1. How the teaching of Epicurus helps to temper the human mind

An overriding aim Nietzsche has in his middle period texts is to employ philosophy to temper mental and emotional excess. The task, as he sees it, is to help cool down the human mind. He writes in 1878:

Epicurean philosophy can play a key role here. Along with science in general, it serves to make us ‘colder and more sceptical’, helping to cool down ‘the fiery stream of belief in ultimate definitive truths’, a stream that has grown so turbulent through Christianity.Footnote ²² For Lucretius ‘there's no good life, no blessedness, without a mind made clear …’Footnote ²³ As Lucretius further writes in De Rerum Natura:

In interpreting Epicureanism as a form of knowledge and wisdom that tempers emotional and mental excess, Nietzsche is following a tradition well-established in nineteenth century thought that appreciates this point. Marx, for example, notes that the method of explanation ‘aims only at the ataraxy of self-consciousness, not at knowledge of nature in and for itself’.Footnote ²⁵ As Lange notes in his History of Materialism (1866), a text that deeply impressed the young Nietzsche: ‘The mere historical knowledge of natural events, without a knowledge of causes, is valueless; for it does not free us from fear nor lift us upon superstition. The more causes of change we have discovered, the more we shall attain the calmness of contemplation; and it cannot be supposed that this inquiry can be without result upon our happiness’.Footnote ²⁶ If we can come to regard change in things as necessarily inherent in their existence we free ourselves from our natural terror at this order of change and evolution. If we believe in the old myths we live in fear of the eternal torments to come; if we are too sensible to believe in these torments we may still apprehend the loss of all feeling which comes with death as an evil, as if the soul could continue to feel this deprivation. As every student of philosophy knows death for Epicurus is an affair of indifference and precisely because it deprives us of all feeling. As Lange glosses Epicurus, ‘So long as we are, there is as yet no death; but as soon as death comes, then we exist no more’.Footnote ²⁷ If events can be explained in accordance with universal laws, with effects attributable to natural causes, an important goal of philosophy can be attained and secured, chiefly liberation from fear and anxiety.

In The Wanderer and his Shadow Nietzsche describes Epicurus as ‘the soul-soother (Seelen-Beschwichtiger) of later antiquity’ who had the ‘wonderful insight’ that to quieten our being it is not necessary to have resolved the ultimate and outermost theoretical questions.Footnote ²⁸ To those who are tormented by the fear of the gods, one points out that if the gods exist they do not concern themselves with us and that it is unnecessary to engage in ‘fruitless disputation’ over the ultimate question as to whether they exist or not. Furthermore, in response to the consideration of a hypothesis, half belonging to physics and half to ethics, and that may cast gloom over our spirits, it is wise to refrain from refuting the hypothesis and instead offer a rival hypothesis, even a multiplicity of hypotheses. To someone who wishes to offer consolation – for example, to the unfortunate, to ill-doers, to hypochondriacs, and so on – one can call to mind two pacifying formulae of Epicurus that are capable of being applied to many questions: ‘firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise’.Footnote ²⁹

Nietzsche's middle period writings are marked, then, by an Epicurean enlightenment. What appeals to Nietzsche about Epicurus is the emphasis on a refined egoism, the teaching on mortality, and the general attempt to liberate the mind from unjustified fears and anxieties. The Epicureanism we can find in Nietzsche in his middle period indicates his preference for individual therapy and self-cultivation over large-scale social transformation and political revolution. In Dawn (1881) Nietzsche explicitly writes against impatient political invalids and argues instead in favour of ‘small doses’ as a way of bringing about change.Footnote ³⁰ It seems certain that at this time he sought to found a philosophical school modelled on Epicurus's garden. In a letter of 26 March 1879 he asks his amanuensis Peter Gast: ‘Where are we going to renew the garden of Epicurus?’ In addition he writes that Epicurus ‘is the best negative argument in favour of my challenge to all rare spirits to isolate themselves from the mass of their fellows’.Footnote ³¹ In 306 BC Epicurus founds his school in Athens, and this remains a presence in the city until the second century A.D. In contrast to the Stoics who philosophised in the agora of Athens, never far from the public eye, Epicurus and his followers did philosophy in a garden which bore the injunction ‘live unnoticed’. Another injunction was ‘do not get involved in political life’.Footnote ³² The school took the form of a community of friends who lived within the walls of the garden and worked together, studying under Epicurus, writing philosophical works, and growing their own food: going against the mores of the time it was open to both slaves and women. So, the school was a community based on friendship and friendship was considered by the Epicureans to be the most important thing of all. As one commentator has written:

Epicureanism was an apolitical or even anti-political philosophy. The ideal mental state to attain for the Epicurean is ataraxia (freedom from disturbance, or imperturbability), and to achieve this the philosopher had to withdraw from the disturbances of everyday life as much as possible, including public affairs which were seen as a particular cause of mental disquiet and disturbance (this is a key difference with Stoicism which advocated involvement in public life). This apolitical, even anti-political stance, is reflected in the ethos Nietzsche adopts in his middle period texts. He writes at one point:

‘Our age’, Nietzsche writes at one point in Dawn, ‘no matter how much it talks and talks about economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, spirit’.Footnote ³⁵ Nietzsche succinctly articulates his concern in the following manner: ‘Political and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society's most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than having none at all’.Footnote ³⁶ Today, he goes on to note, everyone feels obliged to know what is going on every day to the point of neglecting their own work or therapy and in order to feel part of things, and ‘the whole arrangement has become a great and ludicrous piece of insanity’.Footnote ³⁷ The therapy Nietzsche is proposing in Dawn is, then, directed at those free spirits who exist on the margin or fringes of society and seek to cultivate or fashion new ways of thinking and feeling, attempting to do this by taking the time necessary to work through their experiences.

The view that Epicureanism advocates an apolitical posture is in need of some refinement. It might be suggested that the philosophy of Epicurus offers an alternative way of organising communities, promoting practices – such as justice, friendship, and economic co-operation – that are genuinely useful to people's needs and eliminating all that promotes false conceptions of values and places our happiness in danger.Footnote ³⁸ It is the case, however, that Nietzsche appropriates Epicureanism for the ends of an ethical reformation Although he anticipates ‘numerous novel experiments’ taking place in ‘ways of life and modes of society’Footnote ³⁹, his model at this time for the practice of self-cultivation is Epicurus's garden.

2. The Inventor of Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing

In each of the different main stages of his intellectual development Nietzsche comes up with a striking conception of philosophy. In his early period he urges philosophy to hold onto to the sublime since it is the sublime, he thinks, that enables us to distinguish between what is great and what is small, and so to appreciate what is rare, extraordinary, and stupendous. Here the philosopher is seen as an abnormality and outsider in search of a new people. In the late period, and as is well-known, philosophy is defined as legislation and creative positing, and the philosopher is a lawgiver who declares ‘thus it shall be!’ In the middle period Nietzsche offers a conception of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’ with the philosopher conceived as a figure of great sobriety and extraordinary serenity.

The reality of the ‘heroic-idyllic’ struck Nietzsche with the force of a revelation. In a note from July-August 1879 he writes, for example:

In The Wanderer and his Shadow Nietzsche depicts an idyllic scene entitled ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, involving looking down ‘over waves of hills, through fir-trees and spruce trees grave with age, towards a milky green lake’.Footnote ⁴¹ Whilst cattle graze on their own and gather in groups, the narrator of the aphorism experiences ‘everything at peace in the contentment of evening.’ Whilst looking upon the herders in the field, he witnesses mountain slopes and snowfields to the left and, high above him, to the right two gigantic ice-covered peaks that seem to float in a veil of sunlit vapour: ‘everything big, still and bright’.Footnote ⁴² The beauty of the whole scene induces in him an experience of the sublime, ‘a sense of awe and of adoration of the moment of its revelation’; involuntarily, as if completely natural, he inserts ‘into this pure, clear world of light’, free of desire and expectation, with no looking before or behind, Hellenic heroes, and he compares the feeling to that of Poussin and his pupil (probably Claude Lorrain), at one and the same time heroic and idyllic, noting to himself that some human beings have actually lived in accordance with this experience, having ‘enduringly felt they existed in the world and the world existed in them’.Footnote ⁴³ Epicurus is singled out for special mention.

The title of this aphorism is borrowed from two paintings of Poussin and was also adopted by Goethe as the motto of his Italian journey (1829). In fact, Poussin's paintings were inspired by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) and his painting of around 1618–22 entitled ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. This painting depicts the discovery of death in Arcady, a region of Greece thought to be an earthly paradise: we see two shepherds gazing out of a wood at a skull that has been placed on a masonry plinth, and underneath the skull the inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ can be read. Such words seem to be intended as a message spoken by death itself, ‘I, Death, am also in Arcady’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Poussin's first painting, bearing the same title, dates from 1627–8, and the second painting, with the same title, from 1638–9. In the first painting, which features a skull and two shepherds (but also flanked by a young shepherdess and a river god), the main motif is, once again, the recognition of human mortality. In the second version of the painting, from a decade later, a sarcophagus now lies in the centre of the picture and the scene depicted is much more allegorical. Although still a painting about the discovery of death in Arcadia, the foreground depiction of details such as the skull is omitted and instead we are presented ‘with subtle allusions that do not disturb the atmosphere of contemplative but cheerful relaxation’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the second painting the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ are no longer uttered by death itself but might be the lament of a girl who has died young and who is buried in the sarcophagus: ‘I, too, was once in Arcady.’ This is how the Abbé Dubos interpreted the painting in the early eighteenth century and this interpretation then exerted an influence on writers and poets such as Schiller and Novalis, where the words are employed as a stock-phrase, being adopted in verses that sing longingly of the possibility of a better world and of resignation to the fact of having missed it.Footnote ⁴⁶

There are several striking things about Nietzsche's turn to, and portrait of, the idyllic. First, we can note the contrast with his earlier critique of the idyll in The Birth of Tragedy where it is equated with the superficial and the optimistic.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, in his depiction of the heroic-idyllic scene the reality of death is completely absent from it. What might be informing Nietzsche's decision to leave death out of the picture is the Epicurean inspiration that the fear of death has been conquered and death is nothing to us.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus, Nietzsche does not wish the image of the tombstone to cast a shadow over the idyll he is focusing our attention on: for this reason it is both heroic and idyllic. And third, for Nietzsche the idyll is not in any inaccessible celestial heavens but belongs in this world and is within our reach, and what takes place after death does not concern us anymore.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nietzsche writes in Dawn: ‘…the after-death no longer concerns us! An unspeakable blessing … and once again, Epicurus triumphs!’Footnote ⁵⁰

The ‘heroic-idyllic’ is heroic, then, at least in part, because conquering the fear of death is involved and the human being has the potential to walk on the earth as a god, living a blessed life, and idyllic because Epicurus philosophised, calmly and serenely, and away from the crowd, in a garden. In Human, all too Human Nietzsche writes of a ‘refined heroism’ ‘which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses … and goes silently through the world and out of the world’.Footnote ⁵¹ This is deeply Epicurean in inspiration: Epicurus taught that one should die as if one had never lived. As I have already noted, there is a modesty of human existence in Epicurean teaching that greatly appeals to the middle period Nietzsche.

3. Overcoming the Fear of Death

In her Therapy of Desire Martha Nussbaum explains well the nature of Epicurus's intervention in a society ‘that values money and luxury above the health of the soul’, and in which ‘every enterprise is poisoned by the fear of death, a fear that will not let any of its members taste any stable joy, but turns them into the grovelling slaves of corrupt religious teachers’.Footnote ⁵² As Lucretius has it:

In his middle period Nietzsche picks up the Epicurean doctrine on death and puts it to critical effect. For Nietzsche our religions and moralities do not wed us to the earth as a site of dwelling and thinking; rather, we consider ourselves ‘too good and too significant for the earth’, as if we were paying it only a passing visit.Footnote ⁵⁴ Several aphorisms in Dawn consider humanity's misguided dream of an immortal existence. Dawn 211 is an especially witty aphorism in which Nietzsche considers the impertinence of the dream. He notes that the actual existence of a single immortal human being would be enough to drive everyone else on earth into a rampage of death and suicide out of being sick and tired of it! He adds:

Nietzsche champions Epicurus as a figure who has sought to show mankind how it can conquer its fears of death. Identifying the goal of a good life with the removal of mental and physical pain Epicureans place, ‘the eradication of the fears of death at the very heart of their ethical project’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a ‘therapy of anguish’ Epicureanism is a philosophy that aims to procure peace of mind, and an essential task here is to liberate the mind from its irrational fear of death. It seeks to do this by showing that the soul does not survive the body and that death is not and cannot be an event within life.

In the letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus seeks to identify what the study of philosophy can do for the health of the soul and on the premise that, ‘pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Epicurus stresses that he does not mean the pleasures of the profligate or of consumption; rather, the task, is to become accustomed to simple, non-extravagant ways of living. Although Epicurus regards voluptas as the highest good, in which we can take delight in all that nature has provided to stimulate pleasure, it is an error to suppose that for him happiness is to be found ‘simply in eating, drinking, gambling, wenching, and other such pastimes.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Nietzsche seems to have fully appreciated this point. The key goal for Epicurus is to liberate the body from pain and remove disturbances from the soul. Central to his counsel is the thought that we need to accustom ourselves to believing that death is nothing to us; our longing for immortality needs to be removed: ‘… there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life.’Footnote ⁵⁹ What appears to be the most frightening of bad things should be nothing to us, ‘since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.’Footnote ⁶⁰ The wise human being ‘neither rejects life nor fears death. For living does not offend him, nor does he believe not living to be something bad.’Footnote ⁶¹ If, as Epicurus supposes, everything good and bad consists in sense-experience, then death is simply the privation of sense-experience. The goal of philosophical training, then, is freedom from disturbance and anxiety in which we reach a state of ataraxia or psychic tranquillity: the body is free from pain and the soul is liberated from distress.

According to Martha Nussbaum, Epicurus's teaching amounts to an inversion of Plato because for him truth is in the body and in contrast to Plato for whom the body is the main source of delusion and bewitchment and where the task is to purify ourselves of our bodily attachments through proper mathematical and dialectical training.Footnote ⁶² This inversion was well understood by Nietzsche and appreciated by him. In the texts of the middle period, including and perhaps especially Dawn, Nietzsche highlights the dangers of a teaching of pure spirituality. By definition such a teaching is excessive and in the process destroys much nervous energy: ‘it taught one to despise, ignore, or torment the body and, on account of all one's drives, to torment and despise oneself’. The teaching succeeds in producing human beings who feel melancholy and oppressed and conclude that the cause of their distress and anxiety must reside in the body, which continues to flourish. As Nietzsche points out, in such cases it is in fact the body that registers a protest against such derision. He draws attention to the irrational mode of existence that spiritual excess results in: ‘A pervasive, chronic hyper-excitability was eventually the lot of these virtuous pure spirits’ since ‘the only pleasure they could muster was in the form of ecstasy and other harbingers of madness’.Footnote ⁶³ Their mode of being thus reaches an apogee when ecstasy is accepted as the highest goal in life and the as the standard.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Dawn Epicurus is portrayed as the enemy of the idea of punishments in Hell after death, which was developed by numerous secret cults of in the Roman Empire and was taken up by Christianity. For Nietzsche the triumph of Epicurus's teaching resounds most beautifully in the mouth of the sombre Roman Lucretius but comes too early. Christianity takes the belief in ‘subterranean terrors’ under its special protection and this foray into heathendom enables it to carry the day over the popularity of the Mithras and Isis cults, winning to its side the rank of the timorous as the most zealous adherents of the new faith (Nietzsche notes that because of the extent of the Jews’ attachment to life such an idea fell on barren ground). However, the teaching of Epicurus triumphs anew in the guise of modern science which has rejected ‘any other representation of death and any life beyond it’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nietzsche, then, is keen to encourage human beings to cultivate an attitude towards existence in which they accept their mortality and attain a new serenity about their dwelling on the earth, to conquer unjustified fears, and to reinstitute the role played by chance and chance events in the world and in human existence.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Hadot notes, for the Epicurean sage the world is the product of chance, not divine intervention, and this brings with it pleasure and peace of mind, freeing him from an unreasonable fear of the gods and allowing him to consider each moment as an unexpected miracle. Each moment of existence can be greeted with immense gratitude.Footnote ⁶⁷

Nietzsche finds in Epicurus a victory over pessimism in which death becomes the last celebration of a life which is constantly embellished.Footnote ⁶⁸ This last of the Greek philosophers teaches the joy of living in the midst of a world in decay and where all moral doctrines preach suffering. As Richard Roos puts it, ‘The example of Epicurus teaches that a life filled with pain and renunciation prepares one to savour the little joys of the everyday better. Relinquishing Dionysian intoxication, Nietzsche becomes a student of this master of moderate pleasures and careful dosages’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Epicurus Nietzsche discovers what Roos calls aptly an ‘irresistible power’ and a rare strength of spirit, and quotes Nietzsche from 1880: ‘I found strength in the very places one does not look for it, in simple, gentle and helpful men … powerful natures dominate, that is a necessity, even if those men do not move one finger. And they bury themselves, in their lifetime, in a pavilion in their garden’ (KSA 9, 6 [206]).Footnote ⁷⁰

There are gaps, potentially significant ones, in Nietzsche's appreciation of the Epicurean teaching with regards to death. For example, he never subjects to critical analysis the effectiveness of Epicurus's arguments but simply assumes that the rediscovery of the certainty of death within modern science, along with the demise of the Christian afterlife, is sufficient to eliminate mortality as a source of anguish. But the triumph of the Epicurean view that we are mortal and need not live in fear of an after-life is not necessarily a triumph for the Epicurean view that we should not fear death: one can eliminate fear of the after-life by exposing it as a myth, but this does not liberate us from the fear of extinction. Nietzsche does not make it clear whether he thinks the Epicurean arguments suffice to console us for the fact of our mortality, though there are places in his corpus where he appears to be offering new post-religious consolations, such as the consolation we can gain from the recognition that as experimental free spirits the sacrifices we make of our lives to knowledge may lead to a more enlightened humanity in the future (others may prosper where we have not been able to).

4. A Gate of Hospitality

Taken as a whole, Dawn of 1881 perhaps represents Nietzsche's most avowedly Epicurean moment. It is an attempt to revitalise for a modern age ancient philosophical concerns, notably a teaching for mortal souls who wish to be liberated from the fear and anguish of existence, as well as from God, the metaphysical need, and are able to affirm their mortal conditions of existence. Here one might adopt Hadot's insight into the therapeutic ambitions of ancient philosophy which was, he claims, ‘intended to cure mankind's anguish’ (for example, anguish over our mortality).Footnote ⁷¹ This is evident in the teaching of Epicurus which sought to demonstrate the mortality of the soul and whose aim was, in the words of a recent commentator, ‘to free humans from “the fears of the mind” ’.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, Nietzsche's teaching in Dawn is for mortal souls.Footnote ⁷³

Dawn occupies a special place in Nietzsche's development because it's with this work, he stresses in Ecce Homo, that there begins in earnest his ‘campaign against morality’, although he adds that here – and this is important – we should not detect the whiff of gunpowder but smell something quite different and much sweeter. Although at this time Nietzsche is in favour of free-minded and progressive social transformation, he is no advocate of revolution: the process of change should be a slow and gradual one, and in Dawn we find Nietzsche outlining a therapy made up of ‘slow cures’ and ‘small doses’. If Nietzsche wants his readers to achieve a free-mindedness with respect to religion, the same is also the case with morality, for example, relinquishing the idea that there is a simple definition of morality and embracing the idea that there is no single moral-making morality.

Nietzsche's Epicureanism in Dawn is perhaps most evident in the way he polemicizes against morality. The ‘campaign’ centres largely on a critique of what Nietzsche sees as the modern tendency, the tendency of his own century, to identify morality with the sympathetic affects, especially Mitleid, so as to give us a definition of morality. Nietzsche has specific arguments against the value accorded to these affects, but he also wants to advocate the view that there are several ways of living morally or ethically and the morality he wants to defend is what we can call an ethics of self-cultivation. In place of what he sees as the ruling ethic of sympathy, which he thinks can assume the form of a ‘tyrannical encroachment’, Nietzsche invites individuals to engage in self-fashioning, cultivating a self that others can look at with pleasure and that still gives vent to the expression, albeit in a subtle and delicate manner, of an altruistic drive. We find the allusion to Epicurus and his mode of living is made explicit:

Nietzsche's ethical commitment is clear from this aphorism: a pleasure and care of self that strives for independence and self-sufficiency. One does not isolate oneself from others, but neither does one seek to effect a tyrannical encroachment on them. Instead, one offers a ‘hospitable gate’ through which others can freely enter and leave, and through self-cultivation one fashions a style of existing that others will behold with pleasure. As Michael Ure has helpfully shown, in opposition to the desert of undifferentiated atoms offered by modern commercial culture Nietzsche provides the image of an oasis and one that depicts neither the past glories of Homeric agonism nor the resplendent isolation of the noble individual.Footnote ⁷⁵ The image Nietzsche comes up with of a self-enclosed garden clearly draws on ideas of paradise in the Western tradition (our word ‘paradise’ etymologically derives from the Persian for ‘walled garden’, paradeiza), and he provocatively counters the Christian idea of a locked gate or porta clausa with that of a hospitable one: ‘To cultivate oneself … is to create oneself as a paradise garden for the other’.Footnote ⁷⁶

5. The Happiness of the Afternoon of AntiquityFootnote ⁷⁷

Nietzsche writes in 1882 that he is proud of the fact that he experiences the character of Epicurus differently from perhaps everybody else: ‘Whatever I hear or read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity’. In this aphorism, entitled ‘Epicurus’, Nietzsche writes:

As Monika Langer has recently noted in her interpretation of this aphorism, although clearly a paean of sorts to Epicurus, Nietzsche does not elaborate on the origin or nature of his happiness and suffering, but rather tacitly encourages the reader to consider various possibilities. In the end she argues that Nietzsche is reading Epicurus as a figure who whilst standing securely on firm ground, gazes at the sea and is able to enjoy the possibility of uncertainty it offers. She writes, ‘Literally and figuratively he can float on the sea.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Epicurus is depicted as the antithesis of modernity's shipwrecked man since such is his liberation and serenity he can ‘chart his course or simply set sail and let the wind determine his way’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although he might suffer shipwreck and drown or survive he does not live in fear of dangers and hazards: ‘In taking to the sea he might lose his bearings and even his mind.’ In contrast to modern man who is keen to leave behind the insecurity of the sea for the safety of dry land, ‘Epicurus delights in the ever present possibility of leaving that secure land for the perils of the sea.’Footnote ⁸¹

This interpretation misses the essential insight Nietzsche is developing into Epicurus in the aphorism. Rather than suggesting that the sea calls for further and continued exploration, hiding seductive dangers that Epicurus would not be afraid of, Nietzsche seems to hold to the view that Epicurus is the seasoned traveller of the soul who has no desire to travel anymore and for whom the meaning of the sea has changed. Rather than serving as a means of transportation or something that beckons us towards other shores, the sea has become an object of contemplation in the here and now. It is something to be looked at for its own sake and in a way that discloses its infinite nuances and colours. The scene Nietzsche depicts is one of Epicurean illumination or enlightenment: Epicurus is not estranged from nature and recognizes his kinship with animals and the elements of nature. Rather than deploying his contemplation of the sea to bolster his own ego (thinking of his own safety or taking pride in fearlessness), Epicurus abandons his sense of self altogether so that he can open himself up to the sea of existence, and perhaps here we find an alternative to Dionysian ecstasy, entailing a more peaceful and less grandiose loss of the self into the Ur-Eine. Unlike Christ, Epicurus does not walk on the water but floats serenely on the sea, buoyed up by it and even cradled by it, happy with the gifts life has to offer, and existing beyond fear and anxiety even though he is opening himself up to troubling realities, such as the approach of death and his personal extinction: ‘We are born once and cannot be born twice, but we must be no more for all time.’Footnote ⁸²

As Langer rightly notes, the imagery deployed in the aphorism is striking since far from evoking boredom the serenity of Epicurus signals a kind of ecstatic bliss.Footnote ⁸³ And yet there is much in this aphorism that merits careful exegesis and that, in the end, remains elusive. Why is the sea ‘white’? What is the role being played by the animals depicted at the heart of the scene? What does Epicurus suffer from and why does he suffer continually? Let's note that the ‘afternoon of antiquity’ refers to the specific cultural horizon that characterizes the moment of Epicurus within the history of philosophy: it is not the ‘dawn’ of the emergence of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, and neither is it the dark period that philosophy is plunged into with the rise of Christian morality. It would seem that the sea is white because it characterizes the tumultuous nature of human experience: the white colour of the sea comes from the froth of waves crashing against one another and serves as a metaphor for human existence in which life is fraught with difficulties and beset by fears, most notably the fear of death and anxieties about the future. The mention of sunlight is significant since it makes the entire scene clearly visible to anyone who looks upon it; the roll of the waves is obvious to anyone who cares to look and who is not suffering from myopia or a similar affliction, and so it is up to individuals to gaze on the world and attain a standpoint on existence beyond fear and anxiety. We are to learn from animals since they are tethered to the present moment and do not live in anticipation of death and the anxiety this anticipation generates for human beings. Epicurus might be suffering from physical ailments – we know these were acute at the end of his life – but he is also surely suffering from the anxiety of existence. However, Nietzsche sees the philosophical task as essentially a practical one, namely, that of conquering such anxiety, becoming serene in the process and, like a child playing with a kaleidoscope, appreciating, even being enchanted by, the many shades of colour that characterize existence.

At stake in the Epicurean way of life are those things which threaten human happiness, such as disturbances that arise from our irrational fear of death and the idea that divine decisions impact on the world and on the next life. Therefore, at the heart of Epicurean teaching is freedom from the fear of death and freedom from fear of the gods. An important distinction is made between kinetic pleasure and katastematic pleasure and that works as follows: ‘kinetic’ pleasure is basic instinctive pleasure produced by action to satisfy a need, such as the ingestion of food or the ejaculation of sperm; this is an unstable kind of pleasure since it is temporary and involves pain – the pleasure of eating will soon be followed by the pain of hunger, etc.; ‘katastematic’ pleasure is ‘stable’ in that it endures and involves no pain: it is the pleasure of contentment and serenity, involving the absence of need and desire, and psychic equilibrium. It is superior to the animal pursuits of food and sex and for the Epicureans is to be elevated into the highest goal of life, attaining the state of ‘ataraxia’. As Gisela Striker puts it, Epicurus was perhaps the first philosopher who sought to bring this mental state into the framework of a eudaemonist theory and by arguing that it is a special sort of pleasure.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is to be reached by true insight and reasoning. James Porter describes it as the ‘basal experience of pleasure’ on account of it being the criterion of all pleasure’. In this sense, then, it is more than a condition of simple or mere happiness since ‘it seems to operate as life's internal formal principle, as that which gives moral sense and shape to a life that is lived ...’Footnote ⁸⁵

In The Gay Science 45 Nietzsche makes a specific contribution to our understanding of Epicurean happiness. According to the portrait of Epicurus he provides this happiness is hard-won and has a precarious character: the sea of existence has become calm but, as one commentator has put it, ‘its continued calmness cannot be guaranteed, and the “shuddering skin of the sea” is a constant reminder of the turmoil that may return.’Footnote ⁸⁶ The aphorism, however, is opaque and it has to be acknowledged that Nietzsche maintains in it the distance between his portrait of Epicurus and the existence of Epicurus himself: it's far from clear if he is, in fact, offering Epicurus as some kind of philosophical ideal or whether in fact he is suggesting that the Epicurean mode of living is not available to us mere human beings. There is something god-like, even superhuman, about the Epicurean mode of living, and whilst Nietzsche may on occasion be in awe of it, it's not necessarily the case that he is recommending it to us. The critical concerns he has about it manifest themselves only in his late writings, to which I now turn in conclusion.