Jefferson's Epicurus: How America's Philosopher-President Embodied the Fifteen Core Doctrines

The history of Epicurean philosophy is in large part the history of its suppression. For twenty-three centuries, the tradition has been calumniated by Stoics, domesticated by Humanists, and buried under Platonic theology dressed in Christian clothing. Epicurus became, in the popular imagination, either a crude hedonist who recommended indulgence in bodily pleasure, or a quiet ascetic who advocated withdrawal from the world — two opposite caricatures that between them ensured that the actual philosophy never had to be confronted on its own terms.

That this outcome was not inevitable — that an educated person in the Western tradition could read the primary sources, understand Epicurus correctly, endorse his philosophy explicitly and by name, and fight for it against both Platonism and organized religion — is demonstrated by one of the most consequential public figures in American history.

Thomas Jefferson stated plainly, in a letter to his friend William Short on October 31, 1819: “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

He was not being modest. In the same letter he called Stoic calumnies of Epicurus a “great crime,” identified Cicero as an accomplice in those calumnies, and traced the ruin of Christian theology to its incorporation of Platonic “mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind.” He wrote in 1816 to Charles Thomson that the Epicurean system was, “notwithstanding the calumnies of the Stoics and caricatures of Cicero, the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients.”

Jefferson had multiple copies of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, had studied Gassendi’s translation of the Life of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, and compiled his own “Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus” — a document he attached to the Short letter as a reference. He was not a dilettante who encountered Epicurus late in life and nodded at him approvingly. He was a close and deliberate student of the primary texts who understood what he was endorsing.

What follows is a walk through the fifteen core doctrines of Classical Epicurean philosophy, in the order in which we identify them as the heart of the system, with Jefferson’s own words demonstrating his understanding and endorsement of each.

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Part One: Natural Science (Physics)

1. Nothing Comes From Nothing or Goes To Nothing Supernaturally. Everything Happens Naturally From the Motion of Atoms Through Space.

Jefferson’s Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus states at the head of its physical section: “The Universe eternal. Its parts, great and small, interchangeable. Matter and Void alone. Motion inherent in matter, which is weighty & declining. Eternal circulation of the elements of bodies.”

This is precisely the Epicurean position that Lucretius argues at the opening of De Rerum Natura: the universe has always existed and will always exist, its material content is conserved, and everything that happens follows from the natural motion of matter through space. No supernatural creation, no supernatural destruction, no divine intervention in the processes of nature.

Jefferson confirmed his personal commitment to this position in his letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820, where he wrote: “I feel: therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.”

The Epicurean formulation could not be stated more cleanly. Matter, void, motion: the complete physical ontology on which Lucretius built De Rerum Natura and on which Epicurus grounded everything else.

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2. The Universe Is Infinite In Size And Eternal In Time And Has No Gods Over It. There Is No Supernatural Design Or Existence Outside Of Nature.

Jefferson’s Syllabus is explicit: “The Universe eternal.” And in the same letter he attached the Syllabus, he identified Plato and his theological heirs as the source of the supernatural framework that Epicurus was built to oppose. To his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, Jefferson wrote that when examining religious claims, “those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of Nature, must be examined with more care,” and that the authority of a writer claiming divine inspiration must be assessed by the same standards of evidence as any other claim.

In the Adams letter of 1820, Jefferson made the nature of his materialism unmistakable: “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.”

A universe without immaterial existences is a universe without supernatural governors — which is the Epicurean universe precisely.

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3. True Divinity Is Incorruptible And Blessed. Beings Which Are Divine Do Not Reward Friends And Punish Enemies Or Intervene In Human Affairs.

Jefferson’s Syllabus states of the gods: “Gods, an order of beings next superior to man, enjoying in their sphere their own felicities, but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them.”

The phrase “not meddling” is the entire Epicurean theological position in two words. The gods are blessed, self-sufficient, incorruptible — and therefore have no anger, no favor, no interest in human affairs. Jefferson understood this and stated it as a core Epicurean doctrine.

To Peter Carr he wrote that reason must be the standard even for theological questions: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” A god who approves rational inquiry rather than requiring submission to fear is not the god of divine wrath and punishment — it is a conception of divinity entirely consistent with the Epicurean account of beings dwelling in perfect felicity, undisturbed by the affairs of lesser creatures.

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4. Death Is Nothing To Us. When We Die We Cease To Exist.

Jefferson returned repeatedly to the Epicurean account of death as the end of sensation. In the letter to Adams of August 1820, after establishing that matter and void are all that exist, he drew the direct consequence: immaterial souls are “nothings.” In the same letter he expressed his personal equanimity about death with a Latin quotation — “qui summum nec metuit diem nec optat” (“who neither fears nor desires his last day”) — which he applied to himself in the letter to Charles Thomson in 1816.

But the most direct statement appears in the letter to William Short, where Jefferson described his own state of mind as “the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.” Hope of an afterlife and fear of divine punishment — the two forces that the Epicurean account of death was designed to eliminate — are both equally dismissed. The philosophical consolation is not hope for something better after death. It is the understanding that there is nothing to fear in what comes after.

In a letter to John Adams in 1816, Jefferson wrote of death in terms that echo Epicurus directly: “There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.”

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5. There Is No Necessity To Live Under the Control of Necessity. There Is No Fate Or Destiny — We Decide How We Live.

Jefferson’s Syllabus records: “Man is a free agent.” These four words place him squarely in the Epicurean tradition that Epicurus built the atomic swerve to defend — the insistence that human choice is real, that the universe is not a machine of iron necessity, and that a life directed by reason toward genuine goods is not merely the playing out of a script written before we were born.

Jefferson demonstrated his commitment to free agency not just philosophically but through every major act of his public life. The Declaration of Independence, which he drafted, rests on the Epicurean premise that humans are capable of deciding how they live and governing themselves accordingly. In the letter to Justice Johnson in 1823, he described the founding generation’s belief that “man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and protected in right by moderate powers confided to persons of his own choice.”

Persons of their own choice — not assigned by fate, not determined by birth, not governed by divine necessity. This is the free-agent premise of Epicurean ethics applied to political theory.

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Part Two: The Theory of Knowledge (Canonics)

6. He Who Says Nothing Can Be Known Knows Nothing. Knowledge Of Reality Is Possible.

Jefferson’s rejection of radical skepticism is emphatic and consistent. In the Adams letter of 1820, after establishing the foundation of matter, void, and motion through sensation, he wrote: “Rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.”

Pyrrhonism — the ancient tradition of radical skepticism that held nothing could be known — was the same target that Epicurus attacked in the Canon. Jefferson’s rejection of it is explicit and uses its technical name. He continued: “A single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms.”

This is precisely the Epicurean account: sensation is reliable, reality is knowable, and the person who insists on radical uncertainty has produced nothing but unnecessary distress.

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7. All Sensations Are True. Error Is In The Mind And Not The Senses.

Jefferson’s statement in the Adams letter — “On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need” — affirms sensation as the foundation of knowledge. But the more precise Epicurean point — that error enters through the mind’s addition of false opinion on top of accurate sensation — appears in his consistent practice of distinguishing between what sensation reports and what abstract reasoning adds.

The entire critique of Plato that Jefferson mounted across his letters rests on this distinction. When Jefferson wrote to Adams in 1814 that Plato’s Republic was full of “whimsies, puerilities, and unintelligible jargon”, and that “nonsense can never be explained”, he was identifying the Platonic method of abstract conceptual construction — reasoning about eternal Forms detached from sensory reality — as the source of the unintelligible results. The senses report accurately; the Platonic mind adds constructions “incomprehensible to the human mind” to what sensation provides, and the result is the fog for which Jefferson had such contempt.

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8. The Criteria of Truth Are The Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings. These Natural Faculties Connect Us With Reality.

Jefferson’s clearest statement of the Epicurean three-criteria theory of knowledge appears in the letter to Peter Carr in 1787, where he described what he called the “moral sense”:

“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his Nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the [beautiful], truth, &c., as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”

And crucially: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”

The “moral sense” Jefferson describes is the Epicurean faculty of feelings (pathē) — the natural instrument that every human being possesses by virtue of being alive, which connects them directly with what is genuinely good and genuinely harmful. The “anticipations” (prolēpseis) — the pre-formed concepts that accumulated experience builds in every mind — appear in his observation that this faculty is given to all, is “as much a part of man as his leg or arm,” and enables the ploughman to reason correctly where the professor, misled by “artificial rules,” fails. The point that a great philosophical apparatus is not required for reliable moral judgment is directly Epicurean.

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9. Dialectical Logic And Radical Skepticism Do Not Determine Truth. Reasoning Must Be Grounded In The Perceptions Of Our Natural Faculties.

Jefferson’s contempt for the dialectical method — reasoning that proceeds through abstract logical construction independently of sensory experience — is on display throughout his letters. Of Plato he wrote that his “foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions.” Of the method itself, he wrote to Adams in 1820 that once you “quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind.”

The rejection of abstract dialectic as a path to truth, and the grounding of all genuine reasoning in what the senses actually report, is the core of the Epicurean Canon and the specific point on which Epicurus broke from Plato most decisively. Jefferson’s repeated insistence on sensation as the foundation, and his consistent mockery of reasoning that floats free of sensory grounding, places him precisely on the Epicurean side of this ancient dispute.

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10. Platonic Ideal Forms, Aristotelian Essences, And Divine Revelation Do Not Exist. All Truth Exists In This World.

Jefferson attacked Platonic “ideal forms” — existences beyond the natural world — with a directness that rarely appears in polite philosophical discourse. In the Adams letter of 1820: “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.” In the Adams letter of 1814: Plato was “one of the race of genuine sophists” whose “foggy mind” produced material that “should have consigned him to early oblivion.”

On divine revelation specifically, Jefferson was equally direct. To Carr in 1787, he advised treating biblical claims by the same evidentiary standards as any historical claim, and examining supernatural assertions — a sun standing still for hours, a virgin birth — against the laws of nature rather than accepting them on the authority of a writer claiming divine inspiration.

The Epicurean insistence that all truth exists in this world — that there are no Forms beyond nature, no divine revelations that override what sensation and reason establish, no “true world” behind the world we experience — is Jefferson’s consistent position across decades of private correspondence.

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Part Three: Ethics

11. Happiness Is the Goal of Life. A Life Of Happiness Is A Life In Which Pleasure Predominates Over Pain.

Jefferson’s Syllabus states without qualification: “Happiness the aim of life.” And the Declaration of Independence, which he drafted, enshrined “the pursuit of Happiness” as one of the three fundamental purposes for which governments are instituted — placing happiness alongside life and liberty as the natural rights that political arrangements exist to protect.

The choice of “happiness” rather than “property” — the term used in other founding documents — was deliberate. Jefferson knew the philosophical tradition on which he was drawing. Happiness as the aim of life, achievable in this world through the intelligent pursuit of genuine goods, is the Epicurean starting point. It is not virtue for its own sake. It is not conformity to divine command. It is the natural goal that nature itself has indicated through the feelings it has provided to every living creature.

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12. Pleasure Is the Guide, Beginning, And End Of The Happy Life. Pleasure Includes Not Just Bodily Stimulation But All Mental And Physical Experience We Find To Be Agreeable.

Jefferson’s Syllabus specifies: “Pleasure active and in-dolent. In-dolence is the absence of pain, the true felicity. Active, consists in agreeable motion; it is not happiness, but the means to produce it. Thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to produce it.”

And in the letter to William Short, Jefferson quoted and endorsed one of Epicurus’s own practical maxims on the subject: “One of his canons, you know, was that ‘that indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.’” This is not the pleasure of a crude hedonist. This is the pleasure of a calculator — an honest account of what actually produces the greatest genuine good over the course of a life.

Jefferson applied this calculation explicitly to the question of friendship in the Head and Heart letter to Maria Cosway (1786), where the “Head” argues that acquaintances should be avoided because their loss produces pain, and the “Heart” responds that the pleasures of friendship and love are genuine goods that outweigh the pain of eventual loss: “Grief, with such a comfort, is almost a luxury!” The Heart’s position is the Epicurean one — genuine pleasures are to be pursued even when they involve risks of future pain, because the honest calculation favors them.

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13. The Term “Pleasure” Is The Exact Equivalent Of “Absence of Pain.” All Experiences Of Life Are Either Pleasurable Or Painful, With No Middle Ground.

Jefferson’s Syllabus makes the two-feelings doctrine explicit: “The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind… In-dolence of body, tranquility of mind.” And: “In-dolence is the absence of pain, the true felicity.”

In the Adams letter of 1820, Jefferson stated the underlying principle in philosophical terms: “I feel: therefore I exist.” Feeling — the fundamental faculty of experiencing pleasure and pain — is the bedrock of existence and of knowledge. Everything is referred back to this faculty because it is the natural standard that connects us to what is genuinely good and genuinely harmful.

The two-feelings doctrine — that pleasure and pain are the only real evaluative categories and that every experience is one or the other — appears in Jefferson’s consistent refusal to recognize any third category. The Stoic “indifferents,” the Platonic abstraction of virtue as something above and beyond pleasure and pain, the Christian elevation of suffering as spiritually valuable — all of these introduce a third category that Epicurus denied. Jefferson’s materialism and his consistent grounding of evaluation in what is felt as good or harmful leaves no room for the third category.

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14. Virtue Is Not Absolute Or An End In Itself. There Is Nothing Good But Pleasure And Nothing Evil But Pain.

Jefferson’s Syllabus: “Virtue the foundation of happiness. Utility the test of virtue.”

These two statements together are the complete Epicurean account of virtue. Virtue is not good in itself, as an abstraction with value independent of its consequences. Virtue is good because it is the foundation of happiness — because the exercise of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice produces more genuine pleasure than pain over the course of a life. And utility — what actually produces genuine good — is the test. Abstract virtue that fails this test has no claim on us.

Jefferson demonstrated this principle in practice throughout his letters. In the Carr letter: “Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.” Virtue is commended not by divine command or by its intrinsic nature but by what it actually produces — comfort, pleasantness, the love of others. The test is utility.

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15. Life Is Desirable, But Unlimited Time Contains No Greater Pleasure Than Limited Time. A Full Life Cannot Be More Than Full.

Jefferson’s Syllabus includes: “Man is a free agent. Virtue consists in: 1. Prudence 2. Temperance 3. Fortitude 4. Justice.” And the letter to Adams in 1820 closes: “I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.”

Jefferson applied the principle that a full life cannot be made fuller by more time most movingly in his letter to John Adams in 1816: “There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.”

And in the letter to Short, writing at the age of 76 near the end of his life: “With one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.”

Equally indifferent to hope and fear. Not hoping for more life, not fearing the end of it. The cup that has been full does not need to be fuller. This is the Epicurean attitude toward time and death — not resignation, but the recognition that a life well-lived, filled with genuine pleasures, is complete in itself regardless of its duration.

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What Jefferson Demonstrates

The history of Epicurean philosophy has been so thoroughly controlled by its enemies — calumnied by Stoics, buried in Platonic theology, domesticated by Humanists who stripped it of its physics and its courage — that many people encounter it for the first time as a minor footnote to the traditions that suppressed it. The assumption has been allowed to settle that this was the inevitable outcome: that Epicurus’s philosophy was necessarily going to be absorbed, distorted, and forgotten.

Jefferson demonstrates that the assumption is false.

Here was a man who read the primary sources in their original languages, understood the philosophy correctly, named it explicitly in private correspondence he knew could damage him politically, and applied it consistently across the full range of his intellectual and public life. He fought for the philosophy by name, against Platonism, against Stoicism, against the ecclesiastical Christianity that had absorbed and institutionalized both. He placed its central ethical claim — the pursuit of happiness as a natural right — in the founding document of a new nation. He built the University of Virginia on its epistemological commitment to reason grounded in experience rather than received authority.

He was not perfect in his application of the philosophy, as no human being is. But that is not the point. The point is that someone could understand Epicurus correctly, in the tradition that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and stake a lifetime’s intellectual commitment on its truth.

The philosophy was not fated to be domesticated. It was not necessary that the most vital, most honest, most empirically grounded philosophical tradition in the ancient world should have been replaced by the Platonic-Christian synthesis that suppressed it. Thomas Jefferson is the proof.

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Primary Jeffersonian sources cited include the letter to William Short (October 31, 1819), the Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus (1819), the letter to John Adams (August 15, 1820), the letter to John Adams (July 5, 1814), the letter to Charles Thomson (January 9, 1816), the letter to Peter Carr (August 10, 1787), the letter to Thomas Cooper (December 11, 1823), the letter to Justice William Johnson (June 12, 1823), and the letter to Maria Cosway (October 12, 1786). Discussion of these topics is ongoing at EpicureanFriends.com.