- Length
- 6 pagesInwood and Gerson, The Epicurus Reader, Hackett, 1994 - the Doctrines alone
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Principal Doctrines
A complete philosophy compressed into forty sentences a student could learn by heart, on the principle that an argument you cannot recall when you need it is no use. Epicurus was the most systematically misrepresented philosopher in antiquity - his name became a byword for luxury while he was living on bread and water and calling friendship the greatest of all goods.
- Date
- c. 300 BC
- Author
- Epicurus
- Region
- Athens
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1688 English, Walter Charleton Early English rendering, from the Latin Consensus
- 1926 English, Cyril Bailey Public domain in most jurisdictions Attested
- 1994 English, Inwood and Gerson Standard teaching text; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years to the reply
- 255 years
Almost all of Epicurus' three hundred rolls are lost. What survives is this list, three letters, and a body of charred papyrus from a villa buried by Vesuvius that is still being read.
What the book says
Forty short statements, meant to be memorised, covering an entire philosophy in about four pages. The first four are the core, and they are arranged as a course of treatment. The divine is untroubled and troubles nobody, so fear of the gods is misplaced. Death is nothing to us, because what is dissolved has no sensation and what has no sensation is nothing to us. What is good is easy to get. What is terrible is easy to bear - severe pain is short, and chronic pain leaves room for pleasure. The rest work outward from there. Pleasure is the absence of pain, not its opposite, so it has a ceiling and cannot be increased once reached, only varied. Desires divide into the natural and necessary, the natural and unnecessary, and the empty; almost all human misery comes from the third kind. Wealth measured by nature has a limit and wealth measured by empty opinion has none. Justice is not a thing in itself but an agreement not to harm or be harmed, so it varies with circumstance and is binding only while it remains useful to both sides. Friendship gets the last word: of everything wisdom provides for a complete life, much the greatest is friendship.
What it argues
That philosophy is medicine for the mind, and that the diseases are fear and empty desire. The physics does the first job: if the world is atoms falling through void, then the gods are not managing it and death is the end of sensation, so the two great fears have no object. The ethics does the second: pleasure is what we naturally pursue, but pleasure properly understood is the state of a body without pain and a mind without disturbance, which is cheap to reach and impossible to exceed. Chasing more once you are there is not more pleasure but a different flavour of it, and chasing what nature does not require is the engine of every kind of unhappiness.
What answered it
Cicero answers in On Ends, giving the Epicurean case a fair hearing and then arguing that a school which reduces the good to pleasure cannot account for its own reverence for virtue and friendship. Plutarch answers with open hostility in a series of essays. The Stoics answered continuously for three centuries, and the two schools defined themselves against each other so thoroughly that most of what we know of Epicurean physics comes from Stoic attacks on it. The Christian answer, when it came, was not an argument but an erasure: of all the ancient schools this is the one whose books were least often copied.
How it argues
It does not argue at all; it states. The Doctrines are conclusions stripped of the reasoning that supports them, meant to be held ready. The full arguments were in the thirty-seven books on nature, now mostly lost, and in the letters. This is a deliberate pedagogy: Epicurus held that a doctrine had to be available at the moment of fear to do any good, and a treatise is not available at three in the morning. The compression is why the text survived when the arguments did not.
The moment
Athens after Alexander, with the free city gone and politics no longer a career open to the ordinary citizen. Epicurus bought a garden outside the walls and taught there, admitting women and at least one slave, which shocked people. His advice to live unnoticed is a direct response to a world in which public life had become dangerous and pointless, and the school's structure - a household of friends, deliberately outside the city - is part of the doctrine rather than an arrangement around it.
How it travelled
Barely. Epicurus is said to have written three hundred rolls and almost nothing survives. The Doctrines exist because Diogenes Laertius copied them into his Lives in the third century AD, along with three summarising letters, and that compilation survived. A second source has been opening slowly since 1752, when the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum yielded charred rolls of Epicurean texts buried by Vesuvius; imaging techniques are still recovering them. Almost everything else comes through the writings of enemies.
The strongest objection
That the argument about death answers the wrong fear. Granting that a dead person cannot suffer, most people fear death not as a state to be endured but as the loss of everything they were going to have, and the symmetry Epicurus offers - you did not mind the aeons before your birth, so do not mind those after your death - has struck many careful readers as false, because we do not regard the future the way we regard the past. Thomas Nagel put the objection in its modern form and it has not gone away. Epicurus has no reply available, because on his account there is no subject left to be deprived.
Why read it
Because it takes ten minutes and is one of the few philosophical texts designed to be used rather than studied. The forty statements are the whole of it: no vocabulary, no background, nothing to reconstruct. Read as a practical document rather than a theory, it is also a corrective to what the word Epicurean has come to mean, which is roughly the opposite of what the text says.
- First printed
- 1533
- First in English
- 1688
- Digitised
- Yes
Preserved entire in Book Ten of Diogenes Laertius, which also carries the three letters and a second collection, the Vatican Sayings, found in a manuscript in 1888.
Bailey's 1926 English is out of copyright in most jurisdictions. Inwood-Gerson and Long-Sedley are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, and the revival is real rather than nostalgic. Epicurean arguments about the fear of death - in particular that being dead cannot be bad for the person who is dead - are a live topic in contemporary moral philosophy, and the account of desire and its limits has been taken up in work on wellbeing.
On quoting this book
The Greek is public domain and the doctrines are famous in translation, but the memorable English formulations are translators' work and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the collection was compiled by Epicurus or assembled after his death from his writings is unresolved. The relation between the Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings - a second collection found in a manuscript in 1888, overlapping but not identical - is unclear. The interpretation of pleasure is the standing dispute: whether the absence of pain is itself the highest pleasure or merely its necessary condition divides scholars and divided the ancient school. And the account of the gods is genuinely obscure: whether Epicurus held that they exist as beings made of atoms in the spaces between worlds, or only as ideas humans form, has been argued for two thousand years.