Note 5 — Chapter XIX · THE MORAL SCIENCE OF THE EPICUREANS. GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

(2) Freedom from pain. At the same time, this proposition was restricted in the Epicurean system by several considerations. In the first place, neither pleasure nor pain is a simple thing. There are many varieties and degrees of pleasure and pain, and the case may occur in which pleasure has to be secured by the loss of other pleasures, or even by pain, or in which pain can only be avoided by submitting to another pain, or at the cost of some pleasure. In this case Epicurus would have the various feelings of pleasure and pain carefully weighed, and in consideration of the advantages and disadvantages which they confer, would under circumstances advise the good to be treated as an evil, and the evil as a good. He would have pleasure forsworn if it would entail a greater corresponding pain, and pain submitted to if it holds out the prospect of greater pleasure.5 He also agrees with Plato in holding that every positive pleasure presupposes a want, i.e. a pain which it proposes to remove; and hence he concludes that the real aim and object of all pleasure consists in obtaining freedom from pain,6 and that the good is nothing else but emancipation from evil.7 By a Cyrenaic neither repose of soul nor freedom from pain, but a gentle motion of the soul or positive pleasure was proposed as the object of life; and hence happiness was not made to depend on man’s general state of mind, but on the sum-total of his actual enjoyments. But Epicurus, advancing beyond this position, recognised both the positive and the negative side of pleasures, both pleasure as repose, and pleasure as motion.8 Both aspects of pleasure, however, do not stand on the same footing in his system. On the contrary, the essential and immediate cause of happiness is repose of mind—ἀταραξία. Positive pleasure is only an indirect cause of ἀταραξία in that it removes the pain of unsatisfied craving.9 This mental repose, however, depends essentially on the character of a man’s mind, just as conversely positive pleasure in systems so materialistic must depend on sensuous attractions. It was consistent, therefore, on the part of Aristippus to consider bodily gratification the highest pleasure; and conversely Epicurus was no less consistent in subordinating it to gratification of mind.