What Did Epicurus Mean About Pleasure

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Look around you today and you will see as many opinions about pleasure as you see people. Everyone has their own view of the best pleasure, and about what kinds of pleasure are acceptable and what are not.

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Some will say that God will tell you what kind of pleasures are good for you. Others say that there is no god but you can rely on psychologists and other experts. Some will say that there are no hard and fast rules at all and the best you can do is try to be a good person and do what everyone else does. In the end most authorities agree that the best thing to do is to go along with the crowd, keep your head down, and stay out of trouble as best you can.

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In the history of western thought there was one leader, Epicurus, who taught something dramatically different. Before the rise of Judeo-Christianity the views of Epicurus were widely popular. Leading Romans at the time of Julius Caesar felt like Epicurus' philosophy had "taken the Roman world by storm."

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Rome had tremendous influence on us today, so you would think that the teachings of such a prominent leader would be widely known. Unfortunately that is not the case. Whenever Epicurus is discussed today, there is more confusion than clarity, especially about his view that Pleasure should be the focus of life.

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Most of what Epicurus wrote during his life is now lost. Today most people generally read no further than a short letter that Epicurus wrote to one of his students. In that letter Epicurus said many things about how to live, and among them he wrote that "by pleasure we mean the absence of pain."

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The problem with that formulation of course is that in general saying that something is absent tells you nothing about what is present. That was not a problem for Epicurus' student, who had direct access to Epicurus and his fellow teachers who could explain to him what Epicurus meant.

Unfortunately for us today that full explanation was not included in the letter. When we read this letter, we naturally presume that Epicurus was using the word pleasure exactly as we use it today - but that would be a big mistake.

Fortunately much more information about Epicurus survives in other places and we can piece together the full picture.

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First of all, we know that Epicurus included within pleasure the same kind of bodily and mental stimulations that we think of today. In fact, Epicurus said that he would not know what is good at all without the bodily pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.

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But this does not mean that Epicurus was a drugged-out party animal. Have you ever seen a bust of Epicurus from the ancient world? Observe how he is always portrayed with an intense and serious look in his eyes. Epicurus took pleasure seriously, but not by fast and easy living like his enemies claimed.

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Epicurus held that physical stimulation of the body is just one type of pleasure. So long as those activities do not lead to more pain than pleasure in the end, Epicurus does not discourage us from pursuing these natural pleasures as part of a happy life. Food, drink, sex, music, dance, literature, and artistic expression are all important parts of an active and healthy life.

In fact, Epicurus points to these pleasures to prove that pleasure is desirable. He reminds us that all living things pursue exactly this type of pleasure from birth, and they continue to do so unless and until they are corrupted by false ideas.

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But Epicurus saw that there is much more to the story of pleasure than simple bodily stimulation. Epicurus taught that we should study nature to find out our true place in the universe. When we do, we will see that the universe is natural, that it has always existed, and that it is filled with life other than ourselves. In this big picture death is just as natural as life and is not to be feared because once we die we no longer exist.

Once we realize our consciousness comes to a final end at death, we can fully appreciate how valuable life is. This frame of mind leads us to conclude that every part of life which we do not feel to be painful is itself pleasurable.

The pleasures we feel when stimulated by outside things are desirable and an important part of the happy life. But once we grasp the big picture we see that all activities of a normal healthy life - even without outside stimulation - are also very pleasurable.

Once we see that there are many different types of pleasure, we can find many ways to live happily even when outside stimulation is not available.

How did Epicurus decide that it makes sense to view pleasure in this way?

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According to his ancient biographer Epicurus taught that there are ultimately only two feelings - pleasure and pain. Pleasure like food is close to and supportive of nature but pain is like disease alien and destructive. By means of pleasure and pain Nature leads us in deciding what to choose and what to avoid.

Whenever in any situation there are only two possibilities, the absence of one implies the presence of the other. That's exactly what Epicurus said about pleasure and pain in his Principal Doctrines. There he wrote that wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body, nor of mind, nor of both at once.

The phrase absence of pain therefore does not refer to a particular type of pleasure, any more than the word pleasure itself tells you exactly what you are experiencing. But what you do know is that because there are only two possibilities, absence of pain means exactly the same thing as pleasure.

Can we point to more evidence that this is the way Epicurus was going? Fortunately the answer is yes.

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The Roman Senator Cicero was a committed Stoic and Skeptic. Cicero disliked Epicurus, but in writing against him Cicero explained what he did not like. In doing so, Cicero unintentionally preserved for us key information about the Epicurean view of pleasure.

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Cicero tells us about a Roman leader by the name of Torquatus who spoke out in defense of Epicurus.

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Torquatus explained that Epicurus taught that Nature gives us nothing but pleasure and pain by which to decide what is good and what is evil. A person who is totally deprived of all mental and bodily sensation is essentially dead, and therefore it is fair to conclude that Nature herself - through sensation - is the judge of what we find to be agreeable or disagreeable. What facts other than pleasure and pain does Nature give us to decide whether to pursue or to avoid any particular thing?

Torquatus explained that Epicurus held that anyone who is conscious of his own condition is either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain. Life can be visualized as a constant battle between the two, with our goal being to fill our experience with pleasure and thereby eliminate all pain. At any moment we can change the mix of pleasures that we experience, but we can never add any additional pleasures once all pains have been removed. That's because when all pains have been removed our total experience is already fully occupied with pleasures.

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Torquatus explains this further by responding to a Stoic leader who argued against Epicurus. The Stoic held out his hand and asked us to consider our hand or any other part of our body in its normal condition. He argued that normally your hand is not feeling pleasure, and if pleasure were the highest good, the hand would tell you that it lacked what it really wanted. Torquatus said that this is actually a good argument against those philosophers who support pleasure but say that Pleasure consists only in stimulation. But this argument proves nothing against Epicurus, because Epicurus teaches that pleasure is not only stimulation, but also includes all aspects of normal and healthy life when we are not feeling some specific pain.

So long as any part of our body or mind is not experiencing pain we are more than justified in saying that it is experiencing pleasure. That is because we don't have to be stimulated from the outside in order to feel pleasure. Once we bring the big picture of life into focus we can clearly see that all aspects of life that are free from pain are pleasurable.

But seeing that all of normal life in the absence of pain is a pleasure must not cause us to forget that stimulation is also pleasurable. This would not be a problem for people of average intelligence, but some people make the mistake of thinking that Epicurus held "absence of pain" to be a type of exotic condition that is different from and more important than other types of pleasures. Those who have a tendency to think like Stoics or Buddhists and to distrust or dislike bodily pleasure,argue that in embracing "absence of pain" Epicurus was advocating for aloofness or apathy or anesthesia or some vaguely ambiguous "tranquility. " And they think that Epicurus was teaching absence of pain as something more important than the active pleasures of life.

Neither Epicurus himself nor his fellow Epicurean teachers held any such thing. Epicurus' enemies criticized him for talking about active bodily pleasures and absence of pain at the same time, but this is because they were trying to make him look confused and hypocritical. Epicurus' enemies never alleged that Epicurus repudiated the active pleasures of mind and body. In fact his enemies constantly criticized Epicurus for pursuing exactly that combination!

But once we see that absence of pain does not conflict with what all of us think of as the normal pleasures of life, does Epicurus' wider view of pleasure really make sense? It certainly does once you remember what Epicurus had to say about the nature of the universe and how we cease to exist at death.

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Epicurus held firmly that we only have one life to live. When we die we forever cease to exist, and no supernatural god is going to take us to heaven or to hell. Some think that this is a painful thought, but people like Epicurus who truly love life see that it is actually liberating.

Epicurus points out that there is no reason to think that we will be any worse off when we die than we were before we were born. Each of us knows for ourselves that we felt no suffering before we were born. There is no reason for us to think that when we die we will be any worse off than that.

Everyone understands that those who are told that they are dying want to live to its fullest the time that is left to them. What can be more motivating than to understand completely that all of us must die, and after that we have no more opportunity to experience pleasure? Once we see that, we can also see clearly that life itself is our most valuable asset, and that we should use every minute we have as pleasurably as possible.

This Epicurean view of life is the opposite of depressing - it is positive and uplifting. Epicurus tells us to gather under the name of pleasure all that we hold valuable in life, and he tells us that there are no supernatural limits or false ideals of virtue that restrict us from pursuing happiness wherever we find it.

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The best evidence of what Epicurus meant by pleasure was the way Epicurus spent his own life, Epicurus lived actively and in full engagement with the world around him. He was no humble wallflower or reclusive hermit. Epicurus poured his life into studying nature and teaching others what he himself had found to be true, and the school he founded lasted for hundreds of years before it was ended by the rise of Judeo-Christianity, As Nietzsche wrote, "Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean."

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What does all this mean? Understanding Epicurus' view of pleasure is the key to making use of the rest of Epicurean philosophy.

Epicurus' major innovation was not to limit the meaning of pleasure, but to extend it to include the normal state of being. Before Epicurus the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal condition of life, but this does not change the facts: The name of pleasure ought to be applied to life without pain. Reason justifies this application, and people would be happier for so reasoning and believing.

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Epicurus stands for the proposition that it is Nature and not supernatural gods or fate or ideal abstractions that rule the world. Nature herself tells us that pleasure includes agreeable stimulation, while Epicurus tells us further how pleasure can also be found in so much more. When we understand the full implication of making Pleasure the goal of life, and rejecting false gods and false ideas, we see that within the name of Pleasure comes everything in life that we find to be desirable.