CYRENAICS. - A Greek philosophical sect founded by Aristippus of Cyrene (whence its name), one of the four schools that arose from the teaching of Socrates. Its principal representatives were: Aristippus, his daughter Arête, her son Aristippus the Younger, called “the pupil of his mother,” Theodorus the Atheist, Hegesias called “the death-persuader” (τελεσίδαντος), and Anniceris, all from Cyrene.
ARISTIPPUS, born in Cyrene in 435 B.C., came to Athens in 416 and was among the most assiduous followers of Socrates. When Socrates died, he was in Aegina (Plato, Phaedo, 59c). He resided at the court of the two Dionysii in Syracuse. Diogenes Laertius records two lists of works under his name; the second, shorter list was recognized by Sotion and Panaetius. Only one fragment survives: “Men leave their wealth to their children, but do not leave them the knowledge necessary to use it” (Demetrius, On Style, §296). The accounts that the sources give of his doctrine do not allow any distinction to be made between what is due to him and what, in the formulation of problems and terminology, appears more reasonably to belong to the age of Aristippus the Younger. Rather than a system, he developed an art of living, widely characterized in the numerous anecdotes and sayings transmitted under his name.
Like Antisthenes, he is half a continuer of the Sophists, and like him he missed what was essential in Socratic dialectic: the search for the universal. His epistemology is linked to that of Protagoras (cf. Plato, Theaetetus, 156a) and develops it into an absolute phenomenalism. Sensations alone are subjectively true: the object is unconscious, and we have no other source of knowledge than sensations. He follows the same line in his ethics, where Sophistic and Socratic elements are fused together. Socrates had admitted the useful and pleasure but had universalized them, bringing them by their nature to coincide with the good. For Aristippus, the universal does not exist, and thus the good is reduced to pleasure. Yet here too he goes beyond the early Sophistic hedonism. Pleasure is pleasure in act, the pleasure of the moment, and just as sensation does not yield the qualities of the object but the modifications of the subject (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, VII, 191), the same holds for affection. This grants the subject a freedom with respect to things that Socrates sought in the universal, and by transforming hedonism into aestheticism, it restores to intelligence (Socratic φρόνησις) its guiding function. Hence the famous saying: “I possess, I am not possessed” (ἐγώ, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἔχουμε). Intelligence, however, has no criteria of its own: the criteria of the true and the good are always the present sensation; its achievement thus consists in extracting from every circumstance the greatest quantity of pleasure. This demands an art, of which Aristippus was a master (Diogenes Laertius, II, 66); Horace perfectly characterizes him in the well-known line: “omnia Aristippum decuit color et status et res” (Epistles, I, 23). That the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly in an ethical sense, exist only by convention and not by nature goes almost without saying. If the wise man respects custom and laws, he does so to avoid the penalties attached to them and out of respect for his reputation (Diogenes Laertius, II, 93; cf. also loc. cit., 87, 89, 90 and X, 136-137, where a comparison is drawn between Epicurus’ doctrine and that of the Cyrenaics).
With Theodorus and Hegesias, the focus of the doctrine shifts. Theodorus, called the Atheist for having denied the gods (in Athens he ran the risk of prosecution, from which he was saved by Demetrius of Phalerum), transferred the end from the body to the soul, proclaiming wisdom and justice as goods, never the habits opposed to them, and placing physical pleasure and pain among indifferent things. Consequently, he made the joy proper to wisdom the end and the sadness relative to folly the opposite term. These terms, however, must not mislead: wisdom and justice are understood in an absolute sense. The individualistic thrust remains. Theodorus affected great contempt for things and men, developing to a radical degree the indifference that was characteristic of Aristippus. He denied friendship as useless to the wise, who need no one, and harmful to fools; he found it plausible that the wise man would not sacrifice himself for his country, since wisdom ought not to perish for the sake of folly. The doctrine that the wise man will steal and commit adultery and sacrilege when he has the opportunity must be regarded as slander by opponents (Diogenes Laertius, II, 98-99).
In a distinctly pessimistic direction Hegesias developed the doctrine. Whereas Aristippus had said that happiness is to be chosen not for itself but for the pleasures of which it is the sum, Hegesias removed it from the number of real things and limited the end to the avoidance of pain and mental disturbance, agreeing with Theodorus in treating pleasure and pain as indifferent states. He showed, however, greater understanding for fools, denying the voluntariness of error and prescribing indulgence for the wise.
He regarded living and dying as matters of free choice, and life as useful only to fools. Hence his nickname “the death-persuader” (Diogenes Laertius, II, 93-96).
With ANNICERIS the doctrine returns to its earlier form but emerges from its selfish isolation. He prescribed that the wise man should cultivate friendship, love his parents and his country, and sacrifice his own pleasure for them when necessary (Diogenes Laertius, II, 96-97); V. HEDONISM.