Who Was Epicurus?

Epicurus (341—270 BC) was a Greek philosopher who founded one of the most influential and enduring philosophical schools of the ancient world. After recruiting a network of like-minded friends and colleagues in the provincial areas of Greece, he moved his school to Athens itself, where he taught for decades in a school that came to be known as “the Garden.” Epicurus built his philosophy on three interlocking foundations:

• Physics: The universe is entirely natural, and as a whole it has always existed, not created or controlled by supernatural forces. Nothing is ever created from nothing, and there is no life after death or reason to be concerned about any supernatural forces governing our lives.
• Canonics: Reality and Truth are established by the faculties given to us by Nature, which are our five senses, our feelings of pleasure and pain, and our anticipations (a natural capacity to recognize patterns). Knowledge does not and cannot come from divine revelation or dialectical logic disconnected from the evidence we obtain through these natural faculties.
• Ethics: The guides of life are the feelings of Pleasure and Pain. While we are alive, everything we experience in life, whether mental or physical, is felt by us as either pleasing or painful. We do not always choose each immediate pleasure, or avoid every immediate pain, because our ultimate success in life is not judged by any single moment but by the predominance of pleasure over pain in our lives as a whole. It is the feeling of Pleasure - mental and physical and all positive feeling in all its forms - that gives meaning to life rather than Virtue, Piety, Logic, or any other man-made abstraction.

The Physics, Canonics, and Ethics of Epicurus are mutually-reinforcing. Epicurus was insistent that you cannot understand how to live well until you understand the nature of the universe, and you cannot understand the universe without the right tools for separating true from false. Epicurean philosophy stands as a whole or not at all.

What Makes Epicurus Different

Epicurus was not the only ancient philosopher who discussed pleasure, happiness, or the good life. What makes him genuinely different — and genuinely threatening to the traditions that attacked him — is the combination of positions he held, and the confidence with which he held them.

He taught that the universe has no supernatural overlord, no divine plan, and no afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. He taught that the gods — understood correctly as natural, not supernatural, beings — are wholly indifferent to human affairs. He taught that our senses are reliable and that knowledge of reality is achievable. He taught that pleasure, broadly understood as all experience that is not painful, is the beginning and end of the happy life. He taught that virtue matters — not as an end in itself, but as the most important set of tools for living well. And he taught that death is nothing to us, since it is simply the end of sensation, and where there is no sensation, there is neither good nor evil.

Taken together, these positions constitute one of the most thorough and consistent philosophical systems in the ancient world. They were also considered dangerous by the major competing traditions of his own time and the centuries that followed — and they remain controversial today.

How Epicurus Has Been Misread

If you have encountered Epicurus before — in a philosophy class, an article, a popular book — there is a substantial chance that what you read was shaped by one of four traditions that have systematically distorted Epicurus' philosophy.

Stoicism was Epicurus’s most direct ancient rival. The Stoics held that virtue alone is the good, that pleasure is at best irrelevant and at worst corrupting, and that the wise man accepts fate with equanimity. Stoic writers — including Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero in his own voice — wrote extensively about Epicurus, often in ways that portrayed him as essentially a failed Stoic: someone who used the word “pleasure” but really meant something very like Stoic tranquility. This portrait is dishonest to the texts.

Platonism taught that the highest realities are not the things we experience with our senses but abstract, eternal Forms accessible only through pure reason. Platonic philosophy elevates the abstract over the real, demotes the body as a prison of the soul, and treats sensory pleasure as philosophically unworthy. Scholars shaped by Platonic assumptions have consistently read Epicurean pleasure as something more abstract and less embodied than Epicurus actually described.

Supernatural religion — above all the Judeo-Christian tradition — treats pleasure as morally suspect, prizes self-denial as a virtue, and promises reward and punishment after death. The caricature of Epicurus as a crude hedonist was already being promoted by Christian apologists in the second century AD, and it has never fully gone away. Reading Epicurus through a framework that assumes bodily pleasure is base and that the highest good is spiritual produces a distorted picture at every point.

Humanism, in the broad modern sense, substitutes idealism, rational self-restraint, and service to others for pleasure as the foundational category of ethics. Humanist readings of Epicurus tend to emphasize moderation, civic duty, and the subordination of desire to idealism — importing assumptions that are foreign to Epicurean philosophy and transforming it into something closer to Kantian ethics than to what the texts actually say.

All four of these traditions share one structural feature: each posits a highest good that transcends the natural guidance of pleasure and pain. Whether that highest good is called Virtue, the Form of the Good, God’s Will, Rational Dignity, or Good Without God, it is always something other than the pleasure that Nature has actually provided as our guide. Epicurus rejected each of these frameworks completely, and understanding his philosophy requires being willing to examine them critically rather than importing them as unexamined assumptions.

We pursue Epicurus' original teachings by prioritizing what he himself wrote to his friends Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus, and in his Principal Doctrines. We also prioritize the works of his primary followers such as Lucretius and Cicero's Epicurean spokesmen Torquatus and Velleius.

Keeping the focus on Pleasure answers the question of what is the highest good, but leaves unanswered the practical question of "Which pleasures?" Because Epicurus held that all mental and physical experiences in life fall within either pleasure or pain, the scope of choice is wide. Physical pleasures are necessary for life, but mental pleasures are necessary for happiness. The pleasures we choose to pursue will differ according to individual circumstances, but some circumstances are universal: All of us eventually die and cease to exist. There are no supernatural forces or rules. Under these universal conditions, Epicurus teaches that Nature tells us to pursue maximum net pleasure -- not minimum total pain. Some modern writers argue that Epicurus taught pursuit of minimum total pain as his overriding goal. This is false, as presented here on this site in articles such as Against Katastematic Supremacy: Pleasure Is a Unified Good, Not a House Divided Against Itself or others listed below. Epicurean happiness embraces active engagement with life and willing acceptance of pains that lead to greater net pleasure. It rejects retreat, resignation, and avoidance of all pain at every turn.

Think about how you will judge your life when it nears its end. If you are the type who will be happiest if you can say that you lived your life pursuing the maximum net pleasure that was possible to you, then you are in the right place here at EpicureanFriends. If you agree that pleasure is the highest good and you would like to join us and participate in our work, check here for our Rules, Policies, and Terms of Use and consider setting up an account.