IN ITS always-entertaining Booking the Cooks feature, The Ticket supplement had an interview recently with the keyboard player of New Zealand band Fat Freddy’s Drop, who was described as “a true epicurean”.
Why was he a true epicurean? Because, among other things, he brings a stove on tour for “whipping up risottos and noodle dishes on hotel balconies”. Because he goes sea-diving, whenever possible, searching out the “tastiest crustaceans”. And because he always keeps “frozen won ton pastries” in his freezer, to guard against emergencies when fresh pasta is unavailable.
Fair enough. This is in keeping with the modern definition of an epicure as a “pleasure-seeker of refined and fastidious taste, especially in food and wine”. But it just so happens that, last week, I visited the reputed site of the Garden of Epicurus, in Athens, where the philosopher himself taught. And I was reminded there of how much the latter-day meaning of epicureanism is a libel on everything the man stood for.
Yes, Epicurus believed pleasure to be the ultimate virtue. It was “the beginning and end of the blessed life”, he wrote. He also thought the stomach was the root of all good and that “even wisdom and culture” were its dependants. Yet it was never extreme pleasures he sought, in food or anything else.
On the contrary, he and his followers lived mainly on bread and water, with a little cheese on feast days. Their simple diet may have been influenced by lack of money as well as principle. Even so, expanding on his philosophy, Epicurus once said: “I spit on luxurious pleasures, not for their own sake, but because of the inconveniences that follow them.” This is the nub of the argument. As Bertrand Russell wrote in the History of Western Philosophy, Epicurus believed that if the pains of indigestion outweighed the pleasures of gluttony, they should be avoided. And in fact he was a martyr to the gallstones. Thus, in practice, he regarded (in Russell’s words) the “absence of pain, rather than presence of pleasure, as the wise man’s goal”.
He would equally have shunned the notion that “hunger is the best sauce”. The aim should be for an equilibrium of quiet pleasures, he thought, rather than the pursuit of joy. Russell again: “Epicurus . . . would wish, if it were possible, to be always in the state of having eaten moderately, never in that of a voracious desire to eat.”
The rationale extended beyond food and drink. “Sexual intercourse,” warned the philosopher, “has never done a man good and he is lucky if it has not harmed him”. As a violent pleasure, it was a thing to be avoided. But then there were its unfortunate consequences. Although he was fond of children (“other people’s”, as Russell notes), he considered marriage and parenting a distraction from more serious pursuits.
The lust for power was yet another pleasure too risky to indulge. Epicurus advised total abstinence from public life, because in proportion to his achievement of power, a man increased the numbers of people wanting to harm him. Hence the wisest course was to live unnoticed, if possible, and thereby have no enemies.
A cornerstone of Epicureanism was hostility to religion. This too was consistent with his commitment to pain-avoidance: since far from regarding religion as a consolation, he considered it a source of unnecessary fear.
In any case, he believed that everything, including the soul, was made from atoms, which were continually falling somewhere, but colliding accidentally in ways that created the world and everything in it. Like the body, the soul would be dispersed on death. Therefore: “death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing”.
Wacky as some of his beliefs might seem now, they worked for him. Despite his precautions, he endured plenty of pain, but accepted his sufferings as well as any member of that rival school of his time, the Stoics. Moreover, he spent his last moments in peace of mind, while thinking of others, including the offspring of a student, who had left his children orphans.
Here he is, in 270 BC, sharing his final thoughts with a friend: “I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions . . . I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.”
So what does all this tell us about the keyboard player from Fat Freddy’s Drop and his alleged epicureanism? Well, I suppose it’s just about consistent with the philosophy that the original Epicurus might have stored frozen won ton pastries as a precaution against pasta shortages. It seems highly unlikely, however, that he would have approved of whipping up noodle dishes on hotel balconies. And it’s quite impossible to envisage him diving for crustaceans.
According to their biography, Fat Freddy’s Drop started out, in New Zealand, as a “jam band”. I’m not entirely sure what this means. But I suggest that if they’d stayed with the jam, along with bread and water and maybe an odd bit of cheese, they would indeed be true epicureans.