Cyrenaic School of Philosophy

The Cyrenaic School of Philosophy, so called from the city of 
Cyrene, in which it was founded, flourished from about 400 to 
about 300 B.C., and had for its most distinctive tenet Hedonism, 
or the doctrine that pleasure is the chief good. The school is 
generally said to derive its doctrines from Socrates on the one 
hand and from the sophist, Protagoras, on the other. From 
Socrates, by a perversion of the doctrine that happiness is the 
chief good, it derived the doctrine of the supremacy of pleasure, 
while from Protagoras it derived its relativistic theory of 
knowledge. Aristippus (flourished c. 400 B.C.) was the founder of 
the school, and counted among his followers his daughter Arete and 
his grandson Aristippus the Younger. The Cyrenaics started their 
philosophical inquiry by agreeing with Protagoras that all 
knowledge is relative. That is true, they said, which seems to be 
true; of things in themselves we can know nothing. From this they 
were led to maintain that we can know only our feelings, or the 
impression which things produce upon us. Transferring this theory 
of knowledge to the discussion of the problem of conduct, and 
assuming, as has been said, the Socratic doctrine that the chief 
aim of conduct is happiness, they concluded that happiness is to 
be attained by the production of pleasurable feelings and the 
avoidance of painful ones. Pleasure, therefore, is the chief aim 
in life. The good man is he who obtains or strives to obtain the 
maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. Virtue is not good in 
itself; it is good only as a means to obtain pleasure. This last 
point raises the question: What did the Cyrenaics really mean by 
pleasure? They were certainly sensists, yet it is not entirely 
certain that by pleasure they meant mere sensuous pleasure. They 
speak of a hierarchy of pleasures, in which the pleasures of the 
body are subordinated to virtue, culture, knowledge, artistic 
enjoyment, which belong to the higher nature of man. Again, some 
of the later Cyrenaics reduced pleasure to a mere negative state, 
painlessness; and others, later still, substituted for pleasure 
"cheerfulness and indifference". The truth seems to be that in 
this, as in many other instances, sensism was satisfied with a 
superficial and loosely-jointed system. There was no consistency 
in the Cyrenaic theory of conduct; probably none was looked for. 
Indeed, in spite of the example of the founders of the school, the 
later Cyrenaics fell far below the level of what was expected from 
philosophers, even in Greece, and their doctrine came to be merely 
a set of maxims to justify the careless manner of living of men 
whose chief aim in life was a pleasant time. But, taken at its 
best, the Cyrenaic philosophy can hardly justify its claim to be 
considered an ethical System at all. For good and evil it 
substituted the pleasant and the painful, without reference, 
direct or indirect, to obligation or duty. In some points of 
doctrine the school descends to the commonplace, as when it 
justifies obedience to law by remarking that the observance of the 
law of the land leads to the avoidance of punishment, and that one 
should act honestly because one thereby increases the sum of 
pleasure. The later Cyrenaics made common cause with the 
Epicureans. Indeed, the difference between the two schools was one 
of details, not of fundamental principles. 

WILLIAM TURNER 
Transcribed by Rick McCarty 


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