Epicurus
341–270 BCE, Samos and Athens
Hellenistic
Pleasure is the absence of pain, and it is cheaper than you think.
“Death is nothing to us, since when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist.”
The life
Epicurus was born on Samos to Athenian settlers and came to philosophy young, reportedly frustrated that no teacher could explain what chaos meant. He studied atomism in the tradition of Democritus.
Around 307 BCE he bought a house and garden on the outskirts of Athens and founded a community there. The Garden was unusual for admitting women and enslaved people as full members, which scandalised Athenians and generated a long tradition of slander about what went on inside.
He suffered for years from kidney stones and died of them at seventy. On his last day, in severe pain, he wrote to a friend that the joy of remembering their conversations balanced it out.
What shaped the ideas
Alexander's conquests had dissolved the independent city-state, and with it the assumption that a good life meant civic participation. Hellenistic philosophies responded by making the individual, not the polis, the unit of the good life.
Epicurus took this furthest. His advice was to withdraw from public life, live modestly among friends, and stop being frightened by gods and death, which he regarded as the two great sources of unnecessary misery.
Core arguments
- 01
Pleasure as absence of pain
The highest pleasure is a settled state, not a stimulation.
Pleasures that involve stimulation depend on a lack that is being filled, and the lack returns. Once hunger and pain are absent, pleasure is complete and cannot be increased, only varied. So the target is tranquillity of mind and freedom from bodily pain, which are achievable and stable.
- 02
The three classes of desire
Sort your desires and most of your anxiety disappears.
Some desires are natural and necessary, like food and shelter, and are easy to satisfy. Some are natural but unnecessary, like luxurious food, and can be enjoyed without being needed. Some are empty, like fame and unlimited wealth, and cannot be satisfied at all because they have no natural limit.
- 03
Death is nothing to us
Death cannot be bad for the person who dies.
All good and bad consists in sensation, and death is the end of sensation. While you exist, death is absent; when death arrives, you do not exist to meet it. There is never a moment at which death is happening to you, so there is no subject for the harm.
- 04
The gods are unconcerned
Divine beings exist but take no interest in human affairs.
A perfect being is by definition untroubled. Managing human behaviour, dispensing punishment and monitoring sacrifices would be trouble. So a genuinely blessed being would do none of it, which means religious fear is a mistake about what perfection implies.
Commonly got wrong
- "Epicurean" now means a connoisseur of luxury. Epicurus lived on bread and water, described a pot of cheese as an occasion for a feast, and argued that expensive tastes create dependence.
- His hedonism is ascetic, not indulgent. Because the goal is a settled absence of disturbance, most intense pleasures are rejected for the anxiety and dependence they carry.
- He is not an atheist in the modern sense. He argues the gods exist and are simply indifferent, which was still shocking enough to get him called one for centuries.
Works
Letter to Menoeceus c. 300 BCE
The ethics in four pages: gods, death, desire, pleasure. Start here.
Principal Doctrines c. 300 BCE
Forty numbered maxims, memorised by students as a portable kit.
Letter to Herodotus c. 300 BCE
The physics: atoms, void, and why nothing comes from nothing.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things c. 55 BCE
Not by Epicurus, but the fullest surviving account of the system, in Latin verse.
Letter to Menoeceus. It is short enough to read twice in one sitting, which is how it was meant to be used.
Why they still get taught
He gave the West a fully worked-out naturalist ethics with no afterlife and no divine oversight, and the death argument is still the standard opening move in philosophy of death.
Chapters
- Pleasure, Rightly Understood · The Art of Living