The Word "Epicurean" Has Betrayed Epicurus

When someone calls themselves an "Epicurean" today, they usually mean they enjoy a good meal at an expensive restaurant. The word has come to signify a refined appetite, a taste for the finer things — a person who lingers over the wine list.

Epicurus would have been baffled by this. And a little insulted.

Yes, he taught that pleasure is the greatest good. On that single point, his modern namesakes are correct. But watch what happens when you follow the premise where he actually took it. For Epicurus, happiness was the only legitimate goal of a human life — and happiness, he insisted, was not the presence of delight but the absence of disturbance. Freedom from anxiety. And since the deepest anxiety of all is the fear of death and what might come after it, the path to happiness runs, strangely, through physics. You have to understand the true nature of the universe — atoms drifting through infinite void, no gods micromanaging your fate, no afterlife to dread — before you can stop being afraid.

That's the part the Williams-Sonoma crowd tends to skip.

The Greek word to hold onto is ataraxia — the tranquility that comes from being sufficient in oneself. This is the actual goal, and it is nearly the opposite of indulgence. You reach it not by adding pleasures but by subtracting sources of unnecessary disturbance. And the list of disturbances Epicurus wanted removed is where the whole thing turns radical: no politics. Probably no marriage. Friendship, yes — friendship he loved — but ambition, public life, and most of the machinery people build their identities around, no. The pleasure he prescribed was closer to a quiet garden and a settled mind than to a tasting menu.

This is why the philosophy was genuinely controversial, not just quirky. It drew high-profile Roman followers and furious enemies. Cicero attacked it for rejecting traditional religion and for its retreat from civic duty — a serious charge in a culture that measured a man by his public life. Plutarch wrote entire treatises against it, one bearing the wonderfully blunt title It Is Not Possible to Live Pleasurably According to the Doctrines of Epicurus.

Which is the real question, and a better one than it looks. A creed that promises pleasure by telling you to want less, to withdraw, to make peace with oblivion — does that deliver joy, or does it just talk you out of caring? The modern Epicurean, ironically, has answered by keeping the pleasure and quietly ditching everything that made it a discipline.

Worth turning over. Preferably over a good dinner — the kind Epicurus would have suspected you of enjoying for the wrong reasons.

Distilled from Open Culture