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
http://www.knight.org/advent
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.
Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).
This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.
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