|
ANTISTHENES, an Athenian, was one of the most constant associates of Socrates. He was attracted to him not by the pleasure of intellectual discussion, but by his self-denying and ascetic life. Socrates had said that the gods had no wants, and that those who had fewest came nearest to the gods. This was the guiding maxim of the life of Antisthenes. He professed disdain for philosophic speculation or scientific study, and taught that a true philosophic career consisted in an ascetic life, led with entire indifference to enjoyment, wealth, or power. He engaged in controversy with Plato, whose lofty speculations on a world of ideal existence he despised; and whose stateliness of life was wholly foreign from his own ideals. He and his pupil Diogenes were the founders of the Cynic, or ascetic school of philosophy. From them, shortly afterwards, sprang Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, equally severe in doctrine, but not so regardless of the decencies of life.
The contempt for science shown by Antisthenes and his followers marks the severence between Greek science and Greek philosophy. Henceforth science was pursued by specialists; and philosophy tended to degenerate into wordy and windy rhetoric. The Cynics were called by Grote "a mendicant order in philosophy."
Find more articles on Antisthenes
Purchase books on Antisthenes
| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
|
