Gilgamesh Hedonism

Throughout the literature examined, therein emerged a complex picture of an ideology dating back to antiquity. It has no concrete time period with a start and an end date. It is an ideology that has been subject to the ebbs and flows of human thought. Hedonism has been present in human society as a value for thousands of years. Despite how varied and multifaceted Hedonism is, it is difficult for one to initially consider the attainment of pleasure an ideology.
Pleasure and pain are the base most of the human experience. Ideologies comment, usually auxiliary to the main tenets, on pleasure and pain. Hedonism is the foremost ideology that examines this directly, pain and pleasure form the foundation of it. Hedonism is divided into two broad
The original version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (1000 BCE), written in Babylonian, in it Gilgamesh is directed to eat, drink, and be merry. This is the thematic embrace of the hedonic state of pleasure. While Hedonism can branch out from pleasures of the body, this early example of Hedonism does not separate types of pleasure (Jastrow, 2006).
Epicurus (341-270 BCE), an antiquity era Greek philosopher, added to this idea 700 years later. Epicurean thought, as it is dubbed, prescribes a life of happiness as the ultimate goal for a human. The kind of Hedonism he advocated for favored the hedonic state of pleasure and fits into ethical Hedonism. Katastematic pleasures are the ultimate good in Epicurean thought. He distinguishes pleasure into the two types, the one previously mentioned, Katastematic, and Kinetic. These pleasures are defined as the happy or tranquil state that can exist in the lack of pain in the body and the lack of disturbance in the soul, respectively known in Greek as aponia and ataraxia (Waggle.
The idea of convenientia, the idea that God harmonizes natural law with human nature, is used by Locke to similarly synthesize Hedonism with the natural law doctrine. The assertion made by Rossiter is that pleasure and pain play an indicative role in the promulgation of the duties of natural law. The concordance between humanistic psychology and moral obligation is significant. Locke writes in “Pleasure, Pain, and the Passions” that pleasure and pain of the mind are the roots from which all passions arise from and are the foundation on which they stand. The moral law is synthesized with this in later Locke writings where he dismisses the idea that God would create a being whose sole obligation would be to perform actions that would make it miserable (Rossiter,