“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”
Editor’s note: All of the italicized words within quotations constitute the original emphasis intended by the quoted author.
If we look beyond everyday reversals in fashion trends, discursive fads, and the like, beyond even the rise and fall of entire political regimes, cultures, and religions, a bird’s-eye view of world history reveals only a few fundamentally distinct epochs which, as far as their overall profiles are concerned, can be delineated with remarkable precision. At the highest level, real historical change always involves a radical reorientation of human being-in-the-world such as only seldom occurs.
At least three major orientations can be discerned. In regard to the earliest—often referred to as prehistory—any conception we may have of human activity at this stage barely surpasses the merely speculative. Holistically, prehistorical humans may be said to have been in thrall to Nature in the ancient sense of phusis, as that which spontaneously wells up without much extrinsic involvement. Prehistory as such is the realm of storied time, the earliest recorded glimpses of which are available only through mythology. After prehistory comes antiquity, broadly conceived—which is really history as we tend to understand it, up to and including the Middle Ages and roughly coterminous with agricultural modes of development. In this second phase of world history, we encounter a welter of more or less sophisticated management stratagems, all devised to facilitate “the reign of man over man,” or what Karl Marx calls “relations of personal dependence”—those, to be sure, that have evolved beyond the “entirely spontaneous” (as in prehistory).
History proper is followed by an age with a distinctively post-historical flavoring. Post-history itself, however, is merely postulated as a virtual terminus of what is more commonly called modernity, the period we still inhabit today (pace postmodernists of various persuasions). The way Marx tells it, modernity coincides with the emergence of civil society, in which “the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes.” In civil society, “personal independence founded on objective dependence” becomes the dominant social form—the form of the isolated individual or the social atom—such that “the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things.” This “great form” is enabled by “a system of general social metabolism,” a “general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual.” Compared to what came before, the modern age has an unmistakably insatiable quality to it. Modern man “strives not to remain something he has become, but is [always] in the absolute movement of becoming.” “The modern,” in short, “gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar.” In fact, having forfeited even the pretense of “satisfaction,” “the modern” often amounts to a protracted exercise in deliberate disorientation, as it proactively oversells the radical indeterminacy of human existence from its own “limited standpoint”—namely, that of civil society.
In echo to what Marx was getting at when he identified vulgarity as the fount of modern dissatisfaction, Friedrich Nietzsche insists moderns are most afflicted by an absence of “good taste”: “Proportionateness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward-panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern men, we semi-barbarians—and are only in our highest bliss when we—are most in danger.” The absence of measure, satisfaction, and proportion, is, I would suggest—following Marx and Nietzsche—the defining feature of our era, which is uniquely incapable of bounding itself, of “standing firmly and planting [itself] fixedly on still trembling ground”—and even lacks the necessary vocabulary to articulate the sanctity of bounds in whatever shape or form they may appear. Chesterton’s fence is, on this account, only a dirty fix to a problem that is perhaps as profound as problems get, and which no amount of trivializing and hand-waving will do away with.
It is modernity’s absence of shapeliness which also underlies another one of its more bewildering features: a seemingly inborn tendency toward the blobby and the grotesque—a tendency which is most certainly not confined to any corner of the political spectrum but seems instead to define both mainstream and counterculture in whatever constellation they so happen to arrange themselves. All across the Occident, we are currently engrossed in spectacular slugfests between, on the one hand, an emergent host of Dionyso-promethean theatrocrats—assuming it is appropriate to apply what Plato thought was an apt descriptor of the excesses of Athenian democratic rule to today’s febrile climate of digitally mediated progressive populism—and, on the other, cadres upon cadres of wide-eyed fools desperate to safeguard what Fyodor Dostoevsky (and later Peter Sloterdijk) referred to as the “crystal palace”—an intimation of the massive glass-and-iron structure built in Hyde Park, London for the Great Exhibition of 1851—which symbolizes, among other things, “the global dream” of “a transparent, enlightened space without borders.” Both “alternatives” are reflective of mass inebriation on a grand scale—the shambolic, feverishly overwrought fanfare of which only barely manages to conceal the dull monotone playing in the background: a nauseating Muzak set to “an inflexible rhythm,” mnemonically sustaining, as Theodor Adorno would say, an ontology infected with sameness.
What, if anything, are we to make of all this? The phrase epicureanism for the masses, which I am vainly trying to embed in the collective unconscious, suggests, if not an answer, then at least an interpretive key—a nexus of unlikely affinities, an uncanny recurrence of motifs, “a mobile army of metaphors” (Nietzsche) stalking, as it were, like a roving band of Spartan kryptai, the peripheries of our social imaginary. It seems to me that modernity is best summarized in terms of a particular metaphorical profile, which explains much of its attendant phenomenology. This profile has since its inception morphed into a wide variety of diverging, often starkly contrastive formulae that nevertheless share a common root, in the philosophical program of the “garden god” Epicurus. Many of the core features of Epicurean philosophy—social and cosmological atomism, political contractualism, disenchantment, (qualified) hedonism, all centered around a credo to “live in obscurity” in imitation of “divine leisure”—have made their way into some of the most influential philosophies of the modern era. The “vulgar epicureanism” of Thomas Hobbes, the “refined epicureanism” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “Dionyso-tragic epicureanism” of Nietzsche, and the “critical-revolutionary epicureanism” of Marx—to name only a few prominent examples—all bear witness to a subterraneous influence that is as profound as it is invisible. (Indeed, the same obscurity which characterized the life of Epicurus seems to have clouded the dissemination of his philosophical doctrine.)
To substantiate, or least corroborate, these provisional claims, a few scattered quotations may suffice. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel notes that “it may… be said that Epicurus is the inventor of empiric Natural Science, of empiric Psychology.” A bold statement—with which Adam Smith, for one, heartily concurs. The “Philosophy of Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras,” Smith observes, though it had “almost [been] forgotten for some generations…was afterwards more successfully revived by Epicurus.” And later, after centuries of dormancy, in the 17th century, Epicurus was again “revived by [Pierre] Gassendi, and [his philosophy] has since been adopted by Newton and the far greater part of his followers. It may be considered the established system, or as the system that is most in fashion, and most approved of by the greater part of the philosophers of Europe.”
As regards Epicurus’ influence on politics, Marx, at one point during his famous, interminable lampooning of Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, notes almost offhandedly: “it is sufficient to mention that the idea that the state rests on the mutual agreement of people, on a contrat social… is found for the first time in Epicurus.” (In fact, it can already be found, albeit as an argumentative foil, in several of Plato’s dialogues, but that is neither here nor there.) And in a chapter of The Holy Family, where the origins of communism and socialism are traced back to materialist philosophy, Marx points out that “French and English materialism was always closely related to Democritus and Epicurus.” Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.
Smith first mentions the “Philosophy of Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras [and later also Epicurus]” in an essay on The History of Astronomy, and it is in terms of its astronomical considerations—or, more broadly, in matters of cosmology, i.e., universal matters—that this philosophy’s significance is best appreciated. “It may be,” wrote the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, “that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.” The role played by the restoration of epicureanism in molding “universal history” and the metaphors attending its course, though only subtly hinted at by Borges, may give us an especially figurative indication of “the modern’s” existential insatiability—and all that this implies. It may also reveal that world history and “universal history” are in a sense “consubstantial,” as tectonic societal shifts—away from “the power of the community” to “the development of all human powers as such”—are mirrored almost exactly in our evolving conceptions of “the heavens.”
Universal History
In an essay titled The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, Borges was intent on narrating only a single chapter of “universal history,” a chapter which begins “six centuries before the Christian era” and ends with Blaise Pascal. The centerpiece of Borges’ fable is “the rounded Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude,” a motif which recurs again and again, expressed in various shades of elocution and tenebrity, over the course of “universal history,” popping up first in Ancient Greece and snaking its way, via Hermetic detours, along the twists and turns of the medieval intellectual landscape, only to arrive, finally, at the “dispirited century” of Milton, Donne, and Pascal. For Plato, as for Xenophanes before him, the eternal sphere had been a symbol of sublimity, “the most perfect and most uniform figure,” a figure (of speech) that would eventually typify God himself, as immortalized in the phrase “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Rather than wallow in sententious reverence, however, Pascal would face the same sphere with marked apprehension, as “a labyrinth and an abyss.”
What separated Pascal from Plato was a chasmic rift in the space-time continuum of “universal history”: the Copernican “rupture of the stellar vaults.” Writing in the century prior to Pascal’s, Giordano Bruno, for one, delighted in this violent displacement, which infused him with religious inspiration on account of its liberatory potential. When Bruno “searched for words to tell men of Copernican space,” the following flowed from his pen: “We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” Contra Bruno, Pascal “abhorred the universe and would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the abhorred universe.” The universe, or rather Nature, thus became “a fearful [effroyable] sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
When no longer applied to a supernatural God but to Nature itself—Nature as an infinite, “absolute space”—the spherical motif seems to lend itself to profoundly opposing outbursts of sentiment. In its own way, this motif still operates as a primary motor of modern subjectivity, grounding as it does both the jubilation and the dread we feel when confronted with the modern world’s aforementioned unboundedness. Interestingly, Borges tells us that the same “absolute space” which elicited such diverging reactions from Bruno and Pascal had also “inspired the hexameters of Lucretius.” But Lucretius, known primarily as the great Roman rhapsodist of Epicurean philosophy, had died long before the Copernican rupture, suggesting that maybe Copernicus’ renovations merely cleared a passage for something else—something much older. Epicureanism for the masses—a playful inversion of Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses”—if it means anything, then, is simply the name for a collective move away from a well-ordered, divinely ordained kósmos (or as Marx put it, “the childish world of antiquity… where closed shapes, forms, and given limits are sought for”), to what Alfred Tennyson, in his poem “Lucretius,” called “the illimitable inane”—together with all the psychosocial, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical disruptions that have resulted from this.
A Totality with Receding Boundaries
More than three centuries after the publication of Pascal’s Pensées, we might ask ourselves whether he was correct. Is the infinite sphere of Nature to be dreaded after all? A few curious resonances should at least give us pause. Consider, for example, an off-handed remark made by the great American political philosopher, Sheldon S. Wolin: “The peculiarity of totalitarianism: it is a totality with receding boundaries.” Now compare this with the following description found in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura:
“The nature of room, the space of the abyss
Is such that even the flashing thunderbolts
Can neither speed upon their courses through,
Gliding across eternal tracts of time,
Nor, further, bring to pass, as on they run,
That they may bate their journeying one whit:
Such huge abundance spreads for things around—
Room off to every quarter, without end.”
These lavish Lucretian flourishes immediately conjure up another one of Pascal’s more memorable murmurations: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Based on Wolin’s remark, this sullen apprehension of cosmological grotesqueries may perhaps be read as a faint, barely articulable warning of possible similitudes on a civilizational scale—of what happens when we “enlarge our conceptions” of society “beyond all imaginable space.” When Pascal asked, “What is a man in the Infinite?” it seems he was hinting at the dangers of divine proximity—of infinity becoming profane and relinquishing its distal austerity. (Tellingly, this question appears as part of an aphorism titled Man’s disproportion: yet another allusion to Marx’s and Nietzsche’s diagnoses of the quintessential disproportion of “the modern.”) The new infinite, which reaches “unmeasured round/And downward an illimitable profound,” has, after all, had a peculiar tendency to spawn temporary simulacra in the realm of politics. All too often, society itself has become, as Simone Weil put it, an “ersatz of God” (much like the disenchanted universe itself), an awesome intrusion of infinity into cramped tellurian space, devouring humans “without end.”
In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt’s well-known phrase, “the banality of evil,” which, when extricated from the particular context in which it was first applied (the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961), may still be used effectively to explain the often rote and quotidian manner of political terror in general, the voiding of consciousness, the “thoughtlessness,” which consumes participants of mass politics—the same banality which, after the extension du domaine de la lutte, has attended so much psychosexual politics—makes more sense as a codicil to the already presupposed illimitable inanity of “the modern.” Can evil be anything other than banal when the infinite universe itself has been emptied of all significance, and, conversely, can banality become anything other than evil when allowed to assume infinite proportions?
Further political and socioeconomic ramifications of cosmic inanity, more appropriate to our own times, include both what Wolin has called “critical totalitarianism” and the infectious truism, crystallized by Marx, that “production for the sake of production” is tantamount to “the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself”—and not, as one would assume, only the latest indication that something has gone horribly awry. “Critical totalitarianism,” which Wolin associates with the Nietzschean tradition, “takes the form of relentless destruction, of emptying the world of established forms of value, religion, morality, politics, and popular culture.” Although by no means exhaustive of the cornucopia that is Nietzsche himself, critical totalitarian discourse doubtless animates significant portions of his work. “Such a discourse,” Wolin writes, “would be totalistic in the sense that the aggression acted out in its metaphors, images, and narratives aims not only to obliterate its enemies but to bring down an entire world it believes the enemies have made…In its godlike superiority, critical totalitarian discourse savages its enemies in dehumanizing terms.” As such, it is merely the more overt (and for that reason perhaps more innocent) cultural counterpart to the insidious economic totalitarianism championed (and, at turns, lamented) by Marx.
Immortal Death
Borges’ “universal history” may have come to a standstill in the 17th century, but that does not mean “the hexameters of Lucretius” have not continued to exude their influence in later ages. As suggested earlier when glossing over Nietzsche’s and Marx’ respective epicurean affiliations, both critical totalitarianism and production for the sake of production feed on the same Lucretian imagery which so seemed to frighten Pascal. Marx, who wrote his doctoral dissertation as a vindication of Epicurus as “the greatest representative of the Greek Enlightenment,” characterized his own materialistic worldview as follows: “There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement—mors immortalis.” Mors immortalis, which means “immortal death,” is a phrase lifted straight from Book III of De Rerum Natura. Its metaphorical significance is the paradox at the heart of all Epicurean ethics: that a world of relentless kinesis should also be the one to afford the greatest leisure. As Marx puts it: “For the Epicureans the principle of the concept of nature is the mors immortalis, as Lucretius says, the atom, and, in opposition to Aristotle’s divine energy, divine leisure is put forward as the ideal of life instead of ‘active life.’” Divine leisure is the atom’s default state. But the atom—“an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being,” to use Marx’ phrasing—is, at the same time, “the abstraction of movement,” i.e., freneticism itself: such that the ideal, “ataractic” life it represents necessarily crumbles under the constant pressures of vulgarization (sometimes rebranded as “decadence”) and fails to give any lasting satisfaction—except maybe in death.
Much like the totalitarian regimes of the past century, economic totalitarianism is in thrall to “a dynamic that is law-breaking, or, in contemporary language, transgressive, boundary-defiant, disruptive of established life-forms, whether of norms, cultures, or skills.” This is, in fact, the shared characteristic of all totalitarianisms, of totalitarianism as an “ideal type.” And it reveals precisely the opposite of what totalitarianism is most often assumed to be. Properly speaking, totalitarianism is an “anti-system,” a “super-organization in control of all aspects of society combined with an ‘absence of system’…calculated suppression controlling systemic chaos”—in short, “rationalized irrationality,” as Max Horkheimer had it—whose ultimate nature “can be described as the moment when the extraordinary marginalizes the normal, usurping its role in order to become the dominant practice.” The very antithesis of a “tribalistic” regime of “closed shapes, forms, and given limits,” totalitarianism resembles, in every one of its guises, the infinite sphere “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere;” the absolute space of the illimitable inane, “a totality with receding boundaries.”
As regards critical totalitarianism, we find that Nietzsche’s preemption and exacerbation of the general socioeconomic derangement affecting the post-Copernican world, a kind of proto-accelerationism, really just testifies to a now widespread desperation to find stable moorings in a world without berths—a world where, as Nietzsche put it, “pleasure [is] no longer to be found in certainty, but in uncertainty.” The only point of refuge, in such a world, is an intoxicating affectation of “godlike superiority,” committed, sans cesse, to a “transvaluation of values” perpetrated from on high. The avatar of Nietzsche’s project, and of critical totalitarianism as a whole, is the Übermensch, who was explicitly conceived in Epicurean terms.
In one of his notebooks, Nietzsche noticed that “the indifferentism of Epicurus acts almost as a transfiguration.” And elsewhere, he wrote: “The order of rank executed in a system of earthly rule: the rulers of the earth last, a new ruling caste. Springing up from them here and there, quite Epicurean god, the superhuman, the transfigurer of existence.” The Übermensch reflects a single demand: “to produce beings who stand sublimely above the entire species ‘human being’: and who sacrifice themselves and ‘their neighbors’ for this goal.” These sublime beings are contrasted with the “last humans,” who reflect the overall mediocritizing of mankind. “The goal,” Nietzsche insists, “is not at all to conceive of the [former] as the masters of the [latter]: but rather: the two species should exist alongside one another—as segregated as possible; the one, like the Epicurean gods, having no concern for the other.”
Behind the delightful wastefulness of “godlike superiority,” however, and the overall glamor of the Nietzschean masque, hides something much more akin to wasting away. The isolated sovereign individual, who stands athwart the human being as “gregarious animal,” has, more often than not, opted for exile only insofar as it already seems inevitable. Living in obscurity, as Epicurus encouraged, is reinterpreted as though it were self-imposed and heroic, when really, the impetus to self-segregate merely seems to underscore and further reinforce the psychological alienation already undergone by the noblest natures, who can no longer recognize their own affective experience in the vegetative complacency of the teeming multitudes, their so-called “neighbors.” The entire illogic of acceleration feeds on this notion: epicureanism for the masses (“herd evaluations, Epicureisme, and benevolence”) is met with epicureanism for the elites; immiseration is met with further immiseration, and, for the umpteenth time, we are asked to place our trust in dubious alchemical formulae: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch. (“Where, however, is danger, there also lies in wait the saving power.”) (It should be instructive that Nietzsche himself, surely one of the noblest natures of the last few centuries, wrote of his disposition to mask himself and “live in obscurity” under circumstances of crippling loneliness and near-suicidal misery. Moreover, given that Nietzsche suffered chronically from bad health, his description of “Epicurean happiness as that of a convalescent” is particularly telling.)
All of this was sounded off in Pascal’s “shriek” (for it was not yet a “scream”). The “fearful sphere” has since become a mainstay of modern life. On earth, it is reflected in the ambient insecurity and tasteless extravagance of civil society and the restless omnivores who live in its interstices. (As far as the latter are concerned, Arendt was quite right in saying that, in a sense, “the bourgeoisie’s political philosophy was always ‘totalitarian’; it always assumed an identity of politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only as the façade for private interests.”)
Is there a way out of this mess, a potential for a collective sigh of relief? Every healthy alternative to the latent totalitarianism of modernity—call it “post-liberalism”—has a high bar to clear. Indeed, post-liberals of all stripes, my heart goes out to you, but take note: It is not merely the case that our modes of governance tend to go haywire every now and then (as evidenced again by recent decades); rather, our entire cosmology (or, our lack thereof) is already “intemperate” at the most basic level. How to establish a post-liberal politics in a liberal universe? A fearful question, but one worth mulling over nevertheless.
Michael Weyns is a Ph.D. candidate at Ghent University.
