What is aponia?

Epicurus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Epicurus answers

Aponia — the absence of bodily pain — is one of the two pillars of the pleasant life, the other being ataraxia, the freedom of the soul from disturbance. Together they constitute katastematic pleasure: the stable, static condition in which there is nothing further to add, no deficit that pleasure must fill, no storm that has not already been dispelled.

The limit of pleasure is precisely this removal of all that causes pain.¹ Nature increases pleasure up to the point where it eliminates the painful, and there it stops; it does not permit pleasure to grow larger beyond that point, though once free of distress it admits of certain non-necessary variations. This is the central technical claim that most readers miss.

The popular picture — that pleasure is an escalating pursuit of gratification — confuses the variations that kinetic pleasure introduces with an increase in pleasure itself. The variations only vary; they do not augment. From birth, every animal has an impulse toward pleasure and away from pain, before any teaching has reached it.² As we grow older, that original impulse becomes articulated into the distinctions the philosophy draws.³

The natural-and-necessary desires — for food, drink, warmth, shelter — are the body's own cry: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold.⁴ Satisfy these, and aponia is achieved; the body is at peace. We are in need of pleasure only when we are in pain because of its absence, and when we are not in pain, we no longer need pleasure.⁵

That is the whole architecture in a single sentence. What follows from this is that the goal is short and economical.⁶ The journey toward aponia does not require wealth, luxury, or elaborate gratification. Barley cake and water suffice when they remove the pain of hunger and thirst. The unnecessary desires — for wealth, for status, for ever-finer pleasures — are the ones that can never be satisfied, and their pursuit therefore guarantees the very pain they promise to relieve. It is not the needs of nature that produce injustice and anxiety, but desire based on groundless opinions.⁷

Sources

1. Epicurus has assigned a common limit to [the pleasures], the removal of all that causes pain, as though nature increased pleasure up to the point where it eliminates the painful, but did not permit it to make any further increase in its size.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 100–101

2. the Epicureans too think that they are proving that pleasure is naturally worth choosing; for they say that animals, as soon as they are born and while they are still uncorrupted, have an impulse to pleasure and avoid pains.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 98–100

3. The Epicureans held that what is first congenial to us, unqualifiedly, is pleasure, but they say that as we get older this pleasure becomes articulated.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 98–100

4. The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 98–100

5. we are in need of pleasure only when we are in pain because of the absence of pleasure, and when we are not in pain, then we no longer need pleasure.

   The extant letters, pp. 29–30

6. The journey [which we make] towards this goal, in the company of desire, constitutes the [full] measure of pleasure and it is certainly short and economical.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 100–101

7. For it is not the needs of nature which produce injustice from without, but the desire based on groundless opinions.

   Short fragments and testimonia from uncertain works, pp. 100–101