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. Whether the word began as plain abuse — the dog being the animal that eats, sleeps, mates, and relieves itself in the open, indifferent to the eyes on it — or whether it descended from the Cynosarges, the gymnasium outside the Athenian walls where the first of them taught, the ancient sources never quite settle. Either way the dog stuck, and the Cynics made it theirs. To be called a dog was to be told one had no shame; they answered that shame was itself a convention, and that the dog, watching its masters anxiously guard what it had no use for, saw the human situation more clearly than the humans did.

The movement’s roots run back to Socrates, by way of his follower Antisthenes, an older Athenian who had heard Socrates and drawn from him a single, narrowed lesson: that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, and that everything else a person might pursue — possessions, reputation, pleasure, even health — is at best a tool and at worst a trap. Antisthenes pressed the Socratic life toward austerity and self-mastery, holding that virtue is a matter of deeds and training rather than argument, and could be taught. From him the line passes to its emblem, Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in fourth-century Athens and reportedly made his home in a large storage jar — a pithos, the great clay vessel used for grain or wine, not the wooden barrel of later retelling.

The Dog of Athens

Diogenes arrived in Athens an exile. The story attached to his beginnings — that his father, a moneyer in the Black Sea city of Sinope, was implicated in debasing or defacing the coinage, and that Diogenes shared the disgrace and the banishment — survives in several versions, and a Delphic oracle is woven through them: asked how he should live, he was told paracharattein to nomisma, to deface the currency. The phrase carried both meanings at once. Nomisma, coin, shares its root with nomos, custom or law; to deface the currency was to deface the coin of convention, to strike the official stamp off the values people had accepted without examining and to mint better ones. Whether the coinage scandal is literal history or a parable grown around the oracle, antiquity could no longer tell, and the divided judgment of the ancient biographers has carried into modern scholarship, which finds both a possible historical core — debased Sinopean coins of the right period — and a suspiciously perfect fit between the crime and the philosophy. The doctrine is the same in either case: the life worth living begins by treating the inherited stamp of worth as forged.

The anecdotes told of him were already in wide circulation in antiquity, and most cannot be verified; biography and parable had merged long before they reached us, and the surviving collection in the sixth book of Diogenes Laertius reads less as a life than as a sheaf of pointed sayings, each one a small performance. He threw away his last drinking cup on seeing a child cup its hands at a fountain, scolding himself for having carried a superfluous thing so long. He walked the marketplace by daylight with a lit lamp, telling those who asked that he was looking for a human being and finding none. Asked by Alexander, master of the known world, what he might do for him, he answered that the king could step out of his light. Whatever the literal truth of any single scene, what the anecdotes carry intact is the doctrine. Diogenes taught by performance — by the chreia, the sharp anecdote that fuses a gesture and a saying — rather than by treatise: that the things people labor and compete for are unnecessary, that nature asks very little, and that the person who needs least is freest. When he called himself not an Athenian or a Sinopean but a kosmopolitēs, a citizen of the cosmos, he was not announcing a sentiment of universal brotherhood but refusing the city’s claim on him altogether — declaring that the only community binding on a rational creature is the order of nature, which has no walls and issues no papers.

Crates, Hipparchia, and the Road to the Stoa

The most consequential of those who took up the life was Crates of Thebes, who was born wealthy and gave the wealth away — the sources say he converted his estate to cash and either scattered it among his fellow citizens or left it in trust with a banker, to be returned to his children only if they grew up ordinary, and given to the poor if they turned out to be philosophers, who would have no use for it. Crates was remembered as gentler than Diogenes, welcomed into Athenian houses as a kind of household conscience and nicknamed the door-opener for the freedom with which he entered them. His partner, Hipparchia of Maroneia, abandoned a prosperous family and a string of suitors to live the Cynic life beside him in the streets and in public, on equal and unembarrassed terms — one of the few women whose philosophical choice the ancient record preserves as a choice, and a direct test of the Cynic claim that the conventions of marriage, modesty, and a woman’s place were nomos and nothing more.

It was Crates who taught the young Zeno of Citium, a merchant said to have turned to philosophy after a shipwreck cost him his cargo, and Zeno who went on to found Stoicism. The Stoic strain thus runs directly out of the Cynic: Zeno kept the Cynic conviction that virtue is the only good and that nothing external can touch the wise person’s happiness, but built around it the systematic logic, physics, and theology that the Cynics had refused, softening the public shamelessness into a doctrine of indifferents lived within the city rather than against it. The school that would dominate the Roman world began as the Cynic life given a system — and the Stoics never forgot the debt, even as they declined to move into a jar.

Nature Against Convention

Two terms anchor what survives. The first is autarkeia, self-sufficiency: the state of needing nothing one cannot supply oneself, so that no other person, no fortune, and no city holds any leverage over one’s contentment. The Cynic reduces wants to the point where they can always be met — a cloak, a wallet, water, whatever food comes to hand — precisely so that nothing he wants can be taken from him. The second is askēsis, training: the Cynic treated the body and the will as an athlete treats his muscles, deliberately courting cold, hunger, and contempt in order to be unmoved by them when they came unbidden. Freedom, on this account, is not a gift of circumstance but the earned result of hard practice; one becomes invulnerable to loss by rehearsing loss until it has no sting.

Against these stood nomos — custom, law, convention, the whole inherited apparatus of what is done and not done — which the Cynic was to test against physis, nature, at every point, and discard wherever it failed the test. Most of human misery, on the Cynic diagnosis, comes from accepting nomos as though it were nature: believing that one genuinely needs the things one has merely been taught to want, feeling shame at acts that harm no one, fearing a poverty or an exile or a death that nature has made unremarkable. The remedy was a deliberate breach of the conventions, in public, to expose how thin they were — and from this came two further Cynic watchwords. Anaideia, shamelessness, was the willingness to do in the open whatever was natural and to refuse the blush that custom demanded; parrhēsia, frank speech, was the freedom to tell anyone, of any rank, the truth to his face. The dog bites, and barks at the powerful, and is not embarrassed; the Cynic took the comparison as a program.

The Cynics left almost no system, and that was deliberate. They distrusted abstract theory — the elaborate logic and metaphysics of the Academy and the Lyceum, the schools of Plato and Aristotle, against which Cynicism set itself as a shortcut to virtue that bypassed learning entirely. Diogenes is supposed to have heard Plato define the human being as a featherless biped, plucked a fowl, and produced it in the Academy as Plato’s man. Where the great schools founded institutions, kept libraries, and wrote treatises, the Cynics wrote satire, diatribe, the mock tragedy, the spoudaiogeloion that mixes the serious and the comic — and above all the chreia, the short philosophical tale in which a saying and a deed arrive together. Their argument was meant to be lived rather than proved, demonstrated on the body in the marketplace rather than defended in the lecture hall. The diatribe, the brisk moralizing harangue that the Cynic Bion of Borysthenes did much to shape, passed from them into the wider literature of the ancient world and left its mark on the sermon and the satire long after the school itself had thinned.

The early Cynic writings are almost entirely lost — the tragedies and dialogues ascribed to Diogenes, the works of Antisthenes, the letters and notebooks of Crates survive only in scraps and report — and what is known of the movement is reconstructed at second and third hand. The biographer Diogenes Laertius is the indispensable source: the sixth book of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers gathers the lives and sayings of Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, and their successors, and is essentially a quarry of chreiai assembled from older collections he no longer names. Around it stand the pseudonymous Cynic Epistles, letters composed in the voices of Diogenes and Crates and circulated under their names for centuries, which preserve the later schoolroom Cynicism more reliably than they preserve the founders. The historian therefore works with a tradition that was already legend when it was written down, in which the deed and the joke have outlasted whatever sober record there might once have been. The absence of a doctrine to memorize was itself the doctrine: a philosophy that could be fully stated in a book would have been, by Cynic lights, no philosophy at all, only more currency to be defaced.

Scout of the Gods

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, folding his self-sufficiency into a more livable ethics. The fullest later portrait comes from the Roman Stoa, some four centuries on. In his discourse on the Cynic calling, Epictetus, the freed slave whose lectures were taken down by his pupil Arrian, described the true Cynic not as a beggar but as a man sent by Zeus as a messenger to humankind concerning good and evil — a kataskopos, a scout sent ahead by the gods to reconnoitre, to find out what is truly friendly to people and what is hostile, and to come back and report without flinching. The image turned the ragged provocateur into a moral office of the highest demand: Epictetus warned that almost no one was fit for it, since the Cynic must be free of every attachment that could be used against him before he presumed to diagnose the attachments of others. The same Stoic line runs on into the notebook of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose private discipline of needing little and bearing much is the Cynic askēsis absorbed into a life at the center of power rather than at its margins.

The word itself took the opposite road. In modern usage “cynic” narrowed to mean a sneering distrust of all motives, a settled assumption that no one acts well and nothing is worth doing — nearly the reverse of the ancient stance, which was austere rather than jaded, and which attacked false values out of the conviction that there were true ones worth living by. The ancient Cynic stripped life down not because he despised it but because he wanted to reach the part of it that could not be taken away.

Movements of holy poverty in later ages worked the same austerity toward a different end. Francis of Assisi and the begging friars who followed him gave away their possessions, owned nothing, and walked the roads with a single cloak, and the outward shape of their lives would have been legible to Diogenes — but they renounced for the sake of God and the imitation of Christ, where the Cynic renounced for the sake of nature and freedom, and the inner argument was not the same. The Cynic kept no faith and obeyed no rule; his poverty was an exercise in reason, a way of clearing the mind of false necessities so that nothing external held power over it.

Sources and Reconstruction

Because the founders’ own books are gone, the textual base of Cynicism is a doxographic one. The single richest source is the sixth book of Diogenes Laertius, available in full in the public domain: the nineteenth-century Bohn translation by C. D. Yonge and the 1925 Loeb facing-Greek edition by R. D. Hicks both carry the lives of Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Crates with their freight of sayings. The later Cynic ideal, philosophical rather than anecdotal, is set out in the discourse on the Cynic calling in the Discourses of Epictetus, in the Matheson translation of 1916. For an orientation to the doctrine and the problems of the evidence, the surveys in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy treat the movement, Diogenes of Sinope, and Antisthenes in detail, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places the Cynic opposition of nature to convention within the wider arc of ancient ethics. The standard modern scholarship runs from D. R. Dudley’s A History of Cynicism (1937), through the collective reassessment edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (University of California Press, 1996), to William Desmond’s Cynics (2008) — each pressing the question of how much of the biography is history and how much is the doctrine wearing a face.

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 · Socrates · Stoicism · Asceticism · Ancient Greece