Cynicism

Um, and the, so the founder of the, the school of Stoicism, um, is a man named Zeno of Citium or Citium.

Um, and it's, this is one of the, the, the influential schools of Hellenistic philosophy alongside things like Cynicism and Epicureanism.

Um, and so there's a, there's a, you know, there's a Stoic school of philosophy that, uh, that goes through several heads, several prominent, um, prominent representatives.

Um, and, you know, the, the, the big divisions of, of Stoic philosophy are, um, physics, logic, and ethics.

Translated by George Long, 1800 to 1879.

Chapter 55, About Cynicism.

When one of his pupils inquired of Epictetus, and he was a person who appeared to be inclined to cynicism, what kind of person a cynic ought to be, and what was the notion, Greek prolapsis, of the thing, we will inquire, said Epictetus, at leisure.

But I have so much to say to you that he who without God attempts so great a matter is hateful to God and has no other purpose than to act indecently in public.

And he himself, when disparaging the Athenians, who gave themselves great as, as having been born out of the earth itself, said that, they are not more noble as far as that went than snails and locusts originally he was the pupil of gorgias the rhetorician owing to which he employs rhetorical style of language in his dialogues especially in his truth and in his exhortations and hermipus says that he had originally intended in his address at the assembly on the account of estymian games to attack and also to praise the athenians and the thebans and lacedaemonians but that he afterwards abandoned the design when he saw that there were a great many spectators come from those cities Afterwards, he attached himself to Socrates, and made such progress in philosophy while with him, that he advised all his own pupils to become his fellow pupils in the school of Socrates.

And as he lived in the Piraeus, he went up forty furlongs to the city every day, in order to hear Socrates, from whom he learned the art of enduring, and of being indifferent to external circumstances, and so become the original founder of the Cynic school.

And he used to argue that labour was a good thing by adducing the examples of the great Hercules and the Kairas, one of which he derived from the Greeks and the other from the barbarians.

He was also the first person who ever gave the definition of a discourse, saying, Discourse is that which shows what anything is or was.

one should attend to one's enemies for that they are the first persons to detect one's errors one should consider a just man as of more value than a relation virtue is the same in a man as in a woman what is good is honourable and what is bad is disgraceful think everything that is wicked foreign Prudence is the safest fortification, for it can neither fall to pieces nor be betrayed.

One must prepare oneself a fortress in one's own impregnable thoughts.

He used to lecture in the gymnasium, called Cynosarges, not far from the gates, and some people say that it is from that place that the sect got the name Cynics, and he himself was called Haplosion.

downright dog he was the first person to sit the fashion of doubling his cloak as dioclus says and he wore no other garment and he used to carry a stick and a wallet but nientus says that he was the first person who wore a cloak without folding it But Sosicratus, in the third book of his successions, says that Diodorus, of Aspendos, let his beard grow, and used to carry a stick and a wallet.

But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more, and the effect my father produced on my character did not depend solely on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still more, on what matter of man he was.

In his view of life, he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern, but in the ancient sense of the word.

In his personal qualities, the Stoic predominated.

His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive text of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain.

But he had, and this was the Cynic element, scarcely any belief in pleasure, at least in his later years, of which alone on this point I can speak confidently.

He was not insensitive to pleasures.

But he deemed very few of them worth the price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid for them.

Where earlier thinkers had obsessed over the physical cosmos and the laws of nature, Socrates redirected the tradition entirely toward moral philosophy.

the idea that philosophy should test how a person lives and examine the soul, a pivot that became the starting point for both the Platonic and Cynic traditions simply by demanding citizens stop hiding behind easy assumptions.

Because Socrates never wrote anything down, we only know him through his students, Plato and Xenophon chief among them, and through the satirical plays of the era's comic writers, which creates the ongoing historical problem of separating the real man from the literary character built by everyone around him.

According to Plato's Apology, the Delphic Oracle once declared that no man was wiser than Socrates.

I thought, you know, it was...

And that is what I failed to do with my friend Cynic there.

Kind of unwittingly, but also often when I talk to people, I try to put myself in their shoes to understand what they're saying.

And With Johnny Scab, his shoes are really different.

I'll pull it up some other

show.

I sent my copy off to my best friend, Cynic.

No one's talking about it.

The disciples of Socrates divided after the death of their master into three distinct sects, the Cynic, the Academic, and the Cyrenaic.

Antisthenes was the leader of the Cynics.

Different reasons have been assigned for these philosophers being distinguished by this appellation.

Some say it was because they lived like dogs, and others that it was on account of the place where Antisthenes taught, being near one of the harbours of Athens which was called Cynosarges.

Antisthenes was a man of austere manners, and of the simplest habits.

He prayed the gods to visit him with madness rather than with fondness for sensual pleasures.

He treated his scholars with severity, and being asked the reason of his doing so, 'Do not physicians,' he replied, 'treat their patients in the same manner?' He was the first among his sect who made use of a large cloak, a staff, and bag, which were afterwards adopted by the Cynics as their sole movables, and the only wealth which they desired, in order to dispute felicity with Jupiter himself.

He suffered his beard to grow without ever trimming it, and was altogether negligent of his appearance.