Unproductive Arguments That Are Restricted At EpicureanFriends

Preface

This article explains the editorial standards of EpicureanFriends.com on a list of unproductive arguments that are often repeated by those who claim to be supportive - or at least neutral toward - Epicurean philosophy. These arguments are false and contrary to the ancient Epicurean texts, but they are regularly repeated in other online discussions, and dwelling on them drives away serious, thoughtful, and healthy people who come to Epicurus looking for a positive philosophy of life grounded in nature and reason. The people who are most likely to be repelled are exactly the sort of people who were the backbone of the Epicurean movement in the ancient world.

Arguments which are based on the premise that life is mostly about suffering and pain are popular in general society, and serve to repel healthy normal people who are focused on positive ways to live life happily, and who recognize those arguments as absurd. When these arguments circulate unchallenged — as they often do due to their general approval by the academic world, the result is predictable. Acting as if these arguments are credible drives away curious newcomers who conclude that Epicureanism is hopelessly passive, negative, oversensitive to pain, and life-denying.

Forum participants who persistently argue on behalf of these positions will eventually be excluded from the community. This editorial policy does not prevent regular discussion of these issues, given that new readers of Epicurus will always confront them elsewhere, but while participating in EpicureanFriends activities we reject pursuit of these positions, as they were clearly rejected by Epicurus.

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Argument One: Epicureans Would Not Want Immortality Or Eternal Recurrence Even If They Could Get It Because This Would Mean Additional Suffering

Source: Michael Ure and Thomas Ryan, Epicurus and Nietzsche, Chapter 6 — “Eternal Recurrence — Epicurean Oblivion, Stoic Consolation”

The following passage represents this argument in its most developed academic form:

Let us sum up the Epicurean treatment of the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Lucretius claims that a proper grasp of recurrence demonstrates the irrationality of our anxiety about future recurrences. We believe that we have grounds for anxiety about our future selves because we assume that this recurrence of the same configuration of atoms means we will once again experience the same sufferings we presently endure. Yet, Lucretius argues, we ought to have no fear for the future because we are psychologically insulated from our future selves. Just as we will not be there when we die, so too Lucretius claims we will not be there when we recur. As we have seen, Lucretius’ argument is flawed on two separate fronts: on an ‘identity’ reading, Epicurean metaphysics does not warrant the non-identity of recurrent individuals, and on a ‘concern’ reading, it provides non-mnemonic grounds for anticipating or fearing future recurrences.

Indeed, against Lucretius, it seems that the Epicurean notion of recurrence must compound my present suffering. Epicurean physics requires that I must admit that I will suffer again, rather than sink into eternal oblivion at the moment of death. The knowledge of my return must intensify and compound my present suffering because I know that I will experience it again and again. I cannot live tranquilly in the knowledge of eternal oblivion, but I must suffer in anticipation of the repetition of my past, present and unknowable future sufferings.

Lucretius’ Epicurean therapy aims to show that death is redemption from the recurrence of life. Epicureans do not want recurrence (the return to life) or, indeed, immortality (the extension of life). To Lucretius the prospect of definitive death is preferable to immortality or recurrence because it eliminates all possibility of pain and sorrow. Since the only pleasure Epicureans value is the absence of all pain, death delivers this end definitively. Lucretius suggests that death is not terrifying since it is like a restful sleep, except it is an eternal, unbroken sleep in which ‘no longing for ourselves [will] trouble us’ (3.920).

Why this argument fails:

The argument is built on a false premise so consequential that everything erected on top of it collapses. Ure and Ryan assert, without defense, that “the only pleasure Epicureans value is the absence of all pain.” This is not Epicurean philosophy. It is a misreading with a long and well-documented history, one that flattens the Epicurean understanding of pleasure into a pale Stoic negative — mere freedom from disturbance — and ignores the full range of what Epicurus actually taught about pleasure as the positive and natural standard of the good life.

The second and more fundamental error is that eternal recurrence is not an Epicurean doctrine. It is a Stoic one. The Stoics taught that the universe periodically destroys itself in a great conflagration and then reconstitutes itself identically — the same events, the same persons, the same sufferings, repeating forever. Epicurus and Lucretius explicitly rejected the kind of cosmic determinism that makes such a doctrine possible. In the Epicurean universe, atoms swerve. History does not repeat. There is no fixed cycle, no eternal return, no guarantee that any particular configuration of atoms will ever be reproduced. Lucretius raises the question of recurrence not to endorse it but to address the anxiety of those who already fear it — to show that even granting the premise for the sake of argument, the fear does not follow. Ure and Ryan treat this conditional argument as a confession of Epicurean commitment to the doctrine. It is not.

The argument is therefore not a challenge to Epicurean philosophy. It is a challenge to a Stoicized caricature of Epicurean philosophy, prosecuted using a doctrine Epicurus rejected, on the basis of a definition of pleasure Epicurus never held.

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Argument Two: Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About Relief From Pain and Suffering

Source: A standard academic formulation; representative expressions appear in Cicero, De Finibus Book 2; cf. also the Ure/Ryan passage in Argument One above

The argument: Epicurus defined pleasure as “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.” His highest good is therefore not a positive state but a negative one — relief from suffering. The truly Epicurean life is a life of minimal stimulation, reduced desire, and the quiet peace that follows when all disturbing wants have been eliminated. Epicurus himself lived on bread and water. He sought the garden rather than the forum. His doctrines on the “limit of pleasure” (Principal Doctrines 3 and 4) establish that pleasure reaches its peak when pain is fully removed — and can go no further. The goal is therefore to get pain out, not to pursue positive goods. This makes Epicurean philosophy essentially therapeutic: a treatment for suffering, not a prescription for flourishing.

Why this argument fails:

This is the single most consequential misreading in the entire history of Epicurean philosophy, and Epicurus himself identified and rejected it in explicit terms. The Letter to Menoeceus states without ambiguity: “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life… we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.” The goal is pleasure. Not the absence of pain. Pleasure. The positive, natural, universal experience of everything that living creatures find congenial to their nature.

The confusion arises from the Letter to Menoeceus phrase “by pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” — and this requires understanding what Epicurus was doing in context. He was not defining the content of the good life. He was explaining what pleasure is using the two-state doctrine: conscious experience divides exhaustively into pleasure and pain with nothing between them, so pleasure and absence of pain are not two different things but two descriptions of the same thing. As Torquatus explains in Cicero’s On Ends: “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.” Absence of pain IS pleasure. The phrase does not demote pleasure to a mere negative; it elevates the entire pain-free state to the status of pleasure.

Principal Doctrines 3 and 4 are equally misread. These are not a summary of Epicurean ethics. They are a targeted response to Plato’s specific argument that pleasure cannot be the highest good because it has no limit — that it can always increase and therefore cannot define a complete good. Epicurus answers: pleasure does have a limit, reached when all pain is removed, at which point pleasure is complete and cannot be increased in magnitude — only varied in content. This establishes that pleasure has the definiteness required of a highest good. It does not say that the content of the pleasurable life is emptiness. The content remains what Epicurus described throughout his letters: friendship, philosophy, food, wine, rest, memory, intellectual conversation, and the full range of human experience.

The “bread and water” portrait of Epicurus is refuted by Epicurus himself: “Send me some preserved cheese, that when I like I may have a feast.” He spoke of cheese because cheese was a luxury, not a staple. His point was that he could feast on simple things when simple things were at hand — not that he never feasted. His school hosted regular dinners. He prized friendship as among the greatest goods available to human life. He owned property, managed finances, wrote hundreds of letters to friends across the Mediterranean world. The portrait of the isolated, desire-suppressing, bread-eating Epicurus is Stoic caricature, and it has done more damage to genuine understanding of the philosophy than almost any other single distortion.

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Argument Three: The Swerve Fails to Establish Free Will — Randomness Is Not Choice

Source: Cicero, De Fato (On Fate), §§18–25; a persistent objection in modern academic philosophy of action

The argument runs as follows: Epicurus introduced the atomic swerve — a small, uncaused deviation from the straight-line downward path of atoms — specifically to avoid the fatalism that would follow from pure mechanistic determinism. If every atomic motion is caused by the prior motion, the chain runs back to eternity, and every thought and action a human being will ever take was already fixed before he was born. To break that chain, Epicurus postulated the swerve. But the swerve does not solve the problem. A swerve is a random event. It has no cause. It is, by definition, not under anyone’s control. Randomness is simply the opposite of determinism — it is not freedom, not choice, not agency. An action caused by a random quantum deviation in your atoms is no more “yours” than one caused by an iron chain of prior causes. Epicurus has traded one form of unfreedom for another. The Epicurean defense of free will therefore collapses.

Why this argument fails:

Cicero pressed this objection in On Fate with considerable rhetorical force, but it misidentifies what the swerve is for. Epicurus did not claim that each swerve is a free choice, or that free choices are constituted by individual atomic swerves. The swerve’s function is structural and negative: it breaks the causal chain that would run from eternity and determine every future event before any living creature exists to choose anything. Once that chain is broken — once the universe is not a closed deterministic system — there is room for the genuinely new: for the compound properties of living minds, for deliberation, for the operation of reason on experience, for decisions that are not reducible to atomic trajectories traced from the infinite past.

Epicurus taught that compound things have properties not possessed by their constituent atoms — this is the anti-reductionist principle that Lucretius applies directly to the question of free will in Book Two of De Rerum Natura. The mind is a compound, and its capacity for voluntary motion is a property of that compound, not of any individual atom within it. The swerve does not produce choices; it permits them by ensuring that the world is not already fully written. The distinction matters enormously. Cicero’s objection assumes that free will must be located in the behavior of individual atoms, which is precisely the eliminative reductionism Epicurus rejected.

Diogenes of Oinoanda put the practical stakes plainly: “If fate is believed in, all admonition and censure are nullified, and not even the wicked can be justly punished, since they are not responsible for their sins.” Epicurus’s rejection of determinism was not a technical puzzle about atomic trajectories. It was a defense of moral responsibility, the rule of law, and the entire enterprise of philosophical self-improvement. The argument that “randomness isn’t choice” treats a structural solution as if it were a direct mechanism — a category error that generates the appearance of a contradiction where none exists.

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Argument Four: The Senses Cannot Be Trusted — Therefore Epicurean Canonics Fails

Source: Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism Book I; general Pyrrhonist and Academic Skeptic tradition

The argument: Our senses constantly deceive us. A straight oar placed in water appears bent. Distant objects appear small. Colors change under different lighting. People with jaundice see everything as yellow. The same water feels warm to a cold hand and cold to a warm hand. Tower walls that look smooth from a distance reveal rough stones up close. Dreams present vivid images of things that do not exist. If the senses are unreliable in all these demonstrable ways, Epicurus’s claim that “all sensations are true” and that sensation is the foundation of knowledge is refuted by the most basic observations of everyday life. Epicurean canonics — the theory that knowledge is possible and is grounded in sensation — collapses at the first example.

Why this argument fails:

This objection, which the Academic Skeptics and Pyrrhonists pressed with great sophistication, rests on a confusion between what the senses report and what the mind judges on the basis of those reports. Epicurus was explicit and precise on this point: the sensation itself is always accurate. The oar in water genuinely does produce the visual impression of a bent shape at the eye. That IS what is occurring at the sense organ — light is bending through water, and the eye is faithfully reporting that bent-looking light. The error lies not in the sensation but in the mind’s hasty inference that the oar is therefore physically bent. The sensation said: “bent-looking light is reaching my eye.” The mind said: “therefore the oar is bent.” The sense told the truth. The mind jumped to a wrong conclusion.

This distinction is not a verbal trick. It is the ground of a practical and coherent epistemology. The senses are the only direct contact we have with the world outside us. If they are not reporting accurately, we have nothing — no way to correct our errors, no foundation for any knowledge whatsoever. The Pyrrhonists who argued that the senses deceive and knowledge is therefore impossible were not being helpfully humble. They were destroying the conditions of any rational inquiry, including their own argument. Epicurus recognized this: the radical skeptic uses the knowledge he claims is impossible in order to argue that it is impossible. The argument is self-refuting.

The deeper purpose of this argument when deployed against Epicureanism in online discussion is almost never genuine epistemological inquiry. It is a weapon designed to produce paralysis — to make the newcomer feel that there is no firm ground anywhere, that Epicurean confidence in the senses is naive, and that the sophisticated position is indefinite suspension of judgment. This is precisely the Pyrrhonist program that Epicurus opposed, and for precisely the reasons he identified: a person who genuinely suspends judgment on everything cannot act, cannot choose, cannot pursue pleasure or avoid pain, and cannot live as a human being. The Pyrrhonist sage is an impossibility. The Epicurean insistence on reliable knowledge is not naivety. It is the precondition of any life worth calling philosophical.

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Argument Five: Ataraxia — Tranquility — Is the True Epicurean Goal

Source: A widespread modern scholarly and popular formulation; representative examples include Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic (where ataraxia is used to assimilate Epicurus to Stoic equanimity); also common in Buddhist-influenced readings of Epicurus

The argument: Epicurus’s practical goal was ataraxia — freedom from mental disturbance, a state of tranquil unperturbedness. This is why he retired to the Garden, why he counseled avoiding politics, why he taught that the wise man will withdraw from the storms of public life. The highest Epicurean condition is a serene, undisturbed equanimity — which is why Epicurus resonates so well with Stoic practice and with Buddhist mindfulness. His philosophy and theirs point toward the same destination by different roads. The differences are matters of technique, not of ultimate aim.

Why this argument fails:

This is Stoicism with Epicurus’s name on it. The substitution of ataraxia for pleasure as the Epicurean telos is not a small technical adjustment; it transforms the entire character of the philosophy. Ataraxia — freedom from disturbance — is a condition that favors the pursuit of pleasure. It is not pleasure itself, and Epicurus never said it was the goal. The goal is pleasure. Ataraxia is what the mind feels when it is free from unnecessary fears and anxieties and therefore able to pursue and enjoy the pleasures of life without interruption. It is the cleared ground, not the garden planted on it.

Diogenes of Oinoanda’s massive stone inscription — carved to spread Epicurean philosophy to all passersby for all time — is explicit. He does not praise ataraxia as the goal. He praises “the fullness of pleasure.” The fullness. Not the absence of disturbance, but the positive, complete state in which pleasures have filled the vessel. Lucretius does not open his poem with a hymn to undisturbedness. He opens it with a hymn to Venus — the force of pleasure and procreation that drives all of nature.

The conflation of Epicurean and Stoic goals — and the further conflation with Buddhist mindfulness — serves the adulterating traditions well and serves Epicureanism badly. Stoic apatheia (freedom from passion) and Pyrrhonist ataraxia (achieved through suspension of judgment) are explicitly what the genuine Epicurean position was designed to oppose. When online discussions allow “Epicurean ataraxia” to be treated as equivalent to Stoic equanimity or Buddhist detachment, they are not exploring the similarities between ancient schools. They are erasing the school that most directly challenged both.

The practical damage is also real: a person who comes to Epicureanism seeking a full, engaged, pleasure-pursuing life — the life Epicurus actually offered — and is instead handed a philosophy of serene withdrawal and minimized desire has been robbed of what the tradition actually contains. They may find Stoicism quite useful for what it is. But they have not met Epicurus.

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Argument Six: Virtue Produces Pleasure — Therefore Virtue Is the True Goal

Source: A persistent Stoic-inflected reframing; often appears in academic discussions drawing on Cicero’s De Finibus Books 3–4 and in popular “Epicurus as proto-Stoic” presentations

The argument: Epicurus himself said that you cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly — and that you cannot live wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. This creates such a tight logical bond between virtue and pleasure that virtue becomes a precondition of the pleasurable life. And if virtue is the necessary and reliable route to pleasure, it is reasonable to treat virtue as the primary aim — the reliable thing to pursue directly — and let pleasure follow as its natural consequence. This is not so different from the Stoic position, which says virtue is the goal and happiness follows. Epicurus and the Stoics are closer than their followers like to admit.

Why this argument fails:

The relationship between virtue and pleasure in Epicurean philosophy is not symmetric. Virtue is the necessary means; pleasure is the goal. These are not interchangeable. A hammer is necessary to drive a nail, but the goal is the nail, not the hammer. If you frame the carpenter’s work as “primarily about hammers,” you have made a category error that distorts everything downstream.

Epicurus was explicit that virtue is instrumental — it is valuable because and insofar as it produces pleasure, not because it has value in itself. Principal Doctrine 5 states: “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living wisely and honorably and justly, nor again to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly.” This is a mutual entailment in practice, not an identification of value. Virtue produces pleasure. Pleasure does not, however, produce virtue by some automatic process — it requires the active exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis) to navigate pleasures and pains well. Phronesis is, as Epicurus says, the greatest virtue precisely because it is the most effective tool for securing pleasure.

The Stoic position is fundamentally different. The Stoics held that virtue is the only good — that it is choiceworthy for its own sake, that external circumstances and bodily states (health, wealth, friendship, pleasure) are “indifferents” that do not affect the truly virtuous person’s happiness. Epicurus rejected this absolutely. Bodily pleasure is real. Bodily pain is real. They matter. A life of virtue under torture is not a happy life, no matter what the Stoics claimed about their theoretical sage. Epicurus specifically mocked this position.

When the argument “virtue and pleasure are so linked that virtue is the real goal” appears in discussion, it is almost always performing a function: it allows the Stoic or Humanist reader to endorse Epicureanism by quietly converting it into a version of what they already believe. The conversion flatters both parties and costs nothing — except Epicurus’s actual position. Virtue is instrumental. Pleasure is the goal. This is not negotiable, and it is not an “extreme” reading. It is what Epicurus wrote.

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Argument Seven: “Live Unknown” Means Epicureans Withdraw From Society

Source: A common reading of Epicurus’s saying lathe biosas (“live unknown” or “live in obscurity”); appears across popular and academic treatments; see e.g. Plutarch’s hostile essay Is “Live Unknown” a Wise Precept?

The argument: Epicurus counseled his followers to live unknown — to avoid public life, political office, and the arena of civic affairs. The Garden was a retreat from society, not an engagement with it. This makes Epicureanism a philosophy for the politically disengaged, the privatized self, the person who has checked out of the struggle of collective life and retreated into a circle of like-minded friends. Whatever its merits as a philosophy of personal happiness, it offers nothing for people who care about justice, politics, or the improvement of society — and its prescription of withdrawal is exactly the wrong counsel for people facing real social challenges.

Why this argument fails:

The argument lifts a single phrase from context and ignores the larger pattern of what Epicurus did and taught. “Live unknown” was counsel against the pursuit of fame and political power for their own sake — against the vain desire to be recognized, celebrated, and honored by the crowd. It was not a command to hide from the world. Epicurus himself was one of the most publicly active philosophers of antiquity: he maintained an extensive correspondence with figures across the Mediterranean world, wrote hundreds of books, founded communities in multiple cities, and cultivated relationships with powerful men and women of his time. He was not hidden. He was not withdrawn. He was simply not pursuing fame as an end in itself.

The Garden was not a bunker. It was a camp in the field — an organized base from which Epicureans engaged with the world, educated students, supported one another, and sent members out into civic and intellectual life. Epicurus did not say “do nothing.” He said: when you act, act for pleasure and friendship, not for the crowd’s applause.

The telos matters here. The Stoic framework, which substitutes duty (kathekon) for pleasure as the organizing principle of life, generates a very different account of political obligation: you act politically because you are a rational social animal and duty demands it. The Epicurean account is more honest and ultimately more stable: you engage with society when and to the degree that such engagement genuinely contributes to a life of predominating pleasure — which, for most people living in a functioning society, turns out to be quite a lot. Friendship, justice, security from others, the conditions of civilized life — all of these require social engagement and Epicurus knew it.

The “withdrawal” reading does real damage because it gives critics a cheap target. An Epicurean who actually understood the philosophy would never accept the label “disengaged.” The question is never engagement versus withdrawal. It is always: engagement in pursuit of what, and on whose terms?

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Argument Eight: Platonic Idealism — There Is a Higher Reality Beyond the Senses

Source: Plato, Republic Book VII (the Allegory of the Cave); Phaedo; Symposium; the general Platonic tradition as it runs through Neoplatonism, medieval theology, and Kantian transcendentalism

The argument: Plato demonstrated that the objects of sensory experience are not truly real. They are appearances — shadows on the wall of a cave, imperfect and perishable copies of eternal, unchanging Forms that only reason can access. Epicurus built his entire philosophy on sensory experience as the foundation of knowledge and on pleasure — above all sensory pleasure — as the goal of life. But if the senses give us only appearances and not reality, then Epicurean epistemology has no ground, and the pleasures of the senses are pleasures in shadows. Whatever the true good is, it must be located in something more permanent than the flux of sensation and the perishable body that experiences it. Epicurus simply refused to climb out of the cave. His philosophy is the philosophy of prisoners who have decided the shadows are good enough.

Why this argument fails:

Epicurus did not avoid Plato’s challenge. He met it at the root and answered it with the Canon. The Canon establishes that sensation is not a veil over reality but direct contact with it. The error is not in the sense reporting what arrives at the sense organ — that report is always accurate — but in the mind’s subsequent judgments about what the report means. Plato’s move was to treat the fact that things change and perish as evidence that they are “not really real” — that genuine reality must be eternal and unchanging, accessible only to reason operating independently of the senses. Epicurus’s answer: reality is what exists and acts in the world. Truth does not require permanence. The apple is real, its taste is real, its pleasure is real — and the fact that it will rot does not make any of that less true while it exists.

The “true world” error — positing a higher, more real realm beyond what we can sense — is the single most consequential mistake in Western philosophy, and it runs without interruption from Plato through Neoplatonism, through Augustine and Aquinas, through Descartes, through Kant’s Ding an sich, and into modern idealism. In every version, the experienced world is demoted and something unverifiable is promoted as the real thing. Epicurus is the philosopher who refused this move at the beginning, before it became the inherited assumption of the tradition. The Canon is his systematic argument for why the move is wrong and the stakes are: if you accept the Platonic premise, you lose the natural world, you lose the natural guidance of pleasure and pain, and you are left subject to whatever “higher truth” the authorities of the day claim to access on your behalf.

Far from having ignored Plato’s deepest argument, Epicurus identified it as the central threat to human freedom and happiness and built the entire structure of his philosophy around defeating it.

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Argument Nine: The Soul Survives Death — Therefore “Death Is Nothing to Us” Fails

Source: Religious traditions universally; philosophical versions in Plato’s Phaedo; Descartes, Meditations Second and Sixth; various contemporary arguments for mind-body dualism

The argument: Epicurus’s most celebrated reassurance — “death is nothing to us, for when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not” — rests entirely on the claim that the soul is mortal and that consciousness ceases absolutely at death. If this is wrong — if the soul survives in any form, whether in bliss, in torment, or in some neutral continued existence — then the entire argument collapses. A person who genuinely believes in an afterlife of punishment receives no comfort from Epicurus, because his argument simply assumes its own conclusion. He asserts that the soul is mortal, but this is precisely what the religious traditions dispute and what dualist philosophers have long argued against. His reassurance is therefore conditional on a contested physical claim, and is worthless to anyone who does not already accept Epicurean physics. He has not answered the fear of death. He has simply declared the fear groundless by definition.

Why this argument fails:

The argument inverts the burden of proof. Epicurus does not begin with a bald assumption of soul mortality introduced to reach a comforting conclusion. Soul mortality is a conclusion arrived at through an extended prior argument about the nature of the soul as a physical compound — made of fine, highly mobile atoms distributed through the body — which loses the compound properties that make sensation possible when the body’s structure dissolves at death. This argument occupies the whole of Lucretius Book Three, some twenty-eight separate proofs. The claim is not asserted. It is derived from the same physical principles — the materiality of everything that exists, the impossibility of sensation without physical structure, the observable correlation between bodily states and mental states — that govern the rest of Epicurean physics.

The supernatural alternative has never been argued. It has been asserted, and the assertion has been backed by authority, tradition, and the threat of punishment for disbelief. What is the soul made of, if not matter? Where does it go when the body dissolves? By what mechanism does it continue to have sensation when disconnected from the nervous system, blood, and fine-structured body that made sensation possible? These questions have not been answered in two thousand years of theology and dualist philosophy because they cannot be answered — they would require producing, for inspection, a soul made of nothing physical that nonetheless somehow continues to act and feel. Epicurus does not owe his critics a refutation of their unanswered assertions.

The practical damage this argument does in discussion is specific: it makes newcomers feel that the Epicurean case against death-fear is no better than a coin flip between two unprovable positions. It is not. One position is grounded in physics, coherent, and consistent with everything we observe about the relationship between body and consciousness. The other is an ancient assertion, supported by the fear it claims to relieve.

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Argument Ten: Epicurean Hedonism Reduces to Short-Term Indulgence — The Cyrenaic Problem

Source: Aristippus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaic school (4th century BC); the popular equation of “hedonism” with immediate gratification; often implicit in casual critiques of Epicurean ethics

The argument: “Pleasure as the goal of life” ultimately means: get what feels good now. The future is uncertain. Past pleasures are gone. The only pleasure that is fully real and fully available is the pleasure of this moment. Once you commit to pleasure as the highest good, you have no principled basis for preferring delayed gratification over immediate satisfaction, or moderate pleasures over intense ones, or the pleasures of friendship over the pleasures of appetite. Epicurus tried to draw these distinctions through his classification of desires as “natural,” “necessary,” and “empty” — but this classification is just his personal aesthetic dressed up as philosophy. Others can draw it differently and still claim to be Epicureans. Without an absolute standard outside pleasure itself, the philosophy has no way to defend against the objector who says: the most intense pleasure available right now is what I want, and that is what Epicureanism tells me to pursue.

Why this argument fails:

This argument conflates Epicurus with Aristippus of Cyrene, his philosophical predecessor, and ignores precisely the distinction Epicurus worked hardest to establish. The Cyrenaics held that bodily pleasure in the present moment is the only genuine good — that past pleasures are gone and future pleasures uncertain, so the rational target is maximum sensation now. Epicurus rejected this explicitly and on principled grounds: the mind genuinely enjoys past pleasures through memory and future pleasures through anticipation, and these mental pleasures are real, often more powerful and more lasting than the bodily pleasures that occasioned them. The whole-life perspective is not rationalization — it is the foundation that makes philosophical happiness achievable and stable rather than merely momentary and collapsing.

The classification of desires is equally grounded, and it is not arbitrary. A desire is natural when it arises from the body’s actual requirements — for food, water, warmth, companionship — or from the genuine pleasures that come with friendship and philosophical activity. A desire is empty when it is generated by false belief — the belief that unlimited wealth, fame, or political power will finally deliver the security they have always promised and never provided. The test is empirical and specific: can the desire actually be satisfied, and does satisfying it produce the pleasure expected? Empty desires cannot be satisfied and do not produce the pleasures expected. They escalate. Every increment of wealth generates the desire for more; every round of applause demands another. The person pursuing empty desires is not pursuing pleasure — they are pursuing a phantom that recedes as they advance, while their actual capacity for pleasure deteriorates from overuse and anxiety.

The objection that “others could draw the classification differently” proves too much: by the same logic, a doctor’s classification of foods as nutritious or harmful could be challenged because “others might draw it differently.” The classification is justified not by Epicurus’s personal taste but by its predictive accuracy — by whether pursuing these desires in fact produces the pleasures they promise. Two thousand years of observation confirm that it does.

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Argument Eleven: All Pleasures Are the Same — So the Content of Your Life Makes No Difference

Source: A common inference from Epicurus’s rejection of qualitative pleasure-hierarchies; most famously associated with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian formulation that “the quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry”; frequently used to accuse Epicurean ethics of providing no meaningful life-guidance

The argument: Epicurus explicitly rejected the Platonic distinction between “higher” pleasures of reason and spirit and “lower” pleasures of the body. He measured pleasures purely in terms of quantity — greater and lesser, longer and shorter — not in terms of kind or quality. Since for Epicurus all pleasures are alike in being pleasures, and since his only evaluative criterion is the quantitative balance of pleasure over pain, it follows that the content of one’s pleasures is philosophically irrelevant. Whether you spend your life in philosophical conversation or in watching gladiators, in cultivating friendship or in pursuing shallow amusements, makes no difference in principle — only the net pleasure-pain total matters. Epicurean ethics therefore provides no meaningful guidance about how to live. It reduces to a single instruction — maximize your personal pleasure balance — and leaves everything else entirely to individual preference. This is not a philosophy of life. It is a permission slip.

Why this argument fails:

The rejection of a Platonic quality-hierarchy between pleasure-types does not entail that all pleasures are equivalent for the purposes of living well. Epicurus rejected the claim that intellectual pleasures are “higher” in kind than bodily ones — that they belong to a superior ontological category by virtue of their objects. He did not reject the observation that pleasures differ enormously in magnitude, duration, reliability, security, and consequences. These differences are exactly what practical wisdom (phronesis) exists to navigate, and phronesis is, in Epicurus’s own words, the most valuable of all the virtues — “more precious even than philosophy itself.” A philosophy that genuinely said “all pleasures are equal, just maximize the total” would have no use for a virtue of practical wisdom at all. Its prominent place in Epicurean ethics is direct evidence against the “no meaningful guidance” reading.

The classification of desires as natural, natural-but-not-necessary, and empty provides further specific guidance that the argument ignores. Empty desires — for unlimited wealth, fame, and power — are not merely “smaller” pleasures rated lower on the same scale. They are pursuits that systematically fail to deliver the pleasures they promise. They escalate rather than satisfy. They generate chronic anxiety rather than the security they advertise. A person who has spent years pursuing wealth in the belief that it will bring happiness and discovered that it has not is not reporting a philosophical preference for simple pleasures. They are reporting an empirical finding about how these desires actually function — a finding Epicurus identified and explained. The classification is predictive, not aesthetic.

Epicurus was also specific and direct about which pleasures are greatest in practice: friendship above all, followed by the pleasures of philosophy, memory, intellectual conversation, and the confident anticipation of continued pleasure. These are not “higher” in the Platonic sense — they are not privileged by their objects or their distance from the body. They are greatest because they are most reliable, most lasting, most resistant to the reversals of fortune that make intense bodily pleasures precarious, and most capable of being enjoyed from any temporal vantage point — in memory, in anticipation, and in the present all at once. This is rich, specific guidance about how to structure a life. It is the opposite of a permission slip.

Bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry” — the most famous expression of this error — was itself contested within utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, who felt compelled to reintroduce qualitative distinctions between pleasures precisely because Bentham’s formulation made the theory unlivable. The irony is that Mill’s solution (a hierarchy of “higher” and “lower” pleasures) is actually less coherent than Epicurus’s, because Mill could not explain the hierarchy without smuggling in a non-hedonist standard of value. Epicurus’s framework — quantitative differences evaluated by practical wisdom, with empirical guidance about which categories of desire tend to satisfy and which tend to disappoint — does not require that move. It is philosophically cleaner than either Bentham or Mill, and it provides more concrete guidance than either.

Argument Twelve: Epicurus Was Not Serious About His Views on the Gods — And Even If He Was, They Are Irrelevant Today

Source: A persistent modern assumption appearing in both academic and popular treatments; see e.g. A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (commentary suggesting Epicurus’s piety was defensive); also widespread in secular contexts where Epicurus is adopted as proto-atheist or proto-humanist

The argument takes two related forms. The first: Epicurus’s statements about the gods — that they exist, live in perfect blessedness in the spaces between worlds, and have no concern with human affairs — were a diplomatic accommodation designed to avoid the fate of Socrates. He did not actually believe in gods in any meaningful sense, and his “theology” is therefore a shield, not a doctrine. The second form: even granting that Epicurus held these views sincerely, we live in a more secular age. The specific content of Epicurean theology — the details about atomic gods in the intermundia — has no bearing on how a modern person should live. What matters is the practical ethics. The metaphysical and theological scaffolding can be set aside.

Why this argument fails:

The “diplomatic accommodation” thesis has no textual support and is contradicted by the evidence. Epicurus wrote about the nature of the gods not once or defensively but extensively, systematically, and with evident conviction. Principal Doctrine 1 — “The blessed and indestructible being has no trouble itself and brings no trouble upon any other being” — is not a hedge. It is a foundational philosophical claim from which a great deal follows. The Letter to Menoeceus opens with the injunction that we must have correct beliefs about the gods, precisely because false beliefs about them are among the most destructive things a person can hold. Epicurus treated theology as a philosophical necessity, not a liability to be managed.

The anti-providentialist position — that the gods do not intervene in human life, do not reward or punish, do not hear prayers, do not threaten the wicked with posthumous torment — was one of the most radical and deliberately adversarial positions in ancient philosophy. It was not a safe formulation. Claiming that the gods exist but are utterly indifferent to human affairs was not calculated to placate religious authorities. It removed every reason to fear or appease them. Lucretius makes this explicit at the opening of Book One: the greatest benefactor of humanity was the person who first dared to look the gods in the face and say that their supposed power over human life was an illusion. This is the opposite of diplomatic hedging.

The second form of the argument — that Epicurean theology is irrelevant today — is more plausible on its face and more damaging in practice. It attempts to retain Epicurean ethics while stripping away the physics and theology that generate and support it. But the Epicurean ethical project is inseparable from its theology. The fear of divine punishment and the anxiety about whether the gods are watching, judging, and ready to intervene are not merely ancient superstitions that modern rationalists have left behind. They are live concerns for the majority of people alive today — and they generate exactly the kind of chronic mental disturbance that Epicurus identified as among the greatest destroyers of human happiness. A version of Epicureanism that has nothing to say about the nature of divinity because that question is supposedly settled leaves people without the philosophical tools to address one of the most powerful sources of anxiety in contemporary life.

Moreover, setting aside the theological framework as optional leaves the ethics floating without foundation. Epicurus grounded his entire account of how to live in a naturalistic understanding of what kind of universe we actually inhabit: one without providence, without cosmic purpose, without divine oversight, and therefore one in which our own nature — pleasure and pain — is the only standard we need and the only standard we have. Remove that grounding and you do not have a simpler Epicureanism. You have Epicurean-flavored advice with no philosophical basis for its claims.

The argument that Epicurus’s views on the gods do not matter is almost always in practice an argument for replacing the Epicurean account of divinity with a more comfortable modern alternative — liberal theism, pantheism, or the vague spiritual sensibility of contemporary Humanism. These are exactly the adulterating traditions that EpicureanFriends.com exists to resist. Epicurus’s theology was not an optional supplement. It was part of the philosophical core.

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All commentary in this document has been compiled and edited by Cassius Amicus. It is subject to regular revision and improvement, and you should always check this page for the latest version. Comments and suggestions may be submitted by email but are best received as part of the discussion thread for this document at EpicureanFriends.com.