Below is a selection of Theodor Gomperz’s A History of Ancient Philosophy detailing the philosophy of Aristippus and the Cyrenaics as regards their epistemic theories. I have underlined important material for emphasis.
Cyrenaic Epistemology:
In the theory of knowledge, the analytic intellect of the Cyrenaics penetrated to still greater depths than in ethics. We cannot take account of their work in this field without making the reader to some extent a partner in our investigation. The regrettable loss of all the works of this school, the meagreness and the one-sidedness of the notices relating to them, almost all of which are of a polemical character, compel us to linger for some time over the subject, and to give it a detailed consideration, the length of which will, we hope, be rewarded by its fruits.
The Cyrenaic theory of knowledge was compressed into a formula which occurs in the same form in different and independent accounts, and therefore must certainly have been taken from the original documents. It runs as follows : “Our modes of being affected are alone knowable.” For the explanation of this proposition, our authorities appeal to the most diverse instances of sense-perception. They allege in the spirit, partly perhaps in the very words, of the Cyrenaics that we do not know that honey is sweet, that chalk is white, that fire burns, or that the knife-blade cuts: all that we can report is our own states of feeling; we have a sensation of sweetness, we feel ourselves burnt or cut, and so on. The first impression received by the attentive reader of this book may possibly be that in these utterances we are again confronted by the Leucippic-Democritean doctrine touching the subjective nature of most sensations (“According to convention, there are a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold,” and so on. Cf. Vol. I. p. 320). But this impression will not bear examination. For there is no repetition of what formed the counterpart of that declaration concerning the subjective or secondary properties of things, namely, a proclamation of atoms and the void as strictly objective realities. Not only so, but nothing else is introduced as a strictly objective existence to take the place of atoms and the void. We must consider, too, that our records, inadequate as they are, present us, in their central features at any rate, with the testimony of competent and well- informed students of the earlier philosophers ; and these would not have omitted to mention the identity or approximate identity of two doctrines. Still, the present is not an unsuitable occasion to allude to the theory of Leucippus, if only as the starting-point, and almost indispensable premiss of the theory now engaging our attention. In the latter we have, without any doubt, a continuation and expansion of the earlier attempt, related to it as the theories of Berkeley or Hume are to those of Hobbes or Locke.
Expositions in some detail of this theory of knowledge occur in three different quarters. There are two late philosophical authors, namely, the empiric physician, Sextus (about 200 A.D.), and a Peripatetic, or adherent of the Aristotelian school, named Aristocles, who came about a generation earlier, and of whom the ecclesiastical historian Eusebius has preserved considerable fragments in his “Praeparatio Evangelica.” Lastly there is Plato. This reversal of the natural order in which the profound philosopher, the contemporary of Aristippus, is made to yield precedence to late authors who were immeasurably inferior to him in every respect, is based upon the following reason. Those two later authorities treat expressly and deliberately of Aristippus and his school ; Plato gives us, in a section of the “Theaetetus,” what purports to be a secret doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, but really belongs, as we believe, along with Friedrich Schleiermacher and several others, to Aristippus. This conjecture for conjecture it is, though anything but a random or reckless one rests entirely on the agreement between Plato's exposition and the above-mentioned accounts, which, nevertheless, are thereby supplemented to a not inconsiderable degree, and, so to speak, illuminated from within.
Aristocles, in truth, gives us little more than the formula quoted above, to which he subjoins a lengthy polemic, betraying his total inability to appreciate his opponent's standpoint. Sextus is an adherent and advocate of sceptic principles. As such he is at pains, as we have already remarked a propos of Democritus (Vol. I. p. 359), to make the representatives of other schools into allies of scepticism. It is thus not surprising that he clothes his account of the Cyrenaic theory of knowledge in the language of his own school, and that he gives the sceptical or negative side of that theory the predominance. But that which more particularly moves our astonishment in this short account of the scepticism of the Cyrenaics, as in the parallel account given by Plutarch, is the lavish use of words expressing dogmatic assurance, such as “true,” “incontrovertible,” “unshakable,” “infallible,” “reliable,” “sound.” How is this contradiction to be explained? For this purpose it seems necessary to penetrate more deeply into the mind of these philosophers and the guiding principles of their thought. What at first may here seem hypothetical, will, we hope, gradually improve its claim to be fact in the course of the investigation.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the great achievement, rich in consequences, of Leucippus, had drawn the attention of thinkers to the subjective element in sense-perception generally. This exaltation of the subject, this insistence on his cardinal significance for the genesis of sensation, natural and obvious as it seems, was a comparatively late development ; when, however, it had once appeared, its influence on the mind of inquirers could not but gain in strength as it became more and more familiar to them. The question was bound to be raised whether those perceptions to which absolutely objective validity was still conceded, were in reality fully entitled to the distinction. For example, the perception of colour was held to be subjectively conditioned, but not that of forms. This violent separation of what was so closely related could not be maintained intact when once attention had been drawn to a number of illusions to which the eye is subject even outside the field of colour-perception. New difficulties were raised by the staff which appears broken when dipped in water, by the different apparent magnitudes of one and the same object as viewed by the two eyes, by the double vision which may be the result either of a pathological condition or of sideward pressure upon one eye. The sense of touch itself, which passed for the type of true objectivity, was found, on closer observation, to labour under grave deficiencies. Thus the fact that, when two fingers are crossed, a single pellet may be felt as two, supplied much matter for thought. (A few, but not all, of these illusions are mentioned in the account given by Sextus; others are referred to in the section of Aristotle's Metaphysics which deals with the relativistic schools of thought.) Some, no doubt, were satisfied with the reflexion that the message of the one sense, or of the one organ, may be corrected by that of another, just as the normal condition corrects the testimony of the abnormal one. But what guarantee have we so might the doubters answer that equally grave deceptions do not occur in other cases, where no correction is attainable ? And, apart from that, had not Democritus already pointed out that it is not the number, not the majority or minority, whether of persons or of conditions, that can decide between truth and false- hood (cf. Vol. I. p. 360) ? Here we call to mind the violent attacks of the Eleatics on the testimony of the senses in general. This tendency of thought to be hostile to sense was necessarily reinforced by the growth of reflexion, and especially by the placing of such observations as we have just mentioned in the forefront of discussion. Nor was Eleaticism by any means dead; it lived on in the school of those Socratics whose home was at Megara, and whom we took leave to call “Neo-Eleatics,” as being the heirs of Zeno and his predecessors. There can be no doubt that the old cry, “The senses are liars; do not believe them ! Truth dwells outside and above the world of sense,” was now raised more loudly than before. It woke the strongest echo in the mind of Plato. But the opponents of the Eleatics, Protagoras for example, had successors as well, and we ask with what weapons could the old conflict be continued? The proposition, “All that is perceived is real” had from the first a subjective tinge, which appears in the reference to “man” as the “measure of all things” but which finds its clearest expression in the treatise “On the Art.” This sophist's discourse, filled with the spirit of Protagoras, contains a passage which runs as follows: “If the Non-Existent can be seen like the Existent, I do not understand how any one can call it non-existent, when the eyes can see it and the mind recognize it as existent” (cf. Vol. I. p. 454). That which in an earlier generation had been a casual glimpse, a fleeting inspiration, now became the central stronghold for the defence of the witness of the senses. Its champions abandon, so to speak, their advanced posts and outworks to the enemy, and retire to the inmost parts of the fortress, the sensations themselves. These are no longer held as the pledges and guarantees of something external; while the adversary receives the most sweeping concessions, his most effective weapon of attack is wrested from his hands. However freely we admit that sensation can bring no valid testimony to the nature, or even the existence, of 'external objects, the sensation itself remains undeniable; it possesses unconditional validity or truth in itself, and, in combination with the other processes of consciousness, makes up a sum of knowledge which is perfectly adequate for all human purposes.
He who encounters for the first time this renunciation of belief in an external world may be excused if he imagines himself in a madhouse. “If you believe in the truth of this doctrine of yours” it was in such terms as these that Bishop Berkeley and his adherents were apostrophized “you may just as well run your head against a lamp-post, for the non-existent post cannot possibly hurt your equally non-existent head.” To which the reply was regularly returned, “We do not deny the sensation of resistance, nor any of the other sensations of which is composed the image or idea of a post, of a head, and of the whole external world ; that which we deny, or that, at least, of which we know nothing “as one section of the school affirms” is that mysterious something assumed by you to lie behind those phenomena which are present to our as to every other similar consciousness, and which are bound together by unalterable laws of sequence and coexistence.” What “we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a horse, the idea of a man” so we are told by a modern advocate of this school of thought, the older Mill, in his “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind” are the ideas of a certain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they coalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of “unity.” Similarly, we read in Plato's “Theatetus: “To such a group [of sensations] is assigned the name of man, of stone, of beast, and of every other thing.” Plato is here dealing with thinkers on whose subtlety he lays particular emphasis, whom he places in the sharpest contrast with the materialists, who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands. He says of them, further, that they resolve everything into processes and events, completely banishing the concept of Being. He represents them, by the aid of that transparent fiction of a secret doctrine of Protagoras, as the successors of the great sophist; and, lastly, he describes for us a theory of sensation which is peculiar to them, one to which we shall presently have to pay some attention. The reader will probably be satisfied that the only contemporaries of Plato to whom this picture could apply were those who maintained that “modes of being affected are alone knowable,” that the “external thing” supposed to underlie a group of such modes was “possibly existent,” but, in any case, “inaccessible to us” (Sextus). Again, we must express regret for the scantiness of our information. We do not know how these earliest representatives of the school of thought now called phenomenalistic, settled accounts with traditional views. Did they undertake to explain the origin of the latter? Did they, like an English psychologist and a German-Austrian physicist of our own day, point to the psychical processes in virtue of which an aggregate of possibilities of sensation “appears to acquire a permanent existence which our sensations themselves do not possess, and consequently a greater reality than belongs to our sensations”? Or did they appeal to the fact that “the colours, sounds, odours of bodies are fleeting,” while the “tangible,” exempt in the main from temporal and individual change, remains as a “persistent kernel,” appearing as the background, substratum, or “vehicle of the fleeting qualities attached to it,” and retained as such, by force of mental habit, even when “the conviction has gained ground, that sight, hearing, and touch are intimately related to each other?” or lastly, did they contemplate the possibility that the conception of material substance arises from the confluence of those two streams of thought? These are questions which we cannot answer. But we should not be in the least surprised to learn that they never advanced beyond the rudiments of the problem, although they can hardly have neglected all criticism of the concept of Being.
The account which Plato gives of their theory of sensation must also be taken as authentic only in essentials. Many a detail in the picture may well be due to that creative intellect which was hardly ever satisfied with the bare reproduction of other men's opinions. For this reason we shall only advert to the main features of that theory. According to it, two elements, an active and a passive, come into play in the production of every sensation. This co-operation is designated as movement, and connected, in jest or earnest, with the Heraclitean doctrine of perpetual flux. From the meeting of two such elements, which only by meeting acquire their characters of active and passive, sensation and the object of sensation take their rise simultaneously colours along with visual sensations, sounds along with auditory sensations, and so forth. It is denied that a previously existing hard, soft, warm, cold, or white thing is perceived ; all this enters upon existence simultaneously with the perception. But how are we to conceive of this process which creates, at one and the same time, the subjective sensation and the objective quality, if not the object possessing the quality ? Plato, as we have remarked, terms the process movement, and clearly attributes to it a spatial character. What we have called the elements concerned in the movement, Plato leaves somewhat indefinite, and the consequence is a certain regrettable want of clearness, which may or may not have been intended. In the reasoning on which the doctrine is founded there is no mention of the material or corporeal; the emphatically repeated denial of all absolute existence, the “activities, processess, and all the invisible,” which are placed in such strong contrast with tangible things, lead us far away from the material world. Or rather, they would take us entirely out of it, were it not for the fact that the substitutes for the strict concept of matter which were used by many ancient thinkers, Plato and Aristotle among them, laboured under a remarkable degree of haziness. Thus the possibility is not entirely excluded that, in the original exposition at least, some species of matter, devoid of form and qualities, was designated as the subject of that movement. But we must not lose sight of yet another possibility, namely, that Aristippus himself may have had in view a purely material process. This last and more natural supposition gave rise to the reproach, urged against the Cyrenaics, of moving in a circle, by resolving the corporeal into sensations, and then deducing sensation from the corporeal. The justice of this reproach is to say the least, doubtful. For in no case can it be contended that the phenomenalist, merely as such, is debarred from studying the physiology of the senses or natural science in general. He will, of course, begin by declaring that bodies or material substances are for him nothing but complexes of permanent possibilities of sensation, or else similar abstractions resting in the last resort on sensations. But he is none the less at liberty to treat of the bodily conditions of each special sensation, and of the material conditions of any other process he may choose to consider. It is possible to contest the admissibility of his analysis, but not the legitimacy of this application of it. The procedure of the Cyrenaics may quite possibly have resembled that which we have just described. This would accord with the circumstance that they were accused of having reintroduced into their system at a later stage the physics and logic which they began by banishing from it. For the crown of their doctrinal edifice (its fourth and fifth parts) is stated to have been concerned with “causes” (physics), and “grounds of proof” (logic).
What more especially was the character of this logic of theirs, is a question to which we should be glad to be able to give an answer. There is an entire lack of positive statements on the subject. Yet it might have been conjectured a priori that in ancient times, as in modern, a phenomenalistic theory of knowledge and a hedonistic-utilitarian system of ethics were accompanied by an empirical and inductive tendency in logic. That such a logic did exist in the schools of the later Epicureans, we learnt, more than thirty years ago, from a work of Philodemus, which had lain concealed by the ashes of Herculaneum. When we first attempted the reconstruction of that mutilated treatise, we were able to point to traces, hitherto unobserved, of similar doctrines in the schools of the Sceptics and of the Empiric physicians. What was the common root? Light has been thrown on this question by Ernst Laas, who drew attention to a pregnant reference to this subject, which had previously been overlooked, in Plato's “Republic.” This passage deals with the preservation in the memory of past events, with the careful consideration of what happened first, what afterwards, what at the same time, and with the deduction, from such sources, of the safest possible forecast of the future. The language employed, for all its picturesqueness, strongly reminds us of the expressions used by more recent authors well acquainted with the inductive logic of later antiquity. We shall hardly go wrong if we connect this passage, not, as was done by another investigator, with Protagoras, but with Plato's contemporary, Aristippus. The conclusion which we draw from all our data taken together is that Aristippus laid the foundations for a system of logic which should be nothing else than a body of rules for ascertaining the sequences and the coexistences of phenomena. The Cyrenaic was, no doubt, prepared for weighty objections against his views, and such were probably raised in abundance by his contentious and inquisitive opponents. “You do not believe in the reality of external things” so may his critics well have exclaimed “at least you deny that they can be known; where, then, do you leave room, we do not say for science, but the most elementary foresight? What is the foundation of the commonest empirical truths which no one denies, not even yourself? How can you infer to-morrow from to-day? Whence do you learn that fire burns, that water quenches thirst, that men are mortal, that there is any permanence in those connexions and co-ordinations on which the whole conduct of life depends, as well as the special methods and processes of the artist, the mechanic, the physician, the pilot, the farmer, and the rest? We shall not be guilty of any great recklessness in conjecture if we assume that the Cyrenaics felt themselves compelled to return some answer to these questions, and not admit, if only by silence, that in renouncing all cognizable objects they also renounced all knowledge and all regulation of conduct in accordance with knowledge. And the very answer which their epistemological assumptions allowed them to give is contained in that allusion of Plato to which we have referred. There is in that passage no mention of objects, but only of events and happenings; and similarly it is quite possible that the inductive logic alluded to above may have grown out of a mode of apprehending the world which neither sought nor found behind things or existences anything else than complexes of phenomena, bound together by fixed laws. There is thus something more than a small probability that the earliest emergence of a radical criticism of knowledge was accompanied by the first formulation of that canon of knowledge which not only can be associated with such criticism, but has once more been so associated in our own century, that is to say, the rules governing the ascertainment of purely phenomenal successions and coexistences.
But it is time to return from this digression, to leave the Cyrenaic treatment of the chief problem of knowledge, known to us as it is only in its main features, for a subject on which all doubt may be said to be excluded the Cyrenaic doctrine of sensation, borrowed by them from Protagoras, but certainly further elaborated by Aristippus. That, properly speaking, there are no illusions of the senses, that, on the contrary, every sensation is the natural and necessary result of the factors which produce it, is a highly important truth which Plato, in the “Theaetetus,” proclaims with all the clearness that can be desired, in close connexion with undoubted Cyrenaic doctrines. It is not the majority or the minority of the subjects who feel in this or that manner, it is not the regularly predominating or the causally occurring state of the individual percipient that can establish a fundamental distinction between sensations; although, as we may add, the conclusions which we draw from the two classes of sensation may be of very different values for the ordering of life. That the authors of this theory were far in advance of their century is clear from the fact that some of the most eminent of our own contemporaries have not thought it superfluous to proclaim and insist upon those same truths. In 1867 Hermann Helmholtz wrote as follows:
“A red-blind person sees cinnabar as black or as a dark- yellowish grey, and that is the proper reaction for his peculiarly constituted eye. He only needs to know that his eye is different from those of other men. In itself, the one sensation is no truer and no falser than the other ['My sensation is true for me,' as we read in the Theatetus], even though those who see red have the great majority on their side. The red colour of cinnabar only exists at all in so far as there are eyes made like those of the majority of mankind. Cinnabar has exactly the same title to the property of being black, that is, to the red-blind.”
And again: “A sweet thing which is sweet for no one is an absurdity.” In the following year another philosophical physicist, to whom we have already alluded, explained his views on the same question in these words
The expression, sense-illusion proves that we are not yet fully conscious, or at least have not yet deemed it necessary to incorporate the fact into our ordinary language, that the senses represent things neither wrongly nor correctly. All that can be truly said of the sense-organs is that wider different circumstances they produce different sensations and perceptions. . . . And it is usual to call the unusual effects deceptions, or illusions.”
We have still to consider a negative circumstance of some importance. The problems of change, of inherence, of predication, which played so great a part in the investigations of the Megarians, the Cynics, and even of Plato, are entirely absent from all reports of the teaching of the Cyrenaics. Nor should we be surprised at this, for all these riddles are offshoots of the concept of Being, which the authors of the theory of sensation expounded in the “Theatetus” endeavoured, as Plato expressly informs us, to abolish altogether. The desire to be rid of the difficulties which attend this concept was, we may be sure, a considerable factor in the thought of the earlier as of the later phenomenalists. There is an entire lack of evidence to show how far their criticism of the concept of Being took a polemical turn, directed against members of other Socratic schools. It is possible that this very subject had its part in the controversies which raged between Aristippus and Antisthenes, and again between Theodorus, a late member of the African school, and Stilpo the Megarian.
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