And that is exactly what Epicurus thought. Now calling some desires natural and necessary may seem to suggest that other desires are unnatural and/or unnecessary.
#The good life game free#
He also counted that the state that you are in when you are free of pain and mental distress not as a neutral state of neither pleasure nor pain, but as a positive, though, “calm” state of pleasure. He just thought we should pursue positive pleasures of the right kind. Those would be pleasures brought about by the satisfaction of what he called our natural and necessary desires – simple desires like the desire for food, or for the company of good friends. Rather, it involved the absence of bodily pain and mental distress.īut I don’t mean to make it sound as though he was entirely opposed to what we might call positive pleasures. The real key to human happiness, on his view, didn’t involve the pursuit of luxury or excessive sensual pleasures.
And he seemed to believe that in the long run the pursuit of them would set you up for a life of pain and distress. But he actually dismissed such desires as entirely unnecessary. His philosophy is actually pretty far removed from epicureanism as ordinarily understood.Įpicurus did acknowledge that desires for good food and fine wine were natural. Now in common parlance an epicurean is one who is “fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.” But the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was decidedly not an epicurean in that sense of the word. This week’s conversation is about Epicurus and the Good Life.
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