The Search for the Good Man — Part II

THE GOOD MAN IN ANCIENT GREEK THOUGHT

It is not easy to account for the genius of ancient Greek thought. No period of human culture has been richer in speculative boldness and penetrating insight. They had a curiosity about man and the universe that led them to an investigation of all aspects of existence, which resulted not only in a synthesis of human knowledge, but also a consideration of ethical ideals.

While civilization was thousands of years old in the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia by the time the Greek spirit emerged, there were several important elements lacking until the Greeks supplied them. Not only did man reach new heights in art and literature, but the inventive Greek mind also gave the world mathematics, philosophy, and science. They produced the first real historians; they were the first critics and logicians. They moved out into the world of ideas and speculated upon the great questions of life without being bound by the superstitions and superficialities that hampered other cultures.

Whatever discipline one may study or whatever aspect of human progress he may consider, the ancient Greeks come into the picture in a significant way. Whether it be physics or biology, psychology or philosophy, history or music, mathematics or astronomy, architecture or medicine the Greeks have played an important role, and usually the primary role. It is to be expected therefore that some of the best thinking on the nature of the good life may also be traced to Greece. They were the first to make ethics central in philosophical thought.

Though we are tempted to stand off and gape at the genius of the Greek spirit, there may be explanations for it. W. T. Jones in History of Western Philosophy points to the circumstance of geography as part of the reason. Greece is a peninsula that is virtually isolated, for the shores are deeply indented, the isthmus is narrow, and there are many mountains with high and precipitous walls. Communication was easier by water than by land. This kind of geography made for both political autonomy and rugged individualism. They not only had time to think, but they were also independent enough of other cultures to think — and to think for themselves. They developed a strong sense of history, and therefore of destiny, and there was intense national pride, so much so that all others were Barbarians.

Another factor was the stimulation they received from the colonies they established in the chain of islands that reached out from their shores toward Asia. These served as frontiers in other cultures, which added vigor and boldness to their individuality. The spirit of philosophical and scientific inquiry actually first appeared in these colonies, then moved to the mainland of Greece through emigration.

The easy-going, gregarian type of life that characterized much of Greece provided the leisure necessary for meditation and speculation. Above all, however, in the Greek mind was what B. A. G. Fuller calls their “disinterested curiosity regarding the nature of the universe.” Freedom from serious international disputes, both isolation and involvement, both individuality and universality, happy geographic and economic conditions — and all these the Greeks had — cannot alone account for the Greek genius. While Fuller refers to their “disinterested curiosity,” Frederick Mayer speaks of them as naturally curious and inquisitive. It does seem that there was something about their nature that made them so ingenious, for they did so much more with what they had.

EARLIER GREEK THINKERS

While the curiosity and ingenuity of the Greeks appeared early, the first thinkers were far less concerned with the nature of man than with the nature of the universe. They did not at first ask questions about the good life. Their questions were more scientific, and they can be thought of as the first scientists as well as the first philosophers. Their basic question was: Why do things happen as they do? They were conscious of such phenomena as change, as they sought explanations for why nature behaved the way it does.

Much of the earlier Greek thinking, therefore, was an effort to explain the world process in natural terms, apart from all the presuppositions of the superstitious religions of the time. Thales, for instance, who is often referred to as the first philosopher, conceived of water as the world-stuff from which all things evolve. This may appear childish to us, but considering the handicaps and limitations under which this sixth century B. C. thinker worked, it was a most reasonable conclusion. He saw water turn to ice or to gases; he witnessed evaporation, rainfall, springs gushing from the earth, the silting-up of the rivers at their mouth. Could he have known that his own body was composed mostly of water he really would have been convinced!

There were many efforts to identify the world-stuff. Anaximander said it was the boundless, a kind of reservoir or bank from which issue such things as water, earth, air, fire. Anaximenes looked to air as the stuff from which all else comes, another plausible conclusion since so much of life is dependent upon the atmosphere. Heraclitus pointed to fire as the world-stuff, but he was more interested in explaining the process of change (How does the one become many?), and he found his answer in the swirling motions of fire. Is not fire always changing, and yet is it not always the same?

Parmenides was one of the more important of these old thinkers, for he accepted the task of explaining how the one basic stuff, whatever it is, changed into the many forms it takes in the objective world. He decided that change is an illusion. He talked about the One as the only reality; other than this he saw no motion and no change. Reality is both uncreated and indestructible. In Heraclitus and Parmenides we have an interesting contradiction: one insisting that all things are in a state of flux, the other that there are no changes taking place, but only illusions. Plato, who comes along a century later, seeks to harmonize these concepts by his view of two worlds, one being this illusory world of change, the other being a spiritual world of ideas that changes not.

Empedocles and Anaxagoras represent the pluralistic concept of world-stuff, for they supposed that “roots” or “seeds” lie behind all that is. Empedocles conceived of the world process as a continuous cycle of opposites, such as Love and Strife, in alternating motions of attraction and repulsion. While the only “real things” are earth, fire, air, and water, Empedocles saw Love as a kind of creator of all the other things that appear real to us. And yet Love contends with Strife for mastery of the universe, which accounts for the vicissitudes of both life and nature. He sees a god in all this (“He is only a sacred and unutterable mind flashing through the whole world with rapid thoughts.”), but this god is no part of any purposive scheme. As for man, he is but the result of a temporary and sheerly accidental mixture of elements.

Anaxagoras saw “seeds” behind everything, and these were so shuffled by Mind as to give the universe the form it now has. This meant to him that everything is a portion of everything else. Flesh, for instance, is composed of bits of everything else. His view of Mind is hazy, for he speaks of it as that which “sets all things in order,” and yet he says it is strictly a mechanical process. Anaxagoras sought answers to the question of motion, and he settled for a single circular force as the explanation for change, but in all this there was no particular concern for the nature of man.

Ancient Greece also had its atomists, who saw the universe as made up of atoms and empty space. They were baffled by the existence of a world made up of so many different things. How could so many different things come from just one stuff or even several basic stuffs? They tried to account for motion on the grounds of atoms that are eternal, solid, indestructible, and that are moved by necessity. Does not modern physics deal with a universe already in motion?

Democritus, the most important of the atomists, held some moral views in connection with his atomic theory. Man’s progress depends upon scientific knowledge, he argued, and man cannot understand himself without a knowledge of the world around him. The soul of man is composed of atoms, which suggested to him that humanity is part of infinity. There can be no Maker or Creator, for the things that are have always been. There is motion that changes stuff into different forms, which is a kind of shuffling of the atoms, but all this is strictly mechanistic.

From what little we have of his writings we can construct a general description of the good Man. He is not one who relies on wealth, fame, or social position, for these things mean nothing apart from wisdom. The Good Man is a man of restraint and understanding, one who controls his desires. He emphasized the purity of motive: “The enemy is, not he that injures, but he that wants to.” He elevates such virtues as the willingness to listen, carefulness, cheerfulness, and soul-care. He urged the avoidance of envy and distrust. He insisted that cheerfulness is gained through moderation, and that it is excess that damages the soul.

These thinkers of the ancient Greek period can be thought of as cosmological thinkers in that they were seeking to understand the ways of the universe. After 2500 years of scientific progress their answers appear to us both trivial and superficial, but when we consider that they lived in the pre-scientific age when men hardly dared to think for themselves and at a time when the methods and tools of research were yet undeveloped, we can but be amazed. After all, they were able to raise some of the most serious philosophical questions: the problem of the one and the many, the nature of the relationship between Being and change, the question of time and space. We admire their curiosity and their. search for truth.

They laid the foundations for conceptual thinking; they gave birth to philosophy. With them the groundwork was laid for logic, epistemology (study of knowledge), and religious philosophy. They were the first scientists, or perhaps pre-scientists. They planted the seed for the natural and physical sciences. Astronomy, mathematics, biology, medicine, geology, and physics were at least anticipated. They did, after all, talk about atoms — and even Mind and the Logos!

We have seen that from this period of the history of thought we learn little about who the Good Man is. Perhaps the purview of things was too mechanistic, or maybe they figured that man must first understand his environment before he could start answering the serious questions about himself. In any event, there were schools of thought that emerged that did show more awareness for the good life, and insofar as time is concerned these schools were approximate to the pre-Socratics, though they represent a different philosophical emphasis. In them we find more definitive efforts to identify the Good Man.

PYTHAGOREANS: THE HARMONIOUS MAN

The Pythagoreans were mystics who did things like preach to animals and perform miracles. Lord Russell describes Pythagoras as a combination of Einstein and Mrs. Eddy. He was a scientist that came to see order — even musical harmony — in all the universe. And he founded a religious society that endeavored to discover reality in man and the universe. If religious mysticism and science cannot stand together, then Pythagoras would have to be placed with the mystics. Like Kant, who drew inspiration from the starry heavens above and the moral law within man, Pythagoras found in an intricately ordered universe a source of intellectual admiration and religious awe.

Such a universe he describes as a cosmos. His formula was: “All things are number.” Even space is dominated by what he called rational numbers. Everything, including the stars and human beings, are controlled by numerical ratios. To the Pythagoreans astronomy was a means of studying human existence; and music was a philosophy within itself, for all of nature is something like a musical scale. Just as one can run his finger down the strings of a violin and discover an harmonious order of sound (even from one string if he stops at the right points that are determined by certain numerical ratios), he can also find that the whole universe is a cosmos of order and beauty, yea even a grand symphony of harmony.

John Randall (The Role of Knowledge in Western Religion) points out that the Pythagoreans were the first to reconcile science and religion, which means an identification of the object of religious feeling and aspiration with scientific truth. To Pythagoras science was a means of stimulating concern for eternal things. He considered his own scientific conclusions as signs of heavenly inspiration. Like both Descartes and Pascal, the Pythagoreans combined scientific interests (especially mathematics) with religious devotion. They were certain that all principles could be expressed in numbers, for number to them was the principle of reality. This enabled them, like Spinoza, to see life under the aspect of eternity.

Their idea of the Good Man is revealed in part by the kind of secret society they founded. It was a monastic order with emphasis on vegetarianism and rigorous self-examination. It had its secret rites and initiation, and much of the teaching was allegorical. “Do not stir the fire with a knife” must have meant some such thing as don’t encourage the pride of man. “Do not overstep the beam of a balance” is probably an injunction to be just. As for other allegorical tid-bits, such as “Do not look in a mirror beside a light,” one guess is as good as another.

Both men and women were admitted to the society; property was held in common; there was a common way of life. At the close of each day they would examine each other as to how productive life had been. They believe in reincarnation and followed rites calculated to purify the soul. So they were as religious as they were scientific and philosophical. We are indebted to the Pythagorean brotherhood for the term philosophy, which meant to them the love of wisdom.

The society used music to purify the soul, and they talked about “the music of the spheres,” which was a kind of revelation from God, even though human ears cannot detect it. Music was a means of strengthening morality, they believed. Warlike tunes will make one belligerent and melancholy tunes will create pessimism and fatalism; but the right kind of music will both educate the mind and improve moral and spiritual values.

The Good Man is one whose soul is in harmony with the orderly system of the universe. Wickedness is sickness caused by disintegration of purposive existence. The good life is theoretical, with “theory” meaning a passionate sympathetic contemplation. The Pythagorean was a stranger in this world, and he thought of his body as a prison of the soul, which will someday take its flight to a higher sphere. The Good Man therefore contemplates the higher values. They divided men into three classes, somewhat like they are divided at the Olympic games. The lowest class is like those who attend the games merely to buy and sell; the next are those who compete in the games. The best of all are those who come just to look on.

The best life, therefore, is the contemplative life, the philosophical life. The man who can stand off from life as a spectator, as if he were viewing things from the perspective of eternity, is the one who finds purification of soul. The perfecting of the soul is the restoration of harmony in the human cosmos. As Cornford puts it in his Before and after Socrates: “The disorderly motions of passion and bodily desire need to be controlled and attuned in Sophrosyne-temperance, self-control, right-mindedness, wisdom.”

SOPHISTS: THE CLEVER MAN

The Sophists were the pragmatists of the ancient world. The word, “Sophist” originally had no bad connotation, referring to a group of teachers that would roughly compare with today’s professor. They were the ones who taught the young men how to live, or better, how to play it smart in a competitive world. They made their living teaching, which was unusual for the Greeks, and it left them open for criticism. They were so different from the Pythagoreans. The Sophists were neither mystical nor scientific; they were hardly even philosophical. They had no concern whatever in “the music of the spheres,” bur they had a great deal of interest in how to win friends and influence people —- and to make money! They taught the art of rhetorical persuasion, public speaking, and political science. Even tricky logic and deceitful argumentation were sometime among their offerings. They taught young men to be clever.

Sophism reveals the cultural changes that were taking place in fifth-century Greece. After all, educators usually train the youth to acquire those values esteemed by the parents, and the Sophists were no different. The knightly virtues of courage, loyalty, honor, and moderation had long characterized Greek thought, but the new aristocracy wanted to know how to live. Facility in debate, demagogism, and oratorical skill began to displace the old virtues. It was more important to be clever than to be good. Indeed, the clever man was the Good Man.

They were a controversial group, mainly because they sought to sweep away the cobwebs of superstition and establish a new enlightenment. This was Their most significant contribution, which of course was negative. There was little of a positive nature. Their whole approach was shot through with both skepticism and relativism, and perhaps pessimism as well. They contended that the human mind is not equipped to mirror the universe. It is useless for man to attempt to describe the universe. Scientific investigation and philosophic speculation are vain pursuits. Man must give himself to practical affairs. Knowledge is unreal and even impossible except in a pragmatic way. Right and wrong depend strictly upon the whims of society.

Protagoras, the most prominent of the Sophists, is known for his statement that “Man is the measure of all things.” This means that each man is his own standard, that there is no higher authority or greater principle than man himself, and when men differ there is no objective truth by which right and wrong can be determined. There is no standard of right; there is indeed no clear theory of anything. Justice is simply a matter of being clever enough to get what you want out of life, which may be achieved by means of getting others to respect my rights!

The Sophists are important to a search for the Good Man because with them the emphasis in philosophy shifted from the universe to man. They stimulated a great deal of thought about the nature of man, and they caused some to re-think their moral presuppositions. A healthy skepticism is imperative in the search for truth, and while the Sophists may have made skepticism an end in itself, they nonetheless caused people to think. They motivated vigorous discussion in the field of ethics. For this reason they will come into view again in our study of Socrates and Plato.

SCEPTICISM: THE UNCOMMITTED MAN

Like most Greek philosophies, Scepticism sought to give men quietude and peace of mind. The good life was tranquil and serene. The Sceptics tried to achieve such a life through non-assertion. By refusing either to affirm or to deny they supposed that they could dispose of the problems troubling the human mind. They found comfort in suspending judgment. They argued that one must suffer mental anguish when he supposes that he must choose between alternatives. Virtue is the courage to remain uncommitted. Mental rest comes only by refusing to affirm or deny anything.

Starting with the proposition that nothing is indisputably certain, which one presumably must concede, the Sceptics contended that no sense impression can be depended upon. Something tastes sweet or sour depending on circumstances; a straight oar looks crooked in the water; a tower may look round at a distance and square close at hand; a mountain may look very near and yet be far away; then there are mirages, hallucinations, dreams. Nothing in human experience is reliable; there can be no absolute certainty of anything; everything is relative.

Any argument that one would make regarding order or providence, the Sceptics would make a counter argument. If one argued for the design and order of the universe by pointing to the movements of heavenly bodies, they would refer to the ills and calamities of life as a sign of disorder. If one suggested that knowledge can be real because of all the progress man has made through the centuries, they would counter by pointing to the many instances when men thought they knew when they did not, and so how can man be sure about what he thinks he knows now. The Sceptics thus kept all ideas fluid and all concepts, both intellectual and moral, strictly relative.

Actually, the only way for man to be free and happy, they insisted, was to abandon the struggle to know. Their advice was for one not to bother himself. As Bevan in Stoics and Sceptics observes of them: “The unhappy desire to know was the cause of all the fever and the fret, the polemical passion and torturing doubt. Once grasp the fact that the desire was essentially futile, that you could let the mind play and hold it back all the while from fixed belief, and there was no reason that you should not be perfectly happy and contented in nescience.”

That is the word for the Sceptics: nescience. They made a science of not knowing, which may itself be a contradiction. If knowledge is so uncertain, how can one be so sure that knowledge is impossible? If I know that I do not know, then there is something I know!

Perhaps we see the Good Man of Scepticism in the person of Pyrrho, the founder of the school. His followers were amazed at his self-control and serenity. He had no fear of physical pain. Once when he underwent an operation, he expressed no emotion whatever. In his teaching he stressed self-examination, like Socrates, and he too used the marketplace for a classroom. The Sceptics thought of themselves as gadflies, like Socrates again, and they too believed in rugged individualism. Pyrrho was a gadfly in that he always questioned the dogmas of his time. He believed that peace of mind comes with suspension of judgment. He taught his disciples that they should neither affirm nor deny anything. “Why this more than that?” was a basic question to Pyrrho. Virtue is found in non-assertion. The Good Man to Pyrrho is arrepsia, which to his Greek mind meant “equipoise” — the refusal to assent to either alternative. All views are equal in credibility and in non-credibility.

It would appear that Scepticism is a complete paralysis of action. If non-assertion and non-commitment are virtues most to be desired, then why should man ever act? Reduced to its logical conclusion, this would follow. But some Sceptics were willing to be inconsistent in order to give place for more moral action. They invented the doctrine of “action based on what is reasonable.” Even though one cannot know, he can act in view of what appears to be reasonable and justifiable. The idea of “probability” became meaningful to them: if an action has a high probability of propriety, it is right. It is a doctrine based on common sense. While the Sceptic can never be dogmatic, he nonetheless lives the good life, based on probability and common sense, because he believes that one cannot be truly happy without virtue.

Though the Sceptics supposedly had no beliefs or values, or at least their teachings would indicate this, they did however appeal to such moral criteria as the guidance of nature, control of the passions, traditional ethics, and even instruction in the arts. This may only mean that the Sceptic’s morality consists in conforming as best one can to the conventions of the day. While piety was not altogether absent in ancient Scepticism (Pyrrho was so pious that his city made him the high priest), ir can hardly be said that it was friendly to religion. There is no place for God in Scepticism.

The Christian philosopher can appreciate one noble contribution of the Sceptics: they mercilessly compelled men to think for themselves and to question every proposition. Like Augustine, the Christian must believe that truth has nothing to fear, and that no truth is contradictory to any other truth. The believer, therefore, be he a scientist or an educator, has no reason to hesitate in moving forward into frontiers of new truth. He will be unafraid to explore new ideas or to find better ways of doing things, for he believes that any new truth he finds will harmonize with the truths he may already have.

The Christian is willing to question every proposition, and in this respect “scepticism” is a virtue. But Scepticism as a philosophy or as a way of life failed in that it purposely and deliberately tried to build a society that believed in nothing. It is a self-contradictory approach, for to contend that knowledge is impossible is itself a proposition that cannot be established. If one says that man cannot know anything, he is saying that man can know something! Scepticism defeated itself in teaching that the way to happiness is the abandonment of all belief. It had to yield to the Stoic “common sense” logic that the senses are reliable and that man can know.

While the Sceptic argued, “There is nothing to believe,” the Christian retorted, “But I do believe.” An important difference is that the Sceptic thought only in terms of propositions, while the Christian thought in terms of a Person. When propositions may appear ever so uncertain, the magnetism of Jesus evoked the curious kind of faith that could say, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.”

Scepticism is wrong because it makes doubt an end in itself. Like Philo the Jew, the Christian contends that doubt for the sake of doubting is unworthy of a philosopher. It is legitimate to use doubt in the testing of ideas or in indicating the limits of human reason, but doubt cannot serve as an end in itself. C. S. Pierce’s definition of doubt is helpful in this connection: “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief.” He shows that the function of doubt is to stimulate man’s thinking until the doubt is destroyed.

Unlike the Sceptic who makes doubt its own end, the Christian accepts doubt as a cause in the struggle to attain a state of belief. Pierce states that “the irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief.” It is when doubts are created that inquiry into truth begins, and a faith that wins out over doubt may be called conviction. If the Christian can say “Faith without works is dead,” he might say in another sense that “Faith without doubt is dead.” At least we can say that doubt begets inquiry and inquiry begets faith. The Christian therefore has no fear of doubt, as uneasy and painful as it may be, for he uses it to enrich faith.

CYNICISM: THE SIMPLE MAN

Cynicism was not a philosophical system as much as a way of life. It has been described as “a short-cut to virtue,” meaning that it had no concern for philosophy as a speculative discipline, but was interested only in those ideas that would produce virtue. They saw happiness as the supreme aim, and all their thinking was toward the creation of the happy way of life. This was the way of renunciation, the simple life. The Cynic sought to overcome all desire except the desire for goodness; purity of motive was the watchword. To be free and serene is what counts; money, politics, pleasure are irrelevant. Marriage is all right, but it is better to be unencumbered. A pleasure-seeking man can be neither happy nor free.

Success is the formation of character; the Good Man has the willpower to be what reason dictates to him. Socrates was their model man, for he cultivated the character that was true to his essential nature. Happiness is a certain attitude of mind, and Socrates had this. They were much like the Stoics whom we shall consider later. Both the Cynics and the Stoics were harbingers for Christian ethics, chiefly because of their concern for freedom, their faith in reason, their belief in one God, and their insistence on ethical religion. Gomperz in Greek Thinkers speaks of the Cynics as having “an insatiable thirst for freedom, a profound sensitiveness to the ills of life, an unshakable faith in the majesty and the all-sufficiency of reason, and a corresponding abysmal contempt for all traditional ideals.” Such characteristics made them tutors unto Christ.

Diogenes is one of the most famous of the Cynics, and he serves as a model of the simple life, shorn of all the ostentation that mars true happiness. He would not own a home, choosing rather to spend his days in a tub. He is the one who carried a lighted lantern day and night through the streets of Athens, looking for an honest man. The story is told that Alexander the Great, once a student of Aristotle, so admired the philosopher for his indifference to social amenities that he once rode up to him as he sat basking in the sun and offered to grant him any favor. “Only stand out of my light” was his response to the emperor.

Diogenes taught the Cynics to renounce civilization and return to simplicity. He ate the simplest foods and wore the same cloak the year round. He once saw a child drinking out of his hands and threw away his cup; he saw another child eating off the ground and threw away his plate. In the summer he would roll in the burning sand, and in the winter he would embrace frozen pillars. He swore himself to poverty. He claimed that philosophy taught him the one thing that matters most, showing him what was his and what was not his. Fame, position, wealth, and human relationships were not his, for these could be lost and are perishable. The power he could claim over his own mind was inalienably his. Wealth and poverty are not in possessions, but in the hearts of men. Philosophy gave him the power to deal with any external circumstance by way of inward discipline.

These philosophers were called Cynics, not because they were “cynical” in the modern sense of that term, but because they were like dogs (cynos is the Greek word for dog) in their churlishness and captiousness, and in their indifference to the niceties of life. But the Cynics did not mind being different or even odd so long as they could be free men who were indifferent to circumstance. Like Socrates, they were convinced that no harm can befall the Good Man. They admitted that sickness and pain and poverty and death do come upon the Good Man, but these are not really bad if one is good.

While they no doubt went too far in discounting social amenities and proprieties as of no value, they made a noble effort to give proper emphasis to the inner man. But in doing this they misinterpreted their hero Socrates, who was so concerned with manners and customs and laws that he refused to collaborate in an act of illegality that would have saved his life.

It was Antisthenes, the founder of the sect, that exemplified for the Cynics “a dog’s life.” He insisted on carrying a beggar’s staff, and his coarse woolen mantle was so ragged that Socrates once twitted him by saying, “ I can see your vanity through your cloak.” But Antisthenes was the ideal man to the Cynics because of his disdain for the amenities of life. He was surly and independent, hardy and self-sufficient. It was his simple life that made him good. Goodness to the Cynics meant self-control, which to them meant fortifying the inner life against both the fortunes and adversities of the external world. Cultivation of the mind is the way to do this. Antisthenes wrote voluminously in an effort to nurture the mind, but his writings are not extant. He wrote so much in fact that he was referred to as a “universal chatterbox.” His writings included criticisms of Plato, whom he saw as an apostle of meaningless abstractions. Plato in turn described him as a man who had the kind of eye that could see a horse, but lacked the kind of mind which could see the conception of a horse.

The Christian might well interpret the Cynic ethic as proud and self-sufficient, offering nothing greater than the crudity of an Antisthenes or a Diogenes. To the Cynic virtue was for virtue’s own sake, and its end was no more than a hardy self-sufficiency. But Antisthenes and his disciples did lay some groundwork for Christian ethics. When asked about his greatest debt to philosophy, Antisthenes replied: ‘The ability to hold converse with myself.” This rugged individualism, so characteristic of the Cynics, left its mark upon Greek culture. Gomperz sees Cynicism as “the philosophy of the proletariat,” and suggests that their accent on freedom and self-assertion was favorable to Christianity. He sees their concern for world citizenship as an important step towards brotherhood.

CYRENAICS: THE MAN WHO HAS A GOOD TIME

This school of Greek thought did not consider philosophy as a study of reality, but as a branch of learning which best teaches man how to enjoy himself. Unlike the Cynics, these philosophers believed it is foolish to neglect the body, for it can give us such great pleasure. Pleasure that can be enjoyed here and now is the chief end in life. They gave little attention to the idea of pleasure in a future life. The immediate pleasures of the flesh meant more to them than any “pie in the sky by and by.” Bodily pleasures are vivid and in-tense, and are, therefore, to be preferred to intellectual pleasures.

The Stoics criticized the Cyrenaics in this regard. Cicero points out that they forgot that as a horse is made for galloping and an ox for ploughing and a dog for hunting, so man is made for understanding. But the Cyrenaic could not forget that the flesh was capable of intense and continuous pleasures, and they saw no reason why “that which is most pleasant to man” should not be the end and aim of life. They distinguished between pleasure and happiness: pleasure is desirable for its own sake, while happiness is desirable only for the pleasure which it brings. Happiness is the sum total of all the pleasures. It is therefore the particular and individual pleasures, the sensual joys, that make up the good life. Because of this view they were called Hedonists, a Greek term meaning pleasure, especially immediate pleasure.

Up to this point it appears that we have described nothing more than a sensualistic way of life, one that is easily criticized and rejected. We should not forget, however, that the Cyrenaic kind of hedonism is a fair representation of the thinking of many people in our own time. How many of us really choose intellectual or spiritual pleasures over the fleshly? How many give only lip service to the higher pleasures while living like a Cyrenaic? In order to do justice to the Cyrenaics it is important that we realize that they were a better people than their beliefs indicate. This is often true of people. Many rise above the narrowness, bigotry, or sensuality of the religious or political sect to which they belong. It can be said that to some extent the Cyrenaics talked one way but lived another. At least this was true of their founder Aristippus.

It is surprising that the founder of this pleasure-loving sect would be a devoted disciple of Socrates. Tradition has it that Aristippus got so excited over Socrates’ teaching that he fainted. He was at one time within the master’s inner circle. So close was he to Socrates that Plato explains that he was not present when Socrates died. His views of pleasure being what they were, it was afterwards said of him, by way of personal attack, that he was not with Socrates when he died because he was out carousing with some woman. History records other such criticisms of him: his life was consistent with his theory of pleasure; he lived like the most debauched of men; one who studied at his school would leave a profligate.

But Aristippus was not all that bad. To the contrary, it appears that he lived so as to gain the respect of most men. Cicero, for instance, who often criticized his doctrine, referred to him and Socrates as having “great and superhuman virtues” that the ordinary man cannot imitate. Even though he talked as if he loved money, luxury, prostitutes, and flattery, he did not seem really to value such things. While pleasure is good, it is mastery over pleasure that counts. His famous epigram is, “I possess but I am not possessed.” He was once given the choice of three prostitutes. Not wanting to choose, he took all three of them home with him, and then dismissed them when he reached the door. Plato referred to this indifference when he said of Aristippus, ‘’You alone are endowed with the gift to flaunt in robes or go in rags.” No man enjoyed luxury more, but none valued it less.

Above all else Aristippus can be respected for his gift of sympathy and the sweetness of his disposition. He never quarreled, and he shows us how to react when maligned. He once walked away from one who was attacking him with foul language. “Why do you run away?” demanded the attacker. “Because, as it is your privilege to use foul language, it is mine not to listen,” he replied. On another such occasion he said, “You may be the master of the wrong way to speak, but I am the master of the right way to listen.” His greatest debt to philosophy he described as “the ability to feel at ease in any company.”

William Barclay in his study of the Cyrenaics in The Expository Times says that the most characteristic thing Aristippus ever said was that “the most wonderful sight in life is the sight of a kind and good man walking in the midst of wicked men, and never deflected from his path.” Barclay comments that he doubtless meant it for Socrates, but that it fits Aristippus himself just as well.

The philosophical basis for the Cyrenaic hedonism was in their theory of knowledge. Nothing can be known with certainty, for our senses are tricky and will deceive us. People see the same things in different ways: the man with jaundice will see everything yellow; the man with ophthalmia will see everything red. Push your eyes sideways and you will see double. Everything is relative to the individual. There is no such thing as a common feeling, Individual sensation is, therefore, the standard of everything. Nothing is really just or honorable, for there is no standard for such virtues. Convention and tradition are the only criteria. They denied the existence of any gods and viewed religion as superstition.

They held pleasure to be good no matter whence it comes, for one’s sensation is the only judge. So no pleasure is bad in itself. In fact pleasure is the only thing that is good in itself. It is the end while all else is the means. They esteemed prudence as a virtue, for the prudent man knows best how to attain pleasures. Ethics, therefore, becomes a matter of making the right choices in terms of the enjoyment of pleasure. Education is also very important in Cyrenaic thought, for only the wise man knows how to enjoy life.

A satisfactory criticism of this kind of hedonism calls for a definition of pleasure. There is that view which may be described as Christian hedonism, which would not only identify pleasure with happiness, which the Cyrenaics would not do, but would also distinguish between lower and higher pleasures. The Christian can concede that pleasure is the supreme end in life if pleasure is given a spiritual meaning. Communion with God should be the highest of all pleasures and could well be regarded as life’s supreme end. Everything that a Christian does should be for the purpose of bringing the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people.

Unlike the Cyrenaics, the Christian moralist will emphasize the quality of pleasure rather than its quantity, and the enduring pleasures over the fleeting ones. The Christian will deny himself of some (or too much of) sensual pleasures in order to enjoy spiritual ones, and he will choose the more enduring joys of the soul rather than the passing pleasures of the flesh.

The Christian may agree with the Cyrenaics that pleasure is in itself good, but he will insist that certain principles must be honored in the quest for pleasure. If one gains pleasure by means of doing another an injustice, he has done wrong, even though the pleasure itself may be good. The Christian may even say that any pleasant sensation within itself is good, whether it be the happy sensation caused by narcotics or the thrill of wine, women and song. But the means employed may be very wrong, the pleasure therefore being undeserved and unpraiseworthy, even if intrinsically good. The thrill of sex, for example is a God-given good, and is still a good even when made possible by the body of a prostitute. It is the means that is wrong. There are God-given means to the God-given good. It is good to give money to the poor, but wrong to steal the money in order to do it. — The Editor