Polystratus the Epicurean

It is impossible to better grasp the currents of ideas which agitated minds towards the middle of the second century than in the little treatise On the Unreasonable Contempt for Popular Opinions by Polystratus (1) who succeeded Hermarqus at the head of the school of Epicurus around 250 î.e.n. It is a kind of protreptic, where the author encourages a young man to leave other schools to enter the Epicurean school.

We have seen that the Epicureans denied almost everything that the Stoics considered as the assured foundation of moral life: providence of the gods, soul of the world, uniqueness of the world and sympathy between its parts, destiny, divination by signs , all these assertions being linked together by dialectics. But Stoic dogmatism found at the same time other adversaries, the skeptics and the new academicians who claimed to keep the spirit of Plato intact against invading dogmatism.

Polystrate addresses a young man who is close to being seduced by this skeptical antidogmatism; he finds there in fact what the Epicureans proposed to him, the impassibility obtained by wisdom, capable of “removing the vain disturbance which comes from dreams, signs and everything which agitates us in vain” (column I a). But this wisdom operates with a completely different method and spirit; the Epicureans motivated their negations by a physics based on evidence; on the contrary the adversaries of whom Polystratus speaks, to shake these false opinions, criticize all knowledge and even the most certain. They use the method that is most odious to an Epicurean, dialectic, which serves rather “to shake the opinion of others than to produce in themselves the ataraxia” of which they boast (column XII a) . They demonstrate, based on the diversity of human opinions, that there is neither beautiful nor ugly, nor good nor evil, nor anything of the sort. “Embarrassing our lives with the embarrassments of other men”, they become incapable of distinguishing “what end our nature seeks and of what this end is composed”. We cannot define dialectics in a more precise way, which in fact consists of making everyone discover the uncertainty of their own opinions.

Who are the philosophers targeted by Polystrate? He only mentions, in the preserved text, “the sect of those who call themselves the impassive” and the cynics, whose conventionalism, in fact, we remember (column XII a); but he adds that he has just spoken of other philosophers who follow the same method.

We therefore grasp here a whole current of thought very distinct from Stoicism and Epicureanism, in agreement with Stoicism in using dialectic and with Epicureanism in denying Stoic beliefs, but radically hostile to the dogmatism of one and the other. The most general trait of this current of thought is hostility to physics in the full sense of the word, that is to say to an overall conception of the world, the object of a certain faith and on which moral life is based. To this dogmatism, this entire philosophical current opposes a sort of humanism which constantly brings back the thought of external things which are inaccessible to us to meditation on the human conditions of intellectual and moral activity.

(1) Teubner edition of a papyrus from Herculaneum.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu