What is ataraxia?

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

Epicurus answers

Ataraxia — freedom from disturbance, the untroubled condition of the soul — is the goal toward which the whole of philosophy points.1 I do not mean by this a passive emptiness or a numbness to experience. I mean the positive condition that remains when the unnecessary fears and desires that agitate most human lives have been dissolved by understanding.

The soul at rest, neither driven by terror nor pulled by insatiable appetite, is the soul that has arrived at what it was always seeking. The chief obstacles to this condition are two: fear of death and fear of the gods.2 Both are confusions, and both dissolve under the same remedy — the honest study of what nature actually is. When you understand that the mind and spirit are material and mortal, that they disperse at death as smoke disperses in open air, the fear of punishment after death loses its object.2

Death is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; when death is present, we no longer exist.2 The living have no encounter with it; the dead are no longer there to suffer it. The gods, likewise, are perfectly self-sufficient and perfectly tranquil — beings for whom the whole troublesome business of creating worlds, punishing the wicked, and rewarding the righteous would have been incompatible with the very blessedness that makes them divine.3

A god disturbed by human affairs is not a blessed being; the blessed-and-immortal causes trouble to nothing and is troubled by nothing. Once this is clear, the thunder loses its terror and the earthquake its divine menace. This is why natural science is not, for me, a luxury of the curious mind. I said it plainly in Principal Doctrine 11: if we were not disturbed by our suspicions concerning celestial phenomena, and by our fear that death concerns us, and by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science at all.1 The physics exists to serve the cure. Ataraxia is the health the medicine is meant to restore.4

Sources

  1. The main obstacles to the goal of tranquillity of mind are our unnecessary fears and desires, and the only way to eliminate these is to study natural science.
    On the Nature of Things, pp. 23–24
  2. 'Death... is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the living it is non-existent and the dead no longer exist.'
    On the Nature of Things, pp. 23–24
  3. Even if they had possessed the power to create and govern the world, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, the whole business would have been much too troublesome for them to have undertaken it.
    On the Nature of Things, p. 29
  4. if we were not disturbed by our suspicions concerning celestial phenomena, and by our fear that death concerns us, and also by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science
    On the Nature of Things, pp. 23–24