextus passage in Greek)

The resemblances to Marx are striking; both confront the exact same issues. And both are happy to transpose the disagreements between the two ancient atomists in terms of a modern contrast between idealism and realism, understood in a typically German and speculative way.34 And yet, for all these similarities, their judgments come out exactly reversed. On Marx’s reading, Epicurus is the idealist (with his heady endorsement of self-

34

Compare Hegel’s assessment of atomism as idealist in either its early (Lectures, 18:358) or late forms (see above).

30 conscious reflection) and Democritus the realist (driven as he is to empiricism out of his search for an ultimate reality that forever eludes his grasp). What is more, Nietzsche plainly favors the earlier atomist, whom he finds by far the more attractive figure in his complexly baffled stance towards reality. The simpler, coarser realism of his descendent who is readily satisfied with sensuous immediacy holds few attractions for Nietzsche at this early date, and this stance will more or less dictate his responses to Epicurus over the next two decades. As Nietzsche’s thinking evolved, Epicurus increasingly came to the fore as a kind of permanent touchstone and an emblem of historical depth, with a far greater frequency than even Democritus—not the Epicurus who invented the swerve (the swerve is conspicuously absent in Nietzsche’s writings), but the philosopher whose views hold a variety of implications for ethics and for life. And though Epicurus is nowhere as frequent in Nietzsche’s repertoire of ancient names as Socrates or Plato, he is surprisingly common, and probably comes out somewhere near the top of the list. In a word, Epicurus is a frequent, almost obsessive presence in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings after 1872, his name occurring well over 150 times in hundreds of passages, twice as often as Democritus’. What is most surprising in Nietzsche’s recourse to Epicurus after The Birth of Tragedy, however, is not the abundance of mentions that Epicurus earns, but the variety of hues in which he appears. Nietzsche can adore him in places and he can vilify him in others. His virtues and vices are sometimes identical, and sometimes discretely different. One might conclude that Nietzsche is simply being inconsistent in his views of this Greek thinker. A better solution to the problem is to acknowledge that there is no one Epicurus in Nietzsche’s thinking. He is more like a

31 figure of thought and a literary device, capable of taking on different colors according to the requirements of the moment. And, unlike the Hegelians, who treated Epicurus as a passing moment in the forward march of Spirit, Nietzsche reads Epicurus into a much wider cultural and historical landscape, where he is made to stand, symbolically, for any number of forces, tendencies, and potentials within the complex psyche of evolving Western culture. The end result is a fascinating kaleidoscopic portrait, one that is doubtless distortive in its details but true of Epicurus’ various receptions up through the nineteenth century. The contrast with Marx or Hegel could not be any more striking. This is also why Nietzsche can claim with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole that Epicurus has lived on “eternally” and anonymously: “Eternal Epicurus”. — Epicurus has been alive at all times and is living now, unknown to those who have called and call themselves Epicureans, and enjoying no reputation among philosophers. He has, moreover, himself forgotten his own name: it was the heaviest pack he ever threw off. (Human, All Too Human, 2.2:227; 1880; trans. Hollingdale) No such creature existed in the Hegelian tradition, which left Epicurus behind in the dust, a casualty of history and of progress. For Nietzsche, Epicurus is crucially and permanently alive. Nietzsche’s aphorism points to Epicurus’ unending capacity to signify, and it does so by playing off of two conceits, that of the indestructibility of atoms, and the Epicurean saying, “Live unnoticed” (lathe biōsas)—only now the life in question is one of an afterlife and an anonymous dispersal: Epicurus lives on as a spiritual essence and a dispersed presence, very like atoms whirling through the void, whether amongst those who would inherit his mantle (while forgetting who Epicurus was) or amongst

32 those who have adopted his ways unbeknownst to themselves.35 All of Nietzsche’s mentions of Epicurus attest to the validity of this claim. His reading of Epicurus is a reading of this reception, which is to say of the ways in which Epicurus successfully managed to insinuate himself into his posterity and into Nietzsche’s own historical present. Nietzsche felt that he had a unique insight into Epicurus, one that was partly grounded in his training as a classicist and partly rooted in a peculiar affinity with the philosopher—or perhaps we should say, in an insight that arose from what Nietzsche learned (or else feigned) to cultivate as an affinity, whether for reasons of convenience or utility (more on this in a moment). Thus we read in The Gay Science from 1882: Epicurus. —Yes, I am proud to experience Epicurus’ character in a way unlike perhaps anyone else and to enjoy, in everything I hear or read of him, the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity: I see his eyes gaze at a wide whitish sea, across shoreline rocks bathed in the sun, as large and small creatures play in its light, secure and calm like the light and his eye itself. Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such happiness—the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest. (The Gay Science, 1:45; trans. J. Nauckhoff)

35

Cf. 15[59]; 1881 on the way in which ancient philosophical life practices have quietly filtered into the habits of later culture, foremost among them Epicureanism.

33 This is an extraordinary claim, coming from the mouth of someone who until recently had modeled his scholarship and much of his thought on Democritus, and had defended him against the outrages of Epicurus.36 Evidently, somewhere along the line Nietzsche found it essential, or useful, to reappraise Epicurus. We can only speculate about the reasons for this volte face, though several spring to mind. Epicurus’ position in world history must have appeared to be more interesting and discussable than that of Democritus. A Hellenistic philosopher basking in the warm glow of the decline of Greece and facing forward towards the advent of modernity, pitched rather tantalizingly on the edges between religion, philosophy, and science, Epicurus was a pivotal figure (cf. 33[9]; 1878). Being a transitional figure, Epicurus was also rather chameleon like, or at least he could be made to seem so, depending upon how the light reflected off his portrait. Simultaneously turned towards the world and away from it, a hedonist and an ascetic, an atomist and a moralist, a combatant of godly superstitions and a fashioner of superhuman gods of his own, Epicurus could be made out to be, at different turns, a pessimist, an optimist, a skeptic, an indifferentist, and a believer, a forerunner of contemporary science or a harbinger of Christianity, naïve or calculating, Apollonian or Dionysian, a figure for classical Greek cheerfulness and thus healthy, heroic, and idyllic (“one of the greatest of men”), or a symptom of degraded decadence.37 For the most part, however, Epicurus proved to be some unstable combination of these features in Nietzsche’s writings, rarely just one or the other, as the passage from The Gay Science illustrates. There, the sunny

36 37

See, e.g., Nietzsche’s letter to Rohde, 9 December 1868. Caygill (1994) 47 calls these shifts “bewildering.”

34 superficiality of Epicureanism is, like Democritus’ empiricism according to Marx, the sign of an urgent need rather than a stable state. It is a voluptas that is lined with abyssal depths of darkness and despair: pleasure and pain map out the full range of the Epicurean sensorium in equal measure. In many ways, Epicurus in passages like this (and there are several of its kind) has taken over the role of Apollonian appearances in The Birth of Tragedy, whose function there was to screen the self from a deeper-lying metaphysical truth, the ultimate consequences of which could be fatal. Nietzsche’s reading of this aspect of Epicurus and Epicureanism, portrayed as a kind of tragic cheerfulness towards reality, occasions some of his most deeply moving passages on Epicurus—perhaps because they are finally not about Epicurus at all. Another text, this time from a notebook from 1885, is a good example, as it develops the same thought a little further: There is a misunderstanding of cheerfulness, which cannot be eliminated: but whoever shares it should ultimately be satisfied with it. — Those of us who take refuge in happiness —: we who need every kind of south and boundless sunshine and need to take a place on the street where life waltzes by like a drunken masquerade, as something that takes away your senses and makes you mad; we, who precisely demand of happiness that it should “take away our senses”: doesn’t it appear that we have a knowledge that we fear? With which we do not want to be alone? A knowledge whose pressure causes us to tremble, whose whispering makes us grow pale? This stubborn aversion to tragic performances, this harsh stuffing of the ears before every source of

35 suffering, this bold, derisive superficiality, this willful Epicureanism of the heart, which wants to have nothing warm and whole and worships the mask as its ultimate divinity and savior: this scorn for the melancholic of taste, in whom we always suspect a lack of depth, isn’t this all merely a hatred of life? It seems that we know ourselves as all too fragile, perhaps as broken and beyond healing already; it appears that we fear this hand of life, that it must break us, and so we take refuge in its appearances, in its falsehood, its superficiality and dappled deceptiveness; it appears that we are cheerful, because we are tremendously sad. We are serious, we know the abyss; for this reason we defend ourselves against all manner of seriousness. (KSA 12:279, 2[33]; 1885) The beauty of passages like these is the depth of feeling they evoke. Epicureanism is clearly being made to stand for a whole complex of emotions, some of them historically verifiable in the philosophy of the atomist, others freely generalized so as to take in a larger body of individuals whom Nietzsche stylizes as latter-day Epicureans— “Epicureans of the heart”—among whom, one is tempted to say, Nietzsche numbers himself. Or does he? Identifications are risky and fluid attractions in Nietzsche’s writings—fleeting, mask-like, uncertain, and functioning as virtual lures and traps for a reader. Nevertheless, the notion that serenity is wrung from the depths of suffering is more or less a constant in Nietzsche’s writings from The Birth of Tragedy into his final works. Epicureanism can signal either this deeper form of wisdom or its aversion.

36 Wherever the latter occurs, wherever a subject remains obtuse to her own suffering, Nietzsche can be a stern critic of Epicurus or Epicureanism, which he finds too readily “accepts suffering” and therefore “resists everything sad and profound” (Beyond Good and Evil 270). In such cases, Epicureans, because they cannot truly suffer, can experience no orders of difference in the world, no pathos of difference, no distinctions of rank, and no “spiritual arrogance” (ibid.); they are therefore morally confused (7[129], 1883). This leveling of affections, this equanimity of the passions, and resulting spiritual indifference naturally inclines Epicureanism towards a certain democratization of the soul, a weakening of the instincts, a turn towards goodness and sociability (Gemütlichkeit), decadence, the satisfactions of the earthly paradise (the garden), a lassitude and quiescence of the will, and the absence of any urgency in life, any sense of a “task” or project worth undertaking (34[108]; 1885; 11[365]; 1887). The very “concept of the future” is lacking in Epicureanism, Nietzsche observes. In its place, the view forward extends as though over a flat plane. There are “no wishes, not even any velleities, no desires to make plans, no desire for change” (16[44]; 1888; cf. Human, All Too Human, 2:295; 1880). For the Epicurean, whom Nietzsche facetiously ventriloquizes in this same passage, “there are really no surprises in life; the reason for this is because I do not like to busy myself with what might be possible. The proof is how much I live in thought . . . An accident [Zufall] brought this to my awareness [Bewußtsein] a couple of days ago” (ibid.). Nietzsche is parodying the intellectualism and the ineffectuality of Epicurus’ Lebensphilophie here, which he elsewhere correctly notes is staked not on discovering truth, but on cultivating “the art of living” (9[57]; 1887). He is also parodying the role of chance and contingency (Zufall) in Epicurus’ philosophy, and the Sage’s capacity to

37 conform to the hazards of the unknown on a day-to-day basis with complete nonchalance. Nietzsche’s ruthless depiction of the Epicurean attitude here could not be any more unlike Marx’s if he tried (though the convergences are strictly accidental, so to speak—or else uncannily inevitable).38 As if in a point for point rebuttal, Nietzsche is turning upside down every positive item in Marx’s reading of Epicurus, from his applauding of contingency to that of self-consciousness to the primacy of thought and the virtues of possibility (“the principle of philosophy for Epicurus,” Marx had written, “is to show the world and thought as conceivable, as possible”).39 Both may concur in the fact of Epicurus’ “boundless nonchalance” (the phrase is Marx’s). But their assessments are strikingly different. Nietzsche’s assessments can, however, be self-discrepant, as we have seen. Though Epicurus’s lifestyle can in places be described as a form of asceticism (selfcontrol [The Gay Science, 375; 3[53]; 1880], “a life full of pain and renunciations” [38[1]; 1878], and so on), elsewhere the comparison breaks down: “ascetics require an enormous feeling of power” to carry out their self-abnegations and their denials of the world (4[204]; 1880). But not so the Epicureans: “they find happiness in . . . fearlessness before gods and nature; their happiness is negative (as is pleasure, according to Epicurus),” while their feelings are “neutral and weak,” not powerful (ibid.). Ascetics are creatures whom Nietzsche normally both fears and loathes (as a glance at the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals will confirm). Epicureans, under the present description, are too weakly to register even a single hit on Nietzsche’s “dynamometer.” They are

38

It is unlikely that Nietzsche knew of Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus, which appeared in print for the first time in 1902. 39 Cf. 19[114]; 1872: “The Epicureans tarnished the rigorous principles of Democritus with mushy ideas (possibilities).”

38 more like Buddhists than anything else, just as their modern avatars are “a sort of European Chinadom” (25[222]; 1884; cf. Beyond Good and Evil 61). Schopenhauer is one more latter-day Epicurean and European Buddhist: he is the extrapolation of the ancient philosophy of quiescence in its modern, nihilistic form, and the exponent of “the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose deepest sleep, in short absence of suffering” (On the Genealogy of Morals 3:6; 3:17; trans. Kaufmann). Nietzsche here is in fact quoting from Schopenhauer, who himself had linked Epicurus’ highest form of pleasure to the stilling of the Will’s desires in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (vol. 1, Book 3, §38). Drawn up in this light, Epicurus and his allies are beginning to look like a sorry lot indeed. But worse is to come. Perhaps Nietzsche’s deepest insult to Epicureanism is his assimilation of the philosophy to Christianity. Democritus could not be accommodated to Christianity (cf. 26[3]; 1884; 36[11]; 1885), unlike Epicurus, who could. The reason was quite simple: in a marked departure from earlier atomism, Epicurus condoned religiosity. Even as he vanquished ancient superstitions and paved the way for modern science (Dawn 1:72 (1881); The Gay Science 375), he nevertheless erected a defense of conventional divinities and religious piety based on his physical and ethical principles. This did entail a bold reconception of the gods—as remote, eternally cheerful, immense in size, beautiful, quasi-material, quasi-immaterial, possibly consisting of no more than the streaming of eidōla, or simulacra, or even less—of mere human preconceptions of divinity. Nietzsche’s response to Epicurus’ views on religion is mixed. On the one hand, he can praise the Epicurean gods as the pinnacle of the Greek creative achievement, the finest product of that “artists’ nation” (Künstlervolk), not least because they embody “the

39 triumph of existence and an abundance of vitality (Lebensgefühl)” (Die Geburt des tragischen Gedanken, 2 = “The Dionysian Worldview,” 2; 1870; cf. 16[8]; 1881). At his most enthusiastic, Nietzsche will even go so far as to identify the Epicurean gods with his own conceptual gods, the Overman (7[21]; 1883; 16[85]; 1883; 35[73]; 1885)40 and Dionysus (35[73]; 1885)—though at other moments he will just as quickly deny them this distinction (40[35]; 1885; cf. 25[95]; 1884).41 But while Epicurus is in places acknowledged to have combatted Christianity in its latent or preexisting forms (The Antichrist, 58; 16[15]; 1888), elsewhere and for the most part he is said to be uniquely compatible with Christianity and consequently a decadent spirit, no better than any other modern or Romantic (“Epicureanism in Christianity,” 14[87]; 1888; cf. 14[3]; 1883; Antichrist, 30: Epicurus “the typical decadent,” espousing a “religion of love”; Beyond Good and Evil, 61; Nietzsche contra Wagner, We Antipodes; 1889; 14[141]; 1888; Gay Science 370).42 To say that Nietzsche’s view of Epicurus is multi-faceted would be an understatement. Nietzsche thinks both with and against Epicurus in his own inimitable fashion, while letting his writings and voicings run through every imaginable register and scale in the process. His portrait of Epicurus is about as similar to those by Marx and Hegel as a Jackson Pollock is similar to a Rembrandt. Unlike the Hegelians before him, Nietzsche fastens on to no one feature of Epicurus’ thought in order to grasp it, be this “interruption,” the swerve, or the rupture that Epicurus achieved in his own system. This is not only because Nietzsche’s Epicurus is not primarily interested in physics but only in

40

The first hint of this comes in The Birth of Tragedy §1; see Porter (2000a) 180 n. 10. The comparison could easily be an analogy without any real substance to it. 42 The basic thesis of Caygill (2006) that Epicurus “exceeds” Dionysianism and Christianity rests on evidence. 41

40 ethics, but also and primarily because his Epicurus is simply not one. Rather, he is a figure for cultural variety, and a symptom of cultural change. Had Nietzsche known anything about the Hegelians’ readings of Epicurus, he would doubtless have incorporated them into his analysis. But he did not, and so we can only speak of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche on Epicurus as one of the many happy coincidences of nineteenthcentury thought.43

43

A version of this essay was presented at the Philosophy Department at Emory University in February 2011. My thanks to the audience there for helpful feedback.

41

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