Epicureanism

Based on Wikipedia: Epicureanism

Here's a philosophy that got a terrible reputation it never deserved. When someone calls you an "epicure" today, they mean you're obsessed with fancy food and wine, chasing sensory pleasures without restraint. The actual philosopher Epicurus would have found this hilarious—and then politely declined your invitation to the tasting menu.

Epicurus taught that the highest pleasure was the absence of pain. Not ecstasy. Not indulgence. Just peace. The goal was to reach a state the Greeks called ataraxia—a kind of unshakeable tranquility, freedom from fear and anxiety. His followers generally avoided politics, ate simple meals, and spent their days in philosophical conversation with friends.

So how did a philosophy of modest contentment become synonymous with hedonistic excess? That's a story about rivals, religious opposition, and two thousand years of misunderstanding.

The Garden and Its Founder

Epicurus was born in 341 BCE on the island of Samos, a Greek colony in the eastern Aegean Sea. His early education included studying under Pamphilus, a follower of Plato, and later Nausiphanes, who taught him the atomic theory of Democritus. Epicurus would later downplay these influences—philosophers rarely credit their teachers as generously as they should—but the fingerprints of Democritus especially would remain visible throughout his work.

At eighteen, he traveled to Athens for military service. After completing his duties, he devoted himself entirely to philosophy, first teaching in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, then in Lampsacus on the Hellespont. In 307 BCE, he returned to Athens and purchased a property that would become famous: the Garden.

The Garden wasn't just a school. It was a community.

Unlike Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum, which operated within the mainstream of Athenian intellectual life, Epicurus and his followers deliberately withdrew from public affairs. They lived together in modest circumstances, sharing meals and conversation, practicing what they preached about the simple life.

What made the Garden truly radical for its time was who it welcomed. Women could join as full members. So could slaves. In an Athens where citizenship was jealously guarded and philosophy was largely an aristocratic pursuit, this was remarkable. The community gathered monthly for a feast called the Eikas, celebrating friendship—which Epicurus considered essential to happiness—and some evidence suggests that vegetarianism was common, though not required.

What Epicurus Actually Believed

The core of Epicurean ethics sounds deceptively simple: pleasure is good, pain is bad. But Epicurus divided pleasures into categories that completely transform what this means in practice.

There are kinetic pleasures—the active enjoyment of eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, the satisfaction of desires. Then there are static pleasures—the state of having eaten, of being satisfied, of wanting nothing. Epicurus argued that static pleasures were superior. The absence of hunger is better than the process of eating. The absence of fear is better than momentary excitement.

This leads to a counterintuitive conclusion. If the best pleasure is the absence of pain and desire, then the path to maximum pleasure isn't pursuing more experiences—it's reducing your needs.

Epicurus classified desires themselves into three types. Natural and necessary desires include things like food, shelter, and companionship—these should be satisfied. Natural but unnecessary desires include things like luxurious food or elaborate entertainment—these can be enjoyed occasionally but shouldn't become needs. Unnatural and unnecessary desires include fame, power, and wealth beyond what's needed for security—these should be eliminated entirely, as they're impossible to satisfy and lead only to anxiety.

This is why Epicurus recommended against passionate romantic love and suggested avoiding marriage. Not because pleasure was bad, but because the intense desires and potential for loss created more pain than the pleasures were worth. Better to cultivate deep friendships, which he valued enormously, than romantic attachments that could consume you.

Atoms All the Way Down

Epicurean ethics rested on a foundation of physics, and understanding the physics helps explain why Epicureans thought the way they did.

Following Democritus, Epicurus believed that everything in the universe consisted of just two things: atoms and void. Atoms were tiny, indivisible particles—the word "atom" comes from the Greek atomos, meaning "uncuttable." They had only three properties: shape, size, and weight. Everything else we perceive—color, taste, temperature—arose from how atoms were arranged and how they interacted with our senses.

The universe was infinite, containing an unlimited number of atoms and an unlimited expanse of void for them to move through. Because both matter and space were infinite, there must be an infinite number of worlds—some similar to ours, some vastly different, separated by vast empty regions the Greeks called metakosmia.

Atoms naturally fell downward through the void. But here Epicurus added something crucial that Democritus hadn't proposed: the swerve. At random, unpredictable moments, atoms could deviate slightly from their downward path. Without this swerve, atoms would simply fall forever in parallel lines, never colliding, never forming anything. The swerve explained how atoms came together to form objects and worlds.

It also explained free will.

If atoms moved only in predictable patterns governed by cause and effect, then everything—including human thought and action—would be predetermined. The random swerve broke the chain of causation, making genuine choice possible. This was a direct challenge to the Stoics, who believed in a deterministic universe where fate governed all. Epicureans thought this made the Stoics' emphasis on accepting fate rather hollow—if you couldn't choose otherwise, what virtue was there in acceptance?

How We Know What We Know

Epicurean philosophy was rigorously empirical. All knowledge, they argued, came ultimately from the senses.

This created an apparent problem. Our senses sometimes seem to deceive us. A tower in the distance looks round, but up close it's square. An oar in water appears bent. If we can't trust our senses, how can we build knowledge on them?

The Epicurean answer was clever: the senses never lie. What lies is our judgment about what we're sensing.

Consider the oar in water. Light particles traveling from the oar to your eyes are genuinely refracted by the water. Your eye accurately perceives those particles as they actually arrive. The error happens when you judge that these light particles represent the oar's actual shape, rather than its appearance through a medium that bends light. The sensation is true; the inference is false.

To avoid such errors, Epicureans recommended seeking what they called enargeia—clear vision. Get closer. Examine from multiple angles. Gather more sensory information until your judgment becomes reliable. This emphasis on direct observation and verification would later resonate with early modern scientists.

Beyond raw sensation, Epicureans recognized what they called preconceptions or prolepsis. These were concepts formed over time from accumulated sensory experience—your general idea of what a horse is, built from all the horses you've ever seen. When someone says "horse," this mental concept activates, allowing communication and judgment. Preconceptions solved an old puzzle from Plato: how can you learn something if you don't already know what you're looking for? The answer was that you have a rough preconception from prior experience, which gets refined as you learn more.

The Gods Exist, But They Don't Care

Epicurus was not an atheist. He believed the gods existed—we have preconceptions of them, after all, and those preconceptions must come from somewhere. But his conception of the gods was radically different from popular Greek religion.

The gods, being perfect and blessed, must be perfectly happy. Perfect happiness means ataraxia—freedom from disturbance. But interfering in human affairs would be disturbing. Listening to prayers, dispensing rewards and punishments, taking sides in wars—all of this would require the gods to care about things, and caring about things disrupts tranquility.

Therefore, the gods must be completely indifferent to humanity.

They lived somewhere in the metakosmia, the vast empty spaces between worlds, enjoying eternal philosophical conversation with each other. They served as models of the blessed life humans should aspire to, but they neither helped nor hindered anyone. Praying to them was pointless. Fearing them was irrational.

This theology served a practical purpose. Much human misery came from fear of divine punishment, anxiety about offending the gods, and worry about what happens after death. Epicurus wanted to eliminate these fears. The gods won't hurt you. And death?

"Death is nothing to us," Epicurus famously wrote. When you exist, death doesn't. When death exists, you don't. You'll never experience being dead, so fearing it is as absurd as fearing the time before you were born.

Rivals and Enemies

Epicureanism became one of the dominant philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world, alongside Stoicism, Platonism, Peripateticism (followers of Aristotle), and Pyrrhonism (the skeptics). But it made enemies.

The Stoics were perhaps the most important philosophical rivals. Where Epicureans sought to withdraw from public life, Stoics embraced engagement and duty. Where Epicureans denied divine providence, Stoics believed the universe was rationally ordered by a divine logos. Where Epicureans emphasized pleasure, Stoics taught that virtue was the only good. The two schools debated constantly, and Stoics often accused Epicureans of promoting selfishness and social irresponsibility.

These accusations weren't entirely fair. Epicurus valued friendship highly and taught that we shouldn't harm others because doing so creates anxiety and invites retaliation—hardly a recipe for antisocial behavior. But the reputation stuck.

The Roman politician Cicero, himself sympathetic to various Greek philosophies, did significant damage to Epicureanism's reputation through his dialogues. While he gave Epicurean positions a fair hearing in some ways, his presentation often emphasized what seemed most objectionable to Roman sensibilities—the withdrawal from public duty, the material explanation for everything, the denial that virtue was an end in itself.

Julius Caesar, interestingly, leaned Epicurean. During the famous trial of the Catiline conspirators, he argued against the death penalty—a characteristically Epicurean position favoring mercy and opposing unnecessary violence. His father-in-law was an adherent of the school. But Caesar's philosophical inclinations are often overlooked next to his military and political achievements.

Lucretius and the Roman Flourishing

The most important Epicurean text to survive antiquity wasn't written by Epicurus himself. It was a Latin poem called De Rerum Natura—On the Nature of Things—written by Titus Lucretius Carus around the first century BCE.

Almost nothing is known about Lucretius personally. A later story, probably false, claimed he was driven mad by a love potion and wrote his poem in lucid intervals before killing himself. This tale has the fingerprints of anti-Epicurean propaganda all over it—what better way to discredit a philosophy than to claim its greatest poet was insane?

The poem itself is magnificent. Running to six books and over seven thousand lines, it presents the entire Epicurean system in elegant Latin verse: atomic theory, the nature of the soul, sensation and thought, the development of civilization, meteorology and geology, and throughout, the therapeutic message that understanding nature frees us from fear.

Lucretius's goal was explicitly pastoral. He wanted to cure his readers of the irrational terrors that poisoned their lives—fear of death, fear of the gods, fear of punishment in the afterlife. "This terror and darkness of mind must be dispelled," he wrote, "not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature."

De Rerum Natura survived the medieval period by sheer luck—a single manuscript rediscovered in a German monastery in 1417. Its influence on the Renaissance and Enlightenment was profound.

The Villa of the Papyri

In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic debris. It was a catastrophe, but it also preserved artifacts that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Among the buried buildings was a luxurious villa in Herculaneum, now known as the Villa of the Papyri. When it was excavated in the eighteenth century, archaeologists discovered something extraordinary: a library. Hundreds of papyrus scrolls, carbonized by the volcanic heat into what looked like lumps of charcoal.

These scrolls turned out to be overwhelmingly Epicurean. Many were works by Philodemus of Gadara, a philosopher who lived in the first century BCE and was associated with the villa's original owner. Others were texts by his teacher Zeno of Sidon, and fragments of works by Epicurus himself.

The scrolls are impossibly fragile. Early attempts to unroll them destroyed many. But modern imaging technology—X-rays, multispectral imaging, and machine learning—has begun reading scrolls that have never been opened. We may yet recover Epicurean texts that no one has read in two thousand years.

The Long Decline

By the late third century CE, Epicureanism had largely died out as a living philosophical movement. Several factors contributed to its decline.

Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophy of late antiquity, with its emphasis on transcendence, mystical experience, and a hierarchical cosmos ordered by divine principles. This was almost point-by-point the opposite of Epicurean materialism and its indifferent gods. For those seeking spiritual meaning, Neoplatonism offered more.

Then came Christianity. The new religion found much to reject in Epicureanism: its materialism, its denial of providence, its rejection of an afterlife with rewards and punishments, its identification of pleasure as the highest good. Early Christian writers regularly attacked Epicurus as an atheist and his followers as degenerates. The fact that he wasn't actually an atheist and his followers weren't actually degenerates mattered less than the rhetorical usefulness of the accusation.

The word "epicure" entered medieval usage as a term for someone devoted to sensual pleasure, completely detached from the actual philosophy. An "epicure" was a glutton, a libertine, someone who rejected God in favor of bodily indulgence. Dante placed Epicurus in the sixth circle of Hell, among the heretics who denied the immortality of the soul.

Resurrection

The rediscovery of Lucretius in 1417 marked the beginning of Epicureanism's rehabilitation. Renaissance humanists read De Rerum Natura with excitement. Here was a comprehensive ancient worldview that explained everything in terms of natural causes, that celebrated this life rather than promising rewards in the next, that encouraged pleasure and friendship rather than mortification and hierarchy.

This was dangerous reading. The church had been telling people for a thousand years that Epicurus was wicked and his followers damned. Suddenly scholars were circulating a beautiful poem that made his ideas seem noble and wise.

The real flowering came with the Scientific Revolution. Epicurean atomism suddenly looked prescient. Galileo, Gassendi, Newton, and others took atomic theory seriously as a potential explanation for matter. The philosophy's empiricism—its insistence that knowledge came from the senses and had to be verified against observation—fit naturally with the emerging scientific method.

Thomas Jefferson famously declared himself an Epicurean. "As you say of yourself," he wrote in a letter, "I too am an Epicurean." He saw in the philosophy an emphasis on human happiness, a rejection of superstition, and a foundation for ethical life without supernatural sanctions—ideas that found their way into the Declaration of Independence's famous assertion that the pursuit of happiness was a self-evident right.

What Remains

Epicureanism never returned as a dominant school of thought. But its ideas permeate modernity in ways we often don't recognize.

The scientific worldview is essentially Epicurean in spirit: materialist, empirical, explaining phenomena through natural causes rather than divine intervention. When physicists talk about fundamental particles, they're working in a tradition Democritus and Epicurus began. When psychologists study how to increase human wellbeing and reduce anxiety, they're asking the same questions Epicurus asked.

The utilitarian tradition in ethics—the idea that we should maximize pleasure and minimize pain across society—owes an obvious debt to Epicurean hedonism, even if utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill modified the theory significantly.

Even the modern conception of "the good life" tends toward Epicurean territory: not the accumulation of wealth and power, but having enough, enjoying simple pleasures, spending time with friends, avoiding unnecessary stress. The minimalism movement, the slow food movement, the various philosophies of "enough"—all echo what Epicurus taught in his Garden.

Perhaps most enduringly, Epicurus offered a template for how to think about mortality. His argument that death is nothing to us because we won't experience it continues to provide comfort to those who can't accept religious promises about the afterlife. You won't know you're dead. You won't miss being alive. The time after your existence will be exactly like the time before it began—and you don't feel bad about that, do you?

It's not a philosophy for everyone. Some people need transcendence, divine purpose, the promise of something beyond. But for those who can make peace with a finite existence in a material universe, Epicurus still points toward a meaningful life: simple pleasures, deep friendships, freedom from fear, and the tranquility of wanting nothing more than what you have.