Pleasure, Rightly Understood

The word epicurean now means a connoisseur of luxury. Epicurus lived on bread and water, described a small pot of cheese as an occasion for a feast, and argued that expensive tastes are a trap. Few reputations have been inverted so completely, and the inversion hides an argument worth having.

He does say pleasure is the good. That is the part everyone remembers. What they forget is the definition that immediately follows, and the definition does all the work. Pleasure, for Epicurus, is the absence of pain in the body and disturbance in the mind. It is a settled state rather than a stimulation. And the moment you accept that definition, the whole shape of a good life changes.

Here is why. Pleasures that involve stimulation depend on a lack that is being filled. Drinking is intense because you are thirsty; the intensity is a measure of the deficit, not of the good. Once the thirst is gone, more water adds nothing. Epicurus generalises: once pain and anxiety are absent, pleasure is complete. It can be varied but it cannot be increased. There is no higher state to climb toward, which means the target is not only achievable but cheap.

From this he derives the practical tool the system is worth having for. Sort your desires into three kinds. Natural and necessary: food, shelter, safety, company. These are easy to satisfy and their absence genuinely hurts. Natural but unnecessary: fine food, comfort, pleasant surroundings. These can be enjoyed when they come and do not need chasing. And empty desires: wealth without limit, fame, status. These are the dangerous category, because they have no natural stopping point. No quantity of them ends the wanting, which means they cannot be satisfied at all, only fed.

Anyone who has watched a colleague grow more miserable with each promotion has watched this sort in action. The problem is not that they have chosen badly among available goods. It is that they have committed to a desire whose structure makes satisfaction impossible.

The other half of the project is the removal of two fears. The gods, he argues, exist but take no interest in us, because a perfect being would be untroubled and running the moral accounts of humanity would be trouble. And death, he says, is nothing to us. The argument is compact: all good and bad consists in sensation, death is the end of sensation, so while we exist death is absent, and when death arrives we do not exist to meet it. There is never a moment at which death is happening to you. There is no subject for the harm.

This has been argued about ever since, and the strongest reply is worth knowing. Thomas Nagel points out that a harm can consist in deprivation (in the goods you would otherwise have had) and deprivation does not need a moment or a subject to be real. Epicureans answer that a harm with nobody to fall on is not a harm at all. Neither side has closed it.

What gets least attention is the Garden itself, the community he founded outside Athens. It admitted women and enslaved people as full members at a time when Athens did neither, and Epicurus rated friendship among the very greatest contributors to a blessed life. That is the part modern research has been quietly confirming for decades: past a fairly modest income, close relationships predict wellbeing far better than money does. He got there without the data, by asking what a person actually needs and then noticing how short the list is.