A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by W. T. Stace (the false prince series .txt) 📕

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CHAPTER XI

THE SEMI-SOCRATICS

Upon the death of Socrates there ensued a phenomenon which is not infrequent in the history of thought. A great and many-sided personality combines in himself many conflicting tendencies and ideas. Let us take an example, not, however, from the sphere of intellect, but from the sphere of practical life. We often say that it is difficult to reconcile mercy and justice. Among the many small personalities, one man follows only the ideal of mercy, and as his mercy has not in it the stern stuff of justice, it degenerates into mawkishness and sentimental humanitarianism. Another man follows only the ideal of justice, forgetting mercy, and he becomes harsh and unsympathetic. It takes a greater man, a larger personality, harmoniously to combine the two. And as it is in the sphere of practical life, so it is in the arena of thought and philosophy. A great thinker is not he who seizes upon a single aspect of the truth, and pushes that to its extreme limit, but the man who combines, in one many-sided system, all the varying and conflicting sides of truth. By emphasizing one thought, by being obsessed by a single idea and pushing it to its logical conclusion, regardless of the other aspects of the truth, one may indeed achieve a considerable local and {156} temporary reputation; because such a procedure often leads to striking paradoxes, to strange and seemingly uncommon conclusions. The reputations of such men as Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, are made chiefly in this way. But upon the death of a great all-embracing personality, just because his thought is a combination of so many divergent truths, we often find that it splits up into its component parts, each of which gives rise to a one-sided school of thought. The disciples, being smaller men, are not able to grasp the great man's thought in its wholeness and many-sidedness. Each disciple seizes upon that portion of his master's teaching which has most in common with his own temperament, and proceeds to erect this one incomplete idea into a philosophy, treating the part as if it were the whole. This is exactly what happened after the death of Socrates. Only one man among his disciples was able to grasp the whole of his teaching, and understand the whole of his personality, and that was Plato. Among the lesser men who were the followers and personal friends of Socrates, there were three who founded schools of philosophy, each partial and one-sided, but each claiming to be the exponent of the true Socraticism. Antisthenes founded the Cynic school, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, and Euclid the Megaric.

Now, of the two aspects of the Socratic philosophy, the theory of concepts, and the ethical theory, it is easy for us, looking back upon history, to see which it was that influenced the history of thought most, and which, therefore, was the most important. But the men of his own time could not see this. What they fastened upon was the obvious aspect of Socrates, his ethics, and above all the ethical teaching which was expressed, not so {157} much in abstract ideas, as in the life and personality of the master. Both this life and this teaching might be summed up in the thought that virtue is the sole end of life, that, as against virtue, all else in the world, comfort, riches, learning, is comparatively worthless. It is this, then, that virtue is the sole end of life, which forms the point of agreement between all the three semi-Socratic schools. We have now to see upon what points they diverge from one another.

If virtue is the sole end of life, what precisely is virtue? Socrates had given no clear answer to this question. The only definition he had given was that virtue is knowledge, but upon examination it turns out that this is not a definition at all. Virtue is knowledge, but knowledge of what? It is not knowledge of astronomy, of mathematics, or of physics. It is ethical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge of virtue. To define virtue as the knowledge of virtue is to think in a circle, and gets us no further in the enquiry what virtue is. But Socrates, as a matter of fact, did not think in a circle. He did not mean that virtue is knowledge, although his doctrine is often, somewhat misleadingly, stated in that form. What he meant was--quite a different thing--that virtue depends upon knowledge. It is the first condition of virtue. The principle, accurately stated, is, not that virtue is the knowledge of virtue, which is thinking in a circle, but that virtue depends upon the knowledge of virtue, which is quite straight thinking. Only if you know what virtue is can you be virtuous. Hence we have not here any definition of virtue, or any attempt to define it. We are still left with the question, "what is virtue?" unanswered.

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No doubt this was due in part to the unmethodical and unsystematic manner in which Socrates developed his thought, and this, in its turn, was due to his conversational style of philosophizing. For it is not possible to develop systematic thinking in the course of casual conversations. But in part, too, it was due to the very universality of the man's genius. He was broad enough to realize that it is not possible to tie down virtue in any single narrow formula, which shall serve as a practical receipt for action in all the infinitely various circumstances of life. So that, in spite of the fact that his whole principle lay in the method of definitions, Socrates, in fact, left his followers without any definition of the supreme concept of his philosophy, virtue. It was upon this point, therefore, that the followers of Socrates disagreed. They all agreed that virtue is the sole end of life, but they developed different ideas as to what sort of life is in fact virtuous.

The Cynics.

Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynic School, repeated the familiar propositions that virtue is founded upon knowledge, is teachable, and is one. But what aroused the admiration of Antisthenes was not Socrates, the man of intellect, the man of science, the philosopher, but Socrates, the man of independent character, who followed his own notions of right with complete indifference to the opinions of others. This independence was in fact merely a by-product of the Socratic life. Socrates had been independent of all earthly goods and possessions, caring neither for riches nor for applause, only because his heart was set upon a greater treasure, the acquisition of wisdom. Mere independence and indifference to the {159} opinions of others were not for him ends in themselves. He did not make fetishes of them. But the Cynics interpreted his teaching to mean that the independence of earthly pleasures and possessions is in itself the end and object of life. This, in fact, was their definition of virtue, complete renunciation of everything that, for ordinary men, makes life worth living, absolute asceticism, and rigorous self-mortification. Socrates, again, thinking that the only knowledge of supreme value is ethical knowledge, had exhibited a tendency to disparage other kinds of knowledge. This trait the Cynics exaggerated into a contempt for all art and learning so great as frequently to amount to ignorance and boorishness. "Virtue is sufficient for happiness," said Antisthenes, "and for virtue nothing is requisite but the strength of a Socrates; it is a matter of action, and does not require many words, or much learning." The Cynic ideal of virtue is thus purely negative; it is the absence of all desire, freedom from all wants, complete independence of all possessions. Many of them refused to own houses or any dwelling place, and wandered about as vagrants and beggars. Diogenes, for the same reason, lived in a tub. Socrates, following single-heartedly what he knew to be good, cared nothing what the vulgar said. But this indifference to the opinion of others was, like his independence of possessions, not an end in itself. He did not interpret it to mean that he was wantonly to offend public opinion. But the Cynics, to show their indifference, flouted public opinion, and gave frequent and disgusting exhibitions of indecency.

Virtue, for the Cynics, is alone good. Vice is the only evil. Nothing else in the world is either good or bad. {160} Everything else is "indifferent." Property, pleasure, wealth, freedom, comfort, even life itself, are not to be regarded as goods. Poverty, misery, illness, slavery, and death itself, are not to be regarded as evils. It is no better to be a freeman than a slave, for if the slave have virtue, he is in himself free, and a born ruler. Suicide is not a crime, and a man may destroy his life, not however to escape from misery and pain (for these are not ills), but to show that for him life is indifferent. And as the line between virtue and vice is absolutely definite, so is the distinction between the wise man and the fool. All men are divided into these two classes. There is no middle term between them. Virtue being one and indivisible, either a man possesses it whole or does not possess it at all. In the former case he is a wise man, in the latter case a fool. The wise man possesses all virtue, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all perfection. The fool possesses all evil, all misery, all imperfection.

The Cyrenaics.

For the Cyrenaics, too, virtue is, at least formally, the sole object of life. It is only formally, however, because they give to virtue a definition which robbed it of all meaning. Socrates had not infrequently recommended virtue on account of the advantages which it brings. Virtue, he said, is the sole path to happiness, and he had not refrained from holding out happiness as a motive for virtue. This did not mean, however, that he did not recognize a man's duty to do the right for its own sake, and not for the sake of the advantage it brings. "Honesty," we say, "is the best policy," {161} but we do not mean thereby to deny that it is the duty of men to be honest even if it is not, in some particular case, the best policy. Socrates, however, had not been very clear upon these points, and had been unable to find any definite basis for morality, other than that of happiness. It was this side of his teaching which Aristippus now pressed to its logical conclusions, regardless of all other claims. Doubtless virtue is the sole end of life, but the sole end of virtue is one's own advantage, that is to say, pleasure. One may as well say at once that the sole end of life is pleasure.

The influence of Protagoras and the Sophists also played its part in moulding the thought of Aristippus. Protagoras had denied the objectivity of truth, and the later Sophists had applied the same theory to morals. Each man