Despising Pleasure is Pleasurable

The Cynics sometimes posed as enemies of pleasure. Lucian represents a Cynic as saying, "My cloak is my lion's skin. Like Hercules I live in a state of warfare and my enemy is pleasure... My purpose is to purify humanity" (Vitarum auctio 10). Dio Chrysostom represents Diogenes as saying; "The noble man holds his hardships to be great antagonists... grappling with hunger and cold, withstanding thirst and disclosing no weakness even though he must endure the lash or give his body to be cut or burned. Hunger, exile, loss of reputation and the like have no terrors for him. . . But there is another battle more terrible and a struggle not slight but much greater than this and fraught with greater danger, I mean the fight against pleasure. . . Pleasure assails a man through each and every sense that he has; and while he must face and grapple with hardships, to pleasure he must give the widest berth possible and have none but unavoidable dealings with her" (8, 20). Dio also represents Diogenes as saying; "Many and mighty antagonists have I vanquished, ... I mean poverty, exile and disrepute; yes, and anger, pain, desire, fear and the most redoubtable beast of all, treacherous and cowardly, I mean pleasure ... all alike have succumbed to her . . . all, that is, save myself" (9, 12).

How much sincerity can we believe that there was in this talk of "warfare against pleasure?" Lucian says, "To hear them, you would say they were at war with pleasure and Epicurus their bitterest foe; yet nothing do they do but for pleasure's sake " (The Runaways 19).

The inconsistency can be partly explained by the supposition that the Cynics denounced the pleasures of others, while indulging themselves without stint in their own. "This very man (Diogenes) used to maintain how much he surpassed the Persian king in his manner of life and fortune; for that he himself was in want of nothing, while the other never had enough; and that he had no inclination for those pleasures of which the other could never get enough to satisfy himself; and that the other could never obtain his" (Cicero, Tusc. Disp. 5, 32).

But the Cynics, by boasting that the life which they led was more pleasant than any other, and at the same time claiming to be waging war against pleasure involved themselves in a confusion which is illustrated by the following; "For even the despising of pleasure is itself most pleasurable, when we are habituated to it; and just as those accustomed to a life of pleasure feel disgust when they pass over to the opposite experience, so those whose training has been of the opposite kind derive more pleasure from despising pleasures than from the pleasures themselves" (D.L. 6, 71). This confusion is consistent with the theory that the Cynics shifted from a frank hedonism to an ostensible moralism and in some cases tried to retain both. They do not appear to have assigned any rational ground for their warfare against pleasure or to have discriminated between different kinds of pleasures.

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