The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  His prediction proved right. At his death, his empire flew apart. His generals fought war after war for the spoils that were left. Greece entered a period of constant turbulence, even as new cities like Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamum and new kingdoms rose to prominence. This was the Hellenistic age, a diverse multicultural world in which Greeks and peoples newly assimilated into Hellenic culture found new ways to flourish and compete for power.

  Much the same happened in philosophy. Thanks to Plato and Aristotle, Athens remained the center of Greek intellectual life. Alexander’s success had neutered the old free polis ideal that Athens had epitomized since the battle of Marathon. The irony was that for all its impotence, Athens was more affluent than ever and home to a philosophical talking shop unlike any before or since.

  Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum soon found themselves besieged by rivals on every side. In 306, a man named Epicurus came to Athens to found a school of thinking that quickly bore his name and was based on the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Five years earlier, a Phoenician from Cyprus named Zeno preached a doctrine of moral austerity under the porch, or stoa, of the city’s marketplace. That gave his followers the name of Stoics, and a school of thought that would soon spread from one end of the ancient Mediterranean to the other.

  Meanwhile, the poor son of an Athenian citizen and a Thracian slave named Antisthenes had been instructing students to renounce all material possessions at the Cynosarges, a gymnasium used by working-class Athenians. Under his disciple Diogenes, Antisthenes’s doctrines, dubbed Cynicism after the gym where he had held classes, would shape the outlook of the Greek and Roman classical worlds.

  Epicureans, Stoics, Cynics, and Skeptics (another group who flourished in Athens in the century after Aristotle, arguing that nothing can be known for certain): All of these schools live on as part of our language today. Of course, when we describe someone as cynical or stoical or skeptical, we usually mean their general outlook on life rather than a formal set of philosophical doctrines.

  Yet this was precisely what the Hellenistic philosophers wanted. They hoped to move philosophy beyond the bounds of formal discussion that Plato and Aristotle had laid down. They encouraged their students to cultivate a distinct attitude toward themselves and the world that would reflect an intellectual “brand” based on their teachings. They were also hungry for the age’s equivalent of media attention. Publicity brought them fame and students from every corner of the Greek-speaking world. They would have been as at home on Facebook or Twitter as any contemporary blogger. They even wanted to look different from other people, growing long beards (just like Plato and Aristotle in their portrait busts) instead of being clean-shaven like the rest of Hellenistic Greece’s ruling class.

  Some of these new schools appeared during Plato’s time, like the Cynics, and some after. Adding to the confusion, most stood in direct opposition to the orthodoxies of the Academy and the Lyceum, even when they drew from the same sources. Epicureans, for example, looked back to pre-Socratic thinkers like Democritus and Heraclitus. There was even a revival of Pythagorean thought (Epicurus came from Pythagoras’s home island of Samos) that would effervesce across the Mediterranean until quite late in antiquity.1

  Nonetheless, everyone’s starting point was the same that Socrates had set out, and that Plato and Aristotle in their different ways had made famous. Every Hellenistic philosopher insisted that life was about the soul’s search for the one crucial thing it did not have but which, once it was found, would make it happy. But what was that one thing? That’s where the battle began.2

  The students who flocked to Athens from all over the Greek world, in the years after Alexander’s death, all wanted an answer to the same question. Where do we find the key to living a moral life that will protect our souls from vice and corruption, they asked, especially when the traditions we have inherited from the past no longer seem to have any meaning? It’s a question that makes the immediate heirs to Plato and Aristotle still relevant today.

  It’s also what cut them off from Plato and Aristotle. Greeks of that earlier age still believed in a familiar and more or less ordered cosmos, which (as the Timaeus said) was writ large in the heavens and writ small in man himself. Aristotle could confidently assert that the free Greek city-state was the ultimate expression of man’s essential nature and be believed.3

  One hundred years later, no one believed it. In the messy multicultural world Alexander’s conquests had stirred up, Greeks found themselves outnumbered. They rubbed shoulders on every street corner with non-Greeks, who now spoke the same language but whose cultural roots lay with strange gods and even stranger traditions. Even the Academy would end up being led by a Carthaginian,* a people whom Plato had dismissed as hopeless barbarians. Hellenistic Greece triggered a cultural revolution that turned every tradition inside out. The heirs to Plato and Aristotle wanted answers Plato and Aristotle could no longer give. However, they could not escape the way the quarreling pair had framed the questions.

  The godfather of the Epicureans, Aristippus of Cyrene, had actually been a student of Socrates. The Phaedo tells us that he, like Plato, was absent from the final death scene in Socrates’s prison cell. However, he and Plato took very different lessons from their dead master’s teachings. They demonstrated that when they met again almost thirty years later at the court of Dionysius II in Syracuse where, the story goes, at one drunken banquet Dionysius asked both men to dance for him in purple robes.

  Plato thought the robes and gesture unseemly and effeminate, and he refused. Aristippus, however, happily agreed to this festive cross-dressing, quoting back to Plato a Greek couplet:

  Even in Bacchus’s wild alarm,

  The modest woman suffers still no harm.

  True or not, the story reveals Aristippus’s formula for happiness: Enjoy the good life, including food and drink, because pleasure is all that counts. His disciple Epicurus systematized this hedonistic impulse into a genuine philosophical doctrine. Aristippus, like Socrates, wrote nothing. Epicurus, who left behind some three hundred separate treatises, probably wrote too much. As one writer puts it, “It is curious that the great advocate of ease and comfort should have cared little for the comfort of his readers.”4

  Epicurus’s doctrines and his parties in Athens attracted, not surprisingly, a rather wild crowd. He himself seems to have taken little interest in the more obvious examples of pleasure, including sex. The comparison with Andy Warhol seems irresistible. But Epicurus had a loftier goal. It was to get his followers to concentrate their minds on the one sure thing in life, pleasure, so they could achieve a constant state of detached well-being, instead of overindulging in pleasure’s more obvious manifestations. Epicurus even defined pleasure as the absence of pain: not exactly a formula for a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

  Still, the underlying principle of his philosophy—that the one thing all nature seeks to avoid is pain, and the one thing it seeks to gain is pleasure, and men should do the same—was only an extreme version of Aristotle’s theory of knowledge based on our senses. Plato had stated that sensation and knowledge were direct opposites. Epicurus, like Aristotle, disagreed. However, Epicurus’s conclusion that sensation must be the source of all knowledge (since the sensation of pain is the only evil and that of pleasure the only good) would have horrified Aristotle, not to mention Socrates himself.5

  For Epicurus, our one friend is our body and the knowledge of the world it provides through the senses. Our one enemy is religion, especially any that promises rewards and punishments in the afterlife in order to keep us on the straight and narrow, instead of allowing us to seek happiness in this world. For in the end, we are nothing but atoms, like the universe itself, and we pass randomly once through this life. Even death is simply oblivion—right where we started in the first place. So live for the moment, Epicurus concludes, “and never shall you be disturbed waking or asleep, but you will live like a god among men.”6

  Epicureanism will
be the hardy perennial among the Hellenistic philosophical plants. The idea that sensation is the source of all knowledge would find a congenial home in the age of John Locke, and his ideas have commanded front and center seats for every debate on morality until today. Certainly Epicureanism enjoyed a fertile flowering in the Greek and Roman worlds, especially among its upper classes.† For all its celebration of the good life, however, Epicureanism as a doctrine was rather chilly and comfortless: an indifferent God; an empty sky above; a random meaningless world below. Beyond that, Epicureanism trumpeted its open declaration of war on both the Lyceum, since it denied Aristotle’s assertion that the universe is immortal and without end, and the Academy, since it overthrew the rule of reason and substituted the kind of hedonism Plato and Socrates had been at pains (a forgiveable pun) to refute.

  Plato’s Academy certainly felt philosophical pressure from the Epicureans. But it faced an even greater challenge from the Stoics. They swung in the opposite direction to Epicurus’s disciples. Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.

  “I leave you what is of far more value than earthly riches,” the Roman Stoic Seneca told his family before he died, “I leave you the example of a virtuous life.”7 Another Stoic master, the ex-slave Epictetus, lived his own version of the Golden Rule: “What you wouldn’t want to suffer, don’t make others suffer”—words one might expect from a man who had lived a life in bondage.‡8

  To some, this must have seemed like an extension of Plato’s own teachings. Zeno, after all, had been inspired to go to the Academy after reading Plato’s Apology. And in the deep background of Zeno’s belief that an all-powerful Logos animates the material universe and makes all men brothers was the notion of the World Soul in Plato’s Timaeus.9

  Still, the Stoic indifference to pain and adversity and worldly success sprang from a deep fatalism—“Fate leads the willing,” Epictetus says at one point, “and drags the unwilling”—that is foreign to both Plato and Aristotle.§ Stoics were even more resolutely convinced than the Epicureans that everything we know, or can know, must come entirely from our senses—in other words, out of the very depths of the cave. It certainly was not geared to win the Stoics many friends at the Academy, which fought the men of the stoa with a passionate intensity that lasted for nearly a century.10

  The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally. He lived in Athens’s port at Piraeus, and legend has it that he walked the forty furlongs every day up to the Agora to hear Socrates speak.11 Antisthenes created his school at the Cynosarges, or “Dog Pond,” after the death of the man he considered his mentor. Above all, he seems to have taken from Socrates the notion that man’s freedom depends completely on the state of our soul, not on some physical or material condition; and on our capacity to endure adversity and to be indifferent to our outward fate.

  This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato’s theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. “A horse I see,” Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, “but not horseness”: words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

  Cynicism really took off, however, with the arrival of a rather scruffy young man who told Antisthenes that nothing would keep him from learning from him, even after Antisthenes beat him repeatedly with a stick. The young man’s name was Diogenes. He came from a small town called Sinope, and when people asked him if it was true that his fellow citizens had condemned him to exile, he would reply, “Yes, and I condemned them to remain in Sinope.”12

  Diogenes’s quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free. Diogenes was the first homeless philosopher. He chose to live instead in a great water jar outside an Athens temple, to beg for food in the street, and to freely defecate and urinate in public.

  Naturally, this drew an enormous audience and great publicity. The ruder Diogenes behaved, in fact, the more his sophisticated Hellenistic audience loved it. In an age when philosophy was being reduced to sound bites, Diogenes provided the juiciest of all. Most people have heard of his walking the streets of Athens with a lantern, looking (he said) for an honest man and never finding one. Someone else once found him begging for food from a statue. When they asked him why, he said, “I’m learning to deal with rejection.”

  At one point he met the greatest celebrity of the age, Alexander the Great himself. The great king had heard about the famous Cynic and on a visit to Corinth wanted to meet him. Alexander found Diogenes sunning himself in an outdoor court of the local gymnasium.

  “I am Alexander the king,” the conqueror said.

  “I am Diogenes the Cynic,” replied the philosopher, and continued to sun himself.

  “Is there any favor that I may bestow upon you?” Alexander asked.

  Diogenes looked up with a frown. “Yes,” he said. “Stand out of my light.”

  Later Alexander said if he could not be himself, he would want to be Diogenes. As a later scholar pointed out, no one asked Diogenes if he would prefer to be Alexander.13

  But behind Diogenes’s clowning lay a serious purpose. He wanted to show that man has to return to his most basic nature in order to discover his true self and that everything that is not part of that self, including property and normal social and political obligations, was a useless distraction. His model was still Socrates: not the dialectician or mystical visionary into which Plato had turned his teacher, but the man from the Apology who described himself as a gadfly stinging his fellow Athenians to the path to virtue. Diogenes wanted to shine the light of truth on the people and institutions sheltering in Plato’s cave, whether they liked it or not. Diogenes also revved up Socrates’s gentle yet caustic sense of humor into a powerful tool for doing that.

  Diogenes’s goal, he said, was “to deface the coinage,” meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.14 He is not only the first homeless philosopher, but the first deconstructionist. Before he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander, an irony he would have appreciated—Diogenes had given Cynicism a respectable position in the field of literature as well as philosophy. His mordant wit inspired the major creators of Greek satire and parody and founded a Western comedic tradition that has lasted until today.15

  All this, of course, was a far cry from the kind of rigorous dialectical and metaphysical training offered at the Academy or the Lyceum. The sight of Diogenes’s urn, with its constant crowd of curious onlookers, must have grated on every serious teacher and student who walked past it. Plato’s and Aristotle’s heirs were finding themselves at war, not just with each other, but with the Cynics and Stoics and all the rest. The Academy fought back with a host of weapons, even using the arguments of the Skeptics to challenge the notion that our senses are the only source of real knowledge.

  The philosophy wars in Athens between 300 and 200 BCE weary readers and scholars alike. What matters here is that they knocked mathematics and science out from the pride of place they had occupied in Plato’s Academy. Plato had wanted all his students to be master mathematicians and astronomers, as well as exemplars of virtue, especially since he believed knowledge of the one pointed the way to understanding of the other.

  Early Academicians, for example, made enormous contributions to the field of astronomy. Plato’s friend Eudoxus devised a working model for showing the movement of the planets and the heavens. Heraclides, another Plato student, may have been the first person to propose that the earth rotated on its axis. He also used cal
culations of the orbits of Venus and Mars to show that they must be revolving not around the earth, but around the sun—literally an earthshaking hypothesis.‖

  Later there would still be Academy-trained geometers; Euclid was one. There would still be Platonic astronomers. But as the Academy’s battles with other schools over what makes for the best life intensified, time spent dealing with empirical scientific questions shrank away.16 Platonism became more and more focused on ethical and metaphysical questions: in other words, what lies either outside or beyond the scope of the physical sciences. In a few short decades, the future trajectory of Plato’s influence on Western culture was set.

  The opposite happened at the Lyceum. It had a rocky time in Hellenistic Athens. The school’s “collaborationist” connections to the Macedonian regime caused Aristotle’s pupils considerable problems. At one point its director, Theophrastus, had to close the Lyceum’s doors. In 287 BCE, there were even anti-Lyceum riots. One of the lecture halls was set on fire; the statue of Aristotle was destroyed or stolen, as were other statues. Even so, the school continued to churn out graduates who were employed and honored across the Greek world. Peripatetic scholars wrote treatises on physics, astronomy, politics, poetry, and even history that earned the respect of a small but educated audience.17

  Perhaps for that reason, the Lyceum had little impact on the more popular philosophies of the age. It was also facing an identity crisis. The turning point came in 287–86, when Aristotle’s personal disciple Theophrastus died, and Strato of Lampsacus was named as his successor.

  Strato, to judge from the sources, was entirely self-directed—a true self-starter. Born in a small town facing the Black Sea, he is one of science’s forgotten heroes. He was nicknamed, significantly, Strato the Physicist. His appointment sent a clear signal that the natural and physical sciences would be the Lyceum’s focus in the future, just as ethics and formal philosophy would be the future focus at the Academy.