As natural as it should be to live in accordance with nature, we don’t take to it naturally. It takes practice and training and an amount of philosophical education to understand what nature requires and to align your will with those requirements.
Our untrained nature often leads us astray. We’re naturally inclined to follow our desires for pleasure, for example, and will follow this desire far beyond any natural requirements, not realising these to be the small seeds of mistakes that will grow into entire forests; forests in which we will eventually get lost.
We don’t like being poor. We don’t like being cold or hungry. We don’t like being looked down on. This is quite normal. But of course the Cynics show us, through their lived example, that we can learn to be content with these. They show us that they are content to be poor, cold, hungry, and looked down on; they show this to be a more contented life than the luxurious life of the rich and comfortable, who are always plagued by troubles of their own making and make fools of themselves by valuing what doesn’t matter.
The Cynics would rather be poor and cold and hungry and wise and free than they would be rich and warm and fat and ignorant and enslaved by their wants and fears. How much the rich and comfortable person has to fear! How much they have to lose! But what has the poor Cynic to fear; what have they to lose? They have everything that matters to them: virtue and wisdom. And these, they know, are what really matters. And since nothing can take this from them, life has no power to hurt or harm them. They are free from all that binds an ordinary ignorant person.
The Cynics show us that there’s nothing to fear in poverty or low status. It’s not necessary for us to fear these things. And if we are wise then we can recognise this lack of necessity and train ourselves to be free from this fear. Take away that fear and you take away the power of that threat to harm you. And what’s more, you replace it with something to be celebrated: wisdom and a virtuous self-reliance.
Nature has not said to me: Be not poor; still less: Be rich. But she cries out to me: Be independent.
Nicolas Chamfort
In showing us how content a human being can be with only wisdom and virtue, they show us that this is the surer route to a life of happiness and contentment. There is more pleasure to be found in a life that resists the desire for pleasure (or wealth or status) than there is in a life of chasing it. You can become content in yourself, for yourself, by yourself. You don’t need anything else, beyond satisfying some very basic natural requirements that are easily provided by nature. It is not necessary to want anything more than this. And for luxuries, sit in the sun, drink some wine if you’re offered, share a joke. Life gives you these for free.
But this Cynic attitude doesn’t come about by accident: it takes effort and training. You need to be taught the philosophical outlook, for a start, and then you need to practise it in order to overcome your natural human tendencies towards excess and luxury. Your nature might have been born aligned with nature – when you were an infant and wanted only what you needed and feared only what you must – but it has become warped and corrupted by the mistakes of your thinking and the nonsense of society.
You need to craft your nature to bring it back into alignment with nature. Identify and correct the mistakes in your thinking and see through the nonsense of society, using Socratic philosophy, and then make practical efforts to live in a way that is consistent with this. This is not an easy road, nor short, but at the end of that long hard road you will be a Cynic and you will be wise and happy.
The Cynics can show you the road, but they can’t walk it for you; that’s something you will have to do for yourself, if you choose. But it is your choice: a philosophical life of contented freedom achieved through wisdom and self-reliance, or a life enslaved to luxury. Which will it be?
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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