Antisthenes

Greek philosopher

• Born: c. 444 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Athens, Greece
• Died: c. 365 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Athens, Greece

Early Life

Antisthenes (an-TIHS-thuh-neez) was the son of an Athenian citizen, also named Antisthenes; his mother was a Thracian slave. Because both parents were not Athenian citizens, Antisthenes was not entitled to citizenship under a law passed by Pericles in 451 b.c.e., and he could not take part in Athenian politics or hold public office. He probably attended the Cynosarges gymnasium, located outside the gates of Athens and reserved for children of illegitimate unions (gymnasia were the central institutions of Greek mental as well as physical education). Antisthenes bitterly resented Athenian boasts of superiority; when Athenians asserted that they had always resided in Attica, having been born of its soil, he responded that snails and wingless locusts could make the same claim. Although not a citizen, he served in the Athenian army; Socrates congratulated him on his brave conduct at the Battle of Tanagra in 426 b.c.e. during the Peloponnesian War.

Despite any disadvantage Antisthenes experienced as a consequence of his outsider status, he remained in Athens his entire life and was a major participant in the vibrant intellectual and cultural activity of the city. When the Sophist Gorgias lectured on rhetoric and logic in Athens, the young Antisthenes attended, and he adopted the Sophist approach, writing and offering lectures on these topics himself. After Antisthenes met Socrates, however, he abandoned his own teaching to follow his new mentor, walking five miles every day from his house at the Piraeus to listen and join in the dialogues through which Socrates taught.

Although he did not live in poverty—his father had left him enough property to provide an adequate income—Antisthenes disdained luxury and prided himself on his austere lifestyle. Socrates joked that he could see Antisthenes’ love of fame peeping through the holes in his cloak. Plato records that Antisthenes was one of the close friends of Socrates who attended him during his execution. After the death of Socrates in 399 b.c.e., Antisthenes returned to teaching at the Cynosarges gymnasium and developed the philosophical approach that came to be known as classical Cynicism, radicalizing and exaggerating the ideas and attitudes he had learned from Socrates.

Life’s Work

Few statements can be made about Antisthenes’ ideas and actions that are not contradicted by one scholar or another. During his lifetime, he reportedly produced sixty-two dialogues, orations, and essays that were collected in ten volumes; however, only brief fragments of these survive, mostly in quotations and paraphrases by later Greek and Roman authors, many of whom were critical of Antisthenes. The quotations were frequently chosen for their wit and reflect Antisthenes’ liking for paradoxes that challenged accepted ideas and customs. As a result, the fragments are sufficiently ambiguous to support widely varying interpretations.

Even the origin of the name “Cynicism” is disputed. The word “cynic” derives directly from the Greek word cunikos, meaning “doglike.” Some claim it was applied to the philosophy because of the name of the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught, interpreting the name “Cynosarges” as “Agile Dog” or “White Dog.” Others say it came from Antisthenes’ Greek nickname (which translates as “Absolute Dog”), given him derisively because of his desire to live life as a dog might, free of human restraints and conventions. This appellation was accepted by Antisthenes and his successors as an appropriate label. Another version credits the origins of the name to his follower, Diogenes of Sinope. When some men eating at a feast threw bones at him and called him a dog, Diogenes approached the men in doglike fashion and urinated on them.

From Socrates, Antisthenes had learned that virtue was the only good worth striving for and that virtue could be taught; in contrast, wealth, fame, pleasure, and power were worthless, and life should be devoted to reason, self-control, and self-sufficiency. He also learned that language should be used only to express the truth. Antisthenes proceeded to expand and exaggerate the ideas learned from Socrates and to illustrate his concepts through his manner of living. To demonstrate his self-sufficiency and contempt for materialism, he reduced his possessions to the bare minimum, walking about Athens supporting himself by a strong stick, his hair and beard uncombed, in what became the Cynic uniform: a threadbare cloak and a leather knapsack containing a few necessities.

The Cynics believed that they needed to shun what others considered desirable—possessions, wealth, honors, and position. For Antisthenes, pleasure, especially, was to be avoided; it produced the illusion of happiness, thus preventing realization of true contentment, which was obtainable only through the practice of virtue. To emphasize this point, Antisthenes expressed his view with characteristic extremism, saying he would rather be mad than feel pleasure. When he heard luxury praised, Antisthenes retorted that luxury was something to wish on the sons of one’s enemy; the true Cynic should be totally self-sufficient and self-governing, owing nothing to anyone, needing nothing from anyone, and being under the control of no one.

Antisthenes constantly ridiculed and expressed his contempt for the democratic political ideas and practices of Athens. He told its citizens they might as well vote to call donkeys “horses” as to believe that they could create leaders and generals by using the ballot. A true king or leader, he said, would act well and have a bad repute—that is, he would do what was right even though it was certain to be unpopular. Like many of Socrates’ followers, he admired the disciplined lifestyle of Sparta, finding it a more rational way to produce leaders and followers than democratic practices—yet even Sparta was far from perfect. The political world as a whole, with its factions, greed, cruelty, and wars, was irrational and undesirable; no country and few political practices met his standards. The wise man would be guided in his public acts not by established laws but by the laws of virtue, he said.

Nor did the speculations of the philosophers and scientists of his day please Antisthenes. He dismissed their theories as linguistic games that failed to meet the Socratic standard of absolute truthfulness. Antisthenes’ focus was on practical ethics; anything beyond that he considered an illusion. He was especially scornful of the Platonic theory that ideal forms had a concrete existence outside the world of sense perception and were the unchanging reality that lay behind the world of appearances. Antisthenes is reported to have told Plato that while his horse could be seen, “equinity” (the idea of a horse) could not be seen.

Antisthenes carefully distinguished between customs created by humans and what was natural and true. Everywhere he looked, he found illusions and practices that failed to meet his test of what was natural and rational. Antisthenes liked to interpret the story of Heracles— the hero who succeeded at apparently impossible labors and whose temple abutted the Cynosarges gymnasium—allegorically, as an example of the moral virtues of hard work and perseverance. However, Antisthenes did not consider the Greek epics to be serious religious tracts. At times, he came close to espousing monotheism, arguing that “according to custom there are many gods, but in nature there is only one.” He rejected the anthropomorphic approach of Greek mythology, claiming that God resembled nothing and no one. God could not be seen with the eyes and therefore could not be understood through imagery. When a priest who was celebrating the Orphic Mysteries boasted about how wonderfully he and the initiates of the Mysteries would be treated in the afterlife, Antisthenes sarcastically asked the priest why he was still alive.

Antisthenes, viewing Greek society through the eyes of an outsider, questioned and criticized many of the accepted customs and values of his day. He rejected the idea that Greeks were by nature superior to the rest of humankind. He deplored the extreme parochialism and nationalism that dominated Greek city-states and led to endless internecine warfare. He was scornful of the widely held notion that work was demeaning and that craftsmen were of lower value than intellectual workers. Instead, he viewed hard labor and perseverance as a means of achieving true virtue. Women were not necessarily inferior to men, he held; because virtue could be taught to both sexes, men and women were virtuous or vicious depending on how they had been educated. By rejecting the distinction between Greek and barbarian, Antisthenes challenged the Greek justification of slavery as a status befitting inferior human beings.

Significance

Antisthenes the Cynic was far removed from today’s cynic, whom the dictionary defines as a person who believes that humankind is motivated wholly by self-interest and who expects the worst from human conduct and motives. Antisthenes’ philosophy stressed virtue as the true aim of all men and women. Ascetic self-control and independence of thought were the means of achieving true happiness. His ideas and practices were admired and adopted by a series of Cynics who persisted through the whole of classical antiquity.

His immediate successor, Diogenes of Sinope, became the best known of the Cynics. Although many anecdotes describe Diogenes as learning directly from Antisthenes, it is unclear whether the two actually met. In any case, Diogenes’ ideas obviously derive from those of his predecessor, and his activities represent an extreme and exaggerated image of what Antisthenes had taught. Diogenes, adopting the Cynic uniform that Antisthenes had pioneered, went further; he limited his possessions to what he could carry in his leather knapsack, and he slept outdoors in a barrel to demonstrate still greater freedom from material possessions. He was even more vitriolic than Antisthenes in his condemnation of custom and society. Diogenes’ successor, Crates of Thebes, continued the practice of asceticism and the public flouting of human customs of his predecessors, while avoiding the sarcastic insults that Diogenes employed.

Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, began as a Cynic follower of Crates, but by 300 b.c.e. he had begun to diverge and create his own school of philosophy. Zeno stressed the self-reliant and independent strain of Antisthenes’ philosophy while eliminating the challenges to the status quo that had characterized the earlier Cynics. Of the three philosophical traditions descending from Socrates, the two deriving from Plato and Aristotle are more significant for their impact on the modern world than that pioneered by Antisthenes. In the ancient world, however, the two schools of practical morality that derive from Antisthenes, classical Cynicism and Stoicism, were of major significance in teaching people how to criticize and yet manage to live in an imperfect society.

Bibliography

Branham, R. Bracht, and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. A collection of fifteen scholarly articles on the impact of Antisthenes and his followers on Western culture from classical antiquity to the present. Includes footnotes and select annotated bibliography.

Dudley, Donald R. A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the Sixth Century A.D. 2d ed. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998. Chapter 1, on Antisthenes, argues that he was not the founder of Cynicism, reserving that title for Diogenes of Sinope. Includes footnotes.

Guthrie, William Keith Chambers. The Fifth-Century Enlightenment. Vol. 3 in A History of Greek Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978-1990. The standard work on its topic discusses Antisthenes in three separate sections, describing how his ideas relate to the philosophical developments in fifth century Athens. Includes footnotes and bibliography.

Navia, Luis E. Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Chapter 2 is an informative discussion of the life and ideas of Antisthenes. Includes footnotes and bibliography.

Navia, Luis E. The Philosophy of Cynicism: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Navia provides lengthy summaries of books and articles dealing with Cynicism, including works in French, German, and Italian. The chapter on Antisthenes contains 139 items.

Rankin, H. D. Sophists, Socratics, and Cynics. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1983. Devotes a chapter to Antisthenes, arguing that he was particularly influenced by the Sophistic movement, especially by the ideas of Gorgias. Includes brief bibliography.