EpicureanFriends Level 03 Basic Understandings -01- There Are Only Two Feelings, Pleasure And Pain
“Nature has given all living creatures exactly two feelings: pleasure and pain.” — Diogenes Laertius, summarizing the Epicurean position, Lives of the Philosophers 10.34
“Therefore Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure; what was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of all pain, was not only itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. Surely any one who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain.” — Torquatus, presenting the Epicurean position in Cicero, On Ends 1.38
Introduction: Why This “Basics” Series, and Why Start Here
Section titled “Introduction: Why This “Basics” Series, and Why Start Here”Over the years our regulars at EpicureanFriends.com have identified a number of sticking points which ought to be understood before newer people move into our “Level 03” circle of participation. We highlight on the front page of the forum five basic areas in each of Epicurean canonics, physics, and ethics, but knowing that they are there is not at all the same as understanding them.
This is the first of a series of articles designed to address these sticking points directly. Each one will take a single core Epicurean teaching and address the most common questions about it. The goal is not to insist on total agreement with every aspect of the argument stated here, but to be sure that active participants at EpicureanFriends are largely on the same page on issues of special difficulty.
This first article addresses a position on which the texts are clear but that many people find difficult to absorb fully. This is an argument clearly set out by Cicero, who like many people today either could not understand it or refused to accept it. The point is this: nature has given us exactly two feelings, pleasure and pain, and there is no neutral or other feeling between them or besides these two. If you are alive and conscious and experiencing something in any part of your body or mind, what you are feeling in that part of your experience is either pleasure or pain.
This sounds simple, but there is strong resistance to it. As Cicero argued to the Epicurean Torquatus, this is not the way many people think about pleasure and pain. Many people think at first that feeling pleasure or pain means that you are being “stimulated” in some particular positive or negative way. They think that when they are not feeling some special positive bodily or mental sensation, they are not feeling pleasure.
People who do not take the time to investigate how and why Epicurus expanded the meaning of the term pleasure to cover every experience in which we are not being stimulated by pain tend to twist and turn themselves into pretzels on this issue. They often think that they are confronting some new or esoteric way to say to themselves: “Now I feel it! This numbness in my tongue really does taste like chicken!” In case this attempted joke is not clear, that is not what Epicurus was saying - nothing is not something, nor does it feel like something. Those who insist that “absence of pain” is some higher plane of positive sensation will never convince others - or even themselves - that this approach is valid. “Absence of Pain” is in fact not a new or higher form of pleasure, nor is “absence of pain” better than or distinct from pleasure itself. That is absurd nonsense. But the term “absence of pain” does refer to something extremely important, and that is what an explanation of the “only two feelings” doctrine will reveal.
In this article we will look at exactly where and how Cicero stated his objection to Epicurus’ viewpoint. We will then look at how Torquatus defended and gave an all-too-brief explanation of Epicurus’ position. We will then show how Professor David Sedley identifies that what Epicurus is doing with feeling is following the same approach by which we divided the universe physically into bodies and space. Last, we will step out of the ancient philosophical debate entirely and try to explain the doctrine in plain terms for those who are still working their way through the history of the arguments. Our goal here is to help avoid the endless series of “what about” questions, where people suggest that their own situation tells them that what they themselves feel is neither pleasure nor pain, so Epicurus must be wrong. By the end of this article, readers should be able to see what those who claim their experience falls outside the Epicurean two-feeling framework are really saying. As one would expect, they are not proving that Epicurus failed to have the same human feelings that they do. As with Cicero, they simply fail to understand or accept what Epicurus was saying.
Cicero’s Objection
Section titled “Cicero’s Objection”Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum — On the Ends of Good and Evil — contains the most detailed surviving presentation of the Epicurean position on ethics. Book One gives us Torquatus presenting the Epicurean case at length, focusing primarily on why virtue is not desirable in itself, but for the life of pleasure that it brings. In Book Two, Cicero pushes his rebuttal, which those who question the “two feelings” doctrine will immediately recognize.
Cicero’s core rebuttal runs as follows. Cicero begins with what he says is the obvious commonsense objection. He argues that “freedom from pain” cannot possibly mean the same thing as “pleasure,” because pleasure is something you feel actively — a positive experience — while freedom from pain is simply the absence of something. Removing a bad thing, Cicero insists, is not logically the same as gaining a good thing. The person who has just had a toothache removed is not automatically in a state of positive pleasure - they simply regard themselves as no longer in pain. No matter what good things we say about relief from pain, relief from pain is not exactly the same thing as the pleasure of stimulation. An absence is not a presence. Cicero demands of Torquatus:
“But unless you are extraordinarily obstinate, you are bound to admit that ‘freedom from pain’ does not mean the same thing as ‘pleasure.’” — Cicero, On Ends 2.9
Torquatus refuses to concede this point, but Cicero does not allow him to explain himself at length, and Cicero presses the same point shortly afterward in a slightly different form:
“Surely it does not therefore follow that what I may call the negation of pain is the same thing as pleasure?” — Cicero, On Ends 2.11
Cicero is doing what many people today do themselves — he is presenting the Epicurean identification of pleasure with absence of pain as something that “does not follow” — as if it were a logical non sequitur, an error in reasoning. But when we look closely we see that Cicero is not engaging with the argument Torquatus has actually made; he is asserting that Torquatus’s conclusion is obviously wrong and that any reasonable person should see this without extended argument.
Cicero never allows Torquatus to explain further, because Cicero was a lawyer and lawyers do not often voluntarily allow their opponents to “take their best shot.” Cicero was writing the book, and Cicero was in the position to dictate the terms of the debate. Cicero was a self-styled Stoic in ethics, and allowing Torquatus further time to expand the Epicurean position would undermine the Stoic framework. Cicero’s appeal to “common sense” is not innocent. Cicero knew from his own training and experience that this question is philosophically loaded, and he did not want to allow Torquatus to explain the philosophical foundations of Epicurus’ position.
What Torquatus Was Allowed To Say
Section titled “What Torquatus Was Allowed To Say”Torquatus’s response to Cicero was not a dodge or a word game, though that is how Cicero tried to make it look. After Torquatus insisted on being allowed at least a brief period to explain Epicurus without interruption, Torquatus presented the foundation early in On Ends at 1.38 before even beginning to address the issue of the role of virtue that generally takes the main stage:
“Therefore Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure; what was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of all pain, was not only itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. Surely any one who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends 1.38
This is the core of the Epicurean ethics, and it rests on a structural claim about the nature of conscious experience. Just as the entire universe is made up of bodies and space, there are exactly two states available to a living, conscious creature. You are either in pleasure or in pain. There is no third option. The universe of feeling is, as the Epicureans understood the universe of matter, exhaustively divided into two and only two categories, with nothing between them and nothing outside them.
Given this exhaustive division, the question Cicero is raising — “is freedom from pain really the same as pleasure?” — has a clear answer: yes, necessarily, because if you are not in pain and you are conscious, you must be in pleasure. There is nowhere else to be. Cicero refuses to entertain this as the high-level philosophical perspective that it is, and Cicero allows Torquatus only to assert the position without explanation, as when Torquatus says:
“I say that all men who are free from pain are in pleasure, and in the greatest pleasure too.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends 2.16
Cicero treats this as absurd because in his view it produces the result that the man simply sitting quietly at a table, not eating, not suffering, not doing anything in particular, is in “the greatest pleasure.” Such a claim can indeed be made to seem to be outrageous to someone who thinks of pleasure as a specific positive stimulus and who is not aware of the philosophical dispute at stake. Torquatus does not flinch from the conclusion, but Cicero does not allow Torquatus to explain that the total absence of pain can be the limit of pleasure without carrying any endorsement of the particular pleasure being experienced. Instead, Cicero holds up this partial argument as if it were complete, and people of common sense rightly recoil from the idea that a condition that is essentially anesthesia can be considered to be a high point of life.
When Cicero protests that this makes him “extraordinarily obstinate” to maintain, Torquatus’s answer is blunt: “Well but on this point you will find me obstinate, for it is as true as any proposition can be.” Torquatus is not making a rhetorical concession to seem polite. He is saying, flatly, that this is simply true as a logical conclusion from the fact that there are only two possibilities and that the absence of one therefore means the presence of the other. Torquatus knows that anyone who understands Epicurus’ big picture will understand that this is true, but Cicero denies Torquatus the opportunity to fairly defend the idea that from the beginning distinguished Epicurus from the Cyrenaics and from all others who insist that “pleasure” can only arise from outside stimulation.
Torquatus also explains what the Epicurean position is not saying. A common form of confusion on this point is to hear “freedom from pain is the greatest pleasure” and conclude that Epicurus is counseling passivity — that the ideal is to sit very still and not feel anything. This is wrong. The Epicurean claim is that the baseline of healthy, pain-free conscious life is already pleasure — already the positive experience of something real and good. This baseline is then enriched, varied, and amplified by the full range of active pleasures: friendship, intellectual activity, fine food, music, memory, anticipation, and all the other genuinely good things that human life makes available. The claim is not that you should stop at the baseline. The claim is that the baseline itself is already good, already pleasure — so that the normal experience of a person going through their day without suffering is not a neutral void waiting to be filled, but is already a positive experience of what is genuinely beneficial for a living creature.
The imagination test Torquatus offers at On Ends 1.42 shows what the full Epicurean picture looks like:
“Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable?” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends 1.42
Numerous and vivid pleasures of body and mind. Undisturbed by the presence or prospect of pain. That is the target. The undisturbedness — freedom from pain — is the condition under which the numerous vivid pleasures are enjoyed and accumulated. It is not the whole content of the good life. It is the floor from which the good life rises. But it is a genuine floor, not a zero.
The Philosophical Foundations: Why Epicurus Drew the Line Where He Did
Section titled “The Philosophical Foundations: Why Epicurus Drew the Line Where He Did”The exchange between Cicero and Torquatus in On Ends shows us the two-feelings doctrine under attack, but it does not show us the full philosophical basis on which Epicurus constructed it. To understand why Epicurus was justified in making this division — and why the division is not simply an arbitrary stipulation but is grounded in the structure of Epicurean philosophy as a whole — we need to look more carefully at what grounds the doctrine in the first place. Those who have studied the inferential foundations of Epicurean ethics most carefully, Professor David Sedley foremost among them, have identified several converging lines of argument that together show Epicurus had far stronger grounds for his position than Cicero was ever willing to acknowledge.
The Cradle Argument: Nature’s Own Testimony
Section titled “The Cradle Argument: Nature’s Own Testimony”The first and most fundamental argument is what scholars call the “cradle argument.” Look at what every living animal does from the first moment of its existence, before it has been taught anything by culture, religion, philosophy, or parents. Before a human infant can reason, before it has learned a word of any language, before it has been told what is good or bad — it reaches for what it feels to be pleasurable and recoils from what it feels to be painful. This is not something the infant learned. It is something nature built into it.
The same is true of every other animal. No creature has to be taught to move toward warmth when cold, toward food when hungry, away from what harms it. These responses are not culturally conditioned; they are present before any conditioning could have occurred. Torquatus develops this point directly:
“Every creature, as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein as in its supreme good, while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil, and banishes that, so far as it can, from its own presence, and this it does while still uncorrupted, and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions.” — Torquatus in Cicero, On Ends 1.30
This observation is not a minor rhetorical point. It is the empirical foundation of the entire doctrine. If ALL animals without exception behave in this way from the first moment of their existence, before they are influenced by outside forces to act differently, this cannot be coincidence or cultural accident. It must reflect something about the nature of what is genuinely good and bad for living things. Nature, speaking through the behavior of every newborn creature that has ever lived, is testifying that pleasure is the good and pain is the evil. No animal is observed from birth seeking out a neutral third state as its natural aim. The binary is written into the fabric of biological existence itself.
The Feelings as Criteria of Truth
Section titled “The Feelings as Criteria of Truth”The second line of argument concerns the epistemological status of the feelings within the Epicurean system. Epicurus recognized three criteria of truth — three faculties whose reports are authoritative and must be accepted as accurate: sense perceptions, prolepses (the natural preconceptions that organize our experiences into recognizable patterns), and feelings. Each is authoritative in its own domain. The senses report on the external world. Prolepses carry the natural conceptual framework that makes thought possible. And feelings report on the relationship between the organism and whatever it is experiencing — whether that experience is congenial or hostile to the organism’s nature.
Just as a sensation reports accurately what is occurring at the sense organ — without the report itself being capable of being false — a feeling of pleasure reports accurately that what the organism is experiencing is congenial to its nature, and a feeling of pain reports accurately that what is being experienced is hostile to it. Error enters only when the mind makes a hasty or otherwise false evaluation about what a sensation means; the sensation itself is always truthful. The feelings are the same: pain genuinely is pain, pleasure genuinely is pleasure, and neither report is capable of being mistaken.
This epistemological status matters enormously for the two-feelings doctrine, because it means that what the feelings reveal about the structure of experience is not a philosophical theory that could be wrong — it is a direct report from nature about how living experience actually is. And what the feelings reveal is exactly what the cradle argument observes: living experience is divided by nature herself into two categories, pleasure and pain. That division is not a philosophical construction. It is a natural fact reported by an authoritative criterion.
The Parallel to Physics
Section titled “The Parallel to Physics”The third line of argument is the one already introduced — the parallel between the two-feelings doctrine and the Epicurean physics of matter and void — but it deserves development because the parallel is a structural foundation of the entire philosophy.
Epicurus was not assembling a collection of unrelated philosophical assertions and mixing and matching them eclectically. He was constructing a complete account of nature from the ground up, and the structural parallels between different parts of his system are not accidental. They reflect a consistent philosophical methodology applied across the different domains.
In physics, Epicurus established that the universe consists of exactly two kinds of thing: body (matter — that which is solid and resistant) and void (empty space — that which is intangible and offers no resistance). These divisions are established by the senses, not by abstract reasoning without sensory input or validation. Every attempt to posit a third kind of physical existence fails: anything that exists either resists and occupies space (it is body) or it offers no resistance (it is void). There is no third option. This is not a guess — it follows from analyzing what “existence” could possibly mean for a physical thing.
Epicurus applied exactly the same methodology to the world of feeling. Every experience a living organism can have either registers as congenial to the organism’s nature or as hostile to it. There is no third category — no experience is neither congenial nor hostile, neither beneficial nor harmful. Why not? Because congenial and hostile are exhaustive with respect to the relationship between a living organism and its experience, in exactly the same way that solid and void are exhaustive with respect to what can exist in the physical universe. An experience that stood in no relationship to the organism’s nature either way — neither good nor bad for it — would be, in Epicurean terms, precisely nothing: not a feeling at all, but the complete absence of feeling — which is death.
This is the point Cicero refuses to engage: the alternative to feeling either pleasure or pain is not some intermediate neutral feeling — it is no feeling at all. It is unconsciousness or death — the absence of any awareness whatsoever. The moment you are awake and aware, you are already in the domain of experience, and every experience in that domain is either congenial or hostile to your nature. There is nothing else it could be.
Why This Distinguishes Epicurus from the Cyrenaics
Section titled “Why This Distinguishes Epicurus from the Cyrenaics”One further point helps clarify what is actually at stake in the dispute with Cicero. Cicero’s objection — “absence of pain is not the same as pleasure” — was also the position of the Cyrenaic school, the other major ancient pleasure-philosophy. The Cyrenaics held that only active, stimulated pleasure deserved the name — only the felt experience of positive sensory or mental stimulation was genuinely pleasurable. On the Cyrenaic view, Cicero was correct: freedom from pain was not pleasure but merely its precondition.
Epicurus’s position is a deliberate and explicit rejection of the Cyrenaic view, grounded in exactly the arguments above. If pleasure and pain are the two authoritative guides that nature has given all living things — if they are criteria of truth, not merely incidental sensations — then the relevant question is not “am I experiencing positive stimulation?” but “is my experience congenial or hostile to my nature?” A body at ease, a mind undisturbed, a person living their ordinary day without suffering: these experiences are congenial to the organism’s nature. They are exactly what the cradle argument shows all animals instinctively moving toward. Calling them “not pleasure” because they lack the intensity of active stimulation is to substitute a culturally conditioned notion of pleasure for the natural and philosophically grounded one. It is exactly the kind of error that Epicurean philosophy exists to correct.
This is why Torquatus insists that Epicurus “refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure” (On Ends 1.38). The refusal is not stubbornness or rhetoric. It is the conclusion of a philosophical argument that Cicero chose not to engage — the argument from the cradle, from the epistemological status of the feelings as criteria of truth, and from the systematic parallel with Epicurean physics. Put all three together, and the Epicurean position is not merely an assertion but a conclusion from converging lines of evidence, all pointing in the same direction: nature itself, consistently and without exception, divides living experience into two and only two categories. Pleasure and pain. Nothing else.
Stepping Back From the Ancient Context
Section titled “Stepping Back From the Ancient Context”For those still working through the primary historical sources, the debate between Cicero and Torquatus can feel remote — a technical philosophical exchange in a language (Latin, with Greek philosophical terminology underneath it) that requires considerable context to follow. There is truly no way around investigating that background if you want its full significance, but for the moment let’s set the ancient debate aside and try to state the doctrine as plainly as possible.
The claim is this: nature has given every living creature a built-in guidance system for navigating the world. That guidance system has exactly two signals: pleasure and pain. Pleasure signals that what you are experiencing is in accord with your nature — that it is beneficial, that it is working for you. Pain signals that what you are experiencing is working against your nature. These are the only two signals. There is no third signal. There is no “neutral” signal that means neither of these things.
The question is how to consider those times when the signals can seem weak, and when it is difficult or impossible to feel any positive or negative stimulation. This is where Epicurus takes the critical next step: The mind is capable of understanding that life itself is desirable, and that we are alive but for a short interval within an eternity of nothingness. Given this context, whenever we are not conscious of experiencing some affirmative pain, it is justifiable and beneficial for us to evaluate that experience - which is expressly not painful - as pleasure. What we are experiencing in these moments can be labeled in many ways, but if we truly understand our place as humans in the universe from an Epicurean point of view, we will consider every moment of non-painful experience to be a pleasure.
This is not a complicated abstract claim, but a straightforward conclusion about the structure of conscious experience. When you are alive and aware, your experience is somewhere on the spectrum between the two poles of pleasure and pain. Whatever your consciousness registers, the feelings weigh in to register it as beneficial or harmful. If you are simply awake and present and not registering anything as harmful, then it is justified and correct to consider that condition to be beneficial.
Put it this way: suppose you wake up in the morning. Your back doesn’t hurt. You’re not anxious about anything. You’re not cold or hot or hungry. You are simply present, comfortable, and alive. Is this a neutral state — a zero — a nothing? From an Epicurean perspective — which is very different from a Buddhist or Stoic or Religious or Schopenhauerian perspective - the answer is clear. It is not a zero at all. Simply being alive and without pain is without question a GOOD thing.
Epicurus viewed life positively. Lying in bed in the morning is certainly not the only type of pleasure, and it is neither the most intense nor the longest. But it is NOT nothing. Consciousness without pain is a real and genuinely good thing. It is a condition that can be appreciated as pleasure by any person who understands and applies the Epicurean worldview to their experience of that moment. Such a person can understand that what they are feeling at that moment is in fact pleasure, even though they can also recognize that getting out of bed and facing life head-on will bring additional and even more rewarding pleasures.
This perspective shows why Cicero’s objection — “removing a bad thing is not the same as gaining a good thing” — misses the point. The Epicurean is not saying that lying in bed - or having a toothache removed - is the same experience as eating a delicious meal, or the best experience available in life. Obviously these are very different experiences, and we want more time spent enjoying joy and delight than we want lying in bed or recovering from toothaches. The Epicurean is saying that after the toothache is removed, or when you are lying there without pain, you should judge what you feel to be pleasure — not the only, not the best, not the most intense, and not the longest, but a real, positive pleasure of a body and mind that is functioning and healthy. The intensity is different and the character is different but all non-painful experience is still a positive experience, still a genuine good, still a perception of satisfaction rather than frustration. In sum, it is still pleasure.
The reason this matters — the reason it is important enough to state clearly for those at the Level 03 stage — is that misunderstanding this leads to a serious misreading of what Epicurean philosophy is recommending as a way of life. If you think the Epicurean goal is a “neutral zero” — an absence rather than a presence — then Epicurean philosophy starts to look like a counsel of passivity: minimize desire, reduce engagement, seek the featureless calm of a mind that has simply stopped wanting anything. This is not what Epicurus taught. It is a reading that Torquatus explicitly rejected, that the ancient Epicurean sources consistently contradict, and that produces a picture of the good life that almost nobody, on reflection, would actually want.
The correct picture is: pleasure is positive, it is broad, and it includes not only stimulation but also the baseline of ordinary healthy conscious life. The goal is to fill that life as richly as possible with pleasures while listening to the guidance of pleasure and pain and processing it through a reasoned understanding of a correct Epicurean philosophy. The absence of pain is pleasure, and complete absence of pain is the limit in quantity of pleasure. But all pleasures are not the same, and a full life is built on the recognition that the pains we choose to endure in life are those which will bring us the greatest pleasures.