Epicurus on Living Blessedly

Abstract This chapter develops an interpretation of Epicurus’s hedonism in which the human goal (telos) is identified with the state of living blessedly (to makariôs zên) rather than with happiness (eudaimonia). This goal is attained through the satisfaction of desires directed at natural and necessary goods, whose priority for blessedness is not established by any direct experience of pleasure (as interpretations of Epicurean theory have sometimes proposed), but by rational reflection on what is naturally beneficial for human beings. On this account, living blessedly wholly consists in what Epicurus characterizes as katastematic pleasures, while kinetic pleasures are mere phenomenal variations of these, of no consequence to blessedness itself. Epicurus’s hedonism thus has a more objective character than has sometimes been supposed, requiring rational reflection on human nature and the limits of desire-satisfaction, and differing markedly, in this respect, from the later hedonism of Bentham and Mill.