The Demanding Pleasures of Coupling

Ever since certain philosophers in Thessaloniki came across St. Paul and wondered “What will this babbler say?” (Acts 17), the schools of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Christianity have been caught in a complex entanglement. They represent different ways of approaching the body, morality, and rationality; writers and artists in the eighteenth century contested their claims, stimulating generations of subsequent scholarship. Stoicism experienced a major revival from the Renaissance onwards, and has been traced in its literary, philosophical, and political dimensions. Epicureanism had a strong presence too, disseminated through Pierre Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (1649) and through editions of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Epicureanism was particularly important for those who were skeptical of political authority and had a major impact on Enlightenment natural philosophy.

Thomas Kavanagh’s new book traces ethical strands of Epicureanism and Stoicism through eighteenth-century French novels and paintings, by showing how they represented pleasure. At one point, he summarizes his argument as follows:

In a very real sense, the Enlightenment’s defining ambition could be described as an attempt to surpass antiquity by bringing together and satisfying simultaneously what before had been the opposing ideals of the Stoic and the Epicurean, of those for whom life’s goal was reason’s contribution to collective happiness and of those who saw that goal as the maximising of pleasures experienced by the individual.

(109)

Stoicism is here equated with reason, collectivity, and happiness; Epicureanism stands for pleasure and the individual. Elsewhere, Kavanagh describes the “Epicurean vision of life as an unpredictable and all-encompassing reciprocity of pleasures grasped and lost” (169), whereas Stoicism acts as a counterweight against this dizzying atomism and materialism. Kavanagh suggests that Epicureanism and Stoicism are better understood not as opposite, but similar, being closely intertwined over the eighteenth century. By rejecting Epicurean “atomism” whilst retaining Stoic “rationalism,” Descartes drove a wedge between the two doctrines (5). Kavanagh argues that in contrast, for mid eighteenth-century philosophers like Diderot, Epicureanism and Stoicism were “two sides of a single coin” (94), and thus we should understand these terms not as opposites but as closely entwined. These schools of thought were joined both in opposition to the Christian dualism of body and soul (presenting instead a continuity between matter and mind), and in opposition to Christian asceticism, here understood as a refusal of bodily pleasure. This beguiling blend of the two philosophies came to an end with the French Revolution, which involved a turn away from pleasure and towards “denial, purification, and heroism” (170). The Epicurean-Stoic mentality had transmuted into “a new and hypertrophied Stoicism of civic duty and accountability to the state” (218).

The argument that eighteenth-century culture celebrated pleasure is not new, nor is the claim that the French revolutionaries attacked aristocratic hedonism. Yet Kavanagh’s account offers some powerful new insights. On the broadest level, his defense of a rich and ethical concept of pleasure goes against some recent works that are nostalgic for a conception of happiness that is said to have lost out historically to a thin idea of mere pleasure. Furthermore, his notion of an Epicurean-Stoic hybrid implies that pleasure in eighteenth-century writing frequently stands for something more communal and reciprocal than selfish, an important corrective to a modern conviction that pleasure, self-interest, and individualism are identical. Epicurean-Stoicism adds to the research, widespread over the past decade, on the rational or cognitive potential of feeling. In voting “for” neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism, Kavanagh suggests a third way between them that feels open-minded and true to the period’s complexity. It may also be more true to the original doctrines: Pierre Hadot’s study of spiritual exercises, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), emphasized how much ancient Epicureanism and Stoicism had in common. Overall, Kavanagh’s approach offers a welcome new means of understanding the nebulous concept of pleasure.

However, there are some problems with this model. Readers hoping to discover “the New Epicureanism” of the title...