Pleasure as the Highest Good

Every animal, Epicurus observes, seeks pleasure and avoids pain from the moment of birth — before any reasoning or instruction. This natural inclination is not a defect to be overcome but evidence of what really matters. The hedonistic starting point does not mean that all pleasures are equal or that any pleasure is automatically worth pursuing. The calculus of pleasure must include the pains that sometimes follow from pleasures and the pleasures that sometimes follow from accepting short-term pains. Wisdom consists precisely in making this calculation correctly.

Epicurus was accused in antiquity, as he has been accused ever since, of advocating sensual indulgence. He rejects this emphatically. When he says pleasure is the good, he does not mean the pleasures of feasting, drinking, and erotic gratification — he means the absence of pain in the body and of disturbance in the mind. The person who eats simply and is satisfied has more pleasure, in the relevant sense, than the gourmand who is never content. The sober calculation that reveals this is not a renunciation of pleasure but its correct understanding.

Virtue, for Epicurus, is not an end in itself but the means by which stable pleasure is achieved. Prudence (phronesis) is the greatest virtue because it enables the correct assessment of pleasures and pains. Justice, courage, and temperance all contribute to ataraxia: the unjust person lives in constant fear of discovery; the coward is tormented by fear of what they dread; the intemperate person is enslaved to desires that can never be permanently satisfied. To live virtuously is, by this account, the only reliable path to the undisturbed life.

The claim that pleasure is the highest good is developed in the Letter to Menoeceus and defended at length in the Principal Doctrines. The accusation of gross sensuality is answered directly by Epicurus in several surviving fragments and by Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Epicurus (Book X).