Enjoyment or tranquillity

The criterion is drawn from the very nature of the living being: from birth, every creature pursues pleasure and shuns pain without any reasoning persuading it, which proves pleasure to be the first, connatural good. But Epicurus redefines what this pleasure is worth: its summit is not enjoyment in motion, which merely fills a lack, but the stable state in which, once the lack is filled, nothing remains to be added, the ataraxia of the soul and the aponia of the body. Pleasure therefore has a limit, the absence of all pain, which makes it fully attainable and turns back the objection that pleasure is insatiable. This is his break both with vulgar pleasure and with the intellectualist eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle.

Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life.Letter to Menoeceus, 128

Letter to Menoeceus, 128-129 · Principal Doctrines, III and XVIII (the limits of pleasure)

Unhappiness comes from desires one cannot fulfil, or whose satisfaction soothes nothing: the therapy is therefore to sort desires by whether they are grounded in nature and necessary to happiness. The natural and necessary desires, few in number, are easily met; the empty desires, born of a limitless opinion such as glory or wealth, are insatiable and yield only disturbance. Wisdom thus neither suppresses desire wholesale, against Cynic asceticism, nor frees it from all bounds: it schools it, confining what one should want to what nature demands and makes easy. This is a reasoned selection that brings happiness within everyone's reach.

Of the desires, some are natural and necessary, some natural but not necessary, and some neither natural nor necessary but arising from empty opinion.Principal Doctrines, XXIX

Letter to Menoeceus, 127-130 · Principal Doctrines, XXIX and XXX (the classification of desires)

The good, the Stoics argue, must be what always benefits and never harms; yet health, wealth or pleasure can be misused: they are not goods but indifferents, at most « preferred ». Only virtue, the right use of reason, meets the criterion, hence the school's most disputed thesis, against Aristotle: it suffices for happiness, and the sage stays happy even amid torments.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius · Cicero, On Moral Ends, book III

The discipline of desire demands desiring only what is up to us and consenting to the rest: desires for external things are to be suspended, even extinguished. Epictetus advises not to ask that things happen as you wish, but to wish them as they happen.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.Enchiridion, §8

Epictetus, Enchiridion, §8