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.

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.