Ancient Recipes: Epicurus and the Stoics — Happiness 2 (C1)

HAPPINESS · LESSON 2

Ancient Recipes: Epicurus and the Stoics

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Who said it?

Task For each line, write E (Epicurus), S (the Stoics) or N (neither). Then agree on the one line you are most sure of, and say why.

5. Of everything wisdom gives us for a happy life, by far the greatest is friendship.

1. Death is nothing to us.

2. People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.

6. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

3. Bread and water give the highest pleasure to someone who is hungry.

7. Live in agreement with nature.

4. Health, wealth and a good reputation are not good in themselves.

8. The right act is the one that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

A

TEXT A · PARTNER A ONLY

The Garden

Task Partner A only. Read Text A. You will explain it to your partner without reading it out, so note three ideas you must not forget.

Around 306 BCE, Epicurus (341–270 BCE) bought a house with a garden in Athens and opened a school there. Its members lived simply, as a community of friends, and, unusually for the time, it admitted women.

Epicurus was a hedonist: pleasure is the only thing good in itself, and pain the only thing bad. His critics took this as a licence to indulge. He meant the opposite: "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul" (Letter to Menoeceus, trans. Hicks). The highest pleasure is a settled state, not a thrill: aponia, freedom from bodily pain, and ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance. Once hunger is gone, more food can vary your pleasure, but it cannot increase it.

The way there is to manage desire.

A

TEXT A · PARTNER A ONLY · CONTINUED

The Garden

Some desires are natural and necessary, like food, shelter and safety. Some are natural but unnecessary, like fine food: harmless, if you don't come to depend on them. Others are empty: fame, power, great wealth. They have no natural limit, so they can never be satisfied. Drop them, and a simple life is easy to fill: bread and water "confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips". Of everything wisdom provides for a happy life, Epicurus said, by far the most important is friendship.

The worst troubles of the mind are fears, above all of the gods and of death. The gods, he argued, live in bliss and take no interest

in us. And death "is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not". There is no one left to suffer it. Later followers condensed the teaching into the fourfold remedy (tetrapharmakos), preserved by the Epicurean Philodemus on a papyrus found at Herculaneum: don't fear god; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.

Within a few generations, his enemies had made his name a byword for indulgence. In English, an "epicure" was a sensualist by the 1560s and a lover of fine food by the 1580s.

B

TEXT B · PARTNER B ONLY

The Painted Porch

Task Partner B only. Read Text B. You will explain it to your partner without reading it out, so note three ideas you must not forget.

Around 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium, from Cyprus, began teaching in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, a public colonnade in the centre of Athens. The school is named after it. Its best-known voices are Roman: Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), adviser to the emperor Nero; Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 CE), born a slave, later freed, who taught at Nicopolis in Greece; and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), whose private notebook we call the Meditations.

The Stoics' central claim is severe: virtue (wisdom, justice, courage and self-control) is the only good, and vice the only evil. Everything else, including health, wealth and reputation, is an indifferent.

B

TEXT B · PARTNER B ONLY · CONTINUED

The Painted Porch

Not worthless: health and wealth are preferred indifferents, sensible to pursue, and sickness and poverty are dispreferred. But they cannot make a life good or bad. A just person who is poor and ill is living well; a rich, healthy villain is not.

Epictetus turned this into a method. His Handbook (Enchiridion) opens with what is now called the dichotomy of control: "Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office" (trans. Higginson). We suffer when we stake our happiness on things beyond our power. A few lines later: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of

things." Death is not terrible, Epictetus says; the terror lies in our belief that it is.

So for the Stoics, emotions such as fear, grief and anger rest on judgements, often false ones, that something outside us is good or bad. The aim is not to feel nothing but apatheia: freedom from these disturbing passions, while keeping calm joy and goodwill.

Unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics expected the wise to serve in public life, and saw every human being as a citizen of one world. Marcus Aurelius governed through years of war and plague, reminding himself: "Men exist for the sake of one another" (trans. Long).

Rebuild the picture

Task Explain your text to your partner in your own words, without reading it out. Then answer the five questions together, once for Epicurus and once for the Stoics.

Epicurus

The Stoics

1. What is the goal of life?

2. What is the main obstacle to reaching it?

3. What should you do about your desires?

4. Where do other people fit in?

5. Why should you not fear death?

6. On which question do the two schools agree most, and on which do they disagree most?

Who said it? The answers

1

5

E

Death is nothing to us.

Principal Doctrines 2 and the Letter to Menoeceus.

E

Of everything wisdom gives us for a happy life, by far the greatest is friendship.

Principal Doctrines 27.

2

6

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

S

People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.

N

Epictetus, Handbook 5.

A proverb built from two lines of the Hebrew Bible (Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22:13), often wrongly pinned on Epicurus.

3

E

Bread and water give the highest pleasure to someone who is hungry.

7

S

Live in agreement with nature.

The Letter to Menoeceus.

Zeno's formula for the goal of life.

4

Health, wealth and a good reputation are not good in themselves.

8

The right act is the one that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

S

Health, wealth and reputation are "preferred indifferents", not goods.

N

Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century hedonist of a very different kind.

The three answers: your verdict

Task Write P (Pleasure), D (Desire) or F (Flourishing) for Epicurus and for the Stoics, with one reason for each. Then discuss the question underneath.

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

1. Epicurus: P, D or F?

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

2. The Stoics: P, D or F?

Both schools teach you to change what you want instead of getting it. Is that a cure for unhappiness, or a way of cheating?

Epicurus? The Stoics?

Where they sit

Epicurus: Pleasure, but a strange kind. He is a true hedonist: only pleasure is good. But his best pleasure is quiet, the absence of pain and fear, so a calm, modest life beats a feast.

The Stoics: closer to Flourishing. A life goes well if it is virtuous, whatever it feels like and whatever it gets. Their list has a single item: virtue.

Desire: neither. Both reject "getting what you want" as the test. Epicurus prunes empty desires; Epictetus says to want only what is up to you, so that you can never be disappointed.

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

Epicurus: Pleasure (a strange one)

The Stoics: Flourishing

Rewrite: a message at midnight

Task The friend's reply goes wrong. Rewrite it twice in 4–5 sentences: first as an Epicurean friend would answer, then as a Stoic friend would. Use at least two ideas from Text A or Text B in each.

Mateus, 34 · 23:40

Can't sleep again. The promotion went to Ana, after I worked weekends for a year. Now everyone at work will think I'm second-rate. My landlord says the rent goes up in March, and I keep scrolling through flats I could never afford. And Dad gets his test results on Friday and I can't stop imagining the worst. I think I need a big holiday to fix all this. Or a new car. Something.

His friend · 23:52

Forget it! Book the holiday, buy the car, you deserve it. Life's short. And don't think about your dad, I'm sure it'll be fine.

READING

The modern echo

In the 1950s the New York psychologist Albert Ellis developed what is now called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). In Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (1962) he credited its central principle to the ancient Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius among them, and quoted Handbook 5. The psychiatrist Aaron Beck, who developed cognitive therapy in the 1960s, wrote with his colleagues in Cognitive Therapy of Depression (1979) that "the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers."

Both therapies work on the beliefs and interpretations that shape distress. But they borrowed a method, not a theory of the good: no therapist tells a client that health and wealth are indifferent.

The case against

The Epicurean motto was "live unnoticed": stay out of politics and keep your peace. The Greek writer Plutarch wrote a whole essay attacking it. If the wise all withdraw, who runs the city or fights injustice? And is the absence of pain really pleasure? Cicero argued, in On Ends, that Epicurus ran two different things together.

Against Epicurus

Critics find them cold. Epictetus advises that when you kiss your child, you should remind yourself that you are kissing a mortal, so that you can bear the loss. Seneca preached simplicity while being one of the richest men in Rome. Hardest of all: if only my judgements are up to me, should a slave accept slavery, or a citizen a tyrant? Stoics reply that their own heroes defied tyrants, and that what we do, unlike what happens to us, is always up to us.

Against the Stoics

Garden or Porch?

Task Discuss as many questions as you can. Choose the one you disagree on most and bring it back to the main room.

1. Is a calm life with no pain or fear the best life, or is something missing?

2. Could anyone really live well while poor, ill or in prison, as the Stoics claim?

3. Is it wise or selfish to stay out of politics to protect your peace of mind?

4. Would you want a friend who loved you "as a mortal", ready to lose you calmly?

5. Where you live, are wealth and fame treated as natural desires or empty ones?

6. Does "it's not up to me" help people cope, or help them accept what they should change?

Up to me?

Task Alone and privately: write a short list of things that worried you this week (small ones are fine). Mark each U (up to me), N (not up to me) or P (partly up to me). Nobody will see your list, and you don't have to share anything.

Lighter alternative: sort Mateus's worries from "Rewrite: a message at midnight" instead.

1. Was the line between U and N easy to draw, or did most things land on P?

2. Is anything fully up to us, even our own judgements?

3. Does sorting a worry change how it feels, or only how it looks?

4. Epictetus says reputation is not up to us. Is he right?

Before Lesson 3

This week, notice one moment when your day went well. Was it pleasure, getting what you wanted, or doing something well?

Pleasure

It can be small: a meal, a finished job, a good conversation. Note which of the three answers fits it best, and whether the Garden or the Porch would call it happiness.

Desire

Flourishing

Next lesson: Flourishing: From Aristotle to Positive Psychology. Is a good life the same as a happy one?

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

WHO SAID IT? The answers and sources are on "Who said it? The answers". Line 4 is a fair trap: Epicurus would also deny that wealth and reputation are good in themselves, but he would count health (freedom from bodily pain) as part of the goal, so S is the better answer.

REBUILD THE PICTURE suggested; question 6 is open

1 Goal. Epicurus: pleasure, understood as freedom from bodily pain (aponia) and mental disturbance (ataraxia). Stoics: virtue, living in agreement with nature.

2 Obstacle. Epicurus: empty desires and fear of the gods and death. Stoics: false judgements, and staking happiness on what is beyond our power.

3 Desires. Epicurus: keep the natural and necessary, enjoy the natural but unnecessary without depending on them, drop the empty. Stoics: desire only what is up to you; treat health and wealth as preferred indifferents, not goods.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

4 Other people. Epicurus: friendship is the greatest means to a happy life; avoid politics. Stoics: serve in public life; every human being is a fellow citizen of one world.

5 Death. Epicurus: when death is, we are not, so there is no one to suffer it. Stoics: death is not terrible in itself; the terror is our judgement about it.

THE THREE ANSWERS: YOUR VERDICT See "Where they sit": Epicurus, P; the Stoics, F (arguable). Neither school is a D theory.

REWRITE: A MESSAGE AT MIDNIGHT (no single right answer). A good Epicurean reply sorts Mateus's desires (the promotion's status and the dream flat look empty; the holiday and car are natural but unnecessary at best), points him to friends and simple pleasures, and says that fear of what may come is the real trouble. A good Stoic reply separates what is up to him (his work, his response, being there for his father on Friday) from what is not (Ana's promotion, other people's opinions, the rent, the test results), and treats "second-rate" as his judgement, not a fact. Both should drop "you deserve it" and "don't think about your dad".