§16. The Cyrenaics
The founder of the Cyrenaic school is Aristippus, who lived in Athens in the latter fourth century and was said to have been friends with Socrates. The school takes its name from the city of Cyrene, in Lybia, where it flourished from the time of Aristippus down to around the mid-third century bce.
Like Socrates, Aristippus was a young contemporary of Hippocrates, and like some of the Hippocratic authors, Aristippus and the Cyrenaics were impressed by the difference between the superior access we enjoy to feelings (pathe) and our inferior (really, nonexistent) knowledge of causes. Instead of focusing on what we lack, however, let us turn the point around and grasp the insight it offers. “The pathe alone are apprehensible (katalepta)” said Aristippus. In other words, forget about supposed external causes, and focus entirely on your own feeling. “They deny that they know what color or sound anything has, but only sense that they are experiencing in a certain way.”132Cyrenaic philosophers were notorious for the neologisms they invented to avoid the specious imputation of unseen causes. When they write of their pathe they do not say “I am feeling a pathos of white.” Rather, “I am whitened.” A person who suffers from jaundice “is moved yellowly.” With such idioms they avoid reference to a cause and merely express the quality of their affection. They drop the neologisms when referring to pleasure and pain. “Whoever has pleasure (hedetai) is happy while the person who does not have any pleasure is miserable and unhappy.” You can be appeared to whitely when no white exists in the cause, but pleasure and pain are not referred to an object. The neologisms seem to have belonged to the school's original teaching, and most of the ancient sources remark on them, which they seemed to have found striking if not always for the right reason.133
The sources hint at why the school favored this idea.
Sextus reports that “the Cyrenaics say that the experiences are our criteria and that they alone are apprehended and happen to be infallible, while none of the things which produce the experiences are apprehensible or infallible.” Scholars quibble about this use of the word “criterion” a technical term of later philosophy and not used among Cyrenaics. Strictly speaking, pathe for Cyrenaics were not a criterion because they do not perform the criterial function of regulating inferences to the non-evident. Cyrenaics want, not to regulate such inferences, but to discredit them, and do so on Socratic, ethical grounds. Nevertheless, Sextus makes the point that Cyrenaics thought they could know impressions or pathe in a way they could not know their causes, or whether they have causes, or whether causes exist at all. “It is possible to say infallibly and truly and firmly and incorrigibly, they say, that we are lightened or that we are sweetened” But as to “what is external and productive of the affection, perhaps [it] is a being, but it is not a phenomenon for us”134They were, it seems, reaching for a concept of relation-free perception. Cyrenaic pathe have no being apart from perception. No distance separates perceiver and perceived because perception is not a relation; it does not reach out. Intentionality is mere doxa, a theatrical effect; perception stays entirely with the perceiver, like a feeling of pleasure or pain. Adverbial reports like “appeared to whitely” are incorrigible, and that is where the Cyrenaics stop. They did not make this incorrigibility a foundation for inference to the unseen. They were uninterested in whether perception could be transmuted into scientific knowledge of nature. They were not doctors but philosophers, friends of Socrates, for whom ethical self-cultivation exceeds the value of any theory of causes.135
A Cyrenaic testimony reads, “I apprehend that I am being burnt but it is non-evident whether the fire is such as to burn.
For if it were such, all things would be burned by it” The reasoning may be imperfect, but the point is that obj ective causes are not evident. That is not to say they do not exist, but rather that they do not matter for ethics. We have perfect knowledge of our pathe and should not expect knowledge of anything else. Is it therefore not reasonable to forget about anything else and live for good pathe? Medical empiricists say that knowledge of causes does not help a physician heal. Aristippus says that such knowledge does nothing for ethics or the problem of a good life either.Physicians do not need knowledge of causes to heal, and philosophers do not need knowledge of causes to be happy. Abide with what we know, which are perceptions, and organize life on the basis of how they make us feel.
The Cyrenaics apparently did not have a philosophy of nature. In this they were consistently Socratic, focused on the ethical problem of how to live. A restless inquirer like Democritus chased causes that are impossible to know and which contribute nothing to a good life. Is that not pathetic? Democritus is an empiricist because he is a materialist, and thinks of knowledge as an effect of bodies on bodies. But Cyrenaics were empiricists because they were hedonists. Pleasure is good, its value not seriously denied, but pleasure is an affect, and our relation to the good is mediated by feeling, not idea or thought. The good life is an aesthetic problem, not a problem of knowledge. In Cyrenaic philosophy the Socratic imperative to take care of the soul undermines Socrates’s other argument, about how happiness and virtue are problems of knowledge.
When at a certain point Cyrenaics have no alternative to speculation, they turn to medicine rather than metaphysics. Aristippus stipulates that pleasure is the only good, but how did he define it? “There are two affections (pathe), pain and pleasure, pleasure being a smooth motion (leia kinesis) and pain a rough motion (tracheia kinesis)” The ethical goal of life is smooth motion.
Smooth and rough describe qualities of physical change in the body, not how such changes feel. The motions are smooth or rough, the feeling of the motions is pleasant or painful. Smooth seems to mean that the motion meets no resistance, while rough indicates a disrupted, unsettled motion that does violence to nature.136The account seems to follow Democritus and the Hippocratics. Democritus taught that the best life was “the most cheerful, the least disturbed,” avoiding “great movements” or “movements over large intervals” in the soul. Violent motion is prejudicial to the integrity of the atomic soulcluster. “Souls that move over great intervals are neither stable nor cheerful. So one should keep one’s mind (gnome) on what is possible and be satisfied with what is present and available.” Something like this recurs in Hippocrates. “A man is in the best possible condition when there is complete decoction (pepsis) and rest.” “So long as the brain is quiet (atremese), so long is man intelligent (phronei).”137