The Agora: Epicurean Garden of Contentment

Thomas Jefferson

Letter to William Short

Monticello, October 31, 1819

.... As you say of yourself, I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus, indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on Him whom they claimed as their Founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of His religion so justly excite. Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates himself complained.....

I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that "that indulgence which presents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided." Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know, is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road....

I will place under this a syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus, somewhat in the lapidary style, which I wrote some twenty years ago; a like one of the philosophy of Jesus, of nearly the same age, is too long to be copied. Vale, et tibi persuade carissimum te esse mihi.

Physical

• The Universe is eternal.
• Its parts, great and small, interchangeable.
• Matter and Void alone
• Motion--inherent in matter which is weighty and declining.
• Eternal circulation of the elements of bodies.
• Gods, an order of beings next superior to man, enjoying in their sphere, their own felicities; but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them.

Moral 

• Happiness is the aim of life.
• Virtue the foundation of happiness.
• Utility the test of virtue.
• Pleasure active and In-do-lent.
• In-do-lence is the absence of pain, the true felicity.
• Active, consists in agreeable motion; it is not happiness, but the means to produce it.
• Thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to obtain it.
• The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind.
• i.e. In-do-lence of body, tranquillity of mind.
• To procure tranquillity of mind we must avoid desire and fear, the two principal diseases of the mind.
• Man is a free agent.
• Virtue consists in 1. Prudence 2. Temperence 3. Fortitude 4. Justice.
• To which are opposed, 1. Folly. 2. Desire. 3. Fear. 4. Deceit

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