The Norm Is Pleasure Too: Why Epicurus Was Right to Call the Normal State 'Pleasure'

“Therefore Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure; what was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of all pain, was not only itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. Surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends Book One, 38

Introduction: The Claim That Changed Everything

Among all the philosophical innovations Epicurus brought to the ancient world, one stands apart for its combination of simplicity, depth, and practical consequences. It is not the atomic theory of matter, not the refutation of divine providence, not the analysis of desires into necessary and unnecessary. It is this: the normal state of a living being — the state of not being in pain, not being disturbed, simply existing and functioning without any particular external stimulus — is a state of pleasure.

Not a neutral state. Not an empty state. Not a zero from which pleasure begins when stimulation arrives. Pleasure itself.

Norman DeWitt, one of the most penetrating modern scholars of Epicurus, identified this as the decisive move in the philosophy:

“The extension of the name of pleasure to this normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form, freedom from pain of body and distress of mind, that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it is really superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it; nor that reason justified the application; nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.” — Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 240

This article examines DeWitt’s three claims in sequence: that the name ought to be applied to the normal state; that reason justifies the application; and that human beings are happier for understanding and accepting it. Together these claims constitute the philosophical case for what we might call the norm of pleasure — the recognition that the baseline of conscious life, rightly understood, is not neutral but good.

This article is a companion to “The Full Cup Model” on this site, which examines how the limit of pleasure answers the Platonic challenge that pleasure cannot be the highest good. The present article addresses a prior and more fundamental question: what makes the normal state pleasurable at all? Understanding this is the foundation on which everything else in Epicurean ethics rests.

Part One: The Two-State Reality

The philosophical starting point is the structure of feeling itself. Epicurus, drawing on the canonical framework he had established as the foundation of all knowledge, identified two and only two internal sensations available to living creatures: pleasure and pain.

“The internal sensations they say are two, pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature, and the one is akin to nature and the other alien: by means of these two choice and avoidance are determined.” — Diogenes Laertius, Book X, 34

This is not a preference or a convention. It is a claim about the structure of experience. Nature has provided all living creatures with exactly two internal guides: one that reports what is congenial to the creature’s nature (pleasure) and one that reports what is working against it (pain). These two cover the entire field of feeling. There is no third sensation alongside them.

The immediate consequence is decisive: if pain is absent, pleasure is present. Not “something” is present. Not “a neutral state” is present. Pleasure is present — because pleasure is what we call the sensation that is not pain, and when pain is not there, that sensation is what remains.

Torquatus makes the argument with admirable directness in response to Cicero’s persistent objection that “freedom from pain” and “pleasure” are different things:

“Surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends Book One, 38

And when Cicero presses him again — surely there must be an intermediate state, neither in pleasure nor in pain? — Torquatus holds firm:

“I say that all men who are free from pain are in pleasure, and in the greatest pleasure too.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends Book Two, 16

“In the greatest pleasure too.” Not in a minimal or marginal pleasure. In the greatest pleasure, because the limit of pleasure — as Principal Doctrine 3 establishes — is reached when all pain is gone. The cup is full. What Cicero wants to call a neutral intermediate state is, on the Epicurean analysis, simply the state of full pleasure correctly identified.

The same point is made from the other direction by Principal Doctrine 3:

“The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body, nor of mind, nor of both at once.” — Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 3

This is the two-state reality stated as a logical consequence: where pleasure is, pain is not. And conversely: where pain is not, pleasure is. The two states are not merely contraries that admit of degrees. They are the exhaustive and mutually exclusive options for conscious experience, and the presence of one entails the absence of the other.

Part Two: The Name Ought to Be Applied

Cicero’s objection — that Epicurus is calling two different things by one name — sounds like a serious logical complaint. It is not. DeWitt calls it “superficial and captious,” and the force of that verdict becomes clear once we examine what the objection actually requires.

Cicero wants to say: there is active pleasure (the pleasure of drinking when thirsty, of hearing beautiful music, of intellectual engagement), and there is the absence of pain (the condition of not being hungry, not being disturbed, not being in physical distress). These are, he insists, different things, and calling both “pleasure” is a verbal deception.

But the Epicurean reply is that Cicero’s analysis depends on a hidden assumption: that there is a neutral third state between pleasure and pain from which both can be viewed as departures. Remove that assumption — which the two-state analysis of feeling removes — and the objection collapses. If there are only two states, and one is pain and the other is pleasure, then the absence of pain is not a neutral state distinct from both; it is the presence of pleasure, seen from one side rather than the other.

This is exactly the point that Torquatus presses in response to Cicero’s objection about the hand:

“For if that were the only pleasure which tickled the senses, as it were, if I may say so, and which overflowed and penetrated them with a certain agreeable feeling, then even a hand could not be content with freedom from pain without some pleasing motion of pleasure. But if the highest pleasure is, as Epicurus asserts, to be free from pain, then, the first admission was correctly made to you, that the hand, when it was in that condition, was in want of nothing; but the second admission was not equally correct, that if pleasure were a good it would wish for it. For it would not wish for it for this reason, inasmuch as whatever is free from pain is in pleasure.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends Book One, 39

The hand that is free from pain does not need any additional sensation to be in pleasure. It is already in pleasure. It is not in want. The desire for further stimulation would only arise if the state of pain-freedom were somehow incomplete or deficient — but it is not deficient, because it is already the full condition of pleasure.

Aulus Gellius, the second-century Latin author and grammarian, provides a useful parallel from literary usage that helps explain why the negative form of a term can legitimately express the positive extreme of its opposite:

“Epicurus too in a similar way defined the greatest pleasure as the removal and absence of all pain… just as he expressed abhorrence of the ‘unpraised’ man by the denial of praise, so he abhorred the ‘unlovable’ by the denial of love.” — Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights

Gellius shows that this linguistic pattern — expressing the fullest positive by denying its opposite — was well-established in Greek literary practice long before Epicurus. Homer praises heroes by denying cowardice. Virgil expresses loathing by denying beauty. Epicurus defines the greatest pleasure by the removal of all pain. The form is consistent; the usage is justified. What was criticized as philosophical sleight of hand was in fact a recognized and legitimate way of expressing a maximum by reference to the elimination of the contrary.

But Gellius’s parallel also reveals something deeper. These are not arbitrary linguistic conventions. Each of them reflects a genuine truth about the thing being described. The most praiseworthy man is the one who has nothing blameworthy about him. The most pleasurable state is the one that has no pain in it. The negative formulation captures the essence of the positive because in each case the positive is constituted precisely by the elimination of its contrary. The name of pleasure ought to be applied to the pain-free state because that state IS what pleasure most fully is.

Part Three: Reason Justifies the Application

The second of DeWitt’s three claims — that reason justifies calling the normal state pleasure — is established by the Letter to Menoeceus and by two Principal Doctrines that have often been read as technical fine points but are in fact central to the whole system.

Epicurus states the matter directly in the Letter to Menoeceus:

“By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.” — Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Diogenes Laertius 10.131

This is not offered as one definition of pleasure among several, or as a description of a special elevated kind of pleasure superior to ordinary pleasure. It is offered as the definition of what Epicureans mean by pleasure. The term’s extension to the pain-free state is not an awkward add-on; it is primary.

The philosophical justification for this extension follows from the structure of the canon. Nature has given living creatures pleasure and pain as guides. These guides report on whether the creature’s condition is congenial or hostile to its nature. A creature in the normal, healthy, pain-free state is in a condition congenial to its nature — which is precisely what the feeling of pleasure reports. There is no need for external stimulation to make the condition pleasurable; the condition is pleasurable because it is what a living creature’s nature is meant to be.

Principal Doctrine 18 and Principal Doctrine 19 establish that reason is required to fully grasp this:

“The pleasure in the flesh is not increased when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied: and the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures, and of the emotions akin to them, which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.” — Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 18

“Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures, by reason, the limits of pleasure.” — Epicurus, Principal Doctrine 19

Both doctrines emphasize reason as the faculty through which the limit and nature of pleasure are understood. This is not because pleasure is a difficult or obscure thing in itself, but because our ordinary unreflective view of pleasure is distorted by habits of thought that look for pleasure only in vivid external stimulation and regard the baseline state as empty. Reason is needed to correct this distortion and see what is actually there: a foundation of pleasure that is fully real, requiring no supplement, constituting the highest state from which all further pleasures are variations rather than additions.

DeWitt’s commentary on Plutarch’s hostile summary of this point is worth noting:

“The stable condition of well-being in the flesh and the confident hope of its continuance means the most exquisite and infallible of joys for those who are capable of figuring the problem out.” — DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 233

“For those who are capable of figuring the problem out.” This is not mysticism or esotericism. It is the recognition that understanding pleasure correctly — seeing that the normal state is pleasurable, not neutral — requires philosophical work. The person who has not done that work will continue to experience the pain-free state as somehow incomplete, always waiting for the next stimulation to begin enjoying. The person who has done the work recognizes that the enjoyment is already there, fully and completely, waiting not to begin but to be recognized.

Part Four: Human Beings Are Happier for Understanding This

The third of DeWitt’s claims is the most practically important: that people are happier for reasoning and believing that the normal state is pleasure. This may seem like an assertion rather than an argument, but there is a genuine philosophical point behind it.

Torquatus spells out what the life of the person who understands this looks like:

“This is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy: he keeps his passions within bounds; about death he is indifferent; he holds true views concerning the eternal gods apart from all dread; he has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life, if that be the better course. Furnished with these advantages he is continually in a state of pleasure, and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains. For he remembers the past with thankfulness, and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness… And pains, if any befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends Book One, 62

The key phrase is “there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains.” This is only possible if the normal, undisturbed state is genuinely pleasurable — because any realistic life will contain many moments without vivid external stimulation, many moments of simple quiet health, simple ease, simple companionship. If those moments are neutral or empty, then happiness depends entirely on a constant supply of external stimulation, which no life can guarantee. But if those moments are genuinely pleasurable — if the norm itself is pleasure — then happiness is available at almost every waking moment of a well-conducted life, and only actual bodily or mental pain can displace it.

This is what Epicurus demonstrated on his deathbed. Writing to Idomeneus on the last day of his life, suffering severe physical pain from a diseased bladder:

“On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.” — Epicurus to Idomeneus, in Diogenes Laertius

The gladness of mind at the memory of past conversations — this is not vivid external stimulation. It is the pleasure that remains available in the mind even when the body suffers severely: the pleasure of memory, of friendship, of a philosophical life well conducted. This pleasure is genuine because Epicurus understood that it was genuine, that the normal state of a mind engaged with its own goods is pleasurable even in the absence of new external input. He did not wait for stimulation to make him happy. The norm — the remembered pleasure of past conversations, the quiet of a mind free from fear even in physical suffering — was enough.

Lucretius captures the positive content of this baseline in a passage that shows how normal bodily and mental experience already participates in pleasure even without extraordinary stimulation:

“Thus often the body, which is clear to see, is sick, when all the same we feel pleasure in some other hidden part; and contrariwise it happens that the reverse often comes to be in turn, when one wretched in mind feels pleasure in all his body; in no other wise than if, when a sick man’s foot is painful, all the while, may be, his head is in no pain.” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book III

The point is that pleasure is present wherever pain is absent, even when other parts of the same person suffer. The foot in pain does not negate the pleasure of the head that is free from pain. This is not paradox but observation: pleasure and pain are both real wherever they occur, and the presence of one in one part does not eliminate the other in another part. The implication for the full life is that pleasure is always present somewhere as long as we are alive and not entirely overwhelmed — which means the foundation is always there, always available, always a source of genuine good.

Part Five: The Philosophical Significance

Why Critics Kept Misunderstanding

The persistence of Cicero’s objection — that Epicurus was making a verbal error, calling two different things by one name — reflects a genuine philosophical difficulty. Anyone raised within a framework that assumes a neutral ground between pleasure and pain will find the Epicurean claim initially counterintuitive. Our ordinary language and ordinary psychology do distinguish between the vivid pleasure of drinking when thirsty and the quiet, unremarkable condition of not being thirsty at all. The latter does not feel like “pleasure” in the ordinary sense of that word.

The Epicurean response is not to deny this phenomenological observation but to explain it. The unremarkable quality of the normal state is not evidence that it is neutral. It is evidence that we are not attending to it. The person who has drunk and is no longer thirsty is in a state of pleasure with respect to thirst — but because the pleasure of satisfying thirst is now complete and the feeling of thirst is gone, there is nothing that demands attention. Pleasure that demands nothing is easy to overlook. It does not mean there is nothing there.

This is where reason comes in, as Principal Doctrines 18 and 19 emphasize. Reason teaches us to attend to the state we are in and to recognize its quality correctly. A person who has learned to do this — who has, as Torquatus says, made the present “so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness” — finds that the normal state is not empty at all. It is quietly and firmly good.

The Practical Transformation

The practical transformation this understanding produces is not dramatic in the way that a religious conversion or a philosophical revelation is often imagined to be. It is quieter and more durable than that. It is the recognition, available at almost any moment of ordinary life, that this — the present moment of health, of ease, of companionship, of intellectual engagement, of simple undisturbed existence — is good. Not waiting to be good. Not on the way to being good when the next pleasure arrives. Already good, now, as it stands.

This recognition is what Torquatus describes when he says the wise man is “continually happy” and experiences “more pleasures than pains” at every moment. It is what Epicurus demonstrated when he called his last day “blissful” despite severe physical suffering. And it is what Diogenes of Oinoanda was celebrating when he wrote of wanting to compose “an anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure” before his death — not an anthem to the occasional vivid stimulation of a life, but to the fullness of a life well and pleasurably lived from its normal foundation outward.

The norm is pleasure. Not as a consolation for the absence of better things. Not as a philosophical technicality. As the genuine, correctly understood, fully real quality of the state that constitutes the foundation of a happy life.

Key Texts Referenced

Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 3, 18, and 19 (Bailey translation, via Diogenes Laertius Book X)
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus (Diogenes Laertius 10.131)
Epicurus to Idomeneus (Diogenes Laertius, final letter)
Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends (De Finibus) Books One and Two, sections 30, 38, 39, 56—57, 62; Book Two sections 9, 11, 16
Diogenes Laertius, Book X, 34 (on the two internal sensations)
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Book III, lines 98ff.
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights (on the linguistic pattern of expressing the positive through negation of its contrary)
Norman DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1954), pp. 233 and 240
Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 3 (on the anthem to the fullness of pleasure)
Companion article: “The Full Cup Model: Pleasure, Purity, and the Limit That Answers Plato,” EpicurusToday.com
Companion article: “Two Names for One Reality,” EpicurusToday.com