Philosophers · 哲學家 · Greece and Rome
Epicurus 伊比鳩魯 · Ἐπίκουρος
A schoolmaster’s son who taught in a garden that pleasure is the goal of life, lived on bread and water, and admitted women and slaves to philosophy.
一個教書匠的兒子；他在一座花園裡教導「快樂是人生的目的」，自己靠麵包與水過活，並且讓女性與奴隸也來學哲學。
- Born 出生
- 341 BCE, on the island of Samos, to Athenian parents
- Died 去世
- 270 BCE, Athens
- School 學園
- The Garden, founded in Athens about 306 BCE
- Wrote 著作
- Some three hundred scrolls, almost all lost
- What survives 現存
- Three letters and forty Principal Doctrines, preserved by Diogenes Laertius; fragments from Herculaneum
- Best-known follower 最著名的追隨者
- The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99–55 BCE)
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
The colonist’s son 殖民者的兒子
Epicurus was born in 341 BCE on Samos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor where his father, an Athenian settler, kept a school. The year he turned eighteen he went to Athens for his military service, and while he was there Alexander the Great died, the Athenian settlers were expelled from Samos, and his family became refugees on the mainland. He rejoined them and spent some fifteen years in the cities of the eastern Aegean, studying with followers of Plato and of the atomist Democritus, quarreling with most of his teachers, and gathering a circle of his own. He liked to say that he had taught himself.
伊比鳩魯西元前 341 年生於薩摩斯，小亞細亞外海的一座島；他的父親是雅典來的殖民者，在那裡開了一所學校。十八歲那年，他到雅典服兵役；就在那期間，亞歷山大大帝去世，雅典的殖民者被逐出薩摩斯，他的家人成了大陸上的難民。他回去與他們會合，在愛琴海東岸的幾座城市裡度過了大約十五年：跟柏拉圖的追隨者與原子論者德謨克利特的追隨者學習，跟他大多數的老師吵架，並且聚集了自己的一個圈子。他喜歡說自己是自學的。
The world he grew up in explains much of his teaching. The independent city, in which Plato and Aristotle had assumed a good life must be lived, was finished. Power lay with kings and their armies, and a private person could do little to affect it. Epicurus drew the conclusion that happiness must be made independent of public events. His advice was to “live unnoticed.”
他成長的那個世界，說明了他的教導的許多地方。柏拉圖與亞里斯多德都預設美好人生必須在獨立的城邦裡過；而獨立的城邦已經結束了。權力在國王與他們的軍隊手上；一個私人，幾乎無法影響它。伊比鳩魯得出的結論是：幸福必須不依賴公共事件。他的建議是「隱居而活」。
The Garden 花園
About 306 he came to Athens for good and bought a house with a garden outside the city wall, on the road to Plato’s Academy. The school that met there was unlike its rivals. It was a household. Its members lived together or near one another and held their goods as friends, and they included women and at least one slave, which scandalized the city. An inscription over the gate is said to have told the visitor that here pleasure was the highest good, and that the keeper would offer him barley cakes and fresh water. Epicurus wrote to a friend asking for a small pot of cheese, so that he might feast when he wished.
大約在西元前 306 年，他定居雅典，在城牆外通往柏拉圖學園的路上，買下了一棟附花園的房子。在那裡聚會的學派，跟它的對手都不一樣。它是一個家。成員們住在一起，或住在彼此附近，以朋友的方式共享財物；其中有女性，也至少有一名奴隸，這讓全城譁然。據說大門上的銘文告訴來訪者：在這裡，快樂是最高的善；而看門的人會請他吃大麥餅、喝清水。伊比鳩魯寫信給一位朋友，要一小罐乳酪，好讓他想吃大餐的時候能吃上一頓。
He taught there for thirty-five years and wrote more than any philosopher before him. The members memorized short summaries of the doctrine and were encouraged to act as though the Master were watching. Friendship was the center of the life. “Nothing enhances our security so much as friendship,” he wrote, and the school held a common meal on the twentieth of each month which his followers kept up for centuries after his death.
他在那裡教了三十五年，寫的東西比他之前任何一位哲學家都多。成員們背誦教義的簡短摘要，並且被鼓勵要像老師正在看著那樣去行事。友誼是這種生活的中心。他寫道：「沒有任何東西比友誼更能增進我們的安全」；這個學派每個月二十日舉行一次共餐，他的追隨者在他死後還維持了好幾個世紀。
A happy last day 幸福的最後一天
He died in 270, at seventy-one, of a blockage of the bladder that had tormented him for two weeks. The letter he dictated on the last day survives. He calls it a blessed day, the last of his life. The pain in his bladder and bowels could not be worse, he says, and he sets against it the gladness of mind that comes from remembering his past conversations with his friend. He asks that the children of a dead disciple be looked after. Then, according to the story, he got into a warm bath, asked for a cup of unmixed wine, told his friends to remember his teachings, and died.
西元前 270 年，他去世了，七十一歲；死因是膀胱阻塞，那折磨了他兩個星期。他在最後一天口授的那封信流傳了下來。他稱那一天是蒙福的一天，是他生命的最後一天。他說，膀胱與腸子的疼痛已經到了無以復加的地步；而他拿來與之對抗的，是回想起從前與朋友的種種談話時心裡的那份歡喜。他請人照顧一位已故弟子的孩子們。然後，照故事的說法，他泡進溫水澡盆，要了一杯沒有摻水的酒，囑咐朋友們記住他的教導，就去世了。
His school lasted about six hundred years and spread across the Roman world. Its finest monument is a poem. Around 55 BCE the Roman Lucretius set the whole system into Latin verse in On the Nature of Things, and the single manuscript of it that survived the Middle Ages, found in a German monastery in 1417, helped to bring atomism back into European science.
他的學派延續了大約六百年，傳遍了羅馬世界。它最精美的紀念碑是一首詩。大約在西元前 55 年，羅馬人盧克萊修把整個體系寫成了拉丁文的詩篇《物性論》；它熬過中世紀而倖存的唯一一份抄本，1417 年在德意志的一座修道院裡被發現，後來幫助了原子論重新回到歐洲的科學裡。
- 341 BCEBorn on Samos生於薩摩斯
- 323Military service in Athens; Alexander dies在雅典服役；亞歷山大去世
- c. 306Founds the Garden創立花園學派
- 270Dies in Athens卒於雅典
- c. 55 BCELucretius, On the Nature of Things盧克萊修《物性論》
- c. 230 CEDiogenes Laertius preserves the letters第歐根尼・拉爾修保存了那幾封信
- 1417Lucretius’s poem rediscovered盧克萊修的詩重新被發現
The central idea · 核心觀念
Enough 足夠
Epicurus held that pleasure is the only thing good in itself and pain the only thing bad. From that starting point one expects a philosophy of indulgence, and he arrives at something close to the opposite. The reason lies in his analysis of pleasure. The greatest pleasure, he argues, is the state of having no pain in the body and no disturbance in the mind. Once hunger is satisfied, eating more adds variety and no increase. So the question for anyone who wants a pleasant life is how to be free of pain and fear at the least cost, and the answer is to want little. Natural and necessary desires, for food, shelter, safety, and friends, are easy to satisfy. Desires for luxury are natural and optional. Desires for wealth, fame, and power are empty. They come from false beliefs, they have no limit, and whoever acquires them has acquired a master.
伊比鳩魯主張：快樂是唯一本身就是善的東西，痛苦是唯一本身就是惡的東西。從這個起點，人們預期的是一套縱欲的哲學；而他抵達的，卻是接近相反的東西。原因在於他對快樂的分析。他論證：最大的快樂，就是身體沒有痛苦、心靈沒有擾動的狀態。飢餓一旦解除，吃得更多只是增添了花樣，並沒有增加什麼。所以，對任何想要愉快生活的人來說，問題是：怎樣以最小的代價免於痛苦與恐懼？而答案是：少要一點。自然而必要的欲望（對食物、遮蔽、安全與朋友），是容易滿足的。對奢華的欲望，是自然而可有可無的。對財富、名聲與權力的欲望，是空的。它們來自錯誤的信念，沒有限度；而誰得到了它們，誰就得到了一位主人。
Two fears, he thought, poison most lives: fear of the gods and fear of death. His physics was designed to remove both. The universe consists of atoms moving in empty space. The gods, if they exist, are perfectly happy beings who take no interest in us, so there is no one to placate. And the soul is a body made of fine atoms that scatter when we die. “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.” There will be no one to suffer it. His followers compressed the teaching into four lines, called the fourfold remedy: God is not to be feared, death is not to be felt, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.
他認為，有兩種恐懼毒害了大多數的人生：對神的恐懼，以及對死亡的恐懼。他的物理學，就是設計來去除這兩者的。宇宙是由在虛空中運動的原子構成的。諸神如果存在，是完全幸福的存在者，對我們毫無興趣；所以並沒有誰需要我們去討好。而靈魂是由精細的原子構成的一個物體，我們死的時候它們就散開了。「所以，死亡，這個最可怕的惡，對我們來說什麼也不是；因為我們在的時候，死亡還沒有來；死亡來了的時候，我們已經不在了。」那時候不會有任何人來承受它。他的追隨者把這個教導濃縮成四句，稱為「四重藥方」：神不足懼，死不足憂，善容易得，苦容易忍。
By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.我們所說的快樂，是身體沒有痛苦、靈魂沒有擾動。
The sentence that separates Epicurus from everything his name has come to mean. 這句話，把伊比鳩魯與他的名字後來所代表的一切區分開來。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
Is the absence of pain a pleasure? 沒有痛苦算是一種快樂嗎？
The ancient critics, Cicero above all, attacked the definition. There is pleasure, there is pain, and there is a neutral state in between, they said. Epicurus has taken the neutral state and called it the highest pleasure. If that is what he means by the word, he is no hedonist, and his philosophy is a kind of asceticism under a misleading label. If he means pleasure in the ordinary sense, he has no right to tell us that bread and water give as much of it as a banquet. His defenders reply that the calm of a mind with nothing to fear is a positive condition and is felt as one, as anyone knows who has recovered from an illness. The experience machine sharpens the objection. If tranquility is all that matters, a tranquil life in a tank is as good as any, and Epicurus, who prized real friends, would not have accepted that.
古代的批評者（尤其是西塞羅）攻擊的是那個定義。他們說：有快樂，有痛苦，中間還有一個中性的狀態。伊比鳩魯拿了那個中性的狀態，把它稱為最高的快樂。如果這就是他用這個詞的意思，他就不是享樂論者；他的哲學是貼著誤導性標籤的一種苦行。如果他指的是通常意義上的快樂，他就沒有資格告訴我們：麵包與水給的快樂，跟一場盛宴一樣多。為他辯護的人回答：一顆無所畏懼的心的平靜，是一種正面的狀態，而且感覺起來就是如此；任何從一場病裡康復過來的人都知道。體驗機把這個反駁磨得更利。如果寧靜就是唯一要緊的，那麼在水槽裡的寧靜人生就跟任何人生一樣好；而珍視真實朋友的伊比鳩魯，是不會接受這一點的。
A second objection concerns what he leaves out. A person who lives unnoticed, avoids politics, and does not marry may be tranquil, and the Stoics asked what becomes of a city full of such people. Someone has to keep the walls. His account of justice as an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed gives a reason to be just only so long as one might be caught. And his argument about death, admired as it is, seems to prove too much. If death is nothing to the one who dies, it is hard to say why killing is the worst of crimes.
第二個反駁，關乎他遺漏了什麼。一個隱居而活、避開政治、不結婚的人，也許是寧靜的；而斯多噶學派問：一座住滿了這種人的城邦，會變成什麼樣子？總得有人守城牆。他把正義說成「互不傷害的約定」；這只在一個人有可能被抓的時候，才給出了行正義的理由。至於他關於死亡的論證，儘管備受推崇，卻似乎證明得太多了。如果死亡對死去的人來說什麼也不是，就很難說明為什麼殺人是最重的罪。
How we know · 史料
Three hundred lost books 三百卷失傳的書
Almost nothing Epicurus wrote has come down to us directly. His major work, On Nature, ran to thirty-seven books. What we have complete are three letters summarizing his physics, astronomy, and ethics, and a list of forty sayings, all copied into the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers about five hundred years after his death. Everything else is quotation, much of it by enemies. The Stoics and later the Christians had reason to make him look like a glutton and an atheist, and the picture stuck: in Hebrew a word derived from his name came to mean a heretic, and Dante put him in the sixth circle of hell among those who say that the soul dies with the body.
伊比鳩魯寫的東西，幾乎沒有一樣直接傳到我們手上。他的主要著作《論自然》有三十七卷之多。我們擁有的完整文本，是概述他的物理學、天文學與倫理學的三封信，以及一份四十條格言的清單；這些全都是在他死後大約五百年，被抄進第歐根尼・拉爾修《哲人言行錄》的第十卷的。其餘的全是別人的引述，其中許多出自敵人。斯多噶學派與後來的基督徒，都有理由把他描繪成饕客與無神論者；而這個形象就這樣固定下來：在希伯來文裡，一個從他的名字衍生出來的詞，意思變成了「異端」；但丁則把他放在地獄的第六圈，跟那些說靈魂隨身體而死的人在一起。
New evidence has come from an unexpected place. A villa at Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, contained the library of an Epicurean philosopher. Its scrolls were carbonized into black lumps, and scholars have been unrolling and reading them since the eighteenth century, in recent years with X-ray imaging. They include parts of On Nature.
新的證據來自一個意想不到的地方。赫庫蘭尼姆的一座別墅，在西元 79 年被維蘇威火山掩埋；裡面有一位伊比鳩魯學派哲學家的藏書。那些卷軸碳化成了黑色的硬塊；從十八世紀以來，學者們一直在把它們展開、解讀，近年來用上了 X 光造影。其中就有《論自然》的一部分。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Epicurus and the Buddha 伊比鳩魯與佛陀
No Greek philosopher sounds more like the Buddha. Both begin from suffering and treat philosophy as medicine. Both locate the trouble in desire and distinguish what we need from what we merely crave. Both founded communities outside the city where friends lived simply together, and both admitted people whom the society around them excluded. Both refused to make the gods the basis of the good life. Ataraxia, the unshaken calm that Epicurus sets as the goal, is the nearest Greek word to the peace of nibbāna, and his sorting of desires into those with a limit and those without would serve as a commentary on the second noble truth.
沒有哪一位希臘哲學家，聽起來比他更像佛陀。兩人都從苦出發，都把哲學當作藥。兩人都把問題放在欲望上，並且區分了我們「需要」的與我們只是「渴求」的。兩人都在城外創立了團體，朋友們在那裡簡樸地共同生活；兩人也都接納了周圍的社會所排斥的人。兩人都拒絕以諸神作為美好人生的基礎。伊比鳩魯立為目標的 ataraxia（不被動搖的平靜），是最接近涅槃之寂靜的希臘字；而他把欲望分成有限度的與沒有限度的，可以當作第二聖諦的註解。
They differ at the root. Epicurus holds that a person is a temporary arrangement of atoms and that death is the end, and he offers this as the cure for the fear of death. The Buddha lists that very view, annihilationism, among the errors, and teaches that the process continues until craving is ended. For Epicurus the goal is the most pleasant life available between birth and death. For the Buddha even the calmest pleasant feeling is impermanent and is not the goal. And the remedies differ in depth. Epicurus removes disturbing beliefs by argument and arranges a life in which few desires are aroused. The Buddha agrees that wrong views must go, and holds that craving has roots that argument does not reach, which is why his path includes a training of attention that has no counterpart in the Garden (Dharma and the West, D6 and D22).
他們在根本處不同。伊比鳩魯主張：人是原子暫時的排列，死亡就是終點；而他把這一點當作治療死亡恐懼的藥。佛陀把這個看法本身（斷見）列在種種錯誤當中，並且教導：這個過程會繼續下去，直到渴愛止息。對伊比鳩魯來說，目標是出生與死亡之間所能擁有的最愉快的人生。對佛陀來說，即使最平靜的樂受也是無常的，並不是目標。而兩人的對治，深度也不同。伊比鳩魯用論證去除擾人的信念，並且安排一種很少激起欲望的生活。佛陀同意錯誤的見解必須去除，卻主張渴愛有論證搆不到的根；這就是為什麼他的道包含了一種對注意力的訓練，而那在花園裡是沒有對應物的（佛法與西方哲學 D6、D22）。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with him 跟著他一起來的詞
Gk. ‘undisturbedness’
Freedom from mental disturbance.
心靈不受擾動。
Gk. a- ‘not’ + ponos ‘toil, pain’
Freedom from bodily pain.
身體沒有痛苦。
Gk. atomos ‘uncuttable’
The theory that everything consists of indivisible particles moving in empty space.
主張一切都由在虛空中運動的不可分割的微粒構成。
L. clinamen
A tiny uncaused deviation in the motion of atoms, which Epicurus introduced to make room for free action.
原子運動中微小而無原因的偏離；伊比鳩魯引進它，為自由的行動留出空間。
Gk. tetrapharmakos
God is not to be feared, death is not to be felt, the good is easy to get, the terrible is easy to endure.
神不足懼，死不足憂，善容易得，苦容易忍。
In philosophy, a follower of Epicurus. In ordinary English, a lover of fine food and drink, by a misunderstanding.
在哲學上，指伊比鳩魯的追隨者。在日常英文裡，由於一個誤解，指講究美食美酒的人。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. What did Epicurus mean by the highest pleasure?
2. Why did he teach physics?
3. What was Cicero’s objection?
Go further · 延伸
Where he appears 他出現在哪幾課
- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, translated by R. D. Hicks ↗Three pages. 三頁。
- Epicurus, Principal Doctrines ↗Forty sayings that his students learned by heart. 他的學生背誦的四十條格言。
- Lucretius, On the Nature of Things ↗The whole system as a poem. Book III is on death. 整個體系寫成的一首詩。卷三談死亡。
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Epicurus” ↗