Cynicism

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Cynicism was an ancient Greek movement that held the good life to be one of radical self-sufficiency: living in accordance with nature, owning almost nothing, and treating the conventions of society — wealth, status, shame, the rules of polite conduct — as obstacles between people and their own freedom. The name comes from the Greek kynikos, “dog-like,” a label thrown at its founders for their shamelessness and adopted by them without apology.

The movement’s roots run back to Socrates, by way of his follower Antisthenes, but its emblem is Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in fourth-century Athens and reportedly made his home in a large storage jar. The stories told of him — discarding his last cup on seeing a child drink from cupped hands, asking Alexander only to step out of his light — were already in wide circulation in antiquity, and most cannot be verified; biography and parable had merged long before they reached us. What the anecdotes carry intact is the doctrine. Diogenes taught by performance: that the things people labor and compete for are unnecessary, that nature asks very little, and that the person who needs least is freest. His pupil Crates of Thebes gave away a fortune to live the same way, and Crates in turn taught Zeno, who went on to found Stoicism — so the Cynic strain runs directly into the school that would dominate the Roman world.

The Cynics left almost no system, and that was deliberate. They distrusted abstract theory and wrote satire, diatribe, and the short philosophical tale rather than treatises; their argument was meant to be lived rather than proved. Two terms anchor what survives: autarkeia, self-sufficiency, the state of needing nothing one cannot supply oneself; and askēsis, training, the hard practice that makes such freedom possible. Against these stood nomos — custom, law, convention — which the Cynic was to test against nature at every point, and discard wherever it failed.

Later thinkers were divided on what to make of them. The Stoics honored Diogenes as a kind of saint of virtue while declining to live in his jar; Epictetus, some four centuries on, described the true Cynic as a scout sent ahead by the gods, a portrait that turned the ragged provocateur into a moral ideal. The word itself took the opposite road, narrowing in modern usage to mean a sneering distrust of all motives — nearly the reverse of the ancient stance, which was austere rather than jaded. The resemblance to later movements of holy poverty, the mendicant friars above all, is real and has often been drawn; it is a resemblance of practice more than of creed, since the Cynic renounced for the sake of nature and freedom, not of God. What endured was the experiment itself: the claim, pressed to its limit, that almost everything people are told they need can be done without.

→ In the library: Epictetus — The Discourses (Matheson, 1916)

→ Related: Reason · Francis Of Assisi