Hedonic Eudaemonism - Achieving The Pleasant Life

In this post, I’d like to thread the needle on a topic of importance for promoting and following Cyrenaicism as a way of life: what, properly considered, is our purpose, end, or telos? I’ll offer the label “hedonic eudaemonism” as best encapsulating the telos of our New Cyrenaicism, because it emphasises the long-range, totalising focus on the happiness of our life as a whole, while also describing the pleasurable quality and content in present-experiential terms. By describing our goal in these terms, we leave no room for Stoicising interpretations of apathetic calm as commanding the character of “eudaimonia”, for example, and we also head-off any lingering misunderstanding that the tantalising fancy of the moment ought enslave our attention. We are concerned with achieving happiness in a robust and lasting manner, and the nature of that happiness is found in living “as easily and pleasantly as possible”. 

Other questions follow: what is our ultimate good? What is the status of other goods in relation to our end and our ultimate good? How do we go about achieving our end?

I propose the following: 

1. Our ultimate good, or summum bonum, is this life itself. The purpose or end of this life is to live pleasantly/pleasurably.

2. Other goods are either instrumental to, or essential components of, the pleasant life.

3. Achieving and enjoying the pleasant life requires exercising practical reason in the realm of choice and avoidance, in order to secure and maintain those aforementioned goods. It is the role of philosophical education to identify, enumerate, and categorise those goods, while also providing us the tools and techniques required to achieve them.

I believe this presentation of Aristippean Cyrenaicism is historically defensible, philosophically preferable, and practically beneficial. The doxographical material we have regarding Aristippus himself suggests a figure who is undeniably concerned with the quality of his life as a whole — it shows us someone who engages in training and study with clear future-concern, someone who values personal character and virtues not merely as means to the end of gaining particular pleasures, but as inseparable elements of The Good Life itself. 

Such an understanding not only brings early Cyrenaicism into clearer alignment with the Greek ethical tradition in which Aristippus was embedded at Athens, it also better accounts for the Socratic flavour of his associations, and more easily accommodates the extant anecdotes, as against any awkward attempts to read later Cyrenaic developments back onto the founder of the school. With this in mind, we come to understand Aristippus as a radical innovator more so in terms of his attitude towards pleasure, his manner of achieving it, and his confident expression — though these are erected upon familiar intellectual soil — rather than as someone promoting a rather complex foundationalist theory, completely divergent from any of his contemporaries, in a manner starkly at odds with the anti-dogmatic, moderate-skepticism he expressed elsewhere. 

The next step is of course to proceed with a breakdown of those component qualities which one ought to cultivate in order to achieve and enjoy the pleasant life. That subject will be covered in a future post, where I will enumerate the “Pillars of Pleasure” which support successful, happy living.