PERENNIAL 109
How to Find Tranquility — Like Epicurus
An Epicurean Guide to Life
Do we make life more complicated than it needs to be? As the ancient philosopher, Epicurus (341–270 BC) advised, should we focus on pleasure? How does pleasure connect with wisdom (or does it)?
In the new book Living for Pleasure, philosophy Prof. Emily Austin (a recent podcast guest) writes, “Epicurus puts it in his notoriously wooden prose, ‘pleasure is the starting point and the goal of living blessedly.’”
Prof. Austin explains,
“Telling someone to aim at pleasure seems like a very unpromising starting point for a self-improvement plan, much less an ethical approach to living. It sounds more like a recipe for insurmountable credit card debt, a series of failed relationships, and a life-long problem with alcohol. Ethics is demanding, but pursuing pleasure seems all too easy and all too destructive. We don’t need some old philosopher like Epicurus giving license to our failures of self-control and calling it ethics and happiness.”
Although the last thing we should do is cavalierly dismiss Epicurus as a debauched glutton, says Austin. We shouldn’t lose sight of how powerfully liberating it can be to hear that pleasure is good.
Why don’t we connect pleasure (or not making ourselves miserable) with wisdom? Epicurus is not the only one saying that we shouldn’t make life more complicated than it needs to be. Generally speaking, all wisdom traditions focus on helping us find tranquility or at least minimizing suffering.
In a previous conversation of Reading & the Good Life (a free weekly meetup) discussed this passage from the late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh,
“If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can produce happiness. We do need some suffering to make happiness possible. And most of us have enough suffering inside and around us to be able to do that. We don’t have to create more.”
That feels right to me. We do not need to create additional suffering. Similarly, one of my favorite quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky points to a similar idea, “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” I speculate that Dostoevsky means that once we know the source of unhappiness, we should wisely stop doing it.
Epicurus’s approach is similar; finding tranquility begins by working through our fears and anxiety. In my conversation with John Sellars (author of The Pocket Epicurean), he explained,
Epicurus thought that first, we need to identify the causes of our anxieties, and then we need arguments to show us that those anxieties are groundless. We have no good reasons to worry about the things we do.
According to Epicurus, many of our fears and anxieties result from failing to see things as they really are. Knowledge of how the world works will ultimately set us free. The Epicurean view is that you already have everything you need if only you could see it.
It’s an interesting question to contemplate. Do I have everything I need?
Epicurus breaks what we need down into three categories:
- Epicurus’s approach to this question was to strip things down to basics. What do we need? What is essential for our physical survival? Food, water, shelter from the elements; that’s about it. These are nature’s demands. Epicurus called the desire for these things “natural and necessary.”
- But what if you want beyond the mere essential? That’s all fine, Epicurus would say, and perfectly reasonable. The desire for these things grows out of our more basic natural desires for food, water, and shelter, even if it goes beyond what is essential. Epicurus called these sorts of things “natural, but not necessary.”
- Then there’s everything else: everything we presumably think we need to live a happy life. For Epicurus, these things would fall into the third category of things, the “unnatural and unnecessary.”
It is challenging to see that the only things we actually need are “natural and necessary.” Everything else is mere window dressing. Epicurus stressed that what we need is actually very little and, because of that, is relatively easy to secure.
By realizing this point, one can embark on a path to tranquility.
Although, it doesn’t stop there. Once we know that we have everything we need, we must intentionally appreciate what we have. To quote Epicurus, “He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.”
Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
P.S. If you’d like daily meditations on the art of living, check out the Perennial Meditations newsletter.