A Short History of Greek Philosophy / THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS / ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS

Page 4

That is to say, to the Cynic conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so perfectly accustomed to its denial as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very act of refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being necessary to have wealth or the admiration of men in addition, that the true kingly life was “to do well, and be ill spoken of.” All else but virtue was a matter of indifference.

The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no multifarious theology; there was but one divinity—the power that ruled all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose manner of existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time. Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As Antisthenes once said to Plato, “A horse I see, but ‘horseness’ I do not see.” What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve for the present.

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