Introduction Part 1

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The following comes from the Cave’s

The Best of the Cynics: The Lives, Writings & Teachings of the Ancient Cynics.

__________

LUIS E. NAVIA WRITES THAT “the word cynic generally conveys negative ideas in modern languages.”[i] It’s true. Crack open a dictionary and you may well find something along these lines defining the cynic or cynical: “A person who believes all people are motivated by selfishness.” Or: “A person whose outlook is scornfully and often habitually negative.” Or: “Negative or pessimistic, as from world-weariness.”

You may recall when you were young, say in your teens, feeling cynical—something you somberly and with a great deal of sincerity reported to a friend late at night. “I’m so cynical.” The inevitable response, accompanied with a sigh: “Yeah, me too.”

But little did you and your friend know! If only you had been familiar with another dictionary definition, then you may not have seen yourself as cynical at all—at least not in the ancient sense. Or possibly you would have embraced the term with gusto. The other definition? “A member of an ancient Greek philosophical school who believed virtue to be the only good and practice of self-control to be the only way of achieving virtue.”[ii]

It’s strange, really, that one word can have such divergent meanings. Isn’t selfishness bad?—and pessimism and a habitual negativity? And isn’t virtue something good, as well as self-control? We may naturally ask, then, how did the idea of cynicism go from something presumably good to something presumably bad?

To answer the question very briefly, we must look to the ancient critique of certain Cynics that was offered during the Roman Empire, if not earlier. According to Lucian of Samosata (second century AD), for example, there were many Cynics who preached Cynicism without actually living it, negatively criticizing people and their way of life without practicing a life of virtue. As such, went the critique, they were hypocrites, frauds (one may think of certain modern, even cynical, politicians, ministers, or gurus).

So it was by the eighteenth century that Edmund Burke labeled Jean-Jacques Rousseau a “cynic” as one who advocated certain ideals but failed to live up to them. According to David Mazella, Rousseau’s “French and British detractors used his writings to assemble a public image remarkably close to the features of what would come to be known as the modern cynic: atheistic disbelief, habitual distrust of others, shameless indifference to conventional morality, and a hypocritical gap between word and deed.”[iii]

There are more twists and turns to the story. But to conclude our brief tour, at best the modern understanding of the term “cynic” takes into consideration only half of what Cynicism first was—the negative, the brash, the eye-brow raised, irony-tinged, self-focused half. If so, then what about the other half? What about the good of Cynicism that was admired for nearly a millennium from its founding around 400 BC to its decline toward the end of the classical world some eight hundred years later? And why should we care to know?

Why should we care about the Cynics?

The Cynics and their way of life influenced the Greek and Roman worlds for centuries, from the rise and development of Cynicism around the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth centuries BC to its demise sometime toward the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century AD. This is the first reason why we should care about the Cynics—for their long-term influence.

Although the impact of Cynicism ebbed and flowed over time, there were always individual Cynics roaming from city to city that made a strong impression on the population. Antisthenes and Diogenes were the first, followed by many others over the next eight hundred years. So far as we know, Sallustius of Emesa, who was born around 430 AD and likely lived into the early years of the sixth century, was the final one. At least he is the last name we possess in the historical record.[iv]

For the eight centuries in between the earliest and latest Cynics, the average person would have encountered Cynicism through its representatives who lived and begged and taught in the open air. There they would be in the typical Cynic outfit, walking along the road, or standing in the marketplace, or sitting by a temple taking care of their own business, or talking with others, preaching even, criticizing society and urging everyone to wake up in order to live freer, more authentic and self-sufficient lives. As for the better off, they absorbed Cynicism through education. As Raffaella Cribiore explains in her work on ancient Greek and Roman education, the “Sayings of [the Cynic] Diogenes dominated education at all levels.”[v]

The truth is that Cynicism had nothing truly original to offer, not in terms of basic philosophical ideas anyway. There was no startling theory regarding how we humans come to know things or about the nature of reality. In fact, Cynicism mostly shunned such questions. What it did have to offer, though, and this to a fevered degree, was a way of life, a practice. It was this offering—that of moral training, of intense practice toward a better way of life in accord with nature—that was its greatest influence on those alive and those to come.

The Cynics lived a radical life, and in doing so they served as moral exemplars for others. Later Stoics referred to the Cynic way of life as a “shortcut to virtue.”[vi] Plato is supposed to have said of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “Socrates gone mad.”[vii] If so, then Diogenes was in step with the example of Socrates found in the now mostly lost Socratic dialogues of Antisthenes, a Socrates who “was undoubtedly ascetic, a ‘man with a mission.’”[viii] Over time Diogenes himself was held up as a moral exemplar to others. In his classic history of Cynicism, Cambridge don Donald R. Dudley explains that “for the Cynics and Stoics Diogenes became a second Heracles, the ideal sophos [wise man] who could be used to emphasize any worthy moral or exemplify any desirable characteristic.”[ix] Diogenes’ student Crates of Thebes was another moral exemplar.

But more. According to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, and confirmed by the Roman emperor Julian, Crates “was the originator of the noble doctrines of Zeno,” the founder of Stoicism.[x]In this way, Cynicism influenced moral philosophy and its practice as it developed during the Hellenistic period and beyond. In the case of Stoicism, Cynicism, as the “shortcut to virtue,” was the ground out of which the great tree of Stoicism grew. Dudley judges that “the Cynic element, present in Stoicism from its foundation, was maintained [for a very long time] … indeed the noblest conception of Cynicism ever formulated was to come from the Stoic Epictetus.”[xi] And whatever Stoicism eventually touched, for instance, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Cynicism also touched in some vicarious way—however challenging to detect with precision.[xii] We can even see its influence, though in a far different and roundabout manner, on the hedonist Cyrenaic school and its offshoots in terms of a shared “contempt for accepted values.”[xiii]

The latter contempt, colorfully expressed in the Cynic penchant for outspoken criticism, points to another way in which this radical philosophy influenced Greek and Roman culture. Over time certain Cynics developed two new forms of discourse or writing. One was the diatribe, a literary genre that frankly “treats of ordinary human problems in a common-sense spirit.”[xiv] In his work on Greek rhetoric, the ancient writer Hermogenes of Tarsus says that the “diatribe is a moral exposition of some brief topic.”[xv] Dudley describes it as a dialogue that dispenses with one of the speakers.[xvi] In this sense, it is more a speaking atthan a speaking with. Nothing is so much being searched for as it is demonstrated by means of “allegory, anecdote, … quotation, [and] its appeals to an imaginary adversary,” among other devices.[xvii] The other genre was the satire. More specifically it was the Menippean satire that zeroed in on certain ideals and practices in order to lampoon them. “In the writings of Menippus, the Cynic spirit of mockery of human values was all-pervading.”[xviii] As a form of seriocomic writing (in Greek, Strabo called such writing spoudogeloios, a blend of the serious and the amusing), the satire came to have a unique place in Roman literature, influencing such writers as Lucian of Samosata, who wrote a number of satires, as well as about certain Cynics and aspects of Cynicism. It is doubtlessly for this Cynic genre that Friedrich Nietzsche much later labelled the Cynics “the humorists of antiquity.”[xix]

In another form of criticism, beginning, we might say, with Diogenes himself and his disdain for Alexander the Great—at least the stories that were told about his disdain, Cynicism played a role in the “philosophic opposition” to several Roman emperors that occurred in the latter half of the first century AD.[xx] This form of criticism was closely tied to Cynic frankness of speech and outspokenness (parrhēsia). Without going into details, such opposition resulted a few times in the expulsion of Cynic and Stoic philosophers from Rome. We also know from Dio Chrysostom that Cynic preaching was responsible for stirring up frequent riots among the people of Alexandria.

As the centuries passed, the Cynics and their radical approach to and ideas about living continued to influence other people and other ways of life in the ever-changing Greek and Roman worlds. One instance is the Judaism of Philo of Alexandria (first century AD). Much of his writing hints at strong ties to Cynic and Stoic writing, including the diatribe. So, concludes Dudley, “the Cynic ingredients of the older Stoicism reappear in [Philo’s] ethics, as do the standard themes and figures of the popular preaching which was common to Stoic and Cynic alike.”[xxi]

Otherwise, there was the Cynic influence on Christian theology and practice. As for the former, there is St. Basil of Caesarea’s letter to the monk Ourbikios (Urbicius) about self-control, which was, as we’ll see, a typical Cynic theme. Not only does Basil praise self-control as any street-preaching Cynic would do, but in a manner that seems to echo St. John’s declaration that God is the Word (logos) or that God is love (agapē), he goes on to suggest that God himself “seems to be self-control (enkrateia) …” Why? Basil explains that God seems to be enkrateia because God “desires nothing … being without need, he is wholly satisfied.”[xxii] As for practice, the historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston remarks that “we find evidence of a Christianized Cynicism … in the person of Maximus of Alexandria,” who, Dudley suggests, “may well have combined the Cynic garb and the Christian faith.”[xxiii]According to an oration of Gregory of Nazianzus (Nazianzen), Maximus is “one who follows our [Christian] faith in an alien garb … [He] is a Cynic not through shamelessness but through freedom of speech, not through gluttony but through the simplicity of his daily life.”[xxiv]

This same Christian Cynicism, or the influence of Cynicism on Christianity, may be observed relative to early Christian monasticism and ascetic practice—though, as Dudley admits, the tie is “hard to trace.”[xxv] Still, the impact was enough for one recent writer to conclude that “there is general agreement that [Cynicism] helped shape the direction of Christian asceticism.”[xxvi] This same Cynic-inspired practice, doubtlessly based on the example and sayings of Christ himself (whom some have compared to a wandering Cynic preacher), eventually inspired later Christian practice during the Middle Ages. Scholars cite likely ties to Irish eremitism, the Albigensians and Cathars, and such mendicant orders as the Dominicans and the Franciscans.

The Cynic influence did not end with the waning of the Middle Ages and the advent of the modern world. Rather, as the classics scholar R. Bracht Branham concludes, “the afterlife of Cynicism … [was] the liveliest and most varied of the ancient philosophical sects.”[xxvii]Its impact extended to European philosophy, politics, and literature. We see it in the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin; we see it in the theories of political and social anarchism; we see it in the revival of Menippean satire during the Renaissance, and in its influence, according to “the heterodox argument of Mikhail Bakhtin” on the “genealogy of the modern novel.”[xxviii] Of course, as we have already observed, we may also see ancient Cynicism’s influence on the modern phenomenon of cynicism, which has led to the largely negative use of the word today.

Given Cynicism’s enduring influence, we may also note the strong reactions that it elicited in the form of praise or blame. This is the second reason why we should care about the Cynics. Whether to acclaim them and their way of life or to condemn them, people felt strongly about them for nearly a millennium. Cynicism was something that demanded a response.

On the praise side of the ledger, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus held that “the ideal Cynic was the highest type of philosopher.”[xxix] The Roman emperor Julian judged Cynicism to be “a match for the most excellent” of philosophies, particularly admiring the example of Diogenes of Sinope.[xxx] “Some,” we are told by Diogenes Laertius, “have said that Cynicism is a shortcut upon the path of virtue,” the path that was itself considered the highest and therefore best road to happiness for most ancient philosophers—no small thing.[xxxi] To give a few more examples, the Roman geographer Strabo acknowledged the Greek colony of Sinope for “produc[ing] excellent men,” among whom was the Cynic philosopher Diogenes.[xxxii] Pliny the Elder included the same Diogenes in a short list of “the masters of philosophy.”[xxxiii] If we were to include all the others in the ancient world who valued Cynicism in one way or another, or who admired individual Cynics, we would have to add Zeno of Citium, Apollodorus of Seleucia, Seneca, Dio Chrysostom, Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Neoplatonist commentator Simplicius, among others.

The negative side of the ledger begins with Plato’s suggestion that Diogenes was a “Socrates gone mad.”[xxxiv] Even if the statement is apocryphal, it nevertheless points to the general reproach that Cynicism was extreme. Dudley explains that many Romans “would have regarded Cynicism as offensive vulgarity.”[xxxv] Cicero is a good example of this sentiment. “The Cynic philosophy,” he declared, “should be wholly rejected. It is hostile to a proper sense of shame.”[xxxvi] The much later Christian rhetorician Lactantius echoed Cicero’s sentiments in suggesting that the Cynics “took away all sense of shame.”[xxxvii] Similarly, St. Augustine of Hippo berated the Cynics for overlooking “the modest instincts of men” by declaring it was okay to have sex in public—though, he speculated, it is likely that no Cynic ever actually went through with the act. Regardless, he asserted that if any Cynic tried to copulate in public in his day, “they would be spat upon, not to say stoned, by the mob.”[xxxviii] Others criticized the Cynic practice of begging as a kind of dependent freeloading. “They say they are self-sufficient, but in fact … they need the rich for food and cooks to satisfy their gluttony.” Tatian, the Christian philosopher who condemned them in this manner, suggested that, for the Cynics, philosophy was “the art of getting money.”[xxxix] Lactantius similarly accused the Cynics of wishing to beg for food rather than working honestly for it, an act that, if universalized, would lead to the economic collapse of any polity, he judged. “If everyone imitated the wisdom of these [Cynics], how would states exist?”[xl] For one ancient voice, Cynic begging and frugality contradicted the gifts of nature provided by God: “If this sort of contentment is to pass for wisdom, God must have been all wrong in making sheep woolly, filling grapes with wine, and providing all our infinite variety of oil, honey, and the rest.”[xli] Then there were all the fake Cynics. A whole chorus of critics denounced these—even some who praised the more ideal form of Cynicism, writers such as Lucian of Samosata, Martial, Petronius, Seneca, Epictetus (at times), and Dio Chrysostom (also at times), among others.[xlii]

Despite all the criticism, and despite all the fakes who did in fact make a bad name for the philosophy and way of life, Cynicism did have, as we have seen, a tremendous influence on the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, an influence that has continued into our own era. Accordingly, we might ask what we may presently learn from ancient Cynicism. This is the third reason we should care about the Cynics—for what they are able to teach us today.

If we care to, we may learn from the Cynics what may be called the modification of desire or desire reduction. Stating “desire reduction” in positive terms, we may learn simplicity from them, the art of simple living. Looking at their viewpoint from one angle, we see that the Cynics realized that if happiness is the satisfaction of desire (an idea going back at least to Homer), then the best way to be satisfied is to drastically reduce desire. The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope “used to say that it was characteristic of the gods to need nothing, and that, consequently, when a man desires very little or nothing at all, he is like the gods.”[xliii] He was like Socrates in this way of thinking. Describing a very Cynic Socrates, or the Socrates after whom the Cynics modelled themselves, Diogenes Laertius observes that he “was a man of great independence or self-sufficiency”—the attribute of autarkeia that was extremely important to the Cynics. Citing a number of examples, he goes on to relate that “often, when Socrates looked at all the goods for sale in the marketplace, he would say to himself, ‘How many things I neither want nor need!’”[xliv]

Such “desire reduction” would go a long way in curing many of us of what some have labeled “affluenza,” or unhealthy consumerism.[xlv] We must consume, we tell ourselves, in order to grow the economy. We must do the latter, of course, in order to consume. But what if we approached life differently? What would progress look like if it were not always measured in terms of the production of consumer goods? Also, on a possibly related note, what would desire reduction do for the environment? We may learn from the Cynics that, aside from apparent economic necessity, there is no intrinsic need, and, therefore, no intrinsic desire for more and more wealth and goods and novel sources of pleasure.[xlvi]

That asserted, most ancient Cynics would not have supported any government that forcibly reduced people’s desires. Not only that but most looked upon those who were poor as living in the necessary condition for happiness—if only, the Cynics judged, the poor would intentionally choose their poverty even as they themselves did. The Cynics did not mean for this to serve as an excuse for the wealthy to go on their merry way in luxury; rather, they often expressed pity for the wealthy and the powerful, who, they believed, were enslaved to what they desired and what they possessed. For those of us who are comfortably wealthy, the idea can serve as a point of reflection: in what way can I reduce my own desires so as to increase my sense of satisfaction and happiness?

There’s far more we can learn from the Cynics. In brief, they have something to say to us about the intrinsic value of hard work and suffering in establishing in us the habit of endurance—what many now call “grit,” the ability to stick with something no matter how challenging and painful it is. Along with this is the significance of practice or training related to cultivating those excellent habits that will carry us through life—the realization that such habits do not always come naturally, and that most of us have to work at forming them. Finally, we may learn to speak the truth frankly and cleverly. Because the Cynics lived a life of chosen poverty judged by them to be incredibly rich, they had very little to lose in speaking their minds to the political and other leaders or powers of their day. When Alexander the Great stood over Diogenes while he was sunbathing and asked him what he could grant him, Diogenes said, “I would like you to stop blocking the light”—this because he wanted nothing. Another time, when a man derisively reminded Diogenes of the fact that he had been sentenced to exile by the citizens of Sinope, his home town, he responded, “And I sentenced them to stay there.”[xlvii]

It is this creative, inside-out way of looking at life that allowed the Cynics to live and freely speak as they did and to be content as they reportedly were.

But who were the Cynics? Let’s turn now to a few basic facts about this influential group of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.

So ends Item 1, “Introduction Part 1 — Why Should We Care about the Cynics?” See you in Item 2, “Introduction Part 2 — Basic Facts about the Cynics.”

Notes

[i] Luis E. Navia, Cynicism – Bibliography. From http://science.jrank.org/pages/ 7612/Cynicism.html.

[ii] Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 3rded., s.v. “cynic” and “cynical.”

[iii] David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 21. See also John Christian Laursen, “Cynicism Then and Now,” Iris, European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate 1, no. 2 (2009): 475.

[iv] “Sallustius, who is referred to in Damasius’ Life of his friend Isidorus, is the last [Cynic] known to us by name in the long line of followers of Diogenes [of Sinope].” Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism—From Diogenes to the 6th Century A.D. (Strand: Methuen & Co. Ltd.), 207.

[v] Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 128.

[vi] See, for instance, the Stoic Apollodorus’ remark from his Ethics: “The Stoics say that the wise man will play the Cynic since the Cynic philosophy and way of life is a shortcut to virtue,” cited in Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 6.121 (from now on Lives).

[vii] Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.54.

[viii] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 14.

[ix] Ibid., 19.

[x] See Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.104, where he recognizes a “certain community between the two schools”—the Stoic and Cynic schools. See also Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 96: “Cynicism was to contribute to a more enduring system, that of Zeno of Citium [Stoicism].”

[xi] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 103.

[xii] Regarding Stoicism’s influence on the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Frederick Copleston offers the example of the logoi spermatikoi (the ideas in the World Soul) as “an obvious adoption of Stoic doctrine.” See Frederick Copleston, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus, vol. 1, A History of Philosophy (Westminster: Newman Press, 1946), 468. But this conception would not have come from the Cynics. Rather, to take a different example, as Dudley points out, the spoudaios (the excellent and thus happy man) in contrast with the phaulos(the sorry and thus unhappy man—a contrast maintained by Plotinus) may be traced to the Cynics. See Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 97. Another Stoic concept originating with the Cynics was that of “things indifferent (adiaphoros)”—that is, those things that neither contribute to virtue or being virtuous nor to vice or being vicious. For more on Stoicism, see The Best of Early Stoicism (Sugar Land: The Classics Cave, 2021).

[xiii] See Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 104.

[xiv] According to Dudley, the diatribe was developed by Bion of Borysthenes. “… Diatribe as a literary genre appears to have been the work of Bion.” See ibid., 65-66; 111.

[xv] Hermogenes, Greek Rhetoric (Rhet. Graec.) III, p. 406, quoted in Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 111.

[xvi] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 111.

[xvii] Ibid., 111.

[xviii] Ibid., 70. Menippus of Gadara was a third century BC Cynic.

[xix] Cited in Bracht Branham, “Cynicism,” in Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 247.

[xx] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 128.

[xxi] Ibid., 186. According to Dudley, the point comes from the argument of the German scholar Paul Wendland.

[xxii] Basil, Letter 366. Roy J. Deferrari notes that the “letter seems to be spurious,” though others have attributed it to Basil. See Roy J. Deferrari, Basil: Letters 249-368, On Greek Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 350- 351 footnote. For “St. John’s declaration” that God is the Word and love, see John 1.1 and 1 John 4.8.

[xxiii] See Frederick Copleston, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus, 441, and Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 204.

[xxiv] Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 23, quoted in Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 205.

[xxv] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 174.

[xxvi] See Robert Dobbin, The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian (London: Penguin Books, 2012), xxxix.

[xxvii] Bracht Branham, “Cynicism,” in Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds. The Classical Tradition, 247.

[xxviii] Ibid., 247.

[xxix] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 145. See Epictetus Discourse 3.22.

[xxx] Julian Oration 6. For a discussion of his admiration of the Cynicism of Diogenes, see Robert Dobbin, The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian (London: Penguin Books, 2012), xxxvi.

[xxxi] Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.104. For virtue as the road to happiness, see Happiness: What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Happiness (Sugar Land: The Classics Cave, 2021) and Aretē: Excellence or Virtue—What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Aretē (Sugar Land: The Classics Cave, 2021).

[xxxii] Strabo, Geography 12.3.

[xxxiii] Pliny the Elder, The Natural History 7.18.

[xxxiv] Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.54.

[xxxv] Dudley, A History of Cynicism, 118.

[xxxvi] Cicero, On Duties 1.148.

[xxxvii] Lactantius, Epitome of the Divine Institutes 39.

[xxxviii] Augustine, City of God 14.20.

[xxxix] Tatian, Discourse against the Greeks 25. Apparently Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism, held something similar—that “the wise [Epicurean] man will not live like a Cynic … nor will he beg for alms.” See Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.119.

[xl] Lactantius, Epitome of the Divine Institutes 39.

[xli] Lucian of Samosata, The Cynic 5.

[xlii] See Frederick Copleston, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus, 439.

[xliii] Diogenes Laertius, Lives 6.104.

[xliv] Ibid., 2.24-25.

[xlv] See John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us—and How to Fight Back (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014).

[xlvi] The Cave makes the suggestion fully recognizing the complexity of the economy and the many goods, both material and spiritual, a healthy economy contributes to human living. Even so, the Cynic position is worth considering.

[xlvii] Ibid., 6.38, 49.