In response to my provocation a couple weeks ago, folks raised some excellent points. In particular they raised Lacanian questions about desire and the repetition of jouissance or the death drive. This is precisely what I like about Epicureanism: it is an empiricist ethical system. What does that mean? It means that we can’t start from timeless ethical axioms, but that we need to know things about biology, economics, sociology, psychology, and so on. Where other ethical systems say “this is the goal and this is what we are”, Epicureanism is singular in saying “right now we think this is what we are, this is our hypothesis, but further inquiry might lead us to very different conclusions and historical and technological differences might lead to very different questions.”
To be Epicurean (or Lucretian) today is not to rotely follow a particular doctrine, but to adopt that spirit of empirical ethics. In other words, if we discover that Freud and Lacan were correct, the question of happiness is substantially transformed. We end up in a place such as Freud outlined in Civilization and its Discontents, where he talked about the goal of analysis as that of transforming misery into ordinary human unhappiness, or where Lacan suggested that the end of analysis consists in identification with the symptom rather than belief in the symptom. Jonathan Lear has also been tireless in reworking questions of happiness and eudaimonia in terms of psychoanalytic theory (hopefully he’ll branch out into neurology and ecology at some point). In other words, the question of happiness and justice must always be posed in terms of– I hate to use the term –our “existential condition” and what our “nature” is, and answers to these questions are “moving targets”. The strength of Epicureanism is that it makes room for that.
This is the power of the Lucretian-Epicurean orientation. It doesn’t begin from the premise that we know what we are and therefore that we know what the telos of our ethics ought to be, but instead begins from the premise that we must learn and discover our nature, our ecological conditions, our social conditions, and pose our questions of happiness within this framework, fully recognizing the limits on that happiness by virtue of being finite, material, embodied, beings. Being Epicurean or Lucretian today does not entail a Talmudic relation to their thought, but rather an orientation from their thought that squarely faces the problem of inquiry with respect to our psychological being, our ecology, and our social relations. It is not a dead text that we perpetually return to as a source of authority and answers, but a sort of methodology or inspiration. In this regard, the ethics of “not giving way on your desire” (in the Lacanian sense, not “American” sense) is thoroughly Epicurean insofar as the title of Lacan’s 19th seminar is Ou Pire, “or worse”. To betray your desire through pursuit of the pleasure principle as opposed to the “one more” and “again!” of jouissance brings far more devastating consequences than living one’s desire. That’s an Epicurean argument if ever one I’ve heard.
Larval Subjects . 
March 27, 2013 at 2:21 pm
I have a question or two about this. I don’t have any texts nearby, so I could be wrong, but doesn’t Epicurus believe that pleasure is the highest good? Pleasure not in the blinding, ecstatic sense, but as closer to a balanced, relatively placid condition free from pain and trauma, and from a psychoanalytic perspective, much more in harmony with the pleasure principle than any ethic of the drive or juissance. You know, reduction of tension and all that. It seems that the Epicurean is interested in the empirical sciences to the extent that 1-studying is a pleasant, mild activity in itself, and 2- the knowledge gleamed can be used to reduce pain as much as possible.
Now, it seems to me that psychoanalysis accounts for why this ethical attitude, reasonable in design, quickly mutates into a destructive obsession with health, maximizing well being, avoiding pain, regulating and protecting the body, etc. With the superego and the death drive, the pursuit of reduced tension becomes the ultimate source of tension.
My point is that the lessons of psychoanalysis have taught us that man is an obsessive animal, highly susceptible to injurious fixations and rigid identifications. The desire for freedom from this state often takes its form and perpetuates it in a different guise. I read Lacanian ethics as an acceptance and endorsement of this.
But maybe this is what others brought up in some of your other posts; I haven’t read them. But it seemed that you wanted to reconcile Epicurus with Lacan, so if that wasn’t even close to your intention, then I apologize for my obtuseness.
March 27, 2013 at 4:23 pm
Frank,
All of that’s correct. My thesis is two-fold. First, it’s the thesis that Epicureanism is based on an empirical theory of human nature that necessarily has to take into account the interplay between our biology, psychology, and social relations. As a consequence, it can only begin with a hypothetical understanding of what we are, not an a priori understanding of what we are. If, as psychoanalysis has taught us, we are riddled with desire and death drive that oppose the pleasure principle, an Epicurean framework has to take that into account and work it into its picture of what the good life would be. Second, from the psychoanalytic perspective, we need to be cautious of romanticizing desire and death drive. Psychoanalysis, in its Lacanian variant, indeed argues that it would have been better never to have been born by virtue of how we’re constituted, but that doesn’t entail that it celebrates the suffering of the death drive. Over the course of analysis the hope, in part, is that better, less painful, and less destructive routes to jouissance (which is not pleasure) are found. That’s an entirely Epicurean thesis. I guess what I’m calling for is a “neo-Epicureanism” that takes jouissance, repetition, and the symptom into account.
May 8, 2013 at 12:44 am
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