Let’s begin with what the sentence doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the aim of life is pleasure, or consolation, or a very good time. It says the aim is to be free from two issues: ache and worry. The aim is said by what it takes away, not by what it provides. That’s straightforward to skim previous, and we predict it’s the entire level.
A be aware earlier than we go additional: we aren’t clinicians, psychologists, or therapists, and nothing right here is recommendation. That is one editorial crew studying a really previous letter about nervousness and dying, and considering out loud about it alongside some fashionable analysis. The research we point out are patterns noticed throughout teams of individuals, not prescriptions for anybody reader.
What Epicurus really meant
The road comes from the Letter to Menoeceus, certainly one of three letters by Epicurus that survive, preserved by the later biographer Diogenes Laertius. Collectively they boil his ethics all the way down to one thing you can learn in a day.
Epicurus has a foul fame. The phrase “epicure” now means somebody who chases superb meals and finer wine. That caricature would have puzzled him. His precise view was stranger and extra austere. Sure, he stated pleasure is the very best good. However he outlined pleasure principally because the absence of ache, not the presence of indulgence. David Konstan, who wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on him, places it clearly: Epicurus “tends to describe the goal by negation, as freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance.” The road within the quote above is precisely that transfer, made plain.
The 2 freedoms: physique and thoughts
Epicurus break up the goal in two. Freedom from bodily ache, and freedom from psychological disturbance. The primary is apparent. No one wants convincing {that a} life with no toothache beats a life with one.
The second is the place his considering does its actual work, and it’s the one he cared about most. A relaxed thoughts, for Epicurus, was not a bonus that arrived after you’d sorted out your physique and your financial institution steadiness. It was the factor all the pieces else was for. Later followers boiled his concepts right into a four-part cure: don’t worry the gods, don’t worry dying, what is sweet is straightforward to get, and what’s horrible is straightforward to endure. Two of the 4 are about worry. That ratio tells you the place he thought the difficulty principally lived.
Why worry was the larger goal
The 2 phrases within the quote weren’t equal companions in his thoughts. Ache he principally filed underneath “manageable.” Worry he handled because the engine behind almost all the pieces that goes improper in a life. As Konstan places it, Epicurus “regarded the unacknowledged fear of death and punishment as the primary cause of anxiety among human beings, and anxiety in turn as the source of extreme and irrational desires.”
That’s a sequence value following. Worry of dying feeds a low background nervousness. That nervousness pushes individuals towards stressed needs, extra money, extra standing, extra distraction, that by no means fulfill, as a result of they had been by no means actually about cash or standing within the first place. Pull out the worry on the root and the frantic wanting loses its gasoline.
His most well-known argument goals straight at that root. Epicurus tells Menoeceus to “accustom thyself” to consider that “dying is nothing to us, for good and evil suggest sentience, and dying is the privation of all sentience.” Konstan restates the logic: “death, Epicurus insists, is nothing to us, since while we exist, our death is not, and when our death occurs, we do not exist.” There may be by no means a second when dying is going on to an individual who’s round to undergo it. And so, he concludes, “life has no terrors” for the one who really grasps that there’s nothing to worry in not dwelling.
We’d flag that this argument is contested, and has been for hundreds of years. Loads of philosophers assume it dodges what individuals really worry: not the state of being lifeless, however dropping all the pieces a life comprises. Epicurus is making a case, not settling one. Nonetheless, as a chunk of self-directed remedy, it’s a intelligent transfer. He goes after the worry somewhat than promising you gained’t die.
How we’d learn the road at the moment
It’s tempting to show Epicurus right into a self-help slogan, freedom from stress in 4 straightforward steps, or to learn him as advising a small, play-it-safe life. We predict each miss the mark.
Maybe, he needs us to stroll as much as the worry, have a look at what’s beneath it, and discover there’s much less there than we assumed. The liberty he’s after isn’t the absence of feeling. It’s what’s left when the factor we had been bracing in opposition to seems to not be coming for us the way in which you thought.
If any of this sits near an actual worry you’re carrying, about dying, loss, or a low nervousness that gained’t settle down, a certified counsellor or therapist is an efficient particular person to speak it via with.
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