The Case for Epicurus - Champion of Truth, Architect of the Happy Life

“When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face. Him neither story of gods nor thunderbolts nor heaven with threatening roar could quell: they only chafed the more the eager courage of his soul, filling him with desire to be the first to burst the fast bars of nature’s portals. Therefore the living force of his soul gained the day: on he passed far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe; whence he returns a conqueror to tell us what can, what cannot come into being; in short on what principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep-set boundary mark. Therefore religion is put underfoot and trampled upon in turn; us his victory brings level with heaven.”

— Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I.62–79, tr. H. A. J. Munro

A Guide for This World and This Life

Before we hear from the opponents, we set out what Epicurus taught and why it deserves to be chosen. The rest of the book tests that teaching against seven rival traditions. This chapter states Epicurus on his own terms.

Epicurus was the champion of truth and of the happy life in this world. He fought first for the truth about nature, and on that truth he built the happy life. Nearly every one of the traditions examined in this book, in its own way, asks a man to look past the life he has toward something higher: a world of Forms, a providence, a heaven, a duty, a Nirvana. Epicurus asks him to look at the life he has and to make the most of it.

“We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all time must be no more. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, postpone your happiness: life is wasted in procrastination and each one of us dies without allowing himself leisure” (VS 14). There is no second life in which to make up for a wasted first one. The wise man, Epicurus says, does not seek “the longest period of time, but the most pleasant,” just as “with food he does not seek simply the larger share and nothing else, but rather the most pleasant” (DL X.126).

The contrast with views typified by the Christian Gospel could not be sharper. In the parable of the rich fool, the man who says to his soul, “take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” is told, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.” The lesson drawn is “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God,” and the disciples are told to provide themselves “a treasure in the heavens that faileth not” (Luke 12:19–21, 33). Paul goes further: “we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Epicurus looks at the things which are seen. That choice takes nerve. Lucretius puts the stakes plainly: “life itself would at once fall to the ground, unless you choose to trust the senses” (IV.507). To trust the senses is to be invested in this world and this life. It means taking what nature gives and treasuring it, rather than laying up treasure in heaven or in some other make-believe story. “We should not spoil what we have by desiring what we have not, but remember that what we have too was the gift of fortune” (VS 35).

And nature gives a great deal. Lucretius describes men who, even without gold or silver or banquet halls, “spread themselves in groups on the soft grass beside a stream of water under the boughs of a high tree and at no great cost pleasantly refresh their bodies, above all when the weather smiles and the seasons of the year besprinkle the green grass with flowers” (II.20–33). That is not the picture of a man waiting for another world. It is the picture of a man enjoying this one.

The rest of this chapter sets out the teaching on which that choice rests, in the three parts into which Epicurus divided philosophy: the Canon, or what is real and true and how we know it; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live.

The Canon: What Is Real, What Is True, and How We Know

Every philosophy presumes an answer to the question of what it means by “true” and “real,” but the answers are not as obvious as they seem. Plato taught that only what is eternal and unchanging is truly real, so that the world we see “is always becoming and never is” (Timaeus 27d–28a), and that truth belongs to that higher world. Democritus, the founder of atomism, went the other way and said “that atoms alone among existing things have true reality, while everything else exists by convention,” so that the colors, tastes and warmth of the world we live in are not really there. Diogenes of Oinoanda answered him: “according to your account, Democritus, it will be impossible for us even to live, let alone discover the truth” (Fr. 7).

Epicurus rejected both views and tied the two questions together. What is real is what exists and acts in nature: bodies, made of atoms, and the void in which they move. The world we live in, with its colors and tastes, its growth and decay, is that real world, not a shadow of another one. And what is true is what reports the real as it is. Sextus Empiricus reports that Epicurus “asserts that all sensibles are true and existent. For there is no difference between saying that a thing is ‘true’ and saying that it is ‘subsisting.’” He defined truth simply: “That is true which is in the state in which it is said to be,” and “False is that which is not in the state in which it is said to be” (Against the Logicians II.9). Truth does not require eternity, and reality does not require that a thing never change. A flower is no less real for fading, and a pleasure is no less true for ending.

That answer leads to the next question: how do we test whether what we say is in the state we say it is? Epicurus held that we have three standards of truth that nature gives us: the senses, the preconcepts (the general ideas that we form from repeated experience), and the feelings of pleasure and pain. “In The Canon Epicurus says that the tests of truth are the sensations and preconcepts and the feelings” (DL X.31).

Nothing stands above these standards. “Nor is there anything which can refute the sensations … nor again can reason, for all reason is dependent upon sensations” (DL X.32). Every sensation truly reports what strikes the sense organ. Error lies in the opinion we add to it, and opinion is tested by further evidence. “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23).

Nor do the senses deceive us on purpose, because there is no purpose behind them. Plato pictured men as prisoners in a cave, watching shadows cast on a wall by figures that others carry behind “the screen which marionette players have in front of them,” and he said that “the prison-house is the world of sight.” But nature is not a puppeteer. It has no design, no aims for men and no wish to mislead them. It holds no opinions, so it cannot hand us false ones. A sensation adds nothing of its own: “all sensation is irrational and does not admit of memory; for it is not set in motion by itself, nor when it is set in motion by something else, can it add to it or take from it.” Falsehood enters only with what we add, for “falsehood and error always lie in the addition of opinion.” Nature gives us no puppet show and no house of mirrors. That is why we can trust the senses, and by trusting them and using them properly to pursue pleasure, we can succeed in reaching a life of happiness, which is in fact a life of pleasure.

What cannot be seen is not always completely closed to us, but we can reach it only by reasoning from what is seen. “We must keep all our investigations in accord with our sensations … in order that we may have indications whereby we may judge both the problem of sense perception and the unseen” (DL X.38). In this way Epicurus reasoned from the fact of motion to the existence of the void, and from the qualities of bodies to the atoms.

Nearly every rival tradition in this book begins by doubting the senses in some way, and that doubt is the first step away from this world. The Epicurean begins by trusting the senses.

Physics: The Nature of Things

“First of all … nothing is created out of that which does not exist: for if it were, everything would be created out of everything with no need of seeds” (DL X.38). Nor does anything pass into nothing. “The universe always was such as it is now, and always will be the same” (X.39).

The universe is made of atoms and void, and it is infinite. Because the atoms are infinite in number, “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours” (DL X.45). Each world comes to be from the motions of the atoms and passes away again. No god made our world, and none governs it.

As the Epicurean Velleius explains in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, Epicurus inferred from a variety of evidence that a class of beings worthy of being called gods does exist. But the critical point is that these gods are entirely natural, and not at all what the many believe them to be. “The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour” (PD 1). “The impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many” (DL X.123).

The soul is “a body of fine particles distributed throughout the whole structure” (DL X.63), and it is scattered when the body dies. “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us” (PD 2). This life is the only one we will have, and that is why it matters so much.

Nor is that life fixed in advance. Fate troubled the ancient world almost as much as gods did, and it troubles many people still. The Greeks grew up on Homer and Hesiod, in whom three Fates spin each man’s lot and cut it off. The philosophers replaced the Fates with necessity. Democritus, the founder of the atomic theory, held that the atoms move only as they are driven by blows, so that every motion, and every thought and choice, follows of necessity from the motions before it. Cicero reports that Democritus “preferred to accept the view that all events are caused by necessity, rather than to deprive the atoms of their natural motions” (On Fate 23). In Epicurus’s own lifetime the Stoics made fate the reason of a god running through all things.

Epicurus rejected destiny in every form. The wise man “laughs at (destiny), whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things.” Of the things that happen, some happen by necessity, “and some by chance, and some are within our control; for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame” (DL X.133). Then comes one of the most emphatic sentences he wrote: “it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation” (X.134). Norman DeWitt observes that in Epicurus’s judgment “the crime of the physicists … had been their failure to deal with the problem of freedom, and their offense was at its worst in the case of the atomists” (Epicurus and His Philosophy, p. 175).

Here Epicurus parted company with his own predecessors, and he did so on the evidence. We see that living creatures move forward “whither the will leads each,” and that “the mind itself does not feel an internal necessity in all its actions” (Lucretius II.251–293). Since nothing comes from nothing, that power must have its beginning in the nature of the atoms themselves, which at no fixed time and place move a little from their path. Diogenes of Oinoanda answers the follower of Democritus who says that the atoms “have no free movement”: “Do you [not] know, whoever you are, that there is actually a free movement in the atoms, which Democritus failed to discover, but Epicurus brought to light — a swerving movement, as he proves from phenomena?” (Fr. 54). Critics ancient and modern have attacked the swerve, and scholars still debate how Epicurus understood it. But on the main point he would not let a theory overrule what we perceive about ourselves.

Epicurus also showed that the opposite view defeats itself: “The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity” (VS 40). And the stakes are practical. “If fate is believed in,” Diogenes adds, “all admonition and censure are nullified” (Fr. 54). A man who believes his life is already written has no reason to deliberate, to plan or to try. Epicurean freedom is not the gift of an immortal soul, granted so that it can be judged. It belongs to a mortal mind made of atoms, and Lucretius names its use: it is the will “whereby we move forward, where pleasure leads each one of us” (II.251–262, tr. Bailey). “Necessity is an evil, but there is no necessity to live under the control of necessity” (VS 9).

Epicurus did not come to philosophy already sure that pleasure was the goal. He came to it with a question about where the world came from. Apollodorus reports that “he took to philosophy because he despised the teachers of literature, since they were not able to explain to him the passage about Chaos in Hesiod” (DL X.2). Epicurus would not accept that the world was made out of Chaos, and he went looking for the truth.

He followed that search wherever the evidence led. He urged on others “the constant occupation in the investigation of nature,” and he found his own peace “chiefly in a life so occupied” (DL X.37). The work of natural science is “to discover accurately the cause of the most essential facts” (X.78), and “we must not conduct scientific investigation by means of empty assumptions and arbitrary principles, but follow the lead of phenomena” (X.87). If the evidence had led Epicurus to a creator who issues commands on how to live, and who rewards and punishes men according to those commands, he would have been among the first to follow that path. It did not. The evidence led to atoms and void.

The same senses that show us how the world is made also show us how to live. We trust the senses, and so we trust nature, and nature tells every living thing to follow pleasure: “Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil” (On Ends I.30). But we cannot follow that guide well unless we know how nature works. That is why we study nature: to perfect our pursuit of pleasure through the truth. Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman says that “to learn what nature’s real requirements are improves the moral character also” (I.63). Epicurus says that “a man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed” (PD 12). A comforting story will not do the work. Only the truth will.

We would like to know the truth in every case, but sometimes the evidence is not enough to show which of several explanations is correct. Lucretius gives the example of a dead body seen at a distance. We name “all the different causes of death, in order that the one real cause of that man’s death be mentioned among them” (VI.703). Every explanation must fit the facts, and none may bring gods back in: “Only superstition must be excluded, as it will, if one successfully follows the lead of seen phenomena to gain indications about the invisible” (DL X.104). When we have explanations that meet that test, we must not suppose that our inquiry “has not reached sufficient accuracy to contribute to our peace of mind and happiness” (X.80). So long as we have at least one explanation that fits the facts and leaves no room for the supernatural, we need not go on adding to the list forever.

That approach is why Epicurean physics remains vitally important today. Much has been learned since Epicurus about the size of the sun, the causes of lightning and the structure of the atom, and some of his specific explanations have been improved upon or replaced. But Epicurus was not writing a science textbook to be outdated by better instruments. He was setting out the rules that any sound account of nature must follow: begin with the evidence of the senses; reason from what is seen to what is unseen; hold that nothing comes from nothing and nothing passes into nothing; where the evidence cannot decide, keep every explanation that fits the facts; and never bring in the supernatural. Modern science has advanced by following those rules, not by abandoning them, and any theory that breaks them, by asking us to believe that the world came from nothing or that the senses tell us nothing, deserves suspicion however impressive its mathematics. The details of Epicurean physics can be revised. Its approach remains correct. The article The Continuing Vitality of Epicurean Physics on EpicurusToday.com develops the point at length.

Epicurus was therefore both things that Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman called him: “that discoverer of truth and architect of the happy life” (On Ends I.32). The order matters. His conclusions about how to live rest on his conclusions about nature, and those rest on the evidence of the senses. Without the truth about nature, his ethics would have nothing to stand on. The two goals are not in conflict. Each supports the other.

Ethics: Pleasure in the Full Sense

Happiness through Pleasure Is the Goal

Epicurus, like the other philosophers of his day, made happiness the goal of life. The Letter to Menoeceus opens by saying that “no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul,” any more than it is ever too early or too late for happiness, and it sets the task plainly: “We must then meditate on the things that make our happiness, seeing that when that is with us we have all, but when it is absent we do all to win it” (DL X.122).

But Epicurus did not leave happiness undefined and ambiguous, a word that each man may fill with whatever he likes, or that a philosopher or a priest may fill for him. He said what it is. A life of happiness is a life of pleasure. Nature has given every living thing a guide from birth, the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the same letter goes on: “We call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For 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” (DL X.129). Pleasure is not a rival to happiness, or a step on the way to something higher. It is what happiness is made of.

Virtually every school of the ancient world agreed that the goal of life is happiness, eudaimonia. The quarrel was over what happiness is. Diogenes of Oinoanda, the Epicurean who in the second century AD carved his master’s teaching on a wall in his city for all to read, stated the issue plainly:

“If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved inquiry into «what is the means of happiness?» and they wanted to say «the virtues» (which would actually be true), it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this, without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not «what is the means of happiness?» but «what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?», I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which are inopportunely messed about by these people (being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end), are in no way an end, but the means to the end.” (Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fr. 32, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith)

That is the question at issue in every chapter of this book. It is not how to reach happiness, but what happiness is. The rival traditions answer virtue, or knowledge of the Good, or contemplation, or the calm that comes from suspending judgment, or obedience to God, or duty, or the end of desire. Epicurus answers that happiness is a life of pleasure.

What Epicurus Meant by “Pleasure”

Most readers hear the word “pleasure” in its narrowest sense: a moment of bodily excitement, a good meal, a drink, a thrill of the senses. Cicero assumed the same. “Every one uses the Greek word hēdonē and the Latin voluptas,” he says, “to mean an agreeable and exhilarating stimulation of the sense” (On Ends II.8). If that were all Epicurus meant, his critics would be right to call his philosophy the philosophy of the trough.

But Epicurus’s key insight was that every experience in life that we find to be desirable deserves to be considered within the term pleasure. His spokesman Torquatus explains: “The pleasure we pursue is not that kind alone which affects our physical being with a definite delightful feeling,—a positively agreeable perception of the senses.” Instead, “everything that causes gratification is a pleasure (just as everything that causes annoyance is a pain)” (On Ends I.37).

That takes in the whole of life, of the mind as well as of the body. Epicurus admitted “both kinds both in the soul and in the body,” the pleasures of rest and the pleasures of motion (DL X.136). He did not despise the body: “I know not how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and withdraw the pleasures of love and those of hearing and sight” (DL X.6). But the pleasures of the mind are often the greater, “since the body can feel only what is present to it at the moment, whereas the mind is also cognizant of the past and of the future” (On Ends I.55). The joy of hope, the delight of a good memory, the company of friends, the thrill of a race won or a summit reached, the beauty of the world and the satisfaction of understanding it are all pleasures. “In philosophy pleasure goes hand in hand with knowledge” (VS 27). Torquatus sums up the goal as “complete freedom from pain and sorrow coupled with the enjoyment of the highest bodily and mental pleasures” (On Ends I.57).

Cicero insisted that this is not how anyone uses the word pleasure, and in a narrow sense he was right. But Epicurus had good reason for it. Nature gives us only two feelings by which to judge what to choose and what to avoid: “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” (DL X.34). Whatever we find desirable, a good meal, the company of a friend, the rush of a zipline ride, an hour free of pain, reaches us through the feeling of pleasure, because there is no other feeling for it to reach us through. To restrict the name to a few thrills of the senses would leave most of what we value without a name, and outside the guide that nature gave us. Norman DeWitt put it this way:

“The extension of the name of pleasure to the 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)

When the Epicurean says that pleasure is the goal, then, he means the whole range of experiences, of body and mind, that make life worth living.

”Absence of Pain” Is Neither Nothingness Nor Asceticism

Epicurus also wrote that “when, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality … but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind” (DL X.131). Many modern readers take this to mean that Epicurus taught a kind of Buddhist withdrawal: want little, feel little, and call the emptiness peace. That is the reverse of what he meant.

The key is that, for Epicurus, there is no neutral state between pleasure and pain. “Epicurus consequently maintained that there ‘is no such thing as a neutral state of feeling’ intermediate between pleasure and pain … A man who is conscious of his condition at all must necessarily feel either pleasure or pain” (On Ends I.38). A life from which pain has been removed is not an empty life. It is a life filled with pleasure, and “complete absence of pain Epicurus considers to be the limit and highest point of pleasure” (same passage). “Absence of pain” is a description of a full life, not a recipe for an empty one.

An old puzzle well known to the philosophers of Epicurus’s day, the puzzle of the heap, or sorites, shows what he meant. Take a heap of grain. Where does the “heap” reside? In one particular grain, or in some number of grains? Add grains one at a time, or take them away, and try to find the point where we cross the line into a heap or out of one. No such point can be found, because a heap has no existence apart from the individual grains. “Heap” is our name for some number of grains taken together.

The same reasoning applies to the good itself, and Epicurus’s own words show it. Cicero quotes his words from “that book which contains all the doctrine of your school,” hoping to embarrass him with them: “Nor can I form any notion of the chief good, abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses” (Tusculan Disputations III.41). Cicero thought this exposed Epicurus as a sensualist. Read in the light of the heap, it says something else. Take away the pleasures of taste, then those of hearing, then those of sight, then every other pleasure of the senses and of the mind, one at a time, and look for the point at which “the good” is left standing by itself. That point never comes. When the last specific pleasure is gone, nothing is left, because the good was never anything apart from the pleasures, just as the heap was never anything apart from the grains.

The words “pleasure” and “happiness” do not mean the same thing, but both must be viewed from this same perspective. “Pleasure” has no existence apart from the specific pleasures of mind and body that we actually feel, and happiness is our name for a way of looking at our pleasures taken together. When we add pleasures or pains to our experience, or take them away, we never reach a separate thing called “pleasure” or “pain” or “happiness” or “unhappiness.” We always find specific pleasures or specific pains. So removing pains can never leave a zero, or a neutral blank. There are only two kinds of feeling, pleasure and pain (DL X.34), and when the pains are removed, the only thing that can remain is pleasure.

Which pleasures remain, and which we should choose, is a different question. That depends on the circumstances and on each man’s own choices: one man spends a painless hour with friends, another in study, another ziplining down a mountain, another racing a sailboat, another at a good meal, and another working toward the day he will fly to Mars. Epicurus did not answer that question for everyone, and he did not need to. The point of “absence of pain” is to identify the conceptual goal of life, which is happiness, not virtue or piety or logic, and to show how to reach it: by acting so that our lives hold as much pleasure and as little pain as possible.

Nor did Epicurus teach that desire itself is the enemy. The Buddhist scripture says: “Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil … From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear” (Dhammapada 211–212). Epicurus says the opposite: “of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship” (PD 27). He teaches us to satisfy our desires wisely, not to extinguish them.

Happiness Does Not Arise by Letting Go

One of the most widespread modern versions of Epicurus comes from no single ancient school, though it borrows from several. It holds that if we clear the mind, meditate, “just breathe” or “get out of our own way,” we can set aside our desires and concerns, and that happiness will then arise of its own accord. Its practical form is minimalism: own less, want less, do less, and treat the emptying of life as the road to contentment. Minimalism is offered as a kinder, gentler asceticism, without the hair shirt but headed in the same direction. Henry David Thoreau gave it its American motto: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand,” for “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone” (Walden, 1854). The same advice runs through the traditions examined in this book. The Dhammapada says “there is no happiness higher than rest.” Epictetus says that freedom “is not acquired by satisfying yourself with what you desire, but by destroying your desire.” The Gospel says “Take no thought for your life,” and that it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Sextus Empiricus says that the Skeptic’s calm followed his giving up the search for truth “even as a shadow follows its substance.” The chapters on each tradition take these up in turn.

Epicurus taught none of this, and his advice does not amount to the same thing.

First, happiness does not arise by itself. It is the result of choice, and choice requires thought. The pleasant life is produced by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance,” and “of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence” (DL X.132). When Epicurus told his students to meditate, he meant the opposite of emptying the mind. “We must then meditate on the things that make our happiness” (DL X.122), and “meditate therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day” (X.135). Epicurean meditation fills the mind with the truth about nature and with the reasons for choosing one pleasure over another, until they are fixed in memory and ready for use. It does not clear the mind of them. “We must laugh and philosophize at the same time and do our household duties and employ our other faculties” (VS 41).

Second, Epicurus did not teach us to want little. He valued the ability to live on little, but he said exactly why: “not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things, but that, if we do not possess many, we may enjoy the few in the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it” (DL X.130). Self-sufficiency is insurance, not the goal. The man who knows he can live well on little has nothing to fear from the loss of much, and so he can enjoy much the more when he has it. The minimalist turns the insurance into the goal. Epicurus also wrote that “he who has learned the limits of life knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain” (PD 21), but that is a reason for confidence, not a ceiling on pleasure: the necessities are easily secured, so a man need not live in fear of losing them, and he is free to pursue whatever further pleasures are worth their cost. “Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is in like case with him who errs through excess” (VS 63).

Third, the Epicurean’s confidence rests on knowledge, not on the absence of concern. “The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it” (Fragment 11). To “rightly calculate” a man has to understand how the world works and what it can be relied upon to provide. The let-go approach is much closer to the Skeptic, who stopped looking for the truth and found that a kind of quiet came to him “as it happened,” than to Epicurus, who found his happiness through the search for the truth and not by giving it up.

The difference lies in the reason. The minimalist reduces his desires because he thinks desire itself is the problem. The Epicurean measures each desire against what it will cost him, and he pursues every pleasure whose cost is worth paying, whether it is a quiet evening with a book or the long work of building a business, climbing a mountain or flying to Mars. The first is a rule for wanting less. The second is a method for getting more of what makes life worth living.

Choosing Among Pleasures

Pleasures are chosen by measuring them against each other and against the pains they bring. “By a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters” (DL X.130). Desires are of three kinds: “some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination” (PD 29).

Torquatus states the principle behind this classification: “the principle of classification being that the necessary desires are gratified with little trouble or expense; the natural desires also require but little, since nature’s own riches, which suffice to content her, are both easily procured and limited in amount; but for the imaginary desires no bound or limit can be discovered” (On Ends I.45). The classification is a tool for predicting how much pain the pursuit of a desire is likely to bring. It is not a fixed list. Epicurus never set out exactly how to decide which desires belong in which category, and a desire that falls in one category for one man may fall in another for a different man, or for the same man in different circumstances.

What the classification does make plain is the danger of desires that come from idle imagination. Because “no bound or limit can be discovered” for them, they can never be satisfied, and a desire that can never be satisfied is likely to bring more pain than pleasure.

But Epicurus never said, or implied, that we should limit ourselves to what is natural and necessary. He said the opposite: “We must not violate nature, but obey her; and we shall obey her if we fulfill the necessary desires and also the physical, if they bring no harm to us, but sternly reject the harmful” (VS 21). The desires that are not necessary are those whose craving “is easily dispelled, when the object is hard to procure or they seem likely to produce harm” (PD 26). When they are within reach and bring no harm that outweighs the pleasure, there is nothing to dispel. A feast with friends, a mountain climbed, a company built, a voyage to the far side of the world, or one day to Mars, is as much a part of the Epicurean life as a quiet evening with a book, whenever the pleasure is worth its cost.

The pleasant life is not a life of drinking bouts and luxury but of “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit” (DL X.132). Sometimes we accept a pain for the sake of a greater pleasure, and sometimes we pass over a pleasure that would bring a greater pain. The measure is always the whole life, seen from its widest perspective, and the purpose of that measurement is to help us fill our lives with the greatest pleasure possible.

Virtue, Justice and Friendship

Virtue is not the goal but the means. “Virtue is preferred for the sake of pleasure, and not for its own sake, just as the doctor’s art is employed for the sake of health” (DL X.138). Yet “it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly” (X.132). Justice is not a heavenly form or a divine command but “a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed” (PD 31). And friendship, the greatest instrument wisdom provides, is the setting in which the pleasant life is lived.

The Good in This World

Nearly every rival tradition in this book makes the same charge: that men will not be good unless they believe in something higher and truer than this world, a world of Forms, a providence, gods who watch them and will punish them, a life after death, or a moral law above nature, so that the belief must be kept alive even if it is a myth. Nietzsche saw the motive behind it: “There is no sense in spinning yarns about another world, provided, of course, that we do not possess a mighty instinct which urges us to slander, belittle, and cast suspicion upon this life: in this case we should be avenging ourselves on this life with the phantasmagoria of ‘another,’ of a ‘better’ life” (Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” §6). Plato let the rulers of his republic tell a “royal lie,” and Cicero warned that without piety toward the gods “justice itself, the queen of all the virtues” would disappear (On the Nature of the Gods I.4).

Epicurus answered that the good is found in this world, and that the fear of gods is neither the source of justice nor its safeguard. Justice is a compact for mutual advantage, and men keep it because they see its benefits and because the unjust man can never be at ease. “Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which attaches to the apprehension of being unable to escape those appointed to punish such actions” (PD 34). “It is not possible for one who acts in secret contravention of the terms of the compact not to harm or be harmed to be confident that he will escape detection, even if, at present, he escapes a thousand times” (PD 35).

Diogenes of Oinoanda put the argument in plain terms. Wrongdoers who do not fear the laws do not fear the gods either, “for if they were [afraid, they] would not [do wrong].” The wise are just “on account of [thinking] correctly and the [opinions] they hold [regarding] certain things [and especially] pains and death,” and ordinary people, so far as they are just, are held to it “on account of the laws and the penalties, imposed by the laws, hanging over them.” As for the gods of the myths: “On account of what kind of gods, then, will human beings be righteous? For they are not righteous on account of the real ones or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ Judges in Hades. We are left with this conclusion; otherwise, why should not those who disregard the laws scorn fables much more?” (Fr. 20).

Lucretius added that the punishments of the underworld are idle tales, but that the guilty already punish themselves in this life: “the conscience-stricken mind through boding fears applies to itself goads and frightens itself with whips” (Lucretius III.1014–1023). Religion, for its part, has driven men to crimes of its own. Lucretius’s example is Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter to win a fair wind for the fleet: “So great the evils to which religion could prompt!” (Lucretius I.101).

Confidence, Not a Guarantee

Epicurus did not promise anyone happiness. A promise would mean that the outcome is fixed in advance, and as we have seen, Epicurus denied that our lives are fixed. Some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some are within our control (DL X.133). Our choices are our own. Chance can still strike even the wise man, though “in but few things chance hinders a wise man, but the greatest and most important matters reason has ordained and throughout the whole period of life does and will ordain” (PD 16). And so Epicurus “thinks it better to be unfortunate in reasonable action than to prosper in unreason” (DL X.135).

What Epicurus offered was not a guarantee but a reasoned confidence. “The flesh cries out to be saved from hunger, thirst and cold. For if a man possess this safety and hope to possess it, he might rival even Zeus in happiness” (VS 33). “The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it” (Fragment 11, On the End of Life). The man who meditates on these teachings “night and day,” Epicurus wrote, “shall live like a god among men” (DL X.135).

That expectation does not look to a reward after death, or in another world, or for obedience. It looks to this life, here and now. Some things will always be beyond our control, but how we choose is not, and the man who has the nerve to trust the senses that nature gave him, to learn the truth about the world, and to take hold of the pleasures that life offers can face the future with confidence that he is following the best path to happiness that life allows.

The chapters that follow show how seven traditions answered the same questions, and what they asked men to give up in exchange for their answers. The final chapter returns to the choice this one began with.