Plutarch and his effort to reject (and even ridicule) Epicurus and the Epicureans
Aulus Gellius (the second century ad Roman lawyer and grammarian) turns out to be a helpful starting point for exploring the role of Plutarch in the transmission of Epicureanism.
When citing Plutarch, Gellius ascribes to him the view that Epicurus uses ‘an inappropriate word and gives it foreign meaning' [verbo usus sit parum proprio et alienae significationis; interestingly, a terminological problem already indicated by Cicero reappears in Gellius]. Immediately Plutarch (through Aulus Gellius) cites Epicurus PD 3, according to which ‘the removal of all feeling of pain is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures', and objects that he should not have said ‘of all feeling of pain' but rather ‘of everything that is painful' since it is the removal of pain that should be invoked, not of that which feels pain (Aulus Gellius, Noc. Att. 2.9, 1-4).Sagaciously, Gellius notes that when Plutarch makes this objection to Epicurus he is ‘word-chasing' with excessive nit-picking and almost with frigidity (Nimis minute ac prope etiam subfrigide Plutarchus in Epicuro accusando λεξιθηρεt' ; Noc. Att. 2.9, 4-5). The chapter where this Gellius passage is included is titled ‘Plutarch criticized with obvious bad faith a phrase of Epicurus'. In a previous passage, Gellius recalls that Plutarch (in book 2 of his Commentaries on Homer) says that Epicurus formulated a syllogism in a wrong and clumsy way (Noc. Att. 2.8, 1). According to Gellius, Plutarch quotes Epicurus verbatim [verbaque ipsa Epicuri]: ‘Death is nothing to us, for what has been dissolved has no sensation and what has no sensation is nothing to us’.19 According to Plutarch (as cited by Gellius), Epicurus forgot to include the premise ‘death is the separation of the body and of the soul’; otherwise, the conclusion does not follow. In this instance, Gellius concurs with Plutarch that such a premise is required (Noc.
Att. 2.8, 5); but beyond the agreements and disagreements between Gellius and Plutarch, what is especially interesting is that in antiquity Plutarch was already taken to be a ‘polemic reader’ of Epicurus and, in general, of Epicurean tenets. But Gellius' testimony, is also remarkable because he notes that he cannot suppose that Epicurus, ‘being the man he was’ [c uiusmodi homost], omitted such a premise through ignorance; such an omission, Gellius contends, is due to the fact that, since the separation of body and soul by death is evident, he did not consider it necessary to call attention to what was entirely obvious to everyone (q uod omnibus prosus erat obvium; Noc. Att. 2.8, 8; the premise according to which death is the separation of the soul from the body can be traced to Plato; see Gorg. 524b; Phd. 67d4-10). This is how Gellius says that one must be charitable with Epicurus; one might argue that it is a way to neutralize Plutarch’s vigorous hostility against Epicurus. Gellius’ reference to Plutarch is therefore accurate insofar as he recognizes that Plutarch is right in noting that a premise is missed in Epicurus’ argument, but at the same time Gellius attempts to balance the impact of Plutarch’s critique by suggesting that such an omission cannot be due to Epicurus’ ignorance or stupidity.Of course, Plutarch’s agenda is always present in his objections to the Epicurean philosophy: Epicurus, since he was not a Platonist, did not endorse the tenet that providence and teleology have any role in the explanation of the cosmos.20 In his brief essay Live Unknown, Plutarch’s purpose is to show that the Epicurean ‘live unnoticed’, which is supposed to advocate a certain kind of tranquillity and absence from public life, is false, and that the person who originally said this had no wish to live unknown but ‘was seeking undeserved fame from the advice to avoid fame’ (1128A-B; transl. D. Russell). From Plutarch’s treatises, it is clear that he thinks of Epicurus as an atheist, since he denies divine providence (for the accusation of atheism see also Cicero, ND 2.76).21 One might wonder how effective this kind of remark is as a real argument (in the context Plutarch is clearly objecting to Epicurus’ famous saying ‘live unnoticed’, and he is taking it to be a recommendation for an absence from public life).
More importantly, in On the Pythian Oracles (399 D-E) Plutarch openly argues against Epicurus' view that there is no providence in the cosmos. He starts by mentioning a series of historical events (the Romans defeated Hannibal and overcame the Carthaginians; Philip met the Aetolians and Romans in battle and was defeated, and so on). In Plutarch's view, it is without doubt that no one could say that all these events occurred at once by chance [κατα τυχην] and spontaneously [αυτοματως]; in fact, all the events mentioned display a certain order, one that shows foreknowledge (η ταξις εμφαiνει την πρoγνωσιν; 399D7). The text is unfortunately corrupted in the following lines; but from the context and, as far as the text can be reconstructed, the passage seems to suggest that what Plutarch is intent on arguing is that (i) there is order in the cosmos, (ii) that such an order is not due to chance, and (iii) that the cosmic order is nothing baffling [ατεκμαρτον and blind [τυφλoν]. On the contrary, there is a certain inner rationality [λoγος] in experience, a rationality that provides many guarantees of experience [πολλα της πεiρας ενεχυρα] and ‘shows the road through which fate [τo πεπρωμενον] advances’. In other words, the cosmos as designed by reason points out the road on which fate is to advance; that is, if there is destiny without providence (quod non, in Plutarch's view), teleology is prior to a mechanically fated world. Plutarch concludes by stating that he does not believe that anyone can find these things to occur by chance.22 In order to reinforce his argument, Plutarch adds that if this was not the case then nothing would prevent one from saying that Epicurus did not write the Principal Doctrines, but that the letters came together by chance and spontaneously.This is, so to speak, a typical ‘rhetorical argument' against the view that a cosmology without teleology is possible. But the Epicurean passages from which such an idea is argued are more complex than that. Once again, it is frustrating that the clearest Epicurean writings against a teleological-providential cosmos are reported only by the indirect tradition (mainly Lucretius and Cicero) and not found in Epicurus' texts themselves. Lucretius, for example, is willing to argue against any teleological component in the cosmos while warning that one should avoid supposing ‘the clear lights of the eyes to have been created in order that we might see' (RN 4.823-824; transl. Long and Sedley; it occurs similarly with the other parts of one's body). Lucretius attributes this to a ‘distorted reasoning', contending that nothing has been produced in our body in order that we might be able to use it. It is the fact of its being engendered that creates its use. This seems to be addressed against a Stoic argument for proving the existence of teleology in the cosmos (see especially DL 7.85-86 - reporting the Stoic Chrysippus' view -, Cicero, Fin. 3.67 - where, ascribed to the Stoic philosopher is the view that animals are born for the sake of human beings and the gods -23 and Hierocles, Elementa Ethica 1.44-50; 3.5-45 et passim). Seeing did not exist before the lights of the eyes were engendered, Lucretius goes on to argue, nor was there pleading with words before the tongue was created. If this is so, neither the eyes nor the tongue can have grown for the sake of their use. The presumably providentialist argument according to which the cosmos was created by the gods is also rejected by Lucretius, this time on the grounds that imperishable and blessed beings such as the gods could gain no profit at all from our gratitude (on this, see again Epicurus, PD 1).24 Besides, the gods have no need to interrupt their tranquil lifestyle to focus on a task for our sake (RN 5.156-170).
Moreover, had the gods decided to create the cosmos (quod non in Lucretius' opinion), they would have had no model for such a creation (RN 5.181) and it is hard to know how they would have arrived at the preconception of human beings and thus know and perceive in their minds what they wished to create. Further, if the gods did decide to create the cosmos, it is unclear how they recognized the capacity of the primary particles and the effect of their different arrangements, if nature herself did not furnish them with a pattern for creation. This is so, Lucretius states, because so many primary particles have been propelled in manifold ways by impacts and by their own weight for an infinity of time past, and have combined in all possible ways, that it is not surprising if they have also fallen into arrangements, and arrived at patterns of motion, like those repeatedly enacted by this present world.This is a concise and general description of some arguments provided by Lucretius against providentialism (we omit the rest of them for the sake of brevity); what should be noted here is that these arguments do not correspond to any passage in Epicurus' texts, although the last example of Lucretian reasoning evokes Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus 45. Here, it is argued that atoms, being infinitely many, travel any distance and, because of being of a suitable nature to be constituents of a world or responsible for its production, have not been exhausted on one world or on any finite number of worlds. The clear conclusion, in Epicurus' view, is that there must be both an infinite number of worlds and that the world has not been created (or rather ‘produced') by an intelligent being that has foreseen everything, but by the atoms that, due to their nature and permanent movement, suitably arrange their combinations in order to produce the different worlds.
Thus, no matter how relevant Plutarch's work is to a reconstruction of Epicurean philosophy, the fact is that he was not sympathetic to Epicurus and Epicureanism (a detail already recognized by Aulus Gellius) and that he constantly attempts to reject or ridicule the Epicurean tenets.25 For example, Plutarch accuses the Epicureans of banishing laws and forms of government [οt νoμους καi πολιτεtας αναιρουντες], and therefore of banishing the possibility of human life.
This is what he infers from the fact that Epicurus and Metrodorus dissuade their disciples from practising what is common to all people [αποτρεποντες του τα κοινα πραττειν; presumably this is politics in the sense of ‘public life' understood as what must concern everyone who shares mutual interests in a social environmente and dispute with those engaged in it (Col. 1127D-E; 1125C). But this must be taken as a personal reading by Plutarch (based on his own Platonic agenda), since if it were true, it would not be possible to account for what Epicurus meant when he argued that someone can pass a law in order to check if the law is in accord with what is useful in mutual associations, and that if such a law is not in agreement with what is useful then it can no longer possess the nature of justice (PD 37).If this kind of Epicurean passage is taken seriously, it is hard to understand Plutarch's position that Epicurus and the Epicureans banish, without qualification, both laws and the various forms of government. It would not be possible either to explain how the Epicurean wise person ‘will not have intercourse with a woman in a manner forbidden by the laws' (DL 10.118; transl. Inwood and Gerson). The same goes for those stances which claim that the Epicureans maintain that the one who breaks the law and commits injustice lives in fear and misery (interestingly, this tenet is reported by Plutarch himself, Pleasant Life 1090C-D; Us. 532). In other words, it cannot be possible that Epicurus and the Epicureans banish laws; what they did was to furnish a different view of what law should be. Their suggestion should have been that a real law is that prescription which can be in agreement with what is useful in mutual associations, and that such an agreement must be the outcome of a rational deliberation concerned with what is convenient for the social community. Otherwise, the alleged law would only be a law in a nominal sense, not in a real one, since it would have no real ‘force of law', and one could raise fundamental questions regarding the nature of the force underlying legal authority. For this reason, Epicurus states that ‘the justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness' (a usefulness consisting of neither harming one another nor being harmed; PD 31), and that justice is not a thing in its own right but exists in mutual dealings where there is a pact (such a pact focusing once again on neither harming one another nor being harmed; PD 33). This clarifies why a ‘real' law is that which agrees with what is useful in mutual associations. If the issue is seen from this perspective, Plutarch's remark that the Epicureans overthrow the polis and utterly abolish the laws cannot be reasonable; indeed, it cannot be reasonable that they withdraw themselves and their disciples from participating in politics (or rather of some ‘form of government': πολιτεtα; Plutarch, Col. 1125C). What the Epicureans urge, as did other ‘political philosophers', is the reformulation of what a just legal system should be, so that it can guarantee the existence of a real justice-based state. Further, there is no political philosopher in antiquity (or in our time) who has limited himself to describing the existing state of affairs. Plutarch's remark, in short, turns out to be a mischievous rhetorical exaggeration which, strictly speaking, evinces an eloquent silence. Plutarch, like Cicero, omits the rich Epicurean themes focused on security, justice and law and does not provide any testimonies or considerations on the elements of Epicureanism's political reflection that we have discussed in the first three chapters.
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