The Ancient Greek Philosopher Epicurus and the Pleasure Principle

The Ancient Greek Philosopher Epicurus and the Pleasure Principle

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus is famous for his teaching that “Pleasure is the principle and end to a happy life,” and for his Epicurean school in Athens.

The Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy of the good life by nature. Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was the first humanist philosopher; he not only understood but also believed in the value of man and that human nature is accompanied by wisdom and justice without hypocrisy.

The ancient Greek philosopher spent most of his early life on the island of Samos, an Athenian settlement in the Aegean. He studied the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Democritus in Athens, where he eventually started his own school.

He was a prolific writer, with 37 volumes attributed to his name. However, only fragments of his writings and four letters remain. Yet his teachings would influence many thinkers who followed.

Epicurus believed that an individual can lead a pleasurable life and, with relative self-sufficiency, ensure their own freedom. Pleasure was the value that Epicureans lived their lives by, in contrast to other philosophies that focused on virtue.

One of the things he valued most was friendship. Although he never married, he believed in marriage and the family. For him, friends provided security as well as strength. Personally, Epicurus was considered by many to be humble, quiet and shy.

The pleasure principle

The ancient Greek philosopher was misunderstood by his contemporaries who believed that his philosophy was about hedonism. However, that was not the case. Epicurus taught about pleasure and the pleasant life in the sense that people should not be burdened by unnecessary desires, fears and anxiety. Without these, one could live a pleasant life.

For Epicurus a pleasant life is one where an inner tranquility (ataraxia/αταραξία) is achieved by being content with simple things. For example, he taught that one should choose the pleasure of philosophical conversation with friends over the pursuit of physical pleasures like food, drink and sex.

Overall, for him pleasure meant one must lead a life of restful contemplation, eating and drinking in moderation, living without anxiety, and forgoing the wants and worries of life.

At age 35, Epicurus bought a garden in Athens where he set up his school, which he called “The Garden.” It was located about halfway between the locations of two other schools of philosophy, the Stoa Poikile (where the Stoic philosophers met) and the Academy (founded by Plato). The Garden was more than just a school, it was a community of like-minded people practicing a particular way of life.

The primary members of The Garden were Hermarchus, Idomeneus, Leonteus and his wife Themista, Colotes, Polyaenus of Lampsacus, and Metrodorus of Lampsacus. It was the first school of any ancient Greek philosopher to admit women. The biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laërtius lists female students such as Leontion and Nikidion. Everyone was welcome to The Garden, even slaves.

According to an epistle of Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, who visited The Garden, an inscription at the gate read: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.”

Epicurus on desire, senses and feelings

For Epicurus and his followers, all desires developed from three main sources: those natural desires that are essential for one to live, such as food and shelter; those natural desires that one can live without, primarily ones that cause jealousy and boredom; and lastly, narcissistic desires such as power, wealth and fame. He wrote, “He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.”

In this philosophy there is a close connection of pleasure with desire-satisfaction. If pleasure results from getting what you want (desire-satisfaction) and pain from not getting what you want (desire-frustration), then there are two strategies one can follow with respect to any given desire: you can either try to fulfill the desire, or you can try to eliminate the desire. For the most part Epicurus advocates the second strategy, that of reducing your desires down to a minimum, so they can be easily satisfied.

All of our knowledge ultimately comes from the senses, the ancient Greek philosopher  said, and we can trust the senses, when properly used. There are three criteria of truth: sensations, ‘preconceptions’ and feelings. Firstly, sensations give us information about the external world. Secondly, along with that information we have certain ‘preconceptions’—concepts such as ‘body,’ ‘person,’ ‘usefulness’ and ‘truth’—which are formed in our (material) minds as the result of repeated sense-experiences of similar objects. Thus, all ideas are ultimately formed on the basis of sense-experience. Thirdly, we can use our feelings to gain insights, and our feelings are important as criteria of choice and avoidance. Feelings operate as criteria on all levels of life, somatic, social and spiritual.

The pursuit of happiness

Epicurus had a definition of happiness based on the pleasurable feeling of the individual. “Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we always come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.”

The ancient Greek philosopher claims that there are two self-imposed beliefs that make us unhappy or full of pain. First is the belief that the gods will punish us for our bad actions, and second is our fear of death. Both of these beliefs fill us with fear and anxiety. Yet both are unnecessary since they are based on fictions. The gods are perfect and eternal and they do not concern themselves with human affairs. Therefore, we have no need to fear any punishment from them, nor do we need to spend time in acts of worship to redeem ourselves. As for death, our sentient experience ends with death and there will be no sensation of pain. Therefore, the fear of death is groundless. “Death is meaningless to the living because they are living, and meaningless to the dead because they are dead,” he writes.

When it comes to desires, Epicurus distinguishes between necessary and unnecessary desires. Necessary desires are those which are necessary to produce happiness, such as desiring that our body is free of pain, or desiring a state of inner tranquility. “The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and once this is obtained the tempest of the soul is quelled,” he writes.

When we are in pain, Epicurus believes, we feel the need to seek pleasure, a need which inevitably only produces greater pain. To eliminate this pain-pleasure-pain cycle, we need to cultivate a mindset in which there is no pain. Thus the aim is not the positive pursuit of pleasure, but rather the attaining of a neutral state which is best described as “peace of mind” or even “emptiness,” which he calls ataraxia, roughly meaning “absence of worry.”

Epicurus stresses the importance of wisdom: one needs wisdom to see which pleasures are really pleasurable and which pains are necessary to produce pleasure. Some pleasures lead to greater pain, like drinking a great amount of wine, and so the wise person will shun them. On the other hand, certain pains, like sadness, can lead to an appreciation for life or compassion, which are highly pleasurable states of mind.

Epicurus, science and the universe

Epicurus was an empiricist and believed that all knowledge comes from one’s senses. He believed that people should be liberated from the fear of death and of the gods, and science was the means by which this freedom could be achieved. He believed that nature acts without divine intervention. He was skeptical about mathematics and astronomy, because knowledge should be based on clear foundations. For him, the two constituents of reality were the natural bodies, directly attested by sense perception; and the void, the space where bodies exist and move. He considered only naturalistic explanations of phenomena to show they are not divine. His philosophy of nature, based on natural causes, was consistently materialist, and therefore anti-teleological.

The ancient Greek philosopher accepted Democritus’ atomism—the origin of everything is the interaction of indivisible bodies, the atoms—but rejected the mechanistic effect as a base for the universe. He argued that if atoms were capable of mechanical motion, then the human being, who is also made of atoms would be reduced to automation, and fatalism would become the law of the universe.

His belief that nothing comes into existence from nothing made him postulate that the universe has no beginning, but has always existed, and will always exist. Atoms, too, as the building blocks of everything else, cannot come into existence, but have always existed. Our particular cosmos, however, is only a temporary cluster of atoms, and is only one of an infinite number of such cosmoi, which come into existence and then dissolve away.

Unlike Aristotle, Epicurus argued that the universe is unlimited in size. Since the universe is unlimited in size, there must also be an unlimited number of atoms and an infinite amount of void.

Taking from Democritus’ teachings, he taught that when one dies the body is reduced to nothing but decomposing atoms. All that exists in the entire universe is composed of atoms and space. Life—the body and mind—is combining and dispersing these atoms. Even man’s soul is composed of atoms, he said. These atoms are not only indestructible and eternal, but unpredictable as well.

Was Epicurus an atheist?

Teaching that we should not fear punishment from the gods when we do something wrong and that gods do not watch us because they are supreme beings that are not concerned with human affairs made Epicurus appear to be an atheist.

Epicurus believed that gods served only as moral ideals that humans could aspire to. He came to the conclusion that the gods could not be concerned with the well-being of humans through observing the problem of evil, meaning the presence of suffering in the world.

The ancient Greek philosopher and his followers lived peacefully in their small communities and did not get involved in the politics of an ever-changing Athens, avoiding social activism.

Later, Epicurus’ denial of immortality and the existence of a benevolent god would bring his followers into direct conflict with the rise of Christianity. This, alongside the misunderstanding of the pleasure principle, led Epicureanism to be condemned by the Church.

However, both Epicureans and Christians would profess to adhere to the same standards of behavior: compassion, forgiveness, generosity, inclusion, hospitality and love.