Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

234 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
Ethics and politics
In his physics Gassendi departs considerably from Epicurus but retains a version
of atomism and a largely materialistic account of the biological soul. 8 The effect
of the departures is to make the Epicurean doctrine cohere with Christianity. God
is brought in not only as creator but as a maintainer of order in material
causation: the combination of atoms by chance is outlawed. God is also brought
in as immediate source of a higher immaterial soul. Epicurean physics is
corrected by theology, and it is the same with Epicurean ethics, which Gassendi
takes up in the third and concluding part of the Syntagma. 9
Epicurus is upheld in claiming that pleasure is to be pursued and pain avoided,
but the pleasure of certain types of action is interpreted by Gassendi as a divinely
appointed sign of the individual or communal preservation that such actions
promote, while the pain of other types of action must be seen as a sign of their
interfering with conservation (Op. Omn., 701). There are pleasures of motion and
pleasures of rest, and Epicurus was right, according to Gassendi, to associate
happiness with enjoyment of the pleasures of rest. He was right, in other words,
to prefer the quiet pleasures of the mind to the pleasures of eating, drinking and
sex. The fact that it does not come naturally to us to give the quiet pleasures their
due; the fact that we are inclined to pursue the earthier pleasures to the exclusion
of the others; these facts do not show that happiness is beyond us. They only
show that happiness is not automatically attained. Fortunately, however, we are
blessed by God with a freedom that, if properly used, enables us to judge that the
earthier pleasures are not superior and are even at times merely apparent rather
than real pleasures. This power of correcting valuations through judgement does
not deprive the lower pleasures of their attraction, or bring it about that there is
nothing to disturb us once we have chosen the higher goods. In other words, our
freedom cannot bring about happiness in the form of perfect freedom from
perturbation; on the other hand, it does make choices of the higher pleasures into
genuine choices. Someone whose valuations of pleasure were completely correct
morally speaking and who was incapable of making the wrong choices would in
a certain sense resemble creatures who acted badly under the influence of
impulse, for they, like the unfailingly right-acting, act in the absence of
spontaneity (Op. Omn. II, 822–3).
Going by the theological corrections one finds elsewhere in his system, one
might expect Gassendi to make Epicurean tranquillity consist of the quiet
contemplation of God in a place away from the distracting pressures of social
life. This would fit in not only with the demands of piety but with Epicurus’s
endorsement of the life in retirement. But in fact the pleasant life appears to be
both more active and more social than this (Op. Omn. II, 717, 720). For
Gassendi, the preferred sort of tranquillity appears to be that of the man who
quietly and calmly gets on with large undertakings (ibid., 717), rather than
someone who withdraws into serene and solitary meditation. Of course, it is
possible to get on quietly and calmly with purely self-interested projects, such as