The Art of Happiness

270 Pages·2013·3.06 MB·English

PENGUIN @CLASSICS
THE ART OF HAPPINESS
EPICURUS (341-271 B.C.) founded one of antiqui­
ty's most influential philosophical schools, which
focused on the pursuit of happiness. Born on the
Greek island of Samas, he operated the Garden,
devoted to philosophy and communal living, out­
side of Athens.
GEORGE K. STRODACH (1905-1971) taught at
Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania-first
in the language department and then in the philos­
ophy department-for more than thirty-five years.
DANIEL KLEIN is the author of Travels with Epi­
curus and, with Thomas Cathcart, of the interna­
tional bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a
Bar. A graduate of Harvard, in philosophy, he is
the author or coauthor of twenty-five other books.
He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife,
Freke Vuijst.

l
The Art of Happiness
Translated with an Introduction
and Commentary by
GEORGE K. STRODACH
Foreword by
DANIEL KLEIN
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Contents
Foreword by DANIEL KLEIN Vll
Preface by GEORGE K. STRODACH Xlll
THE ART OF HAPPINESS
Introduction by George K. Strodach 1
I. Development of the Atomic Concept 1
II. First Principles of Atomism and
Their Implications 8
III. The Motion of Atoms 15
IV. Sensation and Perception 18
V. Theory of Knowledge 25
VI. Religion and Theology 39
VII. Ethics and the Good Life 5 6
A Note on the Translation 77
Excerpts from the Life of Epicurus 81
by Diogenes Laertius
Letter to Herodotus 91
Parallel Passages from Lucretius
VI CONTENTS
Letter to Pythocles 135
Parallel Passages from Lucretius
Letter to Menoeceus 155
Parallel Passages from Lucretius
Leading Doctrines 173
The Vatican Collection of Aphorisms 181
Abbreviations 185
Notes 187
Selected Bibliography 241
Index 245
Foreword
In Athens in the third century B.C., everyday consciousness
reached an unprecedented level of wonder. Athenian minds
were animated with questions: What is the nature of the
universe? What is real? How does man fit into the cosmos?
What is a good life? What is a happy life? Are those two­
"good" and "happy"-in harmony or at odds with each
other? And what role do the gods play in all this?
Philosophical discourse had become the gossip of the
realm. Out on the south slope of the acropolis, where the
Theater of Dionysius was producing a new comedy by Me­
nander, the audience remained buzzing long after the play
was over as they discussed the moral implications of the
drama. Are extramarital affairs ever justifiable? Does bad
behavior necessarily lead to personal unhappiness? Aristo­
tle's Nicomachean Ethics was invoked, as were the moral
arguments of Plato.
Later, as members of the audience walked back through
the agora, they may have encountered Zeno of Citium in the
colonnade lecturing students on the tenets of stoicism,
turned east and passed the Lyceum, where Aristotelian phi­
losophy was being taught, then cut back toward the Acade­
my, where Platonic philosophy was the subject at hand. And
then, farther up a hill overlooking the metropolis, they
would have reached a garden gate that bore these words:
Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our
highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of that abode, a
VIII FOREWORD
kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you
with bread, and serve you water also in abundance, with
these words: "Have you not been well entertained? This
garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it."
They had arrived at Epicurus's Garden, home of the Mas­
ter's boarding school. Here, at the long outdoor table, non­
stop philosophical discussion reached its zenith, and fine
dining, as one can tell from the host's offered menu, reached
its nadir. (No pseudo-Epicurean "foodies" at this table.) Un­
like at the Academy or the Lyceum, women, some of them
concubines and mistresses, as well as a few slaves, joined the
conversation; further, many of the students here had arrived
without academic credentials in mathematics or music, de
rigueur for entry to the other Athenian schools of higher
learning. Everyone in the Garden radiated earnestness and
good cheer. The subject under discussion was happiness.
# # #
Epicurus's notion of happiness has a decidedly Buddhist
quality. Happiness is tranquility, and tranquility comes prin­
cipally from putting aside worldly "hankerings" -ambitions
for power, status, involvement in government, the pursuit of
voluptuous sensory experiences, and the accumulation of
material goods. Two of Epicurus's most quoted maxims dis­
till this idea: "Not what we have, but what we enjoy, consti­
tutes our abundance" and, in its more admonitory form,
"Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too
little."
Remarkably, Epicurus's ideas about ataraxia-the free­
dom from mental anguish and disturbance that is required
for true happiness-were more directly influenced by Bud­
dhist thought than a twenty-first-century reader might imag­
ine for a Greek philosopher of that epoch. Two of Epicurus's
early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, had actually jour-
FOREWORD IX
neyed all the way to what is now India, where they had en­
countered Buddhism in the schools of the gymnosophists
(naked teachers).
A parallel requirement for Epicurean happiness is free­
dom from fear of nature and from punitive gods. In his
magnificent opus inspired by the philosophy of Epicurus,
The Nature of Things, the Roman poet Lucretius reserved
some of his highest praise for Epicurus's brave resistance to
religious tradition and its superstitious interpretations of
natural phenomena. Epicurus was among the first of his
time to make such a clean and decisive break with what he
considered religious hocus-pocus. Interestingly, in Epicurus's
youth on the island of Samos, he often accompanied his
mother, Chaerestrata, on her visits to peasants in her role as
fortune-teller and faith healer. Apparently, Epicurus eventu­
ally saw more harm than benefit in his mother's occupation.
Epicurus defined happiness as the absence of pain, both
physical and mental, and this raises some fascinating ques­
tions for the philosophically minded of every era. One could
argue that the absence of pain brings a person up to only
zero on the happiness scale; to push the meter into the posi­
tive zone, more is required, say a plate of roast lamb with all
the trimmings. But Epicurus would shoot back that the
pleasure of eating lamb has all kinds of future pains at­
tached to it, like a bloated stomach or, worse in the long
run, a hankering for more lamb or lamblike delicacies, put­
ting a person back in the position of the perpetually frus­
trated individual for whom enough is always too little.
These calculations-which pleasures lead to future pain and
which pains lead to future pleasure--comprised a good deal
of the discussions around that table in Epicurus's Garden.
The deliberations could get particularly tricky when they
touched on questions of the relativity of measurement. What
if a man in physical pain is administered tincture of poppy­
opium-and subsequently reports that not only is his pain
gone but he is also experiencing more pleasure than he ever