It’s an Epicurean poem, of sorts. One of the consolations of philosophy, reading as follows:
There is nothing to fear from God,
There is nothing to feel from death.
Good things can be acquired,
Bad things can be endured.
Truth be told, I have never read much of Epicurus. Yet as a response to the first century Roman Empire’s love of all things cynical and cruel, it was a remarkable intellectual response to the material excesses of the day.
I stumbled upon the tetrapharmakon while reading another book from my grandfather’s library about the moral values of the ancient world. The author touched on a number of subjects, but one that he specifically mentions is that of autarxia, or self-sufficiency as the highest good in the eyes of the Greeks — specifically as a reaction to hedonism and excess.
In the end, the author is particularly critical of Aristotle for being of two minds on the subject. Aristotle, while he praises self-sufficiency, does not go so far as to say human beings should be so independent that they shun social contact. Seeing a contradiction, the author pushes further in saying that the Greeks (and the Romans as their inheritors) both shunned the concept of pity as a sin against self-sufficency, namely because pity imposed a certain feeling that the misfortune of others required an act on those who displayed high levels of autarxia, and therefore was a vice.
Christianity would be the salve that would heal such a wound, as it preached the virtues of mercy in a world which thought little of the mass slaughter of human beings — whether in war or by the entertainment of the Colosseum.
In our modern age, one day there will be a temptation to withdraw from the excesses of commercialism, luxury, and hedonism. The ancient philosophers took these to extremes themselves in order to demonstrate the virtuous nature of their cause, living in caves or disposing of every possession possible.
Does this necessarily mean that the self-sufficent must lack in pity in order to be logically consistent? Jefferson certainly did not believe so, and in fact one might argue that self-sufficiency is the prerequisite for any true sense of altruistic pity, otherwise how could one give that which is not yours?
Otherwise, the objectivists such as Ayn Rand are totally correct by saying altruism is the greatest sin one could commit. I’ve certainly disagreed with this sentiment before, and proscribed the antidote for such intellectual mayhem: That altrusim communicates trust, and that without trust there is no free market — which is probably the single best basis for self-sufficient individuals to interact with one another and resolves neatly the problem of social interaction (and incidentally, saves Aristotle from the critics).