To achieve a state of being untroubled, you only need to remember four things:
God is not to be feared.
Death is not to be worried about.
What’s good is easily got.
What’s bad is easily endured.
God is not to be feared.
People in the ancient world put a lot of effort into keeping the gods happy. For many of them this was a source of anxiety. There was an ever-present and very real (perception of) threat of divine punishment. The solution was constant appeasement. Conduct the right rituals, make the appropriate sacrifices, and the gods will be pleased and will look on you kindly. This was the orthodox view.
But for Epicurus, a fear of the gods was an archetypal ‘non-natural’ or empty or imaginary desire. Any atheist will find this easy to understand: how can you fear or appease the gods when they don’t exist?! There is literally no object of your desire.
Even if you are not an atheist, though, Epicurus wants to persuade you that your efforts to please or placate the gods are wasted. To do this, he constructs the first philosophical formulation of what has come to be known as ‘the problem of evil’.
The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling belief in a good and powerful god (or God) with the terrible evil and suffering and injustice that exists in the world. If God is both good and powerful, why would God allow so many bad things to happen? Does God not care? In which case God is not good. Is God not able to prevent bad things happening to good people? In which case God is not powerful. And if God is neither good nor powerful, then why call it God?
This problem remains a serious philosophical challenge to religious belief. It is often, though not always, deployed as an argument for atheism. It can be argued that there is a logical contradiction between the three claims: that God is good, that God is powerful, and that evil exists. If there is a logical contradiction there, then one of those propositions must be rejected; they cannot all three be true at the same time. And given that God’s goodness and power are understood to be essential elements of monotheism, surrendering either of those claims will lead to a denial of that monotheistic God. The only remaining option, for theism, is to deny that evil exists. This is a stretch of common and moral sense for most people, which leaves atheism as the most natural solution to the problem.
Interestingly, however, Epicurus does not use this as an argument for atheism. Epicurus does not argue that the gods don’t exist; Epicurus argues that the gods are indifferent to human affairs and that they are right and good to be so indifferent.
The Greek pantheon of gods were clearly a bit different from our modern monotheisms. Their pagan gods were anthropomorphic in a way that captured the bad parts of humanity as well as the good. As a result there is less of a problem with denying the gods’ goodness or unlimited power: the Ancient Greek gods were not always good and they were not omnipotent like the monotheistic God. Because of this, atheism is not necessarily the natural conclusion to the problem of evil when you are dealing with pagan polytheism.
Instead, Epicurus used the problem of evil to argue that the gods simply did not care very much about human beings and their affairs. He encouraged you to look around and see how well good or bad fortune followed from pious observance of religious ritual. Fairly obviously, the correlation is not particularly strong. Good things happen to impious people just as often as bad things happen to pious people. Why would the gods let this happen, if they really cared about our piety? The only sensible answer is that they do not care about us and our piety at all.
In truth, the gods are immortal and perfect, and because of this they must be perfectly wise. In being perfectly wise, they must be perfectly happy. But if they are perfectly happy, then why on earth would they trouble themselves with our affairs? How much worry we would cause them!
Pleasing the gods is the archetypally empty desire: you cannot please the gods because they are already perfectly pleased. And therefore you can forget about that ever-present source of anxiety: the fear of the gods.
Death is not to be worried about
Another ever-present fear for many people is the fear of death. People do not want to die; people want to live forever. But, as we have seen, the desire for immortality is another archetypal ‘non-natural’ or empty or imaginary desire. There is no chance of that desire being fulfilled because no one lives forever. To maintain this desire, even when you know it cannot be satisfied, is to commit yourself to a kind of static displeasure. This will make it very difficult to be ‘untroubled’.
Epicureans are famous for their statements and arguments against the badness of death. Epicurus states that death is ‘nothing to us’. His argument for this follows directly from his metaphysics and epistemology.
If the only things we can know or experience are physical reality perceived through our senses, then what can death mean to us? How can death affect us? How can death have any reality for us? At death, we cease to exist; we cease to experience; our physical bodies cease transporting the sense-data to our brains. We are left with nothing, not even ourselves. When we are dead, we are not there to know about it. So, as Epicurus says, ‘when death is, we are not’.
The only time we can perceive anything is whilst we are alive. But in being alive, in perceiving, you cannot be in a state of death. That lasts as long (and only as long) as you are alive. Literally no one experiences death. So, as Epicurus says, ‘when we are, death is not’.
When we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not. So there is no time when ‘we’ and ‘death’ ‘are’ at the same time. And, therefore, death is nothing to us.
This argument is intended to undermine the fear of death as such. What might be left is the fear not of death but of dying. There are two parts to dying, one might think: the suffering involved in the process, because we imagine it might be painful to experience if we are conscious at the time, and also the process of entering into the state of death, which involves a sense of losing all that we have. This fear of dying can be countered in two ways by Epicureans: firstly by countering the fear of the suffering involved in dying, which will be dealt with in the ‘what’s bad is easily endured’ part of the tetrapharmakos that is coming later; secondly by countering the fear of losing something by dying. It takes a later Epicurean, a Roman philosopher called Lucretius, to offer an argument against that particular feature of the badness of death.
Lucretius offers a ‘symmetry’ argument. It is very intuitive. Imagine the vast expanse of time before you existed. It’s vast, expansive, and totally devoid of you. Does it trouble you that you didn’t exist for all this time? Presumably not.
But cast your mind forward and consider the vast expanse of time in the future, after you have died. This, too, is vast, expansive, and totally devoid of you. Should that trouble you any more than the vast expansive absence of you in the past? Why should it? It didn’t bother you then, why should it bother you thence?
For Epicureans, most of our intuitions about the badness of death rely on a notion that we are still around to know about it. But that’s to misunderstand what death is. Death is what happens when you are no longer around to know about anything; death is what happens when you no longer exist. And therefore there can be no badness for us in being dead, because we are not there to experience it!
And because death literally cannot affect us (because we don’t exist whenever it does), death is not to be worried about.
What’s good is easily got
If you limit your desires to only the ‘natural necessary’, as the Epicureans suggest, then you will find that the good things in life are pretty easy to get. This is especially true for those of us in the developed world. Clean drinking water comes out of the tap; ample food supplies are available in your nearest supermarket; every house is habitable to a degree far beyond any previous time in human history. We have never had it so easy. Economic structures and inequalities can make this far harder than it needs to be, but nonetheless the vast majority of us are in a position to live very comfortably so long as we limit ourselves to a minimalistic standard of living.
The problem we have is that our understanding of ‘the basics’ is quite relative. Many things that were once considered outrageously luxurious are now understood to be among the bare necessities. Electric light, for example, or a shower with hot water. These things did not always exist; we do not need them. They are luxuries that we can afford to do without. And that’s not to mention the more obvious examples of the modern world: television, phones, the internet, washing machines, cars, holidays, etc., etc. These are relatively recent additions to human existence. For the longest time before, we got along fine without them.
So when we read Epicurus saying ‘what’s good is easily got’, let’s remember that he was speaking at a time when it was far harder to get the actual bare necessities. And he still said that what’s good is easily got. It’s a lot easier now! We really have no excuse.
This can include social and non-material goods too. Good conversations with friends, sharing a joke, spending time with your family, being in nature, contemplating art. These things cost nothing, or very little. They are goods that are easily got.
What’s bad is easily endured
The final obstacle to an untroubled life is the threat of pain and suffering. We all know that these things are inevitable; none of us can avoid them. To desire a life completely devoid of pain and suffering would be a ‘non-natural’ or empty or imaginary desire, because such a thing cannot exist. We need to have some way to cope with the suffering that we will inevitably face. Epicurus offers us a comforting, if a little hard-edged, thought:
Suffering tends to be either long-lasting and mild, or short-lasting and intense. ‘Si gravis brevis, si longus levis’, as the later Latin motto goes: if grave, brief; if long, light. If suffering is long-lasting and mild then, being mild, it will be easy to endure, especially if you are well-trained in your Epicurean ways. Alternatively, if suffering is short-lasting and intense, then you can take comfort in the fact that it will be over soon. This is either because the intensity of the suffering will abate, as acute pains tend to do. Or else, if the intense pain is an indication of something really going wrong, you will be relieved soon by your death! And as we’ve already seen, death is nothing to us and not something to worry about.
The epitome of this happily-enduring attitude is seen in Epicurus himself, as he writes to a friend from his death bed. He writes on what he describes as the happiest day of his life, notes that he is suffering intense pains, but takes comfort in the memory of their pleasant conversations. His well-trained happy attitude outweighs any temporary pain. What’s bad is easily endured.
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