ANTISTHENES  AND  THE  CYNIC  SCHOOL.

 

Antisthenes of Athens, at first a pupil of Gorgias, but afterward of Socrates, taught, after the death of the latter, in the gymnasium called Cynosarges, whence his school was called the Cynic school.

Virtue, be taught, is the only good. Enjoyment, sought as an end, is an evil. The essence of virtue lies in self-control. Virtue is one. It is capable of being taught, and, when once acquired, can not be lost. The safest wall for a town is knowledge based on secure inferences. Virtue requires not many words, but only Socratic force.

Antisthenes combats the Platonic theory of ideas. He grants the validity only of identical judgments. His assertion that contradiction is impossible, gives evidence of his lack of earnestness in the treatment of dialectical problems. The opposition to the political forms and the polytheism of the Hellenic race, which remained still undeveloped in Socrates, pronounced itself distinctly in the cosmopolitism of Antisthenes and in his doctrine of the unity of God.

To the school of Antisthenes belong Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes, Hipparchia, the wife of Crates, Metrocles, her brother, and others.

 

Antisthenes, born at Athens in 444 BC, was the son of an Athenian father and a Thracian mother. For this reason he was restricted to the gymnasium called Cynosarges. In the rhetorical form of his dialogical writings Antisthenes betrayed the influence of Gorgias' instruction. He went to Socrates first in later life, for which reason he is designated in the Sophistes as the “late learner”. Plato and Aristotle criticise him as lacking in culture. Before becoming a disciple of Socrates, he had already given instruction in rhetoric, an occupation which he also afterward resumed. He appears to have lived thirty years after the death of Socrates. In external appearance Antisthenes, most of all the disciples of Socrates, resembled his master, with whom he stood on terms of intimate personal friendship.

Antisthenes holds fast to the Socratic principle of the unity of virtue and knowledge. He emphasizes chiefly its practical side, though not wholly neglecting its dialectical bearings.

Antisthenes first defined definition as the expression of the essence of the thing defined. The simple, said Antisthenes, is indefinable: it can only be named and compared: but the composite admits of an exposition, in which the component parts are enumerated conformably to the actual order and manner of their combination. Knowledge is correct opinion based on definition.

Somewhat sophistical is the doctrine attributed to Antisthenes that it is impossible to contradict one's self, together with the argument: either the same thing is subject of the two supposed contradictory affirmations—and then, since each thing has only definition these affirmations are equivalent, and not contradictory—or the affirmations relate to different subjects, and consequently there is no contradiction. The last result of this dialectical tendency was reached in the doctrine that only identical judgments are valid.

According to Diog. L. Antisthenes recognized virtue as the supreme end of human life: whatever is intermediate between virtue and vice was indifferent. Virtue is sufficient to secure happiness. Pleasure is pernicious. A frequent saying of Antisthenes was: "I would rather be mad than glad''. The good is beautiful, evil is hateful. He who has once become wise and virtuous, can not afterward cease to be such. The good is proper to us, the bad is something foreign.

No actual or possible form of government was pleasing to the Cynic. The Cynic restricts his sage to the subjective consciousness of his own virtue, isolating him from existing society, in order to make him a citizen of the world. He demands that men return to the simplicity of a natural state. Whether it is to this position of Antisthenes that Plato refers in his picture of a natural political state—which he yet terms a society of swine—and in his examination of the identification of the art of conducting men with the art of the shepherd, is doubtful; perhaps in the latter passage the only reference is to the Homeric idea of the “shepherd of the people”.

The religious faith of the people, according to the Cynics, is as little binding on the sage as are their laws. The one God is not known through images. Virtue is the only true worship. Antisthenes interpreted the Homeric poems allegorically and in accordance with his philosophy.

 

Diogenes of Sinope, through his extreme exaggeration of the principles of his teacher, developed a personality that is even comical. He is said himself not to have repelled the epithet "Dog," which was applied to him, but only to have replied that be did not, like other dogs, bite his enemies, but only his friends, in order that he might save them. He was also called ''Socrates raving". With the immorality of the times he rejected also its morality and culture. As tutor of the sons of Xeniades, at Corinth, he proceeded not without skill, on the principle of conformity to nature, in a manner similar to that demanded in modern times by Rousseau, he acquired the euduring love and respect of his pupils and of their father.

Of the disciples of Diogenes, Crates of Thebes, a contemporary of Theophrastus the Aristotelian, is the most important; through his influence Hipparchia and her brother Metrocles were won over to Cynicism. Monimus the Syracusan was also a pupil of Diogenes. Menippus of Sinope, who seems to have lived in the third century before Christ, and is mentioned by Lucian as "one of the an­cient dogs who barked a great deal", was probahly one of the earlier Cynics. There were probably several Cynics who bore the name Menippus.

Cynicism, in its later days, degenerated more and more into insolence and indecency. It became ennobled, on the other hand, in the Stoic philosophy, through the recognition and attention given to mental culture. The Cynic's conception of virtue is imperfect from its failure to determine the positive end of moral activity, so that at last nothing remained but ostentatious asceticism. "The Cynics excluded themselves from the sphere in which is true freedom" (Hegel).

After Cynicism had for a long time been lost in Stoicism—which "gave to the doctrine of the independence of the virtuous will the basis of a comprehensive, scientific theory of the universe, and so adapted the doctrine itself more fully to the requirements of nature and human life—it was renewed in the first century after Christ under the form of a mere preaching of morals. But it was accompanied in this phase of its existence by much empty, ostentatious display of staves and wallets, of uncut beards and hair, and ragged cloaks. Of the better class of Cynics in this later period were Demetrius, the friend of Seneca and of Thrasea Petus, Enomaus of Gadara, (in the time of Hadrian), who attacked the system of oracles with special violence, and Demonax of Cyprus, praised by Lucian, born about AD 50-died about 150, who though holding fast to the moral and religious principles of Cynicism, advocated them rather with a Socratic milduess than with the vulgar Cynic rudeness.