Nietzsche and epicurus: In search of the heroic-idyllic

Abstract

Nietzsche claimed to have understood the character of Epicurus differently from everybody else. However, he was not alone in the nineteenth century in employing the name of ‘Epicurus’ to signal the need for a reformation of philosophy in accordance with Epicurean principles of living. For Marx, writing in the 1840s, and in defiance of Hegel’s negative assessment, Epicurus is the ‘greatest representative of the Greek enlightenment’, 2 whilst for Jean-Marie Guyau, writing in the 1870s, Epicurus is the original free spirit: ‘Still today it is the spirit of old Epicurus who, combined with new doctrines, works away at and undermines Christianity’. 3 For Nietzsche, Epicurus is one of the greatest human beings to have graced the earth and the inventor of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’ (WS 295). In this essay, my main focus is on the figuration of Epicurus we encounter in Nietzsche’s middle period writings. Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurus, which is most prominent in these writings, is, on the face of it, curious: what interest does he have in a philosopher of antiquity who was an egalitarian, offered what Cicero called a ‘plebeian’ philosophy, and who espoused a simple-minded hedonic theory of value? These are all positions we would expect Nietzsche to have no truck with. And yet, in the middle period, he is full of praise for the figure of Epicurus. In his appreciation, Karl Jaspers notes that one enters the garden of Epicurus in order, having overcome oneself, to abandon it once again, and this neatly captures something of the character of Nietzsche’s attachment to Epicurus in the course of his intellectual development. 4 Like the other nineteenth-century interpreters I have referred to, Nietzsche is acutely aware that Epicurean doctrine has been greatly maligned and misunderstood in the history of thought. One commentator on Epicurus’s philosophy speaks of the ‘slanders and fallacies of a long and unfriendly tradition’ and invites us to reflect on Epicurus as at one and the same time the most revered and most reviled of all founders of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world. 5 Since the time of the negative assessment by Cicero and the early Church Fathers, ‘Epicureanism has been used as a smear word-a rather general label indicating atheism, selfishness, and debauchery’. 6 As Nietzsche observes in The Wanderer and His Shadow: Epicurus has been alive in all ages and lives now, unknown to those who have called and call themselves Epicureans, and enjoying no reputation among philosophers. He has, moreover, himself forgotten his own name: it was the heaviest burden he ever cast off.