What Is Epicureanism? Pleasure, Friendship and a Garden in Athens

Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BC, taught in Asia Minor, and in 306 bought a house and garden just outside the walls of Athens, where his school met for the rest of his life; unlike Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum it admitted women and slaves, and its members lived together on the produce of the garden and the gifts of friends. Over the gate, a later writer says, was the greeting that the stranger would do well to stay, since the highest good there was pleasure. Epicurus wrote some three hundred works, of which three letters and two collections of sayings survive, along with the long Latin poem On the Nature of Things by his Roman follower Lucretius, which is the fullest statement of the system.

Epicurus took his account of the world from Democritus: everything is atoms moving in the void, indivisible particles of matter combining and separating by their own motion, with no design and no purpose. The soul is atoms too, finer ones, dispersed at death, so that there is no afterlife, no punishment and nothing to fear. The gods exist, since people everywhere have an idea of them, but they live in perfect tranquillity between the worlds and take no interest in human affairs, neither answering prayers nor punishing sins; they are examples of the blessed life, not managers of this one. The physics is in the service of the ethics: the point of knowing that the world is atoms is to stop being afraid of it.

Pleasure is the goal, but Epicurus's pleasure is not the epicure's:

• •The greatest pleasure is the absence of pain in the body and of disturbance in the mind, ataraxia; once those are gone, pleasure cannot be increased, only varied
• •Desires come in three kinds: natural and necessary, for food, shelter and friends, which are easy to satisfy; natural but unnecessary, for luxuries, which are fine if they come without trouble; and empty, for fame, power and wealth without limit, which can never be satisfied and are the source of most unhappiness
• •Prudence chooses among pleasures by their consequences: a pleasure that brings greater pain later is rejected, a pain that brings greater pleasure, such as a hard task, is accepted
• •Friendship is the greatest of the goods that wisdom provides for a whole life
• •The wise person withdraws from politics, lives unnoticed, and finds security in a small circle rather than in power

The most quoted of Epicurus's arguments is on death. All good and evil consist in sensation, and death is the end of sensation, so death is nothing to us: while we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist, and a thing that cannot be experienced cannot be an evil. The fear of death, he held, is the root of most of the anxieties that poison life, driving people to grasp at wealth and power as if those could postpone it, and the person who has understood that death is not to be feared is free to enjoy the life that is here. Lucretius added that the eternity before one's birth troubled no one, and the eternity after should trouble no one either; the argument has been disputed since, on the ground that death deprives a person of goods they would have had, and it is still the standard text in the philosophy of death.

The Stoics, the school's rivals, attacked a philosophy of pleasure as a philosophy of the pig, and the Christian fathers, who found a doctrine with no providence, no afterlife and no divine judgement intolerable, made the Epicurean the type of the atheist and the glutton; Dante put the Epicureans in the sixth circle of hell for denying the soul's immortality, and by the Renaissance the word meant a sensualist. The rediscovery of Lucretius's poem in a German monastery in 1417 began the recovery, and the atomism that Epicurus had used to banish fear became, in Gassendi and then in Newton's contemporaries, the physics of the scientific revolution. Thomas Jefferson called himself an Epicurean, the utilitarians took the calculus of pleasure and pain from the school, and the modern revival of the philosophy as a therapy for anxiety, the quiet life, the small circle, the refusal of empty desires, is a return to what the garden taught before its name was taken from it.

Almost all of Epicurus's three hundred works are lost, but more has survived than three letters and some sayings. In the eighteenth century, excavators at Herculaneum, the town buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, found a villa containing a library of carbonised papyrus scrolls. Many belonged to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher who taught around the Bay of Naples in the first century BC, and fragments of Epicurus's own major work, On Nature, were among them. The scrolls look like lumps of charcoal, and early attempts to unroll them destroyed a great many.

Modern methods have changed that. Multispectral imaging picks out ink on blackened fragments that the eye cannot read, and in recent years researchers have scanned unopened scrolls with X-rays and used computer models to unroll them virtually, recovering passages no one could have opened by hand. A second source survives in stone: in the second century AD a man named Diogenes paid to have a summary of Epicurean teaching carved along a long wall in the town of Oinoanda, in what is now Turkey, so that passers-by could read the cure for anxiety for free.

Epicurus inherited atoms from Democritus but rejected one consequence of them. If every atom simply follows the motion it already has, then every thought and action is fixed in advance, and Epicurus found that conclusion as frightening as the gods he wanted to banish. His answer, known mainly through Lucretius, was the swerve: at no fixed time or place, an atom deviates by the smallest possible amount from its path. The swerve explains how falling atoms ever collide to form things at all, and it breaks the chain of necessity so that living creatures can act from their own will.

Critics in the ancient world, Cicero among them, mocked the swerve as an event without a cause, invented to rescue a conclusion. The objection still has force, and it has a modern echo. Some people have compared the swerve to the randomness of quantum physics, but philosophers point out the same difficulty Epicurus faced: an action that happens by chance is not obviously any more free than one that happens by necessity. What Epicurus wanted was a world loose enough for praise, blame and deliberate choice to make sense, and how to get that from physics remains an open question.

Epicureanism is easiest to understand next to its great rival. Zeno of Citium began teaching in a painted colonnade in Athens, the Stoa that gave his school its name, only a few years after Epicurus opened the garden, and both schools promised the same prize: a mind at peace, untroubled by fortune. Both also grounded their ethics in an account of nature. But where Epicurus saw atoms colliding without design, the Stoics saw a cosmos ordered through and through by divine reason, in which everything happens for a purpose and the wise person accepts what fate brings.

The two disagreed sharply about what is good. For the Stoics virtue was the only good, and pleasure, wealth and health were at most preferable; for Epicurus pleasure, rightly understood, was the goal, and virtue mattered as the surest route to a pleasant life. They differed on public duty too, since Stoics such as Seneca, adviser to Nero, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius held that the wise should serve the community. Yet the rivalry was not total. In his letters to a younger friend, Seneca often quoted a saying of Epicurus, remarking that whatever is true belongs to everyone.

Epicurus also had a theory of justice, and it sounds strikingly modern. In his Principal Doctrines he says that justice is not something that exists in itself, built into the cosmos, but a kind of compact among people neither to harm one another nor to be harmed. Laws are just when they serve that mutual advantage, and since what is advantageous differs between places and changes over time, what is just can differ and change too. A law that no longer benefits the community it governs has, on this view, stopped being just, even if it once was.

The theory has a tough-minded edge. Epicurus held that injustice is not bad in itself; what makes it a poor choice is the fear of being found out, which never leaves the wrongdoer, since no one can be sure of escaping detection, and fear is exactly the disturbance of mind his ethics sets out to remove. The wise person keeps agreements because that is the only way to live securely. He added that animals, and peoples, unable to make such agreements have neither justice nor injustice among them. Centuries later, social contract thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes built political theories on a similar starting point.

Epicureanism is the philosophy of Epicurus, who taught in a garden in Athens from 306 BC that the world is atoms and void, that the gods do not intervene, that death is the end of sensation and therefore nothing to fear, and that the goal of life is pleasure understood as freedom from pain and anxiety, reached by satisfying natural desires simply, rejecting empty ones, and living quietly among friends. Its rivals and the church turned its name into a word for indulgence, and its atomism and its calculus of pleasure passed into modern science and ethics.