In my last post, I talk about how Epicureans categorize pleasure, and how Epicureanism is not a mindless justification for gluttony, but a philosophy of happiness with a nuanced analysis of pleasure. In this post, we’ll talk about the three kinds of Epicurean desires, which help us discern what pleasures are worth pursuing.
If you’ve ever read about Epicureanism, you’ve probably heard the Tetrapharmakos1 which says:
Don't fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What’s good is easy to get,
What’s terrible is easy to endure
Epicureans believe “what’s good is easy to get” because they think we take for granted the basic goods of life. To understand that, let’s look at how they conceptualized desire.2
Epicureans believe that we have three kinds of desires: natural and necessary (necessary desires), natural and unnecessary (extravagant desires), and unnatural and unnecessary (corrosive desires).
To attain happiness, you must secure necessary desires, occasionally and prudently indulge in extravagant desires, and shield yourself completely from corrosive desires.
A necessary desire is exactly what it sounds like: your basic needs for life, including food, water, shelter, and social interaction.
An extravagant desire is like a necessary desire, but with unnecessary features: wanting a steak, or a glass of wine, or a house that’s too big for all your things, or being best friends with the coolest person you know. Extravagant desires aren’t inherently bad, but they’re problematic because they can lead us to think we need more than what’s necessary to be happy. When we become dependent on them, they cause pain, both in the cost to obtain them, and in losing access to them.
A corrosive desire is like an extravagant desire, but at an order of magnitude worse, perhaps even to the point of delusion. A corrosive desire would be like wanting to only eat food prepared by Michelin chefs, to only drink the finest wine, to live in a mansion in Beverly Hills (when you don’t work in Hollywood), and to be best friends with the cast of Scrubs.
The problem with corrosive desires is that they reflect poor judgment about one's needs and what is “enough.” Always wanting more, no matter your current state of being, reflects an inability to feel satisfied, leaving one in a perennial painful condition. You can’t solve this problem by desiring more or working to obtain more things, but by curtailing corrosive desires altogether.
We intuit this truth when we understand that there is something wrong with a drug addict, someone who chases the pleasures of a high at great cost to their well-being and relationships. The drug addict will never have “enough” of his high because he has a chemical dependence. The solution to the misery he creates for himself is not to pursue more drugs, but to be satisfied without them altogether.
For the Epicurean, you don’t need a chemical dependence to have corrosive desires. Maybe you’re not desiring a high and pursuing it with drugs, but instead you desire to be a billionaire and pursue it by working obscenely long hours and being cut-throat in your personal and business relationships.
Maybe you desire for your child to be the best piano player in the world, and you become a helicopter parent, denying them key life events and experiences so they can become a virtuoso.
Maybe you desire to be famous on social media, and you get there by being mean, spreading disinformation, demonstrating an unapologetic shamelessness in promoting drama, and denying your responsibility in that drama.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with desiring a high, to be a billionaire, wanting your children to be excellent, or to be famous, but what makes these desires corrosive is that they require a degree of dissatisfaction with one’s circumstances.
Perhaps that dissatisfaction will lead you to success, but the Epicureans believe that we have a limited capacity to feel pleasure at one time. As soon as you achieve your goal, you’ll still feel dissatisfied. You could chase that high, become that billionaire, or become that famous person, and you’d still not feel happy.
The original problem wasn’t that you weren’t high, a parent of a world class talent, a billionaire, or famous, but that you couldn’t savor or feel satisfaction in the pleasures already afforded to you.
What’s worse, in chasing these corrosive desires, you opened yourself up to all kinds of other pains: losing friends over addiction, your children feeling resentful toward you, or getting harassed by strangers who see you as a villain.
And so, if you base your life around chasing corrosive desires, you will always be unhappy because even if you fulfill them, it comes at a steep, painful price. Epicureans reject this state of being, because they aim to reduce painful mental states, which includes anxiety and dissatisfaction.
As we’ll learn in the next post, there are moral implications to the Epicurean theories of pleasure and needs. Namely, if we are prudentially pursuing pleasure and desires, while guarding ourselves from corrosive desires, there are ethical implications in how we should behave.
Translates to “Four-Fold Cure”
I’m going to use Dr. Emily A. Austin’s renaming of these desires because it’s simpler to follow.