Why You Should Choose Epicurus To Be Your Guide - The Case for Epicurus

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 it on its own terms.

Epicurus is the leader in the fight for happiness in this world. 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 the 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 how we know; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live.

The Canon: How We Know

Epicurus held that we have three standards of truth that nature gives us: the senses, the anticipations (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 concepts 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).

What cannot be seen is not closed to us, but we 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.

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 them.

Physics: The Nature of Things

“First of all, that 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.

The gods exist, but they are not what the many believe. “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.

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 the 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.

Epicurus was therefore what Cicero’s Epicurean called him: “the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness” (On Ends I.32). The two goals are not in conflict. Each supports the other.

Ethics: Pleasure in the Full Sense

Pleasure Is the Goal

Nature has given every living thing a guide from birth, the feelings of pleasure and pain. “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).

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 expanded the word to cover everything in life that is desirable. 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 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).

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 Not 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.

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.

Simple living, for Epicurus, was a means, not a vow. Plain food brings great pleasure when we are hungry, and the man who is used to it is not afraid of losing luxury. But “those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it” (DL X.130). Epicurus himself, who lived mostly on bread and water, wrote to a friend, “Send me some preserved cheese, that when I like I may have a feast” (DL X.11). And he warned against going too far the other way: “Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is in like case with him who errs through excess” (VS 63).

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). 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.

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 Promise

The man who lives by these teachings, Epicurus promised, “shall live like a god among men” (DL X.135). He did not promise it after death, or in another world, or to those who obey. He promised it here and now, to anyone with 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.

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.