Philosophical treatise: Principal Doctrines

Overview
Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines present forty compact maxims designed to secure a life of undisturbed happiness through sober reasoning, measured desire, and clear views of nature. The aim is ataraxia, the calm of a mind free from fear, joined with aponia, the body’s freedom from pain. Ethics rests on how pleasure and pain actually work in human experience, and on removing false beliefs, about gods, fate, and death, that agitate the soul.

Pleasure, Pain, and the Good
Pleasure is the first and native good, yet its completion is not constant stimulation but the stable state in which bodily pain and mental turmoil are absent. Such “katastematic” pleasure sets a natural limit: once pain is removed, adding more stimulation does not increase blessedness, though it may vary experience. Prudence ranks as the chief virtue because it teaches which pleasures to choose and which pains to accept for greater long-term ease. All the virtues, prudence, justice, moderation, courage, are instruments of tranquility, inseparable from a pleasant life.

Desires and Prudence
Desires fall into natural and necessary (for health, bodily comfort, and peace of mind), natural but unnecessary (varieties and refinements), and groundless or empty (for fame, power, and limitless wealth). Happiness requires simplifying wants, satisfying the natural and necessary with modest means, and treating the others cautiously or rejecting them. Sometimes one accepts short pains for greater future serenity, and sometimes one declines tempting pleasures when they carry heavy disturbance. Self-sufficiency is prized, not as deprivation, but as the richest strategy for consistently secure enjoyment.

Death and the Gods
Death is nothing to us: where we are, death is not; where death is, we are not. The soul is bodily and dissolves with the body, so there is no feeling after death and no punishment to fear. The gods exist as blessed and imperishable beings, but their perfect nature precludes meddling in human affairs or anger toward mortals. Genuine piety consists in honoring their blessedness, not trembling before imaginary providence; freeing oneself from superstitious fear is a major source of serenity.

Justice and Social Life
Justice is a covenant grounded in mutual advantage, a pledge neither to harm nor be harmed so that all may live undisturbed. It has no absolute form independent of benefit; laws and norms are just when they actually secure mutual safety and become unjust when they fail to do so. Wrongdoing is self-defeating, breeding suspicion and constant fear of detection, which is a worse pain than any external penalty. Friendship ranks among the greatest goods, providing trustworthy affection and protection; the wise person lives gratefully among friends while remaining capable of contented independence.

Time, Fortune, and Security
The measure of a pleasant life is not endless time but the removal of disturbance; one who understands the limit of desire can live as happily in shorter time as in longer. Memory of past pleasures and gratitude for present goods counterbalance pains; intense pains are often brief, and chronic ones are tolerable when set against calm recollection and hope. Some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some through our own agency; praise and blame apply where deliberate choice operates, not to fate. True security grows from modest needs, honest compacts, and a quiet life rather than from ambition or domination, and the greatest wealth is to need little.