What Is Hedonism? Hedonism vs Epicureanism, and Why Epicurus Was Not a Party Animal

Last updated: November 4, 2026

Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the highest good, or at least the only thing worth wanting for its own sake, and that pain is the only thing bad in itself. The word comes from the Greek hēdonē, “pleasure”. In everyday English it has come to mean a life of parties, luxury and indulgence, but the most famous hedonist in history, Epicurus, lived on bread and water, praised friendship and quiet, and warned against exactly the excesses the word now suggests. Hedonism vs Epicureanism is therefore less a contest than a misunderstanding, and untangling it tells you a lot about what pleasure actually is.

The meme above plays with that misunderstanding in the “Know the work rules” comic format. Two men say exactly the same sentence, “pleasure is the necessity of life”, and get opposite reactions: the polished Epicurean is told he is sweet, the sleazy-looking hedonist gets reported to human resources. The words are identical; what people hear depends on which kind of pleasure they think you mean. The real story is stranger and more useful: a philosophy of pleasure that ends up recommending a simple life, and a modern psychology of pleasure that explains why the party never quite delivers what it promises.

What Is Hedonism? The Meaning and Origin of the Word

Hedonism, in Merriam-Webster’s definition, is “the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life”, and, in a second sense, “a way of life based on or suggesting the principles of hedonism”. The dictionary traces the word to the Greek hēdonē, “pleasure”, akin to hēdys, “sweet”, and dates its first known English use to 1827.

Those two definitions already show the problem. The first is a philosophical thesis about value: what makes a life go well. The second is a lifestyle, and in modern usage almost always an indulgent one. A philosopher can be a hedonist in the first sense and live like a monk, and a party animal can be a hedonist in the second sense without ever having thought about what is good. Most of the confusion around the word, and most of the bad jokes about Epicurus, come from sliding between the two.

It also helps to separate pleasure from happiness. Pleasure is usually understood as a feeling, something that can be more or less intense and lasts for a while; happiness, in the ancient sense of eudaimonia, is a judgement about a whole life. The ancient hedonists claimed that a happy life simply is a life full of pleasure and free from pain. Their rivals, the Stoics above all, thought this confused the feeling that comes with doing well with doing well itself. That disagreement is the background to everything that follows.

Two Claims in One Word: Psychological and Ethical Hedonism

Philosophers distinguish two very different theses that both go by the name hedonism: one about what actually motivates us, and one about what is actually good.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Andrew Moore puts it compactly: “Psychological or motivational hedonism claims that only pleasure or pain motivates us,” while “ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value.” The first is a theory in psychology. It says that whatever you think you are doing, from running a marathon to visiting a sick friend, you are really seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. The second is a theory in ethics. It says that whatever is good for you is good because, and to the extent that, it brings pleasure.

Psychological hedonism has a long record of looking obvious and turning out to be false. The classic objection goes back to the eighteenth-century bishop Joseph Butler. As Robert Shaver summarises it in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on egoism, “I must desire things other than my own welfare in order to get welfare.” You only enjoy playing hockey if you already want to play hockey for its own sake; the pleasure follows the desire rather than being its object. Experiments by the psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues point the same way. They found, in Shaver’s words, that “increased empathy leads to increased helping behaviour,” and that the altruistic explanation “always made superior predictions” than the egoistic ones. Shaver’s verdict: Batson’s results are “very bad news for psychological egoism.” Ethical hedonism, the claim about value, is a much harder target, which is why the rest of this post is mostly about it.

Aristippus and the Cyrenaics: The Original Party Philosophers

If anyone in antiquity deserves the modern image of the hedonist, it is not Epicurus but Aristippus of Cyrene and the school that took its name from his home town in North Africa.

Aristippus was, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, born around 435 BC and became a close follower of Socrates in Athens. The Cyrenaics, the school founded by him and continued by his family, held that the goal of action is “the pleasure of the present moment” and that “bodily pleasures are more intense than those of the mind.” They were not crude, though. The same article notes that their ideal sage “should possess the pleasures and not they him”, a line that anticipates every later warning about addiction. Aristippus’ grandson, also called Aristippus, was nicknamed “mother-taught”, because he had learned his hedonism from his mother Arete.

The Cyrenaics mattered because they forced the question that Epicurus would answer differently. If pleasure is the good, is it the sharp pleasure of the moment, a feast, a kiss, a win, or something calmer and more lasting? The Cyrenaics chose the moment. As Diogenes Laërtius puts it in C. D. Yonge’s translation, they “do not admit that to be pleasure which exists as a condition, but place it wholly in motion.” Epicurus, who seems to have learned from them, turned that view on its head.

Epicurus: A Hedonist on Bread and Water

Epicurus (341 to 270 BC) taught that pleasure is the goal of life, and then defined pleasure as the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the mind, which makes his hedonism closer to serenity than to indulgence.

He said so in plain words. In the Letter to Menoeceus, in Robert Drew Hicks’ translation, he writes that when his school calls pleasure the goal, “we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality”, but freedom from pain in the body and trouble in the soul. In the same letter he observes that “plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet” once the pain of want is removed. Unlike the Cyrenaics, he admitted calm states as pleasures in their own right: “freedom from disquietude, and freedom from pain, are states of pleasure”, as Yonge renders him. The two technical terms for those states are ataraxia, tranquillity of mind, and aponia, freedom from bodily pain.

His own habits fit the theory. Diogenes Laërtius reports (X.11) that he was “content with plain bread and water” and quotes a letter asking a friend: “Send me a little pot of cheese, that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” A pot of cheese as the height of luxury is perhaps the best one-line summary of Epicurean hedonism ever written. Seneca, a Stoic and therefore a rival, preserved the inscription said to greet visitors to the Garden, the school Epicurus ran in Athens. In Richard Gummere’s translation it reads: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” And what pleasure awaited the guest? The caretaker “will welcome you with barley-meal and serve you water also in abundance.”

The reputation came anyway. Already in antiquity, enemies spread stories that Epicurus lived in excess; Diogenes Laërtius records that a former follower, Timocrates, claimed he “vomited twice a day from over-indulgence”, before dismissing such critics as mad. The word followed the slander rather than the man. Merriam-Webster dates “epicure” to 1551, in a sense now marked as archaic: “one devoted to sensual pleasure”. Epicurus’ ideas about death, the gods and the sorting of desires are explained in our post on Epicurus on death and his recipe for a happy life, and Klaus Koppe’s defence of Epicurus against Dante tells how the Middle Ages condemned him. If you want to join the club, our Epicurus Gardening Club T-shirt is a membership card you can wear.

Hedonism vs Epicureanism vs Stoicism: What Is the Difference?

Hedonism is the general claim that pleasure is the good; Epicureanism is one particular version of it that defines pleasure as tranquillity; Stoicism rejects hedonism altogether and makes virtue the only good.

The table hides a surprising convergence. Epicureans and Stoics fought each other for centuries, yet their recommended lives look alike: modest consumption, self-control, friendship and freedom from fear. The difference is the reason. An Epicurean avoids the banquet because the hangover outweighs the pleasure; a Stoic avoids it because indulgence is beneath a rational being. That is why Seneca, a Stoic, could quote Epicurus with approval in his letters, and why modern readers often find the two schools giving the same advice for different reasons. Our introduction to what Stoicism is explains the other side of the argument.

Bentham, Mill and the Pig: Hedonism Goes Modern

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hedonism became the foundation of a political philosophy, utilitarianism, which judged actions and laws by the pleasure and pain they produce for everyone affected.

Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) with a sentence that, as the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, set the tone for modern hedonism: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure.” For Bentham, pleasures differ only in quantity: how intense, how long, how certain, how soon. His “felicific calculus” added a few more dimensions, among them fecundity, the chance that a pleasure will lead to further pleasures, purity, the chance that it will not be followed by pain, and extent, the number of people it affects. A night of heavy drinking scores well on intensity and badly on purity; a friendship scores well on almost everything. In that sense Bentham’s arithmetic quietly agrees with Epicurus. Counting only quantity made his theory radical and egalitarian, since the pleasures of the poor counted as much as those of the rich, but it also invited mockery. If all pleasures are equal in kind, is a happy pig as good as a happy philosopher?

John Stuart Mill took the objection seriously. In Utilitarianism (1863) he reports that critics called a pleasure-based ethics “a doctrine worthy only of swine” and recalls that the Epicureans had faced the same charge. His answer was to distinguish higher from lower pleasures by quality, not just quantity, and to give the test to people who know both: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” If the fool or the pig disagrees, Mill adds, “it is because they only know their own side of the question.” Critics ever since have asked whether Mill can still call himself a hedonist if some pleasures are better for reasons other than how pleasant they are. Our post on utilitarianism explains how this theory deals with predicting consequences.

The Paradox of Hedonism: Why Chasing Pleasure Backfires

The paradox of hedonism is the observation that people who aim directly at pleasure or happiness tend to get less of it than people who aim at something else and find pleasure along the way.

The phrase was coined, according to Wikipedia’s article on the paradox, by the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics (1874), but the best statement comes from Mill’s Autobiography. After what he called a mental crisis around the age of twenty, Mill concluded that happiness comes most reliably to those who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness, and he summed it up in one sentence: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Anyone who has tried to have the perfect holiday or the perfect evening knows the mechanism. Monitoring the pleasure gets in the way of the pleasure.

This is not an argument against ethical hedonism as such. A hedonist can accept the paradox and simply advise people to pursue friendships, projects and causes, because those are what produce pleasure in the long run. Epicurus himself recommended friendship and philosophy, not pleasure-seeking. But the paradox does show that hedonism makes a poor life strategy if it is taken as a slogan, which is precisely how the modern word is usually used.

Epicurus had anticipated the problem in his own way. His Principal Doctrines make a careful distinction between pleasure itself and its price: “No pleasure is in itself evil,” he writes, but the things that produce certain pleasures “entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.” The hangover, the debt, the jealousy and the boredom that follows the fifth luxury purchase all belong in the calculation. He also saw how desire escalates. “Nature’s wealth at once has its bounds and is easy to procure,” the same collection says, “but the wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance.” That sentence could serve as the motto of the hedonic treadmill, more than two thousand years before psychologists gave it a name. And his practical answer to the paradox was not a technique for enjoying things more but a change of focus: of all the means wisdom provides for a happy life, he says, “by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.” Pleasure, on this view, is best found sideways, in company, while you are busy with something else.

Would You Plug In? Nozick’s Experience Machine

The most famous modern objection to hedonism is a thought experiment by the American philosopher Robert Nozick, from his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

It begins: “Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired.” Neuroscientists could make you think and feel “you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book,” while you floated in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain. You would not know you were plugged in. Nozick’s question is simple: “Would you plug in?” If pleasure were the only thing that mattered, the answer should be an easy yes, since the machine can guarantee more of it than real life ever will. Most people say no, and Nozick offers three reasons: “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them”; we want “to be a certain sort of person”; and the machine “limits us to a man-made reality.” As the Stanford Encyclopedia sums up his conclusion, “something matters to us in addition to experience.”

Hedonists have replies. Some argue that our reluctance comes from status quo bias: in a 2010 study, the philosopher Felipe De Brigard found that people were much more willing to stay in a simulated life once they were told they were already living in one. Others point out that the fear of being unplugged, or of the machine breaking, sneaks pain back into the scenario. But the thought experiment has kept its force for half a century because it separates two things we normally assume go together: feeling that life is good and life actually being good. If you know the Matrix, you know the dilemma; the Agent Smith meme makes its own use of the same film.

The Hedonic Treadmill: What Psychology Says About Pleasure

Modern psychology adds an empirical twist to the ancient debate: people tend to adapt to good and bad events, so that more pleasure does not reliably mean a happier life.

The idea of a “hedonic treadmill” goes back to a 1971 paper by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. A famous follow-up, Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s 1978 study “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”, concluded that lottery winners were not significantly happier than people who had not won. As Ed Diener, Richard Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon summarise in their 2006 review Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill, the treadmill model held that “good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality.” If that were the whole truth, it would vindicate Epicurus in a striking way: chasing intense pleasures would be pointless, because the baseline always returns.

The same review argues that the picture is too simple and calls for “5 important revisions”. People’s set points “are not hedonically neutral”; people differ in their set points, partly because of temperament; different components of well-being can move in different directions; and, “perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions.” The review points to evidence that some people do not fully return to their earlier level after events such as unemployment or the death of a spouse. The lesson is not that nothing matters, but that what matters most tends to be lasting conditions, such as relationships, health, meaningful work and security, rather than peak experiences. Epicurus, with his friends, his garden and his pot of cheese, would not have been surprised.

That is the real answer to hedonism vs Epicureanism. Hedonism, as most people use the word today, means maximising pleasant moments. Epicureanism means minimising unnecessary desires so that ordinary life becomes pleasant enough. The first runs on a treadmill; the second tries to step off it. Our Hedonistic Climate Nihilist T-shirt is for those who prefer the first option with a dose of irony, and if your hedonism has started to feel more like dread, our guide to what existentialism is takes the next step.