Posts by Cassius

Quote from Don

I'd think you'd want to go down the path of oil and water.

While oil and water don't mix, i doubt it is immediately clear that there is an obvious context in which those are the only two alternatives. Even if you're talking salad dressing there's probably spices and other things that i as a non-foodie don't even know about that people would try to include in the mix.

The best illustrations will have to combine both the points that (1) the two don't mix and (2) these two are the only two possibilities.

On this one also: In case it's not obvious from the word "illustration," I am particularly interested in identifying word pictures that can be turned into actual pictures, so that we can "illustrate" the point graphically in pictures that are even more impactful than words.

That's the reason why the draft article has a separate "purely logical" section, as purely logical assertions don't necessarily lend themselves to pictures. Venn Diagrams perhaps, but not pictures of real things. I'm hoping that we can come up with some down-to-earth and actual "pictures" for use in the future.

Many of these examples are open to "but what about" objections, and that aspect is addressed in the article. I don't think that pictures like the earth / moon / a planet shown from space, with the zone of darkness and light starkly defined, are rendered unusable by the fact that if you're actually on the surface there's likely to be a dawn or dusk effect while the light diffuses in a particular area. The point is to drive home the "either/or" nature of the choice.

I've considered and rejected a lot of possibilities because of that problem, but I don't think there's actually a bright line between what's usable as an illustration and what's not. What we want is something that's immediately graspable to reinforce the logic of the issue, even if it's technically possible to quibble around the edges. But the most effective are likely to be those where it's actually or close to impossible to quibble.

My attention today got diverted over to the "Absence of Pain" Substack article, but when I started the day my focus was elswhere. Initially, I was trying to come up with better and clearer ways to describe the principle that when you have a universe of two options, the absence of one is the presence of the other. That is something that needs to "click" in peoples' minds before they truly begin to understand how the terms "pleasure" and "absence of pain" can be interchangeable.

I have a draft of an article oriented toward that topic prepared, but I am not nearly 100% satisfied with it. This is one that would definitely improve with some feedback that would help reorder, add, or subtract from the illustrations that are in the list already. I've started with illustrations that can be found directly in the ancient texts, and added a few modern illustrations, but I feel sure there are others that have not yet been included, potentially even some better than any that are included here.

Before I consider publishing a version of this on Substack or even as a blog article here, I'd appreciate feedback on these illustrations / analogies from anyone so inclined. Does each one work fairly well? Others you can think of as better? Comment on which among each section are the most impactful.

As always, thanks very much.

Two and Only Two: Illustrations of the Epicurean Binary of Pleasure and Pain

Epicurus makes a claim that is both simple and radical: there are exactly two feelings, pleasure and pain, and nothing else. Every sentient experience falls into one category or the other. There is no neutral third state that is neither pleasant nor painful, no middle ground where sensation has somehow opted out of the binary.

This claim carries an immediate consequence that critics of Epicurus have resisted for two thousand years: the absence of pain is not a neutral condition — it is pleasure. Not a pale or diminished pleasure, not a placeholder waiting for “real” pleasure to arrive, but pleasure fully and actually present. When pain is gone, what remains is not a void. What remains is the other of the only two things there are.

The argument is logical, but logic alone rarely produces conviction. What makes an argument land — what makes it felt rather than merely followed — is an image that shows the same truth in a form the eye and the body can recognize immediately. Epicurus and Lucretius knew this. They built their philosophy on illustrations, not just propositions.

What follows is a collection of those illustrations, beginning with the ones the Epicureans themselves used and moving to examples from the modern world. But first, the underlying principle deserves to be stated clearly on its own, because it is a principle that runs through the whole of Epicurean thought — not just its ethics.

The Principle: When Two Covers Everything

The logical structure at work here has a precise form. Two categories are jointly exhaustive when together they cover every possible case — when nothing falls outside them. They are mutually exclusive when nothing can belong to both at once. When a pair of categories is both jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive, a single consequence follows that cannot be argued around: the absence of one is, by definition, the presence of the other. Not probably. Not in most cases. Necessarily, always, without exception.

Pleasure and pain, as Epicurus defines them, form exactly such a pair. They cover every possible state of sentient experience — nothing falls outside them — and no experience can be both pleasant and painful in the same respect at the same time. This means that the moment pain is absent, pleasure is not merely likely or approaching or about to arrive. It IS present. The two conditions share a single boundary, and crossing that boundary in either direction is instantaneous and total.

This is not an empirical observation that could in principle have turned out otherwise. Epicurus is not reporting that he surveyed human feelings and found them to sort neatly into two groups. He is establishing a definition: these two categories, so defined, leave no remainder. The neutral middle ground that critics of Epicurus want to insert between pleasure and pain is not a discovery — it is a refusal to accept the definition. The person who insists on a neutral third feeling is in the same position as someone who insists there must be a third verdict besides guilty and not guilty, or a third position for a light switch besides on and off. The vocabulary for such a verdict exists; the reality it would name does not.

This same logical structure — two categories, jointly exhaustive, mutually exclusive, leaving no third option — is the foundation of Epicurean physics as well as Epicurean ethics. Everything in the universe is either body (that which can touch and be touched, that which impacts and receives impact) or void (intangible space, offering no resistance). Epicurus makes the identical move in both domains. He is not borrowing a physics analogy to illuminate ethics. He is applying one method consistently across everything. When you understand how the binary works in physics, you understand how it works in ethics — because it is the same logical instrument.

The illustrations below make this visible rather than just arguable. Each one shows, in a domain where the principle is already obvious to everyone, the same structure that Epicurus claims for feeling: two conditions, one boundary, no middle ground, the absence of one being the immediate and total presence of the other.

Part One: Illustrations from the Epicurean Texts

Bodies and Space — The Foundational Binary

The single most powerful illustration available is not borrowed from another domain. It is the foundation of Epicurean physics itself.

In the Letter to Herodotus, Epicurus begins his account of the universe with a stark declaration: everything that exists is either body or void. Not atoms, specifically — body. That which is. And the defining characteristic of body is precisely its capacity to act on other things and to be acted upon: to push and be pushed, to touch and be touched, to impact and receive impact. Void — which Epicurus calls ἀναφὴς φύσις, “intangible nature” — is defined as its perfect opposite: that which offers no resistance, which cannot touch or be touched, through which everything passes without contact.

Lucretius develops this into a closed logical argument in De Rerum Natura Book I. Suppose someone proposes a third kind of existence alongside bodies and space. Lucretius’s answer is immediate: ask one question about this proposed third thing. Can it touch or be touched? Can it impact or receive impact? If yes — it is body. If no — it is void. There is no further category in which a third answer could be housed. The two definitions are jointly exhaustive. Any proposed third existence collapses back into one of the two the moment you press it.

This is the identical logical structure Epicurus applies to feelings. Propose a neutral state between pleasure and pain. Ask one question: is it painful? If yes — it is pain. If no — it is pleasure. Not the approach toward pleasure, not a neutral non-pain state waiting for something further to arrive, but pleasure present and actual. There is no room left for a third answer. Epicurus is not borrowing a convenient analogy from his physics. He is applying the same method, making the same move, closing the same logical door.

Before laying out the physics of bodies and space, Epicurus opens the Letter to Herodotus with a methodological instruction that applies with equal force to his account of feeling. We must, he says, “seize firmly the things that underlie our words” — the primary concept that each term points to must be clearly fixed — “else we shall leave everything undetermined as we dispute to infinity, or else we shall be using empty words.” This is not merely a logical caution. It is a precise diagnosis of what goes wrong in every dispute about pleasure that has run for two thousand years without resolution. The person who has never fixed a clear first concept of what pleasure IS cannot recognize it when it is present, cannot identify its arrival, cannot distinguish having it from lacking it. They will dispute to infinity about whether the Epicurean state of pain-freedom counts as pleasure — because “pleasure” remains an empty word for them, pointing at nothing definite. The binary is Epicurus’s instrument for ending that dispute by supplying the fixed reference point: pleasure is what is present when pain is absent. Once that concept is clear, the word points to something that can actually be recognized — and will be recognized, as a matter of course, by anyone who has stopped disputing long enough to look.

The direction of the question matters. Pain is the more immediately recognizable of the two states — when acute pain is present, no one fails to notice it. Pleasure, as Epicurus defines it, is broader and in many of its forms quieter: the pleasures of memory, of friendship, of philosophical conversation, of a body simply functioning without disturbance. These are real and fully present, but they are easy to overlook because they are not dramatic.

The therapeutic point of the binary is therefore corrective in a specific way. It is not an argument for complacency or low expectations — Epicurus himself maintained an extensive circle of friends, wrote and taught without ceasing, took active pleasure in food and conversation and philosophy, and encouraged everyone around him to do the same. The correction is not “stop seeking.” It is “seek from the right foundation, and recognize what you already have so that you can build on it intelligently.” The person who cannot recognize pleasure when pain is absent keeps seeking desperately and anxiously, driven by the false conviction that they have not yet arrived — and so misses both what is already present and the direction in which genuine additional pleasure lies. The person who correctly reads the binary can pursue friendship, philosophy, and the fuller pleasures of an engaged life from a position of clarity rather than chronic restlessness. Epicurus’s argument runs in the corrective direction: begin from what everyone recognizes (pain), establish that its absence is not a neutral waiting-room for something further, and from that correct foundation pursue pleasure actively and without confusion about what it is.

The image this produces is elemental: a particle of matter against empty space. Something, and the absence of something. Two conditions, one universe.

The Relay Torch — Fire or Cold Ash

In De Rerum Natura Book II, Lucretius describes the succession of generations as runners in a relay race passing the torch of life: “et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt” — “and like runners they pass on the torch of life.”

The image carries its own argument. The torch is either burning or it is not. There is no third condition for a torch: not “somewhat alight,” not “pre-ignited,” not “cooling toward neither state.” The flame either lives in the wood or it does not. The moment it goes out, what remains is not a transitional state — it is cold, dark, inert matter. Fire and its absence are the two conditions, and they leave no gap between them.

What Lucretius uses for life and death, the same logic covers pleasure and pain. Either the warmth of pleasure is present or it is not. If it is not, what remains is not an intermediate — it is the cold state, which has its own name.

The Storm and the Shore — Safety or Peril

De Rerum Natura opens Book II with one of the most famous images in Latin poetry: the man standing safely on shore watching a great storm at sea. “Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem” — “Sweet it is, when the great sea is troubled by winds, to watch from land another’s great toil.”

The image is explicitly about pleasure and its opposite. The man on the shore is safe; the sailors are in danger. These are not points on a spectrum. You are either in the storm or you are not. You are either battered by waves and wind or you are standing on solid ground watching. The coastline is an absolute boundary — cross it in one direction and you are in the sea; step back and you are not. There is no zone between the two that is neither shore nor storm.

Lucretius uses this as a picture of the contrast between the Epicurean life and the life of those without philosophy. The man who has secured the foundations of his understanding stands on the shore. Everyone else is in the water. The image does not allow for a middle position.

The Full Vessel — Complete or Not Complete

In the opening of Book VI of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes a life whose cup is already full — the man who has reached the limit, who has attained what pleasure is capable of delivering, and for whom additional accumulation adds nothing because the vessel is already filled to the brim.

The image of the full vessel is not merely decorative. It makes a specific argument about limits: a cup that is full is fully full. There is no gradation between “full” and “fully full.” The filled state IS the complete state. When you pour into a full cup, the liquid does not gradually become “more full than full” — it spills, because the condition of fullness has already been reached and is already total.

This applies directly to the binary of pleasure and pain. The removal of pain does not produce a half-state that is “not quite pleasure yet.” When the cup of pain is emptied, the cup of pleasure is full. The limit has been reached. Fullness is not an approach toward something further — it is the thing itself, arrived.

Health and Sickness — The Medical Binary

Epicurus explicitly compared philosophy to medicine and its practitioners to physicians. This was not a casual metaphor. He meant that the philosopher, like the physician, deals with a condition that is either present or absent — and that the goal of the art is to move the patient from one state to the other.

A physician examining a patient recognizes exactly two conditions: the body is either functioning as it should, or it is not. There is no clinical state called “neither healthy nor sick.” Such a state has no medical meaning. Either the infection is present or it has cleared. Either the fever is there or it is gone. When sickness is absent, health IS present — not as a separate subsequent achievement but as the immediate condition of its absence.

The Epicurean applies the same diagnosis to the whole of life. Either the pain of fear, anxiety, or bodily suffering is present, or it is not. When it is not, pleasure is present — because those are the only two things a feeling can be.

Sleep and Waking — Experience or Its Absence

Lucretius returns repeatedly to the analogy between death and dreamless sleep. The argument about death — that we need not fear it because it is simply the absence of experience — depends on the same binary. Either you are awake and experiencing, or you are in dreamless sleep and experiencing nothing. These are the two states of consciousness, and they leave no room for a third kind of being-conscious-but-not-experiencing.

The same binary holds for the sentient life more broadly. Either sensation is occurring or it is not. Either pleasure or pain is present, or sensation itself is absent — which for a living, functioning body means we have crossed from the question of what we feel into the question of whether we feel at all.

Part Two: Modern Illustrations

The ancient examples carry the greatest authority because they are Epicurus’s own instruments. But the same binary appears wherever nature or human technology has produced a condition that genuinely admits of no third state. The following examples work because they are real, not because they have been constructed to illustrate a point.

The Cardiac Monitor — Wave or Flatline

A cardiac monitor displays exactly two conditions: the undulating wave of a living heartbeat, and the flat line that replaces it when the heart stops. Every person who has ever been in a hospital or watched a film knows both images and knows their meaning immediately.

The flatline is not neutral. It is not the absence of a condition while awaiting a verdict. It is a fully real, fully specific state with a name and a consequence. When the wave returns, life IS present. When it does not, death IS present. No third line exists on the monitor — not because the engineers were insufficiently creative, but because nature has provided exactly two conditions to display.

This is the most immediately visceral modern image for the Epicurean binary. The wave is pleasure; the flatline is the other thing.

The Earth from Orbit — Day Side and Night Side

A photograph of Earth from space shows the terminator — the line that divides the sunlit half from the half in shadow. On one side of that line, every surface is in full daylight. On the other side, every surface is in full darkness. The line between them is the sharpest natural boundary visible from space.

Darkness is not nothing. It is not the absence of a condition while a third option is considered. It is a fully real state that exists on every surface the sun does not reach. When light arrives, darkness does not diminish toward a neutral middle — it is gone, instantly and completely, and light IS there.

The Pregnant and the Not-Pregnant

A phrase that already exists in common speech precisely because the logic is already obvious: you cannot be a little pregnant. Either the biological process has begun or it has not. There is no state of “not-pregnant but also not-not-pregnant” that one occupies while the question is pending. The moment the condition is present, it IS present — entirely, not gradually, not partially.

This example works because it is already culturally established as the canonical illustration of a true binary, recognized by anyone who has heard it.

The Verdict — Guilty or Not Guilty

A jury returns exactly one of two verdicts: guilty, or not guilty. The court does not recognize a verdict of “neither convicted nor acquitted.” Such a verdict would have no legal meaning — and more importantly, it would have no logical meaning, because the verdict is defined as the answer to a yes-or-no question. The defendant either committed the act or did not. The jury either finds this established or does not.

“Not guilty” is not a neutral outcome. It is a full verdict with full legal force and full consequences. It IS a decision, not the absence of one.

The court of sensation works identically. Either the experience is pleasant or it is not. “Not painful” is not a hung jury. It is a verdict: pleasure.

The Relay Torch — Ancient Image, Permanent Truth

The image Lucretius gave us belongs equally in this section, because it requires no historical knowledge to understand. A burning torch and a cold, dark torch: two objects, one condition present in one and absent in the other. No one needs to be told which is which. The eye reads the binary before the mind processes it.

The Logical Form — Argument Without Image

Two further examples work at the level of pure logic rather than picture, and are worth noting for that reason even though they do not reduce to a visual image.

True and false — every proposition is either true or false. There is no third truth-value called “neither true nor false.” This is the law of the excluded middle, and it applies directly: the proposition “I am experiencing pleasure” is either true or false. If false, its negation — “I am not experiencing pleasure” — is true. And “not experiencing pleasure” in a sentient being is the definition of experiencing pain.

Binary computing and the telegraph — at the physical level, every bit in a computer and every moment of a telegraph signal is either current-flowing or current-not-flowing. The entire digital world — every image, every text, every calculation — is built on a binary that has no middle position. A transistor gate is either conducting or it is not. A telegraph line is either carrying signal or it is carrying silence. These illustrate the principle with great logical clarity but do not reduce to a picture, and they require the audience to understand the underlying technology before the analogy can land.

The Common Structure

Every illustration in both lists shares the same structure:

1. There are exactly two conditions.
2. They are defined by each other — one is the presence of what the other lacks.
3. A third condition cannot be inserted between them because there is no logical space for it to occupy.
4. The moment one condition ends, the other IS present — not approaching, not about to become, but present.

This is what Epicurus means when he says pleasure and pain are the two feelings. He is not reporting an observation that could in principle have turned out otherwise. He is defining the terms in a way that closes the door on any third option by construction — the same way he closed the door on a third kind of existence between bodies and space.

The person who insists on a neutral middle ground between pleasure and pain is in the position of someone who insists there must be a third verdict besides guilty and not guilty, or a third state for a torch besides burning and not burning. A name can be invented for such a state — but naming is not finding. The test is not whether a word can be coined but whether the thing named can be located in actual felt experience. Anyone who proposes a neutral third feeling must eventually describe what it is like to be in it; and when they do, every description will draw on either pleasant or unpleasant qualities — because feeling itself is what the binary describes, and feeling’s own report always comes back as one or the other. A neutral state that can be felt as neither pleasant nor unpleasant cannot be felt at all, which means it is not a feeling. This is precisely what Epicurus warned against at the opening of the Letter to Herodotus: words whose referents cannot be located in actual experience produce endless dispute without result. The invented vocabulary for a neutral third feeling is a perfect specimen of the empty word — a name pointing at nothing that can be distinguished from the two states that are already there. What exists, when pain is absent, is the other of the only two things there are — which is pleasure, present, real, and complete.

Quote from Todd

Obviously it is the counsels that Epicurus opposed. But it could also be read as Epicurus opposing those schools, which is not true. Especially that word "directly". I would suggest re-wording this somehow.

I'm going to get to this in a future rewrite as well.

Again, Todd, thank you very much for the suggestion. The new section below has been added.

Argument 6: The Ancient World Already Had a Name for “Absence of Pain” as the Goal — and It Was Not “Epicurean”

This argument cuts to the heart of the historical record in a way that cannot be dismissed as a matter of interpretation.

The ancient philosophical world was perfectly aware that someone had proposed “absence of pain” — freedom from all annoyance — as the ultimate goal of life. They did not attribute this position to Epicurus. They attributed it to Hieronymus of Rhodes, a Peripatetic philosopher who lived approximately 290–230 BC, after Epicurus, and who had Epicurus’s works available to him when he formulated his own position.

The ancient sources are explicit. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromateis (Book II, Chapter 21, sections 127–128), records the ancient division of philosophical schools by their stated goals, explicitly placing Epicurus in the category of those who proposed pleasure as the end, and Hieronymus of Rhodes in the separate category of those who proposed absence of pain as the end. Cicero reports the same division independently in multiple works. In Academic Questions, he states it directly:

Quote

“Hieronymus placed it [the chief good] in being free from all annoyance.”

And in On Ends, Cicero stages a direct debate in which Hieronymus is explicitly named as the philosopher who held that “freedom from pain” and “pleasure” are two different things — and that “freedom from pain” is the true chief good — while Torquatus, the Epicurean spokesman, argues that pleasure is the goal and that freedom from pain is simply another name for the same condition, not a separate or superior alternative.

Several points follow from this with force:

• Epicurus and Hieronymus are listed as distinct positions by the ancient sources. No ancient commentator collapses them. The difference between “pleasure is the goal” and “absence of pain is the goal” was understood in antiquity as the difference between two different philosophers holding two genuinely different views — not as two formulations of the same philosophy.
• Hieronymus came after Epicurus and chose deliberately to differ. He had access to Epicurus’s texts. He was not confused about what Epicurus taught. He disagreed — and the ancient world recorded the disagreement as a matter of philosophical fact.
• Epicurus would have been fully aware of the “absence of pain” option and chose not to adopt it. The position was available to him. He defined pleasure — not mere freedom from pain — as the goal, the beginning, and the end of the blessed life. This was not an oversight; it was a deliberate choice between two positions that the ancient world clearly distinguished.
• The person who today attributes “absence of pain” to Epicurus is not reporting Epicurean philosophy. They are reporting Hieronymian philosophy and attaching Epicurus’s name to it in error. The ancient world would have recognized this immediately — not because the texts are ambiguous, but because the distinction between the two positions was the kind of thing that philosophers in antiquity took pains to establish and record precisely.

The practical implication is direct: if you maintain that “absence of pain” rather than pleasure is the true goal of life, you are not an Epicurean. You are a Hieronymian. The irony is precise: Hieronymus of Rhodes deliberately rejected Epicurus’s position — pleasure as the goal — and substituted his own: absence of pain. That substitution is what the ancient world recorded and attributed to Hieronymus. Today, Hieronymus is forgotten and Epicurus’s name endures — but the “absence of pain” position that Hieronymus invented as a departure from Epicurus has been wrongly reattached to Epicurus himself. Epicurus has been tagged with his own successor’s rejection of his own teaching. The confusion should be corrected wherever it appears.

great comments thank you!

It is gratifying to have a generally appreciative comment on this post from Greg Sadler, whose videos I have frequently watched, and who views I very much respect.

This thread is for discussion of: "Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About 'Absence of Pain'"

Blog Article

Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About 'Absence of Pain'

The Claim and Why It Matters

The claim that Epicurean philosophy is “primarily about the absence of pain” — that the Epicurean goal is a passive, featureless neutral state free from disturbance — is one of the most consequential misreadings in the history of philosophy. It transforms a vigorous, life-affirming system into something that looks, in practice, indistinguishable from the Stoic, Buddhist, or ascetic counsels that Epicurus directly opposed.

The arguments against this reading are…

Cassius

May 20, 2026 at 10:54 AM

Quote from Titus

Maybe this discussion about "absence of pain" is an "English" thing.

I don't know that it is limited to England by any means, but I'd say that England seems to produce the highest concentration of it. Further, it goes deeper than the "stiff upper lip" and "keep calm and carry on" style of Stoicism that became identified with England in WW2. My own ethnic ancestry is English and I'd love to be able to pin this down more thoroughly. I see it as a major problem to be fixed rather than a strength to be cultivated.

I've posted the list of arguments on substack:

Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About "Absence of Pain"

The Claim and Why It Matters

open.substack.com

I should have realized when I came up with an odd number of nine arguments that i was missing something.

I have now added in a tenth, which I actually think is one of the most compelling of all. I should not have forgotten it.

So I can keep track of it I have added an easier-to-read format of it here. This is the version I will be updating going forward:

Good luck Don. Always good to try when there is any hope of success. Here is a summary of the major arguments that appear scattered in many places on this site:

"Why It Is Incorrect to Say Epicurean Philosophy Is Primarily About 'Absence of Pain'"

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"For this reason 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." -- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

The Claim and Why It Matters

The claim that Epicurean philosophy is "primarily about the absence of pain" — that the Epicurean goal is a passive, featureless neutral state free from disturbance — is one of the most consequential misreadings in the history of philosophy. It transforms a vigorous, life-affirming system into something that looks, in practice, indistinguishable from the Stoic, Buddhist, or ascetic counsels that Epicurus directly opposed.

The arguments against this reading are numerous, mutually reinforcing, and grounded in the primary texts. They are collected here in condensed form.

Argument 1: There Are Only Two Feelings — Absence of One Is Presence of the Other

This is the most fundamental argument, and it dissolves the apparent contrast between "pleasure" and "absence of pain" entirely.

• Epicurus taught that Nature has given every living creature exactly two internal feelings: pleasure and pain.
• These two are exhaustive and mutually exclusive — there is no third state between them.
• If pain is absent, pleasure is present — not by convention or definition, but because there are only two options and one of them is gone.
• "Absence of pain" and "presence of pleasure" are therefore two ways of describing the same condition, not two different things.

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"The internal sensations they say are two, pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature, and the one is akin to nature and the other alien: by means of these two choice and avoidance are determined." -- Diogenes Laertius, Book X, 34

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"Surely anyone 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

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"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

• The practical consequence: Saying the Epicurean goal is "absence of pain" rather than "pleasure" is like saying the goal is "not being in darkness" rather than "being in light." The two phrases pick out the same state from opposite directions. The choice to emphasize the negative formulation is a rhetorical one, not a philosophical one — and it is a rhetorical choice that consistently misleads general audiences toward passivity and minimalism.

Argument 2: The Letter to Menoeceus Cannot Be Read Through a Single Sentence Torn From Context

The passage most often cited as evidence for the "absence of pain" reading is this one:

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"When 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." -- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

This sentence is real — but reading it in isolation while ignoring everything around it is a fundamental error of method. The Letter to Menoeceus as a whole says the opposite of what the "absence of pain" reading requires:

• The letter opens by stating that philosophy leads to happiness — not tranquility, not absence of pain, but happiness.
• The letter explicitly declares that "pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life" and "the first good innate in us."
• The contested passage is not Epicurus saying "I don't mean pleasure; I mean absence of pain." It is Epicurus clarifying that "pleasure" in his usage is broader than physical stimulation of the body — it includes freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance as genuine pleasures, not as replacements for pleasure.
• The letter closes with the vision of the wise man living "like a god among men" — a life of full positive pleasure, not minimal disturbance.

Reading one sentence against the grain of the entire letter is precisely the kind of selective citation that produces the misreading. The rule applies here as everywhere: a single passage, read in isolation, cannot overturn the consistent testimony of the whole.

Argument 3: Principal Doctrine 3 Is a Targeted Response to a Specific Philosophical Opponent — Not a Summary of Epicurean Ethics

Principal Doctrine 3 states:

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"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body, nor of mind, nor of both at once."

This doctrine has been taken as definitive proof that Epicurus reduced the goal of life to the mere absence of pain. That reading mistakes the context entirely.

• PD3 is the third in a deliberate sequence of responses to the three most powerful ancient arguments used to attack pleasure as the goal of life:
  • PD1 answers the argument from divine punishment: a truly blessed being has no interest in rewarding or punishing humans.
  • PD2 answers the argument from fear of death: death is the end of all sensation, so neither good nor evil follows it.
  • PD3 and PD4 answer the argument from Plato's Philebus: that pleasure cannot be the highest good because it has no limit and therefore can never be complete.
• Plato's challenge was: pleasure can always be increased; it is never finished; a thing that cannot be completed cannot be the highest good.
• Epicurus's answer (PD3): pleasure does have a limit — the limit is reached when all pain is removed, because at that point there is no more pain to displace. The cup is full. What Plato said could never be complete is in fact complete.
• What PD3 is not doing: It is not saying that the content of a good life is merely the absence of pain. It is establishing that the measure of fullness — the philosophical limit that answers Plato — is the removal of pain. The content of the full life remains what Epicurus stated throughout all his writings: the pleasures of taste, hearing, sight, friendship, philosophy, memory, and anticipation.
• The analogy: PD3 tells us the cup is full when it reaches the brim. It says nothing about what fills the cup. Those who read PD3 as defining the Epicurean goal have confused the measurement of fullness with the content being measured.

Argument 4: Epicurus Stated Explicitly What He Could Not Conceive the Good Without

There is no ambiguity about this:

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"I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form." -- Epicurus, in Diogenes Laertius, Book X

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"For my part I find no meaning which I can attach to what is termed good, if I take away from it the pleasures obtained by taste, if I take away the pleasures which come from listening to music, if I take away too the charm derived by the eyes from the sight of figures in movement, or other pleasures by any of the senses in the whole man." -- Epicurus, as quoted by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations

• These are not the words of a man who thought the good life consisted in a passive neutral state free from disturbance.
• These are the words of a man for whom the positive content of pleasure — vivid, sensory, active, varied — is inseparable from what "good" even means.
• A philosophy whose goal is "primarily absence of pain" would not generate statements like this. A philosophy whose goal is genuine, active, positive pleasure would — and does.

Argument 5: The Ancient Witnesses Are Unanimous That the Goal Is Active, Vivid Pleasure

Both friendly and hostile ancient sources understood Epicurus to be teaching active pleasure, not passive absence of disturbance:

• Torquatus (Cicero's Epicurean spokesman): "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?"
• Diogenes of Oinoanda (carved in stone for all passersby): "I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure."
• Cicero (a hostile critic, which makes his testimony all the more telling): "[The Epicureans said] that nothing was preferable to a life of tranquility crammed full of pleasures" — the Latin is unambiguous: plena et conferta voluptatibus, a life full and crammed with pleasures.
• Torquatus again: "The wise man is continually in a state of pleasure, and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains."

A philosophy primarily about "absence of pain" would not be described by its ancient advocates and critics alike as a philosophy of numerous, vivid, crammed-full pleasures.

Argument 6: The Friendship Argument — Why "Minimize Pain" Cannot Be the Prime Directive

This argument is practical and penetrating. Frances Wright's A Few Days In Athens captures it clearly:

• Deep friendship is one of the greatest pleasures Epicurus identified.
• Deep friendship inevitably ends in grief for one of the parties — grief that is among the sharpest pains available to human experience.
• A person whose goal was primarily to minimize pain would rationally avoid deep friendship, moderate every attachment, guard against every commitment that might later hurt.
• The Epicurean does the opposite — pursues friendship gladly, deliberately, and without reservation — because the pleasures of shared life, mutual support, and being truly known vastly outweigh the cost of eventual grief.
• The pain of grief is accepted willingly as the price of the pleasure that made it possible.

The conclusion: If "absence of pain" were the prime directive, Epicurus would counsel against deep friendship. He counseled the opposite — calling friendship "the greatest of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life." The Epicurean goal must be stated as the maximum of pleasure, not the minimum of pain. These are not the same thing, and the difference shapes every practical choice.

Argument 7: "The Goal of Life Is Absence of Pain" as a Standalone Phrase Is Liable to Systematic Misinterpretation

Even where the phrase is technically defensible (because of the two-feelings doctrine), it consistently misleads:

• Most people who encounter "the goal is absence of pain" without full context will interpret it as recommending a passive, neutral, featureless state — essentially philosophical nothingness.
• The phrase echoes Buddhist and Stoic counsels of detachment and desire-suppression, and listeners draw exactly that connection — the opposite of the Epicurean position.
• The Epicurean texts warn explicitly against this misuse. The correct approach is to lead with pleasure as the positive goal and introduce the equivalence with "absence of pain" as secondary clarification, not as the primary summary.
• Presenting the Epicurean goal as "absence of pain" to a general audience without full explanation produces a picture of Epicurus as an ascetic minimalist — the precise opposite of what Torquatus described and what Diogenes of Oinoanda carved into stone.

Argument 8: The "Limit" Is Not the Goal — The Full Cup Model

The appropriate analogy - as used in the opening of Lucretius Book Six - is that of a "full cup" or "full vessel" which makes the relevant distinction precisely:

• The limit of pleasure (where pain is fully removed) is the measure of whether the cup is full — it is the criterion of completeness.
• The content of pleasure (the varied, vivid, active pleasures that fill the cup) is what the good life actually consists of.
• Confusing the measure of fullness with the content is like saying a feast is "primarily about not being hungry." Not being hungry is what a completed feast achieves — but the feast consists of food, company, and enjoyment, not of the absence of hunger.
• The full cup cannot be made fuller — but it is full, not empty.

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"[T]he Epicureans said that nothing was preferable to a life of tranquility crammed full of pleasures." -- Cicero, In Defense of Publius Sestius 10.23

A crammed-full cup is not a description of an "absence of pain" philosophy. It is the description of a philosophy of positive, active, abundant pleasure — guided by reason to ensure the cup is sound and the pleasures genuine.

Argument 9: The Three Distorting Traditions That Produced This Reading

The "absence of pain" reading did not arise from careful study of the full panoply of available texts. It arose from three cultural filters that have operated on Epicurus for centuries, all pushing in the same direction:

• The Stoic filter: Stoics found it useful to read Epicurus as a failed Stoic — someone whose ataraxia was essentially Stoic apatheia in different language. Domesticating Epicurus as a philosopher of tranquility served the Stoic agenda.
• The religious filter: For traditions that regard pleasure as morally suspect, reading Epicurus as a philosopher of inner peace (rather than pleasure) makes him theologically more comfortable. The cost is misreading him.
• The Humanist filter: Modern Humanism's emphasis on rational self-restraint and the subordination of appetite to principle makes the "tranquility" reading of Epicurus more acceptable than his actual teaching. Again, comfort is purchased at the price of accuracy.

All three filters consistently distort the reading of Epicurus in the same direction: away from pleasure (which sounds too bodily, too individual) and toward tranquility (which sounds elevated and dignified). All three produce an Epicurus who is no longer recognizably Epicurean.

Argument 10: The Historical Record of Epicurean Lives Contradicts the Ascetic Picture Entirely

If Epicurean philosophy were primarily about the absence of pain — about minimizing desire, withdrawing from engagement, and seeking a passive featureless calm — we would expect to find this reflected in the lives of the Epicurean leaders themselves. We find the opposite at every turn.

Epicurus's own life and property:

• At his death, Epicurus held extensive property — the Garden, his house inside the walls of Athens, and other holdings — and bequeathed them formally by will to continue the school's work.
• The Garden was not a remote rural hermitage. It stood on the Dromos, the most traveled ceremonial thoroughfare in Athens — the main road from the Dipylon Gate to Plato's Academy, thirty-nine meters wide in places, used for the great Panathenaic procession and by travelers, merchants, diplomats, and students daily. Epicurus was not hiding. He was on the main road.
• At the gate of the Garden, Epicurus posted an explicit public welcome: "Hospes hic bene manebis, hic summum bonum voluptas est" — "O Guest, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure." He advertised the philosophy on one of the busiest roads in the ancient world and invited every passerby in.
• Epicurus maintained correspondence with friends and followers across the entire Greek world — not a small isolated community but an extensive network.
• He hosted regular meals and dinners, enjoyed wine, engaged in philosophical conversation as a positive pleasure, and is documented as owning slaves and managing the substantial finances of a large and active school.
• Not a single ancient source describes Epicurus as ascetic, minimalistic, or withdrawn from the city and its life. The description of a recluse in a sealed private retreat is, as the evidence establishes, a fiction.

No Epicurean leader of the ancient world is famed for asceticism:

• Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Colotes, and the other early Epicurean leaders were active, engaged participants in philosophical debate — writing polemical works, corresponding with opponents, building institutions.
• Philodemus (1st century BC) lived and worked in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum — one of the grandest private estates in the Roman world — as the philosophical associate of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a man of enormous wealth and political influence. A philosopher whose goal was "absence of pain" in the minimalist sense would not be living in a villa of extraordinary luxury surrounded by one of the largest private libraries of antiquity. Philodemus also wrote prolifically — dozens of surviving works — precisely to bring Epicurean philosophy to the educated Roman public.
• Diogenes of Oinoanda (2nd century AD) spent his personal fortune commissioning a massive stone inscription — covering the entire wall of a public stoa in his city — so that every passerby could read the Epicurean philosophy for free. He states his reason explicitly: he wanted to spread the benefits of philosophy as widely as possible before his death. This is the action of a man who understood his goal as the active promotion of the fullest possible pleasurable life for others — not of a man who thought the goal was passive withdrawal.
• Torquatus and Cassius Longinus, the most prominent Roman Epicureans of the late Republic, were men of the first political and military rank. Cassius organized the conspiracy against Caesar from Epicurean philosophical conviction. Neither resembles an ascetic minimalist by any stretch.

Epicurean leaders actively recruited outsiders:

• Epicurus himself wrote extensively and distributed his works to friends and strangers across the Greek world — the explicit purpose being to share the philosophy and bring others to live well.
• Philodemus's entire career was oriented toward making Epicurean philosophy accessible to Roman intellectual and political society — the opposite of sectarian withdrawal.
• Diogenes of Oinoanda carved philosophy into stone for all who pass by — Greeks and non-Greeks alike, as he states explicitly. His inscription was a form of philosophical outreach without parallel in the ancient world.
• The Epicurean school's warm communal culture — the birthday celebrations of Epicurus, the letters of philosophical friendship, the welcoming of women and slaves as full participants — was explicitly designed to draw people in, not to wall them out.

Epicurean sympathies in the courts of the powerful:

• Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king whose court had Epicurean sympathies, established a Gymnasium in Jerusalem — the institutional center of Hellenistic philosophical culture — not a monastery.
• Empress Pompeia Plotina, wife of Trajan and one of the most powerful women in Rome, was a documented and devoted Epicurean. Her personal letter to Hadrian begins: "How greatly I favor the school of Epicurus you know full well, my lord." She intervened successfully to change Roman law governing the Epicurean school's succession in Athens. Upon her death, Hadrian deified her and built temples in her honor. The Epicurean school's most prominent imperial patron was a woman at the center of Roman power — not a recluse.

The friendship argument as lived practice:

• Friendship — demanding, deep, reciprocal, grief-risking friendship — was not a theoretical value for these leaders. It was the organizing principle of how they lived. Epicurus's deathbed letter to Idomeneus celebrates friendship. Philodemus's philosophical work on frank speech (parrhesia) is organized entirely around the practices of genuine friendship within philosophical community. Diogenes of Oinoanda's inscription is itself an act of friendship extended to strangers.
• Friendship of this kind is neither minimalistic nor ascetic. It requires investment — of time, attention, emotional vulnerability, practical resources — and it generates the kinds of experiences that make "absence of pain" a grossly inadequate description of what the Epicureans were living.

The verdict of the historical record: Not one of the known Epicurean leaders — Epicurus, Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Philodemus, Diogenes of Oinoanda, Torquatus, Cassius Longinus, Pompeia Plotina — lived a life that could honestly be described as organized around minimizing stimulation or withdrawing from engagement. Every one of them was active, connected, productive, and committed to bringing others into the philosophy. The ascetic minimalist picture is a later distortion, not a historical reality.

Summary: What the Texts Actually Say

Conclusion

Saying that Epicurean philosophy is "primarily about the absence of pain" is wrong in multiple independent ways simultaneously:

1. It violates the two-feelings doctrine — absence of pain simply is pleasure.
2. It reads a single clause of the Letter to Menoeceus against the plain meaning of the whole letter.
3. It treats PD3 as a summary of Epicurean ethics when it is a targeted response to a specific philosophical opponent.
4. It contradicts Epicurus's own explicit statements about what he could not conceive the good without.
5. It is flatly contradicted by every ancient witness, friendly and hostile alike.
6. It produces practical counsel (minimize attachments, avoid risk of grief) that Epicurus explicitly rejected.
7. It misleads general audiences by suggesting something like Buddhist or Stoic detachment — the precise opposite of what Epicurus taught.

The Epicurean goal is a life full of positive pleasure — crammed full, as the ancient testimony puts it — pursued wisely so that the pleasures are real, lasting, and uncontaminated by the greater pains that foolish pursuit would bring. Absence of pain describes the same state from the negative side, because where pain ends, pleasure begins — but this logical equivalence should never be mistaken for an endorsement of the empty cup over the full one.

The goal is fullness. Not emptiness.

Also (and there are many other arguments) it is not proper to take a single sentence and not consider it in the context of the full analysis of pleasure as to whether it has a limit, which is what Plato had argued in Philebus. The main reason to consider the total removal of all pain to be the limit of pleasure of pleasure is that unless you can logically define a limit for pleasure, pleasure can always be made better by adding more.

The citations from Plato and Seneca that document this argument about pleasure from the opposing side are in the "Full Cup" article here on the site.

Because he is ignoring the well documented point, stressed by Torquayus as well, that there are only two feelings, pleasure and pain, and that the absence of one is the presence of the other.

He is talking as if less pain is something different and better than more pleasure when in fact they are exactly the same thing.

Thanks to Eikadistes for this link -

The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick--The Project Gutenberg eBook

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"Epíkouros did not ban slavery, but he did free slaves. He did not reform jail, but he did post bail. He did not legalize women’s choices, but he did publish female voices. He did not manage the State, but he did transfer his estate..."

Eikadistes

May 18, 2026 at 6:25 PM

Since the terms psychological hedonism and ethical hedonism are of great interest to some, and those terms appear to originate with Henry Sidgwick, it's probably helpful to have a thread on who Sidgwick was and what he was doing with his categories, and why.

Clearly there is relevance between the thought of the Utilitarians vs Epicurus. I personally consider Utilitarianism to have been a dead end and misapplication of Epicurus' philosophy, but there's always something to learn from history.

The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia

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Sidgwick summarizes his position in ethics as utilitarianism "on an Intuitional basis".^[10] This reflects, and disputes, the rivalry then felt among British philosophers between the philosophies of utilitarianism and ethical intuitionism, which is illustrated, for example, by John Stuart Mill's criticism of ethical intuitionism in the first chapter of his book Utilitarianism.

Sidgwick developed this position due to his dissatisfaction with an inconsistency in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism, between what he labels "psychological hedonism" and "ethical hedonism". Psychological hedonism states that everyone always will do what is in their self-interest, whereas ethical hedonism states that everyone ought to do what is in the general interest. Sidgwick believed neither Bentham nor Mill had an adequate answer as to how the prescription that someone ought to sacrifice their own interest to the general interest could have any force, given they combined that prescription with the claim that everyone will in fact always pursue their own individual interest. Ethical intuitions, such as those argued for by philosophers such as William Whewell, could, according to Sidgwick, provide the missing force for such normative claims.

For Sidgwick, ethics is about which actions are objectively right.^[11] Our knowledge of right and wrong arises from common-sense morality, which lacks a coherent principle at its core.^[12] The task of philosophy in general and ethics in particular is not so much to create new knowledge but to systematize existing knowledge.^[13] Sidgwick tries to achieve this by formulating methods of ethics, which he defines as rational procedures "for determining right conduct in any particular case".^[14][15] He identifies three methods: intuitionism, which involves various independently valid moral principles to determine what ought to be done, and two forms of hedonism, in which rightness only depends on the pleasure and pain following from the action. Hedonism is subdivided into egoistic hedonism, which only takes the agent's own well-being into account, and universal hedonism or utilitarianism, which is concerned with everyone's well-being.^[13][14]

As Sidgwick sees it, one of the central issues of ethics is whether these three methods can be harmonized with each other. Sidgwick argues that this is possible for intuitionism and utilitarianism. But a full success of this project is impossible since egoism, which he considers as equally rational, cannot be reconciled with utilitarianism unless religious assumptions are introduced.^[14] Such assumptions, for example, the existence of a personal God who rewards and punishes the agent in the afterlife, could reconcile egoism and utilitarianism.^[13] But without them, we have to admit a "dualism of practical reason" that constitutes a "fundamental contradiction" in our moral consciousness.^[11]

Metaethics

Sidgwick's metaethics involve an explicit defence of a non-naturalist form of moral realism. He is committed to moral cognitivism: that moral language is robustly truth-apt, and that moral properties are not reducible to any natural properties. This non-naturalist realism is combined with an ethical intuitionist epistemology to account for the possibility of knowing moral truths.^[16]

Esoteric morality

Sidgwick is closely, and controversially, associated with esoteric morality: the position that a moral system (such as utilitarianism) may be acceptable, but that it is not acceptable for that moral system to be widely taught or accepted.^[17]

Bernard Williams would refer to Sidgwickian esoteric utilitarianism as "Government House Utilitarianism" and claim that it reflects the elite British colonialist setting of Sidgwick's thought.^[18]

Philosophical legacy

According to John Rawls, Sidgwick's importance to modern ethics rests with two contributions: providing the most sophisticated defence available of utilitarianism in its classical form, and providing in his comparative methodology an exemplar for how ethics is to be researched as an academic subject.^[19] Allen Wood describes Sidgwick-inspired comparative methodology as the "standard model" of research methodology among contemporary ethicists.^[20]

Despite his importance to contemporary ethicists, Sidgwick's reputation as a philosopher fell precipitously in the decades following his death, and he would be regarded as a minor figure in philosophy for a large part of the first half of the 20th century. Bart Schultz argues that this negative assessment is explained by the tastes of groups which would be influential at Cambridge in the years following Sidgwick's death: Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophers, the remnants of British idealism, and, most importantly, the Bloomsbury Group.^[21] John Deigh, however, disputes Schultz's explanation, and instead attributes this fall in interest in Sidgwick to changing philosophical understandings of axioms in mathematics, which would throw into question whether axiomatization provided an appropriate model for a foundationalist epistemology of the sort Sidgwick tried to build for ethics.^[22]

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That's a great opening email. You are very welcome here!

RoseQuartzAxolotl (that's quite a user name!) tells us this:

Hello Cassius and all!

I'm 34 and I live in the Chicagoland area with my husband and our Shetland Sheepdog. I work on the systems side of education.

I grew up fairly conservative and fundamental Christian, and it took a long time to undo that knot. I've long considered myself an atheist/agnostic in my adult life, but as I enter my middle age years and leave my (relative) "youth" behind, I've looked for answers to existential and practical questions: What is the meaning of my life without religion? What set of ethics do I believe to guide my life? What legacy will I leave behind? How do I navigate this world "alone" without belief in divine intervention or an afterlife? Etc etc.

I had quickly come across Epicureanism a few years ago and I remembered it while reflecting on these questions. As I continue to delve deeper, I continue to find great truth. It's like every time I read a new (to me!) text, I laugh because I think "Aha! Finally some sense in this world!" and I feel I relate to Metrodorus when he fell to his knees after hearing Epicurus speak, feeling he had uncovered the secrets of the universe, so-to-speak. But I am not trained in philosophy at all! I received an earth science degree and most of my humanities classes revolved around arts, art history, and modern foreign language so I never even took a philosophy 101 class. I am trying not to be too intimidated by my current lack of knowledge in both philosophy AND the ancient. I remind myself learning has no age limit, the brain is extremely elastic even well into old age, and the only way to achieve the pleasure of competence is to push through the temporary pain of feeling like a fool. :p I am interested in applying Epicurean principles to modern life, learning more about how the ancient followers structured their day-to-day lives, how these principles can help modern mental health issues (alongside science, not instead of), etc. And just learning more in general!

I wanted to specifically join this forum as my husband does not seem to be nearly as thrilled as I am to discuss an ancient school of philosophy LOL. So for now, this will suffice as my Garden Community.

I appreciate your time! Please let me know if there's anything else I need to provide or questions I need to answer. Have a good day everyone!