 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Beware of the Philosopher, the Cynics. In 1967, a philosophical manifesto was put before the American public. It exhorted them to focus on the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, to forget about their worries, their strife. Rather, they should make do with the bare necessities, Mother Nature's recipes, which this philosopher promised would bring the bare necessities of life. The philosopher was, of course, Baloo the Bear, and his musical advice appeared in Disney's animated film, The Jungle Book. I don't know whether Baloo studied ancient philosophy. If so, he probably did not put much effort into it given his general approach to life, but if he did, he must have recognized a kindred spirit when the class got to Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes was not a bear, though. He was a dog. The Greek word for dog is kouon, and Diogenes and his philosophers were called the cynics in honor of this animal, not an admired beast in the Greek world. But Diogenes wasn't seeking anyone's admiration. He lived the life of, well, a stray dog, choosing to beg for scraps and bark at anyone who he thought might deserve it. This most canine of thinkers set forth a teaching that has much in common with Baloo's song. The cynics, too, taught that one should make do with the bare necessities, and live in accordance with nature. In their case, this meant not plucking fruit from the jungle trees, but subsisting on a modest diet of lentils, owning nothing but a staff and leather pouch, and living in improvised shelter like Diogenes's famous earthen jar. This dropout lifestyle served the goal also recommended by Baloo, to be without worry or strife. In common with other Hellenistic schools, the cynics' highest aim was freedom from disturbance and imperturbability, in Greek ataraxia and apatheia. The cynics' radical methods for avoiding disturbance made some suspect that they might well be disturbed. Plato, as I mentioned last time, supposedly called Diogenes, Socrates gone mad. That's a tip-off that Diogenes was not, strictly speaking, a Hellenistic figure. He was already a noted personality, if not in Plato's day, then at the latest in Aristotle's day. Aristotle refers to Diogenes, and even calls him the dog. The cynics should not be seen as a post-Aristotelian phenomenon, but as a post-Socratic movement. Even before Diogenes, there was Antisthenes. He began his career by studying with the sophist Gorgias, but he gave up rhetoric, and burned his own writings upon encountering Socrates. He features as a kind of Socratic extremist in the writings of Xenophon and Diogenes Laertius, the author of the biographical compilation Lives of the Philosophers, not to be confused with Diogenes the Cynic. Antisthenes was not just a Socratic, he was a proto-cynic. He wore his poverty like a badge of honor, claiming it was true wealth. He said it is better to be insane than to feel pleasure. As we'll see, the rejection of wealth and pleasure is a hallmark of cynicism. Antisthenes also pioneered the Cynic practice of mocking the pretensions of his society. Sneering at the Athenians' boast to descend from men who were born from the earth, he said that the same is true of snails and insects. He also suggested they should meet in their democratic assembly and pass a resolution declaring that donkeys are horses. After all, they are not afraid to declare fools wise enough to serve as generals. According to Diogenes Laertius, he already sported the classic Cynic outfit, carrying nothing but a staff and small bag, and wearing nothing but an unkempt beard and a thin cloak, which he would simply fold over for an extra layer of warmth in the winter. On this and other points, one has to wonder to what extent the stories and details of Diogenes the Cynic, and the Cynics in general, are being applied retrospectively to Antisthenes. But our stories about Diogenes come from the same sources, and are no doubt largely fictional, so it's hard to be sure. In fact, we can't even be sure where the name Cynics comes from. It may refer not to dog-like habits, but to Antisthenes' use of the gymnasium in Athens reserved for non-citizens, which was called the kinosarges. However large a role Antisthenes had in inspiring the philosophy and name of the Cynics, it is Diogenes of Sinope who embodied Cynicism in the ancient imagination. I won't be able to pack all the wonderful anecdotes about him into this episode, but I'll mention the highlights, and talk about their philosophical meaning. We may as well start with the most famous. It seems that Alexander the Great heard of this famous philosopher Diogenes, and sought him out. He found the Cynic sage sunning himself on the wine jar that was his home. Standing over him, Alexander said, What favor can I offer you? Diogenes replied, Get out of my sun. According to another tale, Alexander said that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes. In combination, these two legends speak volumes about Diogenes. He is indigent and has nothing, yet he is completely self-sufficient. The greatest ruler of the ancient world can offer him nothing, because nature, in this case sunlight, is all he needs. His wisdom consists precisely in not wanting what he doesn't need. Alexander's supposed admiration of Diogenes is equally telling. Even wealthy powerful men could admire the Cynics, because they enjoyed a kind of independence, freedom and self-mastery that could otherwise be achieved only through great effort, if at all. As one Stoic philosopher remarked, Cynicism is a shortcut to virtue. Hence the timeless appeal of Diogenes and his followers, which reaches as far as Friedrich Nietzsche, who remarked that Cynicism is the highest one can reach on earth. By late antiquity, Diogenes already became more fiction than fact. A whole tradition of Cynic literature developed, with him in the starring role. Even in Arabic medieval literature, there were compilations of edifying and amusing anecdotes about this philosopher who lived in a jar, although through a historical confusion, it was often Socrates who featured in these tales. As for the real Diogenes, we cannot say much for sure about his biography. He was certainly from Sinope on the coast of the Black Sea, and his father apparently worked minting coins for the city. For obscure reasons, Diogenes' father defaced the coins. In another version of the tale, it is Diogenes himself who ruined the coins. This became a symbol for the Cynic movement, defacing the currency, that is, attacking social convention. It helps here that in Greek the word for coins, nomisma, sounds like the word for custom, nomos. Rather amazingly, by the way, archaeologists have in fact found defaced coins from Sinope dated to the mid-4th century. In any case, Diogenes was forced to leave his home city. He didn't regret this, saying, Exile made me a philosopher. A probably fanciful but typically entertaining story has him being enslaved on his travels. He was put on the block to be auctioned and said he should be sold to someone who needed a master. It's hard to pinpoint Diogenes' geographical movements, but several stories, including the encounter with Alexander the Great, put him in Corinth. Others put him in Athens, where he would have taken up the challenge to live like Socrates, much as Antisthenes had done. Predictably, ancient sources make Diogenes a student of Antisthenes, as usual making every famous philosopher the student of another famous philosopher. Wherever he lived, Diogenes became a law unto himself. He asserted the right to behave and speak however he liked. He called freedom of speech the greatest possession of man, and used this freedom to rail against the hypocrisy of his fellow Greeks. A famous story has him turning up at the market in broad daylight with a lantern, explaining that he was looking for a human being. In case the townsfolk weren't sufficiently offended, when asked where in Greece one could find good men, he replied, Men nowhere, but boys in Sparta. What was it about his fellow Greeks that provoked Diogenes' disdain? One answer is that they failed to embrace poverty and the total freedom and self-sufficiency that paradoxically came with it. If exile made him a philosopher, it was because exile gave him the priceless gift of poverty. Diogenes Laertius quotes our friend Theophrastus, saying that Diogenes the Cynic embraced his lifestyle upon observing a mouse and realizing that this humble creature makes do with nothing. A similar story has him already living as a cynic, owning little more than his pouch, stick and a cup for drinking. Seeing a little boy drinking from cupped hands, he threw away the cup, so as not to be outdone in frugality by a child. Diogenes applied these severe attitudes to others as well as himself. Once he was invited into a rich man's fabulous house. He looked around at the opulent furnishings and then spat in the owner's face. He then explained to the shocked man that everything else in the house was too nice to spit on. There are plenty of other anecdotes about Diogenes' scorn for literal as well as metaphorical currency. He said that gold is a pale color because it is afraid, so many men are plotting against it. He also said that the love of money is the mother city of evils, anticipating a famous passage in the Gospels. Like Antisthenes, he regarded himself as wealthy in his poverty. Now I know what you're thinking. Why didn't Antisthenes and Diogenes die of starvation? Abusing rich citizens is fun, but it is pretty low in calories, so how did they make a living? The answer, at least in Diogenes' case, seems to be that he begged. This may seem more than a little hypocritical, given the cynic claims of self-sufficiency, but Diogenes defended his right to other people's property with a satirical syllogism. All things belong to the gods, the wise are friends of the gods, friends share everything, so all things belong to the wise. His life as a beggar, of course, gave rise to some further choice anecdotes. Harassing a man who was slow to give him any money, he said, I'm asking for a handout, not funeral expenses, and here's one I really like, he was seen begging from statues and explained that he was just practicing being rejected. This being ancient Greece, those statues were religious in nature, which brings us to another feature of the cynic's antisocial attitudes. Nothing was closer to the heart of Greek society than religion, and the cynics followed in the footsteps of thinkers like Sinophanes and Plato by criticizing popular religious beliefs. Antisthenes met a priest who bragged that religious initiates like himself would be rewarded splendidly in the afterlife. Antisthenes replied, why don't you die then? Diogenes observed a temple thief who had been caught by the temple's officers and said, big thieves carrying off a little thief. Seeing offerings at another temple left in thanks by people who had survived storms at sea, he pointed out that there would be many more offerings if they'd instead been left by the ones who didn't survive. None of this is necessarily to say, though, that the cynics were atheists. The satirical syllogism I mentioned implies that the gods do exist, and it seems more in keeping with the cynic approach to say that they rejected false conceptions of the divine but not the divine itself, just as they rejected false conceptions of freedom and wealth but not true freedom or true wealth. So far we've seen the cynics putting forward ideas in a radical way, but how radical were the ideas themselves? Other philosophers wouldn't be shocked to hear that wealth is worthless. Aristotle allows a place for wealth in the good life but only as an instrument for virtue, and Socrates had already lived a life that combined virtue with poverty. I just pointed out that other philosophers had already distanced themselves from popular religion too. The cynics seem more genuinely radical, though, when it comes to the topic of pleasure. While Plato and Aristotle were not hedonists, they stopped short of denying the goodness of pleasure altogether. A philosophy that demands we give up all pleasure seemed to them too demanding. The trick was to show that although pleasure is not the good, the best life is nonetheless pleasant because it contains the pleasures of virtue or contemplation. The cynics were having none of this. About the closest we find to an endorsement of pleasure is the observation, ascribed to Diogenes, that refraining from pleasure is itself pleasant. That's just a standard cynic paradox, you might think, but he seems to have practiced what he preached. Finding a sweet amidst his humble breakfast, Diogenes tossed it away, crying, Away with the tyrant! And we've already seen that Antisthenes said that madness is preferable to pleasure. In place of pleasure, the cynics promoted a life of toil, what in Greek is called ponos. This does not seem to mean actual physical work, Diogenes lived by begging, not by doing manual labor. Rather, it means deliberately choosing a hard life, for instance wearing only that thin cloak and going barefoot in winter. So are the cynics telling us that pleasure is not merely different from the good, but actually bad? That would be going further even than other anti-hedonistic philosophers like the Stoics, who considered pleasure neither good nor bad in itself. And it would put them in the surprising company of some students of Plato, who excluded pleasure from the good life altogether. But the cynic ethical stance is not best understood in terms of what it rejected. Yes, they mocked social norms, they refused to seek pleasure, and I suspect they weren't too keen on good old-fashioned personal hygiene either. But this was all in the service of a positive ethical code, which can be summed up in one word, nature. It's interesting here to compare the cynics to Aristotle. For Aristotle, the good life for humans was also determined by nature, but he thought that we perfect our nature only through extraordinary excellence through the exploitation of our full potential, and that this sometimes occurred through social engagement. The cynics disagreed. They saw society as unnatural, and acted accordingly by flaunting social norms. They equated virtue with a natural existence like that lived by dogs. Wealth and even adequate clothing was a barrier to this natural lifestyle. We're told that Diogenes attempted to eat raw meat in an attempt to get in touch with his inner dog. This explains an otherwise paradoxical feature of the cynic lifestyle. While disdaining pleasure, they satisfied natural urges whenever and wherever they felt like it. For instance, Diogenes was asked why he was eating in the middle of the marketplace, and said, that's where I got hungry. Notoriously, he also gratified himself sexually in public, and when challenged, replied with the immortal line, I only wish I could get rid of hunger by rubbing my belly. Or think back to the famous encounter between Alexander the Great and Diogenes. What Diogenes is doing there is not, for instance, slamming his head into his wine jar to make sure his life is as unpleasant as possible. Rather, he's enjoying the lovely sunshine. So it seems the cynics weren't against pleasure as such. They were against pleasures that are not provided by nature. If pleasure can be had with no effort, then go right ahead, just as dogs do. But don't make your happiness dependent on pleasures that are more difficult to acquire. This brings us back to the cynics' quest to avoid disturbance. By refusing to desire anything that nature cannot provide, the cynics made themselves effectively invulnerable, or as close as any human can be to that ideal. Thus Diogenes proclaimed that philosophy prepares you for any turn of fortune, and makes you rich despite possessing no money. Many contemporaries no doubt collected and read tales of the cynics, because they were titillating and entertaining. But those who took cynicism seriously enough to convert to the lifestyle, walking the barefoot walk as well as talking the bare-faced talk, were attracted not just by the humor, but by the promise of self-sufficiency. An excellent example is the cynic who comes along just after Diogenes, Crates. Though most of the best lines are ascribed to Antistines and Diogenes, there is no better summary of the cynic creed than the one provided by Crates. Philosophy is a quart of beans and to care for nothing. In pursuit of this ideal he gave away his property, living a life of ostentatious poverty and asceticism like Diogenes before him. On the subject of sex, for instance, he had this to say, hunger puts an end to lust. If not, time does. But if you can't use these, use a rope. That's what I call tough love. But Crates's toughness didn't prevent him from finding love. In a relationship much celebrated in the ancient literature, a well-born woman named Hipparchia married him and joined in the cynic lifestyle. Notoriously, they followed Diogenes's example of public self-pleasuring by having sex with each other right out in the open. If you're thinking that the debauched Greeks wouldn't have been shocked by this, think again. They were shocked. And that was the point. Socrates tried to convert men to virtue by arguing with them, the cynics led by example, giving up on wealth and coming up with ever more outrageous ways to critique the society around them. Eventually though, cynics turned to written works in an effort to spread their message. Diogenes may not have written anything, just as Socrates had not, but Crates probably did put pen to paper. One title ascribed to him is In Praise of Lentil Soup, the cynic's favorite humble meal. As we move forward into the third century BC, we find writers composing cynic diatribes, trying to capture the savage wit of Diogenes in works that were called serio-comic. Two major figures here were Bion and Menippus, whose satirical style was influential on Roman literature. Indeed, one thing cynicism has in common with the other schools I'm considering in these episodes on Hellenistic philosophy is that it passed from Greek into Roman society and survived well into the imperial age. Many Roman authors complained that the self-styled cynics of their day were hypocrites. In Roman society, cynicism apparently became a kind of fashionable, or anti-fashionable, stance rather than a living philosophical tradition. Nonetheless, we know that there were self-identified cynic philosophers brave and principled enough to speak truth to power. The philosopher Demetrius refused a gift from that most ungifted of emperors, Caligula. And when the emperor Nero established an opulent bathhouse, Demetrius said that those who bathed there were making themselves dirty. Among other philosophers in the Roman era, attitudes towards the cynics were mixed. Cicero found their shameful behavior appalling, but Epictetus, Seneca, and other Stoics offered the cynics at least grudging respect. Many forgave the cynics their dropout lifestyle and their shocking exhibitionism, because they at least had the good grace to disdain pleasure. The Epicureans had a far more socially acceptable lifestyle and were much more philosophically sophisticated, yet few representatives of other schools showed anything but scorn for them, in part because they were hedonists. As we'll be seeing in episodes to come, pleasure was rarely far from the center of attention in the Hellenistic period, and it was sometimes put at the center of the good life as well as the center of attention. We'll be getting to the hedonist Epicurus and wandering around his garden in a couple of episodes, but first I want to look at a less celebrated group of pleasure lovers, who combined their hedonism with stunningly innovative claims about knowledge. I know you'll enjoy hearing about the Cyrenaics next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.