The Birth of Hedonism

The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life

Kurt Lampe

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400852499
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn't convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus's atheism and Hegesias's pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism's relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the "new Cyrenaicism" of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1. A Cyrenaic Parable: The Choice of Pleasure

If we are to believe Xenophon, Socrates did not entirely approve of Aristippus of Cyrene. Xenophon and Aristippus were both among the crowd of young men who passed their leisure time with Socrates. However, Xenophon felt that he and Socrates agreed on the importance of self-control, which was the foundation of responsible management of one’s body, soul, household, relationships, and polis. By contrast, he narrates how Socrates “had noticed that one of his companions [i.e., Aristippus] was rather self-indulgent” with regard to food, drink, sex, sleep, cold, heat, and hard work (Mem. 2.1.1). So Socrates tries to show Aristippus the error of his ways. His admonishment concludes by recalling the wisdom of the poets Hesiod and Epicharmus, who concur that sweat and suffering are the price of all good things (2.1.20). He then paraphrases Prodicus’s story about “the choice of Heracles,” in which the hero is confronted with two allegorical figures. The figure of Vice promises every sort of pleasure without effort, while Virtue reiterates that there is no happiness without exertion (2.1.21–34). Socrates does not tell us which choice Heracles made, but we all know he chose the path of suffering and glorious virtue. The question is, which choice did Aristippus make?

Xenophon’s way of presenting Aristippus leads most readers to conclude that he chose the path of easy pleasure. Of course, this is not a reliable account of the historical Aristippus’s thoughts. It is a fiction colored by Xenophon’s opinions of Aristippus and Socrates and his own conceptions of virtue, vice, pleasure, and happiness. But it is a useful parable for thinking about the impetus behind the philosophical movement Aristippus started. That movement is called “Cyrenaic” after Cyrene, the polis in North Africa where most of the movement’s participants were born. Although the Cyrenaics do not associate pleasure with vice, Xenophon is right to represent Cyrenaic philosophy as the choice of pleasure. The Cyrenaics reflectively affirm their intuitive attraction to pleasure and commit themselves to working through this decision’s life-shaping consequences. This is what I will mean in this book by calling the Cyrenaics philosophical hedonists.

There are two aspects of this hedonism I initially wish to highlight. First, many of the Cyrenaics’ fundamental beliefs and arguments revolve around pleasure and pain. In particular, they all agree that either bodily or mental pleasure is the greatest and most certain intrinsic good. We might call this formal hedonism. Second, they actually indulge in all sorts of everyday pleasures such as food and sex. In other words, notwithstanding disagreements among members of the movement, in general it is not by sober parsimony or self-restraint that they attempt to live pleasantly. In this they differ (at least in degree) from many formal hedonists, including their competitors and eventual successors, the Epicureans. We might call this everyday hedonism.

In fact we can plausibly think of Cyrenaic philosophy as the first attempt in the European tradition to formalize everyday hedonism with increasingly systematic theories. The Cyrenaics were obviously not the first to claim that pleasure is a good thing; indeed, pleasure’s supposedly universal appeal is the foundation of their reflective choice. Nor were they the first thinkers to grant pleasure an important theoretical position. It seems that Democritus, for example, gave both “pleasure” (hēdonē) and “delight” (terpsis) thematic prominence in his ethical writings.¹ Moreover, among Aristippus’s approximate contemporaries were Eudoxus of Cnidus, who elaborated his hedonism within Plato’s Academy,² and the lamentably shadowy Polyarchus, “The Voluptuary” of Syracuse.³ But the Cyrenaic tradition clearly involves a much more sustained investigation of hedonism than any of these.

It is thus with some justice that the Cyrenaics have sometimes been represented as the originators of the tradition of philosophical hedonism in Europe. For example, both Watson’s Hedonistic Theories from Aristippus to Spencer (1895) and Feldman’s Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (2004) begin by sketching ostensibly Cyrenaic theories, which they then proceed to demolish. Cyrenaicism is thus portrayed as an infantile stage in an evolving theoretical organism. Onfray gives the Cyrenaics an even more originary status in the resoundingly titled L’invention du plaisir: Fragments cyrênaïques (The Invention of Pleasure: Cyrenaic Fragments; 2002), which until very recently was the only translation of the Cyrenaic evidence into a modern language. However, Onfray’s narrative is reactionary rather than progressivist: he sees Western civilization as a “historically sublimated neurosis,” the causes of which lie in Platonism and its monstrous offspring.⁴ The cure for this neurosis is re-engagement with our embodied experience, beginning with the rediscovery of the “philosophical Atlantis” of Cyrenaicism.⁵ There, at the historical foundation of the problem, we must reassemble Aristippus’s “anti-Platonic war machine” to undermine the corrupt fortress of our unhealthy ideologies.⁶

Watson, Onfray, and Feldman remind us in their different ways that the search for origins—in this case the origin of philosophical hedonism—often comes bundled with trans-historical explanatory and critical agendas.⁷ Insofar as those explanations or critiques invoke the chronological primacy of Cyrenaicism, they rely on the historical accuracy of their presentations of this early movement. Yet hitherto there has been no systematic reconstruction of Cyrenaic ethics within its own historical contexts. The most recent monograph, by Guirand, focuses on Aristippus and his reception in European (especially Francophone) literature.⁸ Two other monographs, by Antoniadis and Döring,⁹ have primarily been concerned with stipulating who thought what and when. The collections of the Cyrenaic fragments and testimonia, by Giannantoni and Mannebach respectively,¹⁰ have furthered this biographical and doxographical work, corroborated it with source criticism, and added essays on many items of philosophical interest. Scattered chapters and articles have addressed Socrates’ influence on Aristippus and later Cyrenaicism,¹¹ Aristippus’s relationships with and influence on Xenophon and Plato,¹² the Cyrenaics’ putative rejection of “eudaimonism,”¹³ the historiography of the schismatic Cyrenaics,¹⁴ and a number of other topics.¹⁵ But none of these attempts to convey an appreciation of Cyrenaic ethics in the round by exploring the developmental history of the movement and the manner in which theories arose from and found expression in principled lifestyles. Moreover, few of these works are in English, and many are hard to come by.

This volume therefore aims to be a complement to Voula Tsouna’s monograph on Cyrenaic Epistemology, which is the most thorough investigation of Cyrenaic skepticism,¹⁶ and to help make a fuller appreciation of this “original hedonism” available to classicists, philosophers, and cultural historians.¹⁷

1.2. Methodology

In order to accomplish this project it is necessary to find a method that respects the limitations in the evidence yet still permits us to produce new historical, literary, and philosophical insights. The first challenge is the diversity of our sources, which include hundreds of testimonia from dozens of authors over more than a thousand years. Dealing with these sources has become somewhat easier since Giannantoni’s multi-volume Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (1990) assembled the ancient testimony for all the so-called “minor Socratic” philosophers. Nevertheless, a great deal of research is necessary to assess the knowledge, generic aims, personal agendas, and lines of transmission of the authors and texts involved. Since the painstaking philology involved in this task would frequently interrupt the flow of my arguments, and some readers may want to skip it entirely, I have relegated much of it to footnotes and appendixes 1 and 2.

The second challenge for the interpreter of Cyrenaicism is to say something philosophically interesting despite the fragmentary nature of these testimonia. It is partly for this reason that I will not restrict myself to tracing the development and relations of beliefs and arguments. Of course I will try to present these ratiocinative structures in the clearest and most accessible fashion possible. But if I were to exclude their practical and cultural contexts, not only would I increase the danger of misunderstanding the evidence, I would also find it impossible to reconstruct what it would be like to mentally inhabit this sort of ethical system.

I have chosen the phrase “mentally inhabit” because its resonances are simultaneously intellectual, practical, and existential. I intend to suggest that we can profitably think of Cyrenaic ethics as involving much more than the theories on which previous scholars have generally focused. This is true of most post-Socratic Greek philosophical ethics, as Anthony Long has expressed in speaking of “philosophical power”:

Try to imagine a single affiliation incorporating your political party, religion, form of therapy, cosmology, psychology, and fundamental values, an affiliation which unified all that might be involved in being, for instance, a Christian, Jungian, socialist, utilitarian, and believer in evolution and the Big Bang. Then you have a loose analogy to one of the leading Hellenistic schools in their most challenging phase and a reason for thinking of them as experiments in philosophical power.¹⁸

Long is speaking about the schools that succeeded Cyrenaicism, but his lesson applies to the Cyrenaics as well. Here he emphasizes not only the reach of these schools’ doctrines, but also their “power” to give shape to entire ways of being in the world. The point is that this kind of philosophy does not simply develop arguments about, for example, the truthfulness of Christian theology or Jungian psychology. It aims to incorporate those truths into its practitioners’ attitudes and behavior, for which it requires something loosely analogous to Christian ritual or Jungian therapy.

The scholar who has done the most to chart the analogues for these elements in ancient philosophy is Pierre Hadot. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France he said,

Each school, then, represents a form of life defined by an ideal of wisdom. The result is that each one has its corresponding fundamental inner attitude—for example, tension for the Stoics or relaxation for the Epicureans—and its own manner of speaking, such as the Stoic use of percussive dialectic or the abundant rhetoric of the Academicians. But above all every school practices exercises designed to ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom…¹⁹

In other words, ancient philosophical schools are not simply defined by their doctrines; they are defined by the combination of systematized beliefs, formalized modes of inference, informal ways of speaking and thinking (including patterns of imagery), intentional and affective attitudes, characteristic interpersonal relationships, and the exercises by which members of the school attempt to unify all of these components and channel them into personal transformation. It is this multifaceted breadth that allows these philosophies to pervade their followers’ entire ways of being.

My first response to the fragmentariness of our evidence is therefore to spread my investigative and interpretive nets more widely. On the one hand this will give me a more versatile toolkit for working through the evidence on which previous scholars have already focused. On the other, it will allow me to make use of testimony that has hitherto seemed “sub-philosophical” or trivial. While these additional facets of Cyrenaic philosophy are even less well-documented than Cyrenaic theory, every piece of information we glean contributes to understanding the philosophy as a whole. For example, I have just mentioned the practical or “spiritual” exercises through which ancient philosophers attempted to bridge the gap between an understanding of principles and the consistent enactment of those principles throughout life’s manifold circumstances. Such exercises in other schools include (to name just a few) the memorization of key sayings and rules of thumb, examination and criticism of each day’s actions, meditation on mortality and other perspective-altering topics, self-testing through hardship and temptation, cooperative critical inquiry, and exegesis of canonical texts.²⁰

Acknowledging that some of our testimony may pertain more to spiritual exercises than to theory is just one of the specific ways in which this approach to ancient philosophy will alter my handling of the evidence. The general effect of this approach will be to make me cautious about separating doctrinal assertions and their justifications from their contexts within the larger enterprise of philosophizing. I will instead attempt to think of theory as being in dynamic interaction with pre-philosophical intuitions and the rewarding or disappointing experience of putting doctrines into practice. This begins when a potential philosopher approaches a teacher. As Hadot writes,

At least since the time of Socrates, the choice of a way of life has not been located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary, it stands at the beginning, in a complex interrelation with critical reaction to other existential attitudes, with global vision of a certain way of living and seeing the world, and with voluntary decision itself…. Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice versa.²¹

This does not mean that philosophical discourse is merely a rationalization of what its practitioners are already inclined to do. It means that, faced with an array of possible teachers, potential philosophers’ initial choices depend more on their reactions to individual personalities and the “existential options” adumbrated by each than on the cogency of their arguments.²²

Consider, for example, a more sympathetic depiction than Xenophon’s of the inaugural scene of Cyrenaic philosophy. Here Plutarch (perhaps relying on Aeschines of Sphettus, another of Socrates’ followers²³) permits us to imagine how Aristippus arrived at what I called the “choice of pleasure”:

When Aristippus met Ischomachus at the Olympics, he asked him what sort of things Socrates used to talk about in order to have such an effect on young men. When he’d heard just a few starting points and indications of Socrates’ words, he was so profoundly affected he swooned. He became totally pale and weak until, filled with burning thirst, he sailed to Athens, drew from the spring, and investigated the man, his words, and his philosophy. (Plut. Mor. 516c = SSR 4A.2)

Note that Aristippus had only heard a few “starting points and indications” of Socrates’ beliefs and arguments before being filled with impassioned desire. Something in Socrates’ words touched Aristippus’s own inchoate aspirations and kindled a “burning thirst” to articulate and fulfill them. At this point he turned to rational inquiry, which is what makes this conversion philosophical. Aristippus “investigated the man, his words, and his philosophy,” and elaborated whatever he took from Socrates as seemed best to him. It has been suggested, for example, that one source of Aristippus’s hedonism was the Socratic imperativ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Cyrene and the Cyrenaics: A Historical and Biographical Overview
• Chapter 3 Knowledge and Pleasure
• Chapter 4 Virtue and Living Pleasantly
• Chapter 5 Eudaimonism and Anti-eudaimonism
• Chapter 6 Personal and Political Relationships
• Chapter 7 Hegesias’s Pessimism
• Chapter 8 Theodorus’s Innovations
• Chapter 9 The “New Cyrenaicism” of Walter Pater
• Chapter 10 Conclusion: The Birth of Hedonism
• Appendix 1: The Sources
• Appendix 2: Annicerean Interpolation in D.L. 2.86–93
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index