Aristippus
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Aristippo Proper-name noun: masculine ablative singular, Proper-name noun: masculine dative singular of Aristippus
- a philosopher of Cyrene, disciple of Socrates, and founder of the Cyrenaic school: qui voluptatem summum bonum dicit, Cic. Fin. 2, 6, 18; Hor. Ep. 1, 1, 18.
- —Hence, Ari-stippēus, a, um, adj., of or pertaining to Aristippus, Cic. Fin. 2, 6, 18.
(Ἀρίστιππος).
1. Of Larissa, in Thessaly, an Aleuad, received lessons from Gorgias when he visited Thessaly. Aristippus obtained money and troops from the younger Cyrus to resist a faction opposed to him, and placed Menon, with whom he lived in a disreputable manner, over these forces. (Xen. Anab. 1.1.10, 2.6.28; Plat. Menon, init.)
2. An Argive, who obtained the supreme power at argos through the aid of Antigonus Gonatas, about B. C. 272. (Plut. Pyrrh. 30.)
3. An Argive, a different person from the preceding, who also became tyrant of Argos after the murder of Aristomachus I., in the time of Aratus. He is described by Plutarch as a perfect tyrant in our sense of the word. Aratus made many attempts to deprive him of the tyranny, but at first without success; but Aristippus at length fell in a battle against Aratus, and was succeeded in the tyranny by Aristomachus II. (Plut. Arat. 25, &c.)
(Ἀρίστιππος), son of Aritades, born at Cyrene, and founder of the Cyrenaic School of Philosophy, came over to Greece to be present at the Olympic games, where he fell in with Ischomachus the agriculturist (whose praises are the subject of Xenophon's Occonomicus), and by his description was filled with so ardent a desire to see Socrates, that he went to Athens for the purpose (Plut. de Curios. 2), and remained with him almost up to the time of his execution, B. C. 399. Diodorus (15.76) gives B. C. 366 as the date of Aristippus, which agrees very well with the facts which we know about him, and with the statement (Schol. ad Aristoph. Plut. 179), that Lais, the courtezan with whom he was intimate, was born B. C. 421.
Though a disciple of Socrates, he wandered both in principle and practice very far from the teaching and example of his great master. He was luxurious in his mode of living; he indulged in sensual gratifications, and the society of the notorious Lais; he took money for his teaching (being the first of the disciples of Socrates who did so, D. L. 2.65), and avowed to his instructor that he resided in a foreign land in order to escape the trouble of mixing in the politics of his native city. (Xen. Mlem. 2.1.) He passed part of his life at the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, and is also said to have been taken prisoner by Artaphernes, the satrap who drove the Spartans from Rhodes B. C. 396. (Diod. 14.79; see Brucker, Hist. Crit. Phil. 2.2, 3.) He appears, however, at last to have returned to Cyrene, and there he spent his old age. The anecdotes which are told of him, and of which we find a most tedious number in Diogenes Laertius (2.65, &c.), by no means give us the notion of a person who was the mere slave of his passions, but rather of one who took a pride in extracting enjoyment from all circumstances of every kind, and in controlling adversity and prosperity alike. They illustrate and confirm the two statements of Horace (Hor. Ep. 1.1. 18), that to observe the precepts of Aristippus is "mihi res, non me rebus subjungere," and (1.17. 23) that, " omnis Aristippum deceit color et status et res." Thus when reproached for his love of bodily indulgences, he answered, that there was no shame in enjoying them, but that it would be disgraceful if he could not at any time give them up. When Dionysius, provoked at some of his remarks, ordered him to take the lowest place at table, he said, " You wish to dignify the seat." Whether he was prisoner to a satrap, or grossly insulted and even spit upon by a tyrant, or enjoying the pleasures of a banquet, or reviled for faithlessness to Socrates by his fellow-pupils, he maintained the same calm temper. To Xenophon and Plato he was very obnoxious, as we see from the Memorabilia (l.c.), where he maintains an odious discussion against Socrates in defence of voluptuous enjoyment, and from the Phaedo (p. 59c), where his absence at the death of Socrates, though he was only at Aegina, 200 stadia from Athens, is doubtless mentioned as a reproach. (See Stallbaum's note.) Aristotle, too, calls him a sophist (Metaphys. 2.2), and notices a story of Plato speaking to him with rather undue vehemence, and of his replying with calmness. (Rhet. 2.23.) He imparted his doctrine to his daughter Arete, by whom it was communicated to her son, the younger Aristippus (hence called Μητροδίδακτος), and by him it is said to have been reduced to a system. Laertius, on the authority of Sotion (B. C. 205) and Panactius (B. C. 143), gives a long list of books whose authorship is ascribed to Aristippus, though he also says that Sosicrates of Rhodes (B. C. 255) states, that he wrote nothing. Among these are treatises Περὶ Παιδείας, Περὶ Ἀρετῆς, Περὶ Τύχης, and many others. Some epistles attributed to him are deservedly rejected as forgeries by Bentley. (Dissertation on Phalaris, &c. p. 104.) One of these is to Arete, and its spuriousness is proved, among other arguments, by the occurrence in it of the name of a city near Cyrene, Βερενίκη, which must have been given by the Macedonians, in whose dialect β stands for φ, so that the name is equivalent to Φερενίκη, the victorious.
We shall now give a short view of the leading doctrines of the earlier Cyrenaic school in general, though it is not to be understood that the system was wholly or even chiefly drawn up by the elder Aristippus; but, as it is impossible from the loss of contemporary documents to separate the parts which belong to each of the Cyrenaic philosophers, it is better here to combine them all. From the fact pointed out by Ritter (Geschichte der Philosophie, 7.3), that Aristotle chooses Eudoxus rather than Aristippus as the representative of the doctrine that Pleasure is the summum bonum (Eth. Nic. 10.2), it seems probable that but little of the Cyrenaic system is due to the founder of the school. * Ritter believes that Aristippus is hinted at (Eth. Nic. 10.6), where Aristotle refutes the opinion, that happiness consists in amusement, and speaks of persons holding such a dogma in order to recommend themselves to the favour of tyrants.
The Cyrenaics despised Physics, and limited their inquiries to Ethics, though they included under that term a much wider range of science than can fairly be reckoned as belonging to it. So, too, Aristotle accuses Aristippus of neglecting mathematics, as a study not concerned with good and evil, which, he said, are the objects even of the carpenter and tanner. (Metaphys. 2.2.) They divided Philosophy into five parts, viz. the study of (1) Objects of Desire and Aversion, (2) Feelings and Affections, (3) Actions, (4) Causes, (5) Proofs. Of these (4) is clearly connected with physics, and (5) with logic.
1. The first of the five divisions of science is the only one in which the Cyrenaic view is connected with the Socratic. Socrates considered happiness (i. e. the enjoyment of a well-ordered mind) to be the aim of all men, and Aristippus, taking up this position, pronounced pleasure the chief good, and pain the chief evil; in proof of which he referred to the natural feelings of men, children, and animals; but he wished the mind to preserve its authority in the midst of pleasure. Desire he could not admit into his system, as it subjects men to hope and fear : the τέλος of human life was momentary pleasure (μονόχρονος, μερική). For the Present only is ours, the Past is gone, and the Future uncertain; present happiness therefore is to be sought, and not εὐδαιμονία, which is only the sum of a number of happy states, just as he considered life in general the sum of particular states of the soul. In this point the Cyrenaics were opposed to the Epicureans. All pleasures were held equal, though they might admit of a difference in the degree of their purity. So that a man ought never to covet more than he possesses, and should never allow himself to be overcome by sensual enjoyment. It is plain that, even with these concessions, the Cyrenaic system destroys all moral unity, by proposing to a man as many separate τέλη as his life contains moments.
2. The next point is to determine what is pleasure and what pain. Both are positive, i. e. pleasure is not the gratification of a want, nor does the absence of pleasure equal pain. The absence of either is a mere negative inactive state, and both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul (ἐν κινήσει). Pain was defined to be a violent, pleasure a moderate motion,--the first being compared to the sea in a storm, the second to the sea under a light breeze, the intermediate state of no-pleasure and no-pain to a calm--a simile not quite apposite, since a calm is not the middle state between a storm and a gentle breeze. In this denial of pleasure as a state of rest, we find Aristippus again opposed to Epicurus.
3. Actions are in themselves morally indifferent, the only question for us to consider being their result; and law and custom are the only authorities which make an action good or bad. This monstrous dogma was a little qualified by the statement, that the advantages of injustice are slight; but we cannot agree with Brucker (Hist. Crit. 2.2), that it is not clear whether the Cyrenaics meant the law of nature or of men. For Laertius says expressly, ὁ σπουδαῖος οὐδὲν ἄτοπον πράξει διὰ τὰς ἐπικείμενας ζημίας καὶ δόξας, and to suppose a law of nature would be to destroy the whole Cyrenaic system. Whatever conduces to pleasure, is virtue--a definition which of course includes bodily exercise; but they seem to have conceded to Socrates, that the mind has the greatest share in virtue. We are told that they preferred bodily to mental pleasure; but this statement must be qualified, as they did not even confine their pleasures to selfish gratification, but admitted the welfare of the state as a legitimate source of happiness, and bodily pleasure itself they valued for the sake of the mental state resulting from it.
4. There is no universality in human conceptions ; the senses are the only avenues of knowledge, and even these admit a very limited range of information. For the Cyrenaics said, that men could agree neither in judgments nor notions, in nothing, in fact, but names. We have all certain sensations, which we call white or sweet ; but whether the sensation which A calls white is similar to that which B calls by that name, we cannot tell; for by the common term white every man denotes a distinct object. Of the causes which produce these sensations we are quite ignorant ; and from all this we come to the doctrine of modern philological metaphysics, that truth is what each man troweth. All states of mind are motions; nothing exists but states of mind, and they are not the same to all men. True wisdom consists therefore in transforming disagreeable into agreeable sensations.
5. As to the Cyrenaic doctrine of proofs, no evidence remains.
In many of these opinions we recognize the happy, careless, selfish disposition which characterized their author; and the system resembles in most points those of Heracleitus and Protagoras, as given in Plato's Theaetetus. The doctrines that a subject only knows objects through the prism of the impression which he receives, and that man is the measure of all things, are stated or implied in the Cyrenaic system, and lead at once to the consequence, that what we call reality is appearance; so that the whole fabric of human knowledge becomes a fantastic picture. The principle on which all this rests, viz. that knowledge is sensation, is the foundation of Locke's modern ideology, though he did not perceive its connexion with the consequences to which it led the Cyrenaics. To revive these was reserved for Hume.
The ancient authorities on this subject are Diogenes Laertius, 2.65, &c.; Sextus Empiricus, ad v. Math. 7.11; the places in Xenophon and Aristotle already referred to; Cic. Tusc. 3.13, 22, Acad. 4.7, 46; Euseb. Praep. Evang. 14.18, &c. The chief modern works are, Kunhardt, Dissertatio philos.-historica de Aristippi Philosophia morali, Helmstädt, 1795, 4to.; Wieland, Aristipp und Einige seiner Zeitgenossen, Leipz., 1800-1802 ; Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, 7.3; Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophiae, 2.2, 3. [G.E.L.C]
(Ἀρίστιππος). A Greek philosopher, a native of Cyrené and a pupil of Socrates, after whose death in B.C. 399 he travelled about the Greek cities, imparting instruction for money. He was founder of the Cyrenaic School, or the system of Hedonism (from ἡδονή, pleasure). His doctrine was that as a basis for human knowledge the only things real and true are our sensations, and not the external objects that produce them; that the aim of life is what all living things strive after, pleasure; and that virtue is only so far a good thing as it tends to the production of pleasure. The wise man shows his wisdom in governing his desires; mental training, indeed, being the only thing which can qualify us for real enjoyment. In pleasure there is no difference of kind, only of degree and duration. Aristippus's writings seem to have disappeared early; five letters, in the Doric dialect, which have come down under his name are undoubtedly spurious. See Ueberweg, Hist. of Philosophy, pp. 59-98, Eng. trans. (N. Y. 1872); his life by Diogenes Laertius; and the articles Cyrenaici; Epicurus; Philosophia.