🏛 Western Thought

Epicureanism — Pleasure

"Reduce desires you can do without"

에피쿠로스 (Epicurus, 기원전 341~270) · 기원전 4세기

📜 Origin

Epicurus, born on Samos, bought a garden outside Athens. There he admitted slaves, women, and foreigners as equals — revolutionary for his time. He called pleasure the highest good, but his pleasure was not luxury — it was ataraxia, the unshaken calm. He lived on bread and water and called it "a feast of the gods." His final letter, dying: "This is a happy day, this last day."

💡 Meaning

Epicurus's classification of pleasure:\n1. Natural and necessary (food, sleep, friendship) — pursue\n2. Natural but not necessary (gourmet food, fine clothes) — moderate\n3. Neither natural nor necessary (fame, power, wealth) — reject\nHappiness, he saw, arrives automatically when 1 is satisfied and 3 is emptied.

🌏 Eastern Classic Cross-link

Zhuangzi: "The wren builds in the deep forest, but needs only one branch." 2,300 years ago Zhuangzi and Epicurus reached the same insight. Freedom comes not from having more but from needing less. Our era's minimalism rediscovers this truth.

樂

Compressed into One Hanja

"樂" depicts strings stretched over a wooden frame — a musical instrument. Music is not made by more notes but by the balance of silence and sound. 樂 is the rhythm of emptying. Epicurus's pleasure is not a feast but the quiet chord of bread and friendship.