What Does Epicurean Philosophy Say About "Free Will"?
Listen to the latest Lucretius Today Podcast! Episode 226 is now available. We begin (with the help of Cicero's Epicurean spokesman) the first of a series of episodes to analyze the Epicurean view of the nature of the gods.
From Norman Dewitt's "Epicurus and His Philosophy" Chapter 10 - "The New Freedom"
Since Epicurus was the first to view the rational pursuit of happiness as a practical problem, it was naturally he who first came to grips with the problem of freedom and determinism. Having once assumed that happiness is the goal of life and that the rational pursuit of it presumes both the freedom of the individual and the possibility of planning the whole life, he was bound to single out all those external compulsions to which antecedent and contemporary thought had yielded belief and one by one to demonstrate them to be nonexistent, escapable, or conquerable. In this he was a natural pragmatist, assuming both the need and feasibility of controlling experience.
To begin, as usual, with the synoptic view, this is adequately set forth in a scholium. It should be noted that the problem of freedom arises as part of the problem of causation and that three causes are here presumed, necessity, chance, and human volition: "And he says in other books that some things happen of necessity, some from chance and others through our own choice." To this statement are added supporting reasons, which apply to the three causes respectively: "because necessity is subject to no correction and chance is a fickle thing but the part that is left to us is free of control, to which, incidentally, blame and the opposite naturally attach themselves." Thus in outline the limits of freedom and of moral responsibility are clearly recognized.
The content of the scholium admits of expansion through particulars that are available. Various kinds of necessity were recognized. One of these was observed in the movements of the heavenly bodies; mechanistic causes were assigned to these and no significance for human conduct was recognized.2 Another sort of necessity was that of infinite physical causation, sponsored by Democritus, from which escape was discovered through postulating the swerve of the atoms, that is, a degree of free play sufficient to permit of free will in the individual. Still another sort of necessity was that arising from the interference of the gods in the affairs of men. This was eliminated by declaring the gods to be exclusively concerned with their own happiness. A fourth kind of necessity was dialectical. This was simply ignored. For example, when the disjunctive proposition, "Tomorrow Hermarchus will either be alive or dead," was put up to Epicurus, he declined to give an answer. He was too wary a dialectician himself to swallow a dialectical bait.
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