5 Epicurus

c ha p t e r 4
The Garden Path

Epicurus
Imagine your funeral. What will it be like? Who’ll be there?

What will they say? What you are imagining must be from your
own perspective. It’s as if you are still there watching events
from a particular place, perhaps from above, or from a seat
among the mourners. Now, some people do believe that that is
a serious possibility, that after death we can survive outside a
physical body as a kind of spirit that might even be able to see
what’s going on in this world. But for those of us who believe
death is final, there is a real problem. Every time we try and
imagine not being there we have to do it by imagining that we
are there, watching what is happening when we’re not there.
Whether or not you can imagine your own death, it seems
quite natural to be at least a bit afraid of not existing. Who
wouldn’t fear their own death? If there’s anything we should be
anxious about, it’s surely that. It seems perfectly reasonable to
worry about not existing even if that will happen many years
t h e g a r d e n pat h 23
from now. It’s instinctive. Very few people alive have never
thought deeply about this.
The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 bc) argued
that fear of death was a waste of time and based on bad logic.
It was a state of mind to be overcome. If you think clearly about
it, death shouldn’t be frightening at all. Once you get your
thinking straight you’ll enjoy your time here much more – which
for Epicurus was extremely important. The point of philosophy,
he believed, was to make your life go better, to help you find
happiness. Some people believe that it is morbid to dwell on your
own death, but for Epicurus it was a way of making living more
intense.
Epicurus was born on the Greek island of Samos in the
Aegean. He spent most of his life in Athens where he became
something of a cult figure, attracting a group of students who
lived with him in a commune. The group included women and
slaves – a rare situation in Ancient Athens. This didn’t make
him popular, except with his followers who almost worshipped
him. He ran this philosophy school in a house with a garden –
and so it came to be known as The Garden.
Like many Ancient philosophers (and some modern ones,
such as Peter Singer: see Chapter 40), Epicurus believed that
philosophy should be practical. It should change how you live.
So it was important that those who joined him in The Garden
put the philosophy into practice rather than just learnt about it.
For Epicurus the key to life was recognizing that we all seek
pleasure. More importantly, we avoid pain whenever we can.
That’s what drives us. Eliminating suffering from your life and
increasing happiness will make it go better. The best way to live,
then, was this: have a very simple lifestyle, be kind to those
around you, and surround yourself with friends. That way you’ll
be able to satisfy most of your desires. You won’t be left wanting
24 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f p h i l o s o p h y
something you can’t get. It’s no good having a desperate urge to

own a mansion if you won’t ever have the money to buy one.
Don’t spend your whole life working in order to get something
that is probably beyond your reach anyway. It’s far better to live
in a simple way. If your desires are simple they are easy to satisfy
and you will have the time and energy to enjoy the things
that matter. That was his recipe for happiness, and it makes a lot
of sense.
This teaching was a form of therapy. Epicurus’ aim was to
cure his students of mental pain, and to suggest how physical
pain could be made bearable by remembering past pleasures.
He pointed out that pleasures are enjoyable at the time, but they
are also enjoyable when we remember them afterwards, so they
can have long-lasting benefits for us. When he was dying and in
some discomfort, he wrote to a friend about how he managed to
distract himself from his illness by recalling his enjoyment of
their past conversations.
This is all quite different from what the word ‘epicurean’
means today. It’s almost the opposite. An ‘epicure’ is someone
who loves eating fine foods, someone who indulges in luxury
and sensual pleasure. Epicurus had much simpler tastes than
that suggests. He taught the need to be moderate – giving in to
greedy appetites would just create more and more desires and
so in the end produce the mental anguish of unfulfilled craving.
That sort of life of wanting more and more should be avoided.
He and his followers ate bread and water rather than exotic
food. If you start drinking expensive wine, then you’ll very soon
end up wanting to drink even more expensive wine, and get
caught in the trap of longing for things that you can’t have.
Despite this, his enemies claimed that in The Garden commune
Epicureans spent most of their time eating, drinking and having
sex with each other in a non-stop orgy. That’s how the modern
meaning of ‘epicurean’ got going. If Epicurus’ followers really

did do this, it was completely at odds with their leader’s
teaching. It’s more likely, though, that this was just a malicious
rumour.
One thing Epicurus certainly did spend a lot of time doing
was writing. He was prolific. Records suggest that he wrote as
many as three hundred books on rolls of papyrus, though none
of these has survived. What we know about him comes mostly
from notes followers wrote. They learnt his books by heart, but
they also passed on his teaching in written form. Some of their
scrolls survived in fragments, preserved in the volcanic ash that
fell on Herculaneum near Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius
erupted. Another important source of information about
Epicurus’ teaching is the long poem On the Nature of Things
by the Roman philosopher-poet, Lucretius. Composed over
two hundred years after Epicurus’ death, this poem summa-
rized the key teachings of his school.
So, to return to the question that Epicurus asked, why
shouldn’t you fear death? One reason is that you won’t experi-
ence it. Your death won’t be something that happens to you.
When it happens you won’t be there. The twentieth-century
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein echoed this view when he
wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘Death is not an
event in life’. The idea here is that events are things that we
experience, but our own death is the removal of the possibility
of experience, not something further that we could be conscious
of and somehow live through.
When we imagine our own death, Epicurus suggested, most
of us make the mistake of thinking there will be something of
us left to feel whatever happens to the dead body. But this is a
misunderstanding about what we are. We are tied to our partic-
ular bodies, our particular flesh and bone. Epicurus’ view was
26 a l i t t l e h i s t o ry o f p h i l o s o p h y
that we consist of atoms (though what he meant by this term

was a bit different from what modern scientists mean by it).
Once these atoms come apart at death we no longer exist as
individuals capable of consciousness. Even if someone could
carefully put all the bits back together again later, and breathe
life back into this reconstructed body, it wouldn’t be anything to
do with me. The new living body wouldn’t be me, despite
looking like me. I wouldn’t feel its pains, because once the body
ceases to function nothing can bring it back to life. The chain of
identity would have been broken.
Another way Epicurus thought he could cure his followers of
their fear of death was by pointing out the difference between
what we feel about the future and what we feel about the past.
We care about one but not the other. Think about the time
before your birth. There was all that time that you didn’t exist.
Not just the weeks when you were in your mother’s womb when
you might have been born early, or even the point before you
were conceived but were just a possibility for your parents, but
rather the trillions of years before you came along. We don’t
usually worry about not existing for all those millennia before
our birth. Why should anyone care about all that time that they
didn’t exist? But then, if that’s true, why should we care so much
about all those aeons of non-existence after death? Our thought
is asymmetrical. We’re very biased towards worrying about the
time after our death rather than the time before our birth. But
Epicurus thought this was a mistake. Once you see this, you
should start thinking of the time after your death in the same
sort of way that you do the time before it. Then it won’t be a big
concern.
Some people get very worried that they might end up being
punished in an afterlife. Epicurus dismissed that worry too. The
gods aren’t really interested in their creation, he confidently told
his followers. They exist apart from us, and don’t get involved
with the world. So you should be all right. That’s the cure – the
combination of these arguments. If it works, you should feel
much more relaxed about your future non-existence now.
Epicurus summed up his whole philosophy in his epitaph:
‘I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind’
If you believe that we are simply physical beings, composed of

matter, and that there is no serious risk of punishment after
death, then Epicurus’ reasoning may well persuade you that
your death is nothing to be afraid of. You might still worry
about the process of dying as that is often painful and definitely
experienced. That’s true even if it is unreasonable to fret about
death itself. Remember, though, that Epicurus believed that
good memories could ease pain, so he had an answer even for
that. But if you think that you are a soul in a body, and that soul
can survive bodily death, Epicurus’ cure is unlikely to work for
you: you will be able to imagine carrying on existing even after
your heart has stopped beating.
The Epicureans weren’t alone in thinking of philosophy as a
type of therapy: most Greek and Roman philosophers did. The
Stoics, in particular, were renowned for their lessons in how to
be psychologically tough in the face of unfortunate events.

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c ha p t e r 4

The Garden Path

Imagine your funeral. What will it be like? Who’ll be there?

something you can’t get. It’s no good having a desperate urge to

meaning of ‘epicurean’ got going. If Epicurus’ followers really

that we consist of atoms (though what he meant by this term

‘I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind’

If you believe that we are simply physical beings, composed of

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