Rededication: Why We Continue the Work of Recovering Classical Epicurean Philosophy

Epicurus had nothing but contempt for people who claimed to read the future in the flight of birds, the smoking entrails of a sacrificed animal, or the supposed anger of a god muttering through a thunderclap. He built an entire branch of his physics around explaining comets, eclipses, and lightning in purely natural terms, for the specific purpose of making sure no one would ever again lose sleep over a false omen. So what follows is not an oracle. It is a prediction of an entirely different kind — the kind any person is entitled to make after looking long enough at a pattern in the historical record, and after weighing plain, gatherable evidence. Here is my prediction:

The twentieth century, and the first third of the twenty-first, will eventually be remembered as a crisis of confidence more severe than anything the ancient world endured. And one of this crisis’ most damning illustrations is the way modern intelligentsia - and the culture following its lead - has treated the teachings of Epicurus.

The ancient world argued fiercely about whether pleasure or virtue was the highest good, whether the gods intervened in human affairs, whether the senses could be trusted, whether anything could be known at all. It argued, but never totally lost its nerve until it was displaced - largely by force - by Judeo-Christianity. Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Platonists all fought for their own views of the best life, confident that their arguments mattered. The last century, by contrast, both in the halls of academia and in popular writing, looked directly at a philosopher who held that pleasure is “the beginning and the end of a happy life,” and concluded by projecting their own impotence that surely Epicurus meant something else. This “consensus of the wise” (a term borrowed from Nietzsche) concluded that the wise man’s highest achievement was to want less, feel less, and approach a state of stillness barely worth distinguishing from death. No Stoic or Platonist or Aristotelian ever needed his own philosophy explained to him by an opponent. Only the shade of Epicurus, the greatest ancient defender of THIS world and the pleasures that are possible in it, has had to endure modern scholars stand over his own words and pronounce, in effect, that he did not really mean what he plainly said. That did not happen as a result of translation issues of loss of texts, though both contributed. This total rewrite occurred becayse the rewriters had themselves lost the courage to recognize an argument for pleasure when it was staring them in the face.

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How the Ancients Understood Epicurus

The ancient evidence, friendly and hostile alike, is clear and unambiguous. Epicureanism was one of the most influential philosophical movements in the entire Mediterranean world for over five hundred years, and it did not achieve that reach by promising its followers a life of numbness.

Neither Epicurus nor his followers were quiet eccentrics. Philonides of Laodicea served as a royal adviser and converted a Seleucid king to the philosophy. Titus Pomponius Atticus, one of the wealthiest and best-connected men in Rome, studied under an Epicurean teacher and practiced what has been called “vigilant neutrality” — a shrewd, actively managed navigation of friendship and security across a civil war, not a withdrawal from it, and he lived into his eighties doing it. Cineas of Thessaly, chief diplomatic agent to King Pyrrhus, used Epicurean argument to advise his own king against overreaching ambition in a dialogue preserved by Plutarch. Gaius Cassius Longinus, who led the revolt against Julius Caesar, corresponded with Cicero as an avowed Epicurean, quoting Epicurus’s own doctrines in Greek and accusing Cicero of a deficient and biased understanding of the philosophy he was attacking. Torquatus and Velleius, the Epicurean spokesmen Cicero chose for his own dialogues, were Roman generals and statesmen of the first rank. Cicero’s choice of them, intended to make Epicureanism look respectable enough to be worth refuting, backfires as evidence every time a modern reader imagines Epicureans as reclusive. An empress, Pompeia Plotina, wrote to the Emperor Hadrian in her own hand: “How greatly I favor the school of Epicurus you know full well, my lord.” None of this is the profile of a philosophy whose highest good was to feel as little as possible.

Nor was the school withdrawn from the city that housed it. Epicurus loved Athens with what Diogenes Laertius calls an “indescribable” devotion. He observed the city’s religious festivals, cultivated friendships with sitting politicians, and deposited his own writings in the Metroon, Athens’s official state archive — the only private philosophical works known to have been treated that way. His Garden itself stood directly on the Dromos, the city’s busiest ceremonial road, on the very route between its main gate and Plato’s own Academy; his separate house in Melite was more centrally located than either the Academy or the Lyceum, and valuable enough that a Roman politician sought a formal government decree to build anew on what was left of it two and a half centuries later. Over the gate of the Garden itself hung a sign, preserved for us by Seneca, addressed to any passing stranger: “Hospes hic bene manebis, hic summum bonum voluptas est” — “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” That is not the signage of a school selling stillness, withdrawal, or resignation.

Even hostile testimony confirms the same judgment. Cicero, arguing against Epicurus with every rhetorical weapon at his disposal, described the life Epicureans actually claimed to want as one “crammed full of pleasures” — plena et conferta voluptatibus — not minimal, not ascetic, but crammed. Epictetus, no friend to the school, admits in the same breath that he criticizes Epicureans that they married, raised children, held civic office, and served as priests and public officials, exactly like everyone else. And when Epicurus and his own students went looking for targets, they did not shrink back from the fight — they labeled their opponents with inflammatory names. Diogenes Laertius preserves their list: Nausiphanes “the Mollusk,” Plato “the Golden” and his followers “Flatterers of Dionysus,” Aristotle “the Debauchee,” Pyrrho “the Uneducated Fool.” A philosophy that spends its energy coining and publishing insults for its rivals is not a philosophy of quiet detachment.

The single most useful ancient witness, though, is the one with nothing at all riding on the outcome of the dispute on how to view Epicurus. Aulus Gellius, a Roman writer of the second century AD, cites Epicurus’s own formula — “the utmost height of pleasure is the removal of all that pains” — purely as a grammatical illustration, in the middle of an entirely unrelated dispute about a word Virgil had used. Gellius places that sentence in the same logical category as calling a monstrous king “unpraised” or a blameless man “faultless”: total negation of a bad thing states the maximum of its opposite, not some hollowed-out lesser condition. This is the testimony of a witness who had no stake whatsoever in Epicurean ethics. He was simply commenting on a well-known statement and interpreting it the way any literate person of his century would have read it, and his testimony was that it plainly meant pleasure at its highest possible degree — not tranquility, not numbness, nothing other than ordinary mental and bodily pleasure.

None of this is compatible with the idea that Epicurus’s best life resembled that of a corpse. People do not reorganize their lives, spend their fortunes, and stake their political reputations on a doctrine of intentional numbness. A “best life indistinguishable from a corpse” would have been laughed out of any room in Athens or Rome. Just like the Epicureans themselves, the ancient world was not shy about mockery — it aimed plenty of that mockery at Epicurus over other points, and never once accusing him of asceticism, because friend and enemy alike understood exactly what he was recommending.

The Frankenstein Of The Tranquilist Epicurus

Despite the evidence above and much more that could be added, starting in the early twentieth century a stream of commentators have done their best to extract pleasure from the heart of Epicurean philosophy and replace it with something very different.

In 1960, Philip Merlan concluded that “the philosophy of Epicurus is not a philosophy of pleasure; it is a philosophy of joy,” deliberately chosing “joy” as an allegedly better translation of pleasure. In 1972, J. M. Rist stated a similar substitution as settled fact: “It is certain that for Epicurus the greatest pleasure is a complete absence of pain.” Phillip Mitsis, at Cornell in 1988, found Epicurus’s identification of happiness with the absence of pain “caught in a dilemma,” concluding that this reading makes the Epicurean good the “summum bonum of a corpse.” A.A. Long and David Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers — one of the most widely assigned reference works in the field — stated in 1987 that “as long as pain is absent we have static pleasure,” with no explanation of how this consitutes a felt, active content. Jeffrey Purinton, in 1993, argued that katastematic pleasure is superior to ordinary pleasure precisely because it is non-sensory — “the flesh does not report that this painless state is good.” Tim O’Keefe has proposed outright that “tranquillist” is a more accurate label for Epicurus than “hedonist.” Wikipedia’s own “Epicureanism” article states that the Epicurean goal is aponia and ataraxia, footnoted directly to O’Keefe.

This position dominates academia from Princeton to Cambridge to Oxford to Cornell, through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and through numerous internet commentaries. By now a full century of some of the world’s most credentialed philosophers have looked at “pleasure is the beginning and end of a happy life” and confidently reported back that the man meant something closer to its negation.

This did not happen by accident. Whenever a writer desires to reconcile Epicurus with a religious or ascetic audience, tranquility is promoted from a description of how pleasure can be experienced into a rival, superior category standing above it. This motivation has a long pedigree.

Lorenzo Valla, writing in 1431, has a Christian judge in his dialogue subordinate earthly pleasure to heavenly pleasure — “one pleasure now on earth, the other hereafter in the heavens… we cannot enjoy both of them.” Pierre Gassendi, in 1647, pledged in his own dedicatory epistle to “bend all my strength against Epicurus” wherever his philosophy conflicted with the Catholic faith, and it is Gassendi who appears to coin the phrase “veram germanamque voluptatem” — “true and genuine pleasure” — the likely historical origin of exactly the “genuine versus lesser pleasure” distinction that we hear so often today, despite the fact that pleasure and pain are feelings, and feelings do not come in “genuine” and counterfeit varieties any more than the five senses do. François Bernier popularized Gassendi’s safely tranquil Epicurus in 1699, and the tranquilizing habit these two men needed for theological reasons in the seventeenth century has perpetuated itself through humanist influences even by scholars with no theological project of their own. What began as an apologetic necessity has been inherited by secular but humanist scholarship.

Signs of a Thaw

Few trends no matter how dark go on forever, and since at least 1982, a genuine, if still incomplete, countercurrent has been building. , and it deserves to be named as clearly as the tradition it is answering. Although few scholars today acknowledge his influence, it is also worth noting before referencing these more modern scholars that the work of Norman DeWitt predated these by many years, and DeWitt’s “Epicurus and His Philosophy” remains today the straightest course to the best understanding of Epicurus without the tranquilist corruption that is the target of this article.

In 1982, J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor published The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford, 1982), and in that work argued systematically that what had come to be seen as the traditional tranquilist reading generates problems with no good answers. Gosling and Taylor traced to Cicero the argument that Epicurus’ true highest good was “non-sensory, reflection-only,” and thereby rejected that argument more than a decade before Purinton revived it. Boris Nikolsky, in 2001, argued that the focus of the entire framework of elevating “katastematic” pleasure over “kinetic” pleasure was an artifact of a later classification scheme, not implied or justified by Diogenes Laertius’ mention of the fact that Epicurus embraced both types of pleasure. David Sedley has consistently treated kinetic and katastematic pleasure as jointly necessary aspects of one complete life, not as a hierarchy. Kelly Arenson, in Health and Hedonism in Plato and Epicurus (Bloomsbury, 2019), names the stakes bluntly — “How would Epicureans dodge the charge that their best life resembles the state of a corpse?” — and answers that there was and is no needto, because the reading that produces the charge is false. Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean (2019) states without qualification that pleasure, “including pleasure in food and drink,” was both the main motive of action and the supreme good, and frames her project explicitly as “defending the authentic Epicurus.” Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure (Oxford, 2022) declines to relitigate the dispute for a general audience but plants her flag in a footnote, aligning with Gosling, Taylor, and Arenson. Even Julia Annas, writing as early as 1987, insisted that “ataraxia is not an alternative end but a specification of the kind of pleasure that can be our final end” and that “normal activity can be energetic and varied.”

As welcome as are these corrections, they remain a minority position, still fighting for space against a much larger, much older, much more institutionally entrenched consensus.

Why EpicureanFriends Exists

EpicureanFriends exists because the attempts to excise pleasure from the heart of Epicurus are not isolated slips — they are part of a much larger and much older pattern in which Epicurus’ rivals work to read Epicurus as their friend rather than their enemy.

That is exactly what EpicureanFriends’ founding statement, “Not NeoEpicurean, But Epicurean,” is built to do. Its central point states the correction directly: not “absence of pain” offered as a full statement of the goal on its own, but “the Feelings are two, pleasure and pain” and “Pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life.” Its other points perform the same corrective action against the other traditions that have tried to make the same substitution: not “flourishing” or “self-actualization,” but happiness grounded in the actual feeling of pleasure; not virtue pursued for its own sake, but virtue as the instrument that secures pleasure; not supernatural gods or a life after death, but confidence in a wholly material universe, in which those “for whom wisdom is possible… may truly live as gods” while still alive; not short-term indulgence at the cost of greater pain later, but “continuous pleasures”; not hard determinism, but a universe in which “some things happen of necessity, some by chance, and others through our own choice.”

Each of the traditions this project treats as adversarial rather than complementary gets something specific and identifiable wrong, and the differences are not subtle. Stoicism treats pleasure as, at best, a matter of indifference and at worst a contamination, and asks its adherents to master or silence the passions; Epicurus makes pleasure the good itself and expects the wise man to feel more deeply, not less — Diogenes Laertius records directly that the Epicurean sage “will be more susceptible of emotion than other men: that will be no hindrance to his wisdom.” Platonism posits an ideal realm of Forms standing behind ordinary experience and treats the senses as a source of mere opinion to be escaped; Epicurus held that no such realm exists, that the soul is as material and mortal as the body, and that the senses are the foundation, not the enemy, of all genuine knowledge. Buddhism locates the root of suffering in craving itself and aims at the extinguishing of desire; Epicurus never once recommended eliminating desire, only sorting it correctly — distinguishing the natural and necessary from the empty and unlimited — so that the desires worth keeping could be pursued and enjoyed with confidence rather than dissolved. Humanism, in its most common modern form, substitutes rational self-restraint or service to others for pleasure as the primary good, typically without acknowledging how much of that substitution it has quietly inherited from the Stoic and Christian traditions it otherwise claims to have moved past. Academic Skepticism and Pyrrhonism both claim that no knowledge is possible, or that judgment itself should be suspended; Epicurus regarded that position with open contempt, holding that the senses, the anticipations built from repeated experience, and the feelings of pleasure and pain give any honest observer everything needed to know the world and act on that knowledge with confidence.

None of this is offered in a spirit of splitting the difference. Epicurus was not a conciliatory eclectic, and neither is this project. The tone of Epicurean philosophy toward the dominant traditions of its own era was frankly adversarial, and it remains adversarial here on purpose: state the error plainly, name the tradition responsible for it, and refute it directly, rather than opening by praising a distorting reading as “thoughtful” before disagreeing with it. That adversarial posture is not bad manners. It is the same posture the ancient Epicureans themselves took toward Nausiphanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Pyrrho, and it is the posture the historical record shows actually won Epicureanism five centuries of devoted, active, well-documented followers — not the posture of a school hedging its claims to make them more comfortable for its critics.

Where this continues to go is exactly where it has been going since the project began: doctrine by doctrine, citation by citation, building an ever more complete and ever more precisely sourced record of what Epicurus actually said, what the ancient world actually understood him to mean, and where the modern academic consensus has drifted from both. That means continuing to expand the primary-source citation record, continuing to publish corrective analysis of the specific traditions and specific scholars responsible for particular distortions, and continuing to build a living community of people — not a hierarchy of credentialed experts, but friends in the fullest Epicurean sense of that word — who study this philosophy together and, increasingly, live by it.

A Rededication

None of this correction is complicated to restate once the substitutions are cleared away. Pleasure is the beginning and the end of a happy life, and the standard by which every other good is judged. The absence of pain is not a hedge, a lesser cousin, or a separate category standing above pleasure — it names pleasure at its highest possible degree, “not only itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible,” in the words Cicero’s own Epicurean spokesman would not retract under repeated hostile cross-examination. Virtue is real and necessary, but only as the instrument that secures a pleasant life, never as an end pursued for its own sake. Death is nothing to us, since where we are, death is not, and where death is, we no longer are. The universe is bodies and void, generated and sustained by nothing but nature, with no divine will standing behind it and no fate governing our choices beyond what necessity, chance, and our own agency actually determine. The gods, if they exist, trouble no one and are troubled by nothing, and are worth contemplating only as a model of the blessed life available to us, not as powers to fear. Friendship is the greatest instrument wisdom provides toward a life of security and pleasure, not an abstraction to be theorized about from a distance. And Epicurus’s own death is the proof that all of this was meant in earnest: dying in severe pain from kidney disease, he wrote to Idomeneus that the day was nonetheless “truly happy,” because the memory of their conversations together outweighed the pain in his body. A man who could say that on his deathbed was not a man whose highest aspiration was to feel as little as possible.

If the argument traced in this article is right, then the confident, century-long insistence that Epicurus meant something close to the opposite of his own words says a great deal more about the crisis of confidence that produced it than it says about the philosopher himself. Correcting that reading, one doctrine and one citation at a time, is the work EpicureanFriends was founded to do, and it is unfinished. If you have read this far and find yourself in agreement — that pleasure, not its absence, was always the point; that the ancient evidence supports an active and vivid life rather than a numbed one; that Epicurus deserves to be read in his own words rather than through the assumptions of traditions that found him inconvenient — then the invitation is a simple one. Come study the texts with us, bring your own reading and your own citations to the table, and help us finish the work of rediscovering Classical Epicurean philosophy.