Ancient Philosophy

by Julia Annas

  It is easy to see the changing fortunes of the Republic as a cautionary tale: what happens when a work of ancient philosophy is used as something ‘good to think with’ in a way that cuts it from its moorings, namely Plato’s work as a whole, and the way it was received and studied until recently. But we can also more open-mindedly draw the lesson that we should be aware of at least three things when we study a work of ancient philosophy. One is our interest in seeing and engaging with the work in its own intellectual context. Secondly, our own assumptions as to what is philosophically salient and interesting, what we are likely to find intellectually rewarding. And thirdly, the potential of the work we study to engender creative philosophical thinking on our part. These factors may be of different strengths and come into play in different ways. One thing we can certainly learn from the history of reading the Republic is that lack of awareness of these factors can lead to fruitless wrangling over which of various mutually contradictory interpretations is the correct one.

  If we think of the results of Chapter 1, we can see that sometimes an issue in ancient philosophy is part of an argument that we can immediately relate to. But we can now also see that there are potential dangers in this attitude. We should also be on the lookout for ways in which our own changing philosophical interests play a role in establishing what we find philosophically interesting in the ancient tradition. The Republic is the most extreme example of how a work can be moved from marginal to central, and from being an ethical work to being a political one, under the pressure of changed interests in the audience. The moral is not that we should think that our own interpretations of the Republic are nothing but reflections of our own prejudices. Rather, we should be aware of our own philosophical interests and the role they play, in order to lessen the extent to which they influence us unconsciously. While some parts of ancient philosophy seem extremely alien to our interests, others are too familiar. Sometimes we need to distance them from present concerns and ask about our traditions of interpreting them.

  Engaging with ancient philosophical thinking may in Chapter 1 have sounded easy; now it may sound more difficult. With many texts, particularly the most famous ones, like Plato’s Republic, the right approach is surely to think of them both as available to read and argue with, and as being in their own right the subject of a long tradition of engagement that we stand at the end of. It is, after all, what we would expect. When we begin to read ancient philosophers we feel like the first discoverers, but we soon find out that we are separated from them not merely by two thousand years but by many traditions of reading and writing about them. In recognizing the factors that separate us from the ancients, and that make the ‘canon’ of texts that we engage with so changeable, we bring philosophical discussion with them closer, rather than further away.

  Chapter 3

  The happy life, ancient and modern

  You need to choose

  A familiar story to anyone who had studied philosophy in the ancient world is Prodicus’ Choice of Heracles. Prodicus was a so-called ‘sophist’ or professional intellectual of the fifth century BC. We have the story from a later writer, Xenophon, who recounted conversations of the philosopher Socrates.

  Socrates is talking to a friend, Aristippus, who believes in going for what you want when you want it and not deferring your gratifications. Socrates objects that as a policy this may be dangerous; if you are unable to control your desires you may end up at the mercy of people who can, and who use their superior self-mastery to compete with you successfully and to gain control over your life. Aristippus doubts this. He can, he says, lead a life which is devoted to self-gratification and yet manage to avoid being dominated by others; and this is the way to happiness.

  Socrates disagrees. It isn’t, he thinks, just a matter of evading what others can do to you. It’s a matter of how you regard your own life. To make the point he tells Prodicus’ story of how the demi-god Heracles, at the start of adult life, came to a crossroads. Two women came along, each urging him to take one of the opposing ways. One was self-consciously fashionable, bold and made-up; she ran ahead of him and urged him to take the easy road of satisfying desires and going through life doing what he wanted, deliberating only as to how to do so with least effort. My friends, she said, call me Happiness, though my enemies call me Vice (or Pleasure). The other woman, solemn and modest in manner, appealed by her words rather than her appearance, and urged him to follow her, Virtue, even though her way was one of effort and frequent frustration rather than easy success. What I offer, she said, is worth while but requires work and self-denial; vice and pleasure offer an easy road to happiness, but the initial appeal fades and leaves you with nothing worth having, whereas virtue is the way to achievement and respect, which forms real happiness.

  * * *

  The sophists

  ‘Sophists’ is the term used for a number of intellectuals in the fifth century BC who, while they did not form a unified intellectual tradition, represented a new departure. They travelled around various cities, teaching for money a variety of intellectual skills, the most saleable being skills in rhetoric and argument which would give the learner an advantage in public life. Although only some of their concerns fit into the philosophical tradition, they have remained on its edge because Plato immortalized them in many of his dialogues as pompous incompetent fools, a foil to his own hero Socrates. Plato’s depiction is gleefully unfair, but we lack enough independent evidence to counter it in any detail.

  The most famous sophists were Hippias of Elis, Prodicus of Cos, Thra-symachus of Chalcedon and Protagoras of Abdera. Hippias was famous for the large number of his accomplishments and Prodicus for his study of language. Thrasymachus is portrayed in the Republic as holding an account of justice which aggressively reduces it to the interest of the stronger. Protagoras is the only one who held an important philosophical thesis, namely relativism, the view that for a belief to be true is just for it to appear true to the person who holds it. Plato refutes this view in his dialogue Theaetetus (see p. 72 below).

  Plato despises the sophists for many reasons. He rejects their views, particularly relativism, and he thinks that teaching intellectual skills for money debases these by turning them into commodities, valued for what they do for you rather than respected for their own sake. He also thinks that, just because they do not take it seriously, the sophists are in fact incompetent at philosophical argument. In his presentation of them, of course, they certainly are.

  * * *

  The Choice of Heracles forms a frequent subject in western art. The version illustrated here, by Paolo de Matteis, was commissioned in 1712 by the philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, to provide an illustration for his own book on virtue. It and many similar depictions reinforce something that makes a modern reader uncomfortable: moral choice is depicted as two females competing for a man. Moreover, even though one point is that what matters is reality, not appearance, this point is itself expressed in terms of one female being, on due consideration, more attractive than the other.

  But apart from this, we may feel puzzled as to why this story, which seems to us over-obvious, should be famous. Clearly, we may think, if you are asked to choose between virtue and vice, you should choose virtue, but that’s the easy part; the hard part is working out what virtue is, and depicting it as a modest maiden rather than a shameless floozy not only is a sexist way of presenting it, but doesn’t help us much. If we think this, it is probably because much twentieth-century ethical thinking has made the ancient ethical framework unfamiliar. But this is a comparatively recent development, and one now rapidly being reversed, as virtue becomes more familiar in both philosophical and political discourse. We are now, it turns out, in quite a good position to appreciate the claims of Virtue on Heracles.

  4. Heracles deciding between austere Virtue and tempting Pleasure

  Virtue and Vice are offering Heracles differing roads to happiness. Prodicus was one of the first philosophers to make expl
icit something important; we are all, in our lives, aiming at happiness. We find the thought also in the slightly later philosophers Democritus and Plato; the latter stresses that it would be ludicrous to deny that happiness is our overall goal in life, the destination on everyone’s road.

  But Prodicus also made a mark by emphasizing something else. When you are starting out on adult life, aiming at happiness, and doing so consciously, you will be faced with a choice. You can’t have it all; you can’t go through life gratifying your desires and still hope to achieve anything worthwhile or to live a life that you or others can respect. Recognizing explicitly that your aim in life is happiness brings with it the realization that you have to reflect on and order your life in one way rather than another. Life presents you with the alternatives; you have to make the decisions. Centuries later Cicero, aware of much sophisticated discussion, still thought that the story said something profound about everybody’s life and their attitude to it.

  Happiness and Pleasure

  In the different tellings of the story the shameless floozy is indifferently Vice or Pleasure. In our traditions of moral philosophy it may seem strange that pleasure is the bad, rejected way of getting happiness. John Stuart Mill, a major founder of the Utilitarian tradition, actually defined happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain, but even if we do not see happiness as actually constituted by pleasure it still seems somewhat odd to see happiness as achieved by virtue as opposed to pleasure. Here we can see that ancient ethical thought gives a different conceptual role to happiness.

  Happiness in ancient ethical thought is not a matter of feeling good or being pleased; it is not a feeling or emotion at all. It is your life as a whole which is said to be happy or not, and so discussions of happiness are discussions of the happy life. It is our bad luck that for us what is happy are not just lives, but also moments and fleeting experiences; modern discussions of happiness tend to get confused very rapidly because such different things are being considered. In ancient ethics happiness enters ethical discussion by a very different route from the ‘feel-good’ one.

  Sometimes you step back from your routines of daily life and think about your life as a whole. You may be forced to do this by a crisis, or it might be that passing a stage in your life, such as becoming an adult rather than an adolescent – as in the Heracles story – makes you think about what you are doing in your life overall, what your values are and what matters most to you. For the ancients this is the beginning of ethical thinking, the entry-point for ethical reflection. Once you become self-aware, you have to face choices, and deal with the fact that certain values, and courses of action, exclude others. You have to ask how all your concerns fit together, or fail to fit. What you are looking for, all ancient thinkers assume, is how to make sense of your life as a whole, by bringing your concerns under the heading of your final aim or goal, your telos. For someone who fails to unify her concerns in any overall way is radically in denial about the way all her projects are hers, fit together in her life.

  What can you say about the way your life is tending, the values you are expressing in your life? At first, probably not much. It is only after thinking through some ethical theories that you will have much of an explicit idea as to what values are unifying your life. But there is one thing that you can say, even before venturing on to theory: as philosophers from Prodicus on agree, and as is most famously set forth by Aristotle, everyone agrees that their final end is happiness, and that what people seek in everything they do is to live a happy life. (Hence ancient ethical theories are called eudaimonist, from eudaimonia, the Greek for happiness.)

  Why is this supposed to be so obvious? It would not be obvious at all if happiness were introduced via the notion of pleasure or feeling good. But happiness answers to formal properties that our final end has. That is, the happy life has to meet certain demands before we can even start asking what its content is; any candidate for being the content – virtue, pleasure or whatever – has to meet these demands. The overall end which unifies all your concerns has to be complete: everything you do or go for is sought for the sake of it, while it is not sought for the sake of anything further. It also has to be self-sufficient: it does not leave out any element in your life that has value as part of living well. These are common-sense points, though they have powerful implications. And on the level of common sense or intuition, happiness is the only aim, plausible as an aim in your life as a whole, which is complete and self-sufficient. We do other things in order to be happy, but it makes no sense to be happy for some further reason. And once we are living happily we lack nothing further to be living well. These points are obvious with the ancient conception of happiness. But, as Aristotle immediately points out, they do not settle very much, for great disagreement remains as to how happiness should be specified, and the different schools of thought about ethics take off from here.

  One point is clear right from the start, however. Happiness is having a happy life – it applies to your life overall. Pleasure, however, is more naturally taken to be something episodic, something you can feel now and not later. It is something you experience as we perform the activities which make up your life. You can be enjoying a meal, a conversation, even life one moment and not the next; but you cannot, in the ancient way of thinking, be happy one moment and not the next, since happiness applies to your life as a whole.

  Hence we can see why Pleasure’s role in Prodicus’ story is to provide an obviously faulty road to happiness. Pleasure fixes us on the here and now, the present desire which asks to be satisfied; and this gets in the way of the self-control and rational overall reflection which is required by a life devoted to things that are worth while. Pleasure is short-term, while happiness is long-term. So, in complete opposition to the modern way of looking at the matter, it looks as though pleasure is not even in the running to be a candidate for happiness. How could your life as a whole be focused on a short-term reward like pleasure? Someone who does this is making a big mistake, giving in to the present satisfaction at the cost of a proper concern for the rest of his life.

  In fact hedonism, the view that pleasure is our ethical end, is always on the defensive in ancient ethics. Opponents like to make it appear as though this is because there is something inherently unworthy about humans going for pleasure, but this is edifying rhetoric. The problem is rather that pleasure is defective as an aim that could structure a person’s entire life. We can see this in the two major hedonist theories.

  Aristippus founded a school called Cyrenaics after their home at Cyrene in North Africa. It was not a very unified school, but they all held that our final end – namely what we seek in everything we do – is pleasure, and by pleasure they uncompromisingly meant what we experience when we enjoy or feel good about some experience. Pleasure is a movement, not a settled state (and so is pain). Pleasures do not differ from one another, and one pleasure is not more pleasant than another; that is, pleasure is taken to be a single kind of experience which is always the same whatever the circumstances which produce it. We have access to pleasure only by our direct experience of it, and we have knowledge only of our experiences, not of the objects which produce them. Hence past pleasures, which have vanished, and future pleasures, which are still to come, cannot be compared with the present pleasure which we experience, and the Cyrenaics sometimes speak as though only the present exists; certainly the present is all that matters, and our lives should be so shaped as to get present pleasure.

  If all that matters is to get present pleasure, what has happened to happiness? Alone among ancient philosophers, some of the Cyrenaics say that we should not be concerned about it. A happy life is an organized one in which past and future pleasures count in relation to present ones, but if our concern should always be to pursue the present pleasure then happiness will often get in the way of this, and we should disregard it.

  * * *

  Kinds of hedonism

  Aristippus of Cyrene in North Africa (C.435-355 BC) went to Athe
ns and was an associate of Socrates. Evidence about his life is unreliable, consisting mainly of anecdotes showing him living a colourful life devoted to gratification, with no care for his dignity or for other people. However, he cared enough about his daughter, Arete, to teach her his ideas, and she passed them on to her son, Aristippus the Younger, who may be the source of the systematic philosophy attributed to the school of Cyrene.

  Epicurus of Athens (341-270 BC) developed his own version of hedonism in a way that he represented as self-taught, although he did have some philosophical education. Around 307 he set up a philosophical school in Athens. Unlike the schools of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, it was not one which met in a public place and in which teaching prominently included argument and debate. Epicurus’ school was called the Garden after its home, and his teaching put a premium on learning and memorizing the words of Epicurus and other founding members. Discussion took place orally and in writing throughout the school’s history, but Epicureans regarded Epicurus as a saviour from unhappiness and a shining light in a way that philosophers from other schools found too deferential. Epicurus’ main contribution was his hedonistic ethics; in his philosophy of nature he took over the views of the earlier Atomist Democritus, developing a world-view in which, unusually in ancient philosophy, there is no room for providence or teleology of any kind, and the gods, though they exist, take no interest in the world or in human beings.