Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Two volumes.
The two most famous philosophic schools formed after Socrates’ death were Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Much of what we know about the several other schools and their teaching comes down to us from Diogenes Laertius, who lived in the third century A.D. For Plato’s teachings we have Plato’s writings, preserved intact; for Aristotle’s teachings we have Aristotle’s writings preserved mostly intact. For other ‘post-Socratics’ we have fragments. If we had the same for Plato or Aristotle, would we consider them great philosophers? Diogenes Laertius’ accounts of their thought are much less interesting than their writings. A philosophic life had better be its own reward, inasmuch as literary immortality depends so much upon the vagaries of fortune.
Anisthenes came to Socrates after studying with the rhetorician Gorgias. Rhetoricians teach verbal combat; young philosophers tear at people like puppies. Anisthenes’ doctrine, Cynicism, combines the rhetorician’s combativeness with the open disrespect seen in those new to philosophy. (The Cynics were the philosophers Ambrose Bierce admired.) And so: “Virtue is a weapon that cannot be taken away (VI. i. 13, emphasis added), a weapon that can be acquired or taught (VI. i. 11). The many, the people, preening themselves on their autochthony, not seeing that they share this supposed virtue with snails and locusts (VI. i. 3), very often serve as that weapon’s target: vote that asses are horses as sensibly as you vote untrained men to generalships (VI. i. 9).
Not as politic as Socrates, nor as calculatedly impolitic, Anisthenes nonetheless remains recognizably Socratic, judging from several of his teachings. Do not take notes; remember. The most necessary learning is how to unlearn. “The wise man is self-sufficing, for the goods of all others are his” (VI. i. 13). His sharper-edged, more combative Socratism forms the groundwork of “the most manly section of the Stoic school” (VI. i. 15).
Plato called Anisthenes’ student, Diogenes, “a Socrates gone mad” (VI. ii. 47). Madness isn’t a bad mask for a philosopher. Unlike Socrates, Diogenes “was loved by the Athenians” (VI. vii. 45), perhaps for such wisecracks as the one he delivered upon seeing temple officials leading away a thief who’d stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers: “The great thieves are leading away the little thief” (VI. ii. 47). The people would have admired such lesé majesté as evidenced in his command to Alexander: “Stand out of my light” (VI. vii. 45). Irreverence toward the gods may be tolerated by the people if it is accompanied by irreverence toward great men, and unaccompanied by irreverence toward the people. Diogenes let his runaway slave go (VI. ii. 57). Diogenes’ madness is the rule of natural right unmitigated by convention (VI. ii. 73). His idea of nature, unlike that of Socrates, may be materialistic or ‘democratic’; “all elements are contained in all things and pervade everything” (VI. ii. 75). If so, no meat is taboo, including human flesh.
Zeno and the other Stoics more nearly resemble ‘philosophers’ as we know them, i.e., philosophy professors. Logic applied to human life aims at “life in agreement with nature”; “life according to reason rightly becomes the natural life,” inasmuch as life according to reason corresponds to the most distinctively human capacity (VII. i. 195). More, right reason rather than the natural elements “pervades all things” (VII. i. 197; see also VII. i. 241). This conformity with nature makes virtue its own reward, so to speak. Right reason may be called ‘Zeus’; such a philosophy begins to earn not hostility, not amused toleration or affection, but respect from the Athenian people, whose religious convictions are left undisturbed, seemingly confirmed, by its pious language.
The root of ‘duty’ means ‘reaching down,’ ‘reaching as far as.’ Duty is the result of right (that is, dialectically tested) reason. The Stoic preference for self-preservation over pleasure rests on this rationalist understanding of the soul.
Stoics emphasize the rationalist aspect of Socrates, tending toward an ethics of logical rule-giving and a strong, non-ironic depreciation of the passions. They are more ‘Euthyphronic’ or universalistic than Socrates, claiming that “the wise man is passionless” (VII. i. 221). Joy, caution, and wishing remain as the only good non-rational conditions of the soul (VII. i. 221). Stoics “will take wine, but not get drunk” (VII. i. 223). They strive for godlikeness and, like much more earnest and rational versions of Euthyphro, they endorse ‘piety.’ Their definition of piety is Socratic/rationalistic; the Stoics combine Socrates and Euthyphro. They avoid Euthyphro’s disrespect for parents (VII. i. 225, 241). Socrates might worry that their ability to sustain their balancing act so might not easily be sustained.
Pyrrho is a radical conventionalist, claiming that the senses are unreliable while denying that reason can correct them. It is he, more than Bishop Berkeley, who would fall to Dr. Johnson’s stone-kicking refutation. The fact that Pyrrho lived to be ninety, supposedly getting by with the help of his friends, undermines his plausibility. No self-immolating Foucault he, as mightily as he claimed to strive against facts. “On being discovered once talking to himself, he answered, when asked the reason, that he was training to be good” (IX. xi. 477). A real philosopher, were he being honest, would say: ‘I can find no better conversation in this city.’
Skeptics generally “laid down nothing definitely, not even the laying down of nothing” (IX. xi. 487)—radicalizing Socratic knowing of knowing nothing. Their refutation of the possibility of knowing (IX. xi. 503) is self-refuting. Their refutation of natural goodness and badness (IX. xi. 513) fails because it assumes that ‘by nature’ must mean ‘uniform’—an un-Socratic error indeed. Such errors were noted by the so-called Dogmatists, impelling the Skeptics to moderate their claims (IX. xi, 513, 515). This brings them closer to common sense, farther from coherence. The feasibility of having any life at all, philosophic or not, triumphed over the beguiling extremism of the doctrines.
Epicurus combined a materialist physics with a philosophic life aiming not at politics but at tranquility savored in private. Hatred, envy, and contempt—thumotic passions—may be overcome by reason. The radical depreciation of thumos comports with the radical depreciation of politics. The Epicureans prefer country to city, garden to assembly or marketplace. The tenth “sovereign maxim” questions the value of fame, that ruling passion of the noblest, most political minds (X. 665). Natural justice is mere expediency and avoidance of harm (Sovereign Maxim #31, X. 675). Epicurean political philosophy is minimally political; although quite different from Hobbesian materialism in most ways, Hobbes’s inclination to restrict political rule to ‘the one,’ and to leave the bulk of mankind to commercial life in civil society with no share in in political rule exercised by the modern state, does have a certain quasi-Epicurean cast to it. Modern liberalism has a certain tendency to veer toward ‘epicurean’ habits and a concomitant hostility to politics.
Despite their hedonic reputation, Epicureans also reject Socratic eroticism. No love, no marriage, no family for the wise man. “He will have regard for his property and to the future” (X. 645). And he will have friends, partners “in the enjoyment of life’s pleasures” (X. 647). True pleasures come from the health of the soul, which is the most refined form of matter. What Epicureans call true pleasures are rather tepid, from the Socratic viewpoint: “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (X. 657). Phronēsis comes to dominate philo-sophia.
Epicureans are Socratic with respect to death, neither seeking nor fearing it. But, given their depreciation of both thumos and eros, they must rely upon doctrine to overcome the fear of death. They make much, therefore, of their atomistic materialism and their consequent denial that there is any afterlife to fear. Given their not-strongly philo-sophic psychology they cannot as it were build it into a philosophy of life. Their philosophic doctrine in turn feeds back into the psychology of the one who holds the doctrine (Sovereign Maxim #20, X. 669). Epicurean atomism needs moral doctrines, needs maxims, in order to stabilize a life lived with its potentially nihilistic cosmological doctrine. The Epicurean soul does not so much govern itself as it is governed by maxims, rightly called “sovereign.” This soul seeks something outside of itself to rule it.
Considered as a group, these ‘post-Socratics’ do not quite have the autarchy, the self-ruling, self-sufficient, self-ordering philosophic eros of Socrates. And so they do not go out among the people so much, or, when they do (as with Diogenes) they play the buffoon and the wiseacre, not the questioner. They are less political than Socrates because their philosophic eros is weaker. Or so it seems in the account of Diogenes Laertius.
Recent Comments