We have to acknowledge, first, that most of the philosophical content of Cynicism can be found in Socrates. Antisthenes makes that clear when he sees himself as doing nothing more than teaching what Socrates taught. The foundational insight for Cynicism is just Socrates’ insight that virtue is all that matters and everything else is a matter of indifference. The Cynics just follow that conversation where it leads.
But we must also acknowledge that the Cynics, over the years, add a different dimension and take Socrates’ thought in a different direction. For me, this addition is rooted in the insight that there is virtue to be found in aligning oneself with nature. Actual nature; as in the ‘nature’ that we would describe as the ‘natural world’; Nature with a capital ‘N’. Socrates said there is virtue in being true to your nature, but the Cynics look to ground and locate that individual human nature in Nature itself. Socrates hovered around this idea but never settled on it. The Cynics give it full weight and commitment. And whilst few of us would (or could or should) follow the Cynics to the extreme conclusions of that commitment, it is an idea that has remained influential in philosophy ever since, and one that we would all probably benefit from being reminded of once in a while.
Align Your Will with Nature
Whilst originating with the Cynics, really this idea will find better philosophical expression in various different forms in the Epicureans, the Stoics, and even, ultimately, in Spinoza and Hume. I will leave those developments for later, for now outlining only the basic Cynic insight.
As we saw, Diogenes took a lesson from the example of a mouse and chose to live ‘like a dog’. Not exactly like a dog, obviously, because Diogenes was a human being. Diogenes tried, in the spirit of radical self-reliance, to eat raw meat (like a dog), but it made him ill. So he stopped eating raw meat. The lesson of the mouse and the dog is not to do as they do, but to live as they live. Non-human animals live according to their nature, and nothing more. In doing this, they naturally avoid all the temptations of decadence and vanity to which human beings are so susceptible. All that superficial nonsense means nothing to a dog, because they care about only what matters to them according to their nature.
How often do you see dogs fretting about their wealth or status, regretting the past, or struggling to decide what they want and how they should live? And yet how troubled are we, the supposedly more ‘rational’ humans, about these things? Perhaps we would be well served to follow the dog’s example.
The Cynics are not totally dismissive of the value of all distinctively human activities, only most of them. Diogenes said that when you look at navigators, doctors, and philosophers, you would think there is no wiser animal than man; but if you look at mystics, psychics, and the people who listen to them, and all people puffed-up with glory, you would think there is no animal more foolish than man.
And yet we keep placing value on the wrong things. We prize flashy displays of wealth and status over what has real value. Things of great value – like philosophy or basic food – are sold for almost nothing, whilst things of no real value, mere images of images (or even images of images of images, like NFTs), are sold for a fortune.
True wisdom, for the Cynics, lies in valuing only what is natural and basic and necessary. Human beings are animals that require what all animals require, but we are also rational animals that can think and choose. Cynic wisdom consists in using that rationality to align your choices with your natural requirements. In a perfect Cynic, your natural responses, your wants and fears, would align with your natural requirements. You would want only what you need and fear only what you must. You would be indifferent to everything else. If you can do that then you will be as free and untroubled as it is possible for you to be.
The Cynics say that such a life would be easily provided for by nature. Satisfying our basic needs is not that hard. (And they were saying this 2,500 years ago. How much truer would this be nowadays, with our technological advantages?) Nature has made life easy for us, but we have made it difficult for ourselves by wanting more than we need and fearing more than we must. This is an easy mistake to make but one that needs to be corrected. And nature has been good enough to provide us with what is needed to correct this mistake: our capacity for philosophical reason. Once this capacity is cultivated, which you can learn from philosophers like Socrates, you can come to understand just how unimportant so much of the nonsense that human beings occupy themselves with really is. And when you understand all that nonsense to be worthless, you can forget about it and focus on satisfying your natural needs. A life of easy contentment will follow.
Align your will with nature. Want only what you must want; fear only what you must fear. This, for the Cynics, is the lesson of philosophy, and this is what it means to live a virtuous human life. Because human beings are rational animals, with an animal’s needs and a philosopher’s understanding. Satisfy both and you are doing what nature has equipped you to do. Like a mouse living a mouse’s life or a dog living a dog’s life.
Craft Your Nature
As simple as the take-home message may be – ‘align your will with nature’ – the Cynics know that this is not an easy thing for a human being to achieve. 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 are 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 even 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 is nothing to fear in poverty, cold, hunger, or low status. It is not necessary for us to fear these things. And if we are wise then we can recognise this 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.
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, through 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?
tobybetenson.com 