I began this book by drawing a contrast between the right and the good, between living well and living pleasantly. As we’ve seen, most philosophers conclude that it is more important to live well than it is to live pleasantly. A life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure is often looked down on by philosophers, being seen as a low-minded and animalistic attitude, indicative of a human being not living up to their full potential. Such a life is not worthy of a human being endowed with a capacity for rational thought; and certainly not of a philosopher, who of all people ought to know better.
But what if this contrast draws a false dichotomy? What if to live well is to live pleasantly? What if pleasure is the only good there is? In that case, it is only rational and wise to live a life that maximises what good there is and put philosophy to use as a means to live as pleasantly as possible. This is the approach of Epicurus, founder of the Epicurean school of thought.
Epicurus’s origin story is not particularly dramatic. He is born an Athenian but was raised on the island of Samos; an Athenian colony at the time. He returns to Athens as an eighteen-year-old student, having studied a little philosophy as a younger teenager, but following the death of Alexander the Great the Athenians (including Epicurus’ family) were expelled from Samos, so Epicurus leaves Athens to be with his family who had moved to the mainland of what we would now call Turkey. Epicurus continues his studies there, begins teaching, and attracts some pupils. After ten years or so he moves to the island of Lesbos and from there to the Greek mainland, in both places teaching and gaining more students. Eventually Epicurus (now in his mid-thirties) returns to Athens, founds a school, and remains teaching there until his death.
As with other philosophers, where Epicurus chose to teach is telling. Socrates walked the marketplace barefoot, Plato and Aristotle withdrew to their schools, the Cynics lived on the streets. Epicurus buys a garden in a semi-rural location outside of Athens and establishes his school there. That choice says a lot. It is a quiet, private, pleasant space, connected with nature, away from the stresses and strains of urban life. This is not just Plato’s Academy withdrawn from the marketplace; this is withdrawing outside of the city entirely. It is a place where you can be calm and untroubled. And that, for the Epicureans, is what we should all be aiming for.
Epicurean Physics
A brief word on Epicurean physics and metaphysics, because a good deal of Epicurean ethics follows from this. It only needs to be a brief word, however, because Epicurean physics will seem very intuitive to our modern ears. Epicurus believed the world was composed of ‘atoms’. Epicurus believed that physical reality was the only real reality that we could know about; speculative reasoning about immaterial realities was pointless. Epicurus believed that our sensations – what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell – are the source of all our knowledge. Like Aristotle, Epicurus was an empirical scientist and psychologist long before his time.
This physicalist metaphysics has important ethical implications. If physical reality is the only reality, then ethical reality must be physical if it is to be real. There can be no abstract or immaterial basis for ethics; we must be able to detect and measure the good or bad in the world. Additionally, if our senses are the only way we can come to know the world, then our senses are the only way we can come to know about the ethical world. Ethical truth will be revealed in our sensations, not in our intellectual reasoning.
And if we were to limit our ethical reasoning only to what is grounded in our senses, what would we conclude? We would recognise, with Epicurus, that some sensations are pleasurable and others painful. We call the pleasurable sensations ‘good’ and the painful sensations ‘bad’. And that is all we have to go on as far as ethics is concerned.
This results in the ethical theory of ‘hedonism’, meaning ethical value (good and bad) is determined by pleasure and pain. To be clear – because I think Epicurus is often treated unfairly here – Epicurus only says that pleasure and pain are the best indications of what is good or bad, not that they are the only things good and bad in themselves. He is careful enough to hold back from making the bolder claim (as later philosophers have blundered into making) that pleasure and pain really are the only things that are good or bad. That is probably an untenable theory that does not stand up either to rational scrutiny or moral appraisal.
Epicurus’s empiricist and physicalist metaphysics pushes him to adopt an ethical theory whereby living well is all about maximising pleasure and minimising pain. That is a relatively unremarkable point, you might think. It is not for that point alone that Epicurus’s influence has lasted for nearly two-and-a-half-thousand years. The great strength of Epicurean philosophy is its analysis of how to live a life in which you maximise pleasure and minimise pain. It is that analysis that earns his philosophy its place in the philosophical hall of fame.
The analysis is not without its flaws and weaknesses; these were picked up and picked on at the time and since. Epicurus seems to have been a victim of his own success – like so many other philosophers who offer an original analysis – in that in being the first to offer an outline of an analysis, you cannot be in a position to foresee every single difficulty it might face; and yet if it is a good analysis, you also make it successful and famous enough to invite every critic to come and have a go at criticising it. If the analysis (and resulting school of thought) had been less good, it would have attracted less attention, and hence less criticism. That Epicureanism was the target of so many philosophical authors over the ages is a testament to its challenging greatness. Lesser schools of thought (such as the Cyrenaics – more on them shortly) were ignored to death and simply disappeared.
For all its known flaws, the original Epicurean analysis can be easily adapted and modified to get around the most pressing criticisms and leave us with a powerful school of thought that is highly suited to the distinctive problems of the modern world. All it needs is refreshing, not rebuilding.
Epicurean Ethics
Epicurean metaphysics tells us that pleasure is the only indication of what is good and pain the only indicator of what is bad. To live well, therefore, is all about maximising the amount of pleasure and minimising the amount of pain in your life. How do you do this?
Consider one option, perhaps the most intuitive: try to increase the amount of pleasurable things in your life. If pleasure is the only good, then live for pleasure. Simple, right?
The Cyrenaics
Enter the Cyrenaics, a now relatively obscure (though at the time very vociferous) school of thought that is closely connected with the Cynics. These two schools of thought appear at a similar time and place, both having been founded in Athens by students of Socrates: the older Antisthenes for the Cynics (featured in the previous chapter), and the younger Aristippus for the Cyrenaics; the school being called as such because Aristippus came from the city of Cyrene, in Libya.
Like many others, Aristippus travelled to Athens in pursuit of the renowned wisdom of Socrates; but whilst Aristippus might have found Socrates, he didn’t seem to find the wisdom. Aristippus, by all accounts, comes to exemplify many of the things that Socrates rails against: he is a Sophist, he charges high fees for his teaching, he lives a life of unashamed luxury and debauchery, depending on the patronage of rich men for the maintenance of his extravagant lifestyle. He is at least honest about this. As he says to one of these patrons, on asking for money: ‘When I wanted wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I want money, I have come to you.’
The contrast between the disciplined minimalism of the Cynics and the extravagant luxury of the Cyrenaics is easier to see than any similarity, but there is a close connection between the two. Whilst the Cynics were famous for living content with very little, they were also famous for satisfying any basic desires as and when they felt like it. Remember Diogenes scratching a certain itch whilst in the marketplace and saying he wished he could satisfy his hunger so easily simply by rubbing his belly? The Cyrenaics took inspiration from the more pleasure-loving side of the Cynics and embraced it.
The Cyrenaics lived for pleasure, and only for pleasure, in the moment, in every moment. With Epicurus, they recognised that pleasure is the only thing that we naturally see as good, pain the only thing naturally bad. They share that minimally hedonistic foundation. With the Cynics, they understood it to be a virtue to align yourself with nature in this way and so revel in your enjoyment of pleasure and abhorrence of pain. To this they added an epistemological scepticism, claiming that you could not know anything other than your own sensory experience. You might see a glass of wine in front of you (for example), but you don’t really know the glass is there; all you can know is that you are experiencing thesensation of seeing a glass of wine, which is not the same thing as there being a glass of wine, and the fact that you see it can hardly be counted as conclusive grounds for knowledge that the glass of wine is really there. It might be a trick of the light, or a particularly good picture or sculpture; you might be hallucinating. Echoing the pre-Socratic Protagoras – of ‘man is the measure of all things’ fame – all you can know is things as they seem to you. And because your sensory experience of the glass of wine is all that you can know, the wine has no real value to you beyond your sensory experience of it. In a real sense, for the Cyrenaics, the wine only becomes real to you when you drink it and taste it and feel its effects. So don’t leave it sitting there: drink it and make it real!
And sensory experiences – the only things you can really know, the only things that are real for you – are always in the here and now; you cannot have a sensory experience of the past or the future. We can remember or imagine experiences in the past or future, but this act of remembering or imagining is a different experience altogether and clearly not the same as actually experiencing the thing with your senses. The past and the future, then, cannot have any value for you because you cannot experience them with your senses. Only the present moment has value.
If all these claims are true, then there is every reason to focus only on increasing the amount of pleasure you are experiencing right here and right now, in any way you can. There is no point worrying about the future, or the past, because you can’t experience or control it. All you have is the present moment and the ability to feel pleasure or pain in that moment. So make the present moment as pleasurable as possible and forget about the rest.
What resulted was a life that is not all that admirable, nor even particularly enviable (to my mind). The Cyrenaics retain a shred of philosophical dignity in recommending a degree of self-control, as is seen in Aristippus’s advice to a young man going into a brothel: there’s nothing wrong with going in, but it’s a problem if you’re not able to leave. The Cyrenaics recommend enjoying pleasures with just enough self-restraint to know when enough is enough, saying ‘the best thing is to possess pleasures without being their slave’.
Their way is to take as much as you can get from life but to let it go just as easily. There is an intriguing story about Aristippus being pursued by pirates at sea. No doubt fearing the pirates’ intentions, Aristippus makes a big show of counting his money on deck and – presumably in view of the pirates – ‘accidentally’ drops it all overboard, making an even bigger show of weeping and wailing at his loss. The pirates see that there is no prize to be gained and so lose interest. Aristippus is said to have said of this ruse: ‘it was better for the money to be lost for the sake of Aristippus, than Aristippus for the sake of his money.’
Aristippus is a paradoxical philosophical figure. He revels in luxury and wealth but retains a philosopher’s attitude of indifference to its loss. He relishes status but does not hesitate to debase himself when it suits him. When asking a rich and powerful tyrant for a favour, and not being received favourably, Aristippus falls to begging at the tyrant’s feet. When he is reproached for this indignity, Aristippus replies that he is not to blame for begging: the tyrant is to blame for only responding to people who beg.
I think most of the Cyrenaic’s views can be exposed as errors through Socratic questioning, but I will leave this to you to decide for yourself. The Cyrenaics say that personal pleasure, for you, is the only good, and personal pain, for you, the only bad. But isn’t it sometimes bad to experience pleasure at someone’s else’s pain? Would we, on sober reflection, choose to be such a cruel person, even if they experience pleasure through their cruelty? Aren’t there questions of justice? Isn’t there a distinction between the right and the good, such that pleasure might be good but isn’t always right?
The Cyrenaics say that friends are good because we can make use of them and they can give you things. It would make no sense to inconvenience yourself for a friend unless you expected to get something more valuable in return. But is there nothing more to the concept of friendship than that? Is the only reason I might do a favour for a friend that they might do me one in return? What of loyalty, compassion, a bond of fellowship? Isn’t friendship a more meaningful thing than a contractual exchange of resources?
The Cyrenaics say that the wise would not love because love is always based on faulty opinions: no one can really be as good as the lover thinks the beloved is! And besides, how much pain love causes us, and why take this pain when we can get pleasure from prostitutes? Compare this with Socrates’ responses to these kinds of thoughts in the Phaedrus, mentioned earlier in this book, and you will see one of many examples where the Cyrenaics are in clear disagreement with Socrates. When I think these things through, I find myself siding with Socrates every time, and so I find very little of value in the Cyrenaics. But perhaps that is just my nature, judging things as they seem to me, in a sense proving Protagoras’s old point.
In the end, I think the Cyrenaics are their own refutation. Their lives spent in pursuit of pleasure do not seem to be all that pleasant: they face a lot of troubles of their own making. And for all their claims to philosophical wisdom, their lives show scant wisdom and only a little cleverness. For all their love of wealth, they are often poor; for all their love of status, they are often scorned; their attitude to friendship leaves them with few friends. Many of the Cyrenaics seem to have been banished when the patience of their patrons wore too thin. But to their credit, having some small vestige of philosophy, they took this bad fortune with equanimity and trotted happily off to the next city of pleasures.
The Cyrenaics refute themselves in another way, in that the school of thought seems to slowly distance itself from Aristippus’s pure pleasure-loving origins. Aristippus educates his daughter, called Arete, in his philosophical ways, and she takes control of the school. She seems to pass it on to her son, also called Aristippus, and to differentiate this younger Aristippus from his grandfather he attracts the nickname ‘mother-taught’ (or more literally ‘taught-from-the-womb’), because he was (you guessed it) taught by his mother. The Cyrenaic school is passed in this way from father to daughter to grandson, but by this time the school had split into three distinct branches. One of these branches remained true to Aristippus the older and looked to maximise pleasure whenever possible. A second branch softened this approach and acknowledged the value of things like duty and friendship. Of friendship, for instance, they didn’t consider a friend only valuable for what you might get from them but also recognised the pleasure to be found in the natural feelings of goodwill that exists between friends, regardless of what we get from them. In this way, it might make sense to inconvenience yourself for a friend’s sake, even if you don’t expect anything in return. They might disagree about what types of pleasures there are, but both of these branches agree that you should maximise pleasure whenever possible and that this was the only purpose in life.
But this option – maximise pleasure whenever possible – hasn’t worked out too well. You get some good times, sure, but you get a lot of pain along the way, and you constantly have to debase yourself at the feet of rich men whose opinions can change in an instant. It’s not a secure existence. What about a second option: minimise pain. If pleasure is the only good and pain the only bad, and our goal is to maximise the former whilst minimising the latter, and trying to maximise the former doesn’t work, why not try to minimise the latter?
For all their extravagant hedonism, there is a darker side to the Cyrenaics. If we don’t seek to maximise pleasure but instead seek to minimise pain, then there seems to be but one rational option: How can we ensure that we never experience pain ever again? Only through the ending of all sensation, through death. This is the view of Hegesias, the so-called ‘death-persuader’. The third branch of the Cyrenaic school recognises that, on balance, there is more pain in life than there is pleasure. When faced with this stark pessimistic reality, what is the rational pleasure-seeker and pain-avoider to do other than refuse it all?
According to the Cyrenaic system, then, we are left with only two rational choices: live for pleasure but experience a load of pain; or die to avoid pain. Neither option seems particularly attractive.
Epicurus’s Solution
Epicurus’s great achievement is to start from the same minimalistic foundations of hedonism but find a way to balance the avoidance of pain with the pursuit of pleasure in a way that is sustainable and conducive to a genuinely happy life.
Consider a different way of looking at the problem. Choosing between maximising pleasures or minimising pains is a way of trying to get the world to fit to us. But the world is very resistant to fitting itself to our desires and we are not so powerful as to force it. Dissatisfaction and pain inevitably follow. Instead, what if we tried to make ourselves fit to the world? What if, rather than trying to increase the amount of pleasurable things we experience, we try to increase the amount of pleasure we get from the ordinary things that we experience in our day-to-day lives?
Epicurus’s insight is that we have very little control over what happens in the world; we can’t stop bad things happening and we can’t really make sure that good things happen either. The only thing we can reliably control, or hope or try to control, is ourselves. The most rational solution to the pursuit of a life that maximises pleasures over pain is therefore not to pursue more and more pleasurable experiences, but to train ourselves to get more and more pleasure out of the experiences that we already have or can easily acquire.
What the Epicureans discover is that, with time and training, you can cultivate your sensibilities to take more pleasure from simple things. And in taking pleasure from only these simple things, you make your pleasure-loving existence much more secure, because you don’t need the extravagant wealth of good fortune to provide you with luxury. You avoid all the pains that the Cyrenaics encounter, and any of the pains that come from pursuing more than you need, and you are left with a life of calm contentment: full of pleasure, free from pain.
Not only does Epicurean philosophy find a way to pursue pleasure in a way that is achievable and conducive to a genuinely happy life, it provides you with clear instructions detailing how to go about doing this. Like Aristotle, the Epicureans understand that living their philosophical way of life requires two things: education and training. You need to learn and understand the Epicurean analysis and then you need to put it into practice. The first step on the road to a life full of pleasure and free from pain is to learn what types of pleasure there are.
Types of Pleasure
Epicurus identifies two types of pleasure, one he calls ‘static’ and the other ‘kinetic’. Kinetic pleasures are those pleasures that necessarily involve a degree of pain in their acquisition. These pleasures don’t come without cost. Consider something like the pleasure you experience in taking the first sip of water when you are thirsty. It feels great, much better because you were thirsty. But thirst is a kind of pain, a kind of displeasure. We get pleasure from quenching our thirst in part because it relieves us from some pain.
A lot of pleasures are like this. Consider the pleasure we get from sex. Yes, it’s very pleasurable, but the pleasure of sex comes at a cost, not least the displeasure we experience when we want sex but don’t get it. In wanting sex, you suffer, and you keep suffering until you get what you want. Then, if you are lucky, you get to experience the desired pleasure, which is nice. But this lasts only so long and afterwards you are left with a sense of not desiring, at least for a little while. That might be temporarily satisfying, but can easily become boring, which is another kind of displeasure. Pretty soon the desire will start to build again and you will be experiencing displeasure, again, until you can satisfy your desire. You are now locked in a cycle of desire, frustration, fulfilment, satisfaction, boredom, more frustration, more desire, etc., etc. Pain and suffering are inevitable here. These are what Epicurus calls ‘kinetic’ pleasures.
They are contrasted with ‘static’ pleasures. These are pleasures for which no pain is necessary in their pursuit. These are more often than not what would be called ‘states of being’ rather than ‘experiences’. To be warm, to be comfortable, to be calm; these do not require that you first be cold, or uncomfortable, or anxious. Certainly, we can experience those things as kinetic pleasures, but we do not need to. Static pleasures are characterised by an absence of desire. They are the pleasure you experience when you don’t particularly want anything more than you currently have.
Kinetic pleasures necessarily involve some pain, but static pleasures do not. And so if you are looking to live a life that maximises pleasures and minimises pains, then it stands to reason you should focus your efforts on pursuing static pleasures and not kinetic pleasures. The more pleasure you can get from static pleasures, the less pain you will experience: this maximises pleasure whilst minimising pain, which is the definition of living well for the Epicureans.
Ataraxia
A static pleasure is a state of being in which it feels good just to ‘be’. In order to experience this, you need to be free from pain and disturbance. This establishes the goal of Epicurean philosophy, which they termed ‘ataraxia’. This is a state of being that could be described as ‘tranquillity’ or ‘imperturbability’; it is a state of not being troubled by anything and thus being free to enjoy simply being as you are.
Epicureans are occasionally careless in describing this state of being free from pain as the ‘greatest pleasure’. Many critics, most notably Cicero, took them to task on this and pointed out that it is probably not a coherent position. Setting aside the fact that it pushes us towards Hegesias the death-persuader’s position, surely common sense overrides the notion. It is clearly much more pleasurable, in the moment, to experience outrageous and untrammelled pleasure than it is to experience almost nothing, isn’t it?! That much seems obvious. But the point is not that those outrageous pleasures aren’t more pleasurable; the point is that they come only at great cost or the risk of great cost.
So whilst we might hesitate to say that ataraxia is the greatest of all pleasures, perhaps we can agree that it is the greatest pleasure that comes at the least cost. If you are careful and well trained, it might even be a state of being that comes at no cost at all. As such, it provides the surest and safest route to a life that maximises pleasure and minimises pains.
Types of Desire
In addition to the two types of pleasure – the static and the kinetic – Epicurus identifies three types of desire, which are called the ‘natural necessary’, the ‘natural non-necessary’, and the ‘non-natural’ or ‘imaginary’ or ‘empty’. Careful attention to these types of desire can help us avoid important pitfalls.
Ataraxia might be characterised as an absence of desire, but not all desires are optional, at least for most human beings. Sometimes we need to follow the desires for nutrition, hydration, shelter, or else we will suffer, get sick, and die. But whilst some desires might be necessary for our survival, we need to make sensible choices about which desires we allow to rule our lives.
When talking about these ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ desires in Epicurus’s philosophy, let’s remember that we are dealing with things in translation here; often double translations of Greek to Latin and then Latin to English. But even in spite of that, I’m inclined to say the terminology was always a bit problematic. The current translations seem to favour ‘natural’ as being the key word, but that is a very difficult term to define clearly enough for it to do any work. In this case, I think we can more or less ditch the terminology and let the underlying intuitions and illustrations do the work. So don’t pay too much attention to the words here; focus on the meaning.
To establish his three types of desire, Epicurus makes two distinctions: the first distinction is between what is ‘necessary’ and what is not necessary; the second distinction is between what is ‘natural’ and what is not natural. As I’ve said, ‘natural’ is a very problematic term and shouldn’t be understood to be doing much heavy lifting. We could also get distracted by getting caught up in what we mean by ‘necessary’, but that too can and should be avoided.
What Epicurus means by ‘necessary desires’ are those that serve some basic biological or social purpose. Humans are biological animals and we need some basics in order to continue living; things like food, water, shelter, etc. Evolution has left us with some innate dispositions towards these things: we don’t like feeling hungry, we don’t like feeling thirsty, we don’t like feeling too cold or too hot. We naturally want food, water, shelter, and these are things necessary for our survival. These are ‘natural necessary’ desires.
But humans are also social animals. Most of us can’t help but feel lonely if we are isolated or ashamed if people don’t like us. Again, evolution has left us with some innate dispositions regarding these things. We enjoy socialising with friends, we like it when people like us, we value family. These are also ‘natural’ desires, and if you are willing to concede that they are as central to a human life well lived as food or water or shelter, then you can go ahead and call them ‘necessary’ too.
What Epicurus identifies about these ‘natural necessary’ desires is that they are often quite easy to achieve. We don’t need fancy food, we just need enough to survive; we don’t need tasty wine, because water will suffice; we don’t need big houses, because a small hut will provide all the shelter we need. More often than not our relentless pursuit of satisfying these desires drifts beyond the ‘natural and necessary’ into the unnecessarily extravagant. As a result, we suffer the pains of frustration, disappointment, and incur all the costs of trying to get things that we don’t really need. If, however, we focus only on the ‘natural and necessary’ desires, we will find we can get as much pleasure as we could want from things that are relatively easy to acquire.
What this leaves us with is a distinction between those desires that are ‘natural and necessary’ – like basic food, water, shelter, etc. – and those desires that might be ‘natural’ but are not ‘necessary’ – such as elaborate food, fine wines, and grand houses. And also more social goods like physical attractiveness, expensive possessions, many followers on social media, etc., etc. Epicurus points out that these extravagant desires don’t serve to alleviate pain any better than the more basic versions: a belly is filled just as well by basic food as by elaborate, and thirst is satisfied as well by water as by fine wine. Natural non-necessary desires only serve to ‘diversify’ pleasures, but that variety in itself adds very little. And yet these things are pursued often at great cost, often never really achieved, and even when achieved never pay the kinds of emotional returns for the investment that the more basic desires would. Natural non-necessary desires are invariably aligned with kinetic pleasures because they require so much striving. We could include all the classically kinetic pleasures in this ‘natural non-necessary’ camp too: sex, drugs, and rock and roll; these things are pleasurable, but not necessary. A life lived in wise pursuit of maximising pleasures and minimising pains would not choose to pursue these desires.
Finally, Epicurus goes one step further and considers what he calls the ‘non-natural’ or ‘imaginary’ desires. Again, to reiterate, ‘natural’ is a problematic term and shouldn’t be doing much work here. But the underlying point is clear. Very often human beings desire things that they know they cannot get. Humans fear death, for instance; they desire to live forever. But we know immortality does not exist. Humans desire status, glory, fame, wealth; but we know that no amount of status or glory or fame or wealth is ever really enough. As much fame and fortune as you acquire, humans tend to always want more. As Epicurus says: ‘The wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance.’ Satisfaction is forever just out of reach; it is never quite ‘enough’. You are left perpetually frustrated.
But this is one reason I think ‘non-natural’ is a problematic term here. Clearly, it is natural for humans to want immortality, for example, or fame and fortune and glory; that is as natural a desire as any of the others that we have listed. Epicurus’s point is less about whether or not these kinds of desires are natural to what a human being is, and more about whether the satisfaction of these desires is something that we can realistically hope to achieve. Simply put: these things that we desire do not exist in the world; we make them up, and therefore they are ‘imaginary’ desires; they are desires for imaginary things, which makes them not real. Sometimes the word ‘empty’ is used to describe these desires, because they are desires for which there is no real object. Sometimes the word ‘inane’ is used to describe these desires and I think that is fitting (if uninformative).
We enter into a kind of static pain with these ‘non-natural’ desires: the constant fear of death, for example. There is no relief for this desire because the object of the desire – immortality – does not exist. It is an unachievable aim. To permit the desire for immortality (or fame, wealth, glory, etc.) into your system of living is to commit yourself to a state of being that can never be untroubled. This is the antithesis of the Epicurean way.
We have a choice, then, between desires: we can desire those things that we need and can easily achieve; we can desire those things that we want but do not need; or we can desire those things that we can never get. Of the three, there is clearly only one contender for the top spot, which is to want only what we need. These are the ‘natural necessary’ desires. For Epicureans, these are the only desires that you should permit into your system of living.
If you limit yourself only to wanting what is natural and necessary, you will find: a) your desires are easy to achieve, b) you desires come at the smallest possible cost, c) your desires do not multiply beyond necessity. Training yourself to find the greatest pleasure in these natural and necessary things is the surest way to achieve a life that maximises pleasures and minimises pains.
The Epicurean Way of Life
How is this achieved? The first step is to understand Epicurus’s analysis clearly and hold it in your mind as you live your life. If you understand the analysis clearly, you will naturally drift towards the natural and necessary and away from the non-necessary or non-natural, because you don’t want what is not in your best interests. It’s like clearly understanding that smoking gives you cancer makes it easier to stop smoking, or remembering what a hangover is like keeps you from overdoing the booze.
But this intellectualism only gets you so far. To really achieve the Epicurean way of life, a certain amount of training and habituation is needed. You need to practise restricting your desires; you need to remind yourself of the basic tenets; you need to do this repeatedly until it becomes habitual.
As an aid to this, the Epicureans offered their ‘tetrapharmakos’ or ‘four-part cure’. This is an easy to remember four-sentence mantra that covers the Epicurean basics.
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