ABSTRACT
In Plato and Aristotle we have seen that wealth does no more than furnish foothold and room for the practice of virtue and the perfect exercise of human faculties. A certain measure of material resources is no doubt held indispensable, but it is viewed as a xed factor. The progressive increase of wealth in a people is regarded as an evil rather than a good. Anything beyond the necessaries of life is thought to tend to evil; and the necessaries of life are not conceived as expanding with spiritual needs, but (especially in Plato) as rather diminishing than increasing with the growth of extraordinary powers and gifts. This had probably been the teaching of Socrates himself, who practised plain living and high thinking, though on occasion he could share the pleasures of gay society.1 He thought that to have few wants was godlike and therefore best for man. 2
This independence, which was in the case of Socrates himself the independence of a citizen of a free State, was interpreted by some of his contemporaries and followers in an anti-political if not anti-social sense. Aristippus, the founder of the Cyrenaic Philosophy, which regarded the pleasure of the moment as the chief happiness and end of man, was by his own account a citizen of no State, but “a stranger everywhere.” His independence consisted in making the best of the world as it stood, and getting the utmost enjoyment out of the good things of this life, without any regard even to scientic acquirements. It was the philosophical expression of the characteristically Greek joy of living. But this adapting of wants to circumstances was really a departure from the teachings of Socrates. Antisthenes and the Cynics were more truly Socratic, pursuing independence by subduing the feelings to the intellect and seeking after virtue rather than enjoyment; but the Cynics were unlike Socrates in trying to be independent of all other men and even of the Family and State; they were like the Cyrenaics, citizens of no State in particular but of the world in general. Their philosophy was the caricature, or reductio ad absurdum, of asceticism. If all men had tried to become “independent” by creating a “Sad vacuity,” there would be an end rst to civilization and then to the race itself. When new life was given to philosophical individualism by the extinction of the political independence of the Greek States, rst under Philip (Chaeronea, 338 b.c.), then nally by the Romans (Corinth, 146 b.c.),
the Cynic and Cyrenaic doctrines assumed a new phase; their extravagances were corrected; and a more plausible and rational expression was given to the same aspirations by Stoicism and Epicureanism.
