Epicureanism
A Greek school holding that pleasure — understood as freedom from pain and mental disturbance — is the highest good, reached through simple needs, friendship and the removal of fear.
Epicureanism is a Greek school holding that pleasure is the highest good, where pleasure means the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance rather than indulgence.
Epicurus
Epicurus (341–270 BC) taught in a garden outside Athens, admitting women and slaves, which was unusual enough to attract hostile comment. His surviving work is fragmentary — three letters and collections of maxims — and the fullest presentation of the system is the Latin poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, written two centuries later.
The ethics
Pleasure is the natural goal, and the Epicurean analysis of it is austere. Desires divide into the natural and necessary (food, shelter, friendship), the natural and unnecessary (luxury), and the empty (fame, unlimited wealth). The last group is unlimited by definition and so cannot be satisfied, which makes pursuing them a reliable source of pain.
The goal is ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, achieved by satisfying simple needs and eliminating the fears that produce unhappiness. Friendship is treated as the greatest contributor to a life well lived.
The physics
The ethics rests on atomism, taken from Democritus. The universe consists of atoms and void. The soul is material and disperses at death, which is the premise of the school's best-known argument: death is nothing to us, since where death is we are not, and where we are death is not. Fear of divine punishment is removed the same way, by arguing that the gods take no interest in human affairs.
Reputation
"Epicurean" came to mean devoted to fine food and comfort, which reverses the doctrine. Epicurus recommended bread and water as the basis of diet and treated luxury as a habit that raises the cost of contentment. The school's rivalry with Stoicism shaped much of later Hellenistic ethics.
Questions
What is Epicureanism?
A Greek philosophy holding that pleasure is the highest good, understood as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance. It recommends simple living, friendship, and the elimination of fears about death and the gods.
Did Epicurus advocate luxury?
No. He treated luxury as a habit that raises the cost of contentment and recommended simple food and modest needs. The modern sense of 'epicurean' as devoted to fine living reverses his actual teaching.
What did Epicurus say about death?
That death is nothing to us. Since the soul is material and disperses at death, there is no subject left to experience harm, so fear of being dead is fear of a state that will never be undergone.