 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Livercombe Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Instant Gratification, the Cyrenaics. About 200 years before the birth of Christ, a historian named Hippoebotus sat down at his desk to write about the nine philosophical schools he considered most important. He included the usual suspects, Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, but at least three of the nine names are rather unfamiliar today, the Cyrenaics, the Anakarians, and the Theodorans. Don't panic, I won't have to devote the next three episodes to these obscure groups, because as it turns out, the Anakarians and Theodorans were simply developments within the larger tradition known as the Cyrenaics. Not that this tradition was very large. The Cyrenaics had already fizzled out by the time of Hippoebotus, and they would be on nobody's list of the most influential ancient philosophical movements, but they're worth discussing nonetheless. Along with the Cynics, they present us with a helpful introduction to the main debates of Hellenistic philosophy. They took up rather extreme positions within those debates, and did what philosophers tend to do when they're defending extreme positions, they came up with innovative and provocative ways of defending their corner. And there's one other reason I want to cover them, so that next time someone asks you what your favorite Hellenistic philosophical school is, you can impress the heck out of them by saying, oh, I've always had a soft spot for the Cyrenaics. Of course, a crowd will soon gather round and hang on your every word as you explain the ideas of the Cyrenaics, but as usual in this early period of Hellenistic philosophy, it's not so easy to say what those ideas were. As with the Cynics, our evidence for the Cyrenaics consists of reports and anecdotes rather than preserved philosophical treatises. Actually, the comparison with the Cynics is an apt one. The Cyrenaics were committed hedonists, whereas the Cynics chose a life of deliberate hardship, but they share the same goal, namely total freedom, and the same road to that goal, namely following nature. They even have a good deal in common historically. Ancient sources have Cyrenaics and Cynics studying with one another, and like the Cynics, the Cyrenaics could trace their lineage to an associate of Socrates. With the Cyrenaics, we see yet another variation on the theme of Socratic ethics. Where the Cynics could look back to the Socratic follower Antisthenes, the Cyrenaics claimed to carry on the ideas of another Socratic, Aristippus. If you're starting to get annoyed by the fact that all these names, Cynics and Cyrenaics, Antisthenes and Aristippus, sound rather alike, then I have bad news for you. It turns out that this follower of Socrates named Aristippus is the grandfather of the man who really developed Cyrenaic philosophy in all its glory. The name of this grandson? Aristippus. So we need to distinguish between the grandfather Aristippus the older, who was a companion of Socrates, and the grandson Aristippus the younger, who was really the brains of the family firm. The reason we call them Cyrenaics is that Aristippus the older hailed originally from a town in modern-day Libya called Cairini. He was known as an associate of Socrates, and is already mentioned by Xenophon as a character in his Socratic memoirs. Xenophon presents Aristippus the older as defending his hedonistic lifestyle, as Socrates urges him to adopt a life of greater self-control. In due course, Aristippus the older became famous for his hedonism, or perhaps I should say infamous. Just as many tales were inspired by the poverty and wisecracking of Diogenes the Cynic, so Aristippus is the hero of plentiful one-sentence short stories, each of which could be entitled pleasure is my business. These anecdotes typically feature Aristippus at a feast or visiting prostitutes. For instance, we hear of him telling a student that the problem with visiting a whorehouse isn't going in, but being unable to come back out. In another tale, a woman of loose morals accuses him of getting her pregnant. Aristippus tells her, you're like someone who walks through a thicket and blames one particular thorn for scratching her. Other stories have him demanding money from his students in stark contrast to Socrates, who was well known for asking nothing but friendship. For example, a father brought his son to be taught by Aristippus, who said that the price of instruction was 500 drachmas. The father said, for that much money I could buy a slave, and Aristippus replied, go ahead, then you'll have two. Now, I know what you're thinking. This guy isn't a philosopher, he's a debauched jerk who recycles bee material from the better known act of Diogenes the Cynic. Certainly, the ancient sources do give us that impression. In fact, they sometimes even credit the same one-liners to both Aristippus and Diogenes. But reading more carefully, we can see that Aristippus the older put some thought into his hedonism. We're told that he practiced self-discipline of a kind. He did grab any pleasure that came by, but by the same token, he was able to find pleasure in any circumstance. That story with the whorehouse, where he tells the student you need to be able to come back out, shows that he valued a limited kind of self-control. He emphasized the need to be satisfied with the pleasures one can have right now, and claimed that this life would be easiest, most pleasant, and most free. So there is indeed a lot Aristippus the elder has in common with Diogenes and the other Cynics. He was clearly more interested than the Cynics in luxurious pleasure and wealth, unless we discount these aspects of the evidence as scurrilous rumors. And he put pleasure front and center in his theory of the best life, which the Cynics certainly didn't do. But like them, he accepted the satisfaction of momentary desire as a natural way to live, and strove to live free and unencumbered by social convention. To be honest, though, Aristippus the older by himself would not really merit a place in our history of philosophy. It's Aristippus the younger who devised these signature philosophical theories we know as Cyrenaicism. Still central to his philosophical outlook is hedonism, the claim that pleasure is the good. He also inherits from his grandfather the idea that we should be interested in present pleasures. This forms a contrast to the Epicureans. As we'll see in a couple of episodes, Epicurus and his followers were hedonists who valued long-term planning. For them, pleasure-seeking is not a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment thing, but a strategic way of life which involves careful training, foregoing present pleasures for the sake of future ones and to avoid future pains, and also the enjoyment of remembering past pleasure and anticipating future pleasure. None of that for Aristippus the younger. For him, your life is only as good as what you are experiencing in the present moment. This brings us to something unusual and surprising about Aristippus the younger. Almost all ancient philosophers follow the lead of Plato and Aristotle in trying to identify the best life as the happy life. As I said when I talked about Aristotle, they are eudaimonist, meaning that they center their ethics on the goal of happiness, or eudaimonia. For the Stoics and Plato, at least in some of his moods, wisdom and virtue guarantee happiness. So, for them, wisdom and virtue are the good, at least as far as ethics are concerned. Aristotle is a bit harder to pin down. He makes virtues central to happiness, but leaves room for other goods like friends, family, and even material comfort, and winds up endorsing a life of contemplation. But all agree that when we do ethics we are trying to figure out what will make us happy. Of course, a hedonist can think this too. The Epicureans were hedonists precisely because they thought the life with the most pleasure is the happy and good life. The Cyrenaics are the odd men out. They aren't particularly interested in happiness. They are too focused on the here and now to worry about what would be best over a whole life. Why does Aristippus the Younger take this unusual view? We have to speculate, but my guess is that he saw the pressure a hedonist would feel if he started to admit the need for planning and calculation. In his dialogue The Protagoras, Plato has Socrates point out that a successful hedonist will need what he calls an art of measurement for deciding what will give him the most pleasure. This looks like a step on the slippery slope towards identifying the good with wisdom and rationality, and ultimately whatever reason commends to us, virtue for instance. Aristippus though wants to stick to the idea that the good is whatever feels good. He's not interested in memories of past pleasures or anticipations of future ones. After all, such pleasures don't even exist for us right now. What exists for us is whatever is affecting us right now. Aristippus talks about this as a kind of motion. Pleasure he defines as a smooth motion, and pain as a rough motion. In one of the many nautical metaphors that are scattered throughout ancient philosophy, he compares pain to a storm at sea, pleasure to a favouring wind, and the absence of both pain and pleasure to complete calm. But why does Aristippus identify pleasure with the good in the first place? It's as if he started out knowing he was going to defend the hedonism of present pleasures, and dispensed with anything that would get in the way, happiness, wisdom, memory, hope. In philosophy, holding to a position at all costs like this is not usually considered good form. So is this just misplaced filial devotion to granddad, or does the younger Aristippus have an argument to give on the older's behalf? He does, and it's an interesting one, not least because it was used by a range of hedonistic philosophers around this time, and also by their opponents. Sometimes called the cradle argument, the line of thought goes that from earliest childhood, all humans seek pleasure. Eudoxus, a mathematician and hedonist member of Plato's Academy, who we've met on more than one occasion, apparently gave an argument like this, invoking the fact that all animals strive constantly after pleasure. We'll see it used again in defense of pleasure soon, when we get to Epicurus, and later we'll see the Stoics use the idea that ethics can be grounded in the instinctive, natural responses of children and animals. You might think that the cradle argument is one even a child could see through. Just because animals and human infants seek pleasure no matter what doesn't mean that we mature adult humans should do it. You might even think that it's a sign of maturity to forgo pleasure for the sake of nobler ideals. But the cradle argument has more force if you admit, as many ancient philosophers did, that nature determines what is best for humans. Just think back to Aristotle's function argument, for example. Even today, many people assume that if something is unnatural, it must be unacceptable. The link between nature and ethical goodness is clearly an intuition that runs deep. And there's more. The Cyrenaics' emphasis on present pleasure helps them secure a goal they share not only with the cynics but with other Hellenistic schools, ataraxia, or the lack of disturbance. They take their cue from Aristippus the older, who announced that he sought the easiest and most pleasant life. The man who has pleasure right now and is satisfied by that has no anxiety about the future and no regrets about the past. Aristippus the younger supported this radical idea about the supreme importance of present pleasures by putting forward equally radical ideas about human knowledge. He started from the apparently innocent observation that I can only experience the way I am being affected by the things around me. So, for instance, if I see something white, that thing affects me by making me feel like I'm seeing white. Aristippus emphasized the passivity of this process by saying that if I seem to see something white then I am being whitened. The later author Plutarch makes fun of this by suggesting that for the Cyrenaics, if I seem to see a wall or a horse, then I am walled or horsed. But probably Aristippus spoke only of simpler experiences like seeing a color or tasting sweetness or sourness. This is a side issue though. The main point is that our experience consists in nothing but being affected in various ways. And of course things might affect you in one way and me in another way. For instance, if you are ill, everything may taste bitter to you. In that case, honey will, so to speak, embitter you, whereas it will sweeten me because I am healthy. Of course, common sense would say that if honey tastes sweet to me and bitter to you, then that is because my tasting ability is working properly and yours isn't. After all, honey really is sweet. If you think it's bitter, then that's your fault, not the honey's fault, and certainly not my fault. But the Cyrenaics think common sense needs some correction. Aristippus will remind us that we only experience the various ways the honey is affecting each of us. Those experiences are not something we can share. I can never take part in your experience of the honey any more than I can genuinely feel your pain when someone hits you in the face. All this is bound to remind us of the position Plato ascribes to the sophist Protagoras in the dialogue called Theaetetus. That was way back in episode 22, so perhaps I'd better remind you. Protagoras says that there is no absolute truth about, for instance, whether a certain wind is cold or warm. If it feels cold to you, it is cold for you, and if it feels warm to me, it is warm for me. In general, all truths are true only relative to the way things seem to somebody or somebody else. Perhaps there's no more than a family resemblance between Protagoras' relativism and the theory of the Cyrenaics. The Cyrenaics seem to have focused exclusively on basic sensory experiences, like whether something is sweet or white, whereas Protagoras, as Plato presents him, was at least as interested in judgments about things like justice and the beneficial. But as with Protagoras, modern readers can't help seeing the Cyrenaic position as an exciting premonition of later, radical views. Were these guys adopting a skeptical view about knowledge in general? Were they like Descartes, raising a doubt even about whether there are any external objects out there in the world that we seem to see around us? Well, I don't think so. Certainly, there is a skeptical flavor to their view, since they suspend judgment about whether the honey is in itself really sweet or bitter, and so on. But there's no suggestion that they suspended judgment about whether the honey exists at all. What they're after is rather an ethical point, namely that nothing is, or could be, important for me apart from the way things seem to me. This of course goes hand in hand with their hedonism. If my awareness of life, the universe, and everything boils down to how things seem to me right now, then it only stands to reason that present pleasure and pain are going to be of paramount importance. Now, you might argue that things right now can seem unjust, or unfair, or beautiful to us. That would give us a lot of other things to care about apart from present pleasure. But some interpreters think that Aristippus added one more piece to the puzzle. He may have said that all the experiences we have are in fact pleasures or pains. So if something tastes sweet, that is a kind of pleasure. If bitter, that is a kind of pain. If it is not even slightly pleasant or slightly painful, we will have no experience at all. It will be like something so bland that it has no taste. This explains why the Cyrenaics compare the state in which there is neither pleasure nor pain to a calm sea where there is no wind at all. Let's take stock. We've been looking at the views of Aristippus the Younger, and we've seen that for him, what exists for me is what I am experiencing right now, which is perhaps nothing apart from various pleasures and pains. No wonder that the only good to be had in life is the pleasure I can have right now, while the only bad thing is pain I am having now. This picture is consistent and uncompromising, but it wasn't a huge success. The philosophy of Epicurus pushed the Cyrenaics into a distant second place in the competition to be the most influential hedonistic school. Still, Aristippus the Younger did have his followers, which is why that historian I mentioned at the beginning of this episode lists several branches of the Cyrenaic school. These branches developed Aristippus' ideas in three different directions. An obvious way to defend the Cyrenaic theory was to make limited concessions, so as to render it more plausible. This seems to have been the strategy of one Anichares, who still insisted that pleasure is the good, but took a broader view of pleasure. Whereas Aristippus, both older and younger, seemed to have concentrated on basic physical pleasure, Anichares pointed out that honor and friendship are also pleasant. This more user-friendly version of the theory is in stark contrast to a second development at the hands of a thinker named Theodorus. He had no time for Anichares' socially domesticated version of Aristippus' ideas, yet he also thought little of physical pleasure. This is surprising, from a man who is associated with the Cyrenaic school, but he held on to another central theme of their thought, namely self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Thus he rejected the need for friendship and social ties with our fellow citizens. We seem to be heading in a fairly depressing direction here, and that impression is confirmed by a third strand of the tradition. A philosopher named Hegesius accepted the hedonism and skeptical epistemology of Aristippus the Younger. But like an obscure Greek version of Schopenhauer, Hegesius taught that we cannot expect life to be more pleasant than painful. The best we can do is to avoid pain as much as possible. This crushingly pessimistic outlook won Hegesius the memorable nickname death persuader. This was a philosopher who could literally drive you to suicide. With that, Cyrenaicism itself seems to have died out, and perhaps deservedly so, a theory which puts pleasure at the heart of the good life really shouldn't be this unpleasant. Still, the Cyrenaics are an unusually fascinating footnote in the history of philosophy, remarkable especially for their innovative ideas about human experience and for the contrasts they offer with their great rivals, the Epicureans. Many ancient philosophers regarded the Epicureans and their hedonism with scorn, but Epicurus was one of the most subtle thinkers of antiquity. Like Aristippus the Younger, he showed how hedonism might lead us to a careful and moderate lifestyle and set great store in the value of friendship and wisdom. But like Aristippus, he defended his hedonistic ethics by branching out into other areas of philosophy, including epistemology and physics, where he revived ideas pioneered among the pre-Socratics. In the next episode, I'll be looking at the empiricism, the atomism, and the personality of Epicurus, a man who was happy with the simple pleasures in life, a bit of bread and water, good friends, and a pleasant garden. We'll begin to harvest the fruits of his philosophy next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.