Grim's Hall

Epicurus:

A professor of French literature has some advice about eating. Being reasonably good advice, we find that its source is ancient philosophy (and not French literature, which in the post-medieval period hasn't been very good, exceptis excipiendis).

The epidemiologist cannot tell us what the Epicurean wants to know: What should I choose to love without guilt? What is good for me? What keeps me happy? What, in the best sense, keeps me healthy?

In certain European philosophical circles, there has been a recent spike of interest in Epicurus, and not only among Marxists (Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on Epicurus). Like every Greek, Epicurus was obliged to believe in the pantheon of Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus; but he did so without having to suppose that these gods were even remotely interested in human affairs. As a result, Epicurus needed to find principles for living that were based not on theological but on materialist (or, we might say, scientific) conceptions of the world—those which explained all nature, including mind and spirit, with reference not to the supernatural but to harmonies and atomic processes....

Neo-Epicureans argue that the entire philosophical tradition since Plato—perhaps philosophy itself—has always rejected materialism and has forever been in love with idealism. Even the so-called materialist philosophies exhibit forms of Platonic idealism; this idealism may be turned on its head, as it were, but its articulations are still in place.

An aside, because it will be of interest to some of you: That was Marx's complaint about them, that materialism wasn't adequately materialist. What does that mean? Briefly, that materialist philosophy was still positing a mind apart from the meat. Subsequent philosophers have tried to rectify that; Sebastian Rödl had a book out just three years ago promising a "true materialist" account of self consciousness, the problem that we (especially Joe and I) have discussed here. (Rödl's account isn't very convincing, if you were about to rush out and order the book; indeed, I'm not sure it qualifies as an account. If you're interested in exploring the question, we can discuss it further.)

But, back to eating. We have now a rather bold assertion from our French literary scholar:

The new, radical Epicureanism, on the other hand, is nonphilosophical.

Really? Go on.

It is a new way of articulating the relation between theory and practice; it is a praxis of thinking about pleasure and its value, in and of itself, as well as from the standpoint of health. Like Nietzsche, the Epicurean does not aspire to negate philosophy, for that would be only another way of affirming it. Philosophy is nothing but the history of its successive negations. Rather, Epicurus teaches us how to look away from the tradition. "Looking up and away shall be my only negation," Nietzsche asserts in The Gay Science. Like Nietzsche, neo-Epicureans start their thinking not with ideas but with what Epicurus insists is the origin of thought, the body.

Broadly put, neo-Epicureans suppose not only that you are what you eat, but that you think what you eat. Take German idealism, says Nietzsche. It has the leaden consistency and gaseous redolence of a diet thick with potatoes. Italian thought, one might add, is marked by the slippery texture and doughy blandness of pasta. Jewish metaphysics has the astringency and smoky intensity of briny pickles and cured fish. The indistinctness of Buddhist thought resembles white rice. Neo-Epicureans aim to discover not just a philosophy of being but a hygiene for living; not a universal system but a way of thinking about good health in terms of the peculiar proclivities of the individual body.

Sorry, boys. That's a philosophy, whether you like it or not. Indeed, you give the game away yourself when you say that it's "not just" a philosophy, but also a hygiene.

Speaking of which, I can think of a precedent for this philosophy in French literature. Perhaps he comes by it honestly, then.

What sort of a philosophy is it? A good one, as far as it follows this form: eat enough, and well enough, to be satisfied; not so little as to be hungry, nor so poorly as to be sick, but also not so much as to suffer digestive malfunction or obesity. That's the hygiene.

Why a philosophy, though? If you go no farther along the road than perfecting the body, you've missed an important point. The body isn't an end in itself, after all; it will eventually sicken and die even if you take perfect care of it. Waylon Jennings and Jerry Reed can tell you that (following Shel Silverstein's poem, as Johnny Cash had followed another in "A Boy Named Sue").



So 'you're getting real healthy, but you're still gonna die.' The human mind has a potential far more vast than the maintenance of the body, for the majority of your life; but the body is doomed in spite of the mind's best efforts, when the time comes. The mind is therefore too great a tool to be aimed at the maintenance of the body for most of our lives; and a tool entirely insufficient for that purpose when we reach our designated time. This should be adequate proof that a philosophy aimed only at the material is insufficient for us.

What's left, then, if not the mind and the ideas it can contain? Some of these ideas may be actualized, as in the case of an engineer who dreams of spacecraft; others may remain ideas, but inspire others, as in a composer who writes symphonies.

The day-to-day health of the body cannot be our end, for we are too much for that; neither can its permanent survival be our end, for we are too little for that. To write, to think, to design, to compose, these things are more fit for us. Of them all, though, the greatest and hardest challenge may simply be to understand.