EPICURUS AND THE LIFE OF PLEASURE
sometimes abbreviate the definition of katastematic pleasure to ‘the absence of pain’, the full and proper account is that it is the feeling or awareness of that absence of pain. Otherwise, it would entail that inanimate things and the dead would be having pleasures. Pleasure is a feature of experience, as both the Epicureans and their critics are well aware.13 Although this is not how the term ‘pleasure’ (hedonê in Greek, Latin voluptas) is ordinarily used,14 the Epicureans argue that experiencing the absence of pain is no less a pleasure than is feeling a delightful sensation: [W]hen we are freed from pain, we take delight in that very liberation and release from all that is distressing. Now everything in which one takes delight is a pleasure (just as everything that distresses one is a pain). And so every release from pain is rightly termed a pleasure. (Fin. 1.37) For example, being thirsty is a pain or discomfort. Drinking when thirsty is a kinetic pleasure. The condition of not being thirsty – that is, of not experiencing the pain of thirst, is a static pleasure. In every case in which a pain is removed, a static pleasure results. (Fin. 1.37–39; DL 10.136). Thus there is no intermediate condition between feeling pain and feeling pleasure: ‘whoever is to any degree conscious of how he is feeling must to that extent be feeling either pleasure or pain’ (Fin. 1.38).15 According to the Epicureans, experiencing the absence of pain is not only a pleasure, it is indeed a greater pleasure than kinetic pleasures: ‘the absence of all pain [Epicurus] held to be not only true pleasure, but the highest (summam) pleasure’ (Fin. I 38). This is not to say that static pleasure is more pleasant than kinetic pleasure when measured on the same scale. Rather, he thinks, the two types of pleasure cannot be compared on the same scale at all. This is because kinetic pleasure admits of both increase and diminution, while static pleasure does not. (Fin. 1.38, 2.10; TD 3.47, KD 18, DL 10.121). We can appreciate this point as follows. When one is feeling pained or distressed, this distress will be lessened as each pain is eliminated, but once all pain has been removed, one has achieved the upper limit (peras) of ‘freedom from pain’. The sorts of kinetic pleasures one experiences en route to this freedom from pain, or subsequent to achieving it, will only ‘vary’, but not increase the static pleasure (KD 18). For example, one can achieve freedom from the bodily distress of hunger and thirst by eating bread and water, or by consuming Champagne and caviar. But neither of these very different ‘kinetic’ routes to the condition of bodily satisfaction produces any greater freedom from the pains of hunger and thirst than the other. Similarly, once one is no longer hungry and thirsty, one might enjoy the further kinetic pleasures of listening to music, or smelling flowers, 99