Cyrenaic School
400 BCE – 250 BCE c.
The only thing anyone actually knows is their own present sensation, and the only thing worth pursuing is that it be pleasant.
- Active
- 400 BCE – 250 BCE
- Where
- Cyrene, in North Africa
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
Bodily pleasure in the present moment is the good. Not tranquillity, not the absence of pain, and not pleasure summed over a life — the particular pleasure being felt now.
What it held
The Cyrenaics built their ethics on an epistemology, and the epistemology is the more original part. We know our own affections and nothing else: I know that I am being whitened, not that the thing is white. Two people looking at the same object have no way to establish that their sensations agree, since each has access only to their own.
If that is all anyone knows, then the good has to be found there too. Pleasure is a smooth motion of the flesh, pain a rough one, and the absence of both is neither — which is where they part company sharply with Epicurus, who made that absence the goal. For the Cyrenaics, tranquillity is the state of a sleeping man and no more valuable.
The present is emphasised because past pleasure is gone and future pleasure is not yet real. This produces an ethics with no long-term calculation in it at all, and the school's later branches split over how tolerable that is.
How it argued
Argument from what sensation can and cannot deliver, applied without concession to whatever conclusions follow.
What it was arguing against
Epicurus, most sharply, for redefining pleasure as absence of disturbance. Also Plato's claim that there are objects of knowledge beyond sensation.
Where it disagreed with itself
The school split three ways over exactly this. Hegesias concluded that happiness is unattainable and the best available aim is avoiding pain. Anniceris allowed that friendship and gratitude have value in themselves. Theodorus argued that joy and grief rather than pleasure and pain are what matter, and dispensed with the gods.
Common misconceptions
That it is the same as Epicureanism. They are opposed on the central question: Epicurus wants the removal of disturbance, the Cyrenaics want positive sensation and think an untroubled life is merely inert.
How it began
Aristippus was a companion of Socrates who took from him the indifference to circumstance and drew the opposite conclusion about pleasure. The school may have been organised by his grandson of the same name.
What became of it
Absorbed by Epicureanism, which offered a similar starting point with a more liveable conclusion. Nothing of it survives directly.
Lasting influence
Small in antiquity and considerable since: the epistemological claim that we know only our own affections reappears in Berkeley, Hume and twentieth-century sense-datum theory.
Why it still matters
The problem it posed — whether two people can establish that their experiences match — is now a standard problem in philosophy of mind, and no better answered.
Put another way
A meal eaten with full attention and no thought of the next one.
Where to start
Diogenes Laertius Book II, then Sextus for the argument beneath the anecdotes.
The surprising bit
Hegesias was reportedly nicknamed the death-persuader and had his lectures banned in Alexandria, on the grounds that too many listeners were taking his conclusion seriously.
In their own words
I possess, but I am not possessed.
We apprehend our affections, but of what causes them we know nothing.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Epicureanism
The verdict
A small school that asked one very good question and gave an answer almost nobody could live by.