Epicurus Vs Freud

For Epicurus behavior in pursuit of pleasure assured to an upright life. Epicurus says that the highest good of human living is happiness. However, he identifies happiness with the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is the highest good, and anything else that is good, will be rated by how much pleasure it can bring to that person. Us humans can tell pleasure and pain apart as if we are telling apart hot water from cold water. However, we should not only try and look for pleasure, and we should not try to always avoid pain. Epicurus also distinguishes between physical and mental pleasures and pains. To attain a state of perfect mental peacefulness, a person needs to avoid anxiety. Pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of a desire and pain from
its frustration. So, any desire should either be satisfied to yield pleasure or eliminated to avoid pain. Freud’s view on pleasure is that, the pleasure principal strives to fulfill our most basic primitive urges, including hunger, thirst, anger, and sex.
When these needs are not met, the result is a state of anxiety or tension. Sometimes referred to as the pleasure – pain principle, this motivating force helps drive behavior but it also wants instant satisfaction. As you might imagine, some needs simply cannot be met in the moment we feel them. If we satisfied our every whim whenever we felt hunger or thirst, we might find ourselves behaving in ways that are not appropriate for the given moment. I think that Epicurus and Freud have similar views on what pleasure is and what is unpleasurable. They both believe that the key to happiness and pleasure is, getting the highest good, or things that will make us feel good in that moment. For example, if you are hungry then you would eat, therefore you have met your pleasure goal by feeding yourself, or if someone is thirsty and they drink water, they have satisfied themselves by hydrating. I would also say that both Epicurus and Freud also believe that love is the center of satisfaction. We are satisfied by loving others and by being
loved.
I do not think these two are missing anything because, they do a good job of covering everything, or as much as they can on a topic. I would say that in my perspective love is a high level of pleasure, when you are in love your emotions are all over the place, and everything feels good, and you are happy. But when you break up with someone and end a relationship, everything turns into the opposite. We feel pain, we feel as if our hearts have been truly broken, and that we may never be happy again.
I feel like both Epicurus and Freud’s arguments hold up to scrutiny because, they are basically the founders of the scientific way’s of measuring pleasure and pain.
I personally do not feel like there is anything more basic or important than pleasure that we strive for. Everything that we do is based around pleasure. For example, I am attending college right now so that I can graduate with a good degree, and be able to live a happy and successful life. I know that if I can accomplish this goal then I will reach a high level of pleasure. No one wants to feel pain or unpleasure. If I am hungry then I will eat to satisfy my needs, I would not just sit in hunger as my stomach hurts and makes loud noises. That is in my opinion the opposite of pleasure, which is
pain.
I do not think striving to avoid unpleasure is the best way to live our lives because, everything and anything that we want to accomplish in life comes with pain and unpleasure. I truly believe that to reach the ultimate pleasure in life everyone will go through pain and misery. That is the only way to reach your goal, and to reach the pleasure that you could not feel from much smaller achievements. If we avoid unpleasure, and being sad, then we are not really living. We are just going through life as if everything is easy, and just handed to us. We would have no real motivation or sense of what life is. When you’re in school, the pain is staying up all night to study for an exam, or to finish an eight-page paper, but all that pain ends once you turn that assignment in. All of that pain will turn into pleasure once you receive the grade for that assignment and realize that all of your hard work just paid off.