10.6 — Epicurus and the Cynics

Two schools, contemporary with early Stoicism, and both misunderstood in the same way: their names became English words that mean roughly the opposite of what they taught.

Epicurus

"Epicurean" now means a person devoted to fine food and luxury.

Epicurus lived on bread and water, with cheese as an occasional treat, and wrote that he was thrilled by a small pot of cheese when he wanted to feast.

The actual doctrine

Pleasure is the highest good and pain is the only evil. That much is correct.

And then the analysis, which is where everything changes.

Pleasure, for Epicurus, is primarily the absence of pain — ataraxia, freedom from disturbance in the mind, and aponia, freedom from pain in the body. It is not a positive sensation to be maximised. It is a settled condition.

Which means the way to maximise pleasure is to eliminate disturbance rather than to add stimulation.

And he classifies desires, which is the practical core.

Natural and necessary: food, water, shelter, safety, friendship. Easily satisfied, and satisfying them removes real pain.

Natural but unnecessary: rich food, sex, a comfortable house. Fine to enjoy, not worth arranging your life around.

And neither natural nor necessary: wealth, fame, power, status. These are the ones that cannot be satisfied, because they have no natural limit — which is 8.8's lobha, identified by the same reasoning.

And the argument: the first category is cheap and easy, and almost all human misery comes from pursuing the third.

The four-part cure

His summary, the tetrapharmakos:

Do not fear god. The gods, if they exist, are perfectly happy and take no interest in human affairs. Religion's main function, in his view, was the manufacture of fear.

Do not worry about death. The argument: death is the end of sensation, and what is not experienced is not bad for you. Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. And he adds: you do not fear the infinite time before your birth, and it is the same thing.

What is good is easy to get.

And what is terrible is easy to endure, because severe pain is short and chronic pain is mild — which is his weakest claim and is straightforwardly false about some conditions.

Friendship

And the thing he valued most, which surprises people.

Of all the things wisdom provides for a happy life, he said, by far the greatest is friendship.

His school, the Garden, was a community outside Athens where people lived together — and it admitted women and slaves, which was scandalous and is one of the earliest such arrangements in the West.

And his advice was to withdraw from public life. Live unnoticed. Politics is a source of disturbance with no natural limit, and the way to be untroubled is to keep out of it.

Which is the exact opposite of Stoic and Aristotelian advice (10.4, 10.5), and it is the school's most contested position.

The last letter

He died of kidney stones, in severe pain.

And wrote to a friend on the last day: on this blessed day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings are such that nothing could increase them. But over against them all I set gladness of mind at the remembrance of our past conversations.

A man testing his own doctrine under maximum load and reporting that it held.

The Cynics

**"Cynical" now means distrustful and sneering. The word comes from kyon, dog — they were called the dog philosophers, as an insult, and they adopted it.

Diogenes

The founder in practice, and most of what survives is anecdotes, which is appropriate for a school that rejected doctrine.

He lived in a large ceramic jar in Athens. He owned a cloak, a stick and a bag. He threw away his drinking cup after seeing a child drink from cupped hands.

He carried a lit lamp in daylight, and when asked what he was doing, said he was looking for an honest man.

Alexander the Great came to see him, stood over him and offered him anything he wanted. Diogenes asked him to move slightly, because he was blocking the sun. Alexander is reported to have said afterwards that if he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes.

Asked where he was from, he said he was a citizen of the world — kosmopolites, and this is the first recorded use of the idea of world citizenship, which is not a small thing to have invented while living in a jar.

The doctrine

Because there is one under the theatre.

Everything that makes people miserable is convention. Property, reputation, status, manners, shame, the accumulation of things — none of it is natural, all of it is agreed, and it can be discarded.

Virtue is living in accordance with nature, which means: what an animal needs, and nothing else.

And the method is deliberate public violation of convention, to demonstrate that the conventions are arbitrary and that nothing happens when you break them. Diogenes ate in the marketplace, which was considered shocking, and performed other acts in public that are still shocking and which this book will not detail.

What is actually valuable

Two things, and they survive the theatre.

The demonstration that most needs are manufactured. Diogenes is a proof of concept: a person can live with almost nothing and be visibly happier than the people he is mocking. You do not have to imitate him to have absorbed the point.

And the willingness to be laughed at. This is 8.9's practice, executed as a life. A person who has no reputation to protect cannot be controlled by the threat of losing it, and Diogenes is the extreme demonstration of what that buys you — including the ability to tell Alexander to move.

The line to Stoicism

And the historical connection worth knowing.

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, studied with a Cynic teacher.

Stoicism is Cynicism made compatible with ordinary life. It keeps the core claim — that what disturbs you is your judgement about externals rather than the externals — and drops the requirement to live in a jar.

Which is why Stoicism spread and Cynicism did not. A philosophy that requires public indecency and homelessness has a limited market, and the Stoics kept the insight and made it usable.

The two schools compared

Both agree that most human misery is self-inflicted and unnecessary.

Both agree that the pursuit of wealth, status and fame is the main source of it.

They differ on the remedy.

Epicurus: withdraw quietly, cultivate friendship, satisfy the natural desires cheaply, and let the rest go.

Diogenes: reject the whole apparatus publicly and mock it.

And a third position — the Stoic one — engage fully, in public life, without depending on any of it (10.5).

Three answers to the same diagnosis, and 16.4 is where this volume takes a position on which is available to you.

What to carry from this page

Sort your desires into three categories: natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary, and neither. The third category is where the misery is, and it has no natural limit.

"Where death is, I am not." Epicurus's argument is genuinely good and 14.2 tests it properly.

Of everything that produces a happy life, friendship is the greatest. Said by a man who built a community and tested it while dying of kidney stones.

And a person with no reputation to protect cannot be controlled by the threat of losing it. You do not need the jar to use this.

Next: 10.7 — a thousand years in which the central question was whether reason and faith can occupy the same mind.