4. Pleasure is only an temporary End but in life there is no end but is everlasting activity. Evolution gives no everlasting happiness based on pleasure. Eudaimonia was defined by Aristotles as an activity not an end state. Does a happy person or god do nothing when reached everlasting Absence of Pain ?
Most of this probably does not need an answer except as to the last -- the idea that people would "do nothing" when they achieve "absence of pain" is the real atrocity of the "tranqulity is king" perspective. That attitude achieves what it sets out to do - it reduces Epicureanism to a philosophy of doing nothing, experiencing anothing, achieving nothing.
Ant that's exactly what the historical record shows is the OPPOSITE of the lives that Epicurus and the ancient Epicureans actually lived.
The goal is pleasure, which includes everything in life that is desirable. When there is only two of anything, and one is desirable and the other is undesirable, thenyou want all of the desirable and none of the undesirable. This is not rocket science and the ancient Epicureans understood it so thoroughly that Epicurus thought he had no need to include it in the letter to Menoeceus. He did not have any way of knowing how decadent the world would become 300 years later and how the lack of including it would be twisted to make a philosophy of pleasure into the equivalent of a philosophy of death-worship - the very thing that Hegesius had advocated and the Epicureans rejected.
