In a sense it’s easier to find practical insight in the Cynics, since they were deliberately practical from the outset and throughout. They did not drift into the pure high theory typical of Plato, or even the dense and grounded theory of the more practical Aristotle; or even Socrates, who evidently spent a lot of time talking the talk and not only walking the walk. But in a sense it’s also harder, because the Cynics didn’t bother to clearly outline their philosophical school of thought in a treatise (like Aristotle, for example, and later schools of thought, which we have yet to cover, like the Epicureans and the Stoics, whose adherents offered instructional manuals), and that means we have to work harder to find practical instruction in the Cynics. But that shouldn’t put you off. As a Cynic would say, virtue is a kind of work, and hard work is a good thing.
And by now, having covered the philosophical environment of the time, it should be clear where the Cynics stand: with Socrates on the prioritisation of the ethical, against Plato on the need for metaphysics; with Aristotle (and Socrates) on living aligned with your nature, against Aristotle’s valuing of non-philosophical excellences. Even without their putting it in the form of a clear argument, it’s clear enough why the Cynics would be against Plato’s metaphysical speculations (‘phantoms of infernal dreams’ and disguises that serve only to flatter egos) and Aristotle’s ideal of the great soul (all puffed up with glory and possessed of great wealth in things that don’t matter, like money and other people’s opinions). It’s not worth repeating these.
It’s also not worth repeating what is in the Cynics but can be found in Socrates. We’ve already covered these kinds of ideas: prioritising the health of your soul, virtue being sufficient for happiness, the priority of the ethical and the importance of temperance, etc. The Cynics directly inherit all of these from Socrates.
What is worth focussing on here is what sets them apart, or the distinct lessons that the Cynics add to the Socratic picture. Such as their disdain for ordinary society, or for philosophy and philosophical debate, of a strength and kind that puts Diogenes so at odds with Plato. Or their apparent willingness, at least since Diogenes, to embrace petty desires and make a show of themselves. Neither of these are part of the Socratic picture. Socrates was often critical but rarely hostile to ordinary society; and he participated in philosophical debate, often seeking it out, he just held back from having that debate descend into a mere show of rhetorical competition. He played his part in either case. And Socrates would always encourage temperance and self-restraint, often instructing people to do what is fitting and proper. Whilst the earliest Cynics, like Antisthenes, might have followed Socrates’ instruction, the later Cynics, like Diogenes, clearly didn’t. They walked away from philosophical debate and made deliberate attempts to do what was unfitting and improper. What brought about this transition? And were there any good philosophical reasons for it? It’s to these questions that we now turn.
Society is a corrupting influence.
We learnt from Socrates that virtue is sufficient for happiness. But Socrates confesses that he is never really clear on what virtue is. It’s a very elusive concept, very resistant to comprehensive explanation and definition. Plato expresses this as an inability to look at the Form of the Good directly. Like the sun it’s something that, perhaps, we only come to understand in light of what it illuminates. We understand what virtue is by looking at particular instances of virtue that we can see in the world, always knowing that we are only ever seeing examples of virtue and never virtue itself. We are only ever seeing an image in reflection. Perhaps this is the best that we can hope to do.
When Socrates talks about these reflections of virtue, he sometimes talks about what might be called ‘personal’ virtues, much like Aristotle’s virtues, that might otherwise be termed character traits or attributes. So courage is a virtue and wisdom is a virtue and self-restraint is a virtue, etc., etc. And then we can debate what these things really are or what they mean, whether they can be taught or learned, whether they require practice and cultivation or are a ‘gift from the gods’, etc., etc. If you would be a philosopher and would be virtuous, you must make some attempt to understand these things, knowing that they are what really matters. Most of the time this is a personal endeavour, or at most something that is done amongst a small group of like-minded people. There is nothing about this that requires participation in wider society. The philosophical life naturally lends itself to a kind of isolation from society, like Plato’s Academy withdrawn from the marketplace.
But at other times, Socrates speaks as if the philosophical life is an essentially social process. We see these reflections of virtueout there in the world, after all.He does not withdraw from society but has conversations with people, and whenever possible he chooses to converse with the ‘great and good’ in society (in order to show them, of course, that they might not be as great and good as they believed). Socrates chooses to operate in the marketplace, in the centre of Greek society. And whilst he was always considered a bit of an outsider – atopos, as he was known, ‘odd’ or ‘out of place’ – he remained a part of Greek society and not apart from it.
Socrates understood that he was a citizen and subject to the duties that citizenship entails. He owned property. He served in the military. He encouraged people to obey the laws of the land, taking this duty to extremes in his own case by adhering to the sentence of the court and putting himself to death even though he had the opportunity to run away into exile. Socrates might have encouraged society and the people in it to move in a different direction, and in that he was fatally misunderstood. But Socrates never rejected society; he rarely showed any open hostility to it.
The Cynics are quite different, as we’ve seen, going out of their way to show their disdain and rejection of ordinary society. They insult, mock, and abuse. Diogenes refuses to acknowledge any citizenship other than being a ‘citizen of the world’ (the first ‘cosmopolitan’). What accounts for this difference between them and their philosophical antecedent? In my view, it is a subtle change to an understanding of virtue, shifting from being somewhat public to totally personal. In Socrates, virtue is both personal and public; or at least personal virtues are recognised to take their proper place within the context of a wider society. Socrates’ virtue has a public-facing aspect, even when those virtues are entirely one’s own business. Socrates does not want to appear rude. When he is being rude – which he is often – he hides behind irony. He keeps up a pretence of social decorum, and he does this for the benefit of the one he wants to teach, whether or not they want to be taught. He wants to lead people, gently, to realise their own errors, not to shout at them for being idiots.
The later Cynics abandon this pretence at decorum. They revel in being rude. They spit in faces. They want to give people lessons, as is clear by their showy performances, but they don’t seem particularly bothered about whether people take those lessons or leave them. They make little attempt to steer society in a more virtuous direction by taking up influential offices or looking to advise those who do; they choose instead to freeload on the fringes and shout from the sidelines.
This is a contrast with Plato, and it’s interesting for me to think about this contrast in the generation of philosophers immediately following Socrates. Plato took Socrates’ teaching and elected to withdraw into his Academy, away from the distractions and stresses of the marketplace, but still actively involved in the struggle of philosophical debate. The Cynics went to live in the marketplace, immersing themselves in a personal struggle, but withdrawing from academic philosophical debate.
In the later Cynics, virtue has become an entirely personal matter: how you live your life is your own business and no one else’s. Other people’s opinions mean nothing to you, and how other people live their lives is their business, not yours. Since neither their opinions nor how they choose to live their lives can affect your virtue, which is all that really matters, society itself becomes irrelevant because it can neither give you virtue nor take it away. And since it is irrelevant, it is a matter of indifference to you; as a virtuous Cynic you can see it for what it is. And that means it doesn’t matter in the least if you are part of it or apart from it, whether you are polite or rude, whether you are accepted and praised or rejected and pilloried.
This is liberating, for sure, but it’s also a kind of surrender. The Cynics abandon any hope that philosophy can be a force for good in ordinary society. Ordinary society is a lost cause, too corrupted by spurious nonsense. As they understand it, philosophy can only help individuals; it can only help you; that is its proper business. Society is a distraction from this proper business and should be shunned like any other distraction. It is a corrupting force and not a force for good. Only philosophy is a force for good, for you. Paying any attention to the cares of ordinary society will only lead the philosopher astray.
Philosophy is a medicine intended to cure you of the soul-sickness that you have contracted from society. To cure yourself of this sickness you must do what the doctor orders.
There is a choice that you have to make, if you are to take it, but there is a lesson to be taken from this question: Is ordinary society a force for good in your life, or not? Does it tend to make you more virtuous, or less? If it is not a force for good in your life, if it does not tend to make you more virtuous, but less, then why keep with it?
Examples of society’s corrupting influence are easy to find. At the moment we read a lot about the damaging effects of social media on young people’s fragile little minds or on our increasingly fractious and partisan political culture. Or else it’s pornography, or football violence, conspiracy theories and fake news, crypto pyramid schemes, etc., etc. These are the easy examples. But no one is corrupted by social media unless they are on social media; you can just choose not to be a part of that virtual society. No one gets warped by pornography unless they watch pornography: switch it off or else be more discriminating and avoid what is harmful. No one gets lured into a crypto pyramid scheme unless they have a desire for money-for-nothing: you should want only what you earn. Of course no one in society can isolate themselves from the effects of these things in wider society, but if you look to your own business and want to avoid yourself being a part of the problem, it’s not a complicated lesson: don’t get involved. Recognise what is bad and avoid it. But these are the easy examples.
The Cynics would go further and question the anxiety levels of a generation educated to chase good grades above all else, for the purpose of getting a place at a good university where they can chase more good grades to get a good degree so that they can get a good job and earn good money, not once pausing to question whether any of these things are really ‘good’ in themselves or only a means to an end. And to what end? And can we call that end good, when all it seems to bring about is further anxiety and depression? And if none of this is really good, then don’t buy into it. Reject it and go another way. Don’t get involved. Your involvement only buys you burdens.
And for the Cynics, even philosophy itself is something that leads the philosopher astray, if by ‘philosophy’ you mean the kind of grade-chasing academic philosophy that we see in schools and universities. This ‘philosophy’, far from being a medicine for the soul, is just another symptom of infection. The Cynics avoid philosophical debate in the wider society of philosophers because that society too is a corrupting influence, having already let itself be corrupted by the cares of ordinary society; cares that ought to be beneath a philosopher’s dignity. As any modern academic will know, the academic world is ruled mainly by the values of reputation and prestige, place and status, renown. Success is determined by other people’s opinions, whether those opinions are of your students or your academic peers. Certainly few people are in it for the money (though see how they sulk and strop when they are offered a pay rise at a level beneath what they feel is fitting). Some will say that they are in it for the pure love of their subject, but see how they flinch when their reputations are insulted! It is difficult for any human being to stay true to what really matters when you are immersed in a competitive world of flattered egos. So rather than swimming in the dirty water, adding to its filth, the Cynics get out of the water. The lesson is the same: don’t get involved. Walk away.
What’s easy to lose sight of, in all this vicious Cynicism, is the positive influence that society can have on us and that we can have on society. The Cynics choose to stand as an example of another way but beyond that they make no effort to improve society. But there is nothing stopping us from encouraging our children to question what really matters in life, and nothing stopping us from teaching them how to investigate this question well. Perhaps more philosophers should be doing this, rather than withdrawing to their academies and fussing about their reputations and remunerations, or else cynically shouting from the sidelines.
I’ve often thought there’s something absurd about a philosopher shouting from the sidelines of society, accusing everyone of being miserable. Most people seem quite content to go about their business; they don’t seem particularly tormented by being in ordinary society; it’s only the philosopher that is. Who is more miserable here? The one who is happy in the world or the one who lives outside of it?
But then I look at the brief biographies of famous and successful people (on Wikipedia and the like), or our leaders, the great and good, the paragons of ordinary society, the pictures of success, and although it is only a brief summary of a life no doubt full of ups and downs, I see failed relationships, affairs, and divorces, shattered families; I see lawsuits and litigation; I see debts coming from riches; I see exploitation and abuse; I see drugs, alcohol, and rehab; I see depressions, therapy, and too many suicides. These are the best that ordinary society can offer, in terms of pictures of success; these are the ideals that we aspire towards. Is it a happy ideal? And to the extent that we replicate that ‘ideal’ in our own lives, what do we see there, but more failed relationships, affairs, divorces, shattered families; litigation; debts; exploitation and abuse; alcohol and drugs, whether medication or recreation; depressions, anxieties, and still too many suicides. We live in a technological age where it has never been easier for human beings to satisfy their basic human needs and yet we seem to be as miserable as we have ever been. We are luxuriating ourselves into destruction; our luxury is literally killing us. The absurdity of this is intolerable. We have an obesity epidemic and a food crisis, at the same time and in the same place. Perhaps the philosopher is right to shout, even if only from the sidelines.
And although this is obviously a more personally-relevant example, similar is true when I see pictures of success in contemporary academic philosophy: often they are pictures that I can envy but I cannot admire. The impression is of people who have achieved great reputation through their work but in doing so have lost sight of their purpose for doing it; they have lost sight of what really matters, led astray by what doesn’t. They end up just as Diogenes the Cynic would call Plato the Academic: arrogant, all puffed-up with glory, fat with a sense of their own self-importance. See how they parade and cover themselves with honours! And, ultimately, whether they realise it or not, see how utterly dependent they are on the good opinions of other people. Sometimes these opinions come from a place that might mean something, as the virtuous model of academic peer-review would assume, but too often academics depend on the good opinions of people who are not in a position to know the first thing about whether and why they might be worthy of their subject; such as students or the general public (who have yet to learn enough of the subject to understand what is valuable in it) or managers in universities (who never bothered trying to understand because they’re too busy looking at spreadsheets). But there is no way around this, in the profession, and so we end up chasing these good opinions, whether or not they are worthy. And a certain arrogance must follow, because if you can’t convince yourself that you’re worth listening to, how do you expect to convince others? Like it or not, academics are often enslaved to their status and reputation. See how they react when it is taken away and you will see how much it matters to them! But philosophers, of all people, ought to know better. And so whilst I can envy them for their success, I am not sure I would be happy to pay the price required for it. Not anymore, at least. But as a later philosopher (Epictetus, a Stoic) would say, people sell themselves at different rates. At the moment I am unwilling to sell everything I am in exchange for the passing good opinion of a man in a suit.
That was not always the case, and perhaps this too will prove to be a passing thing, but for now I say with Diogenes that there were times when I did what I did not wish to do but that is no longer the case. I choose exile, and I hope that exile will make me a philosopher. With Socrates I renounce the honours at which the world aims, desiring only to know the truth and to live as well as I can. And whilst I don’t expect to be a Socrates or a Diogenes, it is enough for me that I don’t lag behind.
There is a viciousness to this Cynicism, but there is also a virtue in it. Society can be a corrupting influence. It would be wise to see this for what it is, when it is, and in those cases it would be wise to walk away. But that is a choice we all have to make for ourselves.
Virtue can be taught. And once you know it, you can’t lose it.
Why do the Cynics shout over the choir? Why do they so visibly show themselves walking the walk of the philosopher’s life? It is to teach us a lesson. What lesson? That virtue is all that really matters and everything else is a matter of indifference. In this they presume an important idea: that virtue can be taught. In their case they think it is something best taught by example and learnt through experience.
Whether or not virtue can be taught was a hotly-debated topic in ancient philosophy. It is an idea that can be challenged and was challenged at the time. Ancient philosophers would point out: if virtue can be taught, why is it that good and great men do not necessarily have good and great sons? Why wouldn’t these good men teach their sons what they know? Presumably it’s not for lack of trying. And yet many good and great kings leave us with tyrannical princes. Cities rise and fall on these waves of fortune and there seems to be little that good education can do about it. If virtue really can be taught, why isn’t it learnt by those who are given every opportunity to learn it?
The Cynic answer is straightforward and clear: virtue can be taught, but only to those who are willing to learn. You cannot be made to learn it. You must choose to take the lesson and then you must work to make yourself worthy of it.
This is why the Cynics behave as they do, publicly. All their shows of haughty philosophical disdain are invitations. They are offers, but no more than that. It’s up to you to take the offer or not. They will not chase you for your acceptance; that’s your business, and besides it’s beneath their dignity to chase your approval. If you want the lesson, take it and learn it and benefit from it; if you don’t want the lesson, that’s your loss, not theirs.
But if you do take the lesson, learn it, and apply it in your life, you will be left with a gift that keeps on giving, an investment with endless returns. Because once you understand philosophical virtue and get some knowledge of it, that knowledge never goes away and cannot be taken away. Once you have it, you cannot lose it, so long as you live and can think. Unlike material wealth, whose worth is always subject to good or bad fortune, the wealth of wisdom only ever increases its worth. It doesn’t rot or degrade; it can’t be stolen or defrauded; it isn’t taxed. It is a wealth that can be passed onto future generations. It costs nothing but is worth everything. Why would you refuse such an offer, at any price?
Of course, to say philosophical knowledge and understanding costs nothing is somewhat misleading. I don’t mean a material cost, obviously, despite the it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-tragic absurdity of philosophy in our age being too often hidden behind an elitist paywall of the University. (And in the age of the internet, no less! When anyone could publish anything they like for free for all to see…)
No, what I mean is that philosophical knowledge and understanding is hard earned. As the Cynics would say, it is a kind of work. We need to earn it. And we do this by investing, not money, but time and effort. But small efforts yield exponential rewards over a lifetime, with continual dividends. You should take the offer and invest.
Keep it simple (and memorable).
Though not busy writing instructional manuals or giving inspirational speeches, the Cynics are teaching more than meets the eye. Often it seems like they’re just acting out or acting up, or just making a joke, but there is a lesson in all their stories. They understood that simple and clear messages are easier to understand. And if you can make these simple messages catchy or memorable, then all the better. That is why they so often talk in puns or jokes: it’s a simple message delivered in a way that’s easy to remember. Even if you miss the lesson, you remember the phrase: it plants a seed that might grow in time.
‘What is the best time to eat?’, someone asks Diogenes. ‘When rich, whenever you want; when poor, whenever you can.’
A pithy phrase, apparently saying little. It is a seed. Perhaps you might remember it and reflect on it from time to time. At first glance it conveys a certain sense of living naturally: eat when hungry, sleep when tired, etc. Do as your nature wills. But perhaps there’s also a sense that the poor are unfortunate because they must do what they must and cannot do what they will.
But isn’t Diogenes famous for eating in the time and place that is not proper? In the marketplace, for example. He eats there because it was there that he was hungry. He eats when he wants. Is he rich? Not materially. He hasn’t a coin to his name, defaced or otherwise. What is the lesson here?
What if we understand wealth to be spiritual and not material? This is a familiar metaphor. When you are spiritually rich, you can get soul-sustenance whenever you want, because you have it always to hand, in yourself, in your cultivated philosophical wisdom. And because of that wisdom, you have trained yourself to be content with very little. In full command of yourself, you can eat or not eat as you choose: ‘whenever you want.’ But when you are spiritually poor, having no self-control, you must take whatever you can whenever you can because you are starved and have no choice. You are a slave to your appetites and must do as they command. And who is more free: the one who can eat whenever they want, or the one who must eat whenever they can? Which is the richer man?
And doesn’t the answer to this question turn the world upside down? The materially rich man can eat whatever and whenever he wants, and because of this he becomes a slave to his appetite, never learning how to go hungry. He lives in fear of that hunger and becomes insatiable, and his insatiable desire drives him to seek out ever more luxurious foods. By contrast, the materially poor man cannot eat whatever and whenever he wants and so he learns how to go without; if he is wise and takes the lessons of philosophy then he learns how to be content with this. He learns that a passing hunger is nothing to fear, and besides it is easily sated with simple foods that can be acquired at little cost. The poor man, if he is a philosopher, is in command of himself, and so gains spiritual freedom in his material poverty; but the rich man’s material wealth buys him only spiritual chains and a lifetime of fear. Who is better off? And what does this answer teach you about what is really valuable in life: spiritual wealth or material wealth? To be in command of yourself or a slave to your appetites? Which is the richer man?
You should study nothing but ethics.
If you recognise the great worth of living a philosophical life, and you recognise that the only area of philosophical enquiry that is necessary to live that life is the one that ask questions about what it is to live well as a human being, which we call ethics, then the question arises: why study anything else?
Why bother studying other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics and epistemology? Can studying these things make you virtuous? Plato would say so, but the Cynics would disagree. At most metaphysics and epistemology can be a kind of foundation for philosophical understanding that might lead to virtue. But to paraphrase Diogenes, when you are hungry you want food, you don’t just want to study the foundations of food. Studying soil won’t fill your belly. How will you better satisfy your hunger, by looking at the soil or by digging out and eating the fruit of it? So why would you study the theoretical foundations of practical knowledge, rather than practising that knowledge?
You need enough philosophical education, the Cynics would accept, and that requires a certain grounding in all areas of philosophical enquiry. You need soil to get food, and you need to know how soil works in order to get the most out of it. But there must be limits and you need to be able to recognise those limits: beyond those limits, other branches of philosophy and areas of enquiry are just phantoms of infernal dreams, disguises, serving only to flatter egos, etc., etc. They are distractions from what really matters. You should be wary of getting caught up in these distractions and losing sight of what really matters. So study ethics and whatever is necessary for ethics to be put into practice; everything else is indifferent.
Sometimes it’s healthy to feel exactly as you feel.
A final insight from the Cynics, though I would call it less philosophical and more psychological. I include it really because of the contrast that it shows between them and the other schools of thought that we have covered and are yet to cover, all of whom would seem to suggest various ways of correcting how you naturally feel about things. There’s a tendency for philosophers to suggest that strong emotions are often a sign of a lack of understanding. If you really understand the value of money, you won’t be disappointed to lose it; if you really understand the nature of judgement and the value of reputation and opinion, insults won’t anger you; if you really understand the nature of mortal life, you won’t be so troubled by death; etc., etc. And so if you are disappointed at the loss of money, or angered by insults, or excessively afraid of death, the philosopher will say that these emotions are the products of mistakes and should be corrected.
The collective impression of all these ideas is that the ideal philosopher would be a kind of emotionless drone, unreactive to anything other that an interesting problem in logic. This is a parodic caricature, of course, and not true, but there is some truth in the idea that a lot of philosophy works to help us overcome our harmful emotional states via the application of reason as a corrective. Philosophy is a medicine for the soul, remember, and sometimes soul-sickness shows itself in excessive anxiety, despair, desire, or arrogance, to cite just some examples; you can feel too good about yourself. The soul-doctor will step in and show you what you understand to be true and that you are living in contradiction with yourself, and how to reconcile that contradiction, and often this involves changing how you feel by changing how you think about things.
The Cynics agree with much of this but they also seem to suggest something else: sometimes it’s perfectly healthy to feel exactly as you feel, even if these emotions don’t seem to fit within the philosopher’s ideal. Some strong emotions are entirely natural and aren’t the product of any kind of mistake. These emotions need no correction. It’s perfectly natural to feel hungry when you don’t have food, cold when you don’t have warmth, lonely when you don’t have company, angry when things don’t go your way, etc., etc. These are not mistakes; they are honest expressions of our natural human nature. The mistakes only creep in when we move beyond what our nature requires: wanting more food even though we’ve eaten enough, not putting up with a little bit of discomfort, being unable to bear our own company for more than a short period of time, or expecting things to always go our way. These are mistakes because our natural responses are going beyond our natural requirements. Hunger requires sufficient food, not excessive food; feeling discomfort in the cold requires that we don’t freeze to death or get ill, but there’s no harm in minor discomfort; the desire for social interaction is natural and might be necessary, but being a slave to other’s constant approval is not necessary; we’d like things to go our way sometimes, but we do not need things to go our way all the time.
By now this story will be becoming clear as the Cynic way of life. Most of the time, in the Cynic ideal, the philosopher would not be particularly troubled by hunger, cold, loneliness, or anger. But beneath the surface of their philosophical ideal we find a lot of natural emotion. The Cynics get angry and punch people. The Cynics respond to insults with insults. The Cynics satisfy their natural urges. They eat when they want; they sleep when they want; they sit in the sun when they want; they toil when they want; they feel what they want. They are free to do all these things because they are expressions of their nature and they are living aligned with nature. A dog would eat, sleep, sit in the sun, run, and bark, as expressions of its nature. The Cynics do the human version of the same.
The Cynics feel their emotions but they are not ruled by them because they rule themselves with philosophy. Following their philosophy, they choose to align themselves with nature, aligning their natural responses with their natural requirements, and that means feeling exactly as they feel.
There is a very healthy lesson here, but I would term it more ‘psychological’ than philosophical, because the philosophical lesson is what we’ve already covered: align your will with nature. The psychological lesson is something that follows from that: sometimes it’s healthy to feel exactly as you feel. It’s healthy and proper to feel sad at loss, anger at insults, grief at death. We should not expect nor look to eliminate these experiences from our lives; it would go against our nature to do so and it probably wouldn’t be good for us anyway. So long as we are living aligned with nature we are free to feel exactly as we feel, however we feel.
But I would guard against offering this as a kind of simple or naive psychological lesson, without making it clear that I mean it to be only an expression of the underlying philosophical lesson. If I say to you that it is healthy to feel exactly as you feel, that might be therapeutically useful for you, particularly if you are someone who has a tendency to suppress their emotions or passively give way to other people’s demands and expectations. I can encourage you to ‘feel the feelings’ and not be afraid of them and this might help you on your way. But such a simple lesson would be vulnerable to misinterpretation, it probably wouldn’t be good for the person who is ruled by their emotions and already prone to excessive assertions of them, and anyway it would miss the point of the Cynic lesson. The Cynics would not agree with the simple psychological lesson. If you are told to ‘feel the feelings’ when you are giving a presentation, as a way of encouraging you to address your anxiety and not avoid it, the Cynics will not agree that it is a natural fear and they will not let you get away with it. ‘What are you afraid of?’, they would say, pointing out that your natural response (fear) is extended far beyond your natural requirements, because the only thing that can be harmed here is your reputation, and that ought to be a matter of indifference to you. In that context, for the Cynics, the instruction to ‘feel the feelings’ can only serve to reveal your mistake: you fear other people’s opinions. But have you not heard that it is a precious gift to do well but be spoken badly of?
It’s true that ‘sometimes it’s healthy to feel exactly as you feel’, but the key word is ‘sometimes’. The philosophical lesson from the Cynics is to understand which times. When you are living aligned with nature, then you are free to feel exactly as you feel and it is healthy to do so. But when you are not living in harmony with yourself, then your harmful emotional states are signs of mistakes that ought to be corrected.
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