Living For Pleasure Or Dying For Relief From Pain?

“For this reason we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life.” — Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

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A Clarification

In a separate article I made the case that it is incorrect to describe Epicurean philosophy as primarily about the absence of pain. Jack Gedney, a thoughtful writer about Epicurus on Substack, has now written an article referencing me and essentially affirming a view stated in an earlier article that pain reduction is indeed the primary emphasis of Epicurus. The title of Gedney’s second article changes the focus slightly from “primary” to “emphasizes,” but the body of the article makes clear that he intends to defend the “primarily about” position.

This article is not written to attempt to change the mind of Gedney or those who share his perspective. Anyone familiar with discussions of Epicurean philosophy on the internet for decades has seen this same exchange occur over and over again. Each side lines up its preferred texts, no minds change, and the discussion moves on with nothing ever resolved. As Frances Wright has her Epicurus say in Chapter Eight of A Few Days In Athens: “I incline to doubt, if two men, in the course of an Olympiad, enter on an argument from the honest and single desire of coming at the truth, or if, in the course of a century, one man comes from an argument convinced by his opponent.”

Honest philosophical disagreement sometimes requires not a synthesis but a clear statement of where the parting of the ways actually lies, and how best to move forward from there to resolve what actually can be resolved. This is a good occasion for me to confirm my view, how I intend to move forward, and what aspects of this discussion can in fact be resolved.

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Three Things the “Primarily About Pain” Position Does Not Address

Gedney’s response article is thorough on certain points. But three arguments that go to the heart of the issue are conspicuously absent from it — and their absence is not an accident. They are absent because they do not support his argument.

First Omission: The Two-Feelings Doctrine

Epicurus taught — and this is affirmed across the primary sources, from Diogenes Laertius to Torquatus in Cicero’s De Finibus — that nature has given every living creature exactly two internal feelings: pleasure and pain. These two are exhaustive. There is no third state between them. If pain is absent, pleasure is present — not by convention or stipulation, but because there are only two options and one of them is gone.

If Gedney’s “primarily about the reduction of pain” position were fully worked out in light of this doctrine, it would have to confront the following: if absence of pain simply is the presence of pleasure, then “reducing pain” and “pursuing pleasure” describe the same activity from opposite directions. The debate, on this understanding, is purely about which framing is more useful rhetorically — not about two different goals. Gedney does not engage with this. He does not argue that the two-feelings doctrine is wrong, that it is peripheral, or that it should be qualified in some way. He simply proceeds as though absence of pain and presence of pleasure are two meaningfully different things — which is precisely what the two-feelings doctrine denies.

This is not a minor omission. It is the omission of the starting point and most fundamental structural argument available on what pleasure actually meant to Epicurus and therefore what his ethics was all about.

Second Omission: Epicurus Explicitly Says We Sometimes Choose Pain

The Letter to Menoeceus, which Gedney quotes at length as his primary evidence, contains a passage he does not quote. It is the passage where Epicurus explicitly states that we sometimes choose pain, and that we sometimes decline pleasures. His exact framing: we choose pain when a greater pleasure results from accepting it, and we decline pleasure when the pleasure would bring in its train a greater pain.

This is the language of a philosopher whose governing framework is the maximization of pleasure. A person whose primary orientation is the avoidance of pain does not choose pain. Full stop. You can only make sense of deliberately accepting pain within a framework that says: the goal is the greatest net pleasure, and sometimes that requires accepting pain as the cost. A genuine pain-minimizer would logically avoid deep friendship, costly effort, physical challenge, and the grief that comes with love — all of which Epicurus explicitly endorses.

The fact that Epicurus builds the voluntary acceptance of pain into his explicit ethical framework destroys the “pain avoidance is primary” thesis more completely than any amount of counter-quotation. If pain reduction were the organizing principle, the vocabulary of choice would be “always move away from pain.” Instead, the vocabulary is “choose pain when pleasure justifies it” — which is the vocabulary of a pleasure-maximizer, not a pain-avoider.

Third Omission: The Goal Is Not Relief — It Is a Blessed Life

The Letter to Menoeceus, which Gedney’s article treats as the foundational document, is addressed to a young man and states explicitly from the very beginning that he should live in order to achieve happiness — a blessed life. That is the framing Epicurus himself chose: not how to reduce his suffering, not how to manage his fears, but how to live well and fully and happily. The letter opens by saying that philosophy leads to happiness and that it is never too early or too late to begin. It closes by describing the wise man as living “like a god among men.”

The “primarily about pain reduction” framing systematically strips the goal of this positive character. It recasts a philosophy of rich, full, active life as a philosophy of managed diminishment. And in doing so, it produces an Epicurus who sounds less like the most influential philosopher of the ancient Mediterranean world and more like a counselor of last resort for people who have given up on expecting much from their lives.

That is not a small distortion. A life primarily organized around getting through the day with as little damage as possible is a timid life, a life in retreat from the world, a life that has abandoned the expectation of genuine pleasure before it has even begun trying. Whatever that is, it is not what Epicurus was teaching. And the fact that a careful reading of the primary texts can produce this picture — without any apparent alarm on Gedney’s part — is itself evidence of how far the “pain reduction” framing has traveled from its source.

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The Root Cause: Ethics Without Physics and Canonics

Why does this preference for the “pain relief” reading keep reappearing, as if Epicureans were competing with Anacin or Advil, and why does it survive engagement with the primary texts? The answer is not bad faith on anyone’s part. The answer is that those who study Epicurean ethics in isolation from Epicurean physics and Epicurean canonics often sincerely conclude that they are reading a primary pain-reduction emphasis. The texts, read without their foundations, are fragmentary enough to sustain competing emphases. And the foundation is precisely what most discussions which focus on Epicurean ethics omit.

But the distortion runs deeper than a reading preference. The equation at the heart of this entire debate — that the absence of pain simply is the presence of pleasure — is not merely supported by Epicurean physics and canonics. It is the product of them. It makes no sense without them. To treat that equation as an isolated ethical claim, subject to confirmation or revision by cherry-picking passages from the Letter to Menoeceus, is to treat a conclusion as if it were an axiom and to ask why the building has no foundation while standing on it.

The claim that there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — is not primarily an ethical claim. It is an epistemological claim with roots in Epicurean physics. The universe, on Epicurean analysis, consists entirely of bodies and void. Bodies are either atoms or compounds of atoms. Pleasure and pain are the natural responses of living compounds to the condition of their atomic constitution — pleasure tracking favorable arrangements, pain tracking unfavorable ones. This is what the scholar David Sedley demonstrates in “Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics”: the ethical conclusions are inferences from physical premises. They are not arbitrary preferences. They are what follows from the starting point of Epicurean physics.

What is easily missed when Epicurean ethics is read in isolation is the character of the investigation that produced it. Epicurean physics is not a gentle backdrop or a system of comforting metaphors. It is a logically precise and aggressive examination of the nature of the universe — aggressive in the sense that it refuses to leave any foundational question unanswered, that it takes the physical constitution of reality as the non-negotiable starting point for every subsequent conclusion, and that it is explicitly hostile to every alternative framework that would smuggle in divine providence, fate, supernatural design, or moral absolutes through the back door. Epicurean canonics is equally aggressive: it refuses to yield the authority of our senses and feelings to any abstract system, it closes off the retreat into skepticism with equal firmness, and it insists that the standard for evaluating every claim is ultimately the feelings themselves — pleasure and pain — and nothing else.

A person who has worked through this investigation arrives at the ethical conclusions not with the detachment of a scholar comparing texts, but with a specific urgency. Life is short. It is the only life there is. Every day spent in unnecessary fear — fear of the gods, fear of death, fear of what people will say if you admit that pleasure is your guide — is a day of a finite life drained of its actual content. That urgency, which is built directly into the physical and canonical foundations of the philosophy, is precisely what makes the minimalist framing not merely incomplete but absurd. A finite life that could be filled with pleasure is not well-served by organizing it around getting through the day with minimal suffering. A philosophy that began with a twelve-year-old demanding to know the nature of the universe does not end with advice to lower your expectations.

A person who has not worked through the Letter to Herodotus, through the argument of Lucretius on the nature of things, through the Epicurean account of how knowledge works and what it can and cannot reach — that person is reading the ethical system without the theory that makes it intelligible. And so, inevitably, such a person ends up with something that resembles ethics familiar to them from other sources: Buddhist counsel to reduce attachment, Stoic counsel to manage desire, Humanist emphasis on rational self-regulation. All of these have pain-reduction as a primary component. Epicurus’s ethics, read without its physical foundation, seems to such people to drift in the same direction.

That drift is exactly what the three omissions described above represent. You cannot fully engage with the two-feelings doctrine without the physics that grounds it. You cannot fully understand why choosing pain can be rational without the framework that sets pleasure as the measure. And you cannot see why the blessed life is the right framing — rather than managed relief — without understanding what nature actually is and what it asks of us.

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The Philosophical Dispute That Makes the “Limit” Argument Intelligible

There is a further dimension of context that is almost universally absent from modern discussions of the “absence of pain” argument — one that goes beyond physics and canonics into the history of the philosophical dispute itself. Epicurus was not teaching in a vacuum. He was teaching in direct response to a specific challenge that had occupied his predecessors, and the claim that absence of pain constitutes the limit of pleasure, which reads as baffling or deflationary to modern readers who encounter it without context, was his answer to the most powerful classical objection to hedonism.

Plato pressed that objection in his Philebus with particular force, and it has been pressed by critics of pleasure-based ethics ever since: pleasure, Plato argued, has no natural limit. It is inherently insatiable. Every pleasure obtained creates the appetite for more. The pleasures of food, drink, sexuality, wealth, and competitive victory share this quality — they are not satisfied but inflamed by satisfaction. A philosophy organized around the pursuit of pleasure is therefore organized around an escalating demand that cannot in principle ever be met, and the person who pursues it will find himself not in happiness but in the restless, perpetually dissatisfied condition of someone always wanting and never arriving.

The Cyrenaics — who, like Epicurus, held pleasure to be the highest good — had no compelling answer to this objection. Their version of hedonism, oriented primarily around the excitement and stimulation of the senses, was genuinely vulnerable to Plato’s critique: if the goal is maximal sensory stimulation, there is no principled stopping point. You always want more. Their philosophy had a goal but no coherent account of when that goal was achieved, and the Platonic attack exposed exactly that gap.

This is the problem Epicurus solved — and solved specifically by means of conclusions drawn from physics and canonics. By grounding the two-feelings doctrine in physical reality and by identifying the removal of all pain as the natural limit of the quantity of pleasure, he gave hedonism a coherent and defensible endpoint. Pleasure does have a natural limit — a limit that can be identified, reached, and recognized as complete. At that point, further experience varies pleasure but does not increase it in quantity. The insatiable escalation Plato described is not a feature of pleasure as such; it is a feature of pursuing pleasure without understanding what pleasure actually is and where its natural boundary lies — the very understanding that Epicurean physics and canonics provide.

“Absence of pain” as the limit of pleasure is not, therefore, a deflationary or pessimistic retreat from positive enjoyment. It is the philosophical answer to the most powerful classical (and modern) objection to hedonism, derived from the same foundations that produced the two-feelings doctrine. A reader who encounters Principal Doctrine 3 without this context will find it paradoxical — why would a philosopher devoted to pleasure define its limit as the removal of pain? The answer is that this is precisely the move that answers Plato, solves what the Cyrenaics could not solve, and places Epicurean philosophy on defensible philosophical ground. Without knowledge of the historical dispute, the argument looks like minimalism. With it, it looks like what it actually is: the resolution of a problem that had stumped every previous attempt to defend the life of pleasure.

This is why failing to study not only the physics and canonics but also the history of the philosophical disputes surrounding pleasure leaves the modern reader entirely unprepared to navigate what otherwise seems ambiguous and self-contradictory. The apparent paradox — a pleasure-philosopher who defines the limit of pleasure as the absence of pain — is not a paradox at all once you understand the argument it was designed to defeat. The paradox dissolves completely, but only for someone who knows that Plato raised the objection, that the Cyrenaics failed to answer it, and that Epicurus was applying both physics and canonics when he constructed the two-feelings doctrine.

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What Was Epicurus Actually Captivated By at Age Twelve?

Epicurus turned to philosophy at the age of twelve because his teachers could not answer a question about the nature of things — where the primordial chaos came from before the ordered world. He was not asking how to feel less pain. He was not asking for strategies to manage anxiety. He was asking about the universe.

That captivation — outward, curious, demanding engagement with what the world actually is — is the actual origin of Epicurean philosophy. And it is the actual origin for precisely the reason Sedley identifies: the ethical answers come from the physical premises, and the physical premises are what Epicurus spent his life investigating and establishing. A person whose organizing concern is the relief of suffering does not produce three hundred volumes on physics, meteorology, magnetism, and the nature of the gods. A person who finds the nature of things genuinely exciting does.

The “pain reduction” framing, pursued in isolation from the physics, will never produce the intellectual life that Epicurus actually had. It will produce something that bears a faint resemblance to it — a ghost in the form of practical counsel, all of which is genuinely useful — but unrecognizable as the full philosophy.

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The Normal Baseline of Life Is Pleasure, Not Relief From Pain

Here is the argument that deserves more weight than it usually receives: for most people — and most certainly for every young person who is healthy and engaged with the world — relief from pain is simply not in the top priorities of daily life. Not because such people are unreflective, but because they are living normally.

When you are healthy and present in the world, especially when young, you do not get up in the morning primarily organizing your day around the avoidance of suffering. You are organized around what you want: friendship, learning, physical experience, achievement, beauty, love. You accept pain gladly when it is the price of something you want more than you want to avoid the pain. You risk grief because you would rather have the love or friendship than be safe from loss. This is not philosophical naivety. This is the normal operation of a human life when it has not been corrupted by false beliefs about what is possible or what is appropriate to want.

Epicurus says this directly: “We recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance.” From pleasure we begin. Not from pain. Not from the desire to escape suffering. The baseline — the starting condition — is the natural drive toward pleasure. Pain reduction matters because pain interrupts and degrades that natural condition. But the condition itself, the thing we are protecting and cultivating, is positive pleasure.

This is a very different picture from the one that organizes life around relief. A philosophy primarily about reduction of pain gives you a goal that is achieved by subtraction — take away the bad things and you have succeeded. A philosophy primarily about pleasure gives you a goal achieved by addition and by wisdom — fill the cup with pleasure and fill it fully. Those are not the same project. They attract different kinds of people and produce different kinds of lives.

The “reduction of pain” framing makes intuitive sense as a primary orientation only if you begin from a condition of pain or diminishment and are asking how to improve. Epicurean philosophy absolutely addresses that question, and nothing here should be interpreted as diminishing how important that is. But it is not the fundamental question, and it does not give the philosophy its shape. The person who encounters Epicurus primarily as a counselor for the relief of suffering, rather than as the philosopher who said life should be filled as full of pleasures as possible, has been offered a lesser version of what Epicurus actually had to give.

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Translation Follows Expectation

There is a second, practical dimension to this problem that rarely receives adequate attention: when a translator approaches Epicurean texts expecting to find a philosophy primarily about managing suffering, the cumulative choices of translation will push in that direction. Every significant term in Epicurean philosophy — pleasure, pain, the limit of pleasure, the goal of life — carries a range of contextually defensible meanings, and translators and commentators must choose among them. These choices accumulate, and a phrase about the fullness of pleasure becomes a phrase about the adequacy of what one has. This shifts the tone of the entire philosophy, and the result can be made to support the “pain reduction” emphasis even when the great weight of the surviving texts do not support it.

The issue here is not a matter of bad faith, but a description of how translation inevitably works. All translators bring prior expectations to the texts. The solution is not to accuse anyone of bad faith but to insist on multiple translations, multiple commentators, and above all on reading the physical and epistemological foundations before reading the ethical summaries, in the same order that the philosophy was presented by Lucretius and in the Letters to Herodotus and Pythocles. Those foundations provide the guardrails that limit the interpretive options in ways that the ethical summaries, read in isolation, do not.

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The Appropriate Response Is Benevolent Divergence, Not Endless Debate

The most important practical conclusion here is that continued argument over the same ethical passages is unlikely to resolve this disagreement. The disagreement is ultimately not about texts. It is about whether Epicurean philosophy is approached as a complete system, rooted in physics and canonics, or as a set of practical ethical counsels tending toward minimalism and asceticism that can be extracted and applied without that grounding.

Here is what is within my power to resolve:

Those who find the second approach more useful, who are primarily interested in Epicurean practical ethics, who have no particular interest in working through Lucretius, the Letter to Herodotus, or the Epicurean theory of knowledge, should proceed in the communities suited to that study.

Those who understand that the ethical conclusions cannot be fully grasped without the physical and canonical premises — who find the nature of things genuinely compelling, who want to understand why skepticism and determinism are dead ends that Epicurean canonics closes off, who recognize the importance of a firm grounding in the finality of death and the absence of supernatural guidance before any serious ethical discussion begins — those people can pursue communities suited to that study. EpicureanFriends.com has always been oriented in that direction and with that foundation in mind.

Neither group benefits from concerns about being held back by the other, or from being required to litigate the same passages over and over ad infinitum. Those whose primary focus, like the Stoics or the Buddhists, is directed toward defining pleasure down to the minimal — whether for the sake of social acceptability, therapeutic efficiency, or philosophical caution — sometimes find Epicurus useful, at least until they commit to an examination of the complete philosophy. Those who want the full philosophy, including the claim that pleasure is the norm and the goal and the beginning and the end, will need to go further.

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Moving Forward At EpicureanFriends.com and EpicurusToday.com

For those of us who see our happiness involved in the study and promotion of authentic classical Epicurean philosophy, rather than just getting through life with minimal pain, what needs to happen is not more refinement of ethical debate. What is much more urgent is outreach — bringing to the attention of new readers a complete version of the philosophy as the ancient Epicureans taught it, beginning where Epicurus himself began: with the question of what the world is made of and what that implies for how we should live.

That means explaining why Epicurean physics is not an embarrassing antique but the necessary foundation for understanding why pleasure is the natural guide of life. It means explaining why Epicurean canonics — the study of how we actually know what we know — is the bridge between physical fact and ethical conclusion. It means explaining that Epicurus’s investigation of the universe was not a passive academic survey but a relentless, urgent inquiry driven by the recognition that every day lived in unnecessary fear — of death, of the gods, of what the neighbors will think — is a day of a finite life squandered and taken away from the pursuit of pleasurable living. It means explaining why the finality of death makes life more precious rather than less, why the absence of supernatural guidance is a liberation rather than a loss, and why the combination of these recognitions makes a minimal-pain framing of the best orientation toward life not just incomplete but absurd — a counsel of diminished expectations dressed up as philosophy.

Forever rehashing the same ethical passages, never making any effort to explain what “pleasure” or “absence of pain” would actually mean in the context of a complete Epicurean worldview, is not productive. It demotivates and drives away precisely the type of people who built the Epicurean school as a movement in the ancient world, and who would invest the energy and effort to bring the full message of Epicurus to new generations. If there is anything that distinguishes those who are interested in contributing to the reestablishment of an active Epicurean “school” from those who are mainly interesting in consuming ideas eclectically for their own personal relief, it is that the former are living for pleasure in the full Epicurean meaning of the word — not merely longing for the pain to stop. That was the project Epicurus himself was engaged in, and those are the people for whom the Epicurean leaders of the ancient world were writing.

That’s the direction the EpicureanFriends.com forum and the essays at EpicurusToday.com will continue to go. Those who agree with the perspective that the best way of life is to live for pleasure are welcome to join us in those locations. Those who are simply dying for tranquility are welcomed to go, with best wishes, in whatever other direction they find most appropriate. It’s a big world, and there’s plenty of space for everyone.