An Eye for An I. Robert Spillane

to offer a systematic philosophy in the manner of Plato or Aristotle. Indeed, they were opposed to attempts to make a system out of the flux of the world. Nonetheless, the unholy trinity did agree on several points of doctrine. Laertius notes that the Cynics favoured the study of ethics over physics and logic. They agreed with Socrates that the unexamined life is of little consequence and the precept ‘know oneself’ is the foundation of true philosophy. Cynicism is, therefore, a shortcut to virtue because it dispenses with the distractions and conventions of everyday life. Despising wealth, fame, pretentiousness, pomposity and hypocrisy, the Cynics argued that virtue can be taught and when acquired cannot be lost. Virtuous individuals deserve our respect, vicious individuals deserve our censure, and what lies in between is unimportant.

      Cynicism faded when the centre of philosophy shifted from Greece to Rome. Its practical asceticism was not to the taste of Republican Romans and so it survived as a quaint literary phenomenon. It later fused with Stoicism, revived and faded again in the sixth century after it turned increasingly pessimistic and misanthropic. Cynicism revived in the period of the high Renaissance in a politicised form which was inconsistent with the anti-political stance of the first Cynics. After being driven underground in the periods of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, it revived in the era of the French Enlightenment and fed into the ideas so well represented by the darling of the Enlightenment, Voltaire.