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Where, exactly, does the history of hedonism begin? The answer to this question hinges, naturally, on how we use the term hedonism.

If we use the term in a broad sense, to mean any way of life where one seeks to promote pleasure and avoid pain, hedonism is no doubt extremely old. This, however, is not the sense that is most relevant in the context of philosophy.

In philosophy, hedonism refer to the view that pleasure (Greek: hēdonē) is the only thing that is good in and of itself, and pain the only thing that is bad in and of itself. On this view, pleasure and pain are the exclusive end-points in matters of value.

This does not mean that hedonists must deny that other things, such as knowledge, friendship, honor, health, and justice, can also be genuine goods. The only thing hedonists must deny is that these other things are goods in and of themselves. They are good only insofar as, and in that, they help promote pleasure and avert pain.

Who first proposed this view? We do not know. For the vast majority of the 300,000 years or so that modern humans have existed, we are left without a single trace of their ideas that people held. The transmission of ideas arguably requires writing — and while we have symbols dating back to around 30,000 BCE, we have had writing only from around 7,000 BCE, and the earliest extant examples of writing that we can understand is from around 3,000 BCE.

It is only from around 3,000 BCE that philosophical ideas could potentially be preserved. But only a tiny fraction of people’s ideas are written down, and only a tiny fraction of what has been written down has been preserved.

Therefore, the sources that have been preserved until today, and that we able to interpret, provide the scope for what historians of ideas can say anything about. If we restrict ourselves to this scope, there are — to my current knowledge — four candidates for the earliest formulations of hedonism.

The earliest formulation that can reasonably be labelled as a statement of hedonism is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that, after a period of oral transmission, was written down on clay tablets in today’s Iraq around 2,000 BCE.

In the poem, the goddess Šiduri advises king Gilgamesh to not embark on military conquests for the sake of glory in the afterlife. Instead, she urges, he should cherish the pleasures of this world:

But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean,
let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!
For such is the destiny [of mortal men].

Admittedly, Šiduri’s voice is one among many in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the epic as a whole cannot reasonably be read as an endorsement of her position. Nevertheless, what she expresses can nevertheless reasonably be interpreted as a statement of hedonism.

We find an advise similar to Šiduri’s on stone inscriptions in Ancient Egypt. This central example is the “The Harpist's Song,” the earliest variant of which was found in a stone inscription in the Tomb of King Intef which dates to around 1,000 BCE:

So be happy!
Forgetfulness make you blessed!
Put myrrh on your head,
Wear fine linen,
Anoint yourself with the real wonders that belong to a god!

Increase your joys,
Let not your heart be weary,
But follow your heart and your happiness.

Do as your heart commands while you are upon the earth!
When the day of wailing comes for you,
The Weary-Hearted* hears not the wailing,
Mourning rescues no man from the netherworld!

Make merry,
Do not weary of it!
Look, no one is allowed to take his possessions with him.
Look, no one who departs returns!

(* Osiris, god of the underworld)

Observe that “Harpist’s Song” does not deny that there is an afterlife. On the contrary, it affirms an afterlife. What is proclaimed is that it will be of no use, in the afterlife, to have rejected the pleasures in this life.

Strictly speaking, neither Šiduri’s advise to Gilgamesh nor “Harpist’s Song” contains an explicit endorsement of hedonism understood as a philosophical position. Both recommend the pursuit of pleasure, and they appear to recommend nothing contrary to pleasure. It does not follow from this, however, that pleasure is the only thing that is good in and of itself. Other potential goods, while not endorsed, are also not explicitly rejected . Moreover, it is compatible with what is said by Šiduri and in the “Harper’s Song” to hold that there is some subset of pleasures that are not good in and of themselves. That, arguably, would be incompatible with hedonism in the philosophical sense.

In order to find explicit formulations of hedonism, we must turn to Ancient India.

The oldest explicit proponents of hedonism were the members of the Carvaka school. This was a heretical school, originating in the 600s BCE, that outright rejected the worldview of the Vedas and Upanishads, as well as the authority of Brahmins.

No texts from the ancient adherents of Carvaka have survived. We only have fragments from authors who present Carvaka views for the sake of criticizing them. Let us look at some of these, here following the late Ramkrishna Bhattacharya’s translations and numbering.

According to one fragment, the Carvakas claim that:

While life remains let a man live happily; nothing is beyond death. When once the body becomes ashes, how can it even return again? (fragment C.7)

Another fragment reads:

Oh! The one with beautiful eyes!
Drink and eat (as you like).
Oh! The one with a charming body!
That which is past does not belong to you.
Oh! The timid one! The past never comes back…
(C.14)

We can read that, according to the Carvakas, it is a waste of time and resources to make penances for the diseased: “Penances are only various forms of torments, and abstinence is only depriving oneself of consuming (the pleasures of life).” (C.15)  The Carvakas allegedly claimed that that “ceremonies for the dead” are a hoax: “a means of livelihood that Brahmins have established.” (C.9)

There are interesting ties between the hedonistic ethics of the Carvakas, and their views in epistemology and metaphysics.

In epistemology, the Carvakas held that “perception indeed is the (only) means of right knowledge.” (III.1). By appeal to this, they rejected the authority of mystical revelation: religious “instructions are not to be trusted.” (V.2)

That, in turn, had implications for their metaphysical views. According to the Carvakas, we should reject the view that we have a soul, and instead, hold that “the self is (nothing but) the body endowed with consciousness.” (I.6) Consequently, they hold that there is nothing in us that survives death: “there is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world.” (C.1)

We don’t find explicit arguments for hedonism in the extant Carvaka fragments. We do, however, find a coherent philosophical system in which hedonism is an integral part.

Just like Ancent India had the Carvaka school, Ancient China had Yangsim. Yangism derives its name from its founder, Yang Zhu, who was born around 440 BCE. Yang Zhu might have been influenced by Carvaka.

We have no surviving texts written by ancient Yangists. We must, therefore, as with Carvaka, rely on the accounts of Yangist views found in the work of their opponents.

The most extensive of these works is The Book of Lieh-tzu, written by the Taoist philosopher Lie Yukou in the 400s BCE. Here we can read the the Yangists said the following:

Some in ten years, some in a hundred, we all die; saints and sages die, the wicked and foolish die. … Rotten bones are all the same, who can tell them apart? Make haste to enjoy your life while you have it; why care what happens when you are dead?

We are further told that the followers of Yang hold that you have no reason to strive for “purity” or “correctness.” Rather, Yangists encourage you to “give yourself up to whatever your ears wish to listen to, your eyes to look on, your nostrils to turn to, your mouth to say, your body to find ease in, your will to achieve.” Give your ears “music and song,” your eyes “the beauty of women,” and your nostrils “orchids and spices,” and let the mouth freely and honestly “discuss truth and falsehood.”

The restrictions that people put on their own enjoyment are, Yangists claim, are “oppressive masters” that are not worthy of being obeyed. They recommend that “while you are alive, resign yourself and let life run its course; satisfy all your desires and wait for death. When it is time to die, resign yourself and let death run its course; go right to your destination, which is extinction.”

As with with the Carvaka fragments, the Yangist fragments do not provide us any explicit arguments for hedonism, nor do they provide us with answers to objections to hedonism. In both cases, however, we do see the outline of a philosophical system. If we were to describe them using contemporary terminology, we could say that both Carvaka and Yangism combines a hedonistic ethics with an empiricist epistemology and a materialist epistemology.

This is a combination of position that, as we shall see, will come to reoccur many times in the history of hedonism.

In the next post, I will turn to hedonism in early Greek philosophy.

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