I was looking through my old stuff and found this essay I wrote on the Cyrenaics. It was, I think, my first sustained attempt to write something on them, when I was intrigued by them but not yet quite a convert. I think its lack of rigor on some key points is amusing, but still I can't help but think something like this is on the right track, both as a reconstruction of the Cyrenaic position and in that it is the only ethics I've read that I've ever been able to take seriously as philosophically rigorous rather than merely evocative or wishful or reflective of current trends in human thought at large or within an academy.

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The Cyrenaic philosophers, led by Aristippus of Cyrene, are notorious for denying that there exists an overarching moral end, or telos, at which a successful human life must be aimed. They teach instead that individual goods are self-sufficing, and worthy of being sought for their own sake, rather than for their contribution to a higher goal such as eudaimonia; happiness can be nothing over and above the individual goods that make it up, and the former can only be sought for the sake of the latter, rather than vice-versa as is often assumed. The Cyrenaics are also “crude” hedonists, holding that particular conscious episodes of pleasure are the only good, and further that the attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain should not be sought as future goals requiring long-term planning. Finally, they hold the curious tenet that no one pleasure is better than any other. It has long been noted that these core ethical positions bear an interesting relationship to the Cyrenaics’ subjectivist epistemology, which restricts knowledge to the internal sensations, or pathē, of the individual. In what follows I go further and argue that the Cyrenaics’ ethics are a direct consequence of their epistemology.

The pathē are bodily motions that give rise to experiential affections in the individual perceiver. The Cyrenaics hold, first, that the perceiver has conscious sensation only of his or her own pathē, and second, that the sole criterion of truth is conscious sensation; it follows that the perceiver has epistemic access only to his or her own pathē. This means that the pathē are unable to report on the nature of anything outside of themselves–if and when the pathē are caused by external objects, the nature of those objects is utterly opaque, beyond the perceptual effects to which they give rise. The Cyrenaics arrive at this conclusion via a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that sensation grasps the qualities of sensed objects. Perceptual relativity gives differing reports of the external world, depending on the physical constitution of the perceiver: the same object appears red in the daylight and black at night; foods are simultaneously appetizing to one species and abhorrent to another. It follows that if the nature of the object is what it is perceived to be, then it possesses contradictory properties. Furthermore, because the properties that the senses report change depending on the physical makeup of the perceiver and how it interacts with the object, what is reported of the object is utterly dependent on and defined by the interaction between the two, and therefore the sensed qualities are nothing more than this interaction; that is, they are the bodily movement thereby engendered, which are the pathē.

Because they are purely experiential, and conscious sensation is the criterion of truth, the experience of the pathē is identical to the knowledge they provide. This means that unlike the nature of external objects, the pathē cannot be coherently doubted, as to either their occurrence or their character, so long as one is experiencing them. It further means that all knowledge is a kind of self-knowledge of one’s current internal state, which the Cyrenaics emphasize by translating third-person reports into first-person parallels, so as to preserve the accuracy of their claims: thus, the unknowable “The object is sweet” is instead rendered “I am being sweetened.” This sort of locution is the paradigm of the Cyrenaic conception of knowledge because it preserves its epistemic authority by limiting itself to experience, while making clear that this experience is subjective, present, and temporary. In sum, the pathē exhibit three key features: (1) they are private, meaning that they inherently belong to one individual, and that no individual can know the pathē of any other; (2) they are incorrigible, and so the perceiver cannot possibly be mistaken about them; (3) they are immediate, in that they exist only so long as they are experienced, and are known only for the time in which they endure. Crucially, any Cyrenaic notion of the good must fall within these strict parameters: one can only know that something is good if it exemplifies the features of the pathē, as the pathē are the limit and the whole of knowledge.

The Cyrenaics therefore hold that if anything can be known to be good, its goodness must be contained within the experience of the pathē. One might predict that this position would incline the Cyrenaics towards moral skepticism, on the grounds that goodness and badness are not consciously sensed. They instead adopt the intriguing position that as the pathē themselves are either painful, neutral, or pleasant, and as the body in experiencing these three states senses them to be bad, indifferent, and good, respectively, one actually does sense goodness and badness. Hence, the good and the bad not only can be known, but as pathē must be known incorrigibly, so long as pleasure and pain are experienced, since the goodness and the badness of pleasure and pain are nothing separate from the experience thereof. The Cyrenaics thus collapse pleasure and the good, and their doctrine of hedonism falls out of the following reconstructive syllogism: (1) Only what is consciously sensed can be known; (2) Pleasure is the only good that is consciously sensed; (3) Pleasure is the only good that can be known. The specifically Cyrenaic brand of hedonism also excludes the Epicurean notion of static pleasure, in principle–as pleasure is a pathos, it is a consciously experienced bodily movement, and therefore inherently kinetic, while the absence of pain is not experienced as being either pleasant or painful, and so it is indifferent.

The immediate nature of the pathē prevents them, as particular goods, from acting in the service of a further or higher good. The goodness of the pathē lies in the experience thereof, and since their existence is limited to the time in which they are experienced, they can no longer be good once they are temporally absent, either in their own right or for the sake of anything else–if another good comes along, it too must be an immediate pathos which is incorrigibly good for its own sake, and not because of any past pathos. Thus, a good pathos meets the twofold requirement for being a self-sufficing end: actions are undertaken for its sake, since it is unmistakably good in itself, and insofar as it is good it cannot be undertaken for the sake of anything else. The possibility of a good or telos that applies to life as a whole, towards which individual pathē can or must point, is now thrown into question. If such a telos is only a collection of individual goods, then it can act as nothing more than a label for a series of particular pathē, and so will add nothing to the pathē that has not already been provided by the pathē themselves. On the other hand, if this further telos is something new beyond the individual pathē, then it too must be experienced immediately and incorrigibly: that is, it must be yet another pathos, and so a new particular good that will itself disappear when temporally absent. To posit an overarching good that encompasses all others therefore traps one in an infinite regress: that good will itself have to be particularized, and a new overarching good will need to be posited to encompass it and all the others, and so on ad infinitum. The Cyrenaics’ epistemology thus excludes the possibility of eudaimonia as a telos, insofar as the pathē (and therefore goods) are immediate–it is nonsensical that a single temporally confined good should encompass a lifetime of other temporally confined goods.

The Cyrenaics’ insistence that the pathē are private and immediate also relativizes goods to one’s preferences by precluding the possibility of assessing good and bad from any other standpoint than one’s own, in the present. We cannot know the good of another, as we cannot undergo another’s pathē, and we cannot ponder our own pathē from the perspective of the past, the future, or eternity, as they exist only for the time that they are experienced. This means that we can only make decisions, hold values, and seek ends that relate to our current desires, and so in each case that we perform an action for some purpose, we must have that purpose presently in mind, and desire its fulfillment as the end of that action. Even if we set our sights on a good such as eudaimonia, this will not allow us the privilege of a “God’s-eye view” of our life or anyone else’s, and so eudaimonia will take on the character of a particular good, wanted for its own sake, but only insofar as it can be preferred by some specific person at some specific time. What the Stoics, the Peripatetics, et al. want–an objective measure of success that depends on no preference whatsoever–is vaporous, in that one will never grasp an entire life in order to judge it as a whole, much less endow it with an essence that will make it happy even in the absence of an agent to live through it happily. In casting the quality of life as a completed whole rather than something to be understood in the present moment as it is lived, the eudaimonist puzzlingly seeks the temporal end of life in seeking its ethical end: “Are you doing well?” “Too soon to know–ask me when I’m dead,” appears to be his attitude. The Cyrenaic epistemology makes such a position unjustifiable, and instead comes to the descriptively powerful conclusion that we can want things for no reason beyond those things themselves, and that we need not evaluate life as a whole to know whether they are good. That something is experienced as good is what makes it good, not vice-versa, and so the goodness of the pathē are always entangled with one’s current situation.

A major facet of Cyrenaic ethics is the Arsitippan aversion to long-term planning, which ties into the temporal immediacy of the pathē. Arsitippus reportedly rebukes the Epicurean doctrine that life should be planned carefully by balancing future pleasures and pains, because he believes that the future is “unclear,” and so “neither the memory of past gratifications nor the expectation of future ones was anything to him, but he discerned the good by the single present time alone.” Further, the undergoing of current pains for the sake of future pleasures is “most disagreeable,” and so to be avoided. The grounding of this attitude in Cyrenaic epistemology is clear: in the first place, only the pathē are known, and as the pathē are temporally immediate, it follows that the future cannot be known, and future goods cannot be coherently valued; and in the second place, any attempt to plan a course of future pleasures must deviate from grabbing whatever individual pleasures are close at hand, and so necessitate forgoing present things known to be good for the sake of absent things not known to be good. But then arises the problem of how one is to seek particular pleasures at all: John Watson articulates the difficulty well when he says that to exclude planning from the enjoyment of particular pleasures causes us to “reach the dilemma; either (a) momentary pleasure is an end that cannot be reached, or (b) it is an end that comes without being sought.”

From here the problem surfaces that if the Cyrenaic doctrine of immediacy, and so the Arsitippan remonstrance against planning pleasures, is taken at face value, then the Cyrenaic account of individual goods must either be self-defeating or contradictory. That is, it must either provide no guide whatsoever to action, or it must advise one to seek particular pleasures when they cannot be coherently sought, because they lie outside of pathic immediacy while not being experienced. Certainly any charitable interpretation of Cyrenaic ethics must allow for some modicum of planning, at least from the hand to the mouth–in the accounts of Diogenes Laërtius, Aristippus showcases the character of the model Cyrenaic by attending the court of Dionysius with the aim of acquiring money, while not entertaining any plans to spend it prudently. But it is difficult to say where this necessary modicum of planning comes from: it seems unacceptable either (1) to admit of knowledge beyond the scope of the pathē, since if the future can be known, then the Epicurean notion of pleasure as an overarching telos again becomes tenable, or (2) to extend the scope of the pathē themselves, since then the purpose of limiting knowledge to the pathē alone will be severely weakened. Because Cyrenaic epistemology provides no answer as to how a medium between living completely irrationally and living with an overarching end in mind can be reached, the temporal immediacy of the pathē renders the Cyrenaic attitude towards the future imprecise, and at best it can be said that the Cyrenaic must devote less energy to planning for future pleasures than is ordinarily thought sensible in order to remain consistent.

The Cyrenaic doctrine that the pathē are private also encourages dispute among which kinds of goods are best. If one can only know one’s own pathē, and the pathē of different people cannot be compared, then how can one justify the claim that any one type of pleasure is superior to another? Further, how can substantive disagreement over what is the best kind of good be resolved? In response to the first question, the Cyrenaic must bid the inquirer to sample various goods for himself–how good each pathos is will then be known incorrigibly, and so anyone experiencing a favored pleasure will know that it is best. But then there comes a serious possibility of divergence between individuals. The Cyrenaics are fond of citing instances of perceptual relativity to demonstrate that even optimal observers (those that are sane and healthy) can be affected in different ways by the same object, depending on their physical constitution; this point easily spills over into the goodness of the pathē. Such a divergence is exactly what we find in the history of Cyrenaic philosophy: Annicerus recognizes goods of the soul as well as those of the body, while Hegesias emphasizes the avoidance of pain, though both begin from the same epistemology. The Cyrenaics are then forced simply to admit the possibility of varying goods for varying people, and from this stems the recognition that no pleasure is inherently better than any other, but that each varies according to preference and frequency. In denying that there is a single overarching good for humans, the Cyrenaics are permitted such a viewpoint without contradiction. In fact, if the Cyrenaics are right to despair of determining a single good for all humans on epistemological grounds, then the conclusion that goods can be pluralistic is a marked advantage for their position, as no consensus on a superior kind of good is required for living well.

The strain of Cyrenaic epistemology is one that transforms self-knowledge into a sort of self-love, relative yet indubitably certain, isolating yet carefree, egoistic yet unpretentious. The Cyrenaic ethical system, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, is not a hodgepodge that “can hardly justify its claim to be considered an ethical System at all,” nor is it “merely a set of maxims to justify the careless manner of living of men whose chief aim in life was a pleasant time.” It is rather a rigorous and cogent ethics that follows from principled epistemological doctrines; the Cyrenaic philosophy forms a coherent whole, whose assumptions can be judged by their fruits, and vice-versa.