Cyrenaics

CYRENAICS. - Greek philosophical sect, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene (hence the name), one of the four that arose from the teaching of Socrates. Its principal representatives were: Aristippus, his daughter Arete, her son Aristippus the Younger, called "the pupil of his mother," Theodore the Atheist, Hegesias called "the persuader of death" (πεισθάνατος), and Anniceris, all of Cyrene.

ARISTIPPUS, b. at Cyrene in 435 B.C., came to Athens in 416 and was among the most assiduous followers of Socrates. When the latter died, he was in Aegina (Plato, Phaed., 59 c). He resided at Syracuse at the court of the two Dionysii. Diogenes Laertius records under his name two lists of works; the second, shorter one, was the one acknowledged by Sotion and by Panaetius. Of these only a single fragment has survived: "Men leave their riches to their children, but they do not leave them the knowledge necessary to make use of them" (Demetrius, De eloc., § 296). The accounts that the sources give of his doctrine do not permit any distinction to be made between what is due to him and what, by the form of the problems and by the terminology, appears more reasonably to belong to the age of Aristippus the Younger. More than a system, he elaborated an art of living, largely characterized in the numerous anecdotes and sayings handed down under his name.

Like Antisthenes he is half a continuator of the sophists, and like him he let slip what was essential in Socratic dialectic, the search for the universal. His epistemology attaches itself to that of Protagoras (cf. Plato, Theaet., 156 a), and develops it into an absolute phenomenalism. Sensations are only subjectively true: the object is unknowable, and we have no other source of knowledge than sensations. His ethics follows the same line, in which sophistic and Socratic elements are found fused together. Socrates had admitted the useful and pleasure, but he had universalized them, thereby bringing them to coincide with the good. For Aristippus the universal does not exist, and therefore the good is reduced to pleasure. But here too he goes beyond the first sophistic hedonism. Pleasure is pleasure in act, the pleasure of the instant, and just as sensation does not give the qualities of the object, but the modifications of the subject (Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., VII, 191), the same holds for affection. This restores to the subject that freedom in the face of things which Socrates sought in the universal, and by transforming hedonism into aestheticism, it restores to the intelligence (the Socratic φρόνησις) its function as guide. Hence the famous motto: "I possess, I am not possessed" (ἔχω, ἀλλ' οὐκ ἔχωμαι). Only that the intelligence has no criteria of its own: the criterion of the true and the good is always the present sensation: its task is therefore reduced to extracting from every circumstance the greatest quantity of pleasure. This demands an art, and Aristippus was a master of it (Diog. Laert., II, 66): Horace perfectly characterizes him in the well-known verse: "omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res" (Ep., I, 23). That just and unjust, beautiful and ugly in the ethical sense are by convention and not by nature, is scarcely necessary to say. If the sage respects custom and the laws, he does so in order not to incur the relative penalties and out of respect for his name (Diog. Laert., II, 93; cf. also loc. cit., 87, 89, 90 and X, 136-37, where a parallel is established between the doctrine of Epicurus and that of the Cyrenaics).

With Theodore and Hegesias the center of the doctrine is shifted. THEODORE, called the Atheist, for having denied the gods (in Athens he ran the risk of being prosecuted, had Demetrius of Phalerum not extricated him from the difficulty), transferred the end from the body to the soul, proclaiming wisdom and justice goods, the habits opposed to them evils, and placing physical pleasure and pain among indifferent things. Consequently he considered the joy proper to wisdom the end, and the sadness relating to folly the term opposed to it. These terms must not, however, deceive: wisdom and justice are understood in an absolutely individualistic sense. Theodore affected a great contempt for things and men, developing in a radical sense the indifference that was proper to Aristippus. He denied friendship, because it is useless to the wise, who need no one, and harmful to fools; he found it plausible that the wise man should not sacrifice himself for his country, because wisdom must not perish for the sake of folly. The doctrine that the wise man will steal and commit adultery and sacrilege, when he has the occasion, must be considered as a calumny of adversaries (Diog. Laert., II, 98-99).

The doctrine was developed in a clearly pessimistic sense by HEGESIAS. The happiness that Aristippus had said was to be chosen not for itself but for the pleasures of which it is constituted as their sum, he removed from the number of real things, and limited the end to the flight of pain and of the disturbance of the mind, agreeing with Theodore in considering pleasure and pain as indifferent states. He had, however, greater understanding for fools, denying the voluntary nature of error and prescribing indulgence for the sage.

He considered living and dying to be a matter of free choice, and life useful only to fools. Hence the name of "persuader of death" (Diog. Laert., II, 93-96).

With ANNICERIS the doctrine returns to its earlier form, but emerges from its egoistic solitude. He prescribed for the sage to cultivate friendship, to love his parents and his country and to sacrifice, where necessary, his own pleasure for them (Diog. Laert., II, 96-97); v. EDONISMO.

Carlo Diano