Accueil
https://www.academia.edu/43375819/Epicureans_on_Teleology_and_Freedom
"Epicurus and his followers laboriously criticized those philosophers who believed in a purposefully created and arranged cosmos administered by a divinity. According to them,a blessed and immortal god experiences no troubles himself and causes none for anyoneelse (cf. KD 1) ; hence, such a being cannot be involved in the tiresome creation or administration of our world. The Epicureans consequently liberated their disciples fromthe superstitious fear of the gods, not by denying their existence, but by denying their status as active cosmological principles. The Epicureans material explanation of theuniverse, formulated in opposition to the theists, nonetheless threatened us with subjection to deterministic material laws. If our cosmos is deprived of a divine providence, being the accidental outcome of atoms purposelessly moving in the void, is it not the casethat every phenomenon in the world, including ourselves and our actions, is causallydetermined by the underlying atomic interactions ? In such a case, no room remains for freedom, even for the gods.
In formulating his anti-teleological theory, Epicurus came up with a multitude of argu-ments and innovative ideas, including some that explain how it is possible to preserve agenuine notion of freedom within the general framework of his materialism." (p.224)
"The pages of Xenophon
’
s
Memorabilia
present Socrates as the
????
rst systematic tele-ological thinker (
Mem.
I.4.2
–
10). In order to positively change his interlocutor Aris-todemus
’
attitude to religious practices
—
Xenophon tells us that he held that the gods arenot in need of his worship, since they are above human affairs
—
Socrates catalogues thegifts of the gods to humans (such natural endowments as religious sensibility, intelligence,non-seasonal sex etc.), arguing on the strength of these for the existence of a demiurge: a bene
????
cent, divine craftsman who made the world. Later in the book, he also develops anexplicitly anthropocentric teleology by describing our favorably-orchestrated relation to theanimal kingdom and the environment, both of which exist for man
’
s sake (
Mem.
IV 3.5
–
15). Socrates hence comes across as having formulated the
????
rst versions of several familiar teleological arguments, which were subsequently classi
????
ed as the Argument from Design(also referred to as Intelligent Design, hence ID): that is, arguments that deduce the exis-tence of a providential god from the evidence of rational design in the natural world.
2
Socrates
’
formulation is emphatically non-scienti
????
c: he believes that true piety consists inadmiring the outcomes of divine creation and expressing our gratitude by religious devotioninstead of speculating about the possible material causes of such rational divine activity.Socrates
’
motives for defending creationism have also been viewed as an attack on theearly atomists
’
competing model, which emphasized the creative powers of accident (Sedley 2017, pp. 86, 90, 134
–
5). Leucippus and Democritus thought that there are in
????
-nitely many atoms hurtling in in
????
nite void, and every now and then a large but
????
nitenumber of atoms spontaneously separate out from the rest and form a vortex, which in turncreates an entire cosmos. Given in
????
nite time, space and atoms, they held that it is not onlya possibility but a necessity that there are in
????
nitely many
kosmoi
generated in this fashion,including an in
????
nite number that are identical to our own. And although the early atomists believed in the existence of gods, they did not, similarly to Aristodemus
’
opinion, think of them as creators.
3
Plato, developing Socrates
’
teleological account in his cosmology, put forward a likelyaccount of divine creation in one of his latest works, the
Timaeus-Critias
(Scolnicov 2017).Timaeus, the main speaker of his eponymous dialogue, describes an intrinsically gooddivine craftsman, the Demiurge, who is the cause of our cosmos
’
existence, having becauseof his goodness rearranged a pre-existing material disorder in the best possible way.
4
Hemodelled our cosmos on the eternal Form of the genus Animal to re
????
ect the intelligiblerealm in the ruling motions of the world-soul of a single spherical living being, our world,which is inhabited by less pure rational souls, us, who are capable of reincarnation inmortal bodies in the perceptible realm of becoming. It has been debated since the time of Plato
’
s own students whether Plato, accordingly, believed in an asymmetrical universewhich had a beginning but no end, or whether Timaeus
’
creationist story was intended asan allegorical mythos of an eternal universe, cast in the chronological form of a narrative.Aristotle, Plato
’
s most eminent pupil, understood him in the former sense. Although heagreed that a divine being is the fundamental explanatory principle of the apparently pur- posive organisms in the universe, he did not think that the teleological structures of theseorganisms were ever created. Aristotle conceived of teleological or
????
nal causes as imma-nent in nature itself, as part of a natural design existing from all eternity. Such an intrinsicteleology is local but not global: Aristotle
’
s teleological explanations account for certainfeatures of the natural world, but they do not explain the cosmos as a whole. God, or theUnmoved Mover, could not have created these teleological structures, since he must himself be involved in the best possible activity, contemplation. He is therefore detached fromadministering the universe, let alone from having ever created it. Yet, the Unmoved Mover produces motion by becoming an object of desire, a motivating factor in Aristotle
’
s cos-mology. The entire natural world strives to imitate god
’
s eternal actuality
—
humans by philosophical contemplation (
NE
X
; all animals (humans included) and plants by pro-creation (
De An
. II 4,
Politics
I 2); and even the non-animate elements by their naturalcycles (
Meteorologica
I 9). God, as the
telos
or the
????
nal cause of the natural world himself,is nonetheless unmoved, being self-absorbed in his pure self-contemplation.One upshot of this brief overview is that we can clearly see that Greek accounts of tele-ology before Epicurus had always been connected in one way or another to theology, to thestudy of the nature of God." (pp.225-226)
"The Stoics also thought of their material cosmos both as animated by an active divine principle and as a living being; yet their cosmos was clearly symmetrical, having a beginning and end. Since it is the best possible of worlds, perfect and complete, and one
????
nite world could not occupy all thein
????
nite available time, it keeps recurring endlessly, identical each time to all previous andsubsequent worlds." (p.226)
"Epicurus
’
argument for the in
????
nite number of worlds provides implicit evidence against divine teleology; it becomes explicit in a further extended form by one of his followers,Lucretius. Epicurus supported the simultaneous existence of in
????
nite worlds by arguing that the totality [
to pan
] of things is unlimited. For what is limited has an extremity, and anextremity is evident in contrast to something else; consequently, the totality of things cannot have an extremity, otherwise there would be something outside it, and it would not be atotality; therefore, it has no limit and since it has no limit, it must be unlimited and in
????
nite(
Ep. Hdt
. 41). Consequently, the in
????
nitely many atoms (cf. Lucretius
DRN
II 522
–
68) cantravel any distance in void. This naturally includes those atoms which are suitable [
epité-deia spermata
] for constituting a cosmos. Given that atoms are limited in their kinds, but each kind, according to the theory, is unlimited in its numbers, there are an in
????
nite number of
“
suitable seeds
”
able to constitute a cosmos; these thus cannot have been exhausted inone world, set within its own boundaries, or on any
????
nite number of differentiated worlds,whether these are like ours, or entirely different. There must therefore be in
????
nitely manyworlds (
Ep. Hdt
. 45).This conclusion excludes and thus implicitly refutes both the possibility of a single,anthropocentric, teleologically-arranged cosmos on either the Platonic or the later Stoicmodel, and that of a
????
nite Aristotelian universe. Lucretius extended the conclusion of theargument with the additional point that it would be inconceivable how any such divineleader could have powers adequate to control the in
????
nite universe (
DRN
II 1052
–
1104).This seems partly to rest on the assumption (Cicero,
DND
I 26
–
28) that an anthro- pomorphic divinity could not perceive and run the universe if it is in
????
nitely extended, because perception necessarily occurs in bodily extremities through which one perceiveswhat is outside oneself." (p.227)
"In modern discussions, one concept of moral responsibility turns often on the agent
’
sability to do otherwise even in the same set of circumstances. But Epicurus did not con-ceive of it in this way.
17
Instead, he thought that an agent is morally responsible and can beregarded as the cause of an action a) if he is not forced to bring it about; b) if his action is based on his desire or impulse to carry it out, and c) if he can act accordingly; and
????
nally d)if his action rests on his own beliefs
—
with b) thus actually stemming from d). This last criterion is the most fundamental to Epicurus
’
ethical conception, because without theability to change our beliefs, e.g. as a result of philosophical training, we could not even-tually alter or moderate some of our primary desires in harmony with what is appropriate toour rational development, and hence act virtuously. Without this we could not, in turn,achieve the most pleasurable human condition. Thus, the foundation of Epicurus
’
concep-tion of freedom is the idea that an agent is responsible for his beliefs because [...] we have the capacity to shape our beliefs as grownup rational animals and, based on our beliefs, have some desires that lead us to act in certain ways, we can be heldaccountable for what we do under no compulsion, and praised or blamed for our actionsand moral character.But how could Epicurus explain the real causal ef
????
cacy of an agent within the frame-work of his atomistic theory? Is it not the case that, even if we are the cause of certainactions based on our beliefs which are carried out freely without any external compulsion inharmony with our desires, we are still determined internally by the atomic motions of our constituent matter to such an extent that theoretically what we are going to believe andconsequently do is predictable? If what we do is necessitated by the internal causal atomicframework of our constituent matter, can we properly be praised or blamed for our actions?Can we consider ourselves free if we are internally determined? This worry arises in anytheory of causal determinism, according to which all events are determined by prior causes:taking any event E, given the causal laws that govern the universe
—
whatever they are
—
and the prior state of the world before E occurred, E was inevitable. Epicurus did not think that such a causally determined understanding of the world would be compatible with hisconception of freedom: hence, in order to solve the above worry, he introduced the atomicswerve. In theory, atoms swerve randomly, that is to say, at no determined place or time,inserting an element of indeterminacy on the atomic level into the material universe. But how exactly this random atomic swerve which breaks the internal causal continuity of matter is meant to provide for our freedom on the phenomenal level of our world is unclear." (pp.232)
"If atoms didnot swerve randomly from the trajectories of their motions, eventually all would falldownwards like drops of rain through deep void, and neither any collision nor a blow couldoccur among them given that atoms move with equal speed in void (cf.
DRN
II 225
–
242);consequently, nature would produce nothing (
DRN
II 216
–
250). Furthermore, (S2) if theatoms did not swerve, there would be a closed causal nexus on the atomic level and therewould be no free volition [
libera voluntas
]; but we see that animals in our experience evi-dently have this
libera voluntas
, so it cannot be the case that the atoms do not swerve (
DRN
II 251
–
293). Therefore, the atoms swerve, and the atomic level of the material world is not causally determined." (p.233)
"Lucretius argues for the existence of the swerve as a third type of atomic motion based on the evident voluntary capacity of the mind, but his analogical reasoning does not identify the two, since that would make our volitions random. Lucretius could have replied to Carneades that, just as it is in our nature to act voluntarily, so it is in the nature of atoms to swerve their motion away from their established trajectories. The stake for the Epicureans was not whether or not the mind has a natural voluntary motion, but how such a motion might reasonably be accommodated within an atomist framework." (pp.233-234)
-Attila Németh, "Epicureans on Teleology and Freedom", in Kelly Arenson (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy, Routledge, 2020.
"Epicurus and his followers laboriously criticized those philosophers who believed in a purposefully created and arranged cosmos administered by a divinity. According to them,a blessed and immortal god experiences no troubles himself and causes none for anyoneelse (cf. KD 1) ; hence, such a being cannot be involved in the tiresome creation or administration of our world. The Epicureans consequently liberated their disciples fromthe superstitious fear of the gods, not by denying their existence, but by denying their status as active cosmological principles. The Epicureans material explanation of theuniverse, formulated in opposition to the theists, nonetheless threatened us with subjection to deterministic material laws. If our cosmos is deprived of a divine providence, being the accidental outcome of atoms purposelessly moving in the void, is it not the casethat every phenomenon in the world, including ourselves and our actions, is causallydetermined by the underlying atomic interactions ? In such a case, no room remains for freedom, even for the gods.
In formulating his anti-teleological theory, Epicurus came up with a multitude of argu-ments and innovative ideas, including some that explain how it is possible to preserve agenuine notion of freedom within the general framework of his materialism." (p.224)
"The pages of Xenophon
’
s
Memorabilia
present Socrates as the
????
rst systematic tele-ological thinker (
Mem.
I.4.2
–
10). In order to positively change his interlocutor Aris-todemus
’
attitude to religious practices
—
Xenophon tells us that he held that the gods arenot in need of his worship, since they are above human affairs
—
Socrates catalogues thegifts of the gods to humans (such natural endowments as religious sensibility, intelligence,non-seasonal sex etc.), arguing on the strength of these for the existence of a demiurge: a bene
????
cent, divine craftsman who made the world. Later in the book, he also develops anexplicitly anthropocentric teleology by describing our favorably-orchestrated relation to theanimal kingdom and the environment, both of which exist for man
’
s sake (
Mem.
IV 3.5
–
15). Socrates hence comes across as having formulated the
????
rst versions of several familiar teleological arguments, which were subsequently classi
????
ed as the Argument from Design(also referred to as Intelligent Design, hence ID): that is, arguments that deduce the exis-tence of a providential god from the evidence of rational design in the natural world.
2
Socrates
’
formulation is emphatically non-scienti
????
c: he believes that true piety consists inadmiring the outcomes of divine creation and expressing our gratitude by religious devotioninstead of speculating about the possible material causes of such rational divine activity.Socrates
’
motives for defending creationism have also been viewed as an attack on theearly atomists
’
competing model, which emphasized the creative powers of accident (Sedley 2017, pp. 86, 90, 134
–
5). Leucippus and Democritus thought that there are in
????
-nitely many atoms hurtling in in
????
nite void, and every now and then a large but
????
nitenumber of atoms spontaneously separate out from the rest and form a vortex, which in turncreates an entire cosmos. Given in
????
nite time, space and atoms, they held that it is not onlya possibility but a necessity that there are in
????
nitely many
kosmoi
generated in this fashion,including an in
????
nite number that are identical to our own. And although the early atomists believed in the existence of gods, they did not, similarly to Aristodemus
’
opinion, think of them as creators.
3
Plato, developing Socrates
’
teleological account in his cosmology, put forward a likelyaccount of divine creation in one of his latest works, the
Timaeus-Critias
(Scolnicov 2017).Timaeus, the main speaker of his eponymous dialogue, describes an intrinsically gooddivine craftsman, the Demiurge, who is the cause of our cosmos
’
existence, having becauseof his goodness rearranged a pre-existing material disorder in the best possible way.
4
Hemodelled our cosmos on the eternal Form of the genus Animal to re
????
ect the intelligiblerealm in the ruling motions of the world-soul of a single spherical living being, our world,which is inhabited by less pure rational souls, us, who are capable of reincarnation inmortal bodies in the perceptible realm of becoming. It has been debated since the time of Plato
’
s own students whether Plato, accordingly, believed in an asymmetrical universewhich had a beginning but no end, or whether Timaeus
’
creationist story was intended asan allegorical mythos of an eternal universe, cast in the chronological form of a narrative.Aristotle, Plato
’
s most eminent pupil, understood him in the former sense. Although heagreed that a divine being is the fundamental explanatory principle of the apparently pur- posive organisms in the universe, he did not think that the teleological structures of theseorganisms were ever created. Aristotle conceived of teleological or
????
nal causes as imma-nent in nature itself, as part of a natural design existing from all eternity. Such an intrinsicteleology is local but not global: Aristotle
’
s teleological explanations account for certainfeatures of the natural world, but they do not explain the cosmos as a whole. God, or theUnmoved Mover, could not have created these teleological structures, since he must himself be involved in the best possible activity, contemplation. He is therefore detached fromadministering the universe, let alone from having ever created it. Yet, the Unmoved Mover produces motion by becoming an object of desire, a motivating factor in Aristotle
’
s cos-mology. The entire natural world strives to imitate god
’
s eternal actuality
—
humans by philosophical contemplation (
NE
X
; all animals (humans included) and plants by pro-creation (De An
. II 4,
Politics
I 2); and even the non-animate elements by their naturalcycles (
Meteorologica
I 9). God, as the
telos
or the
????
nal cause of the natural world himself,is nonetheless unmoved, being self-absorbed in his pure self-contemplation.One upshot of this brief overview is that we can clearly see that Greek accounts of tele-ology before Epicurus had always been connected in one way or another to theology, to thestudy of the nature of God." (pp.225-226)
"The Stoics also thought of their material cosmos both as animated by an active divine principle and as a living being; yet their cosmos was clearly symmetrical, having a beginning and end. Since it is the best possible of worlds, perfect and complete, and one
????
nite world could not occupy all thein
????
nite available time, it keeps recurring endlessly, identical each time to all previous andsubsequent worlds." (p.226)
"Epicurus
’
argument for the in
????
nite number of worlds provides implicit evidence against divine teleology; it becomes explicit in a further extended form by one of his followers,Lucretius. Epicurus supported the simultaneous existence of in
????
nite worlds by arguing that the totality [
to pan
] of things is unlimited. For what is limited has an extremity, and anextremity is evident in contrast to something else; consequently, the totality of things cannot have an extremity, otherwise there would be something outside it, and it would not be atotality; therefore, it has no limit and since it has no limit, it must be unlimited and in
????
nite(
Ep. Hdt
. 41). Consequently, the in
????
nitely many atoms (cf. Lucretius
DRN
II 522
–
68) cantravel any distance in void. This naturally includes those atoms which are suitable [
epité-deia spermata
] for constituting a cosmos. Given that atoms are limited in their kinds, but each kind, according to the theory, is unlimited in its numbers, there are an in
????
nite number of
“
suitable seeds
”
able to constitute a cosmos; these thus cannot have been exhausted inone world, set within its own boundaries, or on any
????
nite number of differentiated worlds,whether these are like ours, or entirely different. There must therefore be in
????
nitely manyworlds (
Ep. Hdt
. 45).This conclusion excludes and thus implicitly refutes both the possibility of a single,anthropocentric, teleologically-arranged cosmos on either the Platonic or the later Stoicmodel, and that of a
????
nite Aristotelian universe. Lucretius extended the conclusion of theargument with the additional point that it would be inconceivable how any such divineleader could have powers adequate to control the in
????
nite universe (
DRN
II 1052
–
1104).This seems partly to rest on the assumption (Cicero,
DND
I 26
–
28) that an anthro- pomorphic divinity could not perceive and run the universe if it is in
????
nitely extended, because perception necessarily occurs in bodily extremities through which one perceiveswhat is outside oneself." (p.227)
"In modern discussions, one concept of moral responsibility turns often on the agent
’
sability to do otherwise even in the same set of circumstances. But Epicurus did not con-ceive of it in this way.
17
Instead, he thought that an agent is morally responsible and can beregarded as the cause of an action a) if he is not forced to bring it about; b) if his action is based on his desire or impulse to carry it out, and c) if he can act accordingly; and
????
nally d)if his action rests on his own beliefs
—
with b) thus actually stemming from d). This last criterion is the most fundamental to Epicurus
’
ethical conception, because without theability to change our beliefs, e.g. as a result of philosophical training, we could not even-tually alter or moderate some of our primary desires in harmony with what is appropriate toour rational development, and hence act virtuously. Without this we could not, in turn,achieve the most pleasurable human condition. Thus, the foundation of Epicurus
’
concep-tion of freedom is the idea that an agent is responsible for his beliefs because [...] we have the capacity to shape our beliefs as grownup rational animals and, based on our beliefs, have some desires that lead us to act in certain ways, we can be heldaccountable for what we do under no compulsion, and praised or blamed for our actionsand moral character.But how could Epicurus explain the real causal ef
????
cacy of an agent within the frame-work of his atomistic theory? Is it not the case that, even if we are the cause of certainactions based on our beliefs which are carried out freely without any external compulsion inharmony with our desires, we are still determined internally by the atomic motions of our constituent matter to such an extent that theoretically what we are going to believe andconsequently do is predictable? If what we do is necessitated by the internal causal atomicframework of our constituent matter, can we properly be praised or blamed for our actions?Can we consider ourselves free if we are internally determined? This worry arises in anytheory of causal determinism, according to which all events are determined by prior causes:taking any event E, given the causal laws that govern the universe
—
whatever they are
—
and the prior state of the world before E occurred, E was inevitable. Epicurus did not think that such a causally determined understanding of the world would be compatible with hisconception of freedom: hence, in order to solve the above worry, he introduced the atomicswerve. In theory, atoms swerve randomly, that is to say, at no determined place or time,inserting an element of indeterminacy on the atomic level into the material universe. But how exactly this random atomic swerve which breaks the internal causal continuity of matter is meant to provide for our freedom on the phenomenal level of our world is unclear." (pp.232)
"If atoms didnot swerve randomly from the trajectories of their motions, eventually all would falldownwards like drops of rain through deep void, and neither any collision nor a blow couldoccur among them given that atoms move with equal speed in void (cf.
DRN
II 225
–
242);consequently, nature would produce nothing (
DRN
II 216
–
250). Furthermore, (S2) if theatoms did not swerve, there would be a closed causal nexus on the atomic level and therewould be no free volition [
libera voluntas
]; but we see that animals in our experience evi-dently have this
libera voluntas
, so it cannot be the case that the atoms do not swerve (
DRN
II 251
–
293). Therefore, the atoms swerve, and the atomic level of the material world is not causally determined." (p.233)
"Lucretius argues for the existence of the swerve as a third type of atomic motion based on the evident voluntary capacity of the mind, but his analogical reasoning does not identify the two, since that would make our volitions random. Lucretius could have replied to Carneades that, just as it is in our nature to act voluntarily, so it is in the nature of atoms to swerve their motion away from their established trajectories. The stake for the Epicureans was not whether or not the mind has a natural voluntary motion, but how such a motion might reasonably be accommodated within an atomist framework." (pp.233-234)
-Attila Németh, "Epicureans on Teleology and Freedom", in Kelly Arenson (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy, Routledge, 2020.
