This is the philosophy of Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-356 B.C.) and
his grandson Aristippus, founders of the Cyrenaics, a post-Socratic
school, the most salient principal of which was Egoistic Hedonism, as
passed through the interpretational filter of 19th Century
Aestheticism. The immediate antecedents of this statement can be found
in the works of Walter Pater (1839-1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
Pater, an Oxford don, was an influential critic, historian, essayist,
and novelist in the late 19th Century British artistic movement called
Aestheticism, the main tenet of which was the devotion of life to the
appreciation of refined sensation as represented by artistic beauty.
The movement could trace its philosophical origins back to the Greek
understanding that all human knowledge was gained through stimulation
of the senses, and that personal perception was the ultimate gauge of
reality. The Greeks formulated several schools of philosophy out of
this basic idea. Socrates and Plato projected the notion of Ideas, the
ideal forms that human beings only imperfectly perceived in the
material world and which they had to intuitively reconstruct in their
own minds in order to perceive the true and the good of the "real"
world beyond the senses. Aristippus propounded a philosophy that was
based upon the human reaction to pleasure and pain through sensation
of the world. Pleasure, he thought, was the test of right perception,
while pain was the warning of error. It was the goal of every man to
seek pleasure and to avoid pain, and human understanding of the good
was directed by the correcting influential sensations of pleasure and
pain. Thus, men should seek what is pleasurable and thereby learn what
is good. For Aristippus, this would lead to right moral behavior, as
wrong behavior would inevitably bring about pain, while right behavior
would result in pleasure. For some later Cyrenaics, and for the
Aesthetes, this could be interpreted as advocacy for heightened
sensual experience. And, as every man was the judge of his own
sensations and had his own peculiar natural tendencies and gifts, each
man would tend to find this heightened experience in the cultivation
of his passions, for they were expressions of his basic nature. The
goal, then, was to "Know thyself," since that was all that could be
known.
Therefore, the Cyrenaics thought that every man must seek his own
pleasure as the highest good. Pleasure is an end in itself, and men
ought to pursue it single-mindedly. As every man's perception of
pleasure is unique to him, he must find his own measure of what is
pleasurable and good. The Cyrenaics also believed that men can only
truly know what they are feeling at the moment, and thus each man must
seek the immediate gratification, the pleasure of the moment. These
beliefs can be found in Aestheticism. For instance, in Chapter IX: New
Cyrenaicism of Pater's historical novel, Marius the Epicurean: His
Sensations and Ideas, Pater wrote:
"If he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at best could
not certainly be shown to conduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men's
highest curiosity was indeed so persistently baffled--then, with the
Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that
present with vivid sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions,
as, in strength and directness and their immediately realised values
at the bar of an actual experience, are most like sensations.So some
have spoken in every age; for, like all theories which really express
a strong natural tendency of the human mind or even one of its
characteristic modes of weakness, this vein of reflection is a
constant tradition in philosophy. Every age of European thought has
had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many disguises: even under the
hood of the monk.
But--Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!--is a proposal, the
real import of which differs immensely, according to the natural
taste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table.
It may express nothing better than the instinct of Dante's Ciacco, the
accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on no
hypothesis does man "live by bread alone," may come to be identical
with--"My meat is to do what is just and kind;" while the soul, which
can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil
of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in
conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for
itself; and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the
"Father's business."
In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of the
metaphysical ambition to pass beyond "the flaming ramparts of the
world," but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation
of intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all
varieties of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the
thoughts of Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of
educated persons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really
high and serious key, the precept--Be perfect in regard to what is
here and now: the precept of "culture," as it is called, or of a
complete education--might at least save him from the vulgarity and
heaviness of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper,
though with a material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what
is secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment
between two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our
experience but a series of fleeting impressions:--so Marius continued
the sceptical argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by,
from his various philosophical reading:--given, that we are never to
get beyond the walls of the closely shut cell of one's own
personality; that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an
outer world, and of other minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a
day-dream, and the thought of any world beyond, a day-dream perhaps
idler still: then, he, at least, in whom those fleeting
impressions--faces, voices, material sunshine--were very real and
imperious, might well set himself to the consideration, how such
actual moments as they passed might be made to yield their utmost, by
the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract metaphysical
doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience,
reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human
nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at
least make the most of what was "here and now." In the actual dimness
of ways from means to ends--ends in themselves desirable, yet for the
most part distant and for him, certainly, below the visible
horizon--he would at all events be sure that the means, to use the
well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or perfection
about them, and themselves partake, in a measure, of the more
excellent nature of ends--that the means should justify the end."
Wilde, in his more epigrammatic manner, would reduce this to simpler
terms. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton says,
"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. But I am
afraid that I cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature,
not to me." In conversation, Wilde is reported as having said,
"Knowledge came to me through pleasure, as it always does, I imagine.
I was nearly sixteen when the wonder and beauty of the old Greek life
began to dawn on me...I began to read Greek eagerly for the love of it
all, and the more I read the more I was enthralled." (pp. 180-181, The
Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, ed. Redman, Alvin. Dover Publications,
New York, 1959.)
One can see already the generalizing effect which has taken the
Cyrenaic philosophy and broadened it to include all the Greek life. It
is only a short step from these pronouncements to the sentiment
expressed in the movie. It is, of course, an exaggeration.
Cyrenaics [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/cyren.htm
Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03/7mrs110.txt
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