Orpheus and Eurydice seeking to flee the Underworld.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In 1970, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a short paper entitled Death, in which he asked: If death is the permanent end of our existence, is it an evil?
There are, at least to the non-believer, only two possible answers to this question: either death is an evil because it deprives us of life, or it is a mere blank because there is no one left to suffer this deprivation.
Thus, if death is an evil, this is not in virtue of any unpleasant attribute that it has (such as eternal torment), but only in virtue of what it deprives us of, namely, life. For Nagel, the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements.
The longer we live, the more we ‘accumulate’ life. In contrast, death cannot be accumulated—it is not, as Nagel puts it, ‘an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust’. Most people would not regard the infinitely long period before they were born, or the temporary suspension of life, as an evil. Therefore, if death is an evil, this is not because it involves a more or less lengthy period of non-existence, but because it deprives us of life.
Nagel’s Straw Men
Nagel raises three objections to this view, but only so as to later overturn them:
It is doubtful whether anything can be an evil unless it causes pain or displeasure.
In the case of death, there is no subject left to suffer an evil. So long as we live, we have not yet died; and as soon as we are dead, we are no longer alive. So there seems to be no time at which the evil of death might occur. (This is a formulation of the ancient ‘no subject of harm’ argument.)
If we do not regard the infinitely long period before we were born as an evil, then why should we regard the period after we are dead any differently? (This is a formulation of the ancient ‘symmetry’ argument.)
All three of these ‘objections’—really, arguments for why we should not fear death—were made already by Epicurus (d. 270 BCE). Nagel addresses them in toto by arguing that the good or evil that befalls us depends on our history and possibilities rather than our momentary state, such that an evil can befall us even if we are no longer here to experience it. For instance, if an intelligent person suffers a brain injury that reduces his mental condition to that of a contented infant, this should be regarded as a serious evil even if the person himself (in his current state) is oblivious to his fate.
In essence, if the three objections are invalid, it is because they ignore the direction of time—that is, the shape of a human life. Even though we do not materially survive our death, we can still suffer evil; and even though we do not exist in the time before our birth and in the time after our death, the time after our death is time of which we have been deprived, time in which we could have continued to enjoy the good of living.
The Problem for Nagel
The question remains as to whether the non-realisation of further life is an absolute evil or whether this depends on what can naturally be hoped for: the death of John Keats at 24 is commonly regarded as tragic, but that of Leo Tolstoy at 82 is not (even though Tolstoy died in a freezing cold train station while running away from his wife). ‘The trouble,’ says Nagel, ‘is that life familiarises us with the goods of which death deprives us … Death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive goods.’
Notice that, although Nagel’s conclusion is impeccably arrived at, it rests on an initial assumption which the casual reader may have taken for granted, namely, that ‘the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements’. We might agree or disagree, but Nagel has not proved this. Perhaps it is too fundamental to require proof—or to be provable.
Bernard Williams and the Shape of a Human Life
Three years later (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams took up the problem where Nagel had left off. If life is intrinsically valuable, does it follow that more is always better? Williams concluded, apparently contra Nagel, that immortality would not be desirable. What gives us reason to go on living, he argued, is not bare existence, but our desires, attachments, and projects—which must necessarily assume the shape of a human life.
Yet Nagel’s ‘abrupt cancellation’ may not be quite so abrupt. Our bodies, memories, characters, desires, and projects are continually changing. The child becomes the adolescent, the adolescent the adult, and the adult someone whom the child could scarcely have imagined. By the time death arrives, we have already died several times. Perhaps this is why, consciously at least, we are not more frightened of it: biological death is less an abrupt cancellation than the last in a series of deaths.
Death Kills Us Twice
But although biological death may be the last in a series, it is still the last. If we grant Nagel his premise, it is an evil insofar as it deprives us of indefinitely extensive goods.
No surprise, given the sheer horror of this conclusion, that theologians down the ages have sought to blunt it. But it gets worse, much worse. Death not only deprives us of life, but also compels us to spend the very life that it deprives us of in the mostly unconscious fear of this deprivation. As I have argued, much of our anxiety and the baggage that comes with it stems from our fear of death. Thus, death not only cuts us short, but prevents us from making the most of whatever it leaves us.
To be afraid of death, therefore, is to die twice—and never to live.
Monasteries Are Dying: Time to Bring Them Back in Some New Form?
Life in Epicurus’ Garden.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The monastic life, or monastic alternative, has become so unfashionable that most people no longer consider the possibility; but there is, at least to me, something profoundly appealing about living a life of learning and contemplation, sharing a palace in a remote beauty spot with a group of quiet, thoughtful people, and maybe even making my own honey, cheese, and wine.
More broadly, the monastery offers something that modern society is crying out for: a third way of living that is neither the disintegrating family nor social isolation.
Of course, the monastic life presupposes belief in God, or a particular idea of God, which is a large part of why it has become so unpopular. But many non-Christian religions also have a monastic tradition (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism…), making it possible to abstract the idea of monasticism from the idea of Christianity. Indeed, Christian monasticism is itself rooted in pre-Christian models of communal living for a higher purpose, such as Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’ Garden.
Pythagoras
It all began with Pythagoras.
Upon the advice of Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras travelled to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests. At the age of forty, in around 530 BCE, he established a religious community in Croton, Southern Italy, which admitted both women and men. Those in the community’s inner circle adhered to a strict set of rules, forsaking personal belongings, adopting a vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence. The Pythagoreans believed that ‘all is number’, and devoted themselves to philosophy, mathematics, and music.
Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus
Some 150 years later, in 387 BCE, Plato established a school (officially a thiasos, or religious confraternity) of mathematics and philosophy in a sacred garden called ‘Academia’ after the legendary Attic hero Akademos. Those with the means took up residence in neighbouring houses, and those without resided with others. The school became known as the Academy, and Plato remained its head or scholarch until his death in 348.
Aristotle spent twenty years at Plato’s Academy. When he returned to Athens, he founded the Lyceum, where he gathered Europe’s first great library and set up its first zoo and botanical garden.
Some thirty years later, Epicurus founded the Garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the life of contemplation is not only the highest but the happiest of all possible lives. In the Summa Theologiae (1485), St Thomas Aquinas reprises Aristotle, supplying nine reasons for the absolute superiority of the contemplative life:
It is according to that which is proper in man, namely the intellect.
It is according to the proper objects of the intellect.
It is according to higher, eternal things, transcending the contingent here and now.
It consists in leisure and rest.
It is more continuous.
It is more self-sufficient.
It is more delightful (‘Martha was troubled, but Mary feasted’).
It is loved more for its own sake, rather than for the sake of something else.
It, or its fruits, can never be taken from us.
For the ninth reason, Aquinas leans on Luke’s story of Jesus at the home of Martha and Mary. Martha busied herself playing the perfect hostess while Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet, drinking in his wisdom. Vexed by her sister’s inactivity, Martha asked Jesus to tell Mary to help her.
But Jesus replied:
Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
Plato’s Academy survived in one form or other for some nine hundred years (about as long as the University of Oxford has been around) before being closed down by the Christian emperor Justinian in 529 CE, a date that is often cited for the end of classical antiquity.
The Rise of Christian Monasticism
St Paul of Thebes (d. 342) is commonly regarded as the first Christian hermit. He fled into the desert of Egypt during the persecution of Decius and Valerianus, and lived for almost a century in a cave.
In the early period, many Christians fled into the wilderness to escape persecution or draw closer to God. In this, they followed the example of Old Testament prophets such as Elijah and John the Baptist, and of Jesus himself, who fasted for forty days in the Judaean Desert while being tempted by the devil.
As a young man, Anthony spent fifteen years in a tomb, resisting the temptations and torments of the devil. After that, he spent twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert before other hermits coaxed him out to instruct and organise them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’. The hermits still lived separately, but now came together on Sundays to worship and break bread.
But the decisive development came in around 323, when St Pachomius the Great brought some hermits together at Tabennisi in Upper Egypt, thereby creating the first coenobitic (Greek, koinos bios, ‘common life’) monastery. The hermits, or monks, each had their own hut or room, but shared a common space for eating, working, and praying, under the authority of an abbot or abbess (Aramaic, abba, ‘father’).
Pachomius founded several communities of this sort, including some for women, opening up the spiritual life to those who lacked the physical or mental constitution to thrive or survive in the desert.
Ora et Labora
After Constantine decriminalised Christianity in 313, it rose into the dominant religion, with violent persecution, now in short supply, ceding to ascetic deprivation as a mode of martyrdom.
In the West, Christian monasticism began by imitating the Egyptian model. Its defining form emerged with St Benedict of Nursia (d. 543/7), who is regarded as the father of Western monasticism.
Benedict lived for many years as a hermit in a cave at Subiaco, outside of Rome. He became abbot of a nearby monastery but proved unpopular with the monks, who may have tried to poison him! Later, he founded several monasteries in the region, including the great monastery of Monte Cassino.
The moderate Rule of St Benedict, with its almost equal emphasis on prayer and work (ora et labora), set the pattern for monastic rules across Europe, and, after 1,500 years, remains the most commonly adopted monastic rule.
Reform and Renewal
Early monasteries only had around a dozen members each. When a monastery grew, members were sent out to found a new monastery. But in later times, some monasteries became very large, landed, and lax.
In 1098, a group of Benedictine monks founded Cîteaux Abbey near Dijon, with the aim of returning to the literal observance of the Rule of St Benedict.
But, as is the way, many Cistercian monasteries progressively relaxed their rules. In the seventeenth century, another reform movement took hold at the Abbey of la Trappe in Normandy, giving rise to the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, or Trappists.
More austere still is the Carthusian Order, founded in 1084 by St Bruno of Cologne. Unlike the Cistercians and Trappists, the Carthusians are not a branch of the Benedictines but follow their own Rule, called the Statutes. Each charterhouse encloses a ‘community of hermits’, with each monk working, sleeping, eating, and praying in his or her own cell—much like the first monks in Egypt.
From Contemplation to Action
At the other end of the spectrum are the active orders, which seek to reach out rather than remain remote and cloistered. Because they do not aim at self-sufficiency, they usually live off the generosity of others, making them so-called mendicant (‘begging’) orders. Adherents of mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans (Greyfriars) and Dominicans (Blackfriars, Jacobins), and, later, the Jesuits, are called friars (Latin, frater, ‘brother’) rather than monks. Their involvement in education and charitable causes demonstrates that withdrawal from ordinary life need not amount to withdrawal from the world.
The Monastic Legacy
Aside from the more religious and spiritual dimensions, monasticism has served a number of important social functions.
After the fall of Rome, the monasteries helped to preserve invaluable texts, and education and culture more generally. They also became important patrons of art, music, and architecture. To this day, university life is modelled on the monastic ideal, with quadrangles and cloisters, chapels and gardens, dormitory residences, a common table, and elaborate robes and rituals.
In feudal societies, the monasteries provided a refuge from war, famine, and disease, and served as outlets for the younger sons of noble families, celibates, and other spares and misfits. In their drive for self-subsistence, they contributed in no small measure to the development of agriculture and manufacturing, for example, turning viticulture and winemaking into high arts. Only in modern times did the welfare state supersede them in the provision of services such as health and education.
Movements such as the Protestant Reformation, the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War led to the dissolution and destruction of many monasteries.
But the decline of the monastery involved more than the disappearance of a religious institution. It also meant the disappearance of one of the few socially sanctioned alternatives to marriage, family life, and the pursuit of wealth and status.
Modern society offers enormous freedom in how we live, but surprisingly few models for how we might live together. For most adults, the default remains the couple or nuclear family in a private home. Those who do not marry or partner up are increasingly likely to live alone. We have gained independence, but often at the price of community.
The monastery offered another possibility: solitude without isolation, community without marriage, meaningful work without careerism, and contemplation without compromise. The cloister, garden, library, common table, daily rhythm, and surrounding silence answer to needs that did not disappear with the decline of religious belief.
Monasticism Today
Western monasticism is in long-term decline, with growth in Asia and Africa unable to offset reductions elsewhere. I visited a monastery in Spain where the few remaining monks were worried that they would not have enough young men to carry their enormous Bible. Eastern monasticism on the other hand has been undergoing a revival, especially in the territories of the former Soviet Union.
Monasticism as a whole continues to attract interest, even in Europe and America. The diverse New Monasticism movement seeks to translate monastic insights and practices into more modern, liveable forms. Communities are typically ecumenical, with a focus on charity, friendship, and contemplation, and without the traditional vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience.
Strip away the theology, celibacy, poverty, and obedience, and a surprisingly attractive structure remains: a community of quiet, thoughtful people sharing meals and resources while retaining a measure of privacy; working with their hands as well as their minds; caring for one another; and cultivating friendship, learning, silence, and contemplation.
Nor need such a community be cut off from society. As the active orders discovered, withdrawal can create the conditions for engagement. A modern monastery might teach, write, grow food, make wine, offer retreats, or simply provide its members with the conditions for what the Greeks called eudaimonia, or the good life.
This, it seems to me, offers a viable third way between family life and social isolation—if, that is, you are willing to wake up early.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The Epicureans put pleasure at the centre of their philosophy. For centuries, they presented the main alternative to Stoicism as a comprehensive way of life. With an appealing message elevated and propagated by poets such as Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil, Epicureanism vied with Stoicism for the hearts and minds of Roman elites.
So, who was Epicurus, and what did he have to teach us?
The Garden School
Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.
Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ Thus, the Garden was more of a live-in community, or fellowship, than a school—influenced, no doubt, by Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.
Although the most famous, Epicurus was not the first philosopher to make pleasure the highest good. A century earlier, Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, had advocated a more immediate and sensual form of hedonism. The irony is that Aristippus lived rather more like our idea of an Epicurean, while the moderate Epicurus lived more like our idea of an Aristotelian—or simply our idea of a philosopher.
Pleasure as the Highest Good
According to Epicurus, reason leads to the conclusion that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a rampant call for unbridled hedonism, rather than the absence of physical and mental suffering that Epicurus actually had in mind. He referred to freedom from bodily pain as aponia, and to freedom from mental disturbance as ataraxia. His highest pleasure, then, looked more like tranquillity than ecstasy.
Indeed, Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, since overindulgence so often leads to pain. ‘The pleasant life,’ he wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus (the most important of his three surviving letters), ‘is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.’
Pleasure is the highest good, and all else that is good is so only by virtue of the immediate or deferred pleasure that it can procure. The behaviour of infants confirms that human beings instinctively pursue pleasure. All our actions, including those that may be construed as virtuous or altruistic, are, in the final analysis, aimed at obtaining pleasure for ourselves. Just as we can instantly sense whether something is hot or cold, or colourful or dull, so we can instantly sense whether something is pleasurable or painful.
Even so, not everything that is pleasurable ought to be pursued, and not everything that is painful ought to be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus ought to be applied to determine which things are most likely to result, over time, in the greatest pleasure and least pain—and it is above all with this arithmetics of pleasure that people struggle.
Lesson 1: The Two Types of Pleasure
To help us along, Epicurus began by distinguishing between two types of pleasure, ‘moving pleasures’ and ‘static pleasures’. Moving pleasures involve the satisfying of a desire—for example, tucking into a meal when hungry. Static pleasures, on the other hand, involve the state of having had a desire satisfied—for example, feeling sated after having eaten the meal. According to Epicurus, static pleasures are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.
Lesson 2: The Three Classes of Desire
Because pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of desire and pain from its frustration, Epicurus also distinguished between three classes of desire: natural and necessary desires, such as those for food and shelter, which are hard to eliminate but naturally limited and both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy; natural but non-necessary desires such as those for luxury food and housing, which offer ever diminishing returns; and vain desires such as those for fame and fortune, which, being inculcated by society, are not naturally limited and neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy.
Epicurus advised that desires of the first class ought to be satisfied, desires of the second class can be satisfied if doing so is easy, but desires of the third class should be entirely eliminated. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’ Modern life has multiplied vain desires beyond anything that Epicurus could have imagined. The problem with vain desires, such as acquiring the next thing or gaining another thousand followers, is not merely that they are more difficult to satisfy, but that they have no natural point of satisfaction.
Lesson 3: The Two Greatest Fears
Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, are the greatest obstacles to happiness.
Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.
Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.
Epicurus’ Own Death
Epicurus died at the age of 72 from the complications of renal colic (kidney stones), which is associated with one of the most intense of all bodily pains. On the last day of his life, he purportedly penned this letter to his friend and follower, the political grandee Idomeneus, which is nothing if not a testament to the overriding powers of philosophy:
I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus [Idomeneus’ brother-in-law], in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.
The philosopher of pleasure died in agony—and called it a happy day.
Some three centuries later, Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, compared his relationship with Lucilius to that between Epicurus and Idomeneus. ‘Who would have known of Idomeneus,’ he asks, ‘had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself … are sunk in deep oblivion.’
When all is forgotten, only the humble philosopher will be remembered.
Aristippus of Cyrene believed that pleasure is best enjoyed by those who remain its master.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
History has largely forgotten Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-c. 356 BCE). It shouldn’t have. A disciple of Socrates and the founder of the Cyrenaic school, he was the original hedonist— far more radical than the better-known Epicurus (341-270 BCE). He was also one of antiquity’s sharpest wits, perhaps even its funniest philosopher. Yet to dismiss Aristippus as funny but shallow would be to miss the point entirely. His philosophy is far deeper—and far more demanding—than first appears.
Before we turn to his celebrated wit, it is worth pausing over philosophy itself.
Ancient philosophy, for all its theoretical underpinnings, was above all an art of living, which aimed, through self-transformation, at controlling the passions, relieving suffering, and attaining wisdom. Philosophy was to the soul as medicine is to the body, and the philosopher, first and foremost, a healer of the soul. In the words of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, ‘Unless the soul is cured, which cannot be done without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries.’ According to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, ‘We must live like doctors and be continually treating ourselves with reason.’ For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy was not merely something to discuss, but something to be lived.
The conception of philosophy as therapy can be traced back to Socrates. After his death by hemlock in 399 BCE, his closest students each carried away a different aspect of his teaching. Plato inherited his theoretical side and founded the Academy. Antisthenes embraced his ethic of self-sufficiency and laid the foundations for Cynicism. Aristippus, by contrast, established the Cyrenaic school, which taught that the only intrinsic good is pleasure—especially the vivid, immediate pleasures of the present moment.
The Philosophy of Pleasure
Aristippus emphasised present and physical pleasures over distant hopes or abstract ideals. For Aristippus and his followers, pleasure meant not merely the absence of pain but positively making the most of every moment.
Aristippus first encountered Socrates while visiting Athens for the Olympic Games. Captivated by the philosopher, he remained in the city and became one of his closest followers. Yet he was never content merely to imitate his master. Once, he had the temerity to tell Socrates that he preferred living in Athens because it spared him the politics of his native Cyrene—the sort of remark that alienated fellow Socratics such as Plato and Xenophon, who regarded civic duty as an obligation rather than a burden.
Aristippus was also the first of Socrates’ followers to take money for teaching. When he demanded five hundred drachmas from a man for tutoring his son, the man protested, ‘For that much money, I could buy a slave!’ ‘Go ahead,’ replied Aristippus. ‘Then you’ll have two.’
Many stories are told of Aristippus, and even if some are later inventions, they capture something essential about the man.
One day, Diogenes the Cynic was washing the dirt from his vegetables when he saw Aristippus passing by. ‘Had you learnt to make these your diet,’ called Diogenes, ‘you would have no need to pay court to kings.’ ‘And you, Diogenes, had you learnt to associate with men, you would have no need to wash vegetables.’
When someone chided him for his extravagant tastes, he retorted, ‘Wouldn’t you have bought this if you could have got it for three obols? Very well then, it is no longer I who am a lover of pleasure, but you who are a lover of money.’
When someone remarked that philosophers were always to be found at the doors of rich men, he replied, ‘Physicians are always calling on the sick, but no one would therefore rather be sick than be a physician.’
When Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked why he had come to his court, Aristippus answered, ‘When I needed wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I am in need of money, I come to you.’
On another occasion, Dionysius spat in his face. When someone reproached him for enduring such an insult, Aristippus remarked, ‘If fishermen are prepared to be drenched in seawater in order to catch a gudgeon, should I not be prepared to be sprayed with spittle in order to take a blenny?’
When Dionysius gave him his choice of three courtesans, Aristippus carried off all three, explaining, ‘Paris paid dearly for preferring one out of three.’
For many years he was intimate with the celebrated courtesan Lais of Corinth, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Greece. Yet he maintained, ‘I possess Lais, but I am not possessed by her.’
The Hidden Depths of Aristippus
By now, Aristippus might seem little more than a witty opportunist devoted to luxury and pleasure. But appearances can be deceptive.
Aristippus was far from amoral. He simply believed that we ought to make the most of every situation. When criticised for his love of pleasure, he replied, ‘It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted.’ Pleasure, in other words, is not our master; we are.
One day, as he entered the house of a courtesan, one of the young men with him blushed. Seeing this, he said, ‘It is not going in that is shameful, but being unable to come out.’
Vitruvius, in his treatise on architecture, recounts the story of Aristippus’ shipwreck. Cast ashore on Rhodes, Aristippus made straight for the gymnasium, where he spoke with such eloquence that the Rhodians provided for all his needs. When his companions later prepared to return home and asked what message they should carry back, he bid them tell their children to acquire possessions that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.
Despite having two sons, Aristippus appointed his daughter Arete to succeed him as head of the Cyrenaic school. Her own son, Aristippus the Younger, would later formalise the principles of Cyrenaicism.
Several later Cyrenaics departed from Aristippus’ original teaching. Theodorus the Atheist (c. 340–c. 250 BCE) placed greater emphasis on mental than physical pleasures, identifying the good with prudence and justice. Hegesias of Cyrene (fl. 290 BCE), perhaps influenced by Buddhist missionaries sent out by Ashoka the Great, argued that happiness is unattainable and that the true goal of life is merely the avoidance of pain and distress. According to Cicero, his book Death by Starvation persuaded so many people that death was preferable to life that Ptolemy II Philadelphus banned him from teaching in Alexandria.
A Philosopher for Our Time
Within little more than a century, the Cyrenaic school had been eclipsed by Epicureanism. Yet Aristippus deserves to be rescued.
Contrary to the caricature, Aristippus did not teach people to become slaves to pleasure. He taught them never to become slaves to anything. He could enjoy wealth without depending on it, luxury without being possessed by it, and the company of tyrants without surrendering his independence. Pleasure, for Aristippus, was never an excuse for self-indulgence. It was a test of self-mastery.
In an age that often swings between thoughtless excess and puritanical self-denial, Aristippus still has something important to teach us. Freedom lies neither in rejecting pleasure nor in chasing it blindly, but in remaining its master. His life looked like a celebration of pleasure. His philosophy was really about freedom.
‘It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil in the world? In the Theodicy, Gottfried Leibniz, philosopher, mathematician, and trained lawyer, took it upon himself to mount God’s defence.
Many people who have heard of Gottfried Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, ‘the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire’, a parody that is hard to get past. Insofar as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of 14, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship.
However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.
Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own lawyer—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. ‘Theodicy’, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for ‘vindication of God’.
The Problem of Evil
In 1755, nearly 40 years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?’
This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.
In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:
Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
Leibniz’s Defence
In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence.
What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.
Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:
Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would merge back into God.
Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.
God could have created a world without minds. But although such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil (and, so, much less evil), it would not have been the best of possible worlds.
Our Role in All This
What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimisation. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, ‘To perfect God’s creation!’
Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing upon Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.
And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.
Continue Exploring
To explore Leibniz’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.
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