Stoicism or Epicureanism - In which side are you*

Regardless of the fact that they can be considered dogmatic philosophies and have things in common, like materiality of the soul, the objective here is to check the differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism, the last one considered a non-Socratic school. The main goal in this task is to understand the nature of “the good”: while for Stoicism virtue is the good, for Epicureanism pleasure is the good (and the pain is bad). It is important say that the comparison is done by the stoic point of view, the Epictetus' Criticisms of Epicureanism.
Epictetus complains that Epicureans didn’t understand the pleasure of the soul, in other words, they didn’t understand that the mental pleasure is better than the physical one (on the edge, the pleasure of the mind comes from the pleasure of the body…). Even though, for the Epicureanism, reading a book is better than drugs and sex, they consider that the pleasure is the absence of pain. Epictetus believes that Epicurus didn’t understand the relation between pleasure and good. If for Epicureanism the good is pleasure and pleasant is a useful thing, Stoicism says that good is more than that. A stoic philosophy quotes that doing virtue things is good so we have pleasure, that is, firstly by existing good and then the pleasure come: things are not good because we felling pleasure.
Let’s see the two last points Sadler quoted about Epictetus´s critic. First one, he said Epicureans believes that we receive measures and standards from the nature to discover the true. This means that taking pleasure or pain can lead us to learn how human beings work and our relation to the reality aiming avoid pain. However Epictetus says they didn’t going far enough to figure out other principles (God?) to guide our life.
Last but not least, it is assumed that Epicureans do political and social actions as much as possible. For example, if you can avoid get married and have kids to preserve your own pleasure you should do so, but if we not reproduce, no more humans! More than that, we have an inclination to love and take care of others and live together making the society continues. Finally, Epictetus says Epicurus instrumentalized the goods in the matter that they thought you can commit an injustice being sure you will not be punished meanwhile for Epictetus injustice is bad by itself.


(*) Gregory B. Sadler: Epictetus' Criticisms of Epicureanism - Philosophy Core Concepts. In: https://youtu.be/DKxrIlFqs4o?t=646.

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