Cynic school

The claim

Virtue is the only good and it is a matter of practice rather than theory. Live according to nature, which means shedding every want that convention rather than the body has produced.

What it held

Cynicism is philosophy conducted as a way of life and almost entirely without doctrine. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, owned a cup until he saw a child drinking from cupped hands and threw it away, and answered Alexander's offer of any favour by asking him to stand out of the light.

The arguments are made by demonstration. If shame is conventional, then do in public what convention says must be private, and see whether anything is actually lost. If property is a source of anxiety rather than security, then own nothing and observe that the anxiety goes. If citizenship is an accident of birth, then say you are a citizen of the world — a phrase Diogenes coined and which had no obvious meaning before he said it.

What looks like exhibitionism is a method: the Cynics thought argument was too easily agreed with and then ignored, and that only a visible life could actually confront anyone.

How it argued

Askesis — training — and public demonstration. Argument by living the conclusion in front of people, plus a savage comic wit deployed as a philosophical instrument.

What it was arguing against

Every convention that presents itself as natural: wealth, status, reputation, modesty, marriage customs, national identity, and philosophical system-building along with them.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether Cynicism is a philosophy at all or a manner of life without content — an argument that began in antiquity. Whether Antisthenes really founded it or was made its founder retrospectively.

Common misconceptions

That cynical now means what it meant then. The modern word implies distrust of others' motives; the ancient Cynics were moralists, not sceptics about virtue. The name comes from the Greek for dog, applied first as an insult and then adopted with relish.

How it began

Antisthenes was a pupil of Socrates, and Cynicism reads like one strand of Socrates taken to its limit: the indifference to comfort, the public questioning, the refusal to write.

What became of it

It never institutionalised, which is why it lasted nearly a thousand years and left almost no texts. Cynic street preachers were still a recognisable type in the Roman Empire.

Lasting influence

Stoicism directly — Zeno was Crates' pupil, and the Stoic indifferents are the Cynic position with the edges filed off. Christian asceticism borrowed the posture. Rousseau and Nietzsche both take from it.

Why it still matters

It is the sharpest question anyone has put to consumption and status, and it was put by people who had actually done without.

Put another way

A dog, which the Cynics accepted as their name: shameless, loyal, indifferent to property, and able to tell friend from enemy.

Where to start

Diogenes Laertius Book VI. It is a collection of jokes, and the jokes are the argument.

The surprising bit

Hipparchia, a wealthy woman, threatened suicide unless allowed to marry Crates and live as a Cynic. She did, in public and in poverty, and argued philosophers down at symposia.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Sophistic Movement

Influenced

Early Stoicism

The verdict

The only ancient school whose entire argument can be made without saying anything.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy