Aponia

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  • Freedom from bodily pain. Diogenes Laertius reports that Epicurus classed aponia and ataraxia as "katastematic" (stable-state) pleasures, alongside joy and delight as pleasures "in motion." Like ataraxia, it is a form of pleasure, not a goal that replaces pleasure.

    Greek ἀπονία (aponia), "painlessness"; Latin indolentia (Cicero)

    1. Key Texts

    Quote from Diogenes Laertius 10.136-137

    Epicurus disagrees with the Cyrenaics on pleasure: they do not admit static pleasure but only the kinetic type, whereas he accepts both types, for soul and for body, as he says in his book On Choice and Avoidance and in On The End and in Book 1 of On Lives. In On Choices he speaks as follows: 'Freedom from disturbance and absence of pain are static pleasures; but joy and delight are regarded as kinetic activities.' He has a further disagreement with the Cyrenaics: they take bodily pains to be worse than mental ones, but he takes the mental ones to be worse, since the flesh is storm-tossed only in the present, but the soul in past, present and future. (tr. Long & Sedley)

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