Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  127 128 For if he sincerely believes this, why does he not depart life? If he is firmly convinced, he should be prepared to do so. But if he is joking, he is being foolish in matters that do not admit of it. One must bear in mind that the future is not wholly ours nor wholly not ours; accordingly, we should neither await it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.

  We must take into account that some of our desires are natural, others groundless; among the natural, some are necessary, others are merely natural; and among the necessary, some are necessary for happiness, others for the body’s tranquillity, and still others for life itself. A steady observation of these things teaches one to relate every choice and every aversion to the health of the body and the tranquillity of the mind, since this is the goal of a happy life. For we do everything for the sake of being free of pain and fear; and once we achieve this state, the storm of the mind is completely dispelled, since the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking, or to seek for anything else by which the good of the soul and that of the body will be fully attained. For we have a need for pleasure only when we are in pain because of the absence of pleasure; but when we are not in pain, we no longer feel the need for pleasure.

  129 130 And this is why we say that pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life. For we have acknowledged that pleasure is a primary and innate good and the starting point of our every choice and aversion; and to it we return, since feeling is the criterion by which we judge every good. And it is because pleasure is our first and innate good that we choose every pleasure, though we often forgo many pleasures when a greater annoyance results from them. And we regard many pains as preferable to pleasures when a prolonged endurance of pains brings us greater pleasure. Accordingly, though every pleasure, because we have a natural predilection for it, is good, not every pleasure is to be chosen, just as all pain is bad, though not all kinds of pain are always to be avoided. But it is proper to judge all these matters by weighing and contemplating benefits and disadvantages; for there are times when we treat the good as bad, or, alternatively, the bad as good.

  131 132 And we regard self-sufficiency as a great good, not so as to partake of little on every occasion, but so that if we do not have much we may be content with little, since we are genuinely persuaded that they take the greatest pleasure in luxury who need it least, and that what is natural is easy to procure, while the artificial is hard to come by. For simple fare brings as much pleasure as an extravagant feast, once the pain of want has been removed; and barley cake and water give a hungry man the greatest pleasure. To accustom oneself, therefore, to simple, inexpensive fare supplies the essentials of health, and enables a man to face the demands of life without shrinking, and puts us in a better condition when we encounter expensive fare from time to time, and makes us fearless of fortune. But when we say that pleasure is our goal, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the self-indulgent, as the ignorant think, or those who disagree with or misinterpret our views. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of torment in the soul. For it is not drinking bouts and continuous carousals, nor the pleasures to be had with boys and women, nor the enjoyment of fish and all the other delicacies a luxurious table furnishes that produce a pleasant life, but the sober reasoning that examines the basis of every choice and aversion, and banishes the beliefs that afflict the soul with its worst torments.

  Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. And that is why prudence, from which all the other virtues spring, is more valuable even than philosophy. For it teaches that it is not possible to live pleasantly unless one lives prudently, honorably, and justly; nor can one live prudently, honorably, and justly unless one lives pleasantly. For the virtues have been united with the pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from the virtues.

  133 134 135 For whom do you consider superior to a man who holds pious beliefs about the gods and is utterly immune to the fear of death? He has taken nature’s purpose into account and grasps how easily the limit of good things can be reached and attained, and how slight are either the duration or the intensity of bad things. As for fate, which some have posited as ruler over all things, he laughs at the notion, and claims instead that some things occur by chance, others through our own agency; for he sees that necessity is beyond human control and that chance is unstable, whereas our own actions, to which blame and its opposite naturally attach, are free. It would be better to adhere to the lore about the gods than be a slave to the destiny posited by the natural philosophers; for the former offers some hope of pardon if we honor the gods, while the philosophers’ necessity is inexorable. He does not believe that chance is a god, as the many do, since there is no disorder in the acts of a god; nor that it is an uncertain cause. For he does not think that anything good or bad is given by chance to men so as to make life blessed, though it furnishes the starting points of great goods or great evils. He believes that the misfortune of the rational is better than the good fortune of the irrational. For it is better if what is well judged in our actions does not owe its success to chance.

  Adopt these and related practices day and night, and in company with a person like yourself, and you will never be disturbed by a dream or vision, but will live like a god among men. For a man living in the midst of immortal blessings resembles no mortal creature.

  Elsewhere Epicurus rejects all divination, as in the Short Epitome, and says, “No means of foretelling the future exists; but even if it did, we should regard what happens according to it as nothing to us.”

  Such are his views on the conduct of life, and he has discussed them at greater length elsewhere.

  136 He differs from the Cyrenaics about pleasure.85 For they do not admit the pleasure that is static, but only the pleasure that involves motion. Epicurus admits both, of mind as well as body, as he says in his work On Choice and Avoidance, in his work On the End, in the first book of his work On Life, and in his letter to his friends at Mytilene. Likewise Diogenes, in the seventeenth book of his Selected Writings, and Metrodorus in his Timocrates speak of pleasure in this way: “pleasure being conceived as involving both motion and rest.” And Epicurus, in his work On Choice, says, “The absence of turmoil and the absence of pain are static pleasures, while joy and delight are seen to involve motion and activity.”

  Sleeping Muse, by Constantin Brancusi, 1910.

  c 137 He also differs from the Cyrenaics in this: They hold that pains of the body are worse than those of the mind; criminals, at any rate, are made to suffer corporal punishment. But Epicurus holds that the pains of the mind are worse; the flesh, at any rate, is buffeted only by the present, whereas the mind is buffeted by the past, the present, and the future. By the same token, the greatest pleasures are those of the mind. As proof that pleasure is the goal, he points out that living creatures, as soon as they are born, are content with pleasure and averse to pain, by nature and without reason. By instinct, then, we avoid pain; as when even Heracles, devoured by his tunic, cries out,

  Biting and shouting; on all sides groaned the rocky peaks,

  And the headlands of Locris, and the Euboean cliffs.86

  138 We choose the virtues not for their own sake but for the sake of pleasure, just as we take medicine for the sake of health. This is also said in the twentieth book of his Selected Writings by Diogenes, who also calls education (agogē) a way of life (diagogē). Epicurus says that virtue is the only thing inseparable from pleasure, everything else—food, for example—being separable from it.

  Let me now put the finishing touch, as one might say, to my entire work and to the life of this philosopher by presenting his Chief Maxims, thereby bringing the whole work to a close and offering as its conclusion the beginning of happiness.

  139 I. The blessed and immortal has no troubles himself and causes none for anyone else; hence he has nothing to do with resentments and partisanship; for all such impulses are a sign of weakness. [Elsewhere
he says that the gods are discernible by reason, being on the one hand numerically distinct, but on the other hand similar in form, because of a continuous flow of similar images to the same place; and that they are human in form.]

  II. Death is nothing to us. For what has been dissolved has no feeling; and what has no feeling is nothing to us.

  III. The limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of all pain. Whenever pleasure is present, and for however long, there is neither pain nor grief nor any combination of the two.

  140 IV. Pain does not last long in the flesh; in fact, extreme pain is present for the briefest time, while that which hardly outweighs pleasure does not last for many days. And illnesses that are prolonged may even afford the flesh more pleasure than pain.

  V. It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly; nor can one live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. Nor is it possible for the man who does not live prudently, though he may live honorably and justly, to live pleasantly.

  VI. In order that men might not fear one another, there was a natural benefit to be had from government and kingship, provided that they are able to bring about this result.

  141 VII. Some have longed to become famous and celebrated, thinking that they would thereby obtain security against other men. If the lives of such persons were secure, they attained what is naturally good; but if insecure, they did not attain the object that they were originally prompted by nature to seek.

  VIII. No pleasure is intrinsically bad; but the means of producing certain pleasures may entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.

  142 IX. If all pleasure were condensed in space and time, and pervaded the whole aggregate, or the most important parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ, one from another.

  Two views of a bronze statuette of an Epicurean philosopher on a lamp stand. First-century BC Roman adaptation of a third-century Greek statue.

  X. If the objects that afforded pleasure to profligate men actually freed them from mental fears, namely those that relate to celestial phenomena and death and pain, and also taught them to limit their desires, we would never have any occasion to find fault with such men, since they would then be filled with pleasures from all sides and would be free of all pain and grief—that is, of all that is bad.

  XI. If we were not harassed by apprehensions caused by celestial phenomena and by the fear that death somehow affects us, and by our failure to comprehend the limits of pains and desires, we would have no need for natural science.

  143 XII. It would not be possible to dispel fear about the most important matters if a man did not know the nature of the universe, but lived in dread of what the myths describe. Hence, it would be impossible without the study of nature to enjoy unmixed pleasures.

  XIII. It would be useless to obtain security against our fellow men while things above and below the earth, and in the unlimited in general, continued to terrify us.

  XIV. While some degree of security from other men can be attained on the basis of stable power and material prosperity, the purest security comes from tranquillity and from a life withdrawn from the many.

  144 XV. Nature’s wealth is both limited and easy to procure; but the wealth of groundless opinions vanishes into thin air.

  XVI. Fortune impinges but little on a wise man; reason has directed his greatest and most important pursuits; these it directs and will continue to direct over the course of his life.

  XVII. The just man is utterly imperturbable, while the unjust is full of the utmost perturbation.

  XVIII. Fleshly pleasure does not increase once the pain of want has been removed; it merely diversifies. But the limit of mental pleasure is reached when one reflects on these very realities, and others of the same kind, which afflict the mind with its worst fears.

  145 XIX. Limited and unlimited time furnish an equal amount of pleasure if the limits of pleasure are measured by reason.

  XX. The flesh receives the limits of pleasure as if they were unlimited; and an unlimited time is required to provide it. But the mind, grasping in thought the end and limit of the flesh, and ridding itself of fears of eternity, fashions a perfect life and no longer requires unlimited time. Yet it does not avoid pleasure; and even when circumstances bring life to an end, it dies having missed nothing of the best life.

  146 XXI. The man who has discerned the limits of life knows how easy it is to procure what is needed to remove the pain of want and make his whole life perfect; he therefore needs none of the things that cannot be acquired without a struggle.

  XXII. We must reason about the true goal and about all the evidence to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of confusion and disorder.

  XXIII. If you fight against all your sensations, you will not have a standard by which to judge the ones that you claim are false.

  147 XXIV. If you reject any sensation absolutely, and do not distinguish between an opinion that awaits confirmation and a present reality (whether of sensation, feeling, or perception), you will also throw your other sensations into confusion with your groundless belief, and in doing so will be rejecting altogether the criterion. But if, when assessing opinions, you affirm as true everything that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, <…> you will not escape error; for you will be preserving complete uncertainty in every judgment between right and wrong opinion.

  Bronze larva convivalis, Roman, first century AD.

  148 XXV. If on every occasion you do not refer each of your actions to the goal of nature, but instead divert your attention in the act of choice or avoidance toward something else, your actions will not accord with your theories.

  XXVI. All desires that do not lead to pain when unfulfilled are unnecessary, and such cravings are easily dissolved when the desired objects are hard to procure or are thought to do harm.

  XXVII. Of the things wisdom contributes to happiness over the course of one’s life, the greatest by far is friendship.

  XXVIII. The same attitude that inspires confidence that nothing we dread is eternal or even long-lasting also enables us to see that even in our limited conditions of life nothing affords us greater security than friendship.

  149 XXIX. Some of our desires are natural and necessary; others are natural but unnecessary; still others are neither natural nor necessary, but arise from unwarranted opinion. [Epicurus holds that desires that are natural and necessary bring relief from pain (as drink, for example, relieves thirst); by desires that are natural but unnecessary he means those that merely diversify pleasure without eliminating pain (luxurious food being an example); by those neither natural nor necessary he means desires for crowns or for statues dedicated in one’s honor.]

  XXX. Natural desires that afford no pain if they are not indulged, though they are eagerly pursued, arise from groundless opinion; and when they are not dispelled it is not because of their own nature but because of the man’s groundless opinion.

  150 XXXI. Natural justice is a pledge of the advantage associated with preventing men from harming or being harmed by one another.

  XXXII. Those animals incapable of making agreements with one another, that they may neither inflict nor suffer harm, are without justice or injustice. The same is true of peoples who are unable or unwilling to make such agreements.

  XXXIII. Justice was not something in itself but existed in mutual relations wherever and whenever there was an agreement that provided against the inflicting or suffering of harm.

  151 XXXIV. Injustice is not bad in itself, but only because of the terror aroused by the suspicion that it will be detected by its punishers.

  XXXV. It is not possible for the man who secretly violates the compact to prevent the inflicting or suffering of harm to feel sure that he will escape notice, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times. For right to the end it is not clear whether he will escape.

  XXXVI. In general, justice is the same for everyone, namel
y something that facilitates mutual intercourse; but in light of the peculiarities of a region and all sorts of other causes, it does not follow that the same thing is just for everyone.

  152 XXXVII. That which has been considered just by convention because it benefits our mutual intercourse is therefore stamped as just, whether or not it is so in all instances; and if a law is made and does not prove beneficial to our intercourse, then it is no longer just. And if what the law considers expedient changes, and only corresponds for a time to the preconception,87 it was nonetheless just for that time, if we do not trouble ourselves about empty forms but simply examine the facts.

  153 XXXVIII. Where without any change in circumstances the conventional laws were seen not to accord with the preconception when judged by their consequences, such laws were not just. But whenever, in changed circumstances, the existing laws have ceased to be expedient, then they were just when they benefited the mutual intercourse of fellow citizens, but were no longer just later on when they ceased to be expedient.

  154 XXXIX. He who could best address fear of external threats forged a community of all the creatures he could; but those he could not include he did not treat as enemies; and if even this could not be managed, he avoided all contact and drove away every creature it was expedient to drive away.

  XL. All who could best obtain security against their neighbors, and thereby possessed the surest guarantee, lived most pleasantly with one another; and since they enjoyed the fullest intimacy they did not lament, as something to be pitied, the death of a member of their circle who predeceased them.

  1 A prominent aristocratic family in Athens.

  2 A Greek island in the eastern Aegean, also reputed to be the birthplace of Pythagoras.

  3 A cleruchy was a kind of colony in which the settlers retained citizenship ties to the mother city. Athens established such a colony on Samos around 360 BC.