Claire V. 10A
English composition

Stoicism and Epicureanism

Stoicism is to have patience and calmness when bad things happen to you.

A stoic person is someone who does not show his emotions and does not complain when something unpleasant happens to him.
The Stoics were people that lived in ancient Greece, who believed in Stoicism as their philosophy and their way of life. The founders of the Stoic philosophy and school were Zeno of Citium in Cyprus (344-262 BC), Cleantes (d. 232 BC) and Chrysippus (d. ca. 206 BC).

The word ‘stoicism’ derives from the word porch (stoa poikilê) in the Agora in Athens where they held their lectures and where members of the school congregated. The Stoics held emotions such as envy, love and fear as false jugements and that the Sage (a person who had attained moral and intellectual perfection) woudn’t let himself be submissive. The later Stoics of Roman times, said that the Sage was “utterly immune to misfortune and that virtue is sufficiant for happiness”.

One of the physical theories of Stoicism was that only bodies can act or be acted upon. So bodies therefore only existed. The Stoics however, allowed that there were other ways of being part of nature than by simply existing. They also believed that incorpora l things like place or time were ‘subsistent’, meaning that they considered them as secondary.

The Stoics had a god that they considered as ‘material’ and sometimes he was described as ‘fate’ because he developed all of his creations down to the smallest detail. In the Stoic philosophy, the Stoics identified fire and air as active elements, and water and earth as passive ones. They thought the universe was a plenum (in the Stoic philosophy, it was a space regarded as filled with matter) and they rejected existance of useless space or emptyness.

The direct opposite of stoicism is Epicureanism.
Epicureanism comes from the word Epìkouros that was the name of an Athenian philosopher. The term Epicureanism has two meanings.
One of them stands for seeking the pleas ure of sense and company while the other signifies a philosophical system which includes a way of conduct, of mind and of nature.

The Epicurean school wasn’t as speculating as the Stoic school, it was more of a practise of dicipline. The master or teacher taught the class as though whatever he said was to be evident to everyone. The Epicureans lived a simple, quiet, sensible life, away from worldly extravagance.

According to Epicurious (Epìkouros), his philosophy was intended to make people ‘happy’. But not happy as in where the mind is in a state of well-being accompagnied by pleasure, but happy as in pleasure itself. Epicurious said that the selfish were to be happy, and the unselfish less so than the selfish (makes sense).

The Epicureans also had an interesting philosophy on friendship. Epicurean friendships were not at all like friendships people have today. They judged that the feeling of friendship was too pleasurable and one should not feel pleasure before feeling affection, therefore no affection between the ‘friendships’ ever took place.

In Epicurean logic, the most important criteria was the ability to sense things, for sensablity was never deceptive to them.

The Epicureans knew the human body was made up of atoms and cells which held the body up, and to them, the human will was free. Like the word friendship, Epicureans considered freedom as being totally different from what it actually was (or what it means to us today). To them, freedom didn’t consist in choosing what is pleasurable to them. They considered freedom merely as a physical contingency meaning it was a possible condition in the futur, but not very likely.

Epicurean believed in four basic truths: “there are no divine beings to threaten us; there is no next life; the little we actually need is easy to get; what makes us suffer is easy to put up with.”

The most important difference between the two philosophies, is that Epicureans were for human pleasure, whereas Stoics were for the denial of any form of it.

-The End-

Footnotes.

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DICTIONARIES: Longman Dictionary of contemporary English; Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus