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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2014
This essay looks at Nietzsche in relation to the Epicurean tradition. It focuses on his middle period writings of 1878–82 – texts such as Human, all too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science – and seeks to show that an ethos of Epicurean enlightenment pervades these texts, with Epicurus celebrated for his teaching of modest pleasures and cultivation of philosophical serenity. For Nietzsche, Epicurus is one of the greatest human beings to have ever graced the earth and the inventor of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’. At the same time, Nietzsche claims to understand Epicurus differently to everybody else. The essay explores the main figurations of Epicurus we find in his middle period and concludes by taking a critical look at his later and more ambivalent reception of Epicurus.
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12 Roos, Richard, ‘Nietzsche et Épicure: l'idylle héroique’, in Balaudé, Jean-François and Wotling, Patrick (eds), Lectures de Nietzsche (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), 283–350Google Scholar, 298
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29 Ibid.
30 Nietzsche, Dawn, trans. Smith, Brittain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google ScholarPubMed, section 534
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36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
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41 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, section 295
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid. One might even see in this contemplation of nature, where all is peace and calm and where we have moved beyond ‘desire and expectation’, something of Schopenhauer's ideas on art, including the release from the subjectivity of the will. Schopenhauer, in fact, depicted such a state in Epicurean terms: ‘Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will.’ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, in two volumes, trans. Payne, E. F. J. (New York: Dover Press, 1966)Google ScholarPubMed, volume one, section 38, 196. See also Schopenhauer on the ‘aesthetic delight’ to be had from the experience of light: ‘Light is most pleasant and delightful; it has become the symbol of all that is good and salutary’, 199.
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46 Ibid. Schopenhauer refers to Schiller's belief that ‘we are all born in Arcadia’ in chapter five of his ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’, (1974) in Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. Payne, E. F. J. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)Google Scholar, volume one, 408. Schopenhauer interprets this as the view that we come into the world with claims to happiness and pleasure; he insists though that ‘fate’ soon enters the picture of life and seizes us harshly and roughly, teaching us that nothing belongs to us but everything to it. In short, our yearning after happiness and pleasure is a fanciful if noble ideal that we have to learn to modify and moderate: ‘We then recognize that the best the world has to offer is a painless, quiet, and tolerable existence to which we restrict our claims in order to be the more certain of making them good. For the surest way not to become very unhappy is for us not to expect to be very happy’ (ibid.).
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58 Jones, Howard, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar, 152
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60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 110. Nussbaum also offers an imaginative insight into Epicurus's Garden, (119ff)
63 Nietzsche, Dawn, section 39
64 See also Nietzsche, Dawn, section 50
65 Nietzsche, Dawn, section 72
66 See Nietzsche, Dawn, sections 13, 33, 36. On Epicurus on fear and chance see Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 87, 223, and 252
67 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 252
68 Roos, ‘Nietzsche et Épicure’, 299
69 Ibid. 309
70 Ibid. 300
71 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 265–6
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77 My appreciation of this aphorism from The Gay Science has been greatly enriched by the MA seminar I taught on Nietzsche at Warwick University in the spring term of 2013. I benefitted from the contributions of Kamaran Abdulla, Christopher Howlett, Robert Kron, Luis Mulhall, Andrew Paull, and especially Jeffrey Pickernell. I am also deeply indebted to thoughts suggested to me by Beatrice Han-Pile and Rainer Hanshe.
78 The Gay Science, section 45
79 Langer, Monika M., Nietzsche's Gay Science: Dancing Coherence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 67
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81 Langer, Nietzsche's Gay Science, 67
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91 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Faber, Marion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google ScholarPubMed, section 10
92 Reginster, Bernard, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 240
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95 See Knight, ‘Nietzsche and Epicurean Philosophy’, 439
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97 Vincenzo, ‘Nietzsche and Epicurus’, 390
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99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 295.
102 Ibid., section 12.
103 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, section 295.
