The Key to Happiness According to Epictetus, Epicurus and Aristotle

Raphael's School of Athens - The Key To Happiness, According To 3 Greek Philosophers

Ask three great Greek thinkers what makes a life happy and you get three different answers. Epictetus, the Stoic, said happiness depends on caring only about what is truly in your power: your own judgments and choices. Epicurus said it is a calm, pleasant life free of pain and fear, built on simple needs and good friends. Aristotle said it is eudaimonia, flourishing, which comes from exercising good character and reason throughout a whole life.

None of them meant "happiness" as a passing good mood. For all three it was the state of a life going well as a whole. Below is what each one taught, where they agree and disagree, a few popular misquotes, and how their ideas can be tried out today.

Three answers at a glance

Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE): Separate what is up to you from what is not. Peace comes from wanting only the first.
Epicurus (341–270 BCE): Pleasure is the goal, but the highest pleasure is tranquillity, not indulgence. Cut empty desires, keep friends close, stop fearing death.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE): Humans flourish by doing well what humans distinctively do: acting with reason and virtue, among friends, over a complete life.

The painting at the top is Raphael's School of Athens (1509–1511) in the Vatican, a Renaissance tribute to Greek philosophy in which Aristotle stands at the centre beside Plato.

Epictetus: freedom through what is up to you

Epictetus was born around 50 CE in Hierapolis, in what is now south-western Turkey, and spent part of his life enslaved in Rome to Epaphroditus, an official at Nero's court. After gaining his freedom he studied Stoicism with Musonius Rufus and taught in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Italy around 89 CE. He then opened a school at Nicopolis in Epirus, north-western Greece, and taught there until his death. He wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and condensed them into a short manual, the Enchiridion or Handbook.

His central idea is often called the dichotomy of control. Our opinions, intentions, desires and aversions are ours to direct. Our body, property, reputation and other people's actions are not. Unhappiness comes from tying our peace of mind to the second group. A person who wants only what lies within their own choice cannot be thwarted.

The tool he recommends is to examine every impression before accepting it. The Handbook opens with the advice to tell a harsh impression: "You are an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be." Then ask whether it concerns something up to you. If it does not, it need not disturb you. Modern cognitive behavioural therapy borrowed openly from this idea: what upsets us is often our interpretation of events rather than the events themselves.

A common mix-up: Epictetus did not write the Serenity Prayer. The prayer asking for "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change" was written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the early 1930s, according to research by Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations. It echoes Stoic thought, but the words are Niebuhr's. Likewise, the line often credited to Epictetus about choosing to see yourself as a slave or a free person is a loose summary of his theme, not a sentence from his texts.

Epicurus: pleasure, properly understood

Epicurus was born in 341 BCE to an Athenian family living on the island of Samos. Around 307/306 BCE he bought a house with a garden in Athens and founded a community there that welcomed women and slaves, unusual for its time. The school became known simply as the Garden. According to Diogenes Laertius he wrote around 300 books, but almost all are lost. What survives are three letters, a list of forty "Principal Doctrines", a collection of sayings, and summaries by later writers such as the Roman poet Lucretius.

Epicurus made pleasure the measure of the good life, which earned him a reputation for hedonism he did not deserve. He divided desires into three kinds: natural and necessary (food, shelter, friendship), natural but unnecessary (luxury food, fine clothes) and empty (fame, power, endless wealth), which can never be satisfied. The wise person meets the first, enjoys the second when they come easily, and drops the third.

The goal is a settled state with two parts: aponia, freedom from bodily pain, and ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance. The fifth Principal Doctrine ties this to ethics: you cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly, nor live wisely, honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Justice, for Epicurus, was a practical agreement among people not to harm one another.

His followers summed up the remedy for anxiety in a "fourfold cure", later recorded by Philodemus: the gods are nothing to fear, death is nothing to worry about, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure. Death is nothing to us, Epicurus argued, because when it is here, we are not. Behind this was his physics: everything, including the soul, is made of atoms moving in empty space, and the gods do not intervene in human life.

The Roman Stoic Seneca, no Epicurean himself, recorded the welcoming inscription on the Garden's gate in his twenty-first letter to Lucilius: "Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure." Inside, Seneca adds, guests were served barley porridge and water.

Aristotle: happiness as a life lived well

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, in the Greek region of Chalcidice, and studied for about twenty years at Plato's Academy in Athens. He later tutored the young Alexander the Great and founded his own school, the Lyceum. His interests ranged from biology and logic to politics and poetry, but his Nicomachean Ethics is the work that shaped Western thinking about the good life.

Aristotle starts by asking what everything else is done for. Money, honour and pleasure are pursued for the sake of something further. Only eudaimonia, flourishing, is wanted for its own sake. To find what it consists of, he uses the "function argument": a good eye is one that sees well, a good flute player plays well, so a good human being does well what is distinctive to humans, which is acting with reason. Happiness is therefore an activity of the soul in line with virtue, and since virtue is the key, he says, we must study what virtue is.

Several practical points follow. Virtues are habits built by practice: we become brave by doing brave things and fair by acting fairly. Each virtue sits at a sensible middle point between two extremes, courage between recklessness and cowardice, generosity between waste and meanness. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is needed to judge that middle in real situations. Happiness also needs some external support, such as health, enough resources and above all friends; and it must be judged over a complete life, since one swallow, as he puts it, does not make a spring. In the final book he adds that the highest form of flourishing is contemplation, the active life of the mind.

Interest in this approach returned strongly in the twentieth century, when philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre championed "virtue ethics", and it now informs research in positive psychology on long-term wellbeing.

Where they agree and where they clash

Agreement. All three think happiness is something you can learn and practise, not just luck. All three distrust wealth, fame and status as routes to a good life. All three put great weight on reason and on friendship.

Disagreement. Epictetus held that virtue alone is enough for happiness; a good person on the rack is still not harmed in what matters. Aristotle thought that view unrealistic: a virtuous person struck by terrible misfortune, like King Priam of Troy, cannot be called fully happy. Epicurus put pleasure, not virtue, at the top, valuing virtue mainly because it leads to a peaceful life. The Stoics also urged active involvement in public life, while Epicurus advised living quietly, away from politics.

Common myths about Greek happiness

"Epicureans lived for feasts and luxury." The opposite: Epicurus praised simple meals and warned that chasing luxury brings more pain than pleasure.

"Stoics suppress all emotion." Stoics aimed to avoid emotions based on false judgments, such as rage over things beyond our control, while welcoming calm joy and good feelings toward others.

"Eudaimonia means feeling cheerful." It describes a whole life going well, and a person can flourish in Aristotle's sense while going through hard days.

Trying their ideas today

From Epictetus: When something upsets you, write it down and sort it into "up to me" and "not up to me". Put your energy only into the first list.
From Epicurus: List what you actually need to be content this week. Notice how short it is, and how much worry comes from the empty desires that are missing from it.
From Aristotle: Pick one virtue you want to strengthen, such as patience or courage, and practise one small act of it each day. Character is built in repetitions.

Read the three separately before mixing them: each is a full system with its own reasons, and the contrasts are as useful as the overlaps. The best entry points are short: Epictetus's Handbook, Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus and the first two books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epictetus; SEP: Epicurus; SEP: Aristotle's Ethics; Quote Investigator: the Serenity Prayer; first outlined by HuffPost Greece.

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