Summary of Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, Epicurus on Happiness (Part 1)
A few weeks ago, I started a six-part blog series to summarize a fascinating film titled Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. Part one was about Socrates’ thoughts on self-confidence. Part two focuses on Epicurus and what he believed humans can do to find happiness.
Epicurus spent his life chasing happiness and was led to conclude that it’s a rather tricky issue. He thought that pleasure was the most important thing in life and that one has no reason to feel guilty for chasing pleasure. He was, however, known for getting by on very little often making meals out of water, bread, and a few olives.
His central philosophy was that humans are not very good at understanding what makes us happy and that we can easily and mistakenly conclude that material things are what will make us happy. It’s the “what we want is not what we need” philosophy: we pursue our manic impulses not really understanding what it is that makes us happy.
Epicurus believed he discovered the formula for what we really do need in order to be happy. He believed happiness requires three things:
1. Friends
When Epicurus moved to Athens, he bought a large house in the middle of town and asked a group of friends to move in with him. He did this because he viewed friendship as being something we should seek to have around at all times, not just for the occasional phone call or whatever. He suggested making an effort to never eat alone. “A feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf,” he said. He determined it more important who you eat with than what you eat.
2. Freedom
Later in life, Epicurus and his friends left Athens and started a commune in a remote part of Greece. “We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday life and politics,” he said. He thought it was better to have a simple life in which one is free than a life in which we are answerable to insufferable bosses, etc. He and his friends at the commune became self-sufficient and gained independence from what other people thought. They no longer felt that they had something to prove to others financially.
3. An Analyzed Life
Epicurus thought it was important to slow down and analyze our worries and troubles. He thought that the key to eliminating our anxieties was to give ourselves time to think them through. In order to do this, we need time and space to allow for quiet contemplation about our lives.
His philosophy was that if one does not have much money but does have these three things, then they will not be denied happiness. Conversely, someone with money who is lacking friends, freedom, and space for an analyzed life will never be happy. You hear this backed up in psychological studies that show money does not significantly contribute to one’s happiness once their basic needs are met.
Epicurus was a strong critic of advertising. He blamed it for clouding our view of the path to happiness. He suggested that the reason advertising works is because it succeeds in convincing us on a subconscious level that the product being sold will provide us with one or more of the three things that we need to be happy.
So an ad like the one above might succeed in selling us Bacardi when it’s really friends and freedom that we’re looking for.
Interestingly, all of the books that Epicurus wrote were eventually lost. His wisdom survived by being passed down as a creed through societies that formed based on his suggestions for living. A wealthy man, Diogenes of Oenoanda, paid to have a summary of Epicurean philosophy carved on the walls of an ancient city in what is now in modern southwest Turkey. Diogenes believed that we needed constant reminders of what makes us happy and that simply studying philosophy once in a while wasn’t enough. Think of it as balancing out the forces of advertising which seek to cloud our true desires. Diogenes’ wall was an advertisement for what we really do need.
The film shows a modern day effort to replicate that type of counter advertising. Unfortunately, as they point out, philosophers aren’t known for having the kind of budget to make major advertising purchases. But one sign they put up in a mall was pretty clever. It depicted a large mansion with a luxury car parked out front. The photo contains an asterisk at the top with a small warning in the corner that says, “Happiness Not Included”. I wonder what effect advertising of this nature might have on a grander scale? If people can be convinced that they need material things, can they be successfully reminded that they in fact do not need them through the same medium?
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