The Atomic Age had its anxieties, but Hugh Hefner believed he had a good diversion. “We aren’t a family magazine,” he announced in the first issue of Playboy in 1953. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails, an hors d’oeuvres or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” By the 1960s, the music had grown louder, the colors more lurid, the conversations steamier. When Hefner died in 2017, he was considered either a hero of hedonism or an object lesson in the period’s squalid obsessions. Run a Google search today on Hefner, and you’ll often find the word “Epicurean” to describe him. Is this fair to Epicurus, the man who set forth the philosophy starting in 306 BC?
Marble bust of Epicurus. Roman copy of Greek original, 3rd century BC/2nd century BC. On display in the British Museum, London.
Photo by ChrisO via Wikimedia Commons.
For 23 centuries now, Epicureans have struggled mightily against variations of the Hefner caricature. If pleasure is the highest good, the goal of the best life, must we all strive to live in pajamas, smoking a pipe in a decadent Hollywood Hills estate? Though he didn’t live in a mansion off Sunset Boulevard, at the end of the fourth century BC, at the age of 32, the philosopher Epicurus founded the Garden, a school removed from Athens’s monuments of power and politics. An inscription at the entrance read: “Stranger, here you will do well to stay; here our highest good is pleasure.” (In Chicago, Hefner’s door bore an inscription: Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare, or “If you don’t swing, don’t ring.”)
Leading life in a modern Garden is the subject of Catherine Wilson’s latest book, How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well. There was always an air of Peter Pan-like anarchy at the Playboy Mansion, but as Wilson shows us, life in the Garden was quite different. Her book is a spirited tour and defense of Epicurean philosophy, as reconstructed by the fragments Epicurus left behind in tattered papyrus and as set forth in the epic poem De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things,” by the Roman poet Lucretius.
What did these pleasure-seekers believe? They start with the elementary particles, atoms — tiny, colorless, without smell, shaped this way and that, indestructible, reshuffling themselves infinitely into all the marvelous forms we see, including ourselves. Their forms get swept away by time, only to recombine again into something new — possibly another universe. Blurred in this haze of metaphysics, most atoms fall straight downward into the void, but a few swerve, and from these deviations arise our free will and all that we see. At the California Institute of Technology, physicist Richard Feynman began his lectures by wondering what single sentence would be passed on to future generations, if, in a cataclysm, all scientific knowledge was destroyed. His answer: “The atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms.”
With the Epicureans, we have a historical test of Feynman’s thought. The world is made of nothing more than atoms in the void, but where did that take the ancient Greeks and Romans who believed it? Wilson begins with these basic building blocks because she asserts that mistaken beliefs about nature are the source of our deepest fears and hang-ups: death, punishment in an afterlife, failure in this one, lust for power, greed, jealousy, unrequited love, and status-jockeying. “Epicurean philosophy might be said to be based on the notion of the limit,” Wilson writes. By understanding the atom and the void, by knowing that the soul is mortal and the gods indifferent, that all things pass and are forgotten, we might then liberate ourselves from the grinding weight of superstition and the vanity of ambition and pursue pleasure without guilt.
