1

The Philosophy of the Garden - The Cultivation of the Pleasure of the Self" Epicurus as The Man of Understanding
Epicurus lived at the beginning of what historians call the Hellenistic Age which
followed on for several centuries after the collapse of the Classical Greek World perhaps
best epitomized by the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
The Hellenistic Age is generally agreed to begin with the life of Alexander "The Great"
(b.356 BC-d.323) and end with the battle of Actium where in 31 BC Egypt came under
the dominion of Rome. However, I think the deaths of three key men - all within a year
or two of each other - truly announced the arrival of the Hellenistic Age. I refer to the
deaths of Alexander The Great, Diogenes the Cynic, and Aristotle.
What each of these men represented of the prior age of Classical Greece, died with them,
respectively: political power, refusal of political power, and the power of reason. The
meaning of life once provided by the Classical World to its individuals--that of public
service, that of self-control outside of the Norm, and that of scientific or natural reason-no longer worked for the Hellenistic Age that followed the death of the Classical World.
The conditions that lead to political stability, personal moral commitment outside
religion, politics or custom, and the pursuit of reason as a way of life ended with the
death of these three men. Henceforth, for the Hellenistic Age to follow, politics, personal
morality, and objective reason, failed to provide the basis for the meaning of life.
What rushed in to fill that void were emotional or revelatory religions and superstitions,
big business of private individuals favored by the State, materialistic and hedonistic
lifestyles, egotistical public power pursuits (that is, public service performed for no
principal higher than the individual's self-importance) and brute force when all else
failed.
Epicurus incorporated chance as well as necessity into his philosophy. He worshipped
neither rebellious chance nor dictatorial necessity but the reality of material life which
incorporates both in the gene and its vehicle, the body. The Hellenistic Age was one in
which people felt out of control and took to worshipping Chance as Tyche as well as
giving over control to dogmatic cults such as astrology. For when we worship chance it
is because we feel out of control; and we feel out of control when we as Id-fants rebel
against the natural order of things which we associate with the Id-Father who tries to
control us and tell us what to do - and even if it is what we should do if we wish to live,
we will not to do it just to spite his control and we kill ourselves rather than obey nature.
Thus people worship Tyche when the Father or Norm or God has fallen from power (or
died) and when they have nothing to replace the Father with except sheer irresponsibility
for one's behavior as a regressed Id-fant who refuses to grow up. And so we project our
own disorder out upon the world as the worship of chance.

2
Or, we grow up as Epicurus did and learn as Francis Bacon said that "Nature to be
commanded, it must first be obeyed" - that is, we must choose to do what is necessary to
our nature and reality and therein find our freedom.
The mother principle of unconditional love where the virtue and value of existence is
paramount and the father principle of conditional love where the existence of self-virtue
and self-value is paramount.
Chance and necessity, change and continuity, were the unidualities with which Epicurus
came to terms. In the Hellenistic Age Chance or Fortune - known as the Goddess Tyche reigned supreme for such a time of uncertainty. It was fitting that Epicurus took his
physics from Democritus who wrote, "Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of
chance and necessity."
__________
Epicurus was an Athenian citizen born in 341 BC on the island of Samos off the east
coast of Greece. In 306 Epicurus bought a house in Athens and established a school of
philosophy in its garden. Thus was his school known as "The Garden" or in Greek "Ho
Kepos" and the Epicurean philosophy come to be known as "the Philosophy of the
Garden".
Epicurus' school was in direct competition for students with the two dominant schools of
philosophy in Athens at that time, Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Epicurus
from the beginning taught in an informal manner and what he taught was more a way of
life than a system of ideas. He went against the grain of conventional Greek schools of
philosophy by admitting women, and even one of Epicurus' slaves, called Mouse.
The Epicurean scholar John Gaskin makes the point of the appropriateness of Epicurus'
ideas when he writes,
"The Epicurean idea of an infinite universe of matter and space, indifferent to human
hopes and concerns but whose workings can be understood, is the predominant scientific
idea with which we now live. Mankind...has no significance beyond that which we give
ourselves; no final purpose, no metaphysical or religious objective. We and our world are
like all other things: we form, we grow, we decay and return to the primordial store of the
universe. How then shall we conduct our lives?
"Epicurus' answer is simple. We shall make the very best of the life we have by seeking
happiness and avoiding pain. The first necessity is that we live without fears and worries
which we can avoid. The two great fears that we can avoid are religious fears...and the
fear of death itself. A right understanding of the nature of the universe rids us of both
these fears.
"Epicurean ideas were never intended to be difficult or esoteric or the preserve of the
learned. They were addressed to mankind....We have fellow feeling with the importance

3
Epicurus attaches to happiness in this life, with his desire to diminish pain and overcome
irrational fears, and with the attempt to understand and come to terms with death....the
content of the Epicurean Philosophy - 'the Philosophy of the Garden' as it was often
called - has a more apparent relevance to the world we now know than Christianity
itself."
Which I why I think Epicurus' message is a timely one and just as relevant today for us as
it was for those at the end of the 4th century B.C.
Epicurus' philosophy provided a morality in a form the ordinary person could understand
and practice. In his individualistic and rootless age of social uncertainties, Epicurus
taught a way to develop and use one's self to achieve inward harmony by judicious
relationship to one's environment. He taught self-fulfillment and social happiness in the
management of personal desires by reason. He advocated as did Socrates, selfknowledge based on knowledge of natural reality.
Epicurus was as much a preacher as a philosopher. As the Epicurus' scholar Cyril Bailey
wrote, "Epicurus is primarily a moralist, a preacher of the Gospel of life, who cares
nothing for knowledge and learning as such. But he does care greatly...for a materialist
theory of the universe, based upon a complete trust in the validity of sensation.....
The only writings of his that have come down to us are in the form of a few letters to
various disciples. There are also some several hundred aphorisms recorded or recreated
by others during his life and after his death. The fullest exposition of his philosophy is to
be found in the philosophical poem written by the Roman Lucretius Carus around 50
B.C. called On the Nature of Things. Diogenes Laertius' [circa 250 BC] Lives of the
Famous Philosophers is the main source for information on Epicurus' life.
The usual understanding of the word Epicurean is taken to be a person who delights in
the material good things of life - fine food and drink and the like. The history of the word
taken from Epicurus' name is instructive. In medieval times the negative meaning of
Epicurean reigned.
Epicurus was cast as a "Antichrist of Sensuality". The word became synonymous with
licentious behavior, gluttony and lewdness. Such a inaccurate and deceitful rendering of
Epicurus' teaching began quite early on - in fact even while Epicurus was alive. It first
came from competing schools of philosophy, especially the Stoics, the other main school
besides the Epicureans for contenders to those disenchanted with either Plato's or
Aristotle's teachings.
But it was the growth of Christianity which finally managed to most permanently damage
the reputation of Epicurus. By the mid-4th century AD the Epicurean influence on the
classical world was nearly extinct with the pagan Roman Empire itself soon to follow.
The supernatural Christian promise of life everlasting won out easily over the
natural Epicurean practice of life as defined by the terms of birth and death. Epicurus'
theme of pleasure whose "aim was both to assure happiness and to supply the means to

4
achieve it" - was to become the domain of the devil. Suffering not pleasure was the
purpose of life on earth to earn redemption in the paradise to follow.
***
Now let us enter, with this historical background, the "Philosophy of the Garden".
Pleasure is perhaps the word most associated with Epicurus' philosophy. In today's postindustrial world pleasure is even more a problem then it was in Epicurus' day.
A popular text on behavorial psychology by Brown and Herrnstein frames the pleasure
problem this way: "Drives tie behavior and the environment together in an adaptive way,
promoting both the survival of the organism and its capacity for reproduction....The
feeling of pleasure is not the cause for repeating a rewarding act; rather it is simply the
feeling we get when the act has [been completed to obtain the satisfaction of the need].
[Thus] a given stimulus comes to call forth a given response if the sequence has been
regularly followed by satisfaction or pleasure....[or] a given stimulus would cease calling
forth a response if something disagreeable or unpleasant followed it....psychologists see
rewards and punishments where the casual observer may miss them and because they see
a more pervasive and unavoidable tie between behavior and its consequences."
What is said for psychologists today in learning theory could be said of Epicurus: he
examined pleasure empirically and rationally and came to roughly the same conclusions
as science has today. But now we have, through science and technology, controlled our
environment to the point where we have reversed the natural order of life. Post-industrial
Man uses his life to pursue pleasure. We have reversed the means and ends of life.
Instead of eating to live we live to eat. Biological Man is goal oriented and like all life
forms his fundamental and ruling goal is to live and to further life and he used the means
of pleasure to orient himself towards that goal.
But Western Scientific and Self-Conscious Man has confused the means for the end and
his fundamental and ruling goal has become the pursuit of self-pleasure and he is using
up - literally - the means of his life to achieve this impossible goal. I say impossible for
the obvious reason that to pursue pleasure to the detriment of life is suicidal. Our
personal pleasures can often take precedence over the very value of life itself - as in our
addictions which we continue to pursue to self-destruction.
Western Man is driving himself ever deeper into this dilemma. We are coming to a point
in our Western Civilization where work may not only not be necessary but not even
available. Our age-old problems of adapting to our physical environment may be solved
so completely as to leave us free to pursue whatever we may come up with doing when
we no longer need to support our body with work.
We are entering the kingdom of pleasure and play and we are almost totally unprepared
for this revolution since we do not - most of us - know what to do with our "free" time.
As Thomas Huxley, the Victorian evolutionary biologist said, a man's worst difficulties

5
begin when he is able to do as he likes. For we often find that what we like is not good
for us and that what is good for us we do not like.
Monod: p.24 "All the functional adaptations in living beings...fulfil particular projects
which may be seen as so many aspects...of a unique primary project, which is the
preservation and multiplication of the species.'
What we now adapt to is people as our environment. We have turned the physical
uncertainties into personal ones. [see Gellner from my genius course here]
Our species is known as Homo sapiens which means literally, "Man, the thinking or wise
species". The Latin word from which sapiens is derived actually meant "to have taste or
flavor; to be wise, to know" and is related to the Old English word which meant "mind,
understanding, insight". Our word, savor, meaning to perceive by taste and smell as well
as our words for knowing and wisdom, sapient, savant, and sage, all come from the IndoEuropean base which meant "to taste, perceive".
In the etymology of the word used to describe our species, sapiens, lies an insight into the
human nature and its condition in contrast to its animal predecessors. To have "good
taste" is to possess some sort of knowledge and even, perhaps, wisdom. To be able to
discriminate by our perceptions between what is good for us and what is bad for us is the
essence of human wisdom and it is also what we have come to call morality. What
smelled and tasted good to ancient Man is what kept him alive; what smelled and tasted
bad was what could kill him. We evolved to use our pleasure as the source of our
judgmental knowledge - we were motivated and moved to pursue the good tastes that
gave pleasure and to avoid the bad tastes that gave pain.
But for Modern Man we evolved via our cultural science and technology beyond our
biology to the point we no longer can use - at least without critical thought - our pleasure
sense, our good smell and taste sense to guide us as we used to do. Epicurus can help us
to retrieve our sense of good taste and smell, our native wisdom where we can choose
what is good for us and have it match what we also like.
One of the three letters of Epicurus still remaining is titled "The Happy Life" and he
writes in it, "For we recognize pleasure as the primary and natural desire, and we return
to it in all our judgments of the good, taking the feeling of pleasure as our guide." But
note well, pleasure and happiness are results or consequences of actions or behaviors,
they are not objects of desire themselves, actual things to be pursued and obtained.
What Epicurus taught was that pleasure and happiness arise naturally when the conditions
for living adaptively are present. How to achieve those adaptive conditions is what he is
really teaching. What Epicurus saw that was keeping people from attaining this
equilibrium state necessary for pleasure to operate, was best captured in the word Fear.
For it was fear of the fundamentals of the human condition that drove people to pursue
pleasure mindlessly and thus, paradoxically, to end in pain and self-destructive behavior.
Epicurus saw - as every philosopher does who is worthy of the name philosopher - that

6
the desire to know is what must be encouraged and focussed on if we are to free of fear.
The freedom that Epicurus most valued was freedom from fear which can only come
when knowledge displaces the fear caused by ignorance.
Epicurus' life is an example of the wisdom that if - as is true - the unexamined life is not
worth living, it is also true that the unlived life is not worth examining. Thus Epicurus
emphasis on the ordinary pleasures of life as when he writes: "We must laugh and
philosophize at the same time and do our household duties and employ our other
faculties....The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its
continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it."
Epicurus counsels acceptance of life's pains and tragedies and that one can only really
control one's perceptions of events and not the events themselves. Control of the self is
substituted for control of the environment (at least when the environment cannot be
controlled). Yet one must take this with some levity as the modern philosopher Ernest
Gellner implies when he writes, "The Stoic view [actually Epicurus appeared to
pronounce this view even before the Stoics] was that the good man (one who accepts
reality and adjusts his desires to it could be happy even on the rack. As an undergraduate
allegedly said to Dr Jowett [famous translator of Plato], this would require a very good
man on a very bad rack."
So in our Garden we must cultivate the pleasure of wisdom so we can reap the wisdom of
pleasure. Wisdom, or knowledge understood, frees us from fear since fear comes from
ignorance. The etymology of the word fear is useful here. The English word comes from
the Greek word meaning "trial, attempt, experience" which gave us also our words, peril,
experiment, and experience.
The Greek word itself is derived from the Indo-European base which means to lead
across or drive through or carry over or pass beyond. As Will Durant writes "to
understand is the highest virtue [and] the highest happiness, for it avails us more than any
other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only liberator: it frees us from
bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread of death." [Durant p.648
V.2 The Life of Greece]
The "Garden of Philosophy" is about cultivating the mind as reason. The word "garden"
derives as does the word hortus of horticulture from the IE base ghed- meaning to
enclose, boundary, limit. This base is related to another IE base gher- meaning to seize
from which our words such as comprehend and prey are derived. A garden is an enclosed
place and the mind works by enclosing or grasping an event or an aspect of experience to
make one's own - to cultivate and to thus understand. Life as an ongoing process of
living is a continuous event and to use the mind is to define or delimit - mark out and
capture - some pattern of life so it can be examined out of the flow of existence. The
mind encloses a space of time - a garden in which understanding can grow.
We enclose our garden of reason and thought in order to evaluate the irrational and
thoughtless elements of our life. Only by ordering by enclosure of experience can we

7
examine aspects of life to objectively analyze and evaluate them. We can usefully
examine aberrant forms of life within our garden and judge their maladaptive
development by comparison to the adaptive environment established by our garden.
For Epicurus, the fear of the gods and the fear of death are the two prototypical fears of
the human experience. Fear of god is really the fear of the unknown or of the "unnatural", ie, the unexplainable and the harm it does to us is that it forces us to try and
explain the known in terms of the unknown rather than the other way round; and fear of
death is really the fear of loss, of abandonment, of not belonging and being valued and
approved of and the harm it does us when we seek substitutes for growing up and
learning to trade value for value.
What Epicurus is really teaching is that morality comes from the recognition of mortality,
from an understanding and necessary acceptance of the terms of life and its natural
limitation. Philodemus, a student of Epicurus summed it in four lines: "Nothing to fear in
God./Nothing to feel in Death./Good can be attained./Evil can be endured."
What wisdom does for us is to lead us across and through and beyond the ignorant fears
of experience - the perils of life. Wisdom allows us to learn from experience and history
so as to not have to repeat the same mistakes. We learn new ways to go through life to
better enjoy it and obtain the pleasures inherent in it despite the pains and griefs which
are inevitable. For if we do not gain pleasure from living why live?
And pleasure only comes to the person wise enough to choose to live in such a way as to
allow it to grow. For pleasure to grow, the ground of being and life must be leveled,
cultivated - wisely understood. The etymology of pleasure shows its Indo-European root
meaning "to smooth, make even" from which our English words, please, plain, plan, plant
come.
Epicurus taught the leveling of the up and down of desire, the smoothing out of the jerky
reactions to life. You can only arrive at this pleasing state through the wisdom of
understanding yourself and your world as a natural process of each adapting to the other of learning how to fit in to the order of things as they are. Epicurus knew of the
"hedonistic paradox" implicit in all attempts to pursue pleasure as a way of life - that it
never worked. The more we pursue pleasure the less we achieve it. True pleasure can
only result from the attainment of wisdom.
Now, how do we cultivate our own Garden, level out our lumpy, difficult to manage bed
of competing and upsetting desires and attain the blooms of our efforts: tranquil pleasure
and fulfilling happiness?
PANSY from French pensee 'thought, pansy' of penser 'to think' from Latin pensare 'to
weight carefully, examine, ponder, consider'; so called because it is regarded as the
symbol of though or remembrance. Pendant: L. pendere 'to hang down' related to L.
pendere lit. 'to cause to hang down, hold in suspension' when 'to weigh, weigh out; to
value, esteem'

Epicurus has some specific guidance for us here. And really his advice to us is not much
different than what science has discovered in learning theory of human behavior. And
that is: if we wish to control ourselves to obtain true pleasure (naturally sustainable) then
we must relate our behavior to consequences and use the feedback implicit in adapting to
our circumstances - the feedback of experience subjected to reason grounded on the value
of life as the mediating event.
What's the matter with matter, Epicurus asked. Banish the projections of the mind: spirit
- and you banish most of the fears of Man. That we have happened by the chance
movement of atoms and come to be by necessity of the 2nd law, should not be taken to
mean we are therefore without meaning because without a cosmic purpose. What is it
that makes us so afraid of being only matter? Is the only way we can matter to ourselves
is to imagine we are not matter but only bodyless spirit?
Science destroys spiritual meaning and purpose which must be taken on faith and
continued in ignorance. To reduce Man to the movement of matter in space is to subject
all his projective, subjective meanings to objective analysis which breaks down that
synthetic coverup of divine ignorance to natural laws of chance and necessity.
As Gellner writes, "Reductionism...is the view that everything in theis world is really
something else, and that the something else is always in the end unedifying. There is no
escape: it is not the content, the kind of explanation which dehumanizes us; it is any
genuine explanation, as such, that does it....[those who can't accept such a view] invent a
variety of...inherently absurd dogmas...forces or realms which are beyond the reach of
explanation...to protect their world from erosion by science."
Monod, p.108 "...the entire system is totally, intensely conservative, locked into itself,
utterly impervious to any 'hints' from the outside world. By its properties...between DNA
and protein, as between organism and medium, an entirely one-way relationship, this
system obviously defies 'dialectical' description. It is not Hegelian at all, but thoroughly
Cartesian: the cell is indeed a machine....there is no conceivable mechanism in existence
whereby any instruction or piece of information could be transferred to DNA."
***
"The Philosophy of the Garden" - Epicurus and the Epicureans
Epicurus was an Athenian citizen born in 341 BC on the island of Samos off the east
coast of Greece. In 306 Epicurus bought a house in Athens and established a school of
philosophy in its garden. Thus was his school known as "The Garden" or in Greek "Ho
Kepos" and the Epicurean philosophy come to be known as "the Philosophy of the
Garden".
Epicurus' school was in direct competition for students with the two dominant schools of
philosophy in Athens at that time, Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Epicurus
from the beginning taught in an informal manner and what he taught was more a way of

9
life than a system of ideas. He went against the grain of conventional Greek schools of
philosophy by admitting women, and even one of Epicurus' slaves, called Mouse.
The age that Epicurus lived in - called by historians the Hellenistic age - was one of great
change and uncertainty. The Greek City States were conquered by the "barbarian"
Macedonian, Alexander.
***
After the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. and Aristotle in 322, as Bertrand Russell wrote
in his History of Western Philosophy,
"...the Hellenistic world was sinking into chaos, for lack of a despot strong enough to
achieve stable supremacy, or a principle powerful enough to produce social
cohesion....there was no longer any incentive to take an interest in public affairs. There
was widespread social discontent and fear of revolution.
"The new cities...had not the same traditions as the old. Their citizens were not of
homogeneous origin. The influence of non-Greek religion and superstition...was mainly,
but not wholly, bad. 'Astrology,' says Professor Gilbert Murray, 'fell upon the Hellenistic
mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people....the majority of even the
best philosophers fell in with the belief in astrology. The general confusion was bound to
bring moral decay, even more than intellectual enfeeblement. Ages of prolonged
uncertainty...are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens.
"Menander [a Greek poet], who belongs to this age, says: 'So many cases I have
known/Of men who, though not naturally rogues,/Became so, through misfortune, by
constraint.' This sums up the moral character [of the Hellenistic age]...except for a few
exceptional men. Even among these few, fear took the place of hope; the purpose of life
was rather to escape misfortune than to achieve any positive good. 'Metaphysics sink
into the background, and ethics, now individual, become of the first importance.
Philosophy is no longer the pillar of fire going before a few intrepid seekers after truth: it
is rather an ambulance following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up
the weak and wounded.' [C.F. Angus]
***
The historian, Will Durant, adds to our picture of this time:
"Superstition spread while science reached its apogee....people took it for granted that the
stars were gods who ruled in detail the destinies of individuals and states....everywhere
the Hellenistic world worshipped Tyche, the great god Chance....neither faith nor
patriotism survived in the educated Greek....the growth of knowledge had secularized
morals, marriage, parentage, and law....the pursuit of pleasure consumed the adult life of
the upper classes.

10
"Education spread, but spread thin...it stressed knowledge more than character, and
produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved
about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state. Sexual morality was
relaxed even beyond the loose standards of the Periclean age. Homosexuality remained
popular; the youth Delphis 'is in love,' says Theocritus' Simaetha, 'but whether for a
woman or for a man I cannot say.'
"The courtesan still reigned: Demetrius Poliorcetes levied a tax of $750,000 upon the
Athenians, and then gave it to his mistress Lamia on the ground that she needed it for
soap; which led the angry Athenians to remark how unclean the lady must be. Dances of
naked women were accepted as part of the mores...Athenian life was portrayed in
Menander's plays as a round of triviality, seduction and adultery.
"The partial emancipation of woman was accompanied by a revolt against wholesale
maternity, and the limitation of the family became the outstanding social phenomenon of
the age. When a child came it was in many cases exposed [left to die outdoors]. Only
one family in a hundred...reared more than one daughter. Families with no child, or only
one, were numerous.
"Philosophers condoned infanticide as reducing the pressure of population; but when the
lower classes took up the practice on a large scale, the death rate overtook the birth rate.
Religion, which had once frightened men into fertility lest their dead souls be untended,
no longer had the power to outweigh considerations of comfort and cost. 'In our time',
wrote Polybius [Greek historian], 'Greece has been subject to a low birth rate [and] the
cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit....For as men had fallen
into such a state of luxury, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or, if
they married, to rear the children born to them....' "
***
This then is the anxious, superstitous, post-rational, birth-barren age that Epicurus came
into and in which he founded his school. Such a time helps explain the slant of his
philosophy and its popularity. There was a crying out for a sense of identity and moral
guidance to give order to the social chaos. Doesn't this Hellenistic age sound familiar? I
think it parallels in many ways our modern Western society as we near the end of the 20th
century A.D. Which I why I think Epicurus' message is a timely one and just as relevant
today for us as it was for those at the end of the 4th century B.C.
Epicurus' philosophy provided a morality in a form the ordinary person could understand
and practice. In his individualistic and rootless age of social uncertainties, Epicurus
taught a way to develop and use one's self to achieve inward harmony by judicious
relationship to one's environment. He taught self-fulfillment and social happiness in the
management of personal desires by reason. He advocated as did Socrates, selfknowledge based on knowledge of natural reality.

11
The only writings of his that have come down to us are in the form of a few letters to
various disciples. There are also some several hundred aphorisms recorded or recreated
by others during his life and after his death. The fullest exposition of his philosophy is to
be found in the philosophical poem written by the Roman Lucretius Carus around 50
B.C. called On the Nature of Things. Diogenes Laertius' [circa 250 BC] Lives of the
Famous Philosophers is the main source for information on Epicurus' life.
The usual understanding of the word Epicurean is taken to be a person who delights in
the material good things of life - fine food and drink and the like. The history of the word
taken from Epicurus' name is instructive. In medieval times the negative meaning of
Epicurean reigned. Epicurus was cast as a "Antichrist of Sensuality". The word became
synonymous with licentious behavior, gluttony and lewdness.
Such a inaccurate and deceitful rendering of Epicurus' teaching began quite early on - in
fact even while Epicurus was alive. It first came from competing schools of philosophy,
especially the Stoics, the other main school besides the Epicureans for contenders to
those disenchanted with either Plato's or Aristotle's teachings.
But it was the growth of Christianity which finally managed to most permanently damage
the reputation of Epicurus. By the mid-4th century AD the Epicurean influence on the
classical world was nearly extinct with the pagan Roman Empire itself soon to follow.
The supernatural Christian promise of life everlasting won out easily over the
natural Epicurean practice of life as defined by the terms of birth and death. Epicurus'
theme of pleasure whose "aim was both to assure happiness and to supply the means to
achieve it" - was to become the domain of the devil. Suffering not pleasure was the
purpose of life on earth to earn redemption in the paradise to follow.
***
Now let us enter, with this historical background, the "Philosophy of the Garden".
Pleasure and happiness are perhaps the words most associated with Epicurus philosophy.
One of the three letters of Epicurus still remaining is titled "The Happy Life" and he
writes in it, "For we recognize pleasure as the primary and natural desire, and we return
to it in all our judgments of the good, taking the feeling of pleasure as our guide." But
note well, pleasure and happiness are results or consequences of actions or behaviors,
they are not objects of desire themselves, actual things to be pursued and obtained.
What Epicurus taught was that pleasure and happiness arise naturally when the conditions
for living adaptively are present. How to achieve those adaptive conditions is what he is
really teaching. What Epicurus saw that was keeping people from attaining this
equilibrium state necessary for pleasure to operate, was best captured in the word Fear.
For it was fear of the fundamentals of the human condition that drove people to pursue
pleasure mindlessly and thus, paradoxically, to end in pain and self-destructive behavior.
Epicurus saw - as every philosopher does who is worthy of the name philosopher - that
the desire to know is what must be encouraged and focussed on if we are to free of fear.

12
The freedom that Epicurus most valued was freedom from fear which can only come
when knowledge displaces the fear caused by ignorance.
So in our Garden we must cultivate the pleasure of wisdom so we can reap the wisdom of
pleasure. Wisdom, or knowledge understood, frees us from fear since fear comes from
ignorance. The etymology of the word fear is useful here. The English word comes from
the Greek word meaning "trial, attempt, experience" which gave us also our words, peril,
experiment, and experience. The Greek word itself is derived from the Indo-European
base which means to lead across or drive through or carry over or pass beyond. As Will
Durant writes "to understand is the highest virtue [and] the highest happiness, for it avails
us more than any other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only
liberator: it frees us from bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread
of death." [Durant p.648 V.2 The Life of Greece]
For Epicurus, the fear of the gods and the fear of death are the two prototypical fears of
the human experience. Fear of god is really the fear of the unknown or of the "unnatural", ie, the unexplainable; and fear of death is really the fear of loss, of
abandonment, of not belonging and being valued and approved of. What Epicurus is
really teaching is that morality comes from the recognition of mortality, from an
understanding and necessary acceptance of the terms of life and its natural limitation.
Philodemus, a student of Epicurus summed it in four lines: "Nothing to fear in
God./Nothing to feel in Death./Good can be attained./Evil can be endured."
What wisdom does for us is to lead us across and through and beyond the ignorant fears
of experience - the perils of life. Wisdom allows us to learn from experience and history
so as to not have to repeat the same mistakes. We learn new ways to go through life to
better enjoy it and obtain the pleasures inherent in it despite the pains and griefs which
are inevitable. For if we do not gain pleasure from living why live? And pleasure only
comes to the person wise enough to choose to live in such a way as to allow it to grow.
For pleasure to grow, the ground of being and life must be leveled, cultivated - wisely
understood. The etymology of pleasure shows its Indo-European root meaning "to
smooth, make even" from which our English words, please, plain, plan, plant come.
Epicurus taught the leveling of the up and down of desire, the smoothing out of the jerky
reactions to life. You can only arrive at this pleasing state through the wisdom of
understanding yourself and your world as a natural process of each adapting to the other of learning how to fit in to the order of things as they are. Epicurus knew of the
"hedonistic paradox" implicit in all attempts to pursue pleasure as a way of life - that it
never worked. The more we pursue pleasure the less we achieve it. True pleasure can
only result from the attainment of wisdom which comes from understanding the nature of
reality and human desire - that is, what we value derives from polar or oppositional pairs.
***
C.A. Mace, Control of the Mind, p.154,

13
[we no longer obtain pleasure as a reward for correct living; we now live incorrectly in
order to obtain pleasure]
"Affluent man does not need to work; he is not required to engage in any effortful
activity. What is there left for him to do?...two kinds of activities remain...he can play,
and he can cultivate the arts. [There is a] reversal of the means-end relation [and] the
enjoyment of an activity for its own sake...without regard to its biological or economic
utility....observe the close similarity between the life of a domesticated cat and the life of
an English gentleman: freed from the need to obtain the basic essentials of life, they both
no longer kill to live, they live to kill.
"When men are no longer compelled to work to satisfy needs or when work is turned into
play, the machine begins to operate in a different way. The instruments of response can
now work not merely to produce a goal percept signifying the realization of innately
determined biological end, but also to give enjoyment of the activity itself. Climbing a
mountain and playing a round of gold are biologically pointless pursuits. Sooner or later
it may be necessary to face up to the fact that many of the most important of human
satisfactions, especially the pleasures known in civilized living, are derived from
biologically pointless activities.
"Man no longer eats to live, he lives to eat...no longer works to live but lives to work.
Work has become play, an activity to be enjoyed for its own sake. What he does he does
no longer because he must, but because he enjoys it. This reversal of relations involves a
reorganization of the instruments of the organism. Signals no longer are received as
signals for action required for self-preservation. The signals are enjoyed for their own
sake. There is a source of reassurance for those filled with gloom at the prospect of
automation....the few...the scientists and technicians will be sufficiently well motivated by
the tangible rewards of their jobs, their status, and the satisfaction of doing their jobs
well.
"The displaced many - the relatively unskilled and uneducable - will find other activities
worthwhile for their own sake. Affluence is the soil in which perfection flourishes.
When men work only because they must it is not to be wondered at if they skimp their
work. However, when they live to work, they are inevitably impelled to do the job as
well as they can....the displaced unskilled workers will become perfectionists in their
innocent recreational pursuits....It is under conditions of affluence that man is revealed as
what he is: an incorrigible perfectionist." Mace begins, p.147 "To suggest that man can
escape from, or transcend, biological needs might seem to be a fantastically exaggerated
statement.." [Exactly!]
***
Sure, Mace in the eyes/I's, smarting not from intelligence but the riot control police
attempt to curb the "perfection" burning all around because the dope supply dried up
today frustrating the innocent artist's drive to express his Id.
***

14

Donald Heeb,p.49, " it is possible that a child could be brought up to endure a kind of
monotony, in some one sector of normal experience only, that you or I could not tolerate,
and thus produce a class of space-ship pilots[external perception deprivation] [our
EXGENS!] to do our interplanetary explorations for us. But with this would go the risk
of producing unanticipated distortions of the personality - with behavior so aberrant that
he could not be permitted the freedom of society. [guess what, Donald, its happening]
"An outstanding feature of the isolation experiment was the demonstration that
intellectual work - mental activity initiated from without - is wholly essential to the
human being. Now, in one way this is nothing new, except for showing how strong such
a need can be; but mostly we have concealed the fact from ourselves...by giving a special
name 'play', to work that is done for its own sake, and by assuming, when the question
comes up of the man who like useful work, who likes his job and does not want to retire,
that this is an acquired motive, the result of a long-established habit.
"Harlow and others have demonstrated learning and problem solving for its own sake in
the infrahuman animal, where habit is not the explanation and no extrinsic factors such as
the search for prestige or power can be invoked....man [has] an insatiable need for
intellectual activity, environmentally initiated but self-paced."
p. 51 "The comparative data show that the emotional ambivalence is both real and deep
seated. The fear and horror are not the product of special learning or of some abstract
conception of death, but are a reaction in some way to the strange, which both attracts
and repels. Also, the susceptibility increases with intelligence....the number and variety
of causes of emotional disturbance in man appears to be significantly greater than in
chimpanzee.
"Man then is the most emotionally erratic animal as well as the most intelligent....the
apparent immunity of civilized man from irrational fears and angers is mostly due to his
success in setting up an environment in which the precipitating causes are infrequent.
That is, urbanity depends upon an urbane environment. [ghettos!] We live, day by day,
in a sheltered physical world, but also in a sheltered psychological world consisting of the
ordered behavior of our fellows.
"What we call 'civilization' is a kind of behavioral cacoon which fosters the illusion that
civilized man is by nature calm, dispassionate, and logical. This is illusion only....civiliz.
depends on an all-pervasive thought control established in infancy, which both maintains
and is maintained by the social environment, consisting of the behavior of the members
of society. We do not bring up children with open minds and then, when they can reason,
let them reason and make up their minds as they will concerning the acceptability of
incest, the value of courtesy....Instead, we tell them what's what, and to the extent we are
successful as parents and teachers, we see that they take it and make it part of their
mental processes, with no further need of policing.

15
"Man is not inherently a lover of ease, and not, unfortunately, a lover of peace - not all
the time at least. Up to a point, he enjoys trouble and trouble making, and the problem of
social organization may be to provide him with sufficient opportunity for getting into
trouble individually, for the the excitement-producing experience that he needs by his
very nature, without having it result in social disorder and trouble for others.
"The control of thought and behavior is necessary for society to establish and maintain, if
it is to continue in existence, must be based on a genuine understanding of motivation and
of emotional needs, not on Rousseau-like notions about the noble savage misled by bad
teaching, or on the fundamental misconception that man is essentially a rational animal."
***
The Opponent -Process Theory in psychology is based on evidence that the mammalian
brain "is organized to resist any departure from emotional neutrality, regardless of
whether the departure is pleasurable or adversive. Any initial emotional
response...activates a brain-triggered opposing process to counter, or neutralize, that
departure. These counter-mechanisms are fully automatic and unconscious. After
frequent exposure [to an emotional stimulation], the brain gradually acquires the capacity
to counteract the original reaction to the [stimulation].
"The opponent-process essentially suppresses the intensity of the originally felt emotion.
Habituation refers to a tolerance effect in which the brain responds less intensely to any
[pleasureable] stimulus with its repeated presentation. Withdrawal refers to the lingering
effects an opponent-process emotion can have...[due to the removal of the pleasurable
stimulus]. This craving...[for more of the pleasurable stimulus] is the 'cost of pleasure'.
"Repeated pleasures lose much of their pleasantness over time. In fact [they] make one
susceptible to new sources of suffering. When the drug wears off, the date ends, or the
mother leaves, there is, at first a mild craving for the return of the positive emotional
stimulus. This mild craving quickly dissipates, and the individual returns to a baseline
emotion. Repeated encounters [with pleasurable stimulus] soon give rise to the costs of
pleasure. The baseline resting state is now one [of increased] craving for the now absent
stimulus. [And with the repeated stimulus] the emotional experience is one of only
modest pleasure because of emotional habituation. When the stimulus is again removed,
the individual experiences the strongest of sufferings.
"In the same way that repeated pleasures lose much of their pleasantness, repeated
aversive events lose much of their unpleasantness....aversive experiences can make one
potentially capable of experiencing new sources of pleasure [eg, excercise]."
"Opponent-process theory argues that pleasure and aversion can be learned or 'acquired'.
Consider drug usage....The motivation to repeatedly take a drug soon becomes not the
pursuit of pleasure but the avoidance of pain. Hence, for the repeated drug-user there are
now two motivations for taking the drug 1) to experience the drug-induced [high] and 2)

16
to avoid/escape from the brain-triggered acquired negative feeling of agony from the
absence of the drug....such helps explain some of the apparent masochism of everyday
life, as people come to enjoy many initially adversive experiences." (Understanding
Motivation and Emotion - Reeve, p.45)
***
In the Pursuit of Happiness, Myers , speaks of the relativity of pleasure and happiness.
p.51 "we judge various experiences relative to our previous experiences. From our recent
experience we calibrate 'adaptation levels'...we then notice and react to variations up or
down from these levels. What matters is whether things have just changed - for better or
for worse....as our experience changes, relative luxury may even begin to feel like
poverty.
"Happiness is relative also to our social experience. We are always comparing ourselves
to others. And we feel good or bad depending on whom we compare ourselves to. This
simply fact explains why if you escape poverty your happiness increases, yet,
paradoxically, societies do not become happier as they progress from relative poverty to
affluence. Today's ghettos have more cars and TV sets than yesterday's suburbs, yet the
continuing inequalities leave those with small pieces of the growing pie no more
satisfied....happiness shrivels with the gap between what we have and what we want,
what we have and what we expected to have by now, what we have and what our
neighbors have.
"Comparing upward also affects our satisfaction with our relationships, sometimes
causing us to devalue our partners. In experiments, watching X-rated movies simulating
easy and endless sexual ecstasy tends, back in the real world, to diminish satisfaction
with one's own, comparatively less exciting, partner. Even viewing sexually attractive
women on TV or in magazines leads men to devalue their own companions. After gazing
at a perfect 10 in a centerfold, one's own partner seems less appealing - more like a 6 than
an 8."
p.44"whether we base our conclusions on self-reported happiness, rates of depressions, or
teen problems, our becoming much better-off over the last 30 years has not been
accompanied by one iota of increased happiness and life satisfaction. Once beyond
poverty, further economic growth does not appreciably improve human morale.
P.160 "if we are freer to terminate miserable marriages, are marriages that survive
happier? Compared to back when divorce was uncommon, those in today's surviving
marriages are actually less likely to describe their marriage as 'very happy'. Although
married people are still considerably more likely to feel happy than unmarried people, in
recent years the gap has lessened because married women aren't as happy as they once
were and unmarried men and women are happier. p.162 "couples who lived together
before marriage were one third more likely to separate or divorce within a decade. "
p.163 "The number of premarital sexual partners correlates with marital unhappiness."

17
P.165 "Children of divorce are more likely to divorce and less likely to feel happy with
life." p.178 "Never has a culture experienced such comfort and opportunity or such
widespread depression. Never have we been si self-reliant, or so lonely. Never have we
had so much education or such high rates of teen delinquency, despair, and suicide.
"Never have we been so sophisticated about pleasure or so likely to suffer broken or
miserable marriages. Having answered the question of how to make a living, the
question of why we live often comes to mind.
p.189 "Seligman believes that a loss of meaning accentuates today's epidemic depression,
and that finding meaning requires an 'attachment to something larger than the lonely
self....the self is a very poor site for meaning.' William James noted that, ironically, selfesteem rises as pretensions fall. 'Our self-feeling depends entirely on a fraction of which
our pretentions are the denominator and the numerator our success. Thus, Selfesteem=Success divided by Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as well by
diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as
blessed a relief as to get them gratified....' "
p.207 "materialism and self-reliant individualism have deluded us with false promises of
well-being for all. Well-being is found in the renewal of disciplined life-styles,
committed relationships, and the receiving and giving of acceptance. To experience deep
well-being is to be self-confident yet unself-conscious, self-giving yet self-respecting,
realistic yet hope-filled."
***
Now, how do we cultivate our own Garden, level out our lumpy, difficult to manage bed
of competing and upsetting desires and attain the fruits of our efforts: tranquil pleasure
and fulfilling happiness? Epicurus has some specific guidance for us here.