Below is a selection of Theodor Gomperz’s A History of Ancient Philosophy detailing the philosophy of Aristippus and the Cyrenaics as regards their ethical theories. I have underlined important material for emphasis.
Cyrenaic Ethics:
The apostle of the new doctrine was Aristippus. It is said that this son of Cyrene met with a disciple of Socrates at the Olympic festival, was deeply stirred by what he heard from him, and induced to go to Athens and attach himself to the Socratic circle. Of the further course of his life we know little, except that he gave instruction for pay (for which reason Aristotle calls him a sophist), and that, like Plato and Aeschines, he made a considerable stay at the Syracusan court. His literary activity is shrouded in almost impenetrable darkness. That several writings have been attributed to him erroneously, and others foisted upon him in the interests of particular doctrines, there seems to be no doubt. But as we find a younger contemporary of Aristippus, so competent a judge and so well-informed as Aristotle, acquainted not only with particular doctrines of his, but also with the arguments on which they rested, we cannot but suppose that they were committed to writing. Another contemporary, the historian Theopompus, accused Plato of having plagiarized from Aristippus. The charge was quite unfounded, but it could never have been made at all if the Cyrenaic had left absolutely no philosophical writings behind him. We, however, possess but a few lines of them, nor does any fragment remain of the history of Libya attributed to him. Lost, too, are a couple of dialogues, entitled “Aristippus,” in which the Megarian Stitpo and Plato's nephew Speusippus are introduced discussing his doctrines. Yet we are not without some knowledge of his personality, a sharply outlined sketch of which was preserved by the ancient world. Aristippus possessed the mastery of a virtuoso over the art of life and the art of dealing with men. He joins hands with the Cynics in their endeavour to be equal to all vicissitudes of fate; but he has less faith than they in renunciation, and in the necessity of seeking salvation by flight from the difficulties and dangers of life. The man who makes himself master of a horse or of a ship, so he is reported to have said, is not the man who declines its use, but the one who knows how to guide it in the right direction. A similar attitude seemed to him to be the right one to adopt towards pleasure. His well-known saying, “I possess, but am not possessed,” is reported, rightly or wrongly, as having been originally uttered with reference to the celebrated courtesan Lais ; but its application was much wider than that. “To be master of things, not mastered by them,” is the expression by which Horace characterizes the life-ideal of Aristippus. “Every colour,” to quote the same poet again, “every condition, every situation clothed him equally well.” His equanimity gained him the almost unwilling praise of Aristotle, who relates how a somewhat self-assertive utterance of Plato once drew from him the curt, cool rejoinder, “How unlike our friend!” meaning Socrates. In his disposition there was a peculiar strain of sunny cheerfulness which kept him both from anxious care about the future, and from violent regrets for the past. The almost unexampled combination of great capacity for enjoyment and great freedom from wants, his gentleness and calmness in face of every provocation, made a profound impression on his contemporaries. And though his was a peaceable nature, averse from all contention, and therefore from all participation in public life, there was yet not wanting in it an element of courage, which found expression, passively rather than actively, in contempt for wealth and indifference to suffering. Even Cicero places Aristippus by the side of Socrates, and speaks of the “great and divine excellences” by which both men compensated any offences of which they may have been guilty against custom and tradition. As late as the eighteenth century, the spirit of the age was in sympathy with characters of this type. Montesquieu illustrates, without knowing it, the above words of self-description ascribed to Aristippus, in a phrase bearing reference to his own character: “My machine is so happily compounded that I am sufficiently sensitive to things to enjoy them, but not enough to suffer from them.” And the abbes who frequented the salons of society ladies had no reason for preferring the rags of unwashed Cynics to the fashionable dress of the perfumed philosopher. But with us of the present day that type has to some extent lost favour. With the children of the nineteenth century, a strong, fervid, if one-sided, nature counts for more than the calculating wisdom and the all-round culture of the artist in life. But at least it should not be forgotten that this man with the clear cool brain was exceptionally qualified to examine and appreciate the facts of human nature with dispassionate impartiality. In Plato we find the expressions, “men of refinement,” and “men of superior refinement,” applied to a set of philosophers whom we have every reason to identify with Aristippus and his followers. And it is quite true that subtlety in discrimination, keenness of analysis, strictness in the deduction of consequences, were pre-eminently distinctive of the school of Cyrene.
The field of scientific interest was, for Aristippus, confined within almost as narrow bounds as for his master, Socrates. He was just as far removed as the latter from all investigations of nature, while against mathematics he is reported to have raised the not very far-sighted objection that it stood on a lower level than the handicrafts, because no part is played in it by “the better and the worse,” that is, by considerations of utility and human welfare. His interest thus centres chiefly in ethics, or the science of the well-being of man; he is completely at one with Socrates in this, and he is moved by kindred motives. His earnest endeavour after clearness and definiteness in the treatment of ethical questions is a feature which he may, perhaps, be said to have inherited from Socrates. But in Aristippus this tendency assumes a fundamentally different form. In point of method, he joins hands with Antisthenes. With both philosophers, dialectic and the search for definitions are thrust far into the background. The sure basis which they sought, was found, not in ideas, but in facts. At the same time, Aristippus avoided building upon fictitious empirical data, such as the Antisthenic conception of the primitive age. In him we find the first attempt to work back to the fundamental facts of human nature, its “Urphanomene,” to use Goethe's expression. For him, as for his teacher, happiness is at once goal and starting-point. But for the purpose of establishing its true nature, he follows the path, not of conceptional determination or definition, but of the ascertainment of facts; he recognizes pleasurable sensation. For this, children and animals strive with an instinctive impulse, just as they seek to avoid pain. Here is the root-phenomenon, the at once incontestable and fundamental fact on which must be based, according to his view, every attempt to fix a code of rules for the conduct of human life. In order to follow the line of thought taken by Aristippus and his school, it is indispensable to be familiarly acquainted with the speculations of modern Hedonists. It is only thus that the meagre extracts, from which our knowledge of the Cyrenaic moral system is derived, become intelligible to us, only thus can the dead doctrines speak to us with a living voice. If the pursuit of pleasure is to serve as an unassailable foundation for the construction of rules to govern human life, it is necessary to observe strictly a distinction which was insisted on by Aristippus with as much zeal and as much consistency as afterwards by Jeremy Bentham. Pleasure, as such, must always and everywhere be regarded as a good, and the necessity, which, of course, occurs with great frequency, of abstaining from pleasure, must in each case be supported by cogent reasoning. The argument involves a strict separation of the pleasurable feeling from the circumstances which produce it, accompany it, or arise out of it; and all confusion of the kind must be guarded against with extreme care. At the risk of the worst misunderstandings, both Aristippus and Bentham held with unshakable firmness to the position that pleasure qua pleasure is always a good, no matter what the case may be with its causes or its consequences. From the one or from the other there may arise an excess of pain; the good is then outweighed by the evil in the other scale, and the only rational mode of action is to abstain from it. In other cases, again, actions accompanied by painful feelings are the indispensable means for the gaining of pleasurable feelings the price, as it were, which must be paid for them, a call upon us which must be met without flinching if our object is a positive balance of pleasure. The art of life is thus resolved into a species of measurement or calculation, such as Plato describes at the close of the “Protagoras” a result which he represents as arising legitimately out of the fundamental teachings of Socrates, but which he does not appear to accept with entire inward satisfaction.
But before we come to the application of the doctrine, let us return once more to its logical justification. The pleasure most worth striving for was not considered by Aristippus, as it was afterwards by Epicurus, to consist in mere freedom from pain; but he was just as far from assigning such pre-eminence to violent pleasures, or those which are bound up with the appeasement of passionate desire. The name of “pleasure” denoted for Aristippus, not, perhaps, the zero on the Epicurean scale of emotion, but still a fairly low reading on the positive side of it. The mere absence of pain and the mere absence of pleasure were both regarded as “middle states.”
It is by no means clear what was the precise method which Aristippus followed in constructing his more exact definition of “pleasure.” We only know that he looked upon it as a kind of “gentle motion” finding its way into consciousness, and contrasted it with the rough or tumultuous motion which is felt as pain. He cannot in this have been guided simply by observation of natural processes; for children and animals, to which he was all ready to appeal, seek the more violent pleasures as eagerly as the gentler kinds, if not more so. Was it the short duration of the most intense pleasures, or the admixture of pain arising from want and passionate desire (the ordinary precursors of those pleasures), or was it both factors together, that decisively influenced his judgment and his choice? We have every reason to frame some such conjecture. For nothing lay further from his way of thinking than the arbitrariness of a mere fiat of authority conceived as declaring the gentler pleasures to be the only admissible species, and ignoring all the others. Some rational ground for his preference appears to be alluded to in the statement, attributed to him, that “one pleasure is not different from other pleasures.” Perhaps the least forced interpretation of this strange sentence is as follows: Aristippus (and the same may be said of Bentham) did not deny differences between pleasures in respect of intensity, duration, their purity, that is, freedom from admixture. What he attacked was the recognition, on a priori grounds, of qualitative distinctions between them, or distinctions in respect of their worth. So construed, the above sentence is nothing more than a protest against the claim to assign to one class of pleasures a precedence before others which is not supported by any process of reasoning, but rests entirely on so-called intuitive judgments.
Partial or isolated pleasures, however, were regarded by him as being immediately worthy of pursuit, not merely as a means for the attainment of that “sum of pleasurable sensations” to which was given the name of happiness or well-being. The language of the ancient excerpt is here in almost verbal agreement with that of a modern utilitarian, who, on this point at least, remained a strict Hedonist: “The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate.” A reply was thus provided to the objection which lay close at hand, and was indeed speedily raised, that human life offers on the whole a balance of pain rather than of pleasure. However inevitable this concession to pessimism might seem to be, it remained none the less desirable to seek the maximum of attainable pleasure, no matter whether this maximum did or did not exceed the sum of all the pain experienced in a lifetime. Wisdom was declared to be a good, but not an end in itself; rather was it a means towards the end just described. It preserved the wise man from the worst enemies of happiness from superstition, and from the passions which, like “the passions of love and envy, rest on empty imagination.” But the wise man could not remain exempt from all emotions, he could not escape sorrow and fear, because these had their origin in nature. Yet the wisdom based on such true insight was not in itself enough to guarantee happiness unconditionally. The wise man could not expect a life of perfect happiness, nor was his opposite, the bad man, absolutely and entirely miserable. Each condition would only prevail “for the most part;” in other words, wisdom and its opposite possessed a tendency to bring happiness and misery respectively. And even to create the tendency, note the correction of Socratic onesidedness, wisdom alone was not sufficient; training, the education of the body not least of all, was indispensable for this purpose. Similarly, to some extent consequently, the virtues were not an exclusive privilege of the wise. Some of them might be found in the unwise as well.
This spirit of moderation and circumspection, this cautious avoidance of exclusiveness and exaggeration, present us with a welcome contrast to the impression produced by most ancient systems of ethics, an impression which the reader has possibly already received from the Cynic system. But here again points of contact are not wanting between the two great ethical ramifications of Socratism. It is true that Antisthenes, in expressing his elevation above wants and all manner of dependence, his hatred towards the slavery of sensual pleasure, falls into the exaggeration, not to say unnaturalness, of professing an absolute and entire hostility to and contempt for all pleasure; on the other hand, there is attributed to him a saying that pleasure is a good, but “only that pleasure which is followed by no repentance.” To this Aristippus might very well have assented; only he would have formulated the proposition somewhat more precisely by asserting that pleasure is a good even in the excepted case, though it is then equalled or outweighed by the evil of repentance.
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That by “pleasure” the Cyrenaics did not mean the pleasures of sense exclusively, it is hardly necessary to state. They pointed out, among other things, that the same impressions received by the eye or ear produce different emotional effects according to the verdict passed on them by the intelligence: thus the cries of pain which distress us when they proceed from real sufferers affect us pleasurably when they occur in the artistic presentation of a tragedy on the stage. It is true that the school, or, more correctly, a part of it, assigned the greatest intensity to bodily feelings, in support of which view they appealed to the preponderating use of corporal punishment in education and in the administration of the criminal law.
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Hedonism, to our thinking, does not deserve the reproaches commonly levelled against it. But it hardly seems to give an adequate account of the facts it is intended to explain. Like many other ancient doctrines, it suffers from a defect which is the reverse side of a great merit : it strains after a higher degree of simplicity than the facts really exhibit. That supposed fundamental phenomenon, which it and the most illustrious of its adepts Bentham place at the root of all human endeavour, the desire for pleasure and the dread of pain, does in truth lie at a very considerable depth. But it is not the deepest to which the eye of the searcher can penetrate. Let us consider, for example, the human, or rather animal, craving for food. Is it true that man and beast desire food for the sake of the pleasure which accompanies the consuming it ? If we examine the matter closely, it will appear, we think, that the case is otherwise. Our desire for food is something immediate, arising from the instinctive impulse towards the preservation and the enhancement of life ; the pleasure is an accessory phenomenon, associated with this as with all other actions which promote life and its vigorous manifestation. Probably we shall not go far wrong if we interpret the facts somewhat as follows. The combination of matter which composes an animal organism is subject to continual dissociation, which would be definitive if the loss were not repaired. This combination possesses at the same time a tendency to persist a primordial fact which also appears in the reaction of the cell against injurious influences, and of which, as of some kindred facts in nature, no ulterior explanation seems attainable. We may mention the principle of heredity, which rests on the tendency of a process which has once begun to continue indefinitely, and the First Law of Motion, in which the same tendency is displayed in its most comprehensive application. Now, the processes that take place within the organism are, in part at least, attended by phenomena of a psychical order, particularly by emotional excitement ; and it thus happens, by virtue of one of the least striking but perhaps most far-reaching of teleological adjustments, that the processes conducive to its preservation are felt as pleasurable, while those which are unfavourable are felt as painful. Pleasure and pain may thus pass for phenomena accompanying those primitive tendencies, but not for the tendencies themselves. In the above remarks, the germ of which is to be found in Aristotle, we have considered man as a part of nature, not as something existing by the side of nature. They will have been misunderstood, however, if it is supposed that man, endowed with reason and feeling, is to be taken as a mere slave and tool of his primary impulses. For by virtue of the images and ideas stored in his consciousness, or, more correctly, by virtue of the dispositions of will arising out of them, he is enabled to offer resistance to even the strongest of these impulses ; he can resolve to die, indeed to die of hunger. But so long as, and in so far as, he has entered no veto against his natural instincts, they produce their effects in him immediately, without reference to possible pleasure, even when their satisfaction has pleasure for a consequence. In this, as in other cases, Socratist and the cognate modern schools of thought have overshot the mark in the rationalization of human life. It was a great thought, that the whole code of conduct ought to be based on the foundation of a single impulse. But this Monism or Centralism, if we may be allowed the expression, cannot hold its ground, we think, against the richer variety, the Pluralism or Federalism of nature.
